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Teen Brain Resource
As a follow-up to Part 3 of this e-journal series, watch
this short video
about the teen brain and reward! How might the flavors in vapes be particularly rewarding to the teen brain? How might that high level of reward promote addiction? How can teens use this information to make healthier decisions instead?
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Quick Links
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Forming Identity
The teenage years are a critical time for personal identity development, as students this age explore various sides of themselves. Whether through adult encouragement or rebellion against authority, adolescents are meant to find ways to define their interests, opinions, and personalities.
Identity formation is a normal part of the teenage life. Yet, as teens grow, not all do so from a place of security and confidence. Even a thriving teen can explore areas of identify formation that may be risky for them at times.
In this e-journal, we'll investigate how teen identity formation may be impacted by vaping, and how adults who care can help teens learn who they are in healthy ways.
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New Frontiers as Teens Grow
In the age of social media, teens are well-connected to the world outside their physical communities. In some ways, these connections can be healthy. Adolescents can explore a vast range of identity options beyond their own selves, home, and neighborhood. They can form connections with groups and ideas outside their immediate sphere, and can make their voices heard in public, even international, conversations.
The reach of current media is both persuasive and pervasive, and without being highly regulated, can be a risk for unhealthy teen development. As teens develop their personalities, they do so by creating distance between themselves and their caregivers. Biologically, this allows teens the space necessary to define themselves as their own beings. Social media facilitates a strong feeling of connection to a larger group of new peers, which can lead to both unhealthy and healthy thoughts and behaviors.
Additionally, through interactions with advertisers and social networks, teens may be exposed to false information about substances, including alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine. They may themselves become influencers in risky ways online! For instance, teens are among those who promote the use of e-cigarettes online and who represent the online identity of a "vaper." How can this unhealthy identity formation be prevented?
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First, What's Vaping?
Vaping is a risky behavior by which an electronic cigarette (e-cig) or vaporizer (vape) delivers nicotine, marijuana, and/or other chemicals to the body. Vapes contain chemicals (e-juice) and a heating mechanism to deliver an aerosol form of those chemicals into the body and the environment around the user. Vaped chemicals enter the lungs, bloodstream, and brain in seconds. The user may feel lightheaded, dizzy, or experience a rush or high, which may set off cravings for more. Vapes come in many styles but generally look like high-tech cigarettes.
As of now, e-cigarettes are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For young people, non-use is the healthiest choice!
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The Social Teen Identity: A New Environment of Risks
A primary advertising space for e-cigarettes is social media, which includes site such as YouTube for video sharing and Twitter and Instagram for lifestyle promotion.
Teens and adults alike create public identities within social media. For the most part, teen identity formation online is both normal and healthy. When teens begin defining themselves by an unhealthy online trend, however, it can become risky for both their health and identity formation.
For example, recent trends involving risky teen behavior, like the ingestion of household cleaners, can catch on when they are publicized and spread online. Teens who follow the trend put their immediate health at risk through practice of the behavior. They also jeopardize their long-term health by identifying as someone who might, at least under some circumstances, endorse the inappropriate and potentially life-threatening ingestion of risky chemicals.
How can risky teen trends become magnified when aired online? The exploring teen brain is primed for higher risk and quicker reward than the adult brain. Platforms like YouTube are set up to exhibit rewarding social approval mechanisms in the form of "likes," views, and comments. Within their media channels, teens can often see instantly how many people they are impacting with their choices.
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Vaping on Social Media
Vape content is often promoted on YouTube, a user-driven video platform. A quick search on YouTube for "vape" lists thousands of videos about different tricks to try with heated e-cigarette juice. For instance, teens can find plenty of tips for creating a bigger vape cloud of aerosol expulsion from the lungs. Often such videos are created by teens themselves, or by interesting and attractive young adult role models for teens. Such videos can have hundreds of thousands of views, and likely have a large teen audience.
Teens either creating or exposed to online content promoting vape use may see their interaction with this content, and the behavior it promotes, as a way of joining a larger, worldwide social identity. The gratification of liking a YouTube vape review alongside hundreds of other viewers, of being able to comment on a vape video with one's own experiences, or of uploading a new video for others' enjoyment, can be highly rewarding to the socially-primed teen brain.
Another social media site, Instagram, is a prime space for vape product advertisement. By following a vape company's Instagram page, teens receive updates about that company's product information. Updates in the form of pictures, videos, and stories are aesthetically pleasing, fun, and largely unregulated. Vape companies can produce ads or posts on Instagram that give false impressions about the risks associated with their products, including scientifically unsubstantiated claims about a product's health benefits.
Recently, vape company JUUL Labs announced that as of November 13, 2018, its Instagram page would no longer be active. Yet to date, the page remains up and available to follow, with nearly 83,000 other Instagram accounts doing just that. Further, as JUUL concedes on its website, "More than 99 percent of all social media content related to JUUL Labs is generated through third-party users and accounts with no affiliation to our company." In other words, JUUL Labs and other vape companies popular among teens receive plenty of publicity from enthusiasts who, on the open forum of the internet, can further popularize the vaping among children without the official blessing of the vape producers themselves.
