In this episode of Ask Dr. Jodi, I tackle the pressing youth mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression rates are soaring among Generation Z, leaving parents, teachers, and counselors searching for answers. This episode dives deep into the root causes and equips you with actionable strategies to support young people in building resilience and thriving in today’s challenging world.
The youth mental health crisis has been building for decades, and the modern world has amplified its effects. From the impact of social media and screens to the overwhelming messages of inadequacy and fear, young people are navigating an increasingly complex mental health landscape. I explore how these factors erode their executive functioning skills and self-trust, leading to higher rates of anxiety and depression. This episode offers practical tools for parents, teachers, and counselors to reconnect young people with their sense of belonging, purpose, and capability.
Resources & Links
Key Takeaways on Supporting Youth Mental Health
What You Can Do: Help teens rebuild social skills through structured activities, mentorship programs, or community engagement.
What You Can Do: Encourage healthy digital habits, such as screen-free time zones, mindful content consumption, and face-to-face interactions.
What You Can Do: Provide resources on financial literacy, goal setting, and stress management to help young people navigate these challenges.
What You Can Do: Encourage small, actionable steps like joining local environmental groups, reducing personal waste, or advocating for policy changes.
What You Can Do: Foster connection through peer support groups, volunteering, and extracurricular activities.
What You Can Do: Teach young people about how their brains work. Help them reframe resistance as normal and empower them to take small steps toward their goals.
What You Can Do: Assign chores, encourage goal-setting, and celebrate small achievements to help young people build trust in their abilities.
Thank you so much for listening to Ask Dr. Jodi! If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share it with someone who needs inspiration or help to heal!
Dr. Jodi Aman: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. We're talking about the youth mental health crisis. I wanted to redo that video because it was such poor quality and I refer to it all of the time because this is the main information that you need to know if you're a teacher or you're a counselor.
Or you're a parent of Generation Z, you need to understand why mental health problems are skyrocketing, why anxiety, why depression, why are they struggling so much even when they haven't had trauma or even when they haven't had difficulty. Their anxiety is high anyway. Their depression is high anyway. Of course, usually depression and anxiety, usually all the time, it comes out of a context of our life.
But anyway, right now I'm live. If you want to chat in the chat, if you're on Facebook or if you're on YouTube, you could send me a question.
And I'll answer it. I have no guests [00:01:00] today. It's just me here. And I want to deliver tons of information to you. So pause this if you want to go grab a pen and we're going to get into the nitty gritty. Of what is going on so that you know where it is that you can do something about it.
Okay. If you're a teacher, if you're a parent, if you're a counselor, this video is going to be for you. But if you're a teenager or if you're in your twenties, this will really help you understand what is going on in your mind and help you know how to move forward. Plus for us adults out there, It's affecting us too.
This modern world is affecting us too. So you're going to get a lot out of this video. that's going to help you with whatever you're dealing with. We're dealing with tons of burnout, tons of anxiety and depression ourselves, partly because we are dealing with the young people who are struggling and partly [00:02:00] because we are in this world too.
And this is a regular human response to our world. The anxiety and the depression and the burnout and the overwhelm and the exhaustion and the anger and frustration that you feel is a regular human response to our world. It is not a mental illness. It's not a signal that you're weak. There's some big things going on.
There are big things going on in you. Are responding to them, your body, your soul, your mind, your emotions, your relationships. They are all responding to the context of our world. So I'm going to explain that. But I wanted to say that first because so many young people are worried that something's wrong with them.
They feel like something's wrong with them. They look around and they feel like they're the only ones who feel this way. And they're really they feel different. They don't understand why. And that makes them feel even worse and even more different. It's a, it's an assault on your psyche to be different, [00:03:00] to be left out.
Number one, you are not left out. You are part of the group. We're all feeling the intensity of these times. I can't even reiterate that enough. And every time I do a video talking about this, things out there are getting harder and more confusing. And, the information that we're trying to process as it's coming through, the facts, the opinions, it is overwhelming and it's worse.
So when I started teaching what's going on with the youth mental health crisis years ago, It was before COVID, then it was COVID and we're reiterating it all and it's adding layers to it. And now with what is going on politically and the huge divide in our country and a lot of the fear mongering and the context that people.
