Teen Overwhelm And The Nervous System

Everybody feels it right now: kids are more emotional, adults are exhausted, and nobody seems able to properly switch off. We look at that collective pressure through a nervous system lens, because once you understand what your body is responding to, the shame drops away and practical change becomes possible. I share why I am focusing the next run of shows on tweens and teens, and why these years can feel like a booby trapped landscape when you are trying to parent inside an always on world.

We unpack what constant input does to the body, from notifications and group chats to streaming and 24 hour news. Humans are not built for endless stimulation, and even “relaxing” can keep the system on low level alert. That matters for sleep, digestion, hormones, mood, and behaviour. I also explain why we still crave the scroll when we know it drains us, using a simple view of dopamine, novelty, and the tired but wired loop that shows up in so many homes.

Then we zoom out to what the research is really pointing towards: it is not only screen time, but the quality of the online experience, how it affects sleep, and the culture of comparison. We end with small, realistic ways to create tiny gaps that help your nervous system remember safety again, like a phone free morning, screen free dinners, conversation cards, walks without headphones, and more real presence.

If you want more calm, connection, and resilience for your family, press play, share this with someone raising a tween or teen, and subscribe so you do not miss the rest of the arc. If it helps, leave a review and tell me which micro change you are trying first.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Message

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer.

Why Focus On Tweens And Teens

Naomi Mills 0:41

Hello and welcome to You Are the Answer, and this is the first episode in our young people arc, what I am calling the teen arc or tweens, anything age kind of 10 and up is where I'm going to be focusing my energy over these next 10 episodes. Because I hear lots of people talking about the way the world is now, and especially around our young people, screen time, social media, news, and I really just want to shed some light on that from a nervous system perspective. I'm going to be honest as a so-called expert in this field, as somebody with a postgraduate master's degree in young people, yes, in terms of their musculoskeletal health, but actually I've spent 15 years working with this age group clinically, trying to keep on top of as much reading, research, other experts' books and information, all to make myself a better clinician. But if I'm honest, to try and help myself parent better now that my child is reaching those milestones. She is going to be 11 this year, and we are in the tween phase, that movement between childhood towards adulthood. And honestly, I find a lot of the information we're going to be covering, I was finding it really scary because it can feel very overwhelming, it can feel extremely negative, and as a parent, you can feel certainly underprepared, maybe just like I've got no idea, so I'm just going to give up before I begin, sort of feelings. I've definitely had those. Like there's an inevitability about of all of this. And so in this podcast, I really want to help you, if you are the parent or you have somebody in this age group in your orbit, to let's look at it from a different lens, to feel like there's a bit more understanding and some other ways in because these might resonate with you. I definitely feel like the young teen years can feel like a bit of a booby-trapped landscape as a parent. So we're going to cover why everybody, including yourself and myself and everybody else, often feel so overwhelmed. I'm going to look at understanding the teenage brain and the nervous system. So what's uniquely different about teens and how they are wired, which explains an awful lot about how they are interacting with the world. We're going to go into co-regulation, what it is, how it works, and why you don't need to be a perfect parent or role model, but actually just to be aware and regulated enough yourself to be mindful of some of the dynamics that are at play so that you can change and influence them when you need to. This is something that we can all do in how we physically set up our homes, how we're running our lives. There's a lot of great stuff there that will help both you and a young person be more regulated, be calmer, happier, and move through life a little bit more easily. And then, of course, we need to explore some of the challenges that are not unique to this age. I think that's the thing, but they seem to really come up here in this age group. So why rest feels so uncomfortable? And how, as parents and caregivers, we actually need to connect with our young people before we can correct what's happening. And then I'm going to look at some key concepts in releasing perfectionism and actually building resilience, which is where the good stuff is. I think it's easy to focus on what's bad or wrong or not working. And this podcast is all about let's focus on what we can change, because you know that even altering something by one degree is going to change completely the destination that you end up at. And that is the same with interacting with our young people. But honestly, this arc is about parenting yourself as much as it is your child. Often our inner children need a little bit of healing or revisiting as we've been parented and we've been raised through a certain culture or through a certain time period, and a lot of that is really coming up in our bodies at the same time while we try and guide our young person through an ever-changing environment. And so I'm hoping this is going to be helpful for you, whether you're in a parenting role or not. There might be a young person in your work or just somewhere inside your orbit and you are struggling to understand them. This is going to help that. And if you simply follow the series and apply these concepts to yourself, there's going to be a lot of useful insights, including perhaps why you were how you were as a younger person. And as I say, it's an opportunity to go back over some old patterns to see what needs rewriting.