An Instagram search for "vape" pulls up an endless array of hashtags, including "#vapetricks," "#vapenation," "#vapemodels," and "#vapelife." These hashtags draw together various Instagram pages that promote a common theme.
For teens, the hashtag feature of Instagram may foster a sense of community between the theme the teen seeks to identity with and the posts associated with a hashtag. As with other media, posts on Instagram feature edited photos and often only the positive highlights of an experience or lifestyle, potentially skewing a teen's perceptions of an unhealthy behavior like vaping.
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Vaping as a Lifestyle
Online and offline, vape manufacturers are striving to make vaping a lifestyle with which to identify. A recent vaping ad campaign asked consumers: "What's in your go-to bag?" In the ad, the go-to bag in question includes keys, wallet, and a vape. This marketing technique seeks to make vaping a normal part of everyday life. Teens - who use social media more than adults, and who are more impressionable than adults - are often exposed to such messaging.
Many vape companies also allow their products to be modified by the user. The user can go to a local vape shop and interchange various pieces of the product to make an individualized device. There are also plenty of online tutorials about modifying vape products on one's own.
The customization of vape products imbues the user with feelings of both individuality and expertise. Teens who customize their vapes may feel like a valuable part of an exclusive community of vape aficionados. Customization options encourage teens to hand tailor vapes and discuss their knowledge about how these products work. Modification encourages teens to show off their skills through online videos and in-person meet ups with others. There is a novelty in being involved in the creation of a product, and vape companies capitalize on teens' interest in novelty during the identity formation stage of adolescence by offering endless variations of their products'.
Think back to your own teen years. What brands did you enjoy and why did you enjoy them? What promises about your identity did these brands' advertising campaigns offer you as the adolescent consumer?
Vape brands on social media focus on creating a similar experience for today's teens. What you may have once felt about a clothing brand some teens now feel for their preferred brand of vape. And while identity exploration, novelty in experience, and even risk taking can be healthy for a teen's growth and development, the use of addictive nicotine, THC, and the vape products that expose students to these and other chemicals, is most certainly not.
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Social Media as Prevention
Fortunately, the reality is that most teens are not becoming involved in vape culture via social media! Some are even taking an active stand against vaping. These teens are forming identities that include sharing messages of health and non-use with their peers online.
YouTube is becoming populated with teens advocating for regulations on vape products. These young people are calling for action, both independently and with the guidance of prevention organizations, like Tobacco Free CA. These students are using social media to explain the impact of vaping on their lives and the lives of other vulnerable teens. When teens take a public stand advocating for health, it can be a powerful and effective prevention message.
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Helping Teens Form Healthy, Vape-Free Identities
Teach social media literacy
During FCD's substance abuse prevention seminars for middle and high school students, FCD Prevention Specialists foster social media literacy. Students are encouraged to examine what they personally experience online and especially consider how alcohol and other drug use is portrayed in social and other media. When students can understand that most of their peers are making healthy choices in real life, no matter the display of risky adolescent attitudes and behavior present in their newsfeeds, these teens are more likely to feel confident in their own healthy decisions too.
Help teens find healthy ways to define themselves and "get high"
Encourage teens to find activities and groups that support their strengths and interests. Teens who have friend groups tied to multiple, healthy activities are likely to look to those friendships for support and fun instead of looking to more risky alternatives. Worthwhile and rewarding activities and healthy social groups give teens an identity outside of themselves, when otherwise they may be in a period of uncertainty about who they are. Tell teens often, "I am glad you joined the band this year," or, "Your commitment to academics does not go unrecognized by me." Verbalizing the various ways a young person holds value in your community can help foster a healthy sense of self-identity without the use of substances. Give the students in your life ample opportunity to explore their favorite healthy highs.
Support natural, healthy stress reduction
When students have healthy stress relievers built into their lives, whether sports practice, camping trips, or time set aside each day to read and relax, they are less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like vaping. Teens are stressed and need to have the opportunity and coping skills to recognize and change their own stress levels. Depending on a teen's blossoming personality, what de-stresses one child will not de-stress another. Help your students find what works for them. Support downtime, mindfulness, recreation, alone time, adventure, counseling, journaling, or other methods of stress support and relief. Converse with students about what works for them and what does not work to de-stress. Help students figure out their go-to sources of stress relief during different times of the year, like exam periods, sports seasons, or interpersonal challenges.
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About the Author
Stacey Wisniewski
has been a Prevention Specialist for FCD since 2016. She holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English and Literature from Arcadia University and has worked with adolescents in several teaching and mentoring positions in and out of schools. When she is not traveling for FCD, Stacey is hosting groups for individuals in recovery from addiction. She is also an energetic healing practitioner with a focus on spiritual recovery after trauma.
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