Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Understanding Adolescent Stress During GCSEs

Transcript

Understanding Adolescent Stress During GCSEs · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, Child, an adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am uh offering episode two on the subject of GTSEs and the psychological and other pressures experienced not just by the student themselves, but of course their families.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I offered sort of interim clinical dimension in the previous podcast, and I felt this was important because we have to understand and appreciate the effects of the pressure that is experienced, not just in terms of it being stressful, but how it influences identity, how it influences the student's perception of themselves.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I want to look at the stress and anxiety, but also in the context of the adolescent nervous system, the central nervous system.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the stress response is really important to understand because when adolescents feel overwhelmed by exams, the central nervous system becomes activated and it goes into threat mode.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this produces racing thoughts, panic, poor concentration, forgetting information, sleep disturbance, and sometimes physical symptoms.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, ironically, anxiety reduces performance, so it's the perfect cocktail.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now the brain can't learn effectively under sustained stress.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there are four positions that you may very well see the adolescent taking, and these are called fight, flight, freeze, or avoid.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you may notice fight, instability and irritability, anger, arguing, flight, avoiding revision, distraction, withdrawal, freeze, I can't start, shut down, blank mind.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you will also or may also see perfectionism, overworking and dramatic and powerful fear of disappointing.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And none of these are about laziness, certainly the last one isn't, but they're nervous system responses.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what you will also see is that young people will very often push parents away, and that's partly because they want independence, but under stress they still need containment.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this creates attention.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: They want distance, yet they need support.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you may hear, leave me alone, stop asking, I know what I'm doing.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But beneath this is often fear of failing, fear of disappointing you, fear of not being enough.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So what helps most is not pressure, but emotional steadiness.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Parents who remain calm, predictable, and emotionally available help regulate the adolescent nervous system.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this improves concentration, confidence, emotional resilience, and exam performance.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do really appreciate the fact that your own stress and your own lives inevitably carry a lot of pressure, a lot of demand.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as I often say to parents, I have the luxury of seeing the patient in the consulting room without all of those other pressures intruding on my work with the young person.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But there is something about the way in which my constant state is experienced by the young person, and how what I see so often is a really significant reduction in the stress reactions.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't apply just to exams, it applies to lots of different things.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose I have the opportunity to listen.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the sessions are times when I am listening and not saying very much, because the adolescent or the child needs the space to just be themselves and to say whatever they need to say.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, they're kind of discharging the stress that they hold on to.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they'll talk about particular difficulties, we might look together at how those might be managed.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the single most important method is consistency.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The method of consistency, meaning that by taking a position and holding it and being alongside, is what young people really need.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So in the next episode, we're going to look at how you can support the young person through this period.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: There is a PDF that I produced for parents, which can be found on my Facebook page, which may be how how you got here.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: But in any event, the resource library that will be available from tomorrow will have information about this.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a series of PDFs that you can download.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're free and they uh they sit alongside the podcasts.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be back with episode three.