Chasing Life: Digital Retardation in the Early Stages of Brain Development and Why We Need It? A Reality Talk with Experts
I thought it would be a good time to learn more about the phrase “Digital Retardation” since it’s just popping up everywhere I turn. I’m not sure what that means. You can say the word “detox” just to eliminate toxins from your body. Is that saying that the phone is a toxin? It sounds intense, but these are actually exist. And there are some extreme examples out there. In South Korea and China, there are these internet camps where young people are physically separated from their screens, sometimes for weeks at a time. Maybe that doesn’t sound hard to you. Think about how attached young people are to these devices. They’ve had screens all of their lives. In fact, while estimates vary, the average person checks their phone more than 300 times a day, most within the first 10 minutes of waking up. Most people say that they have texted someone in the room with them at the time.
I explore how technology can affect brain development and what to do about it in the new season of Chasing Life. I’m talking to experts and doing something I’ve never really done on my podcast before: I’m speaking to each of my kids – the real experts.
How I grew up: I know how much I could do, but I don’t know how I am doing. How my daughters and I started talking about technology in a basement studio
A couple of statistics jumped out at me: About two years ago, roughly 85% of US adults reported being online at least daily, with 31% saying they were online “almost constantly.” And as of last spring, for teens, the numbers were even higher: A stunning 97% report being online every day, with 46% saying they’re online almost constantly, according to Pew Research Center surveys.
The numbers are worrying, but not surprising. We’re obliged to do so much on our screens for work and school. But we also do things for fun, like killing time on TikTok or doom-scrolling the news. Add to that constant communication; we text, Snap and Slack throughout the day. It is simple to be on our screens a lot.
I started this journey by talking with each of my daughters, all proud digital natives and Gen Zers: Sage, 17, Sky, 15, and Soleil, 13 – in my tiny basement studio. (Even if you don’t host a podcast, I highly recommend sitting down with loved ones and having uninterrupted, face-to-face conversations on any important topic. You will learn so much!)
Now, most parents think their kids are smart, and I am no exception. I found our conversations to be very thoughtful, with good insights. They did not hold back.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/health/screens-technology-brain-chasing-life-gupta/index.html
Do social media and homework interfere with the lives of young people? When did you realize that social media had no idea? A Zen Master’s perspective
And she’s right: It would be hard and isolating, especially for a young person, to be completely off everything. She couldn’t see herself using social media at a certain age because she would be too embarrassed, but she can’t imagine using another platform to communicate.
She spends about three hours a day on social media, texting, and playing games. I was surprised when she said that she lets it interfere with her sleep on the weekends, but only if it impedes her homework, as she assured me.
When I asked my youngest, Soleil, about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to grow up with all this technology, she answered like a Zen master: “I just think it’s a thing. I do not believe that it is a good or bad thing. … There is not much people can do about it. It is just a thing. This was the world that she would have chose, not the one she was handed.
Cell phones existed, but not social media, which my daughters preferred to be a part of their childhood. They tell me that these platforms make an obligation to engage much more than a desire. I asked Soleil if she wanted to let her friends down.
My girls think that in the future, teens and people of generations to come will have to figure out how to control themselves, just as people do around temptations like chocolate and potato chips.
What Do You Eat When You’re On Your Own? A Question that I’ve Never Learned About: The Gupta Family Dinner Policy
That one is very easy for me. Catherine is correct. Family dinners are sacrosanct for the Gupta family. No phones at the table. I saw a lot of things happen when we started that policy. My girls ate slowly. They relaxed and smiled. I could see their eyes. It was not easy to make this happen. And my girls tried to bully me into letting them have their phones at the table. “Father, you’re making me want to vomit.” All children are allowed to have their phones at dinner. What if there is an important event? Are you talking about “Blah, hey, yeah?” It wasn’t easy initially. During a one hour dinner, on average someone is likely to reach for their phone several times. It is a hard habit to break.
But now, after having talked to my daughters and quite a few experts, I question whether we provided the proper guardrails. I wouldn’t let a 16-year-old with only a learner’s permit steal my car keys and say “You’re on your own!” I wondered if I did the same thing in the digital world.
Talking about screens and limits makes me feel vulnerable. I have to ask myself if I am doing the right thing. Is being a father a good thing? Is there too much or too little of a pushover?
As a doctor, I am accustomed to having the answers and data to back up my beliefs but this is one area that I don’t. These are not normal waters for me or my parents. There’s no agreed-upon best practices. Many of the questions have not yet been formulated, due to the fact that the studies have not been done. We get a handle on one question, but five new ones crop up. It’s like a hydra, the mythical water serpent that grows two new heads for each one cut off.
I am concerned about imposing my values from the US culture in the 70s and 80s on my kids, as my parents did to my brother and me with their Indian culture. To us, it felt like their antiquated beliefs were woefully out of step.
But on the other hand, as a parent, it unnerves me that I can’t rely on that very thing: my own experience. If we choose to follow in the footsteps of our parents, we usually have reference points to guide us in making decisions in our families. But with screens, I can’t say, “This is the way we used to do it when I was a kid,” because nothing so all-encompassing existed back then.
Is There Still Something? A Story of a Student Who Hasn’t Seen So Many Nighters in a Week or So Many Years
I think it wears on me physically first. Because that was when I was just scrolling for hours, you know, not going to sleep. It was taking hours out of my day.
The story I’m about to tell you will sound typical at first. A college student named JeromeYankey is the subject of this piece of writing. He was pulling a lot of all nighters, but not studying for exams. He wasn’t hanging out with people who were friends.
It was hard to stop. It was not easy to say I’ve seen enough because there isn’t enough on TikTok. There is no winning on TikTok. There is no end to this. You just have to keep on going.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
A journey to TikTok. I know what I am doing, but what I don’t know how I’m going to do
Add it all up, half an hour to an hour when I wake up, you know, a little bit in the free time during the day, maybe during a meal, another 2 hours during the day, maybe averaging 5 to 6 hours a day, even more if I had more free time.
It’s that journey, to say “hi” to one of my TikTok accounts. I have zero followers. There is a chance someone might see it, I’m going to post and let them know who I am, because I only know my friends. Because that’s how the TikTok algorithm works.
And then everything changed. Jerome had been scrolling away one night and he saw the sun come up. He hadn’t slept at all, and he was falling behind in school. And at that moment, he decided he had to break up with TikTok.
I was simply watching, just scrolling, just kind of just droning on through endless content. That’s the time when I began to become less of a creative and more of a cynic. I wouldn’t be doing much other than looking at the content. I would watch it. and I would be like, Oh, I could be funnier than that. Or, Oh, they’re not even that good.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What Happens When You’re In The App Store: A Story about Jerome and the Adoption of Video Gamer’s Friend, Sage
Jerome says something deep inside of him stirred. It might have been an urge to simply look up and see what’s going on around him. It was very similar to coming out of a fog.
It wasn’t until I started taking time away from the app that I realized that I wasn’t unattractive, I wasn’t unsuccessful, I wasn’t, you know, unpopular. It was only the fact that I was comparing myself to those ideals that made me sad.
That. That is the thing that really stuck with me about Jerome’s story. How innocently it all started. As a father of three teenage daughters, I can only imagine how I can prevent my daughters from going to that same place. I see that they are very fond of the app. I do see the appeal. Heck, we’ve even made videos together. But here’s what worries me. As much as I try to keep them safe in their real world, I worry about their digital world and what might happen when they don’t have as many rules or supervision. My oldest, Sage, is about to head to college, which means soon she will be the same age Jerome was when this all happened to him. It’s hard to believe but maybe the same thing can happen to her. Thankfully, he did it himself. I know not everyone can do that. Sometimes it gets so bad that people need medical help.
It is there to help those children and families who have gone down a rabbit hole of gaming and bingeing their time on social media.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Chasing Life. CNN’s Jessica Yankee: Teens Are Doomed to Adversely Seeking Apps to Get Their Daily Vitamins and Minerals
We’re in a brave new world that we’re going to have to figure out as we go along. It’s no longer younger anymore. I mean, I have 17 year old patients who say, you know, I’m cool, but I really worry about my 14 year old sibling because this environment is morphing and evolving so rapidly.
I have many questions. How much screen time is too much? What are some of the warning signs? Things are not going well. Most importantly, what can you do about it? He has lots of tips for parents, kids and anyone else who is trying to navigate this new world. I’m a medical correspondent for CNN. And this is Chasing Life.
Jerome Yankee’s story may sound extreme, but as I said, it’s actually not that out of the ordinary. About 16% of teenagers in the United States say they use TikTok almost constantly. That’s mind blowing all of their time on a single app. You know what? It is not just TikTok. It’s also teens, for that matter. Three out of ten people say they are online a lot. Here’s the important thing. It’s important that this data is useful. It doesn’t paint a complete picture. What these numbers don’t tell us is how all of that time on TikTok is actually impacting people’s mental or physical health negatively or positively. Or if they think that they are addicted like Jerome did. One thing I learned is that there’s more to it than that. As much as we like to throw around the word addiction, we need to be careful here. Internet addiction isn’t a thing for now. It’s not an official clinical diagnosis. There’s even still a lot of discussion on whether or not it even qualifies as a mental health disorder or even how to define it, how to measure it, how to test for it, and especially how to treat it. Regardless of the type of game you want to call it, a lot of doomscrolling can be bad for you. And there are a lot of people who want help, who need help. The doctor is Dr. Michael Rich.
Before the lockdown and we went to virtual visits. I had about a 30% no show rate on first visits for kids who are struggling with their interactive media use because the parents would wuss out and wait until the night before or the morning of and saying, we’re going to take you to a doctor, is going to take your video games away. And of course, the kids would say, no effin way, I’m out of here. As soon as we went virtual, our no show rate dropped to zero because they’re comfortable in this environment.
What I found out is that I knew a lot more than my parents did about social media. Mostly, Dr. Rich said that my parents, they should listen to me when I say something about screens.
What Is Happening When a Child is Coming in to See Someone Else, or Does It Happen When They’re Left Behind a Screen?
I worked in the film industry when I was young. I respect Screen Media, but I also love it. There’s a deep respect for any great love affair, that’s for sure.
When a parent brings their child in to see someone else, they are doing it because they are worried. I mean, if a parent is taking their child to see the doctor, period, and leave alone for something like this, it’s because they’re worried. They have been unable to eat because of their pain, and they have been unable to keep food down. They are coming into you with a worry. What is the worry? Exactly. I think my child is spending too much time in front of a screen. What?
The parents are seeing that the young person is withdrawing from a lot of aspects of their life. They’re not getting up for school. Sometimes they’re staying up all night gaming or on social media or whatever. So they see the young person withdrawing actually from them most acutely. The kid is in their room. The kid, you know, is on screen. You know, instead of having meals together, instead of just spending time with the family. That’s a pain point for parents.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How Do You Feel? What Do You Want to Know About Your Children? How Do They Feel? A Question that’s not, but a Challenge for Pediatrics
The patient and family need to know what is abnormal in this world. We have to define within normal limits in medicine. That is how you get lab results. What is within normal limits here?
The problem comes when their day to day functions are not functioning as they should. They’re not getting enough sleep. They are overeating. They are not in school. They are leaving their friends. One thing that I try to do with these young people in the first visit is identify their pain points so that they can make changes to help them succeed, whether it be school or something else. I would rather have more friends, instead of having an ideal that says over x number of hours is problematic, it impairs your life. I want to know more about how they live after they wake up and before they go to sleep. That has been about how you feel in your life. How are you doing? Are you getting grades in school that are reflective of your capabilities? And almost invariably they’ll say no. We’ll explore why that might be.
Yes, it would be TV watching or things like eating disorders, substance use disorders of various kinds. These are actions that are trying to make you feel better or in control of things, and they are exactly what those are. I do not see social media or the internet as being an option for causing anxiety, depression, or anything like that at this time in one’s life. What the interactive media environment does for them is it provides them a place where those anxieties, depression, etc. can kind of manifest themselves even more, even if they were not noticed otherwise.
One of your patients, if you were seeing them in a world where we did not have as much screen time or social media. 15 years ago. 20 years ago, what did you know? Would the child still be with you? It would be something like binge watching TV or something like that, instead of using social media.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Is Screens Addiction a Good Therapy? (A Note on Dr. Rich’s Perspective of Addiction and ADHD in Children’s Playgroups)
Dr. Rich doesn’t think it is appropriate to describe screens as addictive. Why? We need screens just as much as we need food.
And that’s why I sort of move away from addiction as a model, because we as a society use the term addiction as pejorative. We think of addicts as weak people with weak character, etc., and we approach addiction, frankly, still as something to be punished rather than healed. These kids do have certainly short term problems withdrawing from these behaviors. The behavior that the young person is pursuing is not doing anything for them, but it is helping the young person who have been through too much, because it makes them feel better, and it is also helping them who have been through too much, because it makes them feel better. Including their social interactions where they can’t keep on top of a conversation. They come home and they sit down in front of a screen and play a first person shooter. And not only are they in control of that universe, but in many ways they are better than so-called neurotypical kids at a game that actually reinforces and rewards distractibility, hyper vigilance, and all the aspects of ADHD that are problematic in a classroom setting.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Getting Your Kids to Know When You’re Going Home, and How You Can Get Yourself Into Control, What You’ll Do, and When You Come Home
That is fascinating. That’s a really, especially that idea of how you might have a day like you described, where you’re feeling behind all day and then you come home and you can regain some sense of control. That sounds familiar to me, doc. Frankly, it sounds familiar in terms of what I may see with my kids, but even myself to some extent, you know, like I will find myself playing some silly game on planes, you know, and things because I’m. I need to regain control. Maybe I need some wins. I need a few wins because I have had a lot of losses today, but I can beat this computer.
