Emotions are a tricky thing. On one hand it’s pretty amazing that our brain has adapted and evolved over millions of years, to allow us to respond to the environment in every sort of situation – to guide us, tell us what to do, keep us safe.

But on the other hand, emotions can be so complicated, and based on something other than just the situation in front of us. And this is where we often find ourselves as parents of teenagers. Our emotions can be less than productive.

I want to give you a bit more insight into your emotions, help you become a little more introspective, so you can ultimately manage them better. Stay with me.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that teaches you the science of parenting adolescents so you can be less stressed and more excited about having a teenager. I’m Ann Coleman, I’m an attorney turned parent educator and I’ve spent years studying the science of teen behavior and I want to help you learn how to parent your teens for the best possible outcome.

Today I want to talk to you about the big thing that can really trip us up as parents – as people, in general – our emotions.

And I can tell you, I never gave much thought at all to my own emotions over the years. Perhaps like you, I just knew I had lots of big feelings that would just pop up out of nowhere, that I simply couldn’t control.

I didn’t know (or didn’t really think about) where those feelings came from or why I felt the way I did. I can remember feeling deeply unsettled so often when I was younger but not being able to identify that feeling.

When I became a parent, all of that unease and what I know now as anxiety, came bubbling up to the point that I sought out a psychologist and insisted on some pretty major psychological testing. I felt like there was something loose and out of control in my brain. So, I came away with medication but absolutely no understanding of what was going on in my anxious brain.

It wasn’t until we were two years into what I felt was my son’s struggle with his own anxiety, depression, and drug use that I began to take a hard look at my own emotions and how they had very much played an enormous role in my son’s issues.

Once I began to understand how emotions come to be and began to look at my own thoughts, emotions and behavior from an analytic perspective, something clicked in my brain and I began to be able to manage them so much better.

That’s what I want for you. Because I hear so often from parents, “I can’t help how I feel”, “I just snap”, “My teenager pushes all my buttons” etc. It doesn’t have to be that way – you can help it – you can learn.

Let me start by explaining the cognitive triangle: picture a triangle and on the 3 points are thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Each, impact the other 2. If you change your thoughts, you can change your emotions and behavior. If you change your behavior, you can change your thoughts and emotions, etc.

But most often, we go from thoughts to emotions to behavior. And the problem many of us have is taking a pause to think between emotions and behavior.

For example, you see your 14-year-old has once again, after telling her about 1,000 times, not to drop her backpack and coat in the floor at the front door, has done it yet again. And your reaction is immediate.

Your thoughts come so fast that the emotion and the behavior are almost instantaneous. You might think something like this “Oh my God, how can she not remember to do such a simple thing after I’ve told her over and over, I’m just over it – I’m actually just pissed” and then you yell – “I swear LeeAnn, if I have to tell you one more time to pick your things up and take them to your room, I’m going to absolutely lose my mind!”

Thoughts, emotion, behavior happened almost simultaneously.

Professor Susan David in her book, Emotional Agility, talks about emotional rigidity versus emotional agility.

She explains that emotional rigidity comes from us getting stuck in certain ways of thinking, using mental shortcuts, assumptions, cognitive biases that then cause these unpleasant emotions and negative behaviors that just wreak havoc in our lives.

But as Dr. David explains it, emotional agility means being flexible in your thinking and feelings so you can respond to situations more appropriately. But she also points out that this doesn’t mean trying to always think positively, to be happy all the time. That’s simply not realistic and research even shows that it can backfire.

So, being flexible in your thinking and feelings is the first thing to figure out. The way I would explain it is that you have to be willing to take a hard look at your own thought patterns, objectively call out the Bullshit. Then being able to respond to situations more intentionally, more thoughtfully, sometimes taking a while to decide what to do or say, that’s emotional agility.

What’s she’s really describing in scientific terms is emotional awareness and emotional regulation. Being aware of your emotions, where they came from and then being able to respond the way you want to – more intentionally. And it’s that time in between the emotions and the response that many people have such a hard time with.

