Phone addiction? 📱 The science on why you need to cut back

can I do about it? Today's expert is going to blow your mind when it comes to the importance of a spending less time on our phones and most importantly, how we do that or how we get our kids to do that. So, if you're a parent or you know that you spend too much time, but the whole digital detox thing is this extreme thing that's not really going to work for you, you have to stick around. I'm going to hand on heart say it's probably the best chat that we've had on the wood Life. It's

with the incredible doctor Christy Goodwin. That's coming up next. Then we're going to talk incidental exercise. That's all today on the Woodlife. We have had many guests that are in the wellness space on the WOODLFE over the last year and a half, and it's interesting how often their checklist of five or ten things to improve your wellness comes up, and one of those things is inevitably to

reduce screen time. So I've gone and done some research and I've discovered an absolute guru in this space and I'm thrilled to welcome her to the WOODLFE today, doctor Christy Goodwin. Welcome to the WOODLFE. How big an issue is this? What do you specialize in? And then we'll get to it eventually, most importantly, what can we do about it?

You jump, You go down a social media rabbit hole for what feels like two minutes and you've been there for forty five. It's scary, and it's not our fault.

to go and hunt, forage and get information. But when information is constantly being thrust at us, it tricks our brain into thinking, well, this is a potential stress or coming to me. I must be in a heightened alert state. This could be a potential danger. So even though we know our phone is vibrating or flashing, our brain can't differentiate between a real threat and a perceived threat, and so we click on the notification, we pick up the phone.

The fact that our notification bubble by default is usually red, you know, read is a psychological trigger for danger and urgency. The fact that there's a metric saying you've got you know, fourteen unread WhatsApp messages draws us in. You know, the fact in on YouTube and Netflix and stand all the streaming services. One clip rolls into the next. The AutoPlay feature, you know, we used to have to enable that, but

it's now a default setting. So there's so many clever persuasive ways that draw us in and our kids and the average Australian, it is estimated, will spend seventeen years of their life on their phones. Who thirty three percent of our waking hours are sucked into that digital vortex alone, Let alone our laptops, our tablets, our desktop computers. This

will change with artificial intelligence and wearable technologies. We are really spending a huge amount of time and often say if we don't take that control, if we're not intentional, it's not an anti tech you know, I don't believe in digital detoxes. It's not about digital amputation for our kids. You know, they're outdated, antiquated approaches. But if we aren't intentional, if we do not take back control, technology will and does rob us of our two most important human resources,

our time and our attention. And that's why I'm worried.

just turn it back on to be absolutely bombarded. I'd love your advice on how best just focusing on reducing I guess that bombardment of stimuli. Where's the first place you start with people?

done where they compared two groups of people. One group who were asked to reduce their social media use by an hour a day. The other group went on a full digital detox. They fully restricted their use, and what the study conclusively found was that those people that went on the full digital detox reverted back to their screen habits before the digital detox was imposed. But the group that just reduced their social media time by an hour a day was spending four months after the study thirty

minutes less on social media. So the research tells us that cutting it down or cutting it back is better than cutting it out. Because as we know as humans, anything that's fully restrictive doesn't often lead to long term change. So what I often say to people, is we've got to make our tech less sticky, less appealing, because you know it is so psychologically appealing. Is it as simple as putting your phone somewhere where you cannot see it.

Research tells us that even if our phone is on silent and face down, if it's still in our line of sight, it drops out performance our cognitive performance by about ten percent. So put bluntly seeing your phone makes you about ten percent dumber. I can't be any more to recten that. It literally is a brain drain. Some of even if we're not picking it up, not opening it, some of our attention has gone there. So is it putting it in a bag, leaving it in the glove

box in the car? Is it putting it in another room when you want to be fully present in those moments? Is it turning it to grayscale? And the first to say Instagram is really boring in black and white? It really is. Is it logging out of your apps on your smartphone. One of the reasons that we go down that digital vortex is because there's no friction. Now with facial recognition, you don't even have to enter your past code. You can simply hold the device up and off you

go down that rabbit hole. So logging out. You know, most of us now have digital dementia. We can't remember any information because we're just being constantly peppered. When we can't remember the password, it may create a little bit more friction, you know, taking your tech temptations off the home screen of your phone, controlling your notifications. As you said, it's really hard to resist that. So I have three golden rules with notifications. One, disable all non essential ones.

