Girls: Lighting Up to Calm Down?

Why Chicks Flick

By Jeanie Lerche Davis
WebMD Feature

May 14, 2001 -- Growing up has never been easy. For girls, pressures and expectations lurk everywhere. Be thin. Fit in. Find a boyfriend.

"There's such insecurity," says psychiatrist Jerilynn Ross, MA, who specializes in treating anxiety disorders. "Teenage girls are so vulnerable. They're anxious about all kinds of things -- the cliques, the boys, their weight. If there's something that gives them a false sense of security, that makes them feel cool, like part of the crowd, they'll do it. They mask their anxiety by hiding behind a protective wall of conformity."

Smoking is considered by some girls to be the solution to their anxiety. It turns out, however, that just the opposite may be true. Young smokers may be creating greater anxiety problems for themselves later on.

In fact, new research links teen girls' smoking to the onset of anxiety disorders and sudden, unprovoked panic attacks when they reach their 20s and 30s.

Why Chicks Flick

For many girls, cigarettes seem almost inevitable.

Fifteen-year-old Kimberly has been smoking since she was 11, says Marie Justabis, a health teacher at Hazlehurst High School in Jackson, Miss. "She was just doing it to do it. All her friends smoked. Her parents weren't around; she could pretty much do as she pleased."

It's the same story for 18-year-old Amy, who lives just down the road from Kimberly. She, too, started smoking because everyone else did, says her counselor, Pamela Luckett. (WebMD is not revealing the girls' last names to protect their privacy.)

In fact, more women and girls are taking up smoking than ever before, according to an alarming new report by the U.S. surgeon general. Presently, more than 20% of adult women are regular smokers, and about 30% of high school senior girls have smoked in the past 30 days. Given the widespread knowledge of how harmful cigarette smoking is, we're left with one question. Why?

"Many girls believe that smoking helps control weight," says S. Bryn Austin, ScD, an adolescent health researcher at Boston Children's Hospital and a pediatrics instructor at Harvard Medical School. "The tobacco industry certainly markets cigarettes this way in young women's magazines."

In fact, girls who are preoccupied with their weight are four times more likely to take up smoking, according to research Austin published recently in the American Journal of Public Health. Both smoking and dieting are ways girls try to cope with their weight concerns, those researchers say.

Girls also light up in an attempt to calm their nerves, to help them relieve anxieties they feel in social situations, says Jeffrey G. Johnson, PhD, of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "If they're anxious in a crowd, cigarette smoking gives them something to do. They feel like they're fitting in with the group, in sync with everyone."

But if they're trying to feel better, research shows they may be accomplishing just the opposite.

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