Dr. David explains it with a quote from Viktor Frankle, Austrian psychiatrist, Nazi death camp survivor and the author of Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Those are such powerful words. And for parents in the midst of raising adolescents, they should really be taken to heart. You have an opportunity, every time your teen does something that aggravates you, worries you, or makes you mad, to give yourself that space to think and question your thoughts and your emotions and to respond to them in a way that strengthens your connection to them, their trust in you, and takes their feelings into consideration.

But getting there is not that easy for some. You must be willing to open your mind and examine your inner world, pay attention to your own thoughts and feelings, be curious about why you think and feel the way you do.

You must be objective enough to look at your own your thoughts and determine if they’re accurate or distorted; are they leftovers from your childhood; perhaps incorrect assumptions you’ve made about yourself or other people for a long time; mental shortcuts or biases?

You must also be mindful of your thoughts and emotions; separate yourself from them, understanding that thoughts and emotions are just thoughts and just emotions – they’re not really part of you, they’re just separate elements that simply take place in our brain. It doesn’t mean the thoughts are factual and therefore, it doesn’t mean the emotions you’re feelings are appropriate (although valid to feel).

So, let’s talk about thoughts – usually where our emotions start. If you’ve listened to the show regularly, you’ve probably heard me talk about our inner voice – our inner chatterbox. We all have one and it just blabs away all day long, narrating, instructing, pointing out the obvious and the not so obvious and often filling our heads with nonsense.

That little inner voice is responding to stimuli all around us at all times. “I need to clean that sink out” ”I’m going to be late” “I’m not going to email her back right now” and on and on.

Stimuli – things we see, hear, feel, taste, and touch, is interpreted by our brain and our inner voice helps us make sense of it and respond to that stimuli.

However, our brain makes mistakes, jumps to conclusions, interprets stimuli incorrectly, quite often, actually.

And back to Dr. David, she explains it this way:  she says in order to make sense of all the stimuli we encounter, our brain turns it into this constant narrative or story that our inner voice reports on all day. The narrative is supposed to help us stay sane as she puts it, but it often simply gets off track and gives us a false narrative.

And every time this happens, we hear our inner voice telling us something, it gets etched somewhere in the back of our brain. And that really matters because if it’s wrong, but we believe it, it can really mess with our lives, unless and until we challenge that narrative.

For example, how many super models do you think were told they were too tall, too skinny and odd-looking when they were in middle school? Most of them. They likely spent all their younger years believing that narrative. “I’m too tall, too lanky and I’m ugly.”

And at some point, either they or someone else helped them changed that narrative. “I’m model material actually, tall and lanky is good, my odd features are actually embraced by the fashion industry, I have something here.”

Stop and think for a minute about the narratives your inner voice has mistakenly convinced you of. Have you always thought of yourself as one way or another way because of things your parents or teachers said to you or the nicknames they gave you? Are you the quiet one, the big mouth, the athlete, the cute one?

Or maybe something happened a long time ago, something that was actually beyond your control, but you feel guilty about it: a friend’s horrible marriage to the person you introduced them to, a parent’s mental health, your spouse’s drinking problem.

What about relationship issues? Have you gotten mad at your own mom or dad and later realized it was a misunderstanding or that you blew it out of proportion?

The bottom line is, we cannot always trust our inner voice. It can completely mangle the facts and truth with judgments and opinions and total lies.

In her book, David points out that our inner voice can move us from fact to opinion to judgment to anxiety really, really quickly. And she says in her own workshops she often has the executives she works with try free association with some prompts.

For example, she give a list of things in the book for the reader to think about one at a time and just free associate and see where you go in your mind.

I’m going to give you a different list of 4 things more fitting for our situation and I’d love for you to pause after each and just see where your mind goes. Ready?

Your teen’s cell phone

Your teen’s bedroom

Your teen’s grades

Your teen’s behavior at home

Where did your mind go on each of these prompts?

