Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens. Where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teens. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We're here today with Lance Burdett talking about your teenager's bullshit brain.

We're going to look at all the thoughts, feelings, and negative mental spirals that are not helpful, that are made up by the brain.

And we're going to see how some of those things might actually be serving you. And what we can do as parents and as teenagers when we find ourselves dealing with negative and unhelpful thoughts and emotions.

Lance has worked as a crisis negotiator for the New Zealand police. He's worked with the FBI. He advises businesses, teachers, parents, and works directly with adolescents.

He's also the author of the book, Dark Side of the Brain.

Really excited to have Lance on the Talking to Teens podcast.

Welcome to the talking to teens podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Lance Burdett: It's been wonderful. I'm so pleased you reached out to be honest. I was humbled when you reached out.

Andy Earle: There's just so much cool stuff in your research and in your experience, helping teachers learn how to deal with parents. Wow. Really interesting. But everything from that to working with adolescents to your work in suicide and with providers.

Talk to me a little about how you got into this. Why do you get so fascinated by the brain and especially the anxious or depressed or the Dark Side of the Brain as your book is called?

Lance Burdett: So I was a builder for 20 years never really enjoyed it and then joined the New Zealand police and I spent 22 years there and became the lead crisis negotiator for New Zealand police. We deal with barricaded criminals, hostage situations, but suicide intervention fascinated me.

This one on one between the negotiator and the person who's feeling unwell, because that's all it is. And it, I'd just become a crisis negotiator and I fell into depression, not looking after myself. I've only recently discovered very late in life, I have ADHD. And as I've gone down that journey, The realization of what I thought was me being different was actually very similar and common.

And when I fell down the hole, I started reading. My first book was Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life. And I've read it a couple of three times subsequent to the initial reading. And for me now, it makes no sense because I work in the area of neuroscience. But at the time, it was gold. So it enabled me to focus and realize you can start to heal parts of yourself.

And that led me on a journey and I just fell into neuroscience, read a book by a psychiatrist. In fact, it was Daniel Amen. Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. And it changed mine. It really did. It resonated. It said so much. It explained why I had depression: a blow to the head at the age of three. I've got a scar on the back of my head.

And only recently has his second half of his book been picked up by others. People said he's gone a little bit off straight here. He was ahead of his time.

And so I discovered that and I started to learn. I've always had problems with sleep. I've always had problems with overthinking. I've always had problems thinking I'm different to everybody else. And realizing that, and then I have a master's in terrorism, safety, and security, and studied radicalization, another form of changing the brain.

And the influence of others. It just fascinates me. I went on to do amazing things in the police, became a senior detective at the level of lieutenant would be in the United States.

And I had this idea of putting together a humorous book on our brain and why we think we're different. Our Bullshit Brain was to be the title of it, because I believed our brain makes shit up, right?

It's just full of nonsense. But why? And so that started this whole journey and then I've just getting to the point of halfway through writing it and suicide tragically hit our family.

And I thought, no, I need to change this. I've got a specialist field of suicide intervention. I investigated causes of suicide and so I had all that knowledge, plus my own journey of being very unwell to the point of having ideations, thoughts of my own suicide.

And Dark Side of the Brain came to mind. I actually drafted it as basically a story rather than just rolling out data and information. Let's bring some story and some narrative and engage with people.

Mainly based on why I thought I was alone. Why I thought I was different. And don't we all think that? And it was just an amazing journey. It ended up being a really great bestseller in New Zealand and Australia. I'd get people, and teenagers, one contacted me and she said, I was going to kill myself. And I read your book.

I read two paragraph chapters of your book and I didn't. Things like that just sit me on the floor. I just love that stuff.

Andy Earle: You talk in the book about different brains, and specifically about ages and how the brain is different for older people and younger people. I found that super interesting and relevant.

What do you think parents need to know about the differences between parent brains and teenage brains?

Lance Burdett: The most amount of growth as far as the brain is concerned occurs in adolescence. It's indescribable. We need to take more cognizance of our adolescents. Let's just focus on what's happening inside their heads at the moment. And I'm going to disclose I'm 66. So I've been here a while and I can still remember my teenage years clearly as being the most disruptive, unsettled, horrible, joyful, fun. You name it. The extremes of emotions we go through when the hormones get released, never ever does it occur so increasingly as in adolescence. That is the time we need to empower our teenagers, to start giving them ownership, right?

Help them help themselves is a term I use often. If we can show them what, in fact, is happening, that they're not different, and it's good to be different if they are, right?

The world's going through a change. We're becoming more accepting of others.

