Wound Up Kids Grow Into Anxious Adults

There is no way I’d enjoy my current job in the utility industry if I got into it after high school. I was too high strung. Part of that is my make up, and another part is what adults taught me to expect as I got closer to graduating.

The first forward-thinking decision I made was declining my college advisor’s advice to continue taking a foreign language in my senior year. “It’ll look so much better on your applications,” she assured me, but it wasn’t required. So I had an extra free period in 2006 and napped instead of taking a class on a subject I never enjoyed for the sake of an application that’d be read by people I’d never meet. Sadly, that bit of wisdom abandoned me, and I got sucked into the ridiculous world of answering adults about where I was going to school and what I wanted to do with my life.

“I don’t know” was never an acceptable response. That is the tragedy of how we treat those straddling the boundary between childhood and adulting. Fake that you have a plan to satisfy the expectations of those that will forget your answer once your conversation is finished.

The subtext all through my senior year was: “you better figure out what you’re doing with your life because high school is rapidly coming to a close.” With that absurd pressure, I jumped at the first school that was interested in having me play lacrosse. Did I want to? Not really, but it was nice to be able to tell people where I had committed. No one informed me that my parents could have saved $60,000 if I attended a community college for two years for general education courses, then transfer to a major university to finish out a major. Less than half of that money could have started a 401(k) and time alone would have compounded $20,000 at 8% interest into over $60,000 in fifteen years.

• I went to a school I didn’t really look into to satisfy other people’s expectations.

• I went Pre-Med because it sounded good even though I despised chemistry labs.

• I spent days in my dorm room because I was overwhelmed with the pressure I had allowed others to place upon me, and had no way of relieving that pressure.

I entered the working world with that mindset, I was regularly paralyzed by inaction and constantly second-guessing myself. I looked at failure or saying “I don’t know” as character flaws because my adolescent experiences equipped me to hiss at the very concept of not knowing.

Future expectations put the mind into an anxious state. Depression is ruminating about the past; anxiety is predicting the future. I’ve seen this in the youngest kids I coached. In 2011, I had to de-program a ten-year-old from his parents’ judgments and expectations that I overheard, which were:

• Depressive judgments:

  • You missed six ground balls the last game.

  • You missed the goal twice when you were right in front of it.

• Anxiety-inducing expectations:

  • You need to score three goals in the next game.

  • You have to score left-handed at some point.

This poor kid missed the cage while we were warming up for an upcoming game because he was so in his head. I pulled him aside, we both did a quick breathing exercise, and I told him: “All I care about is seeing you smile when you come off the field. Go have a great game.”

He scored five straight goals. Two of them left-handed, and he vacuumed up every ground ball. I didn’t give him judgments, and I didn’t give him expectations. I gave him permission to live in the present moment, which kids are pre-disposed to doing. The natural consequence is that he exceeded the expectations of his parents, and he learned a technique to gain calmness before competition.

That is what I wish I had learned as a kid, and is a major reason why I do what I do now. It is great to have expectations, and it is okay to regret stuff that happened in the past. It is not healthy to make either of those reasons for living, studying, or working. The future is inherently unknowable, and the human brain does not do well with a future permanently clouded in a fog of possibilities. We prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. This is what I experienced as a teenager, and I compounded all the expectations of other people onto my own expectations until every perceived failure destroyed my confidence.

I studied, I worked, I gave talks — by all accounts I exceeded the expectations of others by miles, but the treacherous mentality I waded into as a teenager robbed me of pleasure. Any tiny mistake doused my work with gasoline and set my mind on fire. It wasn’t until I turned thirty that I started living for my present moment and for what I felt happy doing.

Now, I’m a grunt for a utility contractor. I make mistakes and I get yelled at, but my internal world is mostly at peace because I finally learned what I wish I learned as a kid:

The expectations of others can only touch you if you permit them.

Here are some short videos made especially for kids, but because we’re all human they are great introductions to breathing exercises and recognizing unwanted thoughts for people of any age: