29. Happy teenagers ?? and other young adults

1. You can feel and you can think and you can accomplish many things but don’t believe you know everything about thinking or feeling or about your emotional responses There’s a lot going on in your teenage years. Your emotions and thinking skills are developing rapidly but neither have reached maturity. In fact, scientists believe that competence in thinking doesn’t mature until the late twenties. Your body will be mature enough for you to have children, you will be reaching your full adult size and you will be undergoing the second major phase of heightened neurochemical and hormonal activity, yet you will still be relatively immature in some of your cognitive and control functions. Experience and development is a two-way street. Your values will be changing as a part of an iterative process - the environment helps to form them but, in turn, your values inform your choice of environment.
2. Sometimes your emotional responses will feel beyond your control. This doesn’t feel normal but it is. Everyone goes through more or less the same thing. Scientists estimate that the age at which we are the most socially sensitive is around 15. You might feel yourself blushing when you enter a room full of people. Or even at the thought of entering the room. All eyes will be on you, waiting for you to make a mistake, to fall over, to have a wardrobe malfunction. Except they won’t. Older and younger people will be doing and thinking the things they normally do, and people of your own age will be too busy worrying about making their own mistakes, falling over and wardrobe malfunctions to notice what you’re doing. There is a chance that if you are obsessing, romantically, over someone, that they will be doing the same over you but most of the time s/he will not even notice you. But if they do, the first love may indeed be the deepest. If you stumble upon such a love enjoy it for its pleasures and pains. There will never be another quite like it.
3. Sometimes your thinking skills will feel fully-formed and that people who disagree with you are stupid, bad or mad. This too is normal. You don’t know everything - give them a break. The way you think about yourself is necessarily different from the way you think about other people. You have a “my-side” bias. You may attribute the differences in other people's behaviours and beliefs to: ignorance (they don’t have the facts); stupidity (they can’t reason effectively); madness (they are not in touch with reality); or, malice (they wilfully differ, and for negative reasons). And if you give them the facts and show them the reasons and they still differ, they MUST be mad or bad! Except, if they’re roughly your age, they see you in exactly the same way.
4. Sometimes you will feel that you know nothing. This is also normal - give yourself a break. The parts of the brain generally associated with competence in thinking don’t mature until the late-twenties. Other major systems have matured in large part by the end of the teenage years. But even the thinking skills don’t mature at the same rate. Mathematical skills mature early, typically in the early twenties, social and integrative skills much later. But however useless you may feel, whether at school, at work, or in your social life, you are still learning.
5. Your friends will seem to be vitally important to you, possibly to the exclusion of everyone else. They are, but make room for other people, especially your parents and other close family. Perhaps the central developmental challenge during these years is the transition from dependence to independence or, more properly, from family dependence to a dependence on those beyond the family. Teenagers are often acutely aware of this and you may see it as more important than the apparently abstract challenges laid down more formally and purposively at school. Adolescence is the time when you are preparing for independence, preparing to leave the safety of home. In the headlong rush to independence, peers become much more important and parents less so. Peers are likely to be around much longer than parents. Peer respect is highly important to you and your parents may seem out of touch or even irrelevant during this time. That’s unfortunate, because they are still valuable to you in the present and you will be able to see their value again, whether or not you can now, in the future.
6. Your choice of friends will be one of the most important choices you will make. But most of it is down to circumstance. The cynical retort from parents when asked “Why did you send your child to a private school?” is that the best investment that they can make for their child is to choose their friends. This answer is usually too narrowly drawn. They want to pick friends for their children whose parents are well-connected and well-heeled to enhance or at least preserve the financial and social status of members of the family. That doesn’t stop them imitating the behaviour and intentions of people like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP, many of which are dysfunctional. However, it does contain a truth; your parents will be concerned with the company you keep and with good reason. Just as the most important single influence on a child learning a musical instrument is owning one, the easiest way to become a substance abuser is to be surrounded by others. Proximity, to both good and bad, matters. Many years ago, I was given some advise: “If you want to fly with the eagles, don’t dirt-scrabble with the turkeys.” This is true, if somewhat prejudiced against turkeys. And it doesn’t tell you what to do if everyone around you is a turkey. There is a degree of comfort in staying with what you know, even if the results are mixed or bad. And there are penalties from standing out from your crowd. It’s tough - welcome to the twilight world of adults where morality is often conflicted.
7. It is normal to feel that you don’t know who you are or what you want The challenges young people face change but they’re always the same. When I grew up, sexual identity was black and white. The pressures on personal identity are different now but not necessarily any easier to cope with. Looking back, I consider myself fortunate to leave school at a time when people believed there were jobs for life. They also believed that families were for life - I knew very few people whose parents had divorced when I was growing up. Although I was not a believer, many more people were churchgoers then. All of these things give people both a trusted framework for the way their worlds work, a kind of confidence in the world, and a sense of meaning. The greater freedoms we have now have value but they come at a cost. In today’s world, you need to make more of your own meaning and to take more responsibility for choosing among the millions of meanings other people offer in the electronic world.
8. You are likely to take more risks now than in any other period of your life. Some of them could be ruinous. Do not exercise these options but take a lot of the other risks. Although you might worry about failure, you are very likely to be more risk and reward seeking than at any other time in your life. You don't underestimate the risks, but you overestimate the rewards or find them much more salient than people do at other times in their lives. This can be a fantastic advantage. Some of the risks come off, even some of the more outlandish ones that more mature people would be reluctant to take. During these years, you have the power to control your actions but you find that much more difficult when there appear to be attractive rewards on offer. Under some conditions, you can apply your growing cognitive skills to great effect but under others you feel overwhelmed by your emotions. Your task is to work out when the costs associated with risk taking might ruin you, primarily physically - death can be fatal ?? - but also mentally - these years are especially dangerous for the onset of serious and long-lasting problems. The challenge is not to resist taking risks - you should keep on taking them. The challenge is to resist taking the wrong kind of risks, the ones that could ruin you if they go wrong.
9. Specialise early. Practice. But remain open to diversity. And fun! The old saying, practice makes perfect, is wrong. Practice makes permanent. If you’re doing something well, practice may get you as close to perfect as is healthy. If you’re doing it poorly, no amount of repetition will help. Ericsson conducted a piece of research that became famous but is often misinterpreted. The 10,000 hours rule says that it takes 10,000 hours of good practice to stand a chance of being eminent in any field. It doesn’t say that you will become eminent - no guarantees - but without something like that level of commitment you have no chance. What else do you need? Good teachers/coaches/mentors, persistence, good luck and the ability to go further than your teachers. You also need to know when to quit and the luck to be sufficiently gifted, to be born in a useful cohort (whatever that means in your case), and to have the resilience to overcome injury or other setbacks. But you don’t need to be eminent to be happy. Mastering skills and knowledge can be satisfying in their own right, without any competitive element, You can find meaning in the process as well as in the outcome. The journey can be as enjoyable as the destination. Csikszentmihalyi identified a set of conditions that defined immersive enjoyment in the process, which he called flow. To find it you will need to find ways to challenge yourself - neither too much nor too little - and then to concentrate on achieving the goals, even as they develop and change. Both the focus on ends and the focus on process can become obsessive. You may lose your enthusiasm if you don’t have a break, have fun, have a social life. For many teenagers, the problem is the opposite; too little focus on tasks that require concentration, too many distractions from the dominant calls of peers and a social life. Find space for both.
10. Avoid social media and mind changing drugs, including alcohol, until you leave school I know, you hate this one. But recent research says you may not hate it as much as you say. Most teenagers would prefer NOT to have social media so long as all of their peers didn’t have? it either. The rest of the research suggests that it has very negative effects on you, especially in your teens. Apart from the obvious problems with bullying, cancelling and so on, the evidence concludes that it makes concentration much more difficult. In the deliberately sensationalised words of Jonathan Haidt, “Social media is making our teenagers stupid”. Drugs are similar; it’s not that they’re all bad in themselves but that the balance of research says they’re bad for developing brains and more difficult to handle in the hyper-social, risk-taking teenage years. In the cognitive and emotional explosion that is adolescence, they’re just too big a risk. They can ruin the rest of your life.

The changes in your teenage years and early twenties are massive. You will remember the sights and sounds and relationships with a power that will never return. Your pleasures and pains will be intense. Enjoy!