Adolescence and its lessons

Foto: Instagram.com/netflixuk/netflix

I’m sitting here, reflecting on the 2025 Netflix hit series Adolescence, wondering about the lessons I am taking away with my understanding of resilience and wellbeing. Just before the summer break, I taught a group of 13-year-olds about their minds and want to share some of my observations and reflections in response to Adolescence.

If you remember, the four-part series tells the story of why an innocent looking 13-year-old, being woken up forcefully by a heavily armed fire squad in his lovingly decorated boy’s room, would, could or should be responsible for the stabbing of a schoolmate and her death caused by seven knife wounds. This is so inconceivable at the start. It just does not match. It cannot be true. Yet the evidence is indisputable. And the consequences are real and devastating, not just for the victim, her family and friends but just as much for the child, who thought this to be the solution to his problems.

The big question is WHY?

My youngest son is 13. And the whole reason I approached his school to offer my training was that I see this age as particularly challenging, but also full of potential for massive learning and insight. Here in the UK, 13-year-olds are in year 8 and 9. Academically speaking, filler years. Nothing much happens. They seem to have all the time in the world to run themselves crazy with their own adolescent insecurities. These are dreaded year groups for teachers, with a lot of behavioural challenges, absences due to mental health problems and patterns that solidify and spread. By year 10, behaviours and attitudes usually start to calm down again, but the rift between the ones who will struggle with the intense demands of GCSE exam pressure and those who will find a way to cope, will have widened. It’s a time when many parents start trying to get medical attention and support for their children, often children who have attained beautifully up to this point.

Again, the question is WHY?

Adolescence is a biological fact, that applied to humans between 9 and 25 for as long as there are humans. Why are the problems so much more pronounced in our time? And is there something we can do about it?

As with every problem we run into, the first impulse is usually to find the ones to blame. That’s always an easy step. We blame this phenomenon on overworked teachers, a rigid and broken-down school system, NHS wait lists, social media, the information overload, the growing polarisation of our society, lack of human connection and presence, busy minded parenting… In my view, all of these are more symptoms than causes. But let’s keep them in mind.

The course I’m teaching is called iheart – Innate health education and resilience training. iheart is a youth programme, in which we explore the mind. Broadly speaking, we look at the mechanics of the mind. How does it work? Are there any natural laws that apply to us all? Is it as random as it looks, or run by a system? Where do all those feelings come from, that we seem to be bombarded with, especially in adolescence? Where does our nervous system fit in? And ultimately, how does understanding how something works can help us deal with it better?

In practical terms, we looked at questions like, “Why is it, that something small happens in the morning, and then I’m upset all day?” or “How do I stop overthinking and why do I do it in the first place?” or “How come I know, that lashing out in anger never is a really good idea, especially in school or towards teachers, but it happens so fast and there is nothing I can do about it?”. We also explored things like labels and how, when and why we attach them to ourselves and other people. We discussed how we identify with them, worship, fear and dread them, blame them, without realising what they are made of and how much we limit our own range of how we show up in the world, simply by not understanding what they are.

As always when I teach, I’m taking new things away and here are a few of these I would like to share in connection with the series.

Lesson 1 – The wall

When I started my group, my first impression was that everyone was kind of on edge, the wrong word - followed by an outburst. Control felt tense and manufactured and was lost within seconds. Teachers were holding on to the reigns, but you felt their muscles in it, a relentless power battle. Weakness seemed dangerous for all sides: Opening up within a group of other kids, unthinkable. I sensed an atmosphere, that was charged, loaded and as thick as a wall.

This was shown beautifully in part 2 of Adolescence when the police visit the school to find out more about Jamie’s background and friends. There was a mixture of defensiveness and a pretence not to care. It’s hard to read and even harder to penetrate.

What struck me again when working with ‘my’ adolescences, is surprisingly simple. The moment a person understands that all their experiences of life happen in their own mind, their awareness of whatever goes on and their response to it becomes a lot more optional. As a consequence, their defences come down. In other words, if I can see that anything my friends, teachers, parents, bullies say to me, about me or even against me can only be experienced through my own mind, I am facing an entirely different challenge. So, a comment that feels deeply hurtful coming from one person could be a laugh from another. If I can see that, I can also see that my experience is not happening out there and is therefore not up to them. This realisation gives me choices, that I didn’t have, while I was only defending myself from the onslaught happening to me.

What softened ‘the wall’ of mistrust I was up against at the start was learning about something very familiar but forgotten. When we see that underneath all this thinking and feeling, that keeps us occupied all day, is an inbuilt quiet calm, a clarity and peace that never goes away. That’s when confidence and resilience kick back in: Essential human resources that help us deal with any of the challenges of our time.

In answer to the questions we explored, if I don’t understand, that a small thing that happens to me in the morning can only have a lasting effect on my mood, if I keep thinking about it, if I keep reliving and fuelling it in my mind, I will stay alert and prey to anything out there that I believe can put a feeling in me: The weather, other people’s moods, what people say, what they don’t say, their clothes, the sound of their voices or how they look at me, how well I slept. My mind is off-track and every time that happens, I will feel uncomfortable. Understanding this is priceless.

