Catherine (00:00):

There was just a really interesting op-ed that Jon Haidt and one of his collaborators had published recently in the New York Times based on a survey of about a thousand participants in Gen Z, asking if they had any regrets about whether some of these social media platforms had ever been invented. When they broke it down by platforms, nearly half of the respondents said they wished that TikTok and Twitter slash X had never been invented. That’s in direct contrast to the fact that many people in that same generation are spending about five hours a day on those same platforms. So there’s this real disconnect here between what people want and what they’re doing, and I think that’s really empowering for parents who are like, oh my God, can I set limits? My kid’s saying they really want to be on Snapchat or TikTok or whatever. Like, yes, it’s okay to set limits even if your kid’s pushing back.

Dr. Sarah (00:51):

We can all agree that burnout is a big problem for parents today. And while we often think of burnout as coming from having too much to do and not enough time, energy, or resources to do it, burnout can also be hugely influenced by a lack of play and fun. And with screens dominating so much of our lives, we’ve displaced many opportunities for these essential activities. Joining me today to discuss this is Catherine Price. Catherine is the author of bestselling books including How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun. Her Ted Talk on fun was the second most viewed for all of 2022 and her Substack, How to Feel Alive With Catherine Price includes essays, ideas, and evidence backed advice for how to fill your life with more adventure, fun, and delight.

(01:38):

We’re going to unpack why phones are such a compulsive dopamine device and how they displace more meaningful activities like sleep or connection time, and we’re going to cover some simple strategies that you can use to start breaking that cycle. Plus, Catherine is going to coach me through the struggles that I personally face with phone addiction, something that I think a lot of us can relate to. And then we’re going to talk about managing our children’s technology use like when and how to give our kids a phone, breaking down this complex decision into smaller, more manageable steps. And also how to help them navigate the digital world in ways that aligns with your family’s values and also helps them to be critical consumers of technology while still fostering connection instead of power struggles.

(02:31):

Hi, I am Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(03:01):

Hey everybody, welcome back. We are talking with Catherine Price today, and I am really excited for this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. So you have written a number of books, a lot about the ways that phones have embedded themselves in our lives and get in our way, but also that it’s not so easy to just say, oh, well, I’ll just get rid of it. Then how to disentangle ourselves from something that’s so ubiquitous to our lives. Now, how did you get into this?

Catherine (03:42):

Well, I never set out to be a technology reporter. My background was actually much more in health and nutrition. I’ve type one diabetes, so I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve had endocrinology and I wrote a book about the history of vitamins, so that was kind of my world. But then in 2015, I had my daughter and I just had these moments where I would notice that she was looking at me and I was looking at my phone. And those moments really upset me where I realized that wasn’t how I wanted to be interacting with my child. It wasn’t the impression I wanted her to have of what a human relationship is. It wasn’t how I wanted to be living my life. And I also remembered some details from my, I don’t even know which parts of my science journal in the past, but things like the fact that babies can actually only focus about 10 to 12 inches in front of their face specifically so that they can bond with their caregiver.

(04:26):

And so the fact that I was looking away from her and these moments seemed to me not a great idea in terms of her own development. So I decided I wanted to do something about this. And at that point there were some books that were out that talked about the potential problems of excessive screen time or there was a great book out by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows about what the internet does to our brains, but I couldn’t find what I really wanted the most, which was a solution. And so I decided to use my own background and life experience to look into this problem and write a book that ideally would help people create more intentional, healthier relationships with their devices. And so that’s how I came to write How to Bring Up with Your Phone, which basically is a combination of a investigation into why apps and phones are so hard to look away from a kind of look into what that’s doing to us in terms of our productivity and our creativity and our memories and our relationships, all sorts of different aspects of our lived experience. And then that’s combined with a 30 day plan to take back control.

(05:30):

And then that in turn, I ended up breaking it with my own phone, which means a healthier relationship. It doesn’t mean dumping it forever, but that opened up a lot of free time. And then I had a sort of existential moment where I realized, oh my goodness, I’ve kind of lost sight of how I want to spend my own time, my own leisure time. I’m used to just filling it with whatever’s on my phone. And so that led to a long process that resulted in my more recent book, The Power of Fun.

Dr. Sarah (05:54):

And I watched your Ted Talk on topic of fun, and I was really moved by it actually because, so one of the things that I’m a psychologist and I work with a lot of parents, and when I’m working with parents, a lot of times I’m working with parents who have kid who’s got some challenging behaviors or the whole family system is a bit in a disoriented space because they’re working really hard on realigning themselves. And so they’re a bit burnt out. I work with a lot of burnt out parents, and one of the first things I will ask parents when I’m working, when I’m doing an intake is I’ll say, well, what do you do for play? And they invariably will be like, oh, well we play with our kid here, we do this. And I’m like, no, no, no, not how do you play with your child, but what do you do for play? And some people can answer that, but a lot of them are like, I don’t even know how to answer that.

Catherine (06:58):

That’s really interesting.

Dr. Sarah (07:00):

And I think we atrophy that sometimes when we are, I think parenthood can atrophy that in a lot of ways just because we put ourselves at the very bottom of the very big to-do list, and there’s a lot going on in our lives as parents, but I also think burnout is a big cause of cause or result, probably both feeding back and forth, but of this lack of play. And I felt like your talk on the power of fun echoed some of those ideas that when we are having fun, which maybe you could talk a little bit about those ingredients for what really fun truly is, but also why if we’re burnt out, we can’t really engage in it, and if we can’t engage in it, we actually get burnt out. It becomes like this vicious cycle.

Catherine (08:00):

Yeah. I’m curious about, well, I want to ask you follow up questions about the conversations you have with adults about play because play is a very foreign concept to most adults I’ve found, and people can get really uncomfortable with it in a way that I think is really interesting. So I mean, the first thing I would say is that the reason I read a book about fun is that I ended up deciding what I, well, let me back up. When I had written how to break up with your phone and followed its plans, the plan, as I was explaining, I ended up with a lot more free time because I reclaimed some time that I’d been spending on my phone and I realized, oh my goodness, I don’t know what I want to do with that time. And I ended up asking myself this question. I had asked to people when I wrote How to break up with your phone, and that question was, what’s something you say you want to do but supposedly don’t have time for? And the idea there is that we actually have more time than we realize because we’re just spending a lot of it on our phones, the average person spending about four and a half hours a day on the phone, which is easily a quarter of our waking lives.

(08:56):

So yes, some of that is necessary or essential or enjoyable or just logistically useful, but a lot of it is just scrolling. And so my answer to that question is I always said I wanted to learn to play guitar. I played piano as a child and I love music. And as a result, I ended up signing up for this guitar class that meets weekly. And as I went to this class, which was basically other parents, because it was through a children’s music studio, it was just kind of a nighttime offering. It was a group of adults who were there purely for honestly to play, not just play the guitar, but just play in the broader sense of the word. We were not trying to be professionals, it was BYOB, we were doing things like the Moana theme song. It was not an attempt to turn this into something more than it was.

(09:39):

It was purely for the pleasure and enjoyment of it. And I began to realize this was the highlight of my week. I really began to look forward to this class. And I thought about why, and I’m like, what was this feeling of kind of euphoric release from the, as you were saying, like to-do lists of parenthood? I mean early parenthood in particular, just this escape from my normal adult responsibilities and opportunity to play. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to kind of figure out what word best described what I was experiencing. And eventually I was like, oh, it’s fun. I’m having fun. The feeling is fun. Why does this feel so foreign? And I got really interested in what fun was because I would’ve thought it would’ve had an obvious definition considering how often we use the word fun in our everyday lives.

(10:24):

But when I looked into it, the dictionary actually said that fun was just amusement or enjoyment or lighthearted pleasure, but that didn’t really accurately capture the experience I was having in the guitar class, let alone the feeling that came to mind when I thought back on my own life and tried to call to mind experiences that stood out to me as having been fun, which I encourage listeners to do is ask yourself, what are some memories that stand out as just having been so fun? What were you doing? Who were you with? How would you describe that feeling? And so I got really curious about whether or not there could be or should be a better definition of fun. So I came up with a hypothesis based on my own research, and then I posed it to people on my newsletter list and basically asked them just what I asked your listeners, tell me some stories of times that stand out from your life as having been so fun and tell me about what you were doing and who you were with and where were you, what made it fun?

(11:15):

And then I collected all these stories and then I asked people if they would agree with my proposed definition. And my proposed definition, which people did agree with was that true fun, as I call it, is this confluence of three states, three emotional states that we get into, which is playfulness, connection, and flow. So when I give talks, I show actually a Venn diagram, three circles that intersect in the middle, and one of the circles is playfulness and one is connection and one is flow. And where those three converge, that’s what I think of as true fun. And I always like to clarify what I mean by those because playfulness in particular can put people on guard. I’m not talking about necessarily having to play in the traditional sense that we use that word with. You don’t have to be playing a game or playing with your kids or playing, God forbid, might make believe, stuff like that. That is something I particularly don’t enjoy. It’s really more the attitude you bring to what you’re doing. So this lighthearted attitude, this feeling that you’re doing it just for the sake of doing it, you don’t care too much about the outcome. You could care a bit if you’re playing a game, you might want to win, but we’ve all had that experience where if you start to care too much, it’s not fun anymore.

(12:16):

So there’s this lightheartedness, this silencing of our inner critic, this letting go of perfectionism, which is very difficult for many people, particularly moms I would say, and women to do. And then connection refers to the fact that what I collected people’s stories, the vast majority of them involved another person, which I thought was really interesting. And that was true even for introverts. A lot of people said that one of the top ways they describe the experience was the feeling of having a special shared experience. So there really seemed to be this element of connection and involved in these memories of true fun. And then flow is the state we get into, the psychological state we get into when we’re just totally engrossed in what we’re doing, when we’re completely engaged, actively engaged often to the point where you lose track of time. So the most quintessential example of flow is like an athlete playing a game or musician playing a piece of music.

(13:03):

The researcher who coined the term flow did a lot of work with rock climbers because as you can imagine, if you’re climbing a rock wall, you need to be pretty totally engaged in order to be successful at that. And I like to distinguish this kind of true flow from what chi sent me high, the psychologist who coined the term called fake or junk flow, because you lose track of time if you’re sitting in front of your TV or your email or whatever, and you’re just kind of passively consuming stuff that’s not the same as being actively engaged. And so true flow is when you’re really actively engaged in your experience. And I think it’s also important to note that anything that distracts us will kick us out of flow because flow is a state of total engagement. And so that means if you buy my definition of fun, anything that distracts you is also going to prevent you from having fun because you can’t get into flow if you’re distracted. Again, my definition of fun was playfulness and connection and flow all joining together. Yeah, it’s been a couple of years since I came up with that proposed definition, and it’s been interesting. I still believe in it. So, curious what your listeners think.

Dr. Sarah (14:04):

Yeah, it resonates for me so much. And I’m not necessarily asking parents, what do you do for fun? I’m specifically looking at play and the distinction I guess I’d make between when I’m assessing this thing that I’m calling play in adults, which I also look for in kids, I think it’s a sign of emotional health, which is an element I think that’s present in what you’re talking about in fun, but it’s its own thing, which is can you engage with something in a way that you are, how do I describe it? You’re creating something. It’s not about the outcome necessarily, and it’s not about what you’re creating, but there’s some sort of aspect where you are engaged in play. So for grownups, it’s like oftentimes for kids it can be like, I’m going to build a tower, or I’m going to build a Ford, or I’m going to invent all this storyline, all that stuff. Kids have so much more access to that generative creative experiential action. But I feel like as we get older, it gets a little bit more different, but it can turn into, for most times I think of cooking can be play in the sense that it is not, cooking isn’t always play, but play can be cooking or gardening or knitting or anything where you’re like, this is my way of being in touch with my creative generative energy. And there’s no necessarily focus on outcome, but process and presence. It’s crazy how hard that is for us to tap into as grownups. We don’t think we’re allowed to. And I think that’s very similar to the way people also maybe feel like fun is you were saying in your TED Talk, we perceive it as frivolous.

Catherine (16:06):

Yeah, we think of it as frivolous. I mean, I think you’re also getting at the idea is what do you do for yourself that you enjoy just because you enjoy it and what activities really are enjoyable? Yeah. Cooking on a weeknight, I would argue, not my version of play, but if you’re cooking because you are excited about trying a new recipe and you’re inviting friends over and it’s something you truly enjoy.

Dr. Sarah (16:28):

And you’re not, but it’s like the act of if you are cooking in a way that you are like, oh, I’m going to experiment. What would happen if I do this? I’m like, lemme just see what happens here. Oh my God, now I’m lost in this moment of play with these materials. That’s what I mean by play, I guess. It’s not the, oh, I’m cooking, I’m going to become a really good cook, or I got to make my kids’ dinner. Yeah. There’s no minute of curiosity in there in, yes.

Catherine (16:56):

Yeah. I think we lose that as adults. There’s curiosity in the sense that, oh, maybe I’ll just do it just because I’m curious about it. I just want to try it. It doesn’t matter. There’s not necessarily a purpose. Maybe you’ll end up finding a new recipe or a new technique and that will serve you later, but that’s not the point. That’s kind of a nice side effect to it. Yeah, I think curiosity is something that kids intrinsically have and that it’s very important for us to try to encourage our kids to continue to have, but one way to encourage that is to demonstrate curiosity ourselves. And I agree with you that that’s often stamped out of us as adults either because we’ve been kind of dissuaded from it by some parent or authority figure, or just because we’re stressed out and we’re busy. And I think what you were alluding to this earlier, what we fail to realize is that we think we can’t play or have fun because we’re burned out, but in many cases we’re burned out because we’re not playing and because we’re not prioritizing fun, there’s, there’s a causal relationship in the other direction that I think is really important.

(17:53):

Yeah, it’s too easy to put fun and play at the bottom of our priority list and think that they’re frivolous instead of recognizing they’re actually deeply nourishing, and the more we’re able to prioritize them for ourselves, the better we’re going to be able to care for other people. It’s actually enormously important.

Dr. Sarah (18:09):

Yes. I so agree. And to link this into what I think is for me, the reason why I was like, I really want you to come on the podcast because I selfishly have the personal agenda of asking you some very, I have such an addiction to my phone, and I think that these things are interrelated. I have experienced burnout, I’ve experienced burnout from parenthood. I’ve experienced burnout from the pandemic. I’ve experienced burnout from work. I’ve had these experiences and found that when I am most burnt out, I engage in my phone the most. And then even as I work on my own stuff of okay, outside of the work and the parenthood, and when I’m with myself and I’m doing my work on like, okay, I recognize I have burnout out and I recognize what I need, and I do this with parents. I know what I’m supposed to do intellectually I understand this.

(19:10):

And yet the phone, I’ve done a lot of things to kind of lift myself out of burnout, like supporting movement, getting outside more, working on connection, all the stuff you’re supposed to do, nutrition, drinking water, whatever. Working on my schedule, time management, the phone still is, it’s like I flow it outside my body and I watch myself do all the things I’m not supposed to do. I check my phone probably 10 times an hour. It’s just an extension of my hand. It’s this compulsive checking, which is another thing I think we use phones to sort of check out and scroll and sometimes just to keep ourselves busy or feeling busy and fill space, but I think there’s also a compulsive checking that dopamine hit. I got to just see, do I have a new email? Do I have this? Is this there? And it becomes almost hardwired to just compulsively do it. And I go to sleep and my phone’s in my room. It took me six months. I bought alarm clock, a digital analog, like a plugin, the wall alarm clock, so I could disengage from my phone, put it in a different spot out of my room. It took me six months to open that box and plug that alarm clock in because I was so ambivalent about actually doing it, and I couldn’t even put my phone in the kitchen. It now lives on the far side of my bedroom as far as I’ve gotten.

Catherine (20:38):

Okay, well that’s your challenge for tonight. Try it for one night. You don’t have to stick with it forever, although you should. I know. Try it for a night. What do you think was behind hesitation? It’s very interesting. You just have that box you’re sitting looking at.

Dr. Sarah (20:51):

I think I’ve gotten, it’s such a habit and I’m attached to that habit. I look forward to when I’m done putting my kids to bed and I go downstairs and I put the dishes away and I pack up the lunches for tomorrow and everything. I’m like, okay, I’m tired. And now I just want that easy, satisfying feeling of flipping through, checking off emails, watching gardening videos on YouTube, mindless stuff that feels like this easy flow, this current that just like there’s actually, I don’t know if you are familiar with Ale Duarte’s work, but he talks a little bit about, he’s a somatic experiencing practitioner and he’s brilliant, but he actually was on the podcast a while ago and we did an episode about tech. And he has this metaphor of a river and these currents and how there’s different currents in this river and the river of technology and some warm waters. They’re benign. There’s this adventure stream that feels really good and it’s really rewarding and it’s really satisfying. And then there’s the stressful waters, and then there’s the traumatic current, and we can get sucked in really fast. But in all of the adventure, current stress, current trauma, current time disappears. So the adventure current feels really good and we seek that out, but it’s not a place, we’re still in a current, we’re not in our bodies. We’re not in our current present real life. We’re not in gravity.

Catherine (22:45):

Do you find that, you use the word satisfying. So I would say if you genuinely, I think that we do often put too much pressure on ourselves to be productive or proactive at every moment of life. I certainly do that. So there is a time and a space where you want to zone out for a bit, but I’m getting the sense that you don’t actually feel satisfied by what you’re doing with your phone during those moments. So can you talk a bit more about that? Or is it satisfying and relaxing to a certain point and then you start to feel gross?

Dr. Sarah (23:10):

Or it’s like it feels satisfying maybe for 15 minutes, but I don’t have a way of knowing when that 15 minutes is up, even if I have a screen time or alert, I just ignore it. I’ve desensitized myself to all of those things. I have found one app called Opal that I like because it really, oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. It really locks me out. I can get back in, but I have to actually wait increasingly longer periods of time to get back in. So that’s been helpful, but it’s satisfying for a little bit. But then I also lose track of time and I’ll go to bed so much later than I want to go to bed. What is for me a question, and I feel so hypocritical, I coach people on this a lot too, and I’m like, what does the phone displace? And for me, I’m very aware of what it displaces and I’m not cool with it. It displaces my sleep. It displaces connection time with my kids. It displaces productivity at work. It displaces all kinds of things I’m not okay with, and yet it’s like it’s really hard to disentangle myself from it because I do have to pick it up for so many things. I think that’s another part. It’s like I start out with a good intention and too many things suck me into all the black hole of what else is in my phone.

Catherine (24:36):

Yes. So you’re certainly not alone. I mean, I think every single listener can empathize. I mean, myself included, where it’s like you look at your phone for one thing or you want to spend five minutes just mindlessly scrolling just to honestly zone out and then oh, well, all of a sudden it’s like 45 minutes later or you’re up and it’s 1130 or midnight and you’re thinking, oh my God, I’ve got to get up at six. What did I just do? So the first step I do think is awareness that people start to notice when they pick up their phone on autopilot and then ask if you want to continue. So I do have an exercise I developed just mentally to help people with that, which I call what for why now, and what else? It’s WWW.

(25:13):

So just to explain that quickly, I’d recommend, did you put a hairband or a rubber band around your phone just for a couple days so that when you find yourself picking it up on autopilot, you notice it Because a lot of times we don’t notice. And then you look up and suddenly a half hour has gone by and you think, oh my God, just did it again. So the first step is just to have something that’s like, why is there rubber band on my phone? Oh, right, I’m supposed to notice that. I just picked it up. And then next step to ask yourself these questions, what for, why now, what else? So you ask yourself, what did I just pick up my phone for? What was my purpose? Did I have a purpose? Maybe it was to buy something off of Amazon that you genuinely did want to get, or you’re placing an order of groceries or whatever.

(25:49):

Maybe you didn’t have a purpose. A lot of times you don’t have a purpose, but maybe you did. But then the next question is why now? And it might be time sensitive like you needed groceries, or you might genuinely have needed to do it in that moment, but a lot of times, I’d say almost most of the time there’s an emotional component to that. Why now question. It’s like, oh, I was tired. I was feeling burned out, so I decided I’d do something that intellectually I know is not going to help, but it’s so easy. I reach for my phone or I felt lonely. And so I didn’t use my phone to call a friend. No, no, no. I wanted to social media because everyone knows that’s where genuine connection lies, or you’re bored or you’re tired of what you’re doing at work and you’re like, Ugh, my brain just wants a break from this. And so even though it’s not really a break to stare at another screen, I take a break, take a break, heavy quotation marks from what I’m doing by checking my email. A lot of the time on my computer, that’s not a break. That’s just the same type of mental labor that makes me feel worse Anyway, what’s your emotional reason? What’s the why now?

Dr. Sarah (26:43):

Yeah.

Catherine (26:43):

And then once you ask those two questions for why now you could ask yourself the final question, which is, what else could you do in that moment that might actually lead to the reward your brain is seeking? So if you’re feeling lonely, maybe you do actually call the friend instead of going on social media, or maybe you put down the phone and go for a walk around the block if you’re looking for a distraction or some kind of break, or maybe you take a bath if you’re like, oh, I’m just really trying to wind down before bed after a long day. You do something else that you ideally have pre-identified as something that is nourishing to you to.

Dr. Sarah (27:17):

And to pre-identify. That’s critical.

Catherine (27:19):

That’s very smart. So I’d really encourage everybody to write down a list of both things that tend to generate this feeling of true fun, like certain people you really do enjoy hanging out with or certain activities that very often do generate this feeling of true fun, and you have that list ready to go, but some of those are not going to be things that you can do on a random Tuesday night at nine o’clock, and you’re not going to be able to hang out with your best friend from college necessarily at that time. So you also want to have a list of things you just enjoy doing that are nourishing to you or relaxing in some way that are more accessible on a random weeknight. And that might be reading a book. It might be taking a bath that might be doing a craft or a puzzle. It might be calling a particular friend. For me, it’s often, alright, well I like playing music, literally playing music on instruments and that can be weirdly difficult to get myself to do, but if I leave my guitar out of out of its case, it’s much more likely I’m going to play it than if God forbid, I have to unzip the case. I mean, that’s how tricky our brains can be. We create these obstacles for ourselves that you’re like, oh my God, seriously, that’s all that was standing my way is unzipping the case? But it truly does make difference.

Dr. Sarah (28:28):

But there’s nothing that butters the slide more than the phone because it’s so fast. And so compared to that unzipping, the case is quite a bit of labor.

Catherine (28:41):

Think about that, the zipper, then you have to pick up the guitar.

Dr. Sarah (28:44):

But there’s so much friction between we’re joking and it’s funny, but if you really think about cognitively and physically, you have to notice what you’re feeling. You have to reflect on it. You have to give yourself permission to have the feeling you need to then actively pull up in your mind this list of things that you’ve pre-identified, which I think is very smart because it reduces friction that but is still going to be more of a lift than butter on the slide. Pick up your phone, it’s done.

Catherine (29:18):

Right, or turn on the TV and sit and watch three episodes of a show.

Dr. Sarah (29:25):

You have to initiate and you have to use your body and you have to use your mind and you have to, again, it isn’t that hard to go pick up your guitar and unzip the case and pull it out. And yet I also want to acknowledge that it can feel really hard and it could feel in comparison to the complete immediate ease that is two inches away from your hand. So to validate that, this is why we intellectually we could say, oh, why don’t I do that? It’s so easy and yet it’s not nearly as easy relative to the phone. And that’s intentional. That’s very, very, very intentional.

Catherine (30:07):

I think that’s important for people to recognize is that these devices and apps, particularly social media apps, news app, any app that makes money off of attention and data is designed to be as easy as possible. And the designers of these apps themselves use the term friction. So I want to pause on that for a second. That friction is anything that makes it a little harder to engage with a activity or behavior or in this case an app. So our goal as people who want to live meaningful, joyful lives is to fight back against that by removing friction for activities we want to engage in. So that is an example of taking the guitar out of the case that is removing friction. I no longer have to take the guitar out. I can just reach for it and start playing, putting your shoes by the door if you’re trying to, and your workout closed by the door if you’re trying to work out in the morning. That would be reducing friction or making plans with a friend to go to an exercise class just as something that makes it a little bit easier. You don’t have to make a decision in the moment putting a, this is a big one. If you say you want to read more and you’re trying to sleep better, get your phone out of your bedroom and put a book on your bedside table that you want to read.

(31:15):

And now you’re reducing friction for activities you want to engage in, leaving a puzzle out, leaving a scrapbook out, leaving something out. But you also simultaneously want to increase friction for the habits you’re trying to change. And that’s an example where getting your phone out of your bedroom at night. Well, if you’re underneath your covers and you’re cozy and you’re comfortable, it’s going to be harder to go get the phone than it would be to just reach for the book on your bedside table. So you’re creating friction by creating a physical distance between yourself and the phone.

Dr. Sarah (31:46):

Yeah.

Catherine (31:46):

Also, using apps that actually do block you from problematic apps like Opal. There’s another one people like called Screen Zen. I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s free and I know people really like that one. There’s also little devices. There’s something called the Brick that actually allows you to choose which apps you want to have access to and block everything else, and you physically wave your phone over it. It’s a magnet and it kind of feels like when you pay for something with a credit card in a store because it kind of vibrates and then it will block all the apps you’ve preselected. There’s another thing called Unplug. There are these little tags that do something similar but use these tools. There’s nothing hypocritical about using technology to help you with technology, but also doing something as simple as deleting problematic apps off your phone. You can always reinstall Instagram if you truly want to scroll through Instagram, but please don’t have that be an icon on your home screen so that every time you pick up your phone, you got a text message or you thought you got a text message, you got the Instagram logo staring you in the face.

(32:43):

It’s deliberately designed to be irresistible. Those colors are deliberately chosen to suck you in. So one of the most powerful things you can do is just get that off your home screen, ideally off your phone entirely. I went for, actually, I still don’t have news apps on my phone because it’s too easy for me to just start to check the news. That’s made a huge difference. I don’t normally have email on my phone because I’ve got a big problem with email. I don’t really spend that much time on social media, so that’s less of a problem for me. But in general, why bother having those on my phone if I truly need to use any of those things? I found it better to not have them on my phone and make myself check them through a desktop. Because for things like email, it’s a better experience. I hate thumb typing. I’m much better at touch typing.

(33:31):

I also don’t want to be doing work email after work hours, and I have a tendency to do that, a freelancer. So there’s no distinction. What is time and space? What is a weeknight versus a weekday? I don’t know. And so I wrote this book, it came out in 2018, is still a struggle for me to maintain what I call screen life balance, but you got to be proactive about it because you have very powerful forces in the form of tech companies trying to get you to spend more time on their products, how they make money.

Dr. Sarah (34:00):

Yeah.

Catherine (34:00):

So all that is to say it is hard, but we all do have the ability to take incremental steps to improve our screen life balance. And I think it’s really important for us to do so, especially given that there are powerful interests who would prefer that we spend more time on screens.

Dr. Sarah (34:14):

Yeah, it’s funny actually. So I get a lot of parents asking me right now we’re talking about our own parental phone use and screen use and looking at that critically for our own mental wellness and physical wellness, but also looking at that critically so that we can model healthy behaviors for these little people who are watching us. And like, I mean, my kids are still young enough that they don’t have devices yet, but they are exposed to my use of device and I have to really account for that. I have to hold myself to account for that because I am very aware that despite my knowledge base on what I know I’m doing as a model is not healthy. I’m doing it and it’s not okay with me, but it’s really hard to stop. And so that’s one thing, but what you were just saying made me think of this other piece. So parents will often ask me in terms of my kids using screens and my kids using phones, and how do I help my kids develop all the relationship to tech beyond just what I model? And one of the things I will often say to parents, and I’m curious your thoughts on this, is help kids to be educated consumers of who’s making these devices and who is trying to acquire their attention whether they like it or not.

(35:42):

And so kids do not like to be controlled. And when a kid understands that some other third party is trying to control their behavior and control their attention and control how they spend their time and is manipulating them, then they can build their own critical thinking around how they feel about that. And it kind of can help align parents with their child. It’s, Hey, it’s you and me versus this problem versus me versus you because parents get, and I do too, even with TV in my family, we can get into these power struggles with our kids of like, okay, I’m the gatekeeper for all of this tech. And so I feel like the person that you’re fighting to get more screen time, but in reality it’s like, well, can we help our kid understand that when we’re on the same team?

Catherine (36:33):

Yeah, I think that’s actually a very important point because it goes from a confrontational relationship with your kid where it’s you versus them about screen time. Just as you’re saying in reality, it’s all of us kids and adults alike against tech companies that profit from stealing our time and attention from us. And yes, I think that going to what you were saying at first, it’s very important for us to model good behaviors for our kids because they are watching. There’s actually a really heartbreaking experiment that was done originally. There was one called the Still Face Experiment where adults were asked to interact with their babies normally for a minute or two minutes and then go totally still faced blank faced, not have any reaction to what the kids are doing and just look at them for one or two minutes. And it’s actually heartbreaking because the kids, the babies go from normal kind of going and guying and kind of gurgling at their parents to being very confused by why they’re not getting any reaction from their parents to actually being in distress writhing around in their seats screaming these very animalistic sounds like they don’t understand why this person’s face has suddenly gone totally blank.

(37:39):

And that was something that actually really bothered me when I was first starting this process is realizing I was still facing my own kid. But there’s been subsequent experiments inspired by this still face experiment where parents are brought into a lab and specifically are asked to interact with their phones for one or two minutes. So play with your kid with Legos for two minutes, then look at your phone for a couple minutes and ignore your kid. And this was featured in a Diane Sawyer special called Screen Time that I believe aired in 2019. You can find clips from it online if you want, but you can see that kids immediately notice that their parents’ attention is not on them. And their reactions range from kids who start saying things like, pay attention to me, pay attention to me. As their parents are just pretending to scroll. All of us do. And we think no one’s really paying attention to it, to physically intervening, getting on their parents’ lap, trying to get physically between the parents and the devices to I think the most heartbreaking example, which is a little girl who just sits down on a chair and she folds her hands in her lap and she just sits there and waits while her mother is on the phone.