It's a regular human response for people to be afraid. And then the gaslighting that's going on is really overwhelming people. The [00:04:00] powerlessness that people feel is adding to it. So let me talk about what happened years ago, because this has been happening for decades. It's been the last 20 or 30 years that the mental health crisis for young people has rising is rising and rising.
One of the biggest culprits. I have to say is screens and we all know that's not a surprise to any of us. If you're a teacher, if you're a parent, if you're a counselor, you have seen this in real time it is changing how we understand the world, how we understand each other, how we understand ourselves.
Because I want to tell you that I talked about it, my TEDx talk, and it's even more relevant today. My TEDx talk was from 2017 at this point, but it is so relevant still. And it's just increasing. We are getting, I'm saying about three categories of messages from our phones every day. And it is 24 seven.
When I started talking about this, we were talking about [00:05:00] having our phones for hours a day. Now it is. All the hours of the day, we use our phones in bed, in the middle of night, as soon as we wake up, all day long, it's just what our world is like now. But the messages that we're getting on there, and those messages are getting worse because they work.
They are messages that make you feel powerless. And a lot of them are marketing messages. So the marketing messages make you feel like you're inadequate or less than somehow so that you could buy their product to feel whole or feel powerful. The language, the subliminal, the subtleness, and even the blankness of marketing messages are to make people feel vulnerable, powerless, so that they might want to buy that product to change that fate.
We're not [00:06:00] powerless. We're not worthless. They have to make you think they have to make you afraid. What's really trending now with reels is that reverse psychology. What's the biggest mistake you don't want to make? These hooks, you could see a whole list of them. And then there's marketers talking to other business people about how to use these negative hooks to hook people.
They work. And because they work more and more businesses are coming online, creating content with these negative messages. And when I say negative messages, it's you don't want to make this mistake. Don't ever buy this because this is why, or all of these things that these, this, these messages tell you are trying to make you feel like if you don't have this, you're going to fill in the blank, die, get cancer, be fat.
No one will like you feel. Get poisoned from your clothes. [00:07:00] There's just constant messages and it's getting worse and worse since I've started to talk about this. So there's three types of messages that I see. One is this comparison culture, the social media comparison culture, the messages, everybody's better than you.
That's a message. Everybody is better than you. That's what we think when we see all our friends on social media Hanging out with people looking awesome Smiling at the camera all filtered dancing. Awesome. We can't we're alone people with their boyfriends girlfriends significant others It feels like we are left out when we see that.
So when we see that, we feel like everybody's having fun. Everybody's confident. Nobody's anxious. Everybody's happy. Nobody's depressed out there, but me. And you can't figure out why you're a nice person. You've done things good. [00:08:00] It's unconscious actually. It's not actually totally conscious because then we would poke holes in it really quickly.
But these messages have been so subliminal our whole lives that we are only worthy with this product. We are only powerful with this product. We are only good enough with this product. that, we are questioning all the time. And so when we compare ourself to other people, they're highlight reel, all of their greatness compared to our backstage mess in our head, right?
All the negativity nobody else sees, but it is there. All of that negativity is making us feel like we are over the top negative and everybody else is fine, but us.
Though, then online, there are people who are sharing and open about their mental health problems and it helps people feel a sense of belonging. It helps people feel validation and [00:09:00] so they're relating, they are identifying with that diagnosis or with that mental health problem because it makes them feel like they belong.
They don't belong to the happy looking people. Those people look happy. They're not really happy, but they look happy. They don't feel like they belong to the happy looking people. So they have to, they do belong there and it is feel so good that they make those connections and make those connections. And in some way, this is not conscious either in some way they have to stay that way.
So they still belong, right? So there's no motivation at all or no drive at all for them to get better because that would mean they'd be left out again. Okay. So there's three, three types of messages. I think I'm on all kinds of tangents and this is live, so this is how it's going to be. So everyone is better than you cause there's this comparison culture.
Even if they're not, we'll look for the things about [00:10:00] them that is better than us. And we say that, yep, they're better than us because it's a self fulfilling prophecy. We assume people are better than us because we think we're so inadequate and so dumb and so down and so idiotic and whatever. All these inadequacies, you can name them however you name them.
