Have you ever felt the Peer Pressure Stress!!

👉 Who are our Peers?

Firstly, let us get familiar with the word, “Peer”. Peer group is a group of people, usually of similar age, background, and social status, with whom a person associates and who are likely to influence the person's beliefs and behavior.

👉 Understanding "Peer Pressure Stress"

Peer groups happen in every stage of our life. Having a bunch of people in our life isn’t a bad thing until it comes up with such pressure to do some stuffs that we do not feel like doing, and that is what we call “Peer pressure”.
We are dealing with peer pressure every day in our life. Pressure from the friend circle, pressure from family, pressure from social-media are unknowingly influencing our way of living.
In school, adolescents are highly influenced by their peers, and they are judged by how they look or act. Some students are extremely liked while others are not. In friend circle, there is often a pressure mostly heard from teenage group people of getting involved in crimes, like-

🚫 Underage smoking
🚫 Drug abuse or alcohol consumption
🚫 Sexting or even having unplanned sex

and they find doing these stuffs necessary so that they don’t miss out of the group.

👉 Virtual Peer Pressure Stress

Not only in real life, we get such pressure from social media sites as well. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, WhatsApp are some apps where we are socializing with people beyond boundaries. According to several studies conducted lately, viewing posts, images and statuses of friends indulging in inappropriate activities encourage teens to do the same. For instance, in one study, 75% of the kids accepted the fact that the pressure to blend in after seeing posts of their friends openly drinking alcohol and taking drugs, or being in open relationships forced them to repeat this behavior. “Virtual peer pressure” is more dangerous in a sense as it doesn’t go away after you are done with your school/college. The online thing stays there to haunt you for the rest of your life. What seems to be a cool platform for connecting with friends has become a weapon for the bullies now. Increasing amount of cyber bullying is another thick reason behind this. We feel the stress to act in such particular ways and show off things out of the fear of missing out.

👉 What can be done !!

Peer pressure stress is a common thing in our life, but we should have plans to manage them in order to ensure our mental wellbeing.

✅ Openly talking with the person who is pressuring. Sometimes, a nice talk helps even more than anything.

✅ Paying attention to how you feel and having the courage to stand out.

✅ Sharing with someone trusted. It can be a trusted friend, or a teacher, a counselor, or with the family. A trusted adult can listen to you and help you with strategies that might work in your situation.

✅ Planning ahead and having strategies to avoid such uncomfortable situations. Sometimes, giving excuses help out a lot. For example, if your peer is forcing you to smoke, straightly say you have medical reasons that would make it dangerous for you.

🔰 Remember, dealing with peer pressure stress alone is not easy. It’s better to involve someone who might support you and stand beside you in your situations. In such cases, parents shall have better understanding with their child, and should notice visible changes (e.g. depression, loss of appetite, social withdrawal, rude behavior, etc.) in their life, so that the children don’t feel left out.
A proper monitoring and mental support from parents boost up the kids to face many teenage challenges with vast courage.

©️ Fatema Mehrin▪️✍️