How to Handle Peer Pressure Fairfax County Public Schools June 6, 2022 – Posted in: Sober living
Self-regulation involves the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to manage current behavior and achieve long-term goals. In turn, your friend might reconsider criticizing people based on their appearance. By simply adhering to your own values and sharing them with a friend, you can positively peer pressure them to think before making a negative comment. You can also positively peer pressure others by the way you respond to situations. For instance, if your friend is body-shaming another person, you can say, “Actually, it can be really harmful to criticize people’s bodies like that.”
How can parents help with peer pressure?
This can reduce strain on the heart and arteries, helping prevent heart disease. One review concluded that several types of meditation produced similar improvements in blood pressure (43). The mental discipline you can develop through meditation may help you break dependencies by increasing your self-control and awareness of triggers for addictive behaviors (34). Through practice, people learn to extend this kindness and forgiveness externally, first to friends, then acquaintances, and ultimately enemies.
- Perhaps the person peer pressuring doesn’t know how else to communicate or connect with you.
- If saying no is difficult for you, come up with different ways to say no.
Tips for talking to your friends about your mental health
Surround yourself with people who don’t create any type of pressure on you to do certain things they respect your choices. If they encourage you to do good things like going to the gym or studying hard then it’s good but any type of negative influence is not acceptable. Passive peer pressure, sometimes called unspoken pressure, may have more influence over behavior than active peer pressure. Unspoken pressure may be harder to resist because it can seem easier to go along with the crowd in order to fit in, especially when there’s no explicit pressure to do something. People who don’t feel pushed into something may have a harder time finding an opportunity to refuse. We tend to hear more about the potentially negative effects of peer pressure.
Peer Pressure in Children
It’s possible that a friend who is peer pressuring you simply wants to spend more time with you or connect with you, but they don’t know how else to ask. Peer pressure causes people to do things they would not otherwise do with the hope of fitting in or being noticed. Maybe a kid in your science class taught you an easy way to remember the planets in the solar system. Maybe you admire a friend who is a good sport, and you try to be more like them. Maybe you got others excited about your new favorite book and now everyone’s reading it.
- Even if you work hard to fight it, you may find yourself giving in to pressure from friends or classmates.
- The same study also found that students with higher resistance to peer influence were less likely to modify their behavior to match the perceived behavior of their peers.
- Supporting others’ opinions will send the message that you think for yourself.
- Since peer pressure involves communicating some type of message, the way in which that message is communicated can be varied.
- Focus your attention on following your personal goals instead of the goals of the group.
Behavioral Addiction
- Some kids give in to peer pressure because they want to be liked or they think it helps them fit in.
- Surround yourself with people who don’t create any type of pressure on you to do certain things they respect your choices.
This combination can make it quite challenging to resist on how to tackle peer pressure and you may need some coping skills for the same. Once a child begins seeing themselves as a part of a community, the desire to fit in may occur for better or worse. This is why it is important to talk to your child early on about peer pressure and how to avoid being led into negative behaviors by their peers.
In contrast, negative peer pressure coerces others towards risky, inappropriate, unethical, dangerous or illegal choices. This pressure may be overt (e.g. direct goading to try drugs) or subtle (e.g. everyone at a party drinking shots, creating an implicit expectation for others to join in). Saying “no” becomes difficult in such contexts, even when uncomfortable, since humans innately seek to “belong.” However, a lot of social science research focuses on children and teens, who may seek the approval of peers as they move toward independence from their families. A 2020 study used a number of personality and peer influence measures to identify characteristics of adolescents who are more susceptible to peer pressure.
If you’re on the track team, you pace yourself with the fastest runner, because you know it will make you better. If you’re striving for good grades, you compare your scores to those at the top of the list. If you’re in the band, and there are musicians better than you, you are pressured into striving to be the best musician how to deal with peer pressure you can be. Scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, or watching college movies sets up unrealistic expectations for many college students about what this stage of life should look like. Social media is constantly portraying 14-year-olds that bought their first mansion or an 18-year-old’s net worth of over $2 million.