(38:35):

And if you think your kids are not noticing, they are noticing. When I give kids, I mean talks to teenagers, I’ll ask, have you ever felt really hurt or left alone by the fact that your parents are on their phones when they’re around you? And every hand goes up. And I would say even pets realize this, the same Diane Sawyer clip has all these examples of people videotaping their pets trying to get them to put their phones down. My dog does that too. My dog is not a barker. And a lot of times if I’m texting someone, I try not to do this when my daughter’s around, but if the dog’s around, she will start to bark and she will actually get mad at, I mean, we joke about her be getting mad at what we call the rectangle. Why are you looking at that rectangle?

(39:14):

You’re supposed to be playing with me. All that is to say we should be aware that our kids do pay attention to how we behave around them. But I love your point that instead of making this a confrontational relationship with our kids, we really should play up the fact that tech companies are trying to take advantage of, and as you said, rightly manipulate us into giving away our time and our attention for free. That’s their business model, is to convince us that social media is helping us feel connected when in reality it’s really making most of us feel burned out and anxious and lonely and depressed.

Dr. Sarah (39:44):

It’s not really social media anymore, it’s really just media. How many times do you go on Instagram and actually see your friends from high school or whatever?

Catherine (39:52):

It’s really just advertising.

Dr. Sarah (39:53):

I just don’t, I mean, I’m only on it for work.

(40:00):

And actually interestingly, I didn’t really use social media very much before having kids. It was not actually something I engaged in for whatever reason, just kind of didn’t interest me, had kids and started first noticed kind of discovering, oh, there’s mommy content on here. I was nursing my son two in the morning and I’m like, oh, this is kind of interest. I kind of like this. Which wasn’t like using social media for social connections. It wasn’t like this was a deviation from checking in with my friends, but actually using it as content to consume, which I was enjoying

Catherine (40:42):

Passive content.

Dr. Sarah (40:44):

And then I had my second and it increased and then covid happened and it went out of control. And then that was actually interestingly, I mean silver lining, it was during the early stage of the lockdown. I was on it a lot. I was consuming parenting content. I was a parent of two little kids and I was interested in, I specialized in it clinically, and I was like, oh my God, there’s so much content on here that is, I think some of it was great and some of it was at best just not really very useful. And some of it was straight up just harmful. I thought it was literally harmful to parents wellbeing and child development. And I was like, I could do a lot better than a lot of what seeing. And so I started posting and that was kind of how I started really doing the Instagram content that I do.

(41:41):

And this podcast evolved out of that. So there’s a good that came out of it for me and also it became very all consuming. Now it was my work and now I had to be on Instagram every day to manage my work. And it’s been very tricky for me to disentangle myself from that. Like you were saying with the freelance work, my work never really ends because I run a business and people always, there’s always something coming through and it’s very gratifying to check those emails. And I think I’m more addicted to email than I am Instagram or social media emails.

Catherine (42:21):

Yeah, it’s a huge problem for me as well. I think that that is the challenge when your work life does involve as you’re describing social media or when you’re a freelancer. And so there’s no traditional clocking in at the office and leaving at the end of the day. And I think that’s obviously, there’s wonderful freedom that comes with that existence, but there’s also this challenge of you have to be setting limits for yourself. So that’s where I really would encourage people, first of all, to take a step back and just ask, okay, which parts are actually necessary or helpful for your professional life? Or what do you genuinely enjoy? If you’re genuinely enjoying it, then there’s no reason to beat yourself up about that. But there’s probably a lot of stuff around the edges that’s like, oh, I’m just doing this. It’s a compulsive habit.

(43:02):

Or I feel like I quote should or because it’s supposedly for fun, but that’s actually what I consider to be what I call fake fun, which is kind of stuff that’s marketed to us as fun, but it actually doesn’t result in playful connected flow. And that’s often for many people, social media. So if you can start to identify these parts of your media consumption or habits that actually don’t feel good and don’t serve any productive reason, or maybe they are something that theoretically could be beneficial from your work, but it’s too much. It’s like, do you really want to be doing that at 10 o’clock at night? Then you can start to prune away some of that stuff. The other point I was going to make just in terms of kids, I know you’ve got a lot of parents listening and how I’ve been trying to think about communicating with kids about screen time so that it doesn’t feel like this kind of scoldy, judgmental thing is that kids in particularly preteens are in this amazing stage of brain development where as you know, babies have this explosion of neurons, they’ve got more neurons than adults do brain cells than adults do. And by the time a kid is five, their brain is actually about 90% the size of an adult brain. It’s kind of nuts. But there’s actually too many brain cells for our brains to support too many connections between them. So in early adolescence, pre puberty, puberty, our brains start to prune those. And it’s really important at that moment to pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. It’s kind of meta, but in other words, your brain is going to reinforce and keep the stuff that you’re paying attention to and the stuff that you’re repeatedly doing during that time, and it’s going to discard the things that it deems are unnecessary based on whether or not you’re paying attention to them. So if you’re paying a ton of attention to scrolling through social media or engaging in this kind of scattered, fragmented attention, and you’re not paying attention to things like reading or interacting in person with your friends or learning a new skill like an instrument, your brain’s going to prune the stuff that isn’t necessary.

(44:50):

All that is to say, I think is important to tell our kids that they’re in a stage of brain development that’s on the one hand, very vulnerable because it is a period at which they can be influenced by outside forces. So that’s when a lot of the basis for addiction start to take hold is in adolescence, because our brains are in this very malleable state. You’re particularly vulnerable to social media companies getting you to spend all your time and attention on them. But at the same time, it’s actually a really exciting period because it means that you as a young teenager get to kind of shape what kind of brain you want to have for the rest of your life, and that’s going to be determined by what you’re paying attention to on a day-to-day basis. So I try to tell kids that because I think it’s actually, it explains that you’re vulnerable to manipulation, which no one wants to be manipulated, but you also get to actually take action and make decisions that are going to determine your own future.