The Always On Overwhelm Explained

Naomi Mills 6:06

And so I wonder if you've ever just looked around recently and thought, why is everyone so overwhelmed? You might notice the kids are emotional, the adults are exhausted. Nobody's able to switch off. It's definitely something I talk a lot about in my clinical work where parents and children are switches, our nervous system switches are stretched. They are stuck on on, on go. And yeah, everybody kind of considers this normal now because it's absolutely common. Just even I think if the last time you sat in a queue or waiting for an appointment, and who was reaching for their phone versus ones that were happy to stare into space or even read or start up a conversation. We're seeing this need to be distracted everywhere. And so I want to make it very clear before I dive deeper into this is that nobody is failing here. When our nervous systems are an overload, which they all are, mine included much of the time, that is not personal failure. That is a product of the world that we are living in. You're not lazy and our young people aren't difficult. You're not a bad parent. And I'm not asking what's wrong with the family and the world. But I am asking, what environments are our nervous systems trying to survive? And how can we move forward from this collective overload? And so one of the first most important concepts to bring in here, and we talked about it since episode one about how your body was designed to be in this parasympathetic state where it sleeps and it heals and you digest your food and you balance your hormones. Humans are not designed for constant input. And I talked about the last time you waited for something to happen. We did used to stand around in a queue. And of course, when I was younger, there were no headphones or screens to follow around with us that we could take to distract ourselves while we waited. One of the most common things that goes on in a car in our household, if if our daughter asks to use the phone while we're driving, we're like, just look out the window. That's what we did. You remember life before next day delivery, when you actually waited for something, when you wanted your friends to come out, you walked around to their house and you knocked on the door. There wasn't even a telephone necessarily that you were going to use. And if we go back further and further, sitting around the fire, storytelling, human life had so many pauses in the day that were just organically built in because of the times we were living in. And there are certainly a lot of positives around that. And I'm not trying to go back to the dark ages by any means. But when your day is filled with notifications, even listening to podcasts like this, emails, group chats, streaming, I've mentioned before how 24-hour news is overwhelming us with information, particularly negative information that we are just not biologically wired to hold, especially since we cannot influence much of it. Now, on both a macro and a micro level, our nervous systems are being constantly needled. Even myself, I have a separate personal phone to a work phone, and that was my way of trying to take better care of my nervous system so that I could physically leave the work phone at home or physically switch it off and have a much more limited phone that just has a few close contacts, no social media, that kind of thing. But if I notice that a couple of messages have come through on my work phone, even though I no longer feel an obligation to open them, to read them, to respond to them, as I did for many years on evenings and weekends, and when I wasn't working, the very fact I am aware on any level that somebody has messaged, that changes and that is being received in my nervous system, whether I want it to or not. And neurologists are increasingly warning that modern always-on lifestyle is stopping us from genuinely being able to rest ourselves mentally, because we are always on a low-level state of alertness, even when we are doing things that feel relaxing, just watching the TV or sitting around with our families.