It was the last point from Dr. Rich that stopped me in my tracks. What you’re asking for is for people to give up what they’ve got when you treat someone addicted to alcohol or cigarets. Abstinence, that makes sense. But again, for most people these days, that’s simply not realistic with technology, let’s face it. So Dr. Rich’s approach is let’s learn to live with it and along the way, respect it. Look, I know that’s a huge shift from the doom and gloom warnings. We often hear that social media is harming us like a bad drug and that it. Needs to be cut out of our lives.
I think that if we can take a step back and treat the smartphone or the tablet or the social media platform as the power tool it is, and think about it the way we think about our child driving a car, for example. Right? Kids want a car. I don’t believe we would teach our child to drive, because everyone else is doing it, regardless of their age, and it’s sort of like having a have at it. We will give the four year old who is screaming an iPad a message that says, “Go play Angry Birds or something like that” as a tool to calm them down without really thinking about the implications. And so I think that we just have to treat these tools as tools and with more respect and also help these kids learn to use them, not in fear, not in stay safe, because we don’t teach driving a car by saying, don’t hit that tree, don’t run over pedestrians. We teach them to drive a car, and in the process learn how to be safe. I believe that we need to have a sense of mastery of this powerful tool and not fear it.
Think of it as an automobile, more like a power tool. I think it’s really interesting as my children are starting to drive. I think about that all the time as well. If you said that, what is my biggest worry about the screens with my teenagers? You know what I would say far and away, my biggest concern is they use it when they’re behind the wheel of a car far away, because that can be catastrophic in a millisecond. Do I worry about how much they’re using it overall? Yes. But I worry far more about when they are using it and what they are using it for.
The content we are consuming and creating is more important than the context in which it is being used. So something that would be perfectly fine, you know, in the middle of the day between things you don’t want your kid doing at three in the morning, in in bed at night interrupting their sleep, or you don’t want them sitting at the dinner table, you know, online, etc.. We should not pay too much attention to the content. Is this healthy content? Is this helpful or not? What is the context in which they are doing something? When I watch screen time it’s really where I could be doing something, that’s the thing. Yeah. Is there a discussion at the kitchen table with my parents? I wonder if I could play with my friends. And that is where the kind of seductiveness of the online space can get in the way of the rich and diverse menu of experience that is so helpful to growing up.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Revisiting Chasing Life: Dr. Rich’s advice for improving his family’s relationship with technology, and what I can do about it
And I’m going to get his advice for improving my own family’s relationship with technology. Stay tuned. And now back to Chasing Life. I want you to meet one of Dr. Rich’s patients before we hear about more from him.
Allison visited Dr. Rich for the first time as a preventive measure. There wasn’t yet a problem, but her mom, Amy, says that she was struggling to raise Allison and her siblings in a world that was so different from the one that she grew up in.
I had my tonsils out when I had a broken TV in the back of my dad’s closet. And we didn’t have a TV in our house until I was about 16. Coming at that with screens everywhere, it was definitely baptism by fire.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Getting a better sleep with my phone and not using it in the morning or after 830 at night! A Wellness Check for Smartphone Usage
I implemented downtime where I can’t use my phone until 715 in the morning and I can’t use it after 830 at night so I can wind down for bed and have my morning routine. But I also made app limits so I can only spend a certain amount of time on YouTube. I can only do a couple of games at a time. I can only spend a certain amount of time on other apps. So that means that I don’t spend countless hours mindlessly scrolling.