Unfortunately, you're naming them tons and tons of things and that's too bad because none of those are you. I'm talking to you as a parent and teachers and counselors, I'm talking to you as teenagers and I'm talking about this is what teenagers are feeling and you know it because that's what you're all feeling as well.
In the intensity that they're feeling it when you're young, when you're in middle school, when you're in high school, everything feels more intense and you don't have the life lesson, even in your twenties, and you don't have those life lessons to have different perspective, to have a little bit wider perspective.
Also as adults, we have, when we were young, had more work ethic instilled in us. And so there [00:11:00] is a difference between this generation and us, even though we can relate to so many things that I'm talking about that is bothering this generation. Okay. Everyone's better than you. The world is a dangerous place.
We see scary things happening all over the world. From our hands, from our palms, in the, in our, on our couch, on our beds, we're seeing horrible tragedies. And it's horrible tragedies all over the world, but we feel powerless. There's nothing we could do. So our body's responding as if we're there in person.
And when we feel helpless, our mind and our body thinks it's going to die. Unfortunately, these awful things are happening and it would be great if we could, I don't know, take some kind of social action to try to help or send help to people who lost their homes from a natural disaster or something.
If we could do something, if we could help, if we could write or call our senators and congresspeople [00:12:00] to help things get justice be done, that would be good. But what happens is we're sitting in the couch. We see horrendous things and we feel powerless and helpless and we just feel afraid, afraid. The anxiety goes up.
And then third one was those marketing messages that you get all the time that you deserve this stuff just because you deserve it and you better get it or else you're going to feel inadequate. So all of these messages are just telling us over and over again, 24 seven are facing this phone.
We are convincing ourselves. We're being convinced that we are inadequate and man, we feel it right down to our toes that we're inadequate. And when you think you're inadequate, you feel powerless. You feel worthless. You feel out of control. And when you think you're inadequate, you do not trust yourself.
You don't trust yourself. Trust yourself. How could you trust [00:13:00] yourself? You don't. And so what happens is when you don't trust yourself, you get anxious because what if something bad happened? If something bad happened and you can't trust yourself, then what? Then you can't handle it. That's one of the biggest lies that anxiety has told people, tells people every day.
This is my book, anxiety. I'm so done with you. It's a teen's guide to ditching toxic stress and hardwiring their brain for happiness. Get this book. And I also, if you're an adult and you're like, I need myself one, you could definitely. Read Anxiety I'm So Done With You, but you could go ahead and get yourself a copy of You Want Anxiety Zero because that's a book that I wrote first for adults.
And I sum this all up. If you're watching this and you're taking mad notes and you're like, Oh, what if I miss something? What if I miss something? And you're rewinding, forget it. Go over to jodiaman.com/guide. And download [00:14:00] this book. It's a Generation Z Mental Health Survival Guide. It has everything.
It's going to, it more than sums up what I'm talking about in this video because it's going to give you all of the nuts and bolts and understanding of what I'm talking about in here. Okay. So what happens is when we feel inadequate, we don't try stuff because we think that we can't do it. And so we're not proving to ourself that we can do more than we think.
Because we're not doing it. It's affecting our executive functioning skills. So the executive functioning skills are mental processes that, that allow you to go for goals or get focused or manage your time or do something right. Follow an opportunity. Those are skills like impulse control or emotional regulation and flexibility and so much more.
I'm doing a series on YouTube on executive functioning skills. I only have one out yet and that's emotional regulation. It's a good one. [00:15:00] And the next one's coming out is impulse control. But maybe by the time you're watching this video, I will have tons more of executive functioning skills videos out for you.
You're going to want to check those out because it's going to be a. It's incredibly helpful to learn how to grow those skills because these skills aren't growing in the way our modern world works. We have so much convenience that we're not doing daily survival skills. We're not doing things every day to help ourselves survive.
We're not rebuilding our home if there's a hole in it and we're not gathering our food or hunting or growing. We're not doing those daily survival skills that humans have done for millennia, right? Even pre humans and pre human Humanoids, they have been using these survival skills all day forever, [00:16:00] and we have less of them.
