* Parenting Five simple lessons to help de-stress your stressed-out teen Add to ... Erin Anderssen -- Last updated Friday, Sep. 30, 2016 7:07AM EDT More young adults are reporting ‘elevated stress’ than only a few years ago, but the feeling doesn’t have to overwhelm them. Erin Anderssen reports -- [image.jpg] Sleep is one of the most important elements in managing stress and anxiety. (iStockphoto) Stress has become the soul-sucking virus of the modern age. So a recent large-scale Ontario study should come as no surprise: Teenagers are also becoming infected in growing numbers. In August, the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reported that one in three Ontario teens suffers from “moderate-to-serious psychological distress. Close to 30 per cent reported “elevated stress.” And the number of kids saying they felt nervous or overwhelmed either “most” or “all of the time” had jumped significantly since the last time the survey was -- of bullying continued to fall. The stress numbers are worrisome and the survey’s sample size is large, but it is still based on self-reports, not clinical assessments. It determined the level of overall “distress” by scoring the answers to a series of questions about how the students perceived their mood and behaviour over the previous month. Some of the findings aren’t that surprising: Grade 12s report more stress than Grade 7s, and girls admit to more stress than boys. We probably need not worry too much about kids admitting to “feeling -- at Dalhousie University and a leading expert in adolescent health is happy to offer one. Surveys such as this one, he suggests, capture the consequences of a society in a stew about stress, helped along by a hugely profitable stress-management industry. Stress isn’t the evil we’ve made it out to be, Kutcher says, but that’s the message that has trickled down to teenagers. They aren’t faking it – the stress they feel is real, and some of them require clinical help. But for the average teenager, Kutcher proposes a more chill intervention, one he argues is used too little these days: the keep-calm-and-carry-on conversation with a heavy dose of coping skills that keeps stress in check and puts it to better use. After all, soon those kids will have mortgages and careers and families. Stress isn’t going anywhere. [image.jpg] In August, the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reported that one in three Ontario teens suffers from “moderate-to-serious psychological distress." (iStockphoto) 1. Okay, you feel stressed. That’s not the end of the world Teenagers, argues Kutcher, are too often getting the message that feeling nervous or overwhelmed or fidgety means something is wrong with them, that stress should be avoided at all costs. But managing stress poorly is habit forming: What starts in Grade 7 as sweaty palms before a big test can become a panic attack at Grade 12 finals. Here’s an alternative, stress-positive approach: Those sweaty palms mean you care. That racing heart can help you perform. Stress, if you know how to handle it, is not bad for you. It’s normal. Being stressed isn’t a sign of impending failure; it’s an indicator of a problem to fix – like the fuel light on a car. Kutcher says teens should be taught not to work to eliminate stress, but to focus on the issue that is causing it. If it’s a speech, don’t try to avoid it, find out how to prepare yourself. If it’s a fight, seek advice on how to -- The science suggests this mindset adjustment works: People who see stress as positive and manageable perform better, face problems more constructively and recover more easily from failure. Kelly McGonigal’s book, The Upside of Stress, details experiments where researchers told college students who were about to write a practice exam that any nervousness they felt meant their bodies were getting -- common feelings. The latter are debilitating mental-health diagnoses. Teaching them to recognize the difference and to use precise language to define how they are feeling helps normalize their own stress. It also helps identify when symptoms require more serious intervention, both in themselves and their friends. “If everybody is sick,” Kutcher asks, “how do we find the people who are really sick?” 3. Stress is not a sign of impending failure Anxiety can make you lose perspective, it overlaps important details -- they get older.” 4. Feeling stressed? Lend a hand Performing acts of charity also works off stress, McGonigal writes in her book. For one thing, helping another person leaves less time for ruminating about your own problems. Anxiety is exacerbated when life -- 5. Walk it off. Sleep it off The most important tool for managing stress, says Pope, is sleep. And yet, high-performing students (and the adults raising them) brag about how late they stay up studying, how many tests they have and how busy -- As the Ontario study showed, by the time students reach Grade 11, only 25 per cent are getting at least eight hours of shuteye. Teens need to see sleep as a key to stress management, and parents, Pope says, need to set an example and guide them how to get enough. The same goes for exercise, ideally the kind where you aren’t stressing about how many goals you need to score. __________________________________________________________________ -- Kent Butt Grade 11, Edmonton Stress is when the world gets to you, and tries to tear you down. But a little bit of it is good, or else you wouldn’t study for anything. We are super stressed due to our environment. There’s social media. When you are on it, you only see the best parts of your friends’ lives. It can make you feel like you are the worst person in the crowd. -- making everything seem worse than it is. I have a few friends who just let their stress boil inside of them and end up disconnecting from all their peers, and trying to deal with it on their own without help, which usually doesn’t work very well. They -- parents. It’s a habit now. I felt really stressed around finals. With my mom, we went on a very quick-paced walk through the river valley and I just ranted about everything that was wrong. My mom talked about how it’s normal to be stressed, and nothing is as big as it seems at the time, which is something that a lot of kids don’t understand – that individual friends fighting, or one test, there is always a way to make up any failure.