It’s pretty impressive. And again, keep in mind, she’s only 13. Allison, I can really empathise with your parents. We often think about seeing the doctor when we have health problems. And in many ways, that is what your parents did for you here as well. And for all your listeners. The conversation with Dr. Rich on the podcast is supposed to do this for you. Think of it as a wellness check for smartphone usage.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How do you get the patients to trust you? A case study using an old man in a uniform uniform uniformly dressed satsuma
How can you get the patients to trust you? I’m not telling you to say this guy is some old guy. You and I are the same age. I’m not saying much else. How can they understand my world? How do you gain the trust of other people?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How can you steal a car? What do you tell your children about Grand Theft Auto? A Pediatrician’s Question for Dr. Rich
I always ask them what games they play. You know, and I show them that I am knowledgeable about it in ways that are not pejorative, that are not saying it’s a bad place. I’m approaching it as the world in which they live. And I think that’s a mistake that a lot of parents make, which is they’re sort of dealing with it as something else. They are at the top of the basement stairs, saying they need to turn off Grand Theft Auto. I don’t like that. What I encourage the parents to do is sit down next to their child and play Grand Theft Auto with them, because there’s some really interesting things that happen then. I hate that, you’re saying, I love you, I care about you, so get rid of it. I want to understand what engages you. I want to understand what you’re doing here. You ask your child how you can steal a car when you finally figure out the 47 different ways with your thumbs, and I finally figured it out. Let’s talk about why we might want to do that. Right. You’re coming from a very different place. You are learning from them as a child’s student. You’re changing the power differential in ways that are really meaningful to the kid, which is, I care about what you do. I care about you and you don’t point a finger at them so you can help them move on. That isn’t a punishment because it’s the next step.
When you distill everything down, is there a best way, not a right way, but is there a best way to raise children in a digital world? What are the other top tips that you give?
I had the biggest question for Dr. Rich at the end of the day. I wanted to know as a fellow dad, fellow doctor, when he looks at where this is all headed. Does he feel hopeful?
I’m hopeful. I will acknowledge the fact that as a pediatrician that’s kind of a occupational hazard is optimism. I am hopeful because of what I hear from the kids. And so I think that we will get better. We will also encounter problems we don’t even anticipate yet. I think that things are going to get better. There are some potholes on the road. The real question comes down to will we be able to spot those potholes and steer around them? Or are we going to hit them and have to resolve them as problems? But either way, I’m confident that we can do this. We have to be prepared for problems to occur and be ready for them to be solved without guilt.
What Should I Don’t Log In For? How Should I Learn To Survive for Life Off-Grid? A Conversation with Catherine
I came into this episode with one question. Should I not log in at all? And I was skeptical of that. Catherine provided another way of thinking about it. What if we just start just start by being aware, really aware of how we use our devices and the impact they are having on our in-real-life relationships. And then we go from there and ask the questions every time we pick up the device. What is it that they are looking for? Why now? What else? You might be surprised by what you find and where it could take you. I don’t believe most of us are cut out for life off the grid, but this feels a lot more realistic. And with these steps, I’m hopeful that we can start to rebuild our relationships with our devices and with each other. In the next episode, I’m going to talk to someone who’s had to learn to build these boundaries after building a career online.
One suggestion I do have, for all of us, is to get in the habit of taking a break so that you can both better understand the effect that your relationship with technology is having on you and then also appreciate its benefits more.
Yeah, I think I could quit Tik Tok and Instagram. It wouldn’t be easy to give up Snapchat because it’s my main source of communication.
How to Break Up with Your Phone: How My Daughter and I Feel Stressed and Isolated When I’m On My Cell Phone
That’s coming up. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Grace Walker, Xavier Lopez, Eryn Mathewson, and David Rind. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan is the technical director. Steve Lickteig is a producer for CNN Audio. A huge thank you to BenTinker,Amanda Sealey and other CNN Health employees.
My biggest takeaway for myself personally, for from how to break up with your phone is that our lives are what we pay attention to, in that you only are going to experience what you pay attention to. You will only remember what you pay attention to.
That’s me in the podcasting studio with my daughter Sage. As you may know by now, I’ve been bringing all my daughters along for the ride this season, and Sage is up next.
I wanted to sit down with Sage because I think, like many of us, she feels that a week without her phone is kind of impossible. Tell me what the biggest challenge was this week.
I have to memorize my friend’s phone numbers to call her if I want to. It’s hard to say something to someone because you have to call them.
What if it’s important? If Sky and Soleil have to be picked up from sports or friends houses, what should we do? and I have no idea how to get there, and they can’t text me to tell me when they mean to be picked up. And they can’t call me when I’m on my Alexa. I only have the option to call them.
