Speaking of Psychology - Why Gen Z is Feeling So Stressed, with Emma Adam, PhD

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

More than one-third of young adults ages 18 to 23--the older members of Gen Z--said that their mental health was worse right now than at the same time last year, according to APA's Stress in America survey. That's a higher number than any other age group. Emma Adam, PhD, a developmental psychologist at Northwestern University, discusses why the stresses of 2020 are hitting young adults so hard, why the pandemic's effects on teen stress seem to be more mixed, and how stress may affect this generation's health and development.    Music Used in this Episode "Expressions of the Mind" by ShadyDave via freesound.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone is stressed these days, but young people are feeling the stress of 2020 most acutely. In a survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, more than one-third of young adults ages 18 to 23, also known as Generation Z, said that their mental health was worse now than it was at the same time last year. That compares with just 19% of millennials, 21% of Gen Xers, 12% of baby boomers, and baby boomers and 8% of older adults who felt that their mental health had gone downhill since last year. Why are the stresses of 2020 hitting young people so hard? And how will that affect them

both now and in the long term? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the link between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. If you enjoy speaking of psychology, the conversation doesn't have to stop when the podcast is over. Get unlimited access to hundreds of videos about the latest in psychology for just one low price by registering for access to APA's 2020 virtual convention. Start with some of our selected videos featuring psychology's biggest names discussing topics like COVID-19, racism, and stigma.

Or let your curiosity take over and use our on-demand library to explore any topic. Just go to convention. APA.org slash podcast. That's convention. .APA.org slash podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Emma Adam, a developmental psychologist and professor

in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She worked with APA on the Harris Poll on the Stress in America survey to include young people from ages 11 to 23 in our sample and help to interpret the data. In her lab, she studies how factors like school, family, and peer relationships affect teens and young adults' stress levels and how stress in turn affects their health and development.

Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Adam. Thanks very much, Kim. I'm delighted to be here. Let's start with the Stress in America report. Gen Z adults reported more stress and worse mental health than any other age group right now. Was that a surprise finding or was that what you expected the results to be? Well, it was partly a surprise and partly expected. So I was very interested in the teens and the Gen Z teens and the Gen Z young adults. And we've known for many years that stress and depression and anxiety have been increasing in adolescence.

And so we were expecting to see that continue into 2020. But the surprise was the size of the jump. and particularly for the Gen Z young adults. And also why, also the fact that the Gen Z young adults showed more stress, notably more stress than the Gen Z teens. Talk about the Gen Z teens. How are they doing and what are, they're feeling a little bit less stressed? Why might that be?

First of all, let me point out that teens haven't been tested every year in the Stress in America survey. Right. We've had really reliable data a year over year on adults, but there's only been teens tested for a few years. So their stress was not notably higher than in the past years that they've been tested. And that's a bit of a mystery of why that might be the case. But I have actually some other data that speaks to that question. One thing about the stress in America data is that it's cross-sectional, so it's different teens asked every year.

In my own research lab, the Coast Lab, the context of adolescent stress and thriving lab, we had a survey ongoing and we were able to test teens prior to lockdown and then the same teens again after the lockdown and ask questions about mood and sources of stress in their life. And what we've found is that for teens as a whole, the average stress level after lockdown didn't go up greatly, but when you break down and look at sources of stress, certain sources of stress went up and certain sources of stress went down. So it turns out that the stress of schooling, for example, actually decreased for teens because these social stressors and the stressors of schedules of schooling went down. But the stress related to home and health of family and friends and family related stress went up.

And that went up dramatically, particularly for teens from low socioeconomic circumstances. So it's a story of stress changing for teens in terms of the sources and also of disparities in stress with lower income teens experiencing much greater stress as a result of the pandemic than higher income teens. How did these findings from the Stress in America survey fit with the long-term trends in teens' mental health? I've seen data that rates of depression have been rising overall among teens for close to a decade. Do you researchers have any theories as to why that's happening? Sure. This trend has been very concerning to researchers for the last decade. It's been really become apparent in the past few years.

And there's, unfortunately, lots of theories, but no solid evidence regarding what is causing this trend. So some of the theories include increased social media use among teens. But the evidence has been very mixed on that. There is evidence that for some teen social media is a very positive influence. And for others, it can be more harmful. But it tends to be that the social media experiences, the online experience, The online experience of teens mirror the offline experiences. So teens that are doing well already in their interpersonal interactions tend to do well in their online interactions.

