The Emotional Lives of Teenagers E-Book

Lisa Damour

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

*A New York Times bestseller!* An urgently needed guide to help parents understand their teenagers' intense and often fraught emotional lives - and how to support them through this critical developmental stage - from the New York Times bestselling author of Untangled and Under Pressure In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today's teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it's easy for them - and their parents - to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that way. With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.

Leseprobe

‘This book offers a crucial reframing that helps us understand teens, their emotions, and their behaviour. I couldn’t love it more. Damour gifts parents the knowledge, words, and practical advice needed to reach our teens so that we can help them become happy, healthy, and fully themselves.’

Tina Payne Bryson, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline and The Power of Showing Up

‘If, like most parents, you find yourself alienated or confused by your teen’s unruly, unknowable, or unpredictable feelings, add this book to the top of your reading pile immediately. It will put you at ease and your child will thank you for becoming the competent and confident resource on whom they want, and need, to depend.’

Michelle Icard, author of Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen

‘In The Emotional Lives of Teenagers Lisa Damour applies her powerful intellect, decades of clinical experience, and deep empathy to one of the most essential questions of our time: How can adults best support adolescent mental health? Damour lays out a new, essential framework for understanding teens’ emotional lives and hands parents, teachers, coaches and mentors the playbook they need to help teenagers feel heard, healthy and whole.’

Jewel, singer/songwriter and mental health advocate

‘This book is required reading for anyone who worries that their kids aren’t happy, aren’t happy enough, or might be happy now but could become unhappy in the future. […] The Emotional Lives of Teenagers is written as clearly, usefully, and warmly as anything I’ve read about the psychology of adolescence. As a psychologist and a mother of two teenagers, I give it my highest recommendation!’

Angela Duckworth, co-founder of Character Lab

‘I can’t recommend The Emotional Lives of Teenagers enough. Damour delivers on her promise to give parents practical and actionable research-backed advice that will ensure their children develop the emotion skills they need to thrive.’

Marc Brackett, director, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, professor, Yale Child Study Center, and author of the bestselling book, Permission To Feel

‘Lisa Damour is a wonderful, rigorous thinker who draws beautifully from both research and clinical practice to help adults understand teenagers. Damour’s striking clarity and insight make her the perfect guide for those looking to make sense of teens’ emotional lives.’

Richard Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be

*

By Lisa Damour

The Emotional Lives of Teenagers

Under Pressure

Untangled

First published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of

Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2023 by Allen & Unwin,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Lisa Damour, 2023

The moral right of Lisa Damour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Taylor & Francis Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from pg. 275 of Anna Freud (1958) Adolescence, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13:1, 255-278, https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.1958.11823182. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 696 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 697 4

Printed in Great Britain

Allen & Unwin

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To D, my much better half.

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them . . . to love his parents and to hate them . . . to revolt against them and be dependent on them . . . to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge.

— ANNA FREUD (1958)

It is a deep comfort to children to discover that their feelings are a normal part of the human experience.

— HAIM GINOTT (1965)

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONEAdolescent Emotion 101: Getting Past Three Big Myths

Myth #1: Emotion Is the Enemy of Reason

Helping Teenagers Learn to Trust Their Gut

A Caveat: Teen Judgment Can Be Context-Dependent

Myth #2: Difficult Emotions Are Bad for Teens

Emotional Discomfort Promotes Growth

When Should Teens Be Shielded from Emotional Pain?

Myth #3: With Their Amped-Up Emotions, Teens Are Psychologically Fragile

Emotional Does Not Mean Fragile

When Is Professional Support in Order?

CHAPTER TWOGender and Emotion

Why Gender Differences Matter

Gender Rules Start Early 40

Gender Differences in Empathy and Aggression

Girls and Anger

Gender and the Adultification of Black Teens

Gender Differences in Psychopathology

Helping Girls Handle Anger

Helping Boys Talk About Their Feelings

How Peers Reinforce Gender Rules (and What to Do About It)

The Roots of Harassment

Teens and Self-Esteem

Beyond the Traditional Gender Binary

CHAPTER THREESeismic Shift: How Adolescence Puts a New Emotional Spin on Everyday Life

