Lower Their Stress
By Editorial Staff
Your teenagers' stress, that is. The major payoff: lower health risks when they become adults, including their risk of high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes. Research recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association makes it clear: The low-stressed teen has a better chance of growing up healthy than a high-stressed one. Let's look at study findings.
Health assessments in adolescence (average age: 13) and young adulthood (average age: 24) served as the age points to compare self-perceived stress levels with adult cardiometabolic risk factors. According to the researchers, "Consistently high perceived stress from adolescence through adulthood was associated with greater risk for cardiometabolic diseases in young adulthood. If individuals experienced greater levels of stress from their teenage years into adulthood, they were more likely to have worse vascular health, higher total body fat, more fat around the belly and higher risk of obesity compared to those who felt less stressed over time. In general, higher perceived stress levels were also associated with higher risk for cardiometabolic health conditions."
OK, so it's time to assess your child's stress level (regardless of their age) as a tool to help reduce their stress as needed. (You might want to do the same exercise yourself, as adult stress is similarly bad for your health.) You can take any one of various online tests to determine your child's / your stress; although asking the simple question, "How stressed are you on an average day?" on a 1-10 scale is an easy way to get things started.
If neither of you is "low stress," you've got some work to do. Start by figuring out what causes their / your stress, and then make changes as necessary. Smartphone use is often a big stressor these days; whether stress about social media postings / comments or even the stress of not being near your phone (it's a real thing; in fact, there's a term for it: nomophobia). Other potential stress sources for your teen: school / grades, friendships / relationships, family dynamics, "the future," etc. Other potential stress sources for you: all of those (we all worry about our children), plus politics, finances, aging, health, etc.
