Show Notes:
Today we continue our series on Back to Basics for Brain Health and we are diving into the digital era’s great controversy – screens and brain health.
Let’s start with talking about the common challenges that come up around digital health for First Responders and Front Line Workers. Some of the most common ones I hear in my office include feeling tired and finding social media scrolling, video games or TV to be easy, passive ways of feeling like they are “doing” something without actually having to “do” much of anything. Another concern is that engaging with screens becomes addictive – we seek the stimulation, the noise, the comfort of the busy-ness around us. There is significant reward to scrolling and stumbling on that hilarious cat video, or hearing an alert that let’s us know someone has liked something we’ve posted, or watching just one more episode of whatever the latest show is… Another challenge is that so much of what we once did is now on our devices. My husband criticized me awhile back for being on my phone a lot while the kids were in the room, and at first I agreed that it was likely more than I wanted to model – but I also realized that when I was a kid my parents ignored us for lengths of time to read the newspaper, call their families, read a book, read the mail, and so on – and now ALL of that is on my devices. So no wonder we’re spending so much time in front of screens! It’s also true that screens are just a very significant and unavoidable part of our day – interacting with screens and technology has become a central aspect of many workplaces, schools, and other public venues. It is also a part of our home lives as we help kids navigate homework or seek to connect with friends for a game or online chat. It is so embedded into our tasks and needed actions that even if we restricted use for pleasure, we would still find ourselves spending a lot of time in front of a screen.
Recognizing that there are some trip wires that get us hung up in a ton of screen time – let’s talk about the impacts. The research has largely focused on the impacts for kids and I think a lot of parents feel concerned about their kids screen time and work to manage that as well as they can given whatever factors are at play for their family. For adults, the difficulty is we don’t have our own adult to censor and help us manage our behaviour. We have to self-impose restrictions or guidelines that serve us well as people in relationship with tech. And that’s tricky, because one thing most people struggle with is some version of self-control.
The thing about self-control is that it’s not fun. The reward isn’t obvious or direct – it isn’t as rewarding as finding that hilarious goat yoga meme that makes you giggle every time you think of it. So doing self-control feels like it means depriving ourselves of something rewarding for some long-term benefit we don’t feel a clear sense of achieving that feels too far into the future to really hang our hats on. Which is why, even when we try really hard to reduce screens or regulate other parts of our lives, we will tend to inevitably fall back into old patterns.
We talked about this concept a bit with Zam in the episode on fitness and brain health. We talked about how the long term reward of fitness is worth it but feels hard to wade through the uncomfortable parts early on where there are fewer short-term rewards to keep us motivated. He talked about the intangible rewards and anchoring to these, and we also talked a lot about having to really anchor to WHY it matters.
We’re going to have to take a similar approach when it comes to talking about screens, self-control, and working to side-step the tendency to fall back into old patterns.
Before we start talking about how we’re going to shift and shape our relationship with our devices, let’s first acknowledge some of the significant impacts our existing relationships with tech have on our brain and our wellness. I want us to feel grounded in the WHY for wanting to take a step back from our coveted devices. And trust me, I’m talking to myself as much as I am to the rest of you!
Let’s start with this one – the advent of tech the way we experience it today has meant that we never get to turn OFF. The whole entire world is literally CONSTANTLY at our fingertips. Yes that means cat memes, but it also means that email from your boss, and news about bombings in Syria, and text messages from your mom guilting you for missing Thanksgiving, and, and, and… It is never ending and can become inescapable. It gives people who used to have more concrete boundaries in place, like your boss or co-workers, a level of access to you that they likely shouldn’t have – and it can feel suffocating. This has meaning for our poor brains that are holding way more than they were ever meant to, and not granting our brains a break from stimulation, expectation, demands, and information overload. There is some indication that this degree of connectivity is related with increasing anxiety rates. I can appreciate that the access to be connected to feels meaningful for us – but the reality of what it means to be “on” all the time has real consequences in terms of our wellness. For example, one study found that adults exposed to more than 6 hours a day of screens (including TV and computers) were significantly more likely to suffer from depression.
One of the pieces cited in studies linking devices to mental health concerns like depression is not just to do with the information overload, but also with the sedentary nature of engaging in device use. We are finding ourselves to be an increasingly sedentary culture. I hear from a lot of First Responders and Front Line Workers this echo of “I was run off my feet my whole set, when I’m on my days off I don’t want to move.” And I get it – although I likely have the opposite problem as someone who is literally paid to sit all day. But this circles us back to that interview with Zam a few weeks ago – movement is one of the pieces that benefits our brain and our bodies in such meaningful ways, and the problem with devices is that they tend to really trip us up from getting the movement we need. They keep us engaged but stuck all at the same time, and that can be a contributing factor to mental health declines into depression.
Alright, we also have to call out the impact of screens on sleep and we’ve already talked about sleep’s impact on your brain. We touched on this one a bit in our episode two weeks ago with Dr. Glenn Landry. The problem with screens and sleep is primarily two-fold. First, the blue light wave emitted by screens and other lights mess with our brains ability to produce melatonin at the right time when it’s time to feel sleepy. This can make it harder for your brain to fall asleep and can mess with your sleep cycle – which then has negative consequences for your ability to feel regulated and capable when it’s time to wake up and face another day…especially when this adds up on an ongoing. Aside from the blue light issue, we also face the challenge of “revenge bedtime procrastination” which we also touched on with Glenn in our episode on sleep. We didn’t go far into it, so let me take a second here. Revenge bedtime procrastination is identified as a tendency to feel like we’ve earned some time to ourselves at the end of a long hard day. Work is finally done, dinner’s been made, the kitchen is clean, the kids are in bed, I FINALLY have some time to do something for ME. So we put on a show, that turns into 2, 3, 4 episodes; or we open a social media platform and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll – and suddenly 3 hours have gone by and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago and…well…since I’m already so late ...