A Brain Under Major Construction

Why Your Teen Hates How You Chew

Heightened Friction, and How to Deal with It

Risk Seeking, and How to Keep Teens Safe

Starting Life Online

Keeping Technology in Its Place

Peer Relationships, Both Romantic and Not

Why Teenagers Dislike School 106

CHAPTER FOURManaging Emotions, Part One: Helping Teens Express Their Feelings

Talking About Feelings Works

Listening, Really Listening, Matters

Empathy Goes Further than We Think

Helping Teens Get Specific About Feelings

Getting Teens to Open Up

Letting Teens Set the Terms of Engagement

Taking and Making Conversational Openings

Owning and Repairing Parenting Mistakes

Valuing Nonverbal Expression

Recognizing Unhealthy Emotional Expression

CHAPTER FIVEManaging Emotions, Part Two: Helping Teens Regain Emotional Control

When Emotions Need to Be Brought Under Control

Distraction—An Important Tool for Emotion Regulation

Small Pleasures, Big-Time Mood Control

Taking Sleep Seriously

Deliberate Breathing—Sounds Absurd, Works Great

How to Give Advice to a Teenager

Changing Feelings by Correcting Thinking

Helping Teens Adopt a New Vantage Point

As Parents, Managing Our Own Emotions

Recognizing Harmful Emotional Control

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Recommended Resources

Index

Introduction

In June 2021, I got a call from a friend I’ve known since secondary school. We caught up briefly about what had happened in our lives and our families since we last talked, and then she said, “Actually, there’s a reason I’m calling . . . I’m really worried about Will. Can I run something by you?”

“Of course,” I replied, recalling that her son Will, like my own older daughter, was about to go into Year 13.

“A couple of weeks ago, we learned that my husband’s company is transferring us to Seattle. We’re moving at the end of the summer and Will is a mess about it. He loves his friends and his school here in Denver and he can’t believe that we’re uprooting him right before his senior year. He’s been incredibly cranky, and in the last couple of days he’s even gotten tearful about it. I don’t know what to say to make things better, and I’m getting worried that he might be depressed.”

“Is his mood down all the time, or does it rise and fall in waves?” I asked.

“It rises and falls. When he’s not thinking about moving, he actually seems to be okay. He has a job that he likes, and he’s plenty happy when he’s hanging out with his friends. But when the topic of the move comes up, he gets so, so sad. I don’t know what to do, and can’t tell if I should be worried.”

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t think he’s depressed. But let’s stay in close touch, because I’ll want to know if his mood stops going up and down and instead he starts spending most of his time feeling cranky, numb, or blue. From what you’re telling me, it sounds as if he’s unhappy specifically about the move—that he’s feeling sad and angry about it.”

“Absolutely,” said my friend.

“But I don’t consider these grounds for concern. Actually, I think those feelings are evidence of his good mental health.”

“Really? How?”

“Well, being upset about moving right before senior year—especially when he’s happy in Denver—is an entirely appropriate response. I’d actually be more worried about Will if it didn’t bother him at all.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” my friend said, “but how am I supposed to help him through it?”

“There are two things you can do. First, reassure Will that he’s having the right reaction. Just as it’s hard for you to see him so upset, having such painful emotions is probably uncomfortable for him, too. You can help to put his mind at ease by letting him know that what he’s feeling makes sense. Second, try to get comfortable with the idea that he’s probably going to continue to be unhappy about the situation, at least until he gets settled in the fall. Rather than working to prevent or chase away his discomfort, focus your attention on helping him find ways to manage the distress he’s feeling.”

For teenagers, powerful emotions are a feature, not a bug. This has always been true, but these days it seems to be less widely understood. The past decade especially has been marked by a dramatic shift in how we talk and think about feelings in general and, in particular, about the intense emotions that characterize adolescence.

To put it bluntly, somewhere along the way we became afraid of being unhappy.

When I received my first license to practice clinically as a psychologist nearly thirty years ago, I had been steeped in a training program that embraced the full range of emotion—a spectrum of feelings from the most pleasant to the least—as an expectable and essential aspect of the human experience.

My training taught me to regard adolescents’ emotional landscapes with an observant, unafraid eye. I have always understood psychotherapy to be a joint enterprise in which I guide the teenagers in my care to share my curiosity about their inner lives. We work from the unspoken assumption that every one of their emotions makes sense, that their difficult feelings—anger, frustration, sadness, worry, and the rest—happen for a reason, even when the reasons for them are unclear. Though of course I’m there to help them feel better, the aim of our work is less about comfort and more about insight. When teenagers understand what they are feeling and why, they suddenly have choices that were not available to them before.

To me, this is axiomatic. I have never doubted or questioned the value of welcoming even the most distressing or disturbing emotions into the light of my office. But as I’ve worked away in my practice, watching the process of young people discovering, understanding, and accepting their emotions and receiving much-needed and deserved relief, I have sensed the culture around me changing. Twenty years ago, I still felt myself to be part of a broader society that accepted, albeit begrudgingly, that painful feelings are a natural part of life. Today, I am trying to figure out how uncomfortable feelings came to be seen as psychological states that ought to be prevented or, failing that, banished as quickly as possible.

What changed? How did essential aspects of the human condition become unacceptable?

How exactly this happened I can’t know for sure, but I have some ideas. Since the time of my training, three trends have emerged that may help explain the shift in how we view psychological distress: the proliferation of effective psychiatric medications, the rise of the wellness industry, and the climbing numbers of young people who suffer from mental health disorders. Let’s weigh these one by one.

Antidepressant medications have been available since the 1950s, but they were not widely prescribed until the late 1980s, when Prozac hit the market. Let me say right here that Prozac and the many other psychiatric medications that have been developed in recent years dramatically improve, and sometimes save, lives. Before physicians began to prescribe Prozac in 1987, they worked with so-called “first generation” antidepressant medications. While these drugs were often effective, they caused miserable side effects and could be lethal in overdose (a tragic problem when caring for suicidal patients). Then along came Prozac and, soon after, an entire “second generation” of medications that lifted depression and had minimal side effects. Suddenly, prescription drugs became a low-risk option for mood improvement.

It’s no wonder these drugs took off. In 1987 only 37 percent of those being treated for depression received an antidepressant. By 2015 that number had risen to 81 percent. During that same period, the number of people receiving psychotherapy for depression dropped by 20 percent. What drove these two trends? First, it’s likely that antidepressant medication provided some individuals with enough relief that psychotherapy no longer felt necessary. Second, it’s also true that insurance companies are far more willing to pay for pills than for sometimes costly talk therapy.

To these explanations, I’ll also add a third possibility: The proliferation of safe and effective medications to treat depression—and also to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, and focus attention—has altered our cultural stance toward emotional discomfort. Instead of regarding psychological unease as something to be explored and understood, we have increasingly come to view emotional pain as something that can be deterred or contained with chemical interventions. Numbers don’t lie: Since the early 2000s, antidepressants have been on par with blood pressure and cholesterol medications as the most prescribed drugs in adult outpatient visits.

To be clear: There is no question that psychiatric drugs ease human suffering. Further, no conscientious clinician prescribes these medications with the promise that they will solve life’s problems or make people happy, because they don’t. That said, I can’t help but wonder whether the widespread use of mood-altering drugs has stoked the belief that somehow we and our children might and should be spared the reality that being human comes with feeling emotional pain.

I do not, however, think that the rapid proliferation of psychiatric medications can, alone, account for the fact that we’ve become so uneasy with psychological discomfort. So let’s turn our attention to a second factor: the wellness industry.

Wellness is hardly new. Yoga, mindfulness, aromatherapy, and a host of nonmedical practices and products associated with psychological health have been around for millennia. What is new? The pervasive and aggressive marketing of wellness goods and services. In 2010, a business article in The New York Times referred to wellness as an “emerging” industry. Since then, the commercial wellness market has done nothing short of explode. Now an economic juggernaut, the mental wellness industry alone accounts for $131 billion of the global wellness economy. To put this number in perspective, the mental wellness industry now outmatches the $100 billion global entertainment industry.

Of course this isn’t bad news. Studies consistently demonstrate that meditation, mindfulness, and yoga practices can ease psychological discomfort and improve mental well-being. Botanical-infused lotions, aromatic candles, weighted blankets, and other products that delight or soothe the senses can, without question, bring about short-term feelings of peace and relief.

All the same, it seems to be the case that massive economic incentives are now driving the wellness industry to make promises it cannot keep. Advertisements for self-care products often declare or imply that the product for sale (be it a mindfulness app, a scented oil, or a fruity tea) will both grant feelings of ease and ward off unwanted emotions. This might sound great in theory, but common sense tells us that’s not how life actually works. Enjoying your yoga class won’t keep the school principal from calling with news that your kid hit a classmate on the playground. Getting your family to commit to a regular mindfulness practice won’t keep a global pandemic from delivering years of misery to your door. Wellness products or practices can temporarily lift our spirits or help us regain a passing sense of equilibrium. They cannot shield us, or our teenagers, from emotional distress.

We know this and we don’t. It’s incredibly tempting to believe in the possibility of attaining and preserving a state of psychological ease, especially when ubiquitous wellness ads suggest that an unruffled Zen state can be achieved. Or at least purchased.

While the expectations set by the wellness industry border on the ridiculous, their impact is no joke. I now care for teenagers in my practice who feel as if they are “failing at wellness.” They’ve taken to heart the dangerous message, often promoted through social media marketing, that committing to self-care—and the goods and services that come with it—will keep them from feeling stressed or anxious. Then semester exams hit. When this happens, our teens naturally experience the tension and nerves that always come with taking big tests. But now they feel worse than we ever did at the end of the term, as wall-to-wall advertising suggests that their discomfort was somehow preventable. Our already stressed teenagers now feel bad about feeling bad.

Further, the rise of the wellness industry seems to have shifted how our culture defines psychological health. In roughly the last ten years—the same span in which mental wellness became a multi-billion-dollar industry—psychological health has become equated with feeling good. Of course, it’s great to feel good (or calm, or relaxed), but the reality is that pleasant psychological states come and go as we move through our day. No matter what we do, there’s no guarantee that any one of us can sustain an extended period of untroubled ease.

This now widespread message that mental health means feeling good has led many parents and teenagers to its logical corollary, that feeling bad is grounds for serious concern. I worry that the wellness movement has left parents and their teens unduly frightened of garden variety adversity. Now, far more than in years past, I find myself needing to reassure adolescents and their folks that a rough day or a rough week is unlikely to be a sign that “something is really wrong.”

Which brings us to the third factor that might explain how we find ourselves at a time when teenagers and their parents feel more uneasy than ever about emotional distress: Adolescents, as a group, actually do feel worse than they used to.

Some of this has to do with the fact that our teenagers face the unsettling prospect of a future marked by ongoing environmental, social, and political turmoil. A 2018 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found that, compared to adults overall, people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one express higher levels of concern about the direction in which the nation is headed, the prevalence of mass shootings, and climate change.

Among teenagers, more serious mental health concerns have also been on the rise. From 2009 to 2019, the percentage of secondary school students who reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless jumped from 26 percent to 37 percent; the percentage who told survey takers they had made a suicide plan grew from an already startling 11 percent to an even more alarming 16 percent. In about the same time frame, the percentage of secondary school students reporting significant levels of anxiety rose from 34 percent to 44 percent. These grim statistics, as you likely noticed, reflect how teenagers were feeling before a pandemic crashed into their formative years.

While the pandemic was horrible for everyone, teenagers faced unique challenges, precisely because COVID-19 derailed the central developmental tasks of adolescence, namely, spending time with peers and becoming increasingly independent. Global studies found that symptoms of depression and anxiety among teens doubled during the pandemic and that many started to have difficulty sleeping, withdrew from their families, or became aggressive. Studies conducted by emergency medicine departments in early 2021 found that visits for suspected suicide attempts increased by 51 percent among teenage girls and 4 percent among teenage boys, compared to visits in early 2019. Experts are not entirely sure what accounts for the huge gender disparity in increased attempts but suspect that girls may have felt the social isolation of the pandemic more acutely than boys did.

The situation was even worse for teenagers belonging to racial and ethnic groups that have long been marginalized and discriminated against. Compared to white teenagers, Black, Asian American, and multiracial adolescents experienced higher levels of pandemic-related psychological distress. The pandemic was of course also overlaid with a great number of other national crises that affected our teenagers: intense political polarization, rising violence, and a painful and necessary reckoning with the killing of Black Americans by police.

It’s no wonder that so many of today’s parents worry about their teens’ mental health. Being a teenager has always been hard; coming of age during a time of widespread disruption makes the work of being a teenager—or raising one—that much more difficult. With crisis, though, often comes opportunity, and in fact I believe there has never been a better time to get serious about how we support teenagers and their emotional lives.

In the decade prior to the pandemic, I wrote two books that focused on the challenges faced specifically by girls and young women. Under COVID-19, my attention shifted unsurprisingly to the pressing emotional needs of all teenagers, irrespective of gender. This was an easy transition, as in more than three decades as a clinician I’ve cared for many boys and young men. Further, my New York Times articles about adolescence and my Ask Lisa podcast have never been gender-specific. Throughout this book, examples from my clinical work with both boys and girls will illustrate key ideas. For these, all identifying details have been altered, and in a few cases I’ve presented composites in order to maintain the confidentiality of the young people who have been in my care.