Lesson 2 – Do you like me, even a little bit?

In the third part of Adolescence, the psychologist Briony visits Jamie in prison, trying to understand how it was possible, that a smart, kind boy could be capable of such a horrific act. By now we’ve gathered that he had a pretty normal childhood, with two supportive and present parents and a sister, who’s doing well at school. Jamie seems to have a very close bond with his family, especially his dad and there isn’t anything obviously wrong in his world that would explain a rage and hatred strong enough to kill another human being.

In an intense dialog between Briony and Jamie, we learn about his ideas about women, and the bullying and influences that seem invisible to an adult eye. They are hinting on an online culture of symbols and meaning that we only get to understand with the help of teenage translation. Again, I was thinking of my own boys, who also communicate with their peers in ways and in a language, I don’t understand and on channels I wouldn’t necessarily have access to.

But as worrying these developments can seem, the real problem is somewhere else.  It would be easy to blame this on a constant access to mobile phones and dangerous delusionists, such as Andrew Tate or any other hate-spreading influencers. The core of this is much more basic and could take any given shape. It’s the need to fill lack, i.e. be liked.  The one thing that decides whether I blindly react or consciously respond is my understanding of where my worth, my ability to think with clarity and calm, my creativity and my connection to others is coming from. Do I believe it is coming from outside, or do I recognise these capacities as something that belongs to me?

When children learn that our approach to life is radically different, depending on where they believe their safety/worth and contentment is coming from, they get something to orient themselves towards. They learn to redirect and self-correct in mind blowing ways. It’s an inbuilt compass they can now read and navigate by.

In my group, the need to fit in was coming up again and again. It is important to understand and recognise that if my wellbeing is attached to other people approving of me or allowing me in, then being liked is not just a preference. It is existential. Exclusion or rejection become life threatening. Our minds get so busy risk-assessing, scenario planning, manipulating and score keeping, that there isn’t room for anything else. Learning is an afterthought for a mind in survival mode. This is the reason why so many high attaining kids start to drop in performance around this age. If we imagine that 95 percent of our mind’s capacity is filled with survival thinking, we get an idea of how much space is left for anything else. Telling them not to do that is pointless. They have to see for themselves that this is where their energy drains into.  

Here lies a massive potential for growth and development. As soon as people understand that we are born with a core of human qualities, which are unbreakable, even in the worst of circumstances, they relax into challenges in a completely different way. As soon as someone knows that their worth, their lovability, their clarity, their ability to problem solve is not defined by or dependent on other people, they don’t need to wreck their brains for solutions to imaginary threats.

I once worked in a class where this survival game was so extreme, that the teachers had taken charge of the score keeping, inadvertently creating a culture of back-stabbing and blame. The stress levels were sky-high and the children reported that they couldn’t even relax on the weekend as they were either planning a come-back or risk assessing the damage others might do to them. No one felt safe and again, learning was the least of their worries. Disciplining behaviour like that was completely pointless.

Once they recognised this pattern and the connection to their stress and discomfort, there was a choice to not ‘play’ the game.

None of us would have learnt to walk or talk if we didn’t have these innate gifts that make us human. Babies wouldn’t survive the first year without our innate capacity for connection. There wouldn’t be innovation without creativity and our capacity for new thinking. When people see that these are exactly the things they had been trying to find outside of them, they stop looking for them out there almost automatically.

The question I opened my course with was “How much of the day do we make use of our mind?”. It was surprising for most to realise that there isn’t a single second without our mind being involved, even when we sleep or think we have lost it. And there isn’t a single moment when the state of our mind does not determine how we deal with life, from how well we sleep to conflict resolution to A-level results or life decisions. Our mind is the one tool that takes us through every situation there is.

Wouldn’t be great to dedicate ‘filler years’ at school to helping kids to learn about their minds? This is so much more than ‘what to do when you feel anxious?’ or ‘How to cope with exam pressure?’  We have an inbuilt compass to navigate. Wouldn’t it be cool for everyone, if our kids learned to use it?

If this interests you, get in touch.

I’m teaching this to kids and adults and support teams as a coach in using this understanding to find new ways to problem solve and grow. I also have access to a massive pool of great practitioners and resources if you just like to know more.

Adolescence is a time when brain capacity develops in almost as dramatic ways as it did in the first two years of our life. Children wake up one morning with a brain that is capable of faster and more complex processing. Compared to 20 years ago, our children don’t have a single moment without stimulation. When we understand that every thought going through our mind comes with a feeling, we can quickly identify why there is so much more of it, all of a sudden. Children this age feel things they have never felt before and feel utterly overwhelmed. This, coupled with a nervous system that still needs to play catch digesting, and the misunderstanding that the world out there is a threat: You can only guess why this problem is so much more pronounced in our time.

Understanding helps our kids to navigate and thrive through this.  

More than promoting this as a service I would love to give you hope for a situation that seems to have gotten out of hand. There are powerful ways to address the challenges of our time in a new way. Check them out and see for yourself!