(45:44):

And I think that that’s really empowering. And I have heard from kids who have internalized this much, they’re like, I actually don’t want to be spending so much time on my devices. I don’t want to be spending so much time on TikTok or even YouTube because I’ve realized that that’s not the brain I want to have. I want a brain that’s able to focus and be creative and come up with interesting thoughts. And that’s not going to be supported by spending all my time watching 15 second videos on TikTok that are decided for me by an algorithm.

Dr. Sarah (46:09):

Yeah, I mean, yes, and I would add to that most kids can get there, and I have so many parents who will be like, my kid would never say that. Kid would never, and I’m like, well, when are you having that conversation? Because if you’re having the conversation of where do you want your brain to go? What do you want to create? Where do you want to put your attention while they are fighting you for a little bit more screen time and you’re withholding it, that’s not going to sink in that moment. They aren’t going to have the buy-in and the reflection, what do I want my brain to evolve to? Where do I want to put my attention so that my neural connections grow there? They have to have, those conversations have to happen in the outside moments, not when there are no phones present, when we’re not in a exchange about that, when we’re just calm, connected, doing fun, playful things.

Catherine (47:10):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (47:13):

Where we are feeling that connection, we’re feeling that playfulness, we’re feeling that security and that safety to explore some tricky topics. And then you can say, man, these would be great jumping off moments to have conversations around where do you want to take this? This is such a cool time in your life. You are building this such a cool personality and such a cool mind, your interests, I love them. Where do you want to go? What do you want to build? And those are the kinds of foundational conversations upon which to then tuck in. Now, where does screens fit into this? Do you want TikTok to be telling you where to put your attention over there, or do you want to be choosing to put your attention here? How do you get there? What are the books you would want me to get from the library for you to pursue that interest? I dunno. I think how we talk to our kids is we are very focused as parents on how do we talk to our kids? What’s the right thing to say when we talk to our kids is a very underrated question.

Catherine (48:22):

That’s true. If you’re in the middle of a fight, no one’s going to listen. And going off of what you’re saying, I mean, I use the analogy in my mind of what do you want to water? Imagine it’s a garden and where do you want to water? Where do you want the sun and water to be? Because right now it’s probably on TikTok, but that’s not necessarily what you want to really be cultivating.

(48:35):

But I also think you can open up this conversation by saying, Hey, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own screen time and how this is affecting me, and I’m curious about your thoughts about how do you feel when I’m on my phone or when I’m around you, what have you noticed about my habits? Can you help me change how I’m behaving? Because I as an adult would like to be spending more time on reading or whatever. So you can actually invite your kids to kind of call you out where they can be like, Hey, or Hey Dad, you said you wanted to be reading more, but I see you’re just scrolling through the news again, or you’re just on your email. Invite that, and I think kids, that equals the playing field with them a bit in a way that can be very helpful.

(49:13):

I also wanted to say kind of on a tangent, but just in terms of, I know there’s big questions about when to get your kid a phone, and I want to just offer it to parents that I think a lot of times we see this as a black or white thing where it’s like, okay, you either don’t have a phone or you have a full on smartphone where you have access to the whole internet and the whole internet has access to your kid. And there’s actually many intermediate steps just as you wouldn’t go from your kid not driving a car to just handing them the keys to the car that you bought them. The same is true for phones. So I just want to suggest that if you’re trying to figure out a way to give your kid a little bit more independence, like an independent walker from school or go out on their own a bit more, you can have a family loaner phone that’s just a flip phone, like a basic phone that doesn’t really belong to anyone.

(49:53):

You can even get a pay as you go plan for it and just loan that out to your elementary school age kids or whatever age they’re at, where they’re first starting to go out of the house on their own. Use that as a way to just have a communication tool for logistics and emergencies. And then there’s all these smartphone alternatives that can be the next step, that it’s not a full fledged smartphone. And I have some of those on my substack. So if people search for Catherine Price and Smartphone Alternatives, it probably will pop up. But there’s a bunch, there’s Pinwheel, there’s Gab, there’s Tru Me. There’s a bunch of watches that you can use that are kind of starter steps to give your kid more independence and more experience interacting digitally before you give ’em a full smartphone. So I just wanted to throw that out there.

(50:33):

I think we’ve just been approaching this in a really, as I said, a black or white way where it’s like, okay, when are you getting your full smartphone? And I would really recommend not doing the full smartphone until at least high school and keeping your kids off social media until at least 16, if not longer, because it’s just not good. It’s not good. But there’s more tools at our disposal as parents than I think we realized. And I think we just, we’re in the middle of a big societal course correction right now. Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve already given your kid a full fledged smartphone. But do recognize that we need to have conversations with our kids if they do have full fledged smartphones and probably some better boundary setting for ourselves or our kids and ourselves in regards to full fledged smartphones. And then if you’re in a position where you haven’t yet given your kid a smartphone, great because you’ve got a new pathway forward where it’s not just going from zero to 60 all at once.

Dr. Sarah (51:19):

Yes. I think that is so valuable, and I think it’s not lost on me. I appreciate what you just said. It was like, don’t beat yourself up if you’ve already done this. We are always just doing the best we can with what we know, and it isn’t even too late to go back on some of the things. And I think your other point about it not being black and white is really, really important because I think some parents really feel like, well, it is like my choices are nothing or everything, and that feels very overwhelming to me, but nothing doesn’t work. But because my kid has to engage in this social world where there’s social capital that is connected to, and not just as a status symbol, like, oh, I got a phone, but there’s social capital involved in being able to be on the group chat, so you know what everyone’s talking about at lunch.

Catherine (52:22):

That’s true. But I think that that’s where we’re in this weird middle ground where it’s like right now kids have access to all this stuff. And I do think it’s hard to be the first mover in the space to say, you know what? I am aware that this has been how socialization has been happening, but that doesn’t align with our values as a family to be engaging in chats, Snapchat or whatever. And I would really invite parents and encourage parents to talk to other parents about this and say, Hey, can we join together and actually take a stand, talk to the parents of your kids’ friends and ask, how do you feel about our kids getting smartphones or being on social media or doing all these group chats? Can we collectively agree to delay that full fledged smartphone or encourage our kids to call each other instead or to use regular text messages instead of some of these other platforms? It’s not going to happen if we as parents are not taking a stand and working together with other parents. So I do want to encourage parents. There’s so much momentum right now behind this in large part because of Jon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation.