You are reading this book because you care about adolescents. You want to help teens navigate a challenging phase of life during a challenging time in history. You want to raise them to have rich and rewarding emotional lives, to be caring and connected in their relationships, to remain steady and capable in good times and bad, and to develop true emotional strength.

This book will help you do just that. In the first chapter we’ll dispel widely held and misleading myths about how feelings operate and instead ground our exploration of the emotional lives of teenagers in psychological science. Chapter 2 will address how traditional gender roles shape the experience and expression of adolescent emotion and unpack what new understandings of gender mean for teenagers and their parents. In chapter 3 we’ll look at what is unique about emotions during adolescence and how they put a new spin on everyday life for teens and their families. Chapters 4 and 5 draw on clinical research and theory to offer parents concrete, practical guidance on helping teenagers develop independent emotional lives by finding healthy ways to express their emotions and, when needed, bring them under control.

Perhaps most important, this book will ditch the dangerous view that adolescents are mentally healthy only when they can sustain a sense of feeling good. In its place, we’ll get to know a truly useful and psychologically accurate definition of emotional health: having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively.

Let’s not wait another moment to better understand and support the teenagers we love.

CHAPTER ONE

Adolescent Emotion 101: Getting Past Three Big Myths

“Dr. D,” the text read, “can I come c you sometime this week? Tom.” I didn’t recognize the phone number it was coming from and had no one named Tom on my weekly practice schedule. As I stared curiously at my phone, three dots materialized, followed by a message that seemed to come from a mind reader: “It’s me Tommy—I got your number from my mom.”

Tommy! Of course. I immediately remembered a sweet nine-year-old I’d first laid eyes on in my waiting room years earlier. When we met, he was standing anxiously next to his mother as she sat with one hand resting calmly in her lap and the other gently stroking her son’s back. Any progress she’d made in trying to ease his nerves evaporated when I opened the waiting room door. Tommy took me in with wide-eyed dread. His dark hair stood up on one side—bedhead that had impressively survived an entire school day—seeming to underscore his overall sense of alarm. On the phone, Tommy’s mother had explained that he was having nighttime fears that were keeping him and the rest of the family up late. At my office, Tommy and his mom followed me to my consulting room, and there we slowly began what would grow into a long and fruitful working relationship.

Tommy was born tense. As a baby he startled easily and went on to have enormous difficulty separating from his parents when it was time to go to preschool. His worries morphed over the years into nighttime fears, which thankfully yielded to my efforts to be helpful and his parents’ steady support. After those fears were resolved, nearly two years passed before I heard from his folks again. In the summer after Year 8, Tommy bravely tried going to sleepaway camp but within two days was begging to come home. I had a few calls with Tommy at camp and several with his parents, and I also consulted by phone with the camp director. Together, we decided to pull the plug, with the hope of trying camp again the next year. Tommy met with me throughout that summer, both to address the anxiety that brought him home and to process his feelings of frustration and humiliation around being unable to stay.

Remembering all of this as I looked at my phone, I realized that nearly four years had gone by since I’d last heard from Tommy—now Tom—or his parents, which would make him a Year 13. We set up a time to meet and I prepared myself for the likelihood that I’d hardly recognize the person in my waiting room. Sure enough, Tom was now tall and broad-shouldered. He was wearing long, loose shorts that were poorly suited to the chilly late-October temperatures in the suburbs of Greater Cleveland. At once awkward and friendly, he greeted me with a deep voice that I didn’t recognize.

After we settled into my office and caught up briefly, he turned to the reason for his text.

“I’m working on my university applications and don’t want to apply too far from home. I’m okay with this, and my parents are too, but my counselor is kinda making a thing of it.”

Tom was at the top of his class, thanks, no doubt, to the fact that his anxious temperament also made him a highly conscientious student. He was a sought-after cross-country runner and had also developed into an accomplished oboist. Despite the many ways he had matured, Tom explained that although he had hoped to attend a five-week intensive music program in Michigan the previous summer, he could not bring himself to go. Based on that experience, he decided to apply only to universities within a three-hour drive of home.