We may have some, but they look very different than they used to. And there's less of them. And so most people. Especially in the U. S. where there's a lot of luxury and a lot of wealth and a lot of comfort don't have many Survival skills. They don't have many tasks that they need to do every day. And so they're not they can do those things They do have executive functioning skills.
They can Do that. We're highly adaptive. Don't forget your brain has evolved for millions of years To adapt to the world. So people can do that, but because they're not doing it every day, they don't know they can and they've convinced themselves that they can't because all of the messages are also reminding them that they're powerless and inadequate and they can't.
So intense. So what's happening is we're having [00:17:00] a decrease in ability in the ability of these executive functioning skills. People are less flexible because they're so rigid because of anxieties there. They're trying to grab or hold on to power because they feel so powerless everywhere in their lives.
The planning and prioritization. They don't want to plan because they're afraid they're going to fail because all the evidence out there in this powerless world convinces them that they're going to fail. So they don't want to try. Their motivation is shot.
Their stress tolerance is low, their bandwidth is low, they have less to do, but more pressure to succeed. But they don't know how to succeed because they don't see themselves as someone who is skilled because they don't do those survival chores every day. Tons and tons of research. Kids who do chores have happier lives.
They're more, they have better executive functioning [00:18:00] skills, they have more opportunities, they do better financially, they do better relationally, they do better all around. People give your kids chores, teachers give your kids chores, parents give your kids chores, counselors advise your parents to give the kids chores.
We need to see ourselves having skills. We have them. We need to witness that so that we know that we could trust ourself. We need to build that trust. And in the meantime, as adults, we have to tell young people, you can. You can stop thinking that you can't because you absolutely can. You are highly adaptable and I believe in you.
As adults, we're a little shaky in our belief of these young people because we're like, I don't know how they could do it. They don't seem like they can. I remember having a discussion with my aunt and we were talking about young people and she's they can't do anything. I'm like, that's because they don't think that they [00:19:00] can.
She's no, they can't. They just get overwhelmed and then they can't do it. If you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right. And that is going to absolutely affect your motivation for trying. Absolutely. So the problem is not that they can't, it's that they don't think that they can.
And so they need us to remind them that they can, they need us to push them a little bit. As parents, it's really difficult. When do you push kids and when do you let them have a little bit of a break? As teachers, that's really hard too, because you might have parents who think that you're pushing too hard and they disagree with that.
You want to have high expectations of the kids in a positive way. Like high expectations of their potential, but in schools, a lot of teachers have pressure to expect less from the students. So there's this weird line that you have to walk. It's not an easy place right now [00:20:00] to be in a school because you really want to bring out the student's potential.
You're going to bring out their potential. You want to reflect back how much potential they have and how much they can do. They need this. They need this so much. The trick is that some of them turn that around as pressure or oppression. That is also from the messages that they're getting. So when they feel inadequate or when they feel like overwhelmed, that whatever they do is not going to make any difference or that they can't.
When somebody invites them to responsibility, so invites them to do something, invites them to responsibility to, to commit to a task and get that task done, it feels like oppression. Let me explain why. I've talked about this in other videos, but I'm going to say it again here because I think it's really crucial to remember this.
I don't think people are remembering [00:21:00] this. Our brain has two functions. One is to survive and thrive, and the other is to conserve calories. For kids, they have to decide really quickly when they're faced with a task. All people, not just kids. When we're faced with a task, we have to decide really quickly, does this contribute to my surviving and thriving?
Or should I refuse to do it, resist it, not do it so I could conserve calories? This is what we're all up against because even though we have food in our cupboard now, some people don't. I know. I always say that we have food in our cupboard. A lot of people don't have any food in their cupboard, especially now.
Please share food, please donate to food cupboards, but we don't have to do the survival skills that our ancestors. It had to do. And so we don't need that functioning part of the brain anymore. We don't need that [00:22:00] resistance and for adults. We see the big picture. We have our prefrontal cortex fully developed by 25.
It's fully developed. So we see that this task is going to contribute to our surviving and thriving. But if you're young and that's not fully developed, you're processing that. That's something that's a concept that you're learning and when they are faced with a task that feels tedious, feels hard, feels challenging, they will feel that physical resistance.