Dopamine And The Tired But Wired Loop

Naomi Mills 11:09

And here's the kicker: because if it's so theoretically bad for us, and we all kind of go, Oh, I hate that feeling, I know exactly what you're saying. Why do we crave it anyway? And this is where dopamine comes in. Our phones are incredibly good at giving the nervous system what it naturally needs. And I'm just using phones as an example here. It can be going, it can be anything where we are busy or productive or engaging in something outside ourselves, anything that's taking us away from the being. We're getting novelty, we're getting stimulation, we're getting distraction, we're getting a sense of connection, no matter how hollow it may eventually seem. And if you want to hear about the deep dives into phones and specifically and how that's all working on our brains, there are a couple of episodes in the mind-body series that I would recommend you go back and listen to. But broadly speaking, by becoming a little bit busier, by becoming a bit more distracted, we are getting a lot of dopamine. I often call it chocolate for the brain. It's novelty, it's new, and it feels good. And the kind of simple explanation to all of this is our body chemistry gets used to what it's used to. So if you are on a low level of alertness, if you are quite used to getting things done, if that feels good, if you quite like a little scroll, you prefer yourself to maybe be a bit entertained when you are cueing or waiting for something, if you notice yourself less able to go for a walk without having music or something in your ears. These are all just subtle signs that our brain is just very used to a certain chemistry in our bodies, and so we crave it even when we know it's not great for us. And this is the tired but wired phenomenon, and you'll see that phrase used all over the media. And for me as a chiropractor, the conversation I keep having with my families and with colleagues is that I am not seeing overwhelmed teenagers and thinking their parents are doing a bad job. I'm seeing overwhelmed families. I'm seeing children in overwhelm and having an awful lot of empathy for the parents who are also in overwhelm because of the news that we are hearing, because of financial pressures, work pressures, social pressures, along with the desire to give your child the best life possible, whether that's through a paid education or lots of toys or holidays or hobbies. Parents are under an incredible amount of strain. And so our nervous systems are an overwhelm and overdrive as well. So it's not only teens that are struggling, they are growing up in environments that are much harder to regulate within, and we're all living in that environment together.

Screen Time, Sleep, And Wellbeing

Naomi Mills 14:28

And research shows there is an association between more screen use and more symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression in adolescents, especially when they are on it for hours and hours a day. But at the same time, some more recent research is suggesting it's not just the screen time in and of itself and the dopamine in the brain, but it's the quality of the online experience. It's how it's affecting their sleep, it's the comparison analysis, it's their overall well-being, it's the environment and the culture they're accessing online, which is also really important. And so we can't just blame technology alone, it's an evolution of where we are going as humans. And I think the best thing that we can do as conscious beings for ourselves and for our families is to bring more awareness to it and try to balance that out more where we can. So many of us are carrying our environments, our culture, our friendship groups, especially young people, I would say, we're carrying it around in our pockets. And that can lead many of us to feel a bit flat or to become more reactive. Because when our nervous systems are activated or overstimulated for longer periods, obviously that shuts down sleep. So now we're chronically sleep deprived. Now we're becoming even more disconnected between our brains and our bodies. This is something I measure a lot in practice, and we'll see it come out as emotional reactivity, or feeling numb or a bit flat or impatient because our physiology creates our behavior. Just thinking about sleep on its own, that's going to affect your stress hormones, your emotional regulation, and your nervous system function. So this is where everything starts to get tied up in layers and layers that are all feeding into each other, into this feedback loop.

Small Changes That Reset Home Life

Naomi Mills 16:36

But the good news is your nervous system is designed to adapt. It's very, very clever. So you don't need to throw your phone in the bin or book yourself on a silent retreat to become perfect or better. The key here, and if you think back to the episode I did on creating healthy habits and change, and we talked about that James Clear microhabits, it's just creating tiny gaps. A phone-free morning. A big one I like to talk to clients about is like, what do you do the first thing you open your eyes in the morning? Because that is setting the filter on your day. Can you adapt to make your family or whoever's in your household get them sat around the dinner table again without screens? Maybe even getting some conversation cards, which has worked really, really well for my family, especially with young people. These are they're either questions you could get off the internet, or you can buy these decks that have family connection cards. They have questions on them, and I find young people love to be in charge of choosing and asking the question, and of course, everybody answers it. So there's a great way of engaging with each other and bringing ourselves back into connection. Maybe you're going to take your next walk without any input. Spring summer is upon us right now, so going to sit in the garden and just staring into nature. It could be choosing some family board games, choosing to breathe more deeply, choosing to notice something even before you choose to change it. And that might be the very first most important step you can take is taking this nervous system lens to overwhelm and just starting to notice how and where it shows up in your body. Because if you've been looking around wondering why everybody in your family or even in your workplace or in the groups that you're spending your time seems overwhelmed, it's not because we're doing something wrong, but it's because we are all carrying more input, more stimulation, and more pressure than human beings were ever designed for. And once you see that, you can let go of any blaming or shaming. Or even that feeling of having, you know, of defeat, I think, that some people feel. And start creating an environment that helps you to feel safe again. And then create enough of those moments of real presence and connection where your body remembers that it's safe and it can switch into that beautiful, parasympathetic, healing mode that you and everybody around you was designed to live in.

Resources And Gentle Sign Off

Naomi Mills 19:46

For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.