And those that are having difficulty also have more difficulty with online interactions. And there's also evidence of bidirectional effects so that when teens become more distressed, they might turn to social media sources more. So it's really hard to get any insights into causality there. There's also evidence that sleep is declined for teens, and that's a really possible candidate. Sleep has a large influence on mood and depression, and so with the increases in activities and increases in kind of school-related stressors that teens are facing, that both maybe one contribute to the increased stress and depression, but also chip away at sleep, which is something

really important for regulating well-being. The final hypothesis, and this is one that's really relevant to thinking about stress in America, is that increased economic disparities in the family and in schools is contributing to increased stress and depression in teens. And this is where the stress in America data have me really concerned, because there is some pretty good evidence that larger economic terms, which in turn caused family economic conditions to worsen, in turn has effects on parent mental health and teen mental health and that there's some possibility that the past economic downturns have had long-term effects on atla, have contributed to the increase in depression and anxiety.

And then there's some real evidence that this particular economic downturn may be having effects on teens. Going back to sleep, given that so many kids are attending school virtually right now, are they getting more sleep and might we expect to see their stress levels go down, at least as long as they're studying at home and not getting up in the morning to catch the school bus? Yeah, actually, we do have evidence, again, in the data from my lab, from a study called the bio study, that teens are sleeping more post-pondemic or during the pandemic, which is something that may account for why teens in particular aren't showing as high elevations

and stress as we expected. So that's something that's definitely teens run up against, we're running up against relatively rigid school schedules. And the release of the rigidity of those school schedules allows teens to get more of the sleep that they need. And also allows them to sleep at times that they're better suited to sleep. There's a biological rhythm to sleep. And with teenagers actually having a biological circadian pattern

where they are preferred to sleep later, go to bed later and wake up later. And the pandemic from many youth is allowing them to live within that biological rhythm that is more natural to them. So it's just the parents then who are having insomnia because they're worried about the economy and their jobs, right? Absolutely. And those Gen Z young adults as well. Yeah. You've written that there's this common idea that adolescence is by its nature a stressful time of life. But you also say that normalizing high stress for teens ignores the negative effects that it can have. What have you and other researchers found out about how stress affects teens' health and development? Sure. So my research has focused not only on perceptions of

stress, but also the implications of that stress for biological systems and for cognition and for health, both mental health and physical health. And so within my own research, and other people's research, there's really profound implications of stress for all sorts of aspects of biology. But the system that I've focused on is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which is called the HPA axis, for short, or most of you may be more familiar with the hormone that's produced by that axis, which is cortisol. And we have done a diary research where we text teens at random moments during their day and get them to report on the types of stressors that they're encountering throughout the day and then link those with levels of cortisol

the stress hormone. And what we've identified that there are very many, throughout the course of the day, this hormone is going up and down as negative move goes up and down and as teens encounters stressors. And that's perfectly normal to be expected and that's part of what the the system is supposed to do. When cortisol goes up, it helps to mobilize energy resources to help individuals cope with the stressor. The problem is when you start to get exposure to chronic stress. And so the chronic stress associated with poverty, the chronic stress associated with high levels of exposure to bullying or racial discrimination or abuse within the home or domestic violence, those ongoing stressors can really cause dysregulations in the biology, which

in turn have implications for physical health. There's a wide variety of impacts on not only stress hormones, but on immune functioning, on early signs of cardiovascular disease. And then as we've been talking about it, has strong implications for emotional and mental health disorders. But the underappreciated impact also is that stress has, and these changes in stress biology have implications. for cognition. And so it is kind of, is, in my opinion, one understudied contributor to disparities in academic outcomes. If this stress, one thing that stress does to your cognition is it narrows it and focuses your cognition on the stressor at hand, which makes it really hard to focus your attention on things like algebra, which might be what the teacher is hoping that you're focusing on.

So a wide range of implications both in the short term. And there's limited evidence in following teens looking at the long term, but we have every reason to believe that these short term implications, if chronic can turn into long run disease outcomes. What should parents or other caregivers be looking for as the signs that stress is harming their children? So stress is hard to detect because there is in teens, in some senses, because parents have this stereotype that teens will be teens and the kind of moodiness that teens that is a stereotype of being an adolescent can be dismissed as something that is just normal. I think teens, parents need to be willing to ask their teens how they're doing and regularly do so. It is a difficult thing to do. Teens may dismiss parents' interest in their well-being, but I think ultimately it's important to continue to inquire. There's also changes in behavior.

