Things I find myself telling my teen patients often, in no particular order.
(I am not your therapist and nothing in this post is a substitute for getting your own personal mental health treatment if you need it.)
Being a teenager sucks. Your brain is in a state of development where all your emotions are intensified, and those emotions are frequently bad because being a teenager sucks. You’re basically an adult when it’s convenient for the adults, and a kid when it’s convenient for the adults. This is crazymaking. It is my opinion that critics of “it gets better” messaging do not recall being a teenager very well. I’m not saying being an adult is a picnic. But generally speaking it beats the hell out of being the legal property of your parents while your brain is going brrrrr.
On that note, if you have any kind of mental illness, these may be your worst, most symptomatic years.
Your brain is also in a stage of development where new habits are more likely to stick. That means that if you and I (33) both started learning Russian tomorrow, you would be more likely to stick with it and get better at Russian faster than me; but if you and I started doing a new drug tomorrow, you would be more likely to get addicted.
It’s normal to hate living with your parents even if you love them. I’m not saying you have to love your parents, but if you do, that doesn’t obligate you to enjoy living under the same roof. MANY adults have loving relationships with parents they would never want to live with again. (It may also take a few years of living apart for you to determine whether you actually hate your parents or whether you just hate living with them. This too is normal.)
There’s nothing wrong with going through phases. If you believe that what you’ve got going on right now is going to be your permanent identity, well, you’d know better than anybody else; but it’s fine if it’s not. “I’m into this right now” is good enough and people should respect it.
How much time you spend on your Screen Device is less predictive of mental health outcomes than what you are actually doing on your Screen Device. Three hours of gaming with your friends beats one hour of watching thinspiration videos on TikTok or arguing with strangers on tumblr about who gets to call themselves a dyke. (Assuming your friends are nice to you.)
Sex is supposed to be fun. If you’re having sex and it isn’t fun, something is wrong – maybe you’re not ready to be having sex yet, maybe you’re having sex with the wrong people, maybe your partner needs to learn your body and preferences better, or maybe you’re having sex for the wrong reasons.
(Obligatory don’t do drugs BUT) if you’re going to do drugs, weed is safer than alcohol.
You may be tempted to assume that the people who treat you like you’re not cool enough to hang out with them are, in fact, the coolest people ever and ultimate arbiters of cool, and expend a lot of energy trying to win them over. I implore you to at least consider the possibility that your friends who actively want to hang out with you are exactly as cool as those people, and quite possibly cooler.
If you barely eat anything all day and then binge at night, the reason you’re binging at night is because you barely ate all day. If you teach your body that it will not be fed for long periods of time, it will do its best to ensure, whenever you do eat, that you eat as much as possible. This is a feature, not a bug.
Sleep hygiene is unfortunately not bullshit.
“People experience social penalties for not being thin” is extremely true, but “no one will ever love you unless you’re thin” is extremely false.
The world is full of happy, successful, financially solvent adults who did not get into their first choice colleges.
One of the only good additions so far to the "don't do drugs but" bullet point.
I have also told kids "if you're thinking of doing random pills that someone brings to a party, you should look them up in the Drugs Identifier guide on Drugs.com and read about what you're taking before taking it". https://www.drugs.com/imprints.php?imprint=l&color=12&shape=24