Northeast Ohio has no shortage of excellent universities, but the counselor at Tom’s school still felt that Tom was limiting his opportunities. I wasn’t sure what to think. From the gray couch in my office, Tom shared his reasoning with me. If he started to feel nervous or unsure when he was away at university, Tom wanted to be able to come home for a night or two without its being a big deal. He was sending applications to seven very fine area schools—he would certainly have excellent options when the admissions decisions came in. And he wasn’t applying to any university within thirty minutes of his house, because he really did want to feel that he’d gone away to university.

“I still get super anxious,” Tom said. “It’s better than it was, for sure, but I’ve never liked being away from my family. I’m just trying to come up with a solution that doesn’t leave me feeling like my anxiety could mess up my first year. When I explained this to my counselor, he said: ‘Tom, your worries are clouding your thinking.’ ”

Though I knew where the counselor was coming from, I didn’t share his perspective. To me, it seemed to be grounded in an unhelpful but well-worn myth: that our feelings undermine our judgment.

Myth #1: Emotion Is the Enemy of Reason

Emotions and reason were cast as competitors long before Mr. Spock, with his reasoning unsullied by emotion, was showcased as Star Trek’s model thinker. Indeed, the opposition between our thoughts and our feelings has seemed so apparent that philosophers have commented on it for ages. Plato imagined reason as a charioteer working to keep the horses of human emotion under control; René Descartes, a champion of rationality, idealized those who “are entirely masters of their passions,” while David Hume, flipping Descartes’s script, argued that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

So how should we think about the place of emotions in decision making? Plato, Descartes, Hume—who has it right?

Probably my friend Terry does. She’s a fellow clinical psychologist who once shared a terrifically useful metaphor with me. According to Terry, when it comes to decision making, we ought to view our emotions as occupying one seat on our personal board of directors. Other spots on the board might be held by ethical considerations, our personal ambitions, our obligations to others, financial or logistical constraints, and so on. Ideally, these board members will work together to help us make careful, informed choices about how we conduct our lives. In this metaphor, emotions have a vote, though it’s rarely a deciding one. And they definitely don’t chair the board.

Terry’s take finds support in psychological research. Studies show that, under the right conditions, our feelings can in fact improve the quality of our decision making. To examine how emotions influence reasoning, the psychologist Isabelle Blanchette asked British war veterans to solve logic problems on three different topics. One subset of the topics was combat-related (e.g., “Some chemical weapons are used in wars. All things used in wars are dangerous. Therefore, some chemical weapons are dangerous”); a second was emotionally loaded but not combat-related (e.g., “Some cancers are hereditary . . .”); and the third was emotionally neutral (e.g., “Some teas are natural substances . . .”). The fascinating result? The veterans reasoned most soundly when given logic problems related to combat. Their emotional investment in war-related topics seemed to bolster their ability to make accurate deductions.

Blanchette’s war veteran study included a further wrinkle that sheds light on the interaction between emotion and logical thinking. In her study, half of the veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is characterized by painful, disruptive thoughts and feelings related to a past traumatic event. Blanchette found that veterans who suffered from PTSD underperformed on every category of the logic problems as compared to those who did not. Having a degree of personal investment in a topic can improve reasoning, but too much emotion creates a cognitive drag that interferes with our thinking.

So where does all of this leave Tom? In my opinion, his feelings were serving as a valuable contributor to his internal board meeting. He knew from experience that he had a hard time leaving home, but his emotions were not so powerful that they were crowding out other thoughtful considerations. Tom wanted to be near his family, but not too near, in case things went well and he felt ready to be independent. He cared about school and wanted to have choices about where he went to university. Thanks to his good fortune in living in a region rich with higher educational options, Tom could check all of these boxes without having to look far from home.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that you’ve really thought this through. Given that this will be the first time that you’re truly going away, it makes sense that you’d want to do so with a safety net. Even if you never use it, you’ll feel better knowing it’s there.”

“That’s how I feel,” replied Tom, “but what am I supposed to say to my teacher?”

“I think you can let him know that you appreciate his concern, and that while it can seem like your worries are calling the shots, they’re actually just one of many factors guiding your decision making.”

We went on to talk about what really mattered to Tom as he thought about his transition to university. He wanted to be able to look forward to heading off to school and to feel that he could succeed once he got there. Input from his emotions helped him arrive at a solution that met both these goals. Tom’s anxiety was serving as a wise, measured member of his personal decision-making board.