It's the most dynamic time in human history, right now. Forget about the steam age and the iron age, and the, industrial age. Forget that. This is it. This is the age of technology and we simply must keep up with it. But we have to do it in a way that the brain can keep up with. The brain is still a prehistoric beast. It still takes time to change. And in our instantaneous world we expect that change to happen immediately, and it doesn't. Right?

So research average 66 days just to change a habit. I can tell you sometimes you will never change a habit depending on how ingrained it is, whether it's got to do with nature, nurture, whether it's genetics. But what I'm finding out from my new research is that there are some various ways to influence that growth in a positive way.

And the number one thing is we have to get involved. We cannot sit back and wait for other advances, to see how we get on. The way forward in my humble opinion is neuroscience. It's on cutting edge where the brain lights up. It's been largely dismissed. When I first started my presentations and workshops 10 years ago, I was saying, the left side of the brain is languageless logic.

The right side of the brain is creativity. Yes, to a degree it still is, but there's other parts of the brain that light up. We know memory's not just contained in the hippocampus. There's other parts where it's contained as well. We even have some in our prefrontal cortex.

We're in a good place. Be aware that you will get through this.

Be aware that you're in for a journey. Think of it as a game. Think of it as a ride, an extreme carousel. I was worrying as an adolescent, will I have a house and be married? Forget that. How dumb is that? I remember the conversation to this day with a friend of mine in early high school and I said, I'm so worried about will I get married, will I have enough money. And he looked at me strange and said, I'm worried about whether I've got my gym gear.

What a great answer. And we're going to be running today. I hate running. So that's what we should be worrying about. Focusing on the here and now, and present.

And that's what I'd say to parents. Focus on the present. Don't worry about the future. The world is changing so fast. We used to go down this whole traditional path of you need to do an apprenticeship or you need to go to academia.

Why can't you do both? Why do you even need those? The Googles, the IBMs, the big giants of the world aren't looking for academic qualifications. They're looking for experience. What have you done? How do you think? Do you think differently?

You've probably picked up by now that I think differently with my ADHD brain, and I love it. I wish somebody had said to me when they were punishing me and putting me in the corner. In the 60s they didn't know what ADHD was. I was the naughty child, right? The class clown. I loved making people laugh. Teachers hated me.

And so getting kids to to understand that there's no rush. You will fit in. You will find your groove. If you've got something a bit different, you have a gift. Use that gift and find your passion and just go with it. If your passion changes as the brain changes, then go with that. Don't fix on this path. I have to stay here. No, you don't.

I always say you follow your heart. Enjoy the journey.

Andy Earle: So often as a teenager, especially, we are so worried about trying to do the thing that's normal, that will be accepted, that will make us cool or attractive to the other kids in our peer group .

It is hard to admit to ourself that, hey, I think I, I'm different. That might work for a lot of people, but that doesn't work for me. I think I'm going to try this. I think this is going to be my thing. This is going to work for me better. And so I wonder how we can support teens in that or help them to get more comfortable with that.

Lance Burdett: You've got to get comfortable in the uncomfortable. You've got to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and being yourself. Imagine if everyone did it, and we all said there is no conformity. The brain is wired to look for differences, right? That's what keeps us safe. As we've advanced in our world we have always looked for differences because that's where risk is.

The brain looks for danger the whole time. The brain has one function. It's to keep us alive. Survival. And it does so by keeping us fearful, right? Don't go down by the river. The last time we went down by the river, a crocodile come out and nearly ate you.

Oh, that's right. So I'll avoid the crocodiles. I'll avoid all rivers. No, you got to learn how to go and deal with the crocodiles.

And so be different. And a lot of it is we were ostracized. My generation, Boomers, if I turned up at a function and looked around the room and I thought, Oh gee, I'm wearing a suit and everyone else's jeans or vice versa.

I panic. I don't fit in. Now I walk in and go, ha, look at these people. Aren't they different? You don't want to turn up in beach shorts and flip flops and at a formal event. But just doing something slightly different and we're going to be more accepting, but it's going to take time.

You don't have to fit in. We all look to find our tribe, don't we? And so you'll see in our high schools, in our universities, in our colleges, we'll have people who we gravitate to, who we want to be with, and that's great. But that doesn't bring diversity to our learning. All it does is say, this is my tribe, this is where I belong, and it's comfortable.

So imagine if in our colleges and high schools, we could say you can do that for the first semester. The second semester, you've got to choose another one. And get people to move around a bit, right? It's going to be uncomfortable, but you just never know. It might spark a flame and then lights a fire and off you go, you're on another journey. We have to learn to take on the challenges. We have to learn to go back to the river. I call it run to the fire. Don't back away from the fire, run towards it. Get comfortable with it and then look for another challenge, and look for another challenge.