That's normal. That's biology, but they're going to put meaning around it. They're going to be like, I don't want to do it. I don't know. For some reason it doesn't feel right. This, I'm just tired. Something's wrong with me. I'm tired all the time. I'm not motivated. I'm lazy. What's wrong with me?
Something's wrong with me. I think I'm depressed. They're putting all this meaning around this regular human thing, this resistance. If they did chores all the time, they would be able to override this resistance a little bit more. And actually they're always able to override it. They just don't know. That they are.
They don't know that it's [00:23:00] the brain trying to resist to conserve calories. They think it's something meaningful and you feel like then you want to protest. So when people feel oppressed or feel like someone's making them do something that they shouldn't have to do, they protest. Then there's a conflict and then you double down, right?
They double down and they say more about what, why they don't want to do it and they really convince themselves that this is wrong for them to have to do. Does that sound familiar? Who could relate to that? So common, but if we help them understand what is happening, that it's their brain trying to conserve calories, And this resistance is a regular biological thing, but it doesn't mean anything.
We could override it and we could say, I want to do this because I want to graduate or I want to do this because then I could earn money to whatever I want to do this because I want to use the car, borrow it. I want to do this cause I want to get that job, [00:24:00] right? So it's like cause and effect. The other thing I talk about, this is my TEDx talk.
The other thing is. With all of these messages, we're losing this concept of cause and effect, which is the major concept that helps work ethic. That's why young people, it feels like it's harder to get them motivated to do stuff. Their work ethic is a little bit different than ours, especially as you go down the generations.
That is because the marketing is actually all of these messages, everyone is better than you. Just, they're just lucky. There's no cause and effect. They didn't do anything. They're just happened to be lucky. And the world's a dangerous place. There's no cause and effect. It's just like dangerous random.
That's what the body is. hearing from these messages. It's not true, but that's what the body hears subconsciously. Also, you deserve stuff just because it's like, there's no cause and effect. You don't have to work for something to [00:25:00] earn it. You're just supposed to get it for no reason, but then you don't get it because you can't get everything that you want.
And it's confusing. And we conclude that it's our worth. That's the problem and not that we just, Didn't earn enough and we have to do it, or we have to make a choice of what we're going to buy because we don't, there's a limited amount of finances.
So much is coming at us that is affecting how we understand ourselves and the world, how we understand cause and effect, how we understand what we have to put in to get out what we want. We have this resistance without the prefrontal cortex to override that resistance. And that's why we need adults.
That's why adults are needed for a long time because we need someone to remind us that this is for our survival and thriving. Yes, of course. Some adults are going to be oppressive. There are going to be some, but [00:26:00] we have to help kids read the world and be able to distinguish when are these rules just to press people and push people down and it's somebody grabbing power and when.
Is the adult in your life encouraging you to do stuff for your highest good? We need to teach them the difference because that is going to make or break their life to understand the difference. Okay. I'm going really long in this video, but there's so much information I didn't even touch the surface. I did.
I did touch the surface, but I wanted to talk about the four things. These messages and the powerlessness, the worthlessness, and out of control, which is skyrocketing anxiety and depression. What's happening is those things are affecting kids relationships with each other and kids are having more contacts to increase their anxiety and depression because they're having friends problems.
There was always friends problems. There was always bullying. It's worse. There's always teen dating [00:27:00] violence. It's worse. There is always discrimination, and it's worse, and that's why it's getting worse and worse. The anxiety and the depression that we're seeing among young people and it's affecting us because we're like, oh my gosh, right?
We're only as good as our happiest kid. Less happy, least happy kid. When you have, it's like when there's one of your kids in your class or in your home or in your caseload that is struggling, it affects us. It affects us so much because we care and we want to lift them up and we want to help them feel better.
We don't want them to suffer anymore. So what I did when I was getting my doctorate, I studied this phenomenon and tried to understand why is it increasing? What is the connection between screens, between COVID, between discrimination? What is the connection, the correlation? What is the [00:28:00] mechanism that is causing our mental health problems To rise, what I've come to understand is the phone and COVID and discrimination is separating us from connectedness, mattering, agency, and authority.