These days, it does feel like our phones are a part of us. After all, they go with us everywhere, and sometimes they’re even under our pillows. They can keep us company when we are alone. But here is the struggle I’ve had so far this season. We’ve heard about some bad side effects of being online too much. Last week, a self-described mediatrician, a doctor, told me that he treats patients whose phones are amplifying their stress or anxiety. But at the same time, my own daughters have made it clear that being offline can make them feel stressed out as well. Isolated. I understand what you’re saying. Sometimes, I feel like there is something missing in my life. But the question is, where does that leave us? What’s the right balance between going completely off the grid on one side and always plugged in on the other?
It was 4:00 o’clock in the morning when Yoo Chae-rin realized she’d been on her phone for 13 hours. This was when the 16-year-old decided she needed help.
In the US, people pay a lot of money just to stay off work for a week or more. Now, I’m not that interested in that. I’m not going to let him go to one of these camps. It would be a lot cheaper to take away her phone. I wanted to know if she’d ever consider hitting the pause button on her own.
Most people think that the first thing you should do when breaking up your phone is to uninstall apps, but they don’t remember any actual tips or tricks on how to do that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
How Do I Feel? Telling David that I’m not a neurosurgeon using the “No-Phone-Zones”
One of my producers, David, asked me about this after one of our recent interviews, and I really had to take a beat to think about it because, you know, as a neurosurgeon, I’m actually in these “no-phone-zones” a lot. I can’t use my phone when I’m not in the operating room. But still, that doesn’t mean that separation is always easy for me. Here’s what I told him.
When I was on an international flight, I realized there was no internet service on the plane, as it was going to be a long flight. I thought that it was going to be a long time off the grid. I also read books. I got more sleep than I would have. I was doing some other work. There wasn’t anything that I missed when I got cellular service again. There was no big thing that had happened. I was able to answer emails and text messages between the time we got to our gate and the time I got to my house. I was ready to go. I would have spent hours probably on the device before. In terms of my actual work responsibilities, I was able to do it quickly, even though I didn’t have to. How do I feel? I feel great. And I feel fantastic in part because I am allowed to feel fantastic. I can be someone who is not beholden to the phone.
I don’t use the word digital because I don’t think it’s realistic to try and completely stop using technology for a long period of time. But with that said, I think that having some kind of rituals in which you regularly do take breaks from devices is a great thing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
Breaking Up with Your Phone: Catherine Price’s 30 Day Plan to Take Back Your Life and What she Did with Her Daughter, Sky, When She Was Born
That’s Catherine Price. She is a science journalist and she wrote a book on how to break up with your phone. The 30 Day Plan to Take Back Your Life.” Like Catherine, this work is deeply personal. It really came into focus for her not long after her daughter was born.
I had these moments where I would find myself up late at night, actually, often in this very room feeding her. I would have had an out-of-body experience because of the sleep deprivation. I would see her looking at me. And then I was looking down at my phone and that just devastated me.
That really made me want to vomit. As soon as Catherine described that story with her daughter. Sky was five years-old when she ran into my room to show me a drawing. I admit I was distracted. I was on my phone. I did not give her the attention she deserved. She ran away from the room. She didn’t let me forget it a decade later. After Catherine had had this moment with her daughter, she did something. Something I can relate to. She used this personal moment as an inspiration for change, to not be one of those parents. And in many ways, she got this incredible additional benefit. She found out she had a lot of time on her hands.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
Is the Internet of Things Drug versus Food? Is it a Drug vs. It’s a Food, is It Something You Need to Take a Break from?
So one really nice ritual that I personally love and that I would encourage everyone out there to try is taking a digital Sabbath. You have a one-day period where you don’t interact with your devices. You can start shorter if that scares people. Just do it for a night. In my experience I like to go for a stroll with our daughter. and I’ll practice an instrument and I’ll do something else. Then I will look around and see the time at 11 o’clock. And I don’t know. it’s only 11:00 o’clock in the morning. And that’s also often accompanied by a sense of physical relaxation and calm that’s so profound that many people report not wanting to turn their devices back on at the end of the 24 hours.
We tend to think of them as one thing, but they are more than that. It’s like saying a refrigerator is all food. Like if you look inside the refrigerator, you’ve got all sorts of different categories of foods, and some of them are good for you and some of them are really bad for you, and some of them are delicious in small quantities, but will make you feel gross if you have too much. I think that’s the same with our phones. Do you think you’ll be addicted to your banking app? I don’t think so. I’m not particularly worried about that.
But when you talk about addiction, if you just drill down on that metaphorically, would it be more like like opioids or more like like food? Like we need food. We know we can eat too much of it. You’re just taking them because you’ve become addicted if you don’t require them. You don’t need that. It would be a good example. There’s no redeeming qualities to nicotine and and I’m not trying to sort of gild the lily here. I am asking, where is the inflection point? What is the point of saying that the device is something that I need to take a break from, you know, just certain aspects of the device?
