← The Pediatrician Next Door - Simple Advice on Parenting and Family Health
The Pediatrician Next Door - Simple Advice on Parenting and Family Health
Are Screens Hurting Our Focus and Happiness? Finding Digital Balance with Jeff Wozer
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- [00:00]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
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- [01:21]
Jeff Woeser
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- [01:54]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
Today's topic is one that all of us struggle with. Screens, phones, tablets, televisions. They are in every part of our lives. And if you're like most people that I talk to, you want to know, is this okay? So for this episode, I really dug in. I wanted to understand what's actually happening in our brains and our bodies when we interact with something as unnatural as these glowing screens. This is not something humans evolved for. And I'm going to give you the punchline right up front. Okay, here's what I Found out. It's not great for us as adults, but the effects are really more profound on kids. Like, you need to let go of your guilt about your own bad habits, because watching tv, it's not that bad for you, but it's disturbing because our adult brains, they're pretty set. I mean, think about how hard it is to learn a new skill as an adult, like a new language or whatever. It's slow and it's hard, and it takes a lot to change us as adults. So, yes, technology does affect us, and it pulls our attention away. It can change our habits, but it's not fundamentally reshaping who we are. But that's not true for kids. Kids are different. When a child is young, every experience they have is shaping them. And I don't just mean shaping their ideas or their personality. It literally changes their brain chemistry and their wiring, the way their brain learns and focuses and connects and responds in this world. So I'm going to deep dive into this, what technology is doing, why it's so hard for us to resist it, and more importantly, what we're losing. Then we can talk about what to do about it in real life without throwing every device out the window. I'm Dr. Wendy Hunter, and I'm the pediatrician next door. I'm that doctor friend you call for practical advice about your kid's health. I mix the science of medicine with the reality of parenting. I've got maybe the most unlikely of guests today to help me figure out what we're missing when we spend so much time connected to our technology. He's a standup comedian. You're going to hear my conversation with Jeff Woeser because he's got this great backstory that explains how he went from being a standup comic to an advocate and keynote speaker about technology in our lives and finding digital balance. Jeff was touring as a standup, as they do, and he tells me there's actually a lot of downtime when you're on the road. So he occupied himself by taking on extra gigs. He was writing humor articles for outdoor magazines and scripts for all kinds of things. Unfortunately, he was very successful at this, and at one point, he was spending up to 60 hours a week online doing his work. He was making good money, and he continued in comedy. But something changed. Here's Jeff Woeser.
- [04:50]
Jeff Woeser
I enjoy the money, and I still allowed me to perform standup comedy. But unbeknownst to me, that's when I began conditioning for my brain to crave those dopamine hits. You know, the Distraction. Oh, I'll go check email for a few minutes. I'll go check news for a few minutes. I'll go check sports for a few minutes. And I didn't think anything of it. And all of a sudden, one day, I missed a deadline. And I never had a problem with this. I always took a lot of pride in always getting my deadlines in on time articles. And then I missed another deadline, another one, another one. I could not figure out what was going on. And then one day, I came across this quote by writer J. Brown. He says, don't say you don't have enough time. You have the exact same amount of hours in a day as, you know, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Jefferson, Michelangelo. And he has this whole list of people. And it just like, it's like an epiphany of like, oh, my gosh, who am I to say I don't have enough time when you look what they did. But then the more I thought about it, I realized they did not have the distractions we face right now. And I started to think of it. In all due respect for them, I don't think they would have been as productive if they face what we have right now. You know, Michelangelo, he'd been like, tweeting, what was I thinking taking this lame ceiling job? Existing chapel sucks. They would have been online doing all this stuff. And so I started this, like, oh, that kind of opened up my brain, started looking into us. And then I came across an article. It was a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly by writer Nicholas Carr. It was called Is Google Making Us Stupid? And in it, he described how he and a lot of his author friends, professors, were now having difficulty writing because they lacked the mental stamina needed for deep thought to be on a screen. And that's when it hit me. It's like, bingo. That's what my problem was. It wasn't because I did not want to write. It was because I could no longer write.
- [06:45]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
I know I started this episode by saying that the effects of screens on us as adults aren't that big of a deal. But losing our ability to focus, that's kind of a big deal. It's what lets us solve problems. It lets us be creative. To sit with an idea long enough for something to happen. And what Jeff just described, that feeling of your attention getting pulled, your mind jumping from one thing to another, that's something I know you recognize. But here's the hopeful part. He also talks about how he got it back. He retrained his mind, which tells us something really important. This is not permanent damage. It's more like a muscle that's gotten weak. We can build it back as adults. Mental stamina is just like physical stamina. It's your ability to stay with something even when it's a little bit hard or boring. And modern devices, they are not designed to build our mental stamina. They're designed to give you the next thing before you even have to ask for it. So what happens is we lose our tolerance for feeling uncomfortable. And that's where focus and creativity actually live. Jeff learned this firsthand, that creativity doesn't happen when your brain is always entertained. So that's in adults. What about in kids? We're going to get to that. There's this really interesting exercise I love that teachers sometimes do with kids. They bring in a sealed box and they tell the class, inside the box is something interesting. You need to figure out what it is. The kids ask questions, they make guesses. They get curious. They think they've got the right answer. And then here's the twist. The teacher never lets them open the box. They never reveal what's inside. And what happens is fascinating. The kids are so uncomfortable. Not surprising. Not knowing starts to feel painful. And then the teacher uses that moment to talk about something really human, really good. For kids, that we don't like uncertainty. Our brains are wired to want an answer, to want closure. And you think about it. This is what your phone is doing to you. Every time it lights up, you wonder, did somebody text me? What did I miss? And not checking your phone feels really uncomfortable, just like that sealed box does to the kids. So we check, because our brains are wired to want to know. The problem is when we constantly relieve our discomfort, we never build the ability to tolerate it. And that ability to sit with not knowing, to stay focused and to resist the pull, that's the skill our kids need to learn if they're going to be able to think deeply, be creative and solve problems. They grow up. And there are research studies that show our performance is worse just by having a phone near us.
