The Bad
If you guessed that teenagers might make more bad decisions, you're right. Because the part of your brain involved in reward is more mature than the part involved in impulse control, the way you process rewards and weigh outcomes will be skewed. In your brain, the potential pleasure from something is prioritized over any negative outcomes it may have. This pleasure is also heightened in teenagers, making the task of resisting urges even more difficult. So, you might notice that you take risks and struggle to reign in impulses. For example, as a teen, you have probably chosen to be on your phone instead of doing your work at least once. The impulse to be on your phone is overpowering your immature prefrontal cortex, resulting in you procrastinating even though you know you shouldn't be. For a more dangerous example, consider how increased reward and lowered impulse control also applies to alcohol and drug abuse.
Adolescents are also more responsive to social factors. So, you may be more susceptible to your peers pressuring you to do something that you know is bad or wrong. This means that, in addition to needing to resist the impulses caused by your striatum, you also have to deal with friends or peers pushing you to act dangerously. No wonder teenagers are so infamous for being reckless!
The Good
Despite those two negatives, being a teenager isn't all bad. The tendency of adolescents to take risks sounds completely terrible at first, but consider that risk-taking promotes exploration. It gives you opportunities that you might not have if you had shied away from anything that could fail. It's just a matter of doing something that's actually worth the risk. Also, since your brain is still in development, you and other teens have more plasticity, which allows you to more easily learn new skills and information. So, now is the time to pick up a new language or an instrument, instead of doing something that could get you hurt.
The benefits of adolescence are nice, but the bad parts of it really aren't. Go to the next page to see ways that you can mitigate the negative impacts of being a teen.