So connectedness, mattering, agency, and authority, let me explain those. Connectedness is a sense of belonging. That we're connected to other people and people are connected to us. And we feel like we belong somewhere. This is quintessential. This is essential to humanity because we are social beings because our survival necessitates us to be in a community from the beginning of evolution.
We had to be in a community to survive. And so our psyche, our soul, our body, our mind, all of it. Is looking for a sense of belonging [00:29:00] because we need it. We crave it so much. The problem is with modern times is there's so many different groups and you don't have to belong to everyone, but you do belong to some, but maybe they're not the ones that you want to belong to, or you just feel a little bit different than the people that you do belong to.
And so it makes you feel outside the group. There's so many different negative things in our head that is telling us. Things that are not true, like nobody loves you or nobody cares about you or you're not cool enough or all of those things are lies. But when you are isolated and people are isolated now, when you're isolated, you get lost in that negativity in your head and it sounds like it's true.
Another thing is we evolved for millions of years, right? And I say millions of people, like humans weren't around for more than 200, 000 maybe. But we still evolved from pre [00:30:00] humans, right? We evolved from single cell organisms. And so the, I say millions of years, somebody corrected me in a video. That's why I'm telling you that.
So we evolved for a really long time to solve problems all day long. Like I said, all day long, we had to solve problems for our survival. We had to solve them all day. And so we have a capacity. Our brain has this incredible capacity to problem solve. All day. But we don't have as many problems as our prehumans or our humanoids or, our ancestors anyway, even a hundred years ago, there was so much more to problem solve on a day to day, hour to hour basis that we don't have.
So we have the capacity for 12 to 60 million thoughts a day and we don't use them. And so they get taken up with negative thoughts. Because our brain is looking for a problem to help us survive. And when it's looking for something wrong, [00:31:00] it's going to spin something or find something wrong. That's why fear mongering works so much.
It's because we're looking for something wrong. We're looking for something to be afraid of so we can protect ourself from it. And it, we could spin anything as if it's in our body is feeling like it's an actual risk to us right now. Okay. We have all of these thoughts. We don't need them as much as we used to, and so they turn negative, but we put meaning around them.
When we have all these negative thoughts, we think they mean something instead of realizing this is leftover thoughts, our brain's trying to figure something out and we could redirect our attention to something else. We could redirect our attention to a project or something good or a story or something else besides these negative thoughts.
But when the negative thoughts come and you don't realize that's what's happening, you think the negative thoughts are coming to you for a reason because something's wrong with [00:32:00] you. Or. That there is really a problem. And so we have to help people understand what is going on biologically, what is going on neurobiologically so that they really feel better.
In my last episode last week, I talk about the amygdala. So if you want to know some more biology of anxiety stuff, check that out. You could also get my books. This one right here. Anxiety. I'm so done with you. I talk all about, I go way into detail about the biology of anxiety and they're incredibly helpful.
I have five steps to healing anxiety, curing anxiety in five steps in my books, in my online programs. I have an online It's anxiety program five steps. The first step is understanding it biologically. And I want to say it helps 50 percent of the people anxiety gone just from learning this biological stuff, because anxiety is such a mystery.
And in that mystery, it makes us feel [00:33:00] powerless. And so that is why it has so much power over us. And if we demystify it and understand what's going on, not only understand what's going on, but then, the mechanisms to change, to make yourself feel better. It helps. Okay. So we were talking about connectedness, mattering, agency, and authority.
Let me finish that and finish up because I'm going over tonight. So connectedness, sense of belonging, connection to others. We don't have it. We're more isolated than ever. Not good for our psyches. We're stuck in that negativity. And we feel more inadequate, more worthless and more powerless. because of that lack of connectedness.
The number two one is mattering. Knowing that we have value and that other people have value. When you feel worthless because all the messages are convincing you that you're inadequate and worthless and powerless, you don't feel like you matter. And when you're so busy judging yourself, you're really not taking action to help other people feel like they [00:34:00] matter.
That's why I want to heal anxiety. I feel like our world would be a better place because we'd care about other people. If we saw ourself as having value, then we'd see everyone else's having value. And what's happening right now that you're seeing is that people don't feel like they have value and they're trying to get power over other people.