- [09:42]
Jeff Woeser
Just what you're talking about with the phone, you know, they did a study with University of Michigan, but they. They had people come in. They told them they were doing a testing for cuffs for blood pressure, and they're just testing that. And they asked the people to just sit there and they said, just do a word search puzzle. And then about five minutes into it, they came in and said, you, phone is interfering with our device. Do you mind if we move it across the room? And so then once they moved it, unbeknownst to the test subjects, the researchers had their numbers, had the phone number, and all of a sudden they began texting. And all of a sudden they began calling, and the people could not pick up their phones. And just what you said, they became angry. They became. And they tested them in terms of the word search puzzle. Before that phone was ringing, they were very focused. They had no problem doing that. And all of a sudden, once that phone began ringing, their cortisol went up. Their distraction was just off the charts. But it's. We have to know now. And that's what's just totally corrupting our days, our focus.
- [10:50]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
You know, I love to think about the physiology of what's going on. That's kind of my thing. So here's what's happening in your brain. When you're always interrupted or always interrupting your own self. Your brain is designed for sustained attention. That's what we're supposed to be good at. It likes to pick one thing and stay there long enough to understand it, to solve it, or create something from it. But that's not how we're living anymore. Instead, you know, you start an email, check a text, go back to the email. Then you see a notification, you pick up your phone, you. And you forget what you were doing. And every time that happens, your brain has to do a whole series of steps. You don't even know this is happening. Your brain has to pause what you're doing, hold the information in your working memory that's part of your brain, shift to something new, and then rebuild the entire context when you come back. This is hard. This uses neurotransmitters and stuff. That rebuilding step is where things fall apart. Your brain doesn't just snap back into place. It has to remember, where was I? What was I thinking? What was I about to do? And that does take effort. There's even a term for this. It's called attention residue. Part of your brain stays stuck on the last thing you were doing while you're trying to do the next thing. So you're never really in either place. And we can measure this in lab studies. When people are interrupted, it takes them longer to finish tasks. Their error rates go up, sometimes even doubling in some studies, and the person reports feeling more stressed and more frustrated. We see this in medicine. Interruptions increase the rate of mistakes. And that's why we have an area in the place where nurses draw up medications and vaccines that's marked off with tape on the floor. And it literally says distraction free. Zone. Because we know when nurses are distracted by me walking up behind them and talking, they make mistakes. We know this undoubtedly from studies that when people are interrupted, they make mistakes. So think about this. How many times a day does the average person check their phone? Because every one of these is an interruption. How many times a day, 80 to 100 times a day, are we checking our phones? And those are interruptions that we initiate ourselves. We create an environment of near constant task switching. And over time, your brain adapts to it. And this is where it really matters for kids. Because while we are unlearning focus, they never fully learn it in the first place. So where does that leave us? Should we just throw our phones away?
- [13:31]
Jeff Woeser
We can't just throw away our phones. I mean, that's ridiculous. Because we need them to survive in today's digitally dominated world. I mean, you can't even order a meal at a restaurant now without your phone. It's crazy. So you gotta preplay and that's, you know, you have to like, okay, I'm going to keep my phone, you know, in a backpack or in a purse. All you're trying to do is create friction. If you go onto Facebook, it's so easy, you know, it takes you maybe two clicks to all of a sudden become, you know, on a Facebook. Have you ever tried to get off of Facebook? You talk about mysteries, you're going through all this byzantine trying to figure out how to get off that they make it difficult because the harder it is to do something, the less likely we are to do it. And so you look at everything on the web right now, Autoplay. As soon as a video ends on YouTube or Netflix, another video is playing within seconds, it takes away that resistance. And so they make it everything quick, quick, quick. And the faster it is, the more likely you are going to do it. I mean, they talk about Amazon. If it takes a second longer for product to download on Amazon, they estimate they would lose 1, 1.6 billion annually just because people might jump to a different site. So it's just crazy. So tech knows, make everything quick. Everything quick. And to fight that, we've got to add some friction. Because just to give us that split second, you know, you might have your phone in the room with you, you might have to get up to grab it. But that friction of taking a few seconds might make you pause, is to ask, is this a want or is this a need? So that's what I'm talking about. We just gotta add that little resistance with awareness. We have options. And so One, I'll never have my phone at my desk because they talk about every day. We have a limited amount of cognitive resources. It's almost like a muscle. So if you have, like, say, your phone in front of you, and even though you don't pick that up, it is draining our cognitive resources because the temptation itself is always there. You know, it's almost like putting your favorite food, like, putting it. If you love, you put a donut on your desk at 9 in the morning. You tell yourself, you can't eat that till 5 o'. Clock. That's torturous. I mean, that's just like, oh, my God, sweat's pouring down your forehead. I can't eat this. And that's how the phone is. Even though we're not picking it up, it's a distraction. So, I mean, it's crazy. The studies they have on that, there's a Kapersky lab out of a cybersecurity firm out of Germany. They did a study. They put people in four different scenarios at a desk with a phone in front of them, at a desk with a phone in a drawer, at a desk with a phone across the room, and then at a desk with a phone in a different room. And then they were given a lesson, and then they were tested how well they retained that information. The farther away the phone, the higher the retention. There was a 26% difference between having a phone out of the room and the phone in front of a person.
