I was listening to my favorite podcast on Investing, InvestED, when I heard this interesting insight on anxiety from their interview with Dawa Phillips.
At about 21 minutes they talk about the purpose of anxiety – about how it’s useful for heightened awareness.
Just this week I’d talked with another mom about how even on the off night when our teens have less homework, they still have trouble getting to bed and going to sleep at a reasonable hour. Maybe it’s because anxiety serves a purpose for them as students most of the time.
Most of the time, anxiety helps keep them awake and alert so that they can finish massive amounts of homework. The difficulty is they don’t have the brain maturity yet to keep from going past the point where arousal – the beginning of anxiety – is useful.
Further, their anxiety gets stuck on and they haven’t learned how to turn it off. Maybe that’s a skill that can be learned? And maybe that’s why giving kids more and more to do at such a young age – even with the justification that it’s to prepare them for what’s coming. Be it high school or college – isn’t a good idea. They need to be older with a more developed brain before they encounter that level of anxiety and responsibility.
It may be that younger brains lack the ability to turn off this amount of anxiety. If they are older when they first encounter that much anxiety, their brains are better equipped to handle it and turn it off when it is not needed.