(53:20):

I’m actually collaborating directly with him and his team now, and he is personally a wonderful, wonderful person. He’s a great team. But the momentum behind getting phones out of schools is amazing right now.

Dr. Sarah (53:29):

Yes.

Catherine (53:29):

There’s a lot of activism from parents who are like, Hey, actually, wait, we all feel uncomfortable with this? Let’s course correct. It’s okay. We didn’t know. Just as you’re saying, don’t beat ourselves up for what’s happened so far. But that doesn’t mean we need to continue down this path. Is it going to be hard? Yes. Are our kids going to push back? At first, yes. But it is quite possible to create a societal and cultural shift where it doesn’t seem so normal to have kids as young as nine years old on TikTok. That’s not even supposed to happen legally. Right? That’s not okay. Just because a lot of this is happening doesn’t mean it should be accepted or that it’s okay. And I really do want to empower parents. Our job as parents is to set boundaries for our kids, and they’re probably going to push back on those boundaries. What kids do. Okay, it’s all right if your kid’s mad at you. But I’d also say that in their heart of hearts or in the future, they may look back and be very grateful to you for having set those boundaries. And there was just a really interesting op-ed that John Het and one of his collaborators had published recently in the New York Times where it was based on a survey of kids or people in Gen Z, about a thousand participants in Gen Z who are currently are between about 12 and 26 years old, asking if they had any regrets about whether some of these social media platforms had ever been invented. It asked, do you wish these things had never been invented? And when they broke it down by platforms, nearly half of the respondents said they wished that TikTok and Twitter slash X had never been invented. That’s in direct contrast to the fact that many people in that same generation are spending about five hours a day on those same platforms.

(55:02):

So there’s this real disconnect here between what people want and what they’re doing. And I think that’s really empowering for parents who are like, oh my God, can I set limits? My kid’s saying they really want to be on Snapchat or TikTok or whatever. Yes, it’s okay to set limits even if your kid’s pushing back. And that’s just as you wouldn’t be like, Hey, you want to try cigarettes? Okay, here’s a pack of cigarettes. Even though I know that’s not a good idea, you’re not handing your kid a beer. It’s the same thing. So parents don’t beat yourselves up, but also we do need to set boundaries with these things. Anyway, sorry for that tirade, but I love it. I love it every away. I’ve been nine nine now, so I’m like, I’m in the midst of this. This is the transitional moment. It’s part of the reason I’ve been kind of turning my attention. I’m still doing a lot of talking about fun, but I’m also really talking to a lot of kids and teachers and school administrators and parents about this. We need to make this change and we need to know we’re supported by other parents. We need to do this together.

Dr. Sarah (55:57):

And I think one thing you were saying just now specifically about, okay, we sometimes need to look at what our kids are saying they want to do, or actually, I think more accurately what they believe they can’t stop doing, either because they’re addicted to it or there’s so much social capital embedded in having it that it’s risky, truly socially risky to not have access to it. It feels scary

(56:26):

To imagine not having it. And what they’re also saying they really need and they really want, and what we know they really need and they really want, which is to not have to contend with this at all. That made me think so much of what we were even just talking about when we were talking about my phone on the nightstand. I don’t want to be doing the things that I do with my phone and I would love if I just didn’t have it in my life. And yet, I don’t know that I can totally do that by myself. And I’m almost 40-year-old mom of two. What do our kids have? What tools do they have right now?

Catherine (57:09):

Their brains are so vulnerable because they’re also at a stage where at least adults have a more fully formed sense of self. So you know that that’s not the person you want to be. And so even though it’s hard for you to make those changes, at least who you want to be ideally, but kids are still developing this sense of self and their brains, as we were talking about, are rapidly changing and are very, very susceptible to their everyday experiences. Their brains are changing in reaction to those experiences, so we need to help them out. But I would encourage start tonight yourself. Try to get that phone out of your bedroom, even if it’s just from now through the weekend. We’re speaking on a Thursday.

Dr. Sarah (57:43):

Yeah, so I do a Tuesday newsletter, and I’m going to commit next Tuesday after this episode releases, I will write an update in my newsletter. So if you’re not subscribed, you should subscribe to it. I’ll put a link to that you also should be subscribing to, because you are finding any of this useful. That is where you need to go.

Catherine (58:02):

Yes, thank you. Yeah, I’m writing a substack called How to Feel Alive, and it kind of is an umbrella for all of this stuff, for stuff about kids and phones for adults in screen life balance for my own personal pursuit of fun and my desire to find more community. So it touches on all these things. How do we feel more alive as adults and help our kids do the same? So yeah, I would love it if people would join me there.

Dr. Sarah (58:24):

Yeah, we’ll put a link to that too, just down below. So if you are listening, go sign up for that because it’s very useful. And then next week I will, I am holding myself accountable. I will put an update about what I did tonight with my phone, so I have to, you know…

Catherine (58:41):

It’d be very embarrassing if you don’t. Very embarrassing. Possibly. Now I have to. The shame you’ll feel use shame for good. That’s the kind of twisted piece of advice, but I made it can be helpful. Right.

Dr. Sarah (58:53):

Only to ourselves, not to our kids, only to ourselves.

Catherine (58:55):

Exactly. Exactly. But turn it into a game with your kids. If you do have kids, say you’re trying to change your own habit, so you’re going to get your phone out of the bedroom, turn it into a game where you’re…

Dr. Sarah (59:03):

Well, the clock’s ticking. If I don’t start figuring how to get my phone out of my bedroom, it’s going to be very hard for me to tell them that one day they can have their phone in their bedroom. And I do want that ability authority to not be hypocritical about it. But thank you. This was like, oh gosh. So helpful.

Catherine (59:21):

Thank you so much for inviting me to be on the show.

Dr. Sarah (59:24):

Yeah, I appreciate it. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Catherine (59:26):

You too.

Dr. Sarah (59:33):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how this show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening and don’t be a stranger.