- [16:26]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
Process that for a minute. Next we talk about the social media implications and my tips for reclaiming your focus. Before the break, we were talking about how just having your phone nearby, not even using it, is enough to distract your brain and affect your performance. When your phone is just sitting there on your desk, in your backpack, even in your pocket, part of your brain is still tracking it. It's holding a little bit of attention in reserve. It's almost like thinking, like, don't forget, something might happen there. We also see this in studies with teenagers in classrooms. Students who have their phones on them, even if they're not using them, do worse on tests compared to students whose phones are not in reach. But it doesn't stop at performance, because what Jeff shared next takes this one step further. The presence of a phone can also affect our feelings.
- [17:36]
Jeff Woeser
I mean, there's one at the University of Essex in London where they had strangers just come in and sit, like in a coffee shop for 10 minutes. They don't know each other, just introduce themselves, and then they'd move away half of the Participants, unbeknownst to them, the researchers put a phone at the table next to them. It didn't belong to anyone, just generically. This phone would be within their eyesight. And then they tested everyone after about the warmth of the conversation. Did they find that person trust? Were they, did they like them? It was just night and day between the people who spoke, had the conversation out of phone in view to the people who have the phone in view. And they did a study where they had people purposely trying to be sarcastic. And then they asked the college students, can you tell in that text if that person says they could not pick that up? And that's. We're missing, you know, by not being you and I not being together or, you know, we're missing those facial. You know, you can't read a person's face. And that's when you keep on hearing that. Especially with the kids today, there's an empathy crisis because kids aren't communicating face to face. They don't see if they say something bad or write something, post something negative on social media about not seeing if that person's crying, that person's laughing. They're not seeing if their eyes are wide open. They're not seeing if they're smiling or frowning. And we're missing out on all that. Now, talking with college admission people, they said it's just absolutely mind bending how these kids come in and they have no soft skills. Shaking hands, looking eye to eye with the people they're speaking with don't exist right now. And that's what's frightening.
- [19:18]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
He's right. Learning how to read a room, how to recover from something awkward, that's where growth happens. Which brings me to something that sounds a little counterintuitive. Those uncomfortable, inconvenient experiences, they are not a problem to fix. I know every app and new service is designed to make everything we do easy and convenient, but inconvenience, that's exactly what builds confident, capable kids inconvenience.
- [19:53]
Jeff Woeser
You know, stuff that we wouldn't even consider is considered. You know, I'm reading stuff for smart homes and the one that was describing it, it's like, you know, you'll be able to, with a voice command, be able to control your lights. You don't have to get up manually to turn that light off. It's giving you, you know, upgrading your life, saving you the time. I don't know about you, Wendy, but I've never sat there and think, oh my gosh, I gotta walk three feet to turn that light on. The hell with that, I've never heard anyone through deathbed talking about, oh, I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time in my life turning lights off. And so I just don't get these inconvenience, the stuff they're doing now. I mean. Cause you know, think of, you know, we were kids, you know, listen to my dad. Oh, now he's your age, we had to walk four miles. School now is, you know, is that what kids are going to say? Oh, when I was your age, I had to walk four feet to turn that light off. Do you believe that when I talk about inconvenience? We're not challenging ourselves anymore. And that's when life's exciting. You know, we get outside of our comfort zones. You know, that's when we come alive and that's when life is exciting. I mean, I know it's such a. It's a weird mystery that we feel most comfortable when we have certainty, when we know we're in our comfort zones. But we feel so kick ass alive when we're getting outside of that, challenging ourselves. And that's when life gets magical and we're not doing that.
- [21:17]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
You know, this when kids try something and it doesn't go well and they stick with it and they finally figure it out, the feeling they have, that is real joy. Our brains are wired to feel more satisfaction when effort is involved, when there's a little struggle at first and then success. Okay, I told you, Jeff is funny. He has the best analogy you could share with your kids about how stupid we look when we're so attached to our devices.
- [21:48]
Jeff Woeser
Imagine our dogs, they're wonderful. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