Three Things to know about the Teenage Brain

Teenage Brain Development | Free Quiz| Teenagers | Click to read or pin for later!| Transformed4more.com

Quick Quiz!

1.Have you ever completely forgotten about a school assignment even though your teacher talked about it for a week and it was even written on the board? Y/N

2. Have you ever been in a situation and you know you over reacted emotionally but couldn’t seem to help it? Y/N

3. Have you ever done something and an adult say “Why did you do that?!” and you honestly couldn’t come up with a good answer? Y/N

4. Have you ever done something that you know was dangerous or silly because there was a reward involved? Y/N

If you are a typical teenager, you likely answered yes to at least one of these questions. Did you know there’s a reason you do these things? Read on to see why!

The teenage brain is completely different than a child brain or adult brain.

During your teenage years, your brain undergoes MASSIVE changes that effect everything from your growth to your behavior and your decision making skills.

This week, we will be talking about the teenage brain in three different parts: how it affects YOU, how it affects your relationship with your parents, and how it affects your dating relationships. This is seriously interesting and after these series of posts, we hope it helps you understand why you do some of the things you do and that you are not weird.

Teens! Do you forget easily & seek adventure & thrill? Click to see why. Click To Tweet

Let’s Get Started

Since I do not want you to have to read boring scientific jargon about your development, I am going to let much more interesting people talk about the topic. Don’t skip the videos. They are short and informative and give a great summary of what’s going on! If you don’t want to watch both, watch the first one and save the second for later.

[P.S. The guy who does this video is John Green’s brother, who wrote The Fault in Our Stars]

So given this, here are three things you really need to know going forward:

Impaired decision making

Have you ever done something you know was stupid, and after the fact your parents or another adult asked you, “What were you thinking?!” Did you have trouble coming up with a response? You’ll be glad to know there’s a reason for this!

Quick decisions and consequences are managed in the prefrontal cortex which is still in developmental stages as a teen. This means that if you have to make a quick decision, it has more of a chance to be a bad decision because you are not really considering the consequences.

So if someone is really egging you on or really getting on your nerves, you are more likely to punch them in the face than walk away. So when someone asks, “What were you thinking,” all you can really say is, “I don’t know. They were just getting on my nerves and I wanted them to stop.”

Hyperactive Emotions

Again, since your prefrontal cortex is being developed, much of your decision making and such is processed through your amygdala, which is an emotional center.

Now when I say “emotions” I don’t want you to think of some random girl crying in class or being depressed. I mean the whole range of emotions from anger, frustration, joy, excitement, etc.

Since you are using your amygdala, your emotions are over exaggerated compared to adults or children. This is why when you’re upset, you’re likely to get MORE upset than you need to be, or more angry than you need to be and adults generally say, “Why can’t you just calm down? It’s not that big of a deal.”

Also, your brain development causes you to not be able to understand the full range of facial expressions (as stated in the video). This means you can misread frustration for anger and end up thinking your friend or parent is mad at you when they’re not.

Hyperactive Reward Center

Teenagers are extremely motivated by rewards and approval of others. This is why teenagers do crazy things because the feeling of happiness or elation is in overdrive, so if you do something that feels good, it feels REALLY good. [We go more in depth with this in the dating post].

You can see this when teens win a rivalry football game or even a class review game. When they win, they are EXCESSIVELY excited because the reward center is stimulated.

I remember being in study hall in high school. It was 30 minutes every day and we were not allowed to talk. AT ALL. The teacher took pity on us and said that if we could go the entire week without talking, she would give us the last two minutes on Friday to talk. TWO MINUTES. [And this was before text messaging was invented!]

By giving even this tiny reward, our teacher was able to keep a class of 30 teenagers quiet for 148 minutes. If someone even breathed too loud, we gave them the death stare as a class because we did not want our two minutes taken away.

In Closing

So why am I telling you this?

Because if you know this information, I feel that you will be able to make better decisions. If you know you’re not good at making quick decisions, hopefully it will cause you to step back and think before acting.

If nothing else, I hope this post wasn’t too boring and that it sheds some light on why you act the way you do.

If you found this post intersting, check out the next two in the series: