How anxiety and organized youth programs help adolescents manage stress

Adolescent Challenges

Adolescence can be a time of upheaval, stress and extreme challenges. And how should an adolescent respond and react to challenges he or she will face during adolescence? These issues and others related to how adolescents respond to challenges will be covered in this paper.

Challenges can cause Anxiety and Depression in Adolescents

In the peer-reviewed journal Depression and Anxiety, the authors discuss "anxiety sensitivity" and the "negative social, psychological, or physical consequences" that anxiety sensitivity can have on adolescents and others from stressful situations (Zavos, et al., 2012). It is known that persons that struggle with anxiety sensitivity can later in life experience "subsequent depression," Zavos writes (400). The pertinent events that create stress and the resulting anxiety sensitivity are things like "family discord" and the breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, the authors explain.

In this study, researchers measured stressful life events in 1,500 individuals at three points in their lives -- at ages 15, 17, and 20. The results showed that there was strong evidence for an association between stressful life events can produce a change in "…cognition associated with anxiety and depression" (Zavos, 400).

How can families and schools and communities provide guidance for adolescents?

In my younger years, our community relied on young people to interact with very old, sometimes frail people, in positive, helpful ways. The churches united behind a program of linking teens up with elderly people (called "shut-ins"); each young person was assigned to visit and help an older person in the community. That also meant mowing their grass; taking down their storm windows in the spring and putting them up in the fall; shoveling their sidewalks; doing their grocery shopping. The Boy Scouts also got involved and a scout could earn a merit badge for helping one senior citizen for a full year. Learning to be responsible to and for others is a pathway to maturity for adolescents. We enjoyed interacting with the older people because it felt good to be involved in a positive human activity; but also, the older people always had stories to tell about their interesting lives and we learned to be good listeners as well.