If a teen is sleeping more than usual or less than usual, if their moods seem more more intense than usual, either more sad or more angry. Any large changes in behavior, if they stop going out to see friends, well, now in the pandemic, in the pandemic, that's hard to assess, but you can all, you can assess whether or not they are seeming socially withdrawn. Teens are connecting with friends virtually. If they seem to have drawn back completely from reaching out electronically to friends, and that would be another sign of distress in teens. And so basically large changes in behavior are something to be on the lookout for. And certainly sadness, crying, those are signs. But as I said, anger can be also an expression of depression in teens as well.

You also study interventions like meditation and mindfulness to reduce teen stress levels. What have you found about effective interventions? What are the best that, what have you found that works best? Sure. Well, we have several interventions that are underway. So I hate to draw conclusions about them until all the data are in. But we do have one intervention where we studied meditation in teens. And we found significant reductions in blood pressure.

pressure among teens who were engaged in the meditation intervention. We're currently launching an app-based mindfulness intervention, which is something that we hope will have positive effects. We do know that mindfulness more generally, there's been prior studies that have tested mindfulness in teens and shown positive results, but what we're hoping to do is come up with something that might be a little more scalable, a little more easily accessible to a broad range of teens. The other type of stress that we've not touched on in too much detail is the stress of racial

discrimination, and that's a big focus in my lab. And so we have a specific intervention that is designed to try to buffer teens from the stress of racial discrimination. And that intervention actually focuses on promoting a positive racial ethnic identity in youth. And it's a group-based intervention. We've done it live. We've done it on Zoom. It was designed by Adriana Omania Taylor at Harvard University. And there's initial results from her lab showing positive effects for youth, both in terms of their self-esteem and their emotional well-being as well as some of their academic performance. And the idea is that,

and this is a more general concept that I think you can take away from this, is that belongingness, feeling included in a group, feeling accepted is one of the most important things for regulating stress. We are social beings. And so social interaction and feelings of belonging, feelings that people care for us and that we're included in the group are really are fundamental to our human existence. And so anything that threatens that is a fundamental stressor. So this is why loneliness is a really strong stressor. And this is why racial discrimination is a really strong stressor for teens. And so this intervention is intended to have youth really explore and connect with their heritage in ways that maybe bolster them against some of the slings and arrows of

a very unfair treatment on the basis of race or other categories. Although ultimately, of course, to eliminate those forms of stress in teens' lives. In the meantime, we're concentrating on also bolstering their ability to respond to those types of stressors. Do you know which kind of support helps more, whether that's support from family or friends? Does that vary depending on a child's age? Sure. There is some evidence that, and certainly from a theoretical basis, with younger children, children and early adolescence depend more on support from parents. And as you enter later adolescence, support from peers and communities start to become important. But I don't want to diminish how fundamental parents are even to the lives of older adolescents and young and young adults.

So while there's a transition in certainly seeking outside peers for and, and, entertainment for social enjoyment, and for some forms of support, parents remain a fundamental attachment figure for adolescents and for young adults. And I think it's important, particularly in these times of threat, that that form of communication and support remains open as much as possible for youth. One of the biggest challenges for young people right now is that many high schools and colleges and even elementary schools and middle schools are operating remotely or on a hybrid model. How might this switch to virtual school affect teens and young adults' stress levels, mental health, and ultimately their development?

So this is a place where we don't, where I'm speculating a little bit and drawing on theory to inform my answer here. That's okay. The one piece of data that I do have is the data from the bio study, which does show us that the switch to virtual or hybrid models is allowing teens some relief from the social pressures of school and increased sleep and increased feelings of calm. So we actually looked at mood states of kids before and after the pandemic.