What about your teen’s cell phone? Where did that take you? “It’s an Apple 12-Plus. She already wants a 15-Plus and she’s constantly on it. I don’t know what to do about it, I worry about her mental health, I’m a terrible parent.”

What about your teen’s bedroom. “I love the color we painted his walls. I just wish he’d take better care of them. What a mess it is in there. I don’t think he even cares. I don’t know why I even bother trying to make things nice, he doesn’t appreciate anything.”

You get the picture. Our mind can go from zero to 60 in a split second. And we set up a pattern of reacting a certain way to specific stimuli – David calls it getting hooked. We react automatically because we’ve had this same thought process before and once our brain establishes a pattern, it tends to follow that pattern over and over again.

So, for example, if your teen comes home late, your automatic reaction may be to yell or lecture. And this is because your brain has gotten hooked on the thoughts you’ve had in the past when this same thing happened before. “I’m sure she’s with that horrible group of kids again. When is she going to learn? She’s going to get arrested if she keeps this behavior up.”

Something else that kicks these automatic thoughts into high gear and makes getting them stuck or hooked in our brain even easier is that our brain makes it possible to mix our senses with our feelings. It allows us to blend our sense of sight, hearing, and touch with our emotions, images on a page, or in our mind, a pattern in the sky, a scenario playing out in front of us. This mash up of senses and emotion means our brain will retain these thoughts even better – even if they are false or unhelpful.

You may have heard of the fight or flight response, the brain’s automatic response to stimuli in the environment. When the brain’s amygdala detects a threat through one of the five senses, certain neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine and adrenaline are released in the brain and body which speeds up our heart rate, makes our breathing shallow, sends blood to our extremities (a physiological response), and literally readies us to fight, run away or in some cases freeze (behavioral responses) and depending on the situation, we’ll feel some version of anger, fright, nervousness (an emotional response). This response is automatic, no thought involved.

The human brain has evolved and adapted so that our ancient ancestors wouldn’t have to think, but just react when being attacked by a wild animal or another cave man. And unfortunately, even though our world has changed greatly, and we no longer have the same kind of dangerous threats on a daily basis, our brain has not evolved that much.

So, our amygdala still thinks we’re living among wild animals and tries to protect us and sends us into fight or flight when it perceives something as a threat even if it really isn’t.

And that amygdala makes mistakes ALL the time. Not as often as our teenagers – theirs is super sensitive – but it still makes mistakes.

One reason is because of our unconscious memories. The amygdala remembers things that we don’t consciously remember. So, often, our body will go into fight or flight, sending all those neurotransmitters coursing through us, making us feel like we want to hit a wall or scream or cry all at once, but we have no idea why.

And sometimes the memories just don’t connect in our consciousness until we really dig for it. until we stop I’ve often told about how my brother’s substance abuse caused me to react to my son’s weed smoking – it rocked my world.

The human mind is fascinating - but it’s a little scary as well and it can really get us into trouble if we’re not careful.

For example, something else it does is it takes shortcuts. Our brain makes predictions, estimations, or assumptions about what to expect based on our experience and other information we’ve stored in there.

These shortcuts are called heuristics (or rules of thumb)– it’s a system our brain’s worked out for taking way too much information and breaking it down into a quick and simple prediction. For example, if you hear thunder, you know it’s likely going to rain. If you see someone has to duck to go through a door, you know he’s really tall.

When we need to make a quick decision, our brain simplifies the information for us and allows us to forgo all the complicated figuring and calculating – it’s a much easier way for us to navigate our world – otherwise we’d have to expend way too much mental effort.

Psychologists have come up with different theories of heuristics some of which can really impact your parenting.

For example, there’s the availability heuristic, which causes our brain to prioritize information that’s readily available in your memory. Let’s say your 16-year-old daughter asks to go to a party tonight being held in an area in the city where there was a stabbing on the street in broad daylight last month. You may be more likely to remember that news story and say No to the party. This heuristic leads you to believe stabbings in that area of the city are more common than they actually are.