Helping Teenagers Learn to Trust Their Gut

First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data. Whether painful or pleasant, emotions are fundamentally informational. They bubble up as we move through our days, delivering meaningful feedback. Our emotions give us status reports on our lives and can help guide decision making. Noticing that you feel upbeat and energized after a lunch with a particular friend might inspire you to spend more time with that person. Realizing that you’re dreading an upcoming office party might get you thinking about whether it’s really worth attending this year. Rather than viewing our emotions as disruptive, we’re usually better off if we treat them as a constant stream of messengers arriving with updates on how things are going.

Teenagers don’t always see their feelings this way. Adolescents are often torn between the signals they’re receiving from the outside world and those arising from within. They can doubt the validity of their own emotions, especially when their feelings don’t line up with what their peers seem to feel. For instance, a teenager who becomes uncomfortable about something her friends seem okay with doing—such as badmouthing a classmate, experimenting with marijuana, or cutting class—will sometimes go round and round trying to figure out who’s got it right. She’ll wonder if her friends are in the wrong, or if she’s being uptight.

An adolescent will sometimes bring up a dilemma like this at home in a way that adults can find confounding. Adopting a nonchalant air, your daughter might offhandedly mention that “Some girls in my grade skipped physics to go out to lunch.” It can be shocking to have a teenager share concerning news in such a casual tone. Cutting class is a big deal, we may be thinking, and it’s even worse that our own kid seems okay with it. Before we launch into a lecture, it’s worth entertaining the possibility that our teen may not know how to feel about the situation herself and is feigning indifference as a way to get a read on how we feel about it. Looked at this way, a stern lecture might not be the worst option. Our teenager will at least know that she’s not the only one who thinks her peers are over the line, even if she might not give us the satisfaction of letting us know that she sees it the same way we do.

Still, asking a genuine question would be a better bet. A gentle “Hmm . . . how do you feel about that?” lets our teen know that we’re not comfortable with what her classmates did, and that we suspect she may feel the same way. Now we’re pointed in a promising direction. When we show that we are curious about our adolescents’ feelings—especially around the topics they bring up—we invite them to treat their emotions as informative and trustworthy. Teenagers almost always rise to meet us when we treat them as the deeply insightful souls that they are. Don’t be surprised if the teen who was casually sharing provocative news only moments ago abruptly switches gears to respond thoughtfully by saying, “I guess it makes me feel worried about them,” or something along those lines.

What if, however, you try this approach and find that your teen is in no mood for an earnest conversation? Indeed, asking for thoughts on a peer’s dicey behavior could easily be met with an annoyed (if not flat-out hostile) response. Even if you feel that you hit a brick wall, don’t despair. As far as I’m concerned, the conversation was already a success. When teens bring up their peers’ antics at home, they’re usually looking for a reality check. Raising our proverbial eyebrows—even if teens get mad at us for doing so—gives them just that.

Above all, we want to look for opportunities to drive home the key point that our emotions help us navigate our lives. Ignoring our feelings means flying blind. Any time we hear our teenagers questioning feelings that make abundant sense given the situation, we should be quick to lay on the reassurance. “You have a good gut,” we might say. “Pay attention to what it’s telling you, because it will almost always keep you on the right track.”

Tom, it turned out, was wise to listen to himself. He was accepted at several universities and decided to attend a small liberal arts school about an hour from home. Though in the summer before his first year he was excited about going off to university, his first semester was rocky. He got along well with his roommate, but being away from home was unsettling and made it very hard for him to sleep at night. As Tom’s fatigue increased, his anxiety rose right along with it, setting off a vicious cycle that further undermined his sleep. We picked up our work again, now through virtual sessions at times when Tom had his dorm room to himself. It quickly became clear that he needed to come home for a few days to catch up on sleep, and also to meet with one of my psychiatric colleagues for a consultation about medication.

For much of October and early November, Tom returned home on Thursdays after his last class of the week and then went back to school on Sunday afternoons, feeling restored by spending time with his folks, visiting with his longtime music teacher, and getting to sleep in his own bed. He was intensely frustrated that he was missing out on the university’s weekend activities, but he started to enjoy the time he did spend at school much more for knowing he was only ever a few days away from being able to recharge at home.

With the help of our regular therapy sessions, medication that took the edge off his anxiety, an understanding roommate, and supportive parents, Tom started to stay at school for longer stretches. Two weeks into the second semester, his music teacher encouraged him to audition for the university orchestra. Tom was surprised—and honored—to be named principal oboist. From there, his situation improved rapidly. Rehearsals and concerts quickly filled Tom’s schedule, making it impossible for him to come home. Thankfully, he now rarely wanted or needed to. By April, he was signing a fall lease for an off-campus apartment that he would share with two good friends he had met in the orchestra.