I asked the question of the drugs versus the food. I mean, it’s exactly what you’re saying is that it’s different for every person. How do you get to the point? Is that a book you wrote about this? And you also realize, I think this was a study that you mentioned from the American Psychological Association. Most people agree that it is probably a good idea to stay out of sight for a while. That’ll be good for their mental health. I think you said two thirds of Americans in that study believe that. A very small number of people actually do it.
I think it’s more important if you’re using your phone than if it’s problematic to know the other people in your life. Like, you might think that your alcohol use is just fine and then you talk to your spouse or your children and they’re like, actually, it makes me really uncomfortable or actually it’s harming our relationship. I think that it’s important that people talk to their families and friends, no matter how young their kids are. It’s amazing how perceptive, really young kids can be about this and ask how they feel about your device use. That can be a real wake up call for people.
It’s when you break your phone with it and then make up with it. I mean, the idea being that, like, you know, if you break up with a human being, you’re not saying I’m never going to date another human being again.
You’re just saying that relationship was not right for me. Hopefully, you have a moment of self-reflection to evaluate what was good and what was bad about it and what you would like in the new relationship.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
Why is there a rubber band on your phone? What can you do to stop smoking? An advice for people who have tried to quit smoking
It would be dumb to keep cigarettes in your pocket if you were trying to quit smoking. It’s a good idea to remove one app because it isn’t actually benefiting you and is a problem for you. You can look it up from a computer. You can always reinstall it to look at it for your at your phone, on your phone and then delete it afterwards. You can check it out from the browser, but it’s best to get the app off your phone. You also then can do things like go into your settings and make it so that you can turn it very easily to black and white. That’s in the accessibility settings. Google it. I also would highly recommend minimizing your notifications, like I think of those as interruptions because they’re there to interrupt you. So what’s worth being interrupted in the middle of your family dinner?
Do you want to just look at the apps on your phone and ask yourself if they’re worth it, or if there’s better things to do? And then which ones are actual waste of time that I know that I just feel bad after I use them, that I don’t want to spend as much time on.
Okay. The first thing to do is to uninstall those extra apps. I’m just going to do these now. The club is gone. Oh, my look at all these games. This has taken a lot of time. Solitaire, space shooter, alien shooter. I didn’t know how many games I had. Another solitaire, Golf Rival, Uno deleted. They were all gone. Okay, these are the hard ones over here – Twitter, Instagram. I’m just going to move those off to the side for now. But got rid of TikTok and Snapchat. Gone.
The thing about the design of many of our most problematic apps is that they’re designed to hijack our brain circuitry so that we end up checking them without even realizing what we’re doing. And then we end up spending way longer than we wanted to on them because they’re designed to make us lose track of time. So one suggestion I have to people is to put like a rubber band or something on your phone. When you reach for your phone on autopilot, you get a split second to think, why the hell is there a rubber band on my phone? You could say, Oh, I just picked up my phone. I am not sure what I am doing.
I am a huge fan of the idea of the brain. I think the way to think about it is that it’s just about disrupting the things we do every day. If your brain goes into automatic mode it will bring it back online in a split second. That’s the split second Catherine is describing. When you feel that rubber band, for example, it makes you think and that can be just enough to break the cycle.
I made an exercise called: What for? Why now? What else? For a short time. After you notice your phone in your hand, you just ask yourself the questions. What did I pick it up to do? Then you ask yourself why now? What was that time sensitive reason you picked it up. Sometimes you actually will have a reason. Like it’s your friend’s birthday. You have to give them a gift. There will be an emotional reason most of the time. I was anxious and I had it. I don’t want it to get violent. I was waiting for a long time. I wanted a distraction. I wanted to feel connected, but I felt lonely. First, identify what your brain is after and then the third step is to find out what else you need to know. Which is to ask yourself, what else could you do in that moment to achieve the same result? Would you use your phone to call a friend instead of using social media? If you need a break from work, you can take a stroll around the block and not go over to the news. It doesn’t really matter what the answer is. There is not a right answer. You can decide if you want to be on your phone or not, and that’s fine. It is important to make sure that when using our devices, or any apps for that matter, it is an intentional choice instead of just our mind being hijacked by the tricks being used by the developers.
What are you doing? Why now? What else? I really love this. You need to build regular routines in your life, as well as be aware of what you’re doing. So you are constantly reminded how good life is offline. I’m not trying to make this sound easy. These can be tough habits to break, but they’re worth it.
