Teen Stress: What Does it Feel Like?

Fear and stress many times feel the exact same way.  The reason is that both are affected by that Fight or Flight mentality. Every teen has had the challenges that range from the big test next week, to the disagreement (major fight) with your parents.  It may have been a lost cell phone or the kid that is constantly picking on you in school.  It could be worry about your weight or health or something global like the environment or worldwide starvation.

When you are really stressed out and anxious, you may feel it in your heart, your hands or feet getting colder, headache or a rush of blood to your face, your stomach feeling upset or having butterflies in your stomach.  All of these manifestations mean it is time for you to slow down, because as you continue with the load of stressful situations facing you, you are losing physical energy and the ability of thinking clearly.

In the end it is found that 60% of doctor visits are for stressed related problems.  Some studies have shown that 85% of diseases have stress related factors. So we need to take care of ourselves and start with finding what is effective for us to calm down and cope with our stress.

How do you cope with your stress?

What Stresses Our Children Out?

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?