Tom reached out to me only once more that year, when his grandmother died unexpectedly. We met twice to help him process his grief and shock. After that, I heard nothing until late fall of Tom’s second year, when I ran into his mother at the grocery store. She gave me the full report on how he was doing. “He couldn’t be happier.” She beamed. “We go to some of his performances, but he only comes home during school breaks, and sometimes not even then. Honestly, at this point, he might as well be in school in California.”

A Caveat: Teen Judgment Can Be Context-Dependent

It was clear in retrospect that Tom was wise to let his worries have a say in his university plans. His story is an excellent example of how emotions can improve the quality of an adolescent’s decision making. But this isn’t always the case. There are certainly times when teenagers can find themselves in situations where emotions do get in the way of their better judgment.

Teenagers, far more than children or adults, can be prone to making bad decisions when doing exciting things with their friends. I doubt you’re surprised to hear this. As a former teenager yourself, you can probably remember a time when you, or some kids you knew, did some astonishingly dumb stuff because other kids were doing it too.

For me, it was “skitching.” I grew up in Colorado and was a teenager in the 1980s when Denver was still a small town. After a heavy snowfall, the empty late-night streets would be covered in a packed, slippery layer of snow. In these conditions, we would go out well after dark, grab onto the back bumper of a friend’s car two or three at a time, yell for our driving friend to hit the gas, then enjoy being pulled while in a squat position, our boots like skis, at ever increasing speeds. Eventually our grip would give out and we’d be left in a heap on the snowy road, at which point the driver would circle around and we’d begin again. Between turns on the bumper, we’d sit facing backward in the open trunk chatting with the active skitchers. Recalling this now in my midfifties, I can’t believe what we did, and as the mother of two teenagers, I’d be on the ceiling if one of my own daughters did anything like this. But I also remember how those late-night skitching sessions felt. They were so much fun that I didn’t even think about danger. My good friends were skitching, so I wanted to skitch, too.

At the risk of sounding defensive, I feel the need to note that, as teenagers go, I was pretty level-headed overall. My skitching was not part of a broader pattern of reckless or impulsive behavior. Had my parents known what we were up to and asked me to detail the potential hazards of skitching, I could, even then, have generated a long list of its actual dangers. But when we were out in the snow, I wasn’t weighing what could go wrong. I was having fun with my friends.

Psychologists have discovered that when thinking about risky behaviors, teenagers are almost quite literally of two minds. There’s the “assessing-danger-in-the-cold-light-of-day” mind, and there’s the “I’m-with-my-friends-and-we’re-having-fun” mind. These two different mindsets are referred to respectively as cold and hot cognition, and the one that’s in charge depends on where teenagers are and what’s happening around them.

Under cold cognition conditions, such as when your teen is standing in your kitchen on a Saturday afternoon describing his plans for the night, teenagers have a great capacity for sound and prudent reasoning. But in the heat of a social moment, hot cognition kicks in and they think less carefully about risk. Your teenager may be telling you the God’s honest truth when he says he has no intention of drinking, smoking, or doing anything else that might be dangerous that evening. But when he gets to a party and discovers that all of his friends are drinking, there’s a decent chance that hot cognition will take over and he’ll join in.

What are adults supposed to do with the news that all teens lead a terrifying mental double life? First, they can take comfort in knowing that many states have crafted laws to account for the fact that teens take more risks when they are with their peers. In the US, graduated driver’s licenses restrict the number of adolescent passengers in a new driver’s car because the likelihood that a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old will have an accident rises with every additional agemate on board. Why? Because the teenage brain is unusually sensitive to both the pleasures of engaging in new or exciting experiences, such as driving fast or recklessly, and also the social rewards of feeling accepted by one’s peers. Combine these two factors, as happens with a carful of friends, and driving can quickly become dangerous. Awareness among legislators of the power of hot cognition has resulted in licensing laws that have dramatically reduced automobile accidents among teenagers.

Second, knowing that our teens can spontaneously shift from cold to hot reasoning, we should think, in advance, about how they’ll make decisions when they find themselves in the kind of heady social situation that is likely to flip the switch. We should capitalize on times when teenagers have cold, analytic reasoning on their side, such as the afternoon kitchen conversation, to ask them how they’ll handle themselves when hot, impulse-boosting conditions kick in.