So that they feel like they have value, but it's unsustainable because that's not how it works. And so they have to do it again. And really they're trying to get value for themselves, but they're not valuing other people. If we valued other people, we'd value ourselves. If we valued ourselves, we value other people.
Our fear would go down. Our fear, our anxiety, our depression, our fear of other people who are different than us. Our fear would go down. And then the people who are trying to tell us to be afraid, we were not going to believe them. We're not going to believe them. The reason why we believe them is because we're feeling so inadequate [00:35:00] ourself and it scares the heck out of us.
Not everyone who's afraid is believing that. So that's good. All right. So the next one is agency, having agency in your life. So agent agency means that you have, that you take action for a conscious purpose. So whatever happens to you, your response to what happens is your agency. You have a hundred percent of control over your response to what happens.
And when you have anxiety, you feel like you have no agency at all. You have it. But anxiety makes you feel like you don't have it and you don't act like you have it. You feel helpless, you feel hopeless, you feel powerless, and you're not connected with your agency. If you did chores, if you did things all day, if you challenge yourself and you set goals and you accomplished them and worked on them, you would know you had agency and you know that you could trust yourself and you could depend on your agency and your anxiety would go down.
Okay. Lastly authority is like [00:36:00] agency, but it's more, it's like growth mindset. So not only, that you can respond, that you could learn and respond better and better every time, right? You could learn and your actions would be more and more skilled as you practice. As you learn more, it's a growth mindset.
You don't stay where you are right now. You could solve more and more complex problems. you could understand more and more complex concepts. That's authority. Authority is that understanding, a true trust in oneself and ability to solve complex problems because you know that you could keep trying.
And eventually you'll figure it out, right? That's a growth mindset. Okay. So what we have to do as adults in these kids lives is reconnect them to their connectedness. So help them get that sense of belonging, reconnect them [00:37:00] to their mattering. Remind them that they matter, have rapport with them, spend time with them, let them know that you think that they are so much more than they think they are.
You trust them. You believe in them. When you worry about your kids, it comes across as you're worried about them, that there is something to worry about. I know you're worried. I'm not going to tell you not to worry about your kids, but you also need to believe in them. You don't want to pass that worry onto them because then they feel like a loser and they feel they're already convinced that they can't do stuff.
We don't want to give them any more food for that kind of thought that they can't. We want to give, we want to feed you can, you can, you can. Remind them of things that they do because when you're feeling so inadequate and thinking of all these negative things, you forget the things that you've done in the past and everybody has done some.
Your kids have all done [00:38:00] something in the past that you could remind them of that stands out as being skilled, as being loyal or kind or smart or thinking of good ideas or ingenuitive. So remind them of those stories, remind them of their unique skills. In the back of my book, if you get a copy of my book in the back, there is a letter to parents. So if kids get the book, they could cut out the letter and give it to the parents. Or if they have the audio book or the ebook, they could go to my website and download this parent letter. I want all of you to get this letter.
If you're a teacher, if you're a counselor, if you're a parent I want you to get this. And I want you to get that parent letter. Because very valuable and what it could help you do to move forward. All right I covered a lot today in this talk about the youth mental health crisis, because I. I am [00:39:00] dedicated, I'm dedicated.
So not just writing my books and doing this, this download, this free download. I have designed some games. I have a third one in the works, designing a third game for kids, for young people, for teachers to use in schools and counselors to use. And I have a curriculum for high school health teachers to help them really robustify their emotional, mental, and relational health.
So I'm doing my, I'm doing my due diligence to really try to bring this information out there and let young people know we are not going to leave them here. There is a lot of ways to help them feel better and we are committed. To doing just that. So I'm live every Monday at 8 PM. I would love for you to hang out with me.
You can actually sign up to be a call in guest, which means you could stay off camera. No one will know who you are. You could give me a pseudonym. We could talk about a topic and I could coach you [00:40:00] live on that topic, do live coaching right on the air. So sometimes I've guests, sometimes I talk about a topic and sometimes I have that calling guests and I would love it if I could support you in your life.
So see you next Monday at 8 p. m.