And so post-pandemic after the school shutdowns, kids were lone, teens were lonelier, but they were also calmer and less tired. But the other, on the flip side, youth from lower SES circumstances, in addition to feeling, calmer and less tired and lonelier, they were also feeling increased feelings of shame and anger. And so those were actually not driven by the schooling, but the other aspects of the pandemic. So I think that when just again speculating on the impacts of virtual schooling, what's really going to matter is that kids are getting the education that they need. for the long run, they need appropriate content and teaching needs to be adapted appropriately

to deliver that content in a virtual setting. They need appropriate social contact with their peers and with their teachers to the extent that can be facilitated online. At this point, I'm not worried about screen time as much as I'm worried about ensuring that teens have continuity in their education and in their social relationships. And so if those social relationships can be provided virtually, I think that matters greatly for teams. So schools need to just get creative about how they're offering their education, but also how they're offering a feeling of connection to teams so that they actually have an experience of a peer group and have an experience of interaction with their teacher. So I think it's

too soon to say whether the homeschooling part of it will be devastating. We certainly, I am more worried about the devastation associated with the loss of loved ones due to how the health crises of the pandemic and also the negative impact of the pandemic on, sorry, the negative impact of the pandemic on the economy. So those are the things that worry me more than the virtual schooling. And when you talk about parents, the virtual schooling has been. something extremely difficult to navigate. And so we did in the stress in America, the surveys see the parents are also much more stress

than non-parents. And actually, when I checked the numbers, if you asked about stress related to the pandemic, the parents are almost as stressed as the DENZE young adults. So those are the two groups that are really having trouble navigating this pandemic. And I think one thing we've kind of done,

in this interview so far has broken down all these different sources of stress, but the real problem or the real crisis associated with this pandemic is the number of different issues that have piled up and are affecting both adults and teens right now. There's stress related to the pandemic, and then there's stress related to the economic downturn associated with the pandemic. There's stress associated with the health crises of the pandemic. There's stress associated with the health crises of the pandemic. And then there's stress associated with the very real issues of race in this society in 2020 that have been here for generations, but have really the race relations in the country have really come to the forefront again in 2020 with the shooting and death of black

individuals at the hands of police. And that was something we did see in the survey that the majority of Americans were concerned about those events. And the majority of Americans are very stressed and concerned about the outcome of the election and the tension surrounding the election. And so it's the one thing that we know about stress is that one stress at time is more manageable than accumulation of stressors. And there's something called a cumulative stress model where you essentially add up one stressor, another stressor, another stressor, another stressor. And there is a breaking point for many people where just too many stressors handled all at once are really lead to problematic health outcomes. I thought it was interesting that overall what we found in Stress America

was that people felt positive about their future, but there was an exception among the Generation Z, what did they say about their futures? Well, you know, every generation in the Stress in America survey said they do feel hopeful for their future when they're asked specifically, but the Gen Z were the lowest on that. I think they were 64% or as compared to numbers in the 70s for the other individuals. So they have hope for their future, but the real psychological dimension that I think defines Gen Z in this survey is feelings of uncertainty about their future. They talk about two-thirds of them in the survey said that planning for their future seems impossible or feels

impossible. And this was actually only 51% of Gen Z teen said that. So two-thirds feeling planning for the future feels impossible is a really paralyzing state. And uncertainty, I say, said that social exclusion is one thing that's really a powerful contribute to biological stress. The other is uncertainty. And so these teams are both socially isolated as well as feeling great degrees of uncertainty about what their future schooling is going to look like and also what their future jobs are going to look like. And I think, you know, there's real cause for concern about that. I have a colleague, Hannah Schwant, who has actually studied the impact of individuals graduating into a recession and has found that there is lifelong impacts of graduating into a

recession on lifelong earnings as well as on even things like family formation and health outcomes. And so I think in addition to providing the types of emotional supports that we know are needed by teens and young adults, we also should be thinking really carefully about what kind of economic supports we can provide, what kind of job training programs, what kind of opportunities. I was brainstorming this morning and thinking, well, what about AmeriCorps? You know, could we have an expansion of AmeriCorps? Just have not only opportunities for teens and young adults that are graduating into this difficult economy, but opportunities that would be helpful for our country as a whole.

So there's other policymakers that can think much more creatively about how to create the types of job opportunities I'm talking about. But I really think that we need to, even though psychology is an important part of what we're talking about, we need to move beyond psychology to policy in order to address the types of stresses that this generation is facing. Well, let's hope that there are some important policymakers who are listening to this podcast and are taking this to heart because it's very important. So I want to thank you for joining us today, Dr. Adam. It's been very interesting talking with you. Thank you very much, Kim. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.combeckiq or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman, our sound editor is Chris Kondyne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.