Trying to change a habit through willpower is a guaranteed way to fail. It’s much better if you can give yourself a positive alternative. So I really encourage people to ask, What do you want to be doing with your time? What’s something you say you want to do Are you not able to spend time for?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
Why do you need to be more attentive? I’m all about paying attention, but why do I have to spend an hour or two more hours a day?
My list is a long one, and this is probably the most amazing thing about approaching your phone usage this way. You will suddenly seem to have more time and more attentiveness.
If you feel your attention is slipping, you have to do something else to get through a post. It’s probably because you’ve been training your brain to be more distractible. Our brains naturally want to be distractible. In order to strengthen our ability to focus, we need to do things such as reading a book, meditating or just taking a phone out of your pocket for an hour.
You know, it’s interesting that you can have so much joy just by paying a lot of attention to something. When you’re operating on something, there’s no phones and you have to concentrate on what you have to do, and that’s what I told my residents, when I was operating all day yesterday. You know, maybe that’s a human evolutionary thing for the brain to to survive, to have been able to pay attention to things. Or maybe it’s that, you know, it’s a little bit of both. You know, you need to be easily distractible as well so that you can recognize threats. But whatever it is, my personal experience is that there’s a lot of joy in paying attention to things.
And that means that every time when you’re making a decision in the moment about what to pay attention to, you’re making this much broader decision about how to live your life.
I’m not a tattoo person but I found that powerful for me. I don’t that’s too much commitment. But I made a bracelet for myself that says: pay attention. And it’s exactly that. It’s like we need to be so intentional about our attention Our attention is a resource that is worth a lot of money, so it is more and more difficult to get our attention. So it’s just more important than ever to recognize its value. It’s more important than time. You can spend time with someone in the same room. But if you’re not paying attention, if you’re if you’re just co-scrolling on your phones, like, were you really together?
I told you they were going to be vulnerable conversations. Hearing this from my daughter wasn’t easy. I think that as parents, we will always wonder how well we did. Discipline, joy, liberty, and rules, did we find that balance? Trust, but always verifying. I’m pretty sure that there were times when she was paying too much attention to the things that gave her little in return – her phone, her social media. But part of me also felt that she had to learn some of this herself. She was going to go on a journey of self-awareness. She had to know that she had been paying attention to her life and that there was a lot of beauty in the world. It’s true for all of us. It’s certainly true for Sage. But also for Catherine, whose own journey started when she realized how often she was on her phone around her newborn baby.
How do you feel like you have been given permission to use these devices, how much we have given you, what are the rules, and what are the liberties that you have been granted? How do you feel it’s worked out for you?
I have kids of my own so if I want them to be on social media as soon as possible, I can do that. I would want to not restrict what they can do. I just want to like teach them to be a little bit more responsible with their amount of usage and not what they view, but how much they view. Because I, I think I’m a lot better with it now, but I think when I was a little younger. I was on my phone a lot.
I think it depends on the person. I think my personal hope is the same as yours, which is that people will become more aware of the issue through conversations like this, and new books about it, such as ‘How to Break up with Your Phone.’ I think disgust is a very powerful emotion to use when changing behavior. So my hope is that people will, including teenagers, be like, you know what, actually TikTok is a waste of time. Like the people behind that are trying to steal my time for me and they assume I’m dumb enough to be fooled by it. Guess what? I am not. And I have my own priorities and I’m going to say no to that. That’s what I hope will happen. Is there any chance that it will happen in a society wide basis? No, I don’t think so. I think a lot of people are fine and not thinking about it. But I am hopeful that there are increasing numbers of people who are becoming aware that this is an issue and that they do want to take action on it, and that the biggest thing missing right now is a society wide movement really to take back control. I would like to be a part of that movement and I would also like to help start those conversations.
I worry about how much of a part social media has in my life. Like you watch Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and you think to yourself, well, that doesn’t all seem great. It seems like loneliness and isolation is related to mental health problems.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/764c27e3-4461-4f65-8d12-afb301229c9c
Hank Green on Social Media: Making a Living on the Internet without Letting It Over Your Phone, Is It Really Necessary?
YouTuber Hank Green opens up about how he makes a living on the internet without letting it take over his life. We’ll be back next week. Thanks for listening.
What is your relationship with your phone? Since listening to this podcasts, have you reexamined your social media habits? Call or email and record your thoughts and send it to us at CNN.com. We might even include them on an upcoming episode of the podcast.