What is stress? It is this feeling that you have when there are all kinds of challenges and things happening to you at the same time. It may come from different things that you are up against and if will affect both your mind and your body.
The things that stress teens out the most are school work, parents, friends’ problems, romantic relationships. On top of that, for teens, drugs in the neighborhood was a high stressor and for younger kids they name siblings as a stressor.
It is interesting how girls and boys try to cope with stress. Boys more often use avoidance and distraction while girls tend to look for support and will try to actively reduce their stress. Girls are more likely to find their stress coming from relationships and boys from authority figures.
Both sets of individuals use avoidance to some degree while more and more are seeing their stressed displayed with anger and aggression. Finding healthy ways of dealing with stress is very important to the health, both physical and mental for our young adults. While a certain amount of short term stress can be good, the long term – day in and day out feelings of stress, worry and anxiety are not healthy in any way.
What are your top 5 stressors?