Another heuristic we tend to employ within our family is called the fundamental attribution error. This is when we assume that other people’s bad behavior is due to a character flaw when our own bad behavior is just a matter of circumstance.

For example, you think because your 15-year-old son sleeps until the afternoon on weekends, hates cleaning their room and pees on the toilet seat, that he’s lazy and a slob.

But, if you sneak in an afternoon nap every day, leave the dishes in the sink every night and never can manage to get all the clothes back to your own drawers…you’ve just had a “stressful week”.

So heuristics, can become a real problem because they’re operating within our mind which has already formed mindsets – core beliefs, frameworks through which we see the world. So, these shortcuts are only helping us see things the way we already believe them to be.

And because our mindsets are subjective – they’re how we see the world, not necessarily how the world actually objectively or factually is, our mind can take a shortcut which is fundamentally flawed – a faulty heuristic.

This phenomenon is called a cognitive bias.

Now, when most people hear the word bias, they think of the general definition – being prejudiced in favor of or against something or someone or a group of people in an unfair way – but that’s usually a conscious or intentional bias.

But it’s the unintentional, the faulty shortcuts we’re talking about here – this is what gets parents in trouble because we don’t realize we’re making this subconscious thinking error – and it affects the way we interpret information. These cognitive biases cause us to make inaccurate and irrational decisions and judgments.

Researchers have apparently identified and labeled somewhere around 175 of these specific cognitive biases, many of which could potentially impact our parenting directly or indirectly.

For example, there’s the anchoring bias, which is when you use the first bit of information you hear to form your opinion of something or someone.

This might happen when you find out your teenager is hanging out with a certain person. They show up at your house smelling like smoke or you’ve already heard something about them – maybe they’ve gotten in trouble at school or at a party. So, you automatically form an opinion about this friend without giving them a chance. You could be right, but you may be wrong.

There’s the Halo effect – you might imagine what that one is. “My kid would never do that.” “Not her, I’m sure you’re wrong.”

And there’s the Optimism bias – nothing bad is going to happen to us - “Sure, you can have you’re senior party here and we’ll buy the keg” Invite the whole class.

Or what about the Affect heuristic where you make choices or decisions based on the emotion you’re experiencing that moment. For example, researchers find that if we’re in a good mood we may see things as less risky than when we’re in a negative mood. That’s why teenagers and kids know not to ask to go do something when you’re in a bad mood!

So, what are you supposed to do with all of this information? Several things:

1. Don’t assume because you think it, it must be true. You cannot always trust what your inner voice tells you
2. When you experience an unpleasant emotion, take an objective look at the thoughts behind that emotion, separate yourself from those thoughts and realize they’re not a part of you.
3. Slow down, you probably don’t need to respond immediately. Give yourself that space and time between stimulus and response.

The human brain – our inner voice – our thinking, is fallible…very fallible. So just remember that when it comes to parenting, especially when parenting teens, keep your main goals in mind. What are they? Let me make some suggestions – empathy, connection, mutual trust and respect, emotional validation, firm but kind…something along those lines.

If you find yourself in conflict a lot of the time with your kids, or you just feel out of control, emotionally out of sorts, take a deep dive into your thoughts, your emotions, learn to second guess you normal automatic responses. Just because you’ve always thought and felt a certain way, doesn’t make it right and doesn’t mean you can’t change.

The link for Susan David’s fabulous book, Emotional Agility will be in your episode description – do yourself a favor and get a copy very soon.

Okay, that’s it for Speaking of Teens today. I’m so glad you’re hear and hope you’ll share the podcast and spread the word for other parents with teens and tweens. I’m hear to help!

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And if you enjoy the show, you’ll really love Parent Camp, a community of parents learning together through the Field Guide for Teens, meeting with me weekly, learning from other expert guests and more – check it out through the link at the bottom of the episode description where you’re listening.

Alright, until next time, remember, a little change goes a long way.