Share your advice on how to manage peer pressure

Aoife

Hi everyone,

At The Mix, we're running a project to help raise awareness around drugs and addiction. For this project, we'd like to create some discussions and hear from you so we can help lots of young people who may be reading this topic.

We've had a few conversations with our Community Champions who have helped us come up with a few topic ideas.

Our first topic is about managing peer pressure. Do you have any advice you would give to a friend or your younger self on how to manage peer pressure and communicate when you're not comfortable taking drugs or alcohol?

Share your advice below, I'd love to hear it

Former Member

The one bit of advice that comes to mind is to pick and choose your friends carefully, remember that there's always people out there who you'd have fun with and would want to spend time with you. Admittedly this is more of a pre-emptive tactic to avoid getting peer pressured in the first place but it's also good to remember if your friends are making you uncomfortable there's no reason to force yourself to stick around!

Former Member

Great thread idea!

I think a key piece of advice is that you never need to justify yourself to others. I'm not big on drinking, and I remember worrying about that before going to university. I'd think what excuses can I use? Now I know, you don't need any excuses - what you feel comfortable with is the only thing that matters So just being firm but fun worked for me. Lighthearted things like "I'm happy with my mocktails, no hangover for me!".

If anybody continues to make you feel uncomfortable...they're not the people you need in your life

AislingDM

Mirroring what has been said already, I think it is also helpful to come up with alternative plans which allow you to circumvent the prospect of drinking altogether. Again this is a bit more of a preemptive tactic to avoid the situation of drinking, but I think it might be helpful for people who cannot, or do not feel ready to, openly reject the intense force of peer pressure. Sometimes saying something as simple as 'I was really in the mood for shopping this weekend, or let's bake' can prevent people from defaulting to their standard plan of going out drinking and this can be useful if you're extremely keen on avoiding conflict. As @coc0mac said, if people continue to pressure you, even 'light-heartedly', you deserve better friends who respect your boundaries, no matter what x

Former Member

I think it gets easier as you get older, but I’ve learnt from my partner who is very confident in himself to just tell the truth and how that can help deflect peer pressure. If someone tries to get him to drink and he doesn’t want to, he will simply tell the truth and say ‘no thank you, I don’t want that’. Not really a lot that anyone can argue with then!! I know it sounds really simple but I was always one for making excuses / lying about why I didn’t want to drink (feel sick etc) and people would prod and pressure more. I think it’s a lot easier to just tell the truth and relax!