What a street in Vietnam taught me about the Western teenager’s nervous system
At 6am in my street in Đà Lạt, the day is already a group activity. The woman two doors down is calling something across to the woman opposite, who is laughing before the sentence has landed. An old man waters a row of plants that may or may not be his. Three generations of one family eat breakfast on plastic stools on the footpath, close enough to touch, and not one of them has looked at a phone.
I moved here from Adelaide a little over a year ago: a counselling psychologist with several decades of practice and a nervous system that had spent most of them braced for something. It took my body about three months to notice the bracing had stopped. I tell you this not for the postcard but because it turns out to be the missing variable in one of the most important arguments in psychology right now.
Since roughly 2012, adolescent mental health across the Western world has fallen off a cliff, and the fall has been steepest among liberal teenagers, steepest of all among liberal girls (Gimbrone et al., 2022). The loudest explanation belongs to Jonathan Haidt, and it runs about like this: smartphones rewired their brains, overprotective parenting left them fragile, and progressive ideology trained them to catastrophise (Haidt, 2024; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018). Something, in this account, has gone wrong with the children. Preferably the liberal ones.
There is a quieter and far better answer. It comes from Dr Brianna Migliore, a psychologist writing on Substack as Dysregulation Nation, and once you have read it you cannot un-read it. I paid for her subscription before I reached the end of the piece, which is not a thing I habitually do.
The wrong question
Haidt’s camp keeps asking whether the world got measurably worse in 2012. It didn’t, particularly, and they treat that as the winning move: if the pandemic and the shootings and the climate graphs didn’t spike that year, they can’t be what broke the kids, so it must be the phones and the feelings.
Wrong question. The question is not whether the world grew more dangerous. It is whether the amount of danger reaching a teenager’s nervous system on an ordinary Tuesday went up. There, the answer is not in dispute.
Migliore calls her mechanism the Telescope-Accelerant model, and the telescope half is the part that quietly rearranges your furniture. A nervous system does not read statistics. It has no idea what the national homicide rate is doing. It responds to threat cues that actually reach it, and in 2012 the smartphone became a machine for delivering those cues in industrial quantities. A child in 1985 might have caught ninety sanitised seconds of a distant war on the evening news, once. A child in 2025 watches, uninvited and in high definition, the bodies pulled from the rubble, the mother running barefoot toward the school gate, the child’s face in the flooded street, the stranger dying on the train. The telescope did not invent the horror. Like Galileo’s, it simply let us see what had always been out there and had mercifully been too far away to watch.
I’d add one correction that strengthens her case rather than dents it. A telescope shows you a representative sky. A feed does not. It is engineered to hold attention, and nothing holds attention like threat, so what arrives is not the world’s true ratio of horror to ordinariness but a version with most of the ordinariness stripped out. The events are real. The dose is not calibrated to reality. And a real threat delivered at an unreal concentration is still doing real things to a real body, which is rather the entire point.
We are, when you zoom out far enough, mammals with data plans. The alarm system in your chest was built to fire a handful of times a year at a predator or a cliff edge, then stand down while the tribe groomed you back to calm. It was not built to fire forty times before lunch at other people’s catastrophes, on a screen, in a bedroom, alone.
The word underneath is ‘alone‘
That last word is the accelerant, and it is where my footpath in Đà Lạt walks back into the argument. The same phone that floods us with threat also quietly removes the thing our species uses to recover from it. We are co-regulating animals. A distressed nervous system settles fastest in the presence of a calm one, which is why held babies stop crying and why grief is more survivable in a crowded kitchen than an empty flat. The machinery is real: safety and connection recruit the body’s regulatory circuitry and turn the alarm down (McEwen, 1998; Porges, 2011, whose wider polyvagal claims remain contested, though this core point holds).
Now drop the telescope into a society that had already spent decades dismantling the crowded kitchen. Migliore names that substrate hyperindividualism, and here I want to plant a flag on her behalf, because this is not only an American story. The United States sits at the far extreme, but individualism is a spectrum (Hofstede, 2001), and the whole Anglosphere, my Australia emphatically included, is bunched up at the sharp end. We built economies that treat precarity as a personal failing, thinned out the unions and the congregations and the extended families and the streets where people knew each other’s names, and we called the result ‘freedom’. Then we handed every child a threat telescope and asked why the young ones had started to shake.
Wide circles, thin walls
The pattern inside the data is the real tell. Liberal teenagers, on average, hold wider moral circles: they extend concern outward, to strangers, to other nations, to the whole struggling species, where a narrower circle draws the line closer to self, family, friends, and town (Waytz et al., 2019). Nobody’s circle is emptier at the centre. Some are simply larger at the edge. And a wider circle is a larger surface for a threat telescope to strike. That is not catastrophising. Catastrophising is fear that outruns the facts; her circle just holds more facts worth fearing.
The neat undoing of the whole ‘trained into fragility’ theory is what these teenagers say about their own power. Ask them, and the same distressed liberal kids report rising, not falling, belief that ordinary people can change things. Helplessness does not look like that. Grief with the alarm jammed on looks precisely like that.
What moved it was a street
I know the difference in my own body, because I spent most of my working life on the wrong side of it. In Adelaide I had good friends, good colleagues, a diagnosis or four, and a low background hum of dread I had long assumed was simply my personality. I tried, as one does, to think my way out of it. For years. The dread was patient and unimpressed.
What actually shifted it was not an insight. It was a street. Three generations on plastic stools, a neighbour laughing before the sentence landed, and the slow physical realisation that the ambient level of threat here is low and the ambient level of company is high, and that my alarm system, given a fortnight of that, concluded it could finally stand down. When the dread lifted, the feeling underneath it had a name I had been dodging for decades. I had been lonely for most of my adult life, and I had filed it under stress.
Believe the bird
So, when we tell a generation of distressed teenagers that the cure is to put the phone down and sort out their attitude, we are making the oldest mistake my profession owns. We are treating an environmental injury as a character defect. You cannot gratitude-journal your way out of a threat-saturated, company-starved habitat, any more than you can affirm your way out of a house fire. And the evidence that simply raising awareness, or running the standard feelings curriculum, can leave kids worse rather than better is now hard to wave away (Foulkes & Andrews, 2023). The intervention that fits the mechanism is not inside the child’s head. It is in the room around the child: fewer threat cues at unreal concentration, and many more calm nervous systems within arm’s reach.
Migliore reaches for the old canary in the coalmine, and it is the right image, so let me end where she does and push it one line on. The canary was never neurotic. Its small body simply registered the poison in the air before the larger, slower bodies could. The miners who lived were the ones who believed the bird. Our teenagers are telling us the air is bad. The liberal girls, with the widest circles and the thinnest walls, are telling us first and loudest. We can keep insisting the bird has an anxiety disorder. Or we can start, finally, to clear the air.
References
Foulkes, L., & Andrews, J. L. (2023). Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis. New Ideas in Psychology, 69, 100910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2023.100910
Gimbrone, C., Bates, L. M., Prins, S. J., & Keyes, K. M. (2022). The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs. SSM – Mental Health, 2, 100043. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2021.100043
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin Press.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Waytz, A., Iyer, R., Young, L., Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2019). Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle. Nature Communications, 10, 4389. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12227-0
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