After age eleven or twelve, your brain starts to “delete” some of its unused parts and begin construction on some of the more grownup parts. It takes a lot of time, and what you do, think and feel helps decide what parts to delete. It’s kind of like deleting old files on your computer. Your brain is your computer, and if you leave some “files” unused for a long time, it starts to clean up and put away that old and outdated stuff.
At the same time it’s cleaning out old files, your brain is also figuring out how to do more complicated jobs. Scientists have given these jobs big words like “advanced reasoning,” “abstract thinking” and “meta-cognition.” (You can impress any adult with those words!) What that means is that your brain is becoming more and more able to think about things that you can’t really see, like beliefs, trust and love. You become able to understand what it means to have choices and consequences. And your brain gets smarter every day!
You can also think about “thinking.” That sounds weird, but when you were a little kid, you couldn’t sit down and think about your own thoughts, analyze your feelings or think about how things affected you. Now you are beginning to do just that.
That’s why friendships are meaning more to you—you understand the feelings and emotional part of friends. Friends are not just someone to “play” with anymore. They are people who matter to you because they make you feel good about who you are. Try explaining that to a seven-year-old, and you’ll get a look or a grunt that says, “Huh?” instead of, “Oh yeah, I totally get it.” But young teens do totally get it because their brains are growing just like they’re supposed to. Get it?
These changes in your brain are also giving you some thoughts, ideas and emotions that are very common among teenagers. You may feel like you have people watching you sometimes, even though you know you really don’t, like an imaginary audience. We don’t mean you are crazy, hearing voices or feeling paranoid; you just feel like you are performing for others sometimes. It’s okay. That’s helping you monitor your behaviors and think about how you act or want to act. Sometimes it’s good to “pretend” your parent or best friend is watching. It might keep you from doing something you really don’t mean to do or shouldn’t do.
You may also have the [wrong] idea that bad things only happen to other people and that you are invincible (that’s a good vocabulary word—it means “it won’t happen to me,” “I can’t be beat or hurt”). Think about, for example, getting seriously hurt on your bike. Most adolescents think, “I don’t need to wear a goofy helmet because I’ll never fall and hurt my head.” But every year, hundreds of adolescents are killed or suffer permanent brain damage from falling off their bikes and hitting their heads. And what about pregnancy? Many teens have the idea that “it won’t happen to me,” so having sex without birth control is no big deal. That kind of thinking is why almost a MILLION teenage girls get pregnant every year in the United States, and one in four teen girls who has sex will get a sexually transmitted infection. That’s right, one out of every four every year. Even though you may have feelings of being invincible—remember that bad things can happen, especially if you aren’t being safe!
On a happier note, you also start understanding justice and fairness better. You start to understand why rules you may not like can still be important. You also begin to realize that the world is a big place, and you are a small part of it, but an important part that can help make it a better place.
Another area of your brain that is growing the fastest in adolescence has to do with emotions. That part also reacts to most of the hormones that are surging through your body. It’s what makes you have lightning-fast emotions like we talked about in chapter 2, but it also makes you look for activities and experiences that give you an emotional “high.”
What do we mean by “high”? Most people are talking about drugs when they use that word, but here it means when you get an amazingly awesome feeling from something.
Emotional highs come from all kinds of things, like singing, playing or listening to your favorite music, riding a dirt bike over a big ramp and catching a ton of air, rock climbing to a major height, galloping on a horse, Rollerblading as fast as you can go, riding a roller coaster, drawing a picture you love, laughing as loud as you can with friends who “get it” or writing a poem that other people appreciate.
Having an experience that gives you that awesome feeling doesn’t have to be dangerous, but it usually does involve some risk . . . taking a chance either emotionally or physically. When you do that and succeed, you feel great. When you do that and don’t succeed, it can hurt—either physically or emotionally.
Once you find something that gives you that great, awesome feeling, practicing or spending time with that activity becomes important, especially in adolescence. You become more skilled and familiar with the things that give you those awesome feelings. It’s an important thing to experience in adolescence, and it’s good for your brain development. Find something that makes you feel that way—a passion, a hobby, a challenge—and have fun!
Think of the things that give you that “emotional high” or make you feel good about yourself. Answer the questions below to help you figure out what these things are.
That’s a Wrap
So can we quit with all this body talk? It’s a ton of information. Promise—no quiz, but do you get it? This is a tough chapter, full of facts and new words. Feel free to move on. Come back to this chapter when and if you need to or if you ever just want to. It’s here to help remind you about all the amazing stuff that is changing in you right now. It’s also here to reassure you that a lot of the “weird” stuff going on with your body is common to all preteen and teen girls.
Just remember, all these changes in your body and brain take years to unfold and take hold. It’s normal to feel totally freaked out, amazed, grossed out or excited by your body changes. Some changes you will like; some you won’t. Over the years, your body will become comfortable again for you—like a pair of comfy, worn-in jeans. Appreciate it for what it can do and what it will be able to do in the future. It’s an amazing, miraculous, awesome thing—you are wonderfully made, whether you think so right now or not!
6
Periods, Period
It’s no secret that the whole reason we have periods is so that one day we can have babies. And having babies happens because of sex. So if we are going to talk about sex (which we are a lot), we have to talk about periods, first.
Having periods doesn’t have much to do with sex, but if you decide to have sex, and most people do eventually, you better understand your periods very well! Even if you are not having sex for a long, long time, it’s still important to understand the amazing events going on in your body that give you your little monthly “friend.”
Blame It on Your Hormones