Our Youth’s Perspective 2025: The Mind-Body Loop

Ron Dahl The rapid growth and development of our adolescent years that occurs in our bodies, brains, and social learning are intertwined with each other..they don’t happen separately.

Liam Garcia I’ve definitely noticed over time how in school, when I feel more stressed or overwhelmed that my eczema is impacted and it flares up because of that.

Ron Dahl Understanding the interconnections between our experiences, learning, development and our physical health can help us learn how to manage our emotions…

Jaleon Nocentelli I tend to take a few minutes out of my day every day to just practice breathing exercises by inhaling through my nose, holding it, and then exhaling out of my mouth.

Ron Dahl Insights about these interrelated processes also highlight the importance of healthy relationships and of ensuring that systems to support young people provide opportunities for positive social learning experiences.

Merlot Ghadoushi It takes an environment and a community and a village, especially with like family support.

*****

Ron Dahl I’m Ron Dahl, founding director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent, and this is Adaptivity, where we explore the science of adolescence, untangling misconceptions about the years between childhood and adulthood.

We explore new insights into the rapid cognitive, emotional, and social changes that are happening during these years. And how the developing adolescent brain is primed to promote healthy and adaptive learning.

This is the first episode of our annual three-part miniseries of Adaptivity called “Our Youth’s Perspective,” brought to you by members of the Center’s Youth Scientific Council On Adolescence. The council is a group of high school and college students who work with the Center for the Developing Adolescent to help us inform and communicate the science.

In this episode, YSCA members Merlot Ghadoushi, Liam Garcia, and Jaleon Nocentelli talk with UCLA Professor of Psychology Ted Robles to learn about the “mind-body connection,” and what the research says about how our developmental needs for caring relationships, contributing to others, belonging, and learning to navigate strong emotions can help us thrive emotionally as well as physically.

*****

Merlot Ghadoushi Hi everyone, we hope you are having an amazing day. My name is Merlot and I’m a first-year college student joined by Liam and Jaleon.

Liam Garcia Hello everyone! I’m Liam, a high school senior.

Jaleon Nocentelli And I’m Jaleon, a high school junior. In this episode, the Mind Body Loop, we will be delving deeper into the mind body connection in ways we can create healthy lifestyles during adolescence.

Merlot Ghadoushi Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Theodore Robles, a research professor of health and clinical psychology at UCLA. We are so happy to have you with us. To start us off, can you tell us more about yourself and what you study?

Theodore Robles Yeah, so I’m a professor of health psychology at UCLA, and I study how stress and social relationships impact our health and the underlying biological mechanisms that explain how that happens. So how is it that a good relationship keeps you healthy? How is it that an unhealthy relationship can actually hurt your health?

Liam Garcia That’s really interesting. In order to understand a little bit about you, we want to know how you decided to go into this field. Were there any experiences throughout your life that led you down this path?

Theodore Robles Well, that’s a good question. In one way, I was always a psychology major. I was always interested in health. In some ways, I was influenced by my parents to perhaps be a physician, a doctor. That is often a common thing. My mom was a nurse and my dad was an electrical engineering professor. And so I like to think that my wanting to learn how people tick and how why they do what they do, was kind of the engineering side and the wanting to be practically important and important for people’s health kind of came from my mom as well. And I combined those two things together as a psychology major when I was an undergraduate, and fairly early on, I learned a lot about research on emotions and social relationships and health. And at that point, that’s when I said, okay, I really want to continue to study this and learn how to do this kind of research.

Jaleon Nocentelli Wow. That’s like really interesting and fascinating to know. We had a couple of questions about mental and physical health, stress, and social connection. But can you first talk about how mental and physical health are intertwined with each other?

Theodore Robles Yeah, absolutely. Mental and physical health are intertwined in large part because they’re all packaged within the same physical organism. Right? Our brains are inside us, just like our hearts, just like our livers, just like our immune systems, which is an area that I’m particularly interested in. And they talk to each other. All those systems communicate on a near-constant basis to keep us alive.

And really, it’s only in the last, I’d say, 100 years or so that our science kind of treated them differently. And that, unfortunately, has led to a lot of societal problems related to health, both mental health and physical health. And it’s only in the last, say, 40 or 50 years that we’ve started to recognize that that was a mistake and that we need to start thinking of these systems as communicating together, and that they do so in order to keep us alive. And they evolved to do so over thousands of years. And so it is definitely a scientific fact that all the things that are involved in mental and physical health are intimately interconnected. The problem is that our society kind of went a different direction, and we’re still trying to make up for that.

Liam Garcia That makes a lot of sense. Just to piggyback off of that, I have eczema, and I’ve noticed that it has impacted my life through stress. Has the idea of stress being able to affect the body been prevalent in adolescent research so far?

Theodore Robles So on one hand, we know a lot about how the mind and the body are connected in adolescence when it comes to how we respond to stress, the different biological systems that respond to stress, and how those affect our immune system, for example. We actually know less about what happens in adolescence when it comes to skin conditions, interestingly enough, which I find odd because, you know, that’s very important for many folks your age, including myself when I was your age. Things like acne, things like eczema, and other skin conditions. There’s research on skin conditions and stress in adults, but like I can’t actually I can’t think of many studies that have been done in adolescents. So that would be an area that needs a lot more attention.

Merlot Ghadoushi I’ve struggled a lot with anxiety. And I’m familiar with dialectical behavioral therapy and interpersonal effectiveness. How is stress different from anxiety and are the coping skills different or are they the same?

Theodore Robles Well, I do think it’s important, and I do this with my students, both my undergrads and also my graduate students, I think a good starting point is, what do we mean when we talk about stress?

And one thing that I find helpful to do is to separate out the things that we don’t want to have happen in our lives that happen, that are kind of outside of ourselves. That could be anything ranging from an argument with a friend or a loved one. That could be a test that’s coming up tomorrow or a project. So those are all kind of things that are outside us that happen. I like to and I and others talk about those as “exposures.”

And then we have the responses. And I think that’s oftentimes where people use the word “stress,” which is all the thoughts, the feelings, the physiological changes that occur in response to the exposure. And so I think it’s helpful to kind of separate those things just so that we kind of are clear about what we’re talking about.

So I and other scientists think about anxiety as concerns about threat, either physical or psychological, that could happen in the future.

Jaleon Nocentelli You know, that’s actually really interesting. And I feel that’s also really important. And we were also wondering how we could improve interpersonal connections. And does that have a role in how we encounter stress as adolescents?

Theodore Robles Absolutely. So one of the big ways that you can counter the anxieties of the world and the stresses of the world are to find ways to connect with other people. Many of my colleagues are very interested in the health benefits of social connection.

And, you know, a couple of things to take away are one, one of the most powerful ways to connect people, even across differences, whether that be, you know, different identities, different political beliefs, you know, any differences is to find ways to to work together towards a common goal. That could be volunteering, that could be a project at school, or just ways to make your community better. One, it’s good for the world, but two, it helps develop deeper connections with other people where you get to learn more about them. You get to develop much more empathy around their experiences and hopefully they do for you.

And so one of the big suggestions that has come out in the last, I’d say, 15, 20 years of work on social disconnection and health is that we need to find more ways to connect with each other and in particular, face-to-face connections. So, there’s definitely value to online connections, you know, connections that are mediated through our phones. There’s definitely value for that. Part of the problem, though, is that when they become substitutes for the in-person, face-to-face kinds of interactions that we basically evolved over thousands of years to do, then we’re kind of robbing ourselves of the opportunity to really kind of gain from rich connection with somebody else and working together towards common cause.

Merlot Ghadoushi I was wondering if you have been working on any studies currently, and if they’re mostly with adolescents or adults, and like what specific research studies you’re currently working on?

Theodore Robles So one of the things we’ve been doing for the last 15 years or so is studying how warmth and conflict in families is related to how the immune system works in kids. So these are kids between the ages of nine and 13, and we’ve been looking at how being in a warm and supportive family might lead your immune system to be kind of slightly less activated, which sounds like a bad thing, but can actually be good because you don’t want your immune system to kind of overshoot and do too much damage, say, when you’re fighting off a cold or the flu. And we’ve also been looking at how conflict in families might amplify the immune response, which sounds kind of like a good thing, but oftentimes sort of our worst symptoms of the cold and flu are due to high levels of inflammation, which we know is related to high levels of conflict in families. So that’s an area of work that we’ve been doing for a while.

And more broadly, I’m interested in taking some of this work on social relationships and health and applying it locally to our campus and in ways that we’re trying to understand how feeling a sense of belonging might be related to health among our undergraduate students here.

Merlot Ghadoushi That’s amazing. Did the pandemic and the isolation with the families and also social media becoming more prevalent these days, does that affect social connections and adolescents growing up but also within the family system?

Theodore Robles Yeah, so from our data that we collected in families, that was actually before the pandemic. So it’s not clear. But other work that I’m aware of would suggest a couple of things. One is that if the family is working pretty well, like if they communicate together pretty well and effectively, that kind of prolonged time together was probably kind of beneficial. And generally like relationships during the pandemic that were already good, they did pretty well during the pandemic.

But if there was strain in relationships–so we see this in both romantic relationships and also in family relationships–when things were not great to begin with, the pandemic kind of made those things worse for a variety of reasons, you know, spending more time together and so on.

In some ways, I think it’s a similar story for social media. So if you have healthy relationships with other people in your life in person, the ability to connect with them online in a more persistent and available manner has benefits. But if there’s kind of toxic things happening in one social network, you know that can get further amplified.

Merlot Ghadoushi Yeah, I think I definitely agree with that. Like for me personally, I did like what I call a “green juice” cleanse of just, like, getting rid of social media for–I think it’s been a year or two now–and I feel like overall it’s improved social connection. So I think it kind of aligns with the research that’s been done. And I also think that, yeah, if it’s a connection that’s been strong with family, then it’s going to continue being strong. But adding these environmental factors could bring it down even more if it’s not already a strong connection.

Theodore Robles Yeah, it sounds like it tracked with your experience. Definitely.

Liam Garcia So I know you kind of briefly touched on, like, social media, but we know that, like, social media can affect social relationships. But I want to know more about how they affect, like, your physical health.

Theodore Robles We don’t know as much about that yet because I think there’s still not enough data to know. But one thing I will point out that we do know is that social rejection can be a very powerful stressor, and it can activate our stress response in ways that if that persists over time, can be harmful and can amplify our immune system in ways that can actually be not great for us. And so if we know that about social rejection, and we know that, for instance, that many of these platforms are kind of unfortunately, venues for social rejection that doesn’t just doesn’t really go away. Right. And that can get amplified and we can get persistently exposed to that does not sound like a good recipe for what’s going to happen with…it’s not going to turn down those physiological responses by any means.

So we know the biology of social rejection pretty well and of social adversity. And while we don’t quite know yet kind of what this has looked like when you look at data on social media exposure and so on, I think it stands to reason that if you were exposed more and more continually to social rejection, that that’s going to be harmful. And that is unfortunately what these platforms can enable.

Jaleon Nocentelli So I have anxiety and was diagnosed with anxiety, and was wondering how anxiety manifests differently in various age groups and genders, and if it looks different and if any symptoms are different depending on the stage of life you’re currently in.

Theodore Robles So certainly just knowing the criteria for anxiety disorders, you know, there’s many different ways that it can manifest itself. So I think, one of the things we talk about in psychology research is, for instance, depression, which gets a lot of attention. Depression is not just one thing. There’s many different types of depression, and they manifest and it manifests itself in many different ways. I might have symptoms that are more, like, related to sadness. Another person, maybe more anger and some other things, and anxiety is likely similar, right?

One thing that it’s always good for all of us to keep in mind is that our language is not as sophisticated or as diverse as our experience. And so certainly there’s not just one way to experience anxiety, for sure.

Um, in terms of how it manifests in different ages, I always think it’s important to remember that you guys are still undergoing a lot of brain development. And so some things that an old person like me might view as kind of less important, you know–and a lot of that is due to age and some of it is also due to brain development–those things are going to be really important to you at your age and one of those things is kind of our social world.

Your brain is actively kind of developing how to navigate these complicated social worlds that we live in. And so I think a lot of those kinds of things are going to be the source of anxiety, you know, during that time of life. And that was the way it was when I was your age, and it was the way it was thousands of years ago as well. And so some of that can be chalked up to just what is most important to you guys during this particular time in life?

And certainly the kinds of things that make one anxious now, at your age, they’re not quite the same, or they’re slightly different than when you get to be, fortunately, when you get to be a little bit older. And so that’s one of the reasons why it manifests differently certainly in adolescence compared to adulthood.

And then also, you guys have a leg up on, say, like a fifth grader in terms of your capacity to think and to reason. And so the kinds of things that might make an 11 year old kind of nervous and anxious, you may not feel that way anymore because, again, your brains have developed, you’ve developed experience and so on.

Merlot Ghadoushi So something that I learned about when I took the dialectical behavioral course was that basically there are multiple skills, whether it’s like TIP, which is for distress tolerance or emotion regulation, mindfulness and so forth, that you need all the skills, not one. It’s kind of like a flower bundle and not just one flower, but all of them. What are some of those skills in general like for coping skills that you recommend? We mentioned anxiety and eczema and skin like different skin conditions. What are some of those things you recommend for adolescents?

Theodore Robles One of the things for sure, and this is actually related to some research that I did many years ago, related to the skin actually, and that other people have done since, is being able to experience and express emotions in a way that is manageable. So in dialectical behavior therapy, you know, there’s the concept of distress tolerance, which you’ve probably heard about.

And interestingly, one of the more compelling studies I’ve seen on the skin has to do with, um–so your skin is a barrier against moisture loss. That’s one of the things it does. And when you damage the skin, not necessarily through a cut, but the way that people do this in, like cosmetic and dermatological research is, is imagine that you took a piece of tape and you put it on your skin like on your arm, and you removed it, and you did this a bunch of times. You actually will experience more moisture loss coming out of that little area.

We do know that psychological stress slows your ability to heal that kind of wound. One thing that turns out speeds that is by engaging in what we call expressive writing. So expressive writing was developed to help people oftentimes deal with really difficult and traumatic situations, or just circumstances, where what you’re asked to do is just for, say like 15 minutes, write about a really negative experience that happened to you and just write about your thoughts and feelings during that time and really do try to kind of express those. And while it doesn’t feel great in the moment, it turns out that doing something like that actually did help speed the ability of the skin to recover from this kind of wound that I just described.

And I think that speaks to the value of both being able to express how you feel and kind of be able to talk about it and communicate it, rather than have these feelings feel weird and strange, like you can’t tell anybody or you certainly can’t write about it. Being able to put feelings into words, we do know it does reduce activity in regions of the brain that are involved in the experience of threat. In preparing to talk to you guys, it was neat to kind of reconnect some of this work on the kind of skin things that we were talking about earlier.

Liam Garcia That’s really amazing. Thank you for joining us, Doctor Robles. We really appreciate your time and perspective and have a lot to think about. This has been extremely insightful. Thank you again.

Merlot Ghadoushi Thank you so much, Professor Robles.

Jaleon Nocentelli Thank you, Doctor Robles.

Theodore Robles Yeah, thanks for having me.

*****

Merlot Ghadoushi Hi, guys. So we’re back. We want to talk a little bit more about our conversation that we had with Doctor Robles. And we would love to provide our own perspectives and experiences. He spoke about coping skills such as expressive writing, social media, skin conditions, social connections, and family dynamics. We want to talk a little bit more and expand on what he said with our own experiences. So you guys want to take it away?

Liam Garcia Yeah, of course. So to start off, I really found it fascinating how he talked about, like, how mental health affects physical health. And in my own personal life, I, like I said before, I have eczema. So I’ve definitely noticed over time how in school, when I feel more stressed or overwhelmed that my eczema is impacted and it flares up because of that.

And as a result of my eczema flaring up, I definitely noticed that I feel more self-conscious and, like, almost too aware of myself, if that makes sense. And it’s kind of this endless loop and cycle that’s kind of hard to get over. And I think that over time and through practice, you definitely get better with it and dealing with it. But it’s something that, yeah, it takes time.

And it kind of reminds me of like what Doctor Robles was saying about how like social media like of course, while there’s not really research that kind of like directly says that like, social media can affect physical health, I’ve definitely seen it how in my own life, like kind of seeing other people portrayed as this like ideal self can like almost make me feel self-conscious about like how the way, like my skin looks. And I think that kind of makes the problem almost worse. So I think that how Merlot did her green juice detox, I think that’s really helpful for people because it kind of encourages, like, embracing yourself.

Jaleon Nocentelli Yeah. And I really liked how he talked about how mental health and physical health, like intertwined and how they worked with each other in this whole idea of the feedback loop where when physical health declines, mental health also tends to show signs of struggling and vice versa. And how, when working to improve one of these aspects of this relationship, it also improves the other in like a domino effect type of way. Similarly, in like how when you’re sick physically, you are down and in that way it can lead to a decrease in mental health. But when you tend to feel better physically, your mental health also tends to increase.

Merlot Ghadoushi I also think that Doctor Robles talked a lot about how the psychology isn’t just, like, on one person. It’s a social psychology. It takes an environment and a community and a village, especially with, like, family support. I think that’s really important.

At the same time, I also think that the skill of expressive writing was something that I found quite interesting and something that I would really like to try in my own life. I, as I said, I have pretty bad anxiety. So for me personally, when my anxiety gets bad, that’s when I feel like my physical health declines, whether it’s like through getting hives or panic attacks where I feel like my body gets shaky and it just feels really difficult. And I’m sure I’m not the only one out there. And we’re all not alone. For people who struggle with anxiety, it’s a community, it’s something that we can all lean on each other. And I think that it’s really important to know that you’re not alone.

And at the same time, because of that, we would also like to talk about some of the coping skills that honestly are our favorites. It’s different for everyone, but what we really enjoy. For me personally, I would say that there’s a skill, as we talked with Doctor Robles, dialectical behavioral therapy. It’s called TIP, where you’re basically doing things to activate your system to calm it down. For example, temperature, intense exercise, breathing or muscle relaxation. I really enjoy the, um, temperature aspect of it, where you are probably either taking a really cold shower or you’re holding ice and holding on to that, or jumping into a freezing cold pool or ocean. It activates the vagus nerves and calms you down. And I think that’s really important. So yeah.

Liam Garcia And to kind of add on to that idea of, like, coping skills and things to, like, help you feel better, I think for me, what’s really important in my own life is connecting with family and like, just like getting that, relaxation time and quality time with them. Like, I know that Doctor Robles talked about how, like, communication within family like dynamics is extremely important and kind of, I guess determines whether, I guess the way you succeed or progress as a family. And I think that like in my own life, it’s really important for me to check in on my family for them to check in on me, because through tough times, they’re the people you rely on the most. And of course, for everyone it may be different, and I think it’s important to have people who are like family, if not your family, that you can trust enough to rely on them.

Jaleon Nocentelli Yeah, I’ve also found that another helpful coping skill for me is like mindful breathing. I tend to take a few minutes out of my day every day to just practice breathing exercises by inhaling through my nose, holding it, and then exhaling out of my mouth. For me, this tends to help my anxiety and stress and also just like, refocus my mind whenever I’m feeling down or if I just need something to help bring my focus back to my work.

Liam Garcia Yeah, and to tie it all together, I feel like something that, like, I’m really taking away from this podcast, and this interview, I guess, is the importance of getting help when needed. I think that there’s–in society, there’s this kind of, like, stigma that getting help is kind of weird, I guess, and it kind of puts other people in weird positions.

But I think it’s really important to like, find people you trust or just seek out the resources because it’s a part of who you are, and we shouldn’t be ashamed and we should embrace this part of ourselves. Because at the end of the day, no one can change us. And it’s just something we’re gonna have to live with. And the only way that we can thrive and kind of, I guess, move on and live with our issues or our struggles is by seeking help, so, yeah.

Merlot Ghadoushi Yeah. And it may be difficult if there’s, like, cultural barriers or through gender or sexuality, age and so forth, but it’s important to take that step and ask for help when you need it, because we’re all important. We’re all in unity and we’re not alone.

Merlot Ghadoushi Thank you all for listening. This has been Merlot.

Liam Garcia Liam

Jaleon Nocentelli and Jaleon.

Merlot Ghadoushi If you enjoyed listening, check out the next episode on the age old question of nature versus nurture. Bye!

*****

Ron Dahl Our adolescent years are an important window for learning to build positive relationships, discovering how we can make a difference in the world, and building our capacities for responding to stress and other challenging emotions. Ensuring that young people have the resources and support to meet these developmental needs is one way to help them grow into socially, emotionally, and physically healthy adults who can in turn help create stronger communities for all of us.

I’m Ron Dahl, and this has been a special episode of Adaptivity from the Center for the Developing Adolescent.

We’d like to thank Merlot Ghadoushi, Liam Garcia, and Jaleon Nocentelli from the Center’s Youth Scientific Council on Adolescence for delving into this topic and sharing their reflections with us.

Thanks also to UCLA psychology professor Ted Robles.

For more on the developmental science of adolescence and the YSCA, go to our website at developingadolescent.org.

If you’d like to learn more about the science of adolescence, visit us at adaptivitypodcast.org or share your thoughts through the contact information at our website.

Our podcast is produced at UC Berkeley for the Center for the Developing Adolescent. Our senior producer is Polly Stryker. Our producer is Meghan Lynch Forder. And our engineer is Rob Speight.

A special thanks to Xochitl Arlene Smola for her facilitation of the YSCA projects.