If we can every day set ourselves to do one thing that is different to what we did the previous day, that's how the brain learns. It's the smallest possible step. If you can do the smallest thing every single day that's different, the brain picks up on that and goes, Oh, I like this.

Andy Earle: How do you constantly throw yourself into new situations like that, or notice that your teen is getting into a rut. Over the weekend we were hanging out with a young cousin.

She's in college. That period when you first get to college, in that first month everyone is new and they're trying to meet people. But then that quickly wears off and people aren't so branching out and trying to make new friends anymore. And then you get in a rut and you have your same five friends. Hey, these are my people.

Even something as disruptive to your normal state as college, something that takes you totally out of your environment to a totally new place run by totally new people, you quickly still settle in. You get into your new rut.

Lance Burdett: That's what you should have carried on doing. Nothing wrong with being with people you feel comfortable with. But it brings a lack of diversity for our brain. It brings a lack of understanding of others. It brings a lack of empathy. And empathy is what we all need. And we only get empathy through one thing, and that is face to face connection with others in as many situations as we can. Rather than go, Oh, look at them again, look at the jocks, I fit with the nerds or the geeks or, we should be saying, those computer, man, they are intelligent. I don't even know, what do they do with all those Xs and zeros and Is and ones? What is it they do with that stuff? We should be doing more of that. Because you're exactly right. That's what we do when we first get to these places.

Mix it up. And, the other thing with our young is we have to take on the fear.

We have to be able to accept it. We call it failure. I don't call it failure. Trial and error. There's no error. It's trial. We don't fail, we just don't meet our expectations.

We fear one main thing, and that's loss. Loss of acceptance, loss of achievement. If we can overcome that fear and just say, it didn't work out the way I planned, but gee, what have I done?

If you can, think about the end of the day. What did I do well today? What would I do differently tomorrow? How could I just change that a little bit? What could I have done differently? I'm going to try that again. It's not failure. We just haven't met the expectations.

The brain says, get to the top of the mountain, get here. And you will be... how many times you thought, when I have this, I will be... Let me tell you as a 66 year old.

I'm still saying that. I've got all of those things that I need to search for and more.

Andy Earle: No, but then I'll feel so good about myself. I'll be so happy. I'll be so content.

Lance Burdett: When I get a house and have children and I've got a good job, I'm going to be safe and secure.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I'll feel safe and secure and then I can live life. Yeah. I can tell you, I get out of bed every morning going, I've got to go to work again. I've been saying that for how long? And that's what keeps us going. That's what keeps us all going.

It's that challenge, right? Do you want to know what the average life expectancy after you retire is? Three years. If you do not have something that you think to yourself, Oh, I've got to. It's the I got to that we need to accept.

And when you accept it and embrace it, you realize that this is life and there are no failures. There are no errors. Life is a journey. The more old you get, it's not the wiser you get, it's just you've got more information in your head and you've got more experiences to rely on. Which is what we don't have as an adolescent, right?

So just go with it. Nothing happens in the comfortable. The strongest trees were in the strongest winds.

And that's what we have to remember.

Andy Earle: The strongest trees are in the strongest winds. Yeah. Wow. I love that. Yeah.

Lance, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been great. We've covered so much ground. And there's still so much more to cover. There's really just so much great stuff in the book.

I hope that people will pick up a copy. It is called Dark Side of the Brain. And congrats on the new book that you're just finishing up. Where can people go to maybe find out more about you, to follow you?

Lance Burdett: Google my name. It'll come up the good old way, whatever your search engine is. The books are on Amazon.

Andy Earle: Amazing. I hope that people will go check it out. Thanks again for coming on the show. It's really been an honor.

Lance Burdett: My pleasure, Andy. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You take care brother.

Andy Earle: We're here with Lance Burnett talking about how to overcome your teen's bullshit brain. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show...

So much of what goes wrong in conversations about sensitive issues is that we avoid really diving head into it. We try to tiptoe around it. Just go for it. You got to have lots of conversations about it. And as you do, you get more and more comfortable.

Lance Burdett: People say, I'm burnt out. No you're not, you're tired. So take two days off. There's no such thing as adrenaline fatigue. The body will keep making adrenaline. Stop letting people play with your head. There's no valid science behind it.

I was looked out the window on the fourth floor of the building I was working in and my brain said, you need to go higher. And it hit me like a freight train. What was that? And it was an ideation. I knew what it was because I'd just become trained as a crisis negotiator and I went for help.

Because I knew what it was. It's not cowardice, it's not selfish. It's not who we are.

Don't believe that voice in your head. It makes shit up.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. You can now sign up directly through Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.