Two we can now bundle or batch when our notifications come to us, so rather than dribbling in throughout the day and distracting us, we can nominate what time or times of the day we want the WhatsApp notifications, we want our team's notifications or email notifications. And the third one is create VIP lists so that when you put your phone on focus or do not Disturb mode, they're called different things on different platforms. Everybody else gets blocked

apart from those people on that list. Everybody else gets blocked, but they can get through. So I think there are things that we can do, but I am the first to say it's hard, Like we are fighting a monumental battle in terms of our time and attention.

and I've already found it's helped a little bit. But there's so much more that I can do. And I love the term we need to take back control.

is connection. We are hardwired for relational connection. We want to feel like we belong. This is why social media, group chats, emails, teams, messages, slack messages, multiplayer video games are so popular. Our second need is to feel competent. And in the online world, we don't have to often exert a lot of hard work and we get to feel competent. I can triage my inbox, I can reply

to the messages. For young people, it's how many Fortnite battles they've won, how many social media vanity metrics they get on their posts. And the third need that we have as humans is control. We want to feel like we have some autonomy, and the online world gives us a perceived, although i'll say false, sense that we're in control. And so a couple of years ago, a mum told

me this powerful story, and I have never forgotten. She told me that she picked her daughter up from school one day and her mum turned and said to her mum, how much do you earn per our mom? And her mom thought, wow, my daughter is finally you know, ambitious. She said, look, sweetheart, I own a salary. I'd have to do calculations let me get back to you. She tucked her daughter into bed that night, and she's tucking her in, she said, sweetheart, I've calculated my alli right,

this is what it is. Why do you ask? And her young daughter turned to her mum and said, because I'd liked to buy an hour of your time without your phone. Yeah out. And even if you don't have kids, I think many of us would recognize that our time and our attention are being taken away by this. I don't want us and I know this sounds melodramatic, but the harsh reality is if we are giving up seventeen years of our life just to our phones, that's an

inordinate amount of time. There's certainly some functionality there. I'm not denying that, but if we were brutally honest with ourselves, for many of us, that's a huge amount of time that we will never get back.

but god, you do notice. And then those three needs connected competent control because the connected one is interesting because I have a teenage daughter, and it's that desire to feel connected through social media. But it's just not a real connection, like I just it's not replacing real connections, real friendships, real human interaction. And so it's just this this fake I mean, yeah, but it's a horrible substitute.

biologically has to produce this hormone. What we also know is that text based communications make the brain produce cortisol, the stress hormone, two ways that people totally unaware of that our tech habits can make us feel stressed without even realizing it is that when we're on any screen, we do not sigh as much as what we should now as humans, we are biologically designed to sigh while

we're awaight, roughly every five minutes. It's a natural biological mechanism that's built in to our biology that helps us regulate our stress response. We do it really subtly. It's two inhalations through our nose and an exhalation through our mouth, natural way to regulate our oxides in carbon dioxide levels. But when we are looking at a small surface area our phone, our tablet, our laptop, our computer, we do not sigh anywhere near as much. What does this mean

We are often in a sympathetic nervous system state. We're in an elevated stress state just by looking at our screens. Another way you will find this one hopefully interesting too, is that when we have a very narrow gaze, so when our eyes are converging looking at our phones, our tablets, our laptops, we again trigger the stress response because biologically, as humans, we are designed to dilate our gaze. We

are designed to look at things in the distance. As humans, We're not designed for us to adopt a very narrow gaze. So again, when our eyes converge, it triggers that stress response. There must be something a potential danger or stress or because I've got this very narrow gaze. So think about the hours that all of us, kids, teens, and adults are spending with that narrow gaze and not sighing. We're

often really stressed. Those quartersol levels are high, and we haven't even started to consider what we're actually doing on the screen. Our tech habits are having a profound impact on us in ways that I don't think we've even started to really digest and consider.

big jobs. It's impulse control, it's working memory, and its mental flexibility, so all sort of the high roll to thinking skills. It does not fully develop until somewhere in the twenties, late twenties for males, early twenties for females. So it is a parenting impossibility to expect your son or daughter to spend three hours on TikTok, voluntarily turn it off and say I'm going to go on tidy my bedroom for you, mum or dad. It's just it's

never going to happen. They don't have that impulse control, they don't have working memory, so even though you've repeatedly told them not to look things up, they will still keep looking things up. So we have to be that co pilot, not the passenger. And to be the copilot, I can say we've got to get three bees right. The first be is that we have to co establish boundaries with them, not on them, you know, come up

with some agreed boundaries. And again this is not about imposing an agreement, It's about co constructing with your team. What are some of our parameters, our guardrails, So having more broader conversations beyond how much what are they doing? When are they using it? You know, is it before school or before they go to sleep? Where are they using it? You know, establish your no go tech zones.

Your teenager is much less likely to be sending nudes if it's in the lounge room or on the kitchen counter, much more likely to be doing it in their bedroom or their bathroom with whom you know. Would you invite a complete stranger to come in and lay down next to your teenager in their bedroom at night. Absolutely not. But we're often inevitably doing that when they've got devices in their rooms. So the first bees around boundaries, the

second bee is around their basic needs. I believe the reason that we have a serious mental health crisis in young people is because of technology, but not the way we all think. We're all quick to wag the point the finger and say it's smartphones, and it's social media, it's what they are displacing. Their most basic physical and psychological needs are being displaced and superseded by screens. And

the three big ones. They're three most basic needs that will optimize their mental health, sleep, physical movement, and connection. And they are all being significantly shaped and I would say sometimes sabotaged by screens. We have to fiercely protect those basic needs. And the third b the harsh reality is this is one adults really struggle with, boredom, being idle with our thoughts knowing you know, years ago we used to order a coffee and you talk to the

barista or the people waiting outside. Today we pull out our phones. We pull up at a red traffic light, You look around. What are most people often doing pulling out those phones? And so the pockets of white space that we used to have. I don't know about you, Sam, but I've never ever had a great idea in my inbox or an inn Excel spreadsheet. My ideas come when I'm in the shower, going for a run, going for

a swim, in an airplane without Wi Fi. We used to daydream, but we never have pockets of time to be bored anymore, and neither do our kids. So I say to parents, they are the three bees boundaries, basic needs, and boredom. And if we can nail that, our kids can use technology and we won't have to have all this moral panic and angst that their tech times are eroding their mental health and compromising them. But I think we're struggling as adults because we're not being good digital

role models ourselves. We are tethered to technology, and so if we're not being good digital role models, the brain has mirror neurons, meaning that we are biologically designed as humans to imitate and copy. Like, how can we expect our kids to have really good habits if we are grappling with this. You know, we've got fully developed brain architecture. They don't. So it's again, I don't want to sound sad and somber, but this is hard. But we have to.

I really think we have to put in place some strategies to be that co pilot.

doing this. If we pick up our phones first thing, we trigger the stress response our limbit brain, the Migdaler in particular, sort of the emotional hub of our brain fires up. You know, we only need to see one unkind comment on our social media, an upsetting email, a sad news story, and we're already in this elevated stress

response and our feet haven't even touched the floor. So the first fifteen minutes, if we can keep screen free now the one at night, ideally we would be having a screen free period about sixty minutes before we want to go to sleep, even thirty minutes will make a huge difference. The blue light not only de lazy onset of sleep, but we also now know it disrupts the quality of our sleep. If we're on a blue lit device in that sixty minutes before we go to sleep,

it will shorten our deepen rem sleep stages. That's critical for memory consolidation, that's critical for us feeling like we've woken up and having had a good rest. So trying to make first fifteen and if we can the last hour even half an hour as screen free as possible huge impacts on our wellbeing and our performance.

chat with Christie because that was just wow, brilliant. Next, we're going to talk about incidental exercise, which I think is one of the most unsung heroes in developing good habits and taking care of ourselves. I mean, walking is the biggest example I use. Just adding in some walking to what you're already doing can really move the needle significantly when it comes to feeling better and losing weight

faster and looking better. But we're going to dive into some quirky and otherwise incidental exercise tips and challenges that I want to throw to. That's coming up next, so incidental exercise. The beauty of incidental exercise, by definition is that we just don't have to overhaul our whole life to make a change. It can just be a small, consistent change, and that's often the best thing to do. Incidental exercise one of the easiest ways to create these

small productive habits. So I've put these into two categories, the no effort category or next to no effort, and the more effort category. I went to a lot of trouble with my thinking of the names of these, but let's start with no effort getting out of a chair without using your hands to push you up. So that might be getting off the couch, that might be getting out of the armchair, that might be getting out of your desk chair at work. It activates your core because

you've got a balance you've got to stabilize. It activates your glutes and leg muscles because instead of just cheating, I use the term cheating assisting with your hands. It's all legs and core. And if it sounds silly, but how many times do we get up and down to day twenty thirty fifty, one hundred depends on the individual,

but it all adds up. Let's say every time there's an AD break and your favorite TV show, you walk around the house until your TV show comes back on, or you stand up and sit down without using your hands repeatedly until your TV show comes on, or you hop on the ground and you have a stretch or do a push up or do some sit ups.

balance is. And the thing with unilateral exercises, and I see this in the gym a lot. We are always protecting our weaker side with our stronger side. And simple activities like your toothbrush from lingo will identify where you perhaps need to strengthen or improve your stability. So these are the next to know. If it once now, we're going to step it up. Stretching at your desk two

or three times a day. The ones that I like because I think when we sit for long periods of time you get very tight through your hips, and you get very tight through your upper back. So I love to stand and stretch my arm against the wall or the doorway to stretch out my pecks or the front of my chest. And I love to go into a hip flexa stretch, which is where you take a big stride forward with one leg and push your hips forward and then I stretch my arms right up in the air.

I'm doing it in the studio while I talk to you, looking absolutely ridiculous. But that opens up my hip flexes because they're the muscles that have gotten short and tight while I've been in my seated position on the keyboard or in the car, or even sometimes on the couch. So they're my favorite two stretches. If you're only going to choose two, to get up two or three times a day to do from your desk. And then, as I said, bit more effort, incidental exercise, change your commute.

How do you get to work, get the kids to school in the morning. So I have a rule with Willa and Charlie. We live about six seven hundred meters from their primary school. If it's not raining, we walk. I don't care how cold it is. I don't care if it's just rained before. I don't care how much of a hurry we're in. We walk to school and it's one of my greatest pleasures. I love it the fact that we connect so beautifully. They're wide awake, they're

excited about the day. We have the best lit all chats. It's beautiful and it adds up. I do that four or five times a week. There's seven and a half kilometers that I walk that otherwise would not walk. But those little things, which train station do you get off? Do you get off one earlier? Can you walk to work? Can you bike ride to work? All of these things add up and it can only be a good thing. So there you go. Four little incidental exercise challenges that

I'm throwing to you. Getting up without using your hands, out of your chair, continuously standing on one leg in a flamingo poster, to brush your teeth, stretching two or three times a day, and change up your commute, get those steps up. I'd love to hear how you go with those as always as a link in the show notes, don't be a stranger. Want to hear from you until next week. That's all from the Wordlife