The special teen brain

This lesson explains adolescent brain development and the unique and amazing changes happening in the teen brain. Essential to understand positive habits, addiction related to brain pruning. Fascinating and validating information for this powerful period of growth.

Why this helps? Understanding brain development helps you make sense of the unique adolescent period and how to build positive brain habits for life.

Transcript

What Changes In Adolescence

From Basics To Specializing

Discovering What Makes You You

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Inner Strength Meditations. Let's take a moment. Let's learn about the period of adolescent brain development and a couple of things that are happening only during this time, only between the ages of 15 and 22, or the outside ages of 12 to 30. So, right in the middle of the years that you're enjoying right now, there are certain things happening in your brain that only happen right now. It's an incredibly special time. One of the things that's happening during this period of adolescent brain development is you are specializing. So if you think about when you were a child, there were so many things to learn. You had to learn how to eat, you had to learn how to walk, you had to learn how to speak, you had to learn how to dress yourself. So many basic functions that you had to learn. And everybody had to learn them. Every kid had to learn how to go from crawling to walking. Every kid had to, every infant had to learn from not being able to articulate any words to learning individual words to making sentences to speaking in paragraphs to thinking original thoughts and being able to express them in language. Now, in your adult in the period of adolescent brain development, you don't need to learn those basic functions, but you're specializing. You're discovering what makes you uniquely you, and you're growing those passions. The hobbies you love, the music you love, the colors you like, the style you like, the professions that fascinate you. Some people are more interested in sound, some people are more interested in visuals, some people are more interested in abstracts like philosophy or math. Some people like the way culture works. Some people are interested in travel and adventure in the unknown. Some people are interested in being very settled at home.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Some people love animals, some people love nature, some people love the city.

Brain Pruning Explained

Use It Or Lose It

Habits, Addiction, And Caution

Protect Your Brain, Shape Your Path

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Those specializations are all really happening now in this period of adolescent brain development. And what your brain is doing right now is it's doing something called brain pruning. So it's literally in a in a chemical way, it's snipping away those little pathways that formed in your brain that you don't need anymore. When you're an infant and you had to learn to walk, first you had to stand up, you fell down, you stood up, you fell down. If you're if you've ever been around a baby before they're a toddler, you know, just when they're learning, you know, you see they're they're just endlessly fascinating the way they try to get themselves up and then they plop over and they try to get themselves up and they fall over. And then one day they can walk. And once they can walk, they can walk and they keep walking and then they're running and they're still toddling and sometimes they fall down. But once they've done that, all those muscular patterns and efforts that they had to do before they knew how to balance and stand up, they don't need anymore. So once in adolescence, the brain actually snips away. It's like giving itself a haircut. It snips away at those excess neural patterns that it no longer needs. And it's preferencing or biasing or emphasizing those patterns that you use all the time. So if you like to play a musical instrument, or you love to dance, or play sports, or be on the debate team, those ways of thinking are going to stay with you because your brain is snipping away what you don't use and preferencing that you do use. The thing to be cautious about is if this is during this time, addictive behaviors become very dangerous because the brain will preference them. So whether it's an addiction to technology or smoking or vaping or negative habits like that, be very cautious because your brain is literally going to preference those and it's going to be harder to break bad habits. Really, this is a very unique time of brain development, so important for your passions in individuation. And it's a time when you really want to protect your brain and develop good habits because those negative habits are going to be cut deep and they're going to be strong pathways in your brain, harder to break.