Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. There's been an alarming increase in the levels of stress and anxiety experienced by girls from elementary

school to college. Research indicates that the number of girls who say they often feel nervous,

worried or fearful jumped 55% from 2009 to 2014, while the anxiety levels for boys remained unchanged.

And joining us on this episode is clinical psychologist Lisa DeMore,

who's witnessed this in her own research, private practice,

and at the all-girls school where she consults.

Lisa writes about the problem and what we can do about it in her new book,

Under Pressure, Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.

Lisa, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

I'm delighted to be here.

Tell us more about what led you to write this book.

Well, there are a few different reasons.

One is that I've been a practicing psychologist for almost 25 years, but I would say in the last 10 years, I started to

hear girls and their families talk about stress or anxiety almost all the time. It felt like there

were very few conversations I had where one of those words didn't come up as a source of concern.

And that was an obvious shift from how things had been before. The other reason, sort of in

terms of the main reasons I wrote this book, is that the understanding that clinical psychologists

have about stress and anxiety, how we, you know, what we know about these, what we know about,

you know, how they work and how they operate, is clearly pretty

divorced from how everybody else was talking about it. The people I was caring for in my practice

when they talked about stress and anxiety, they always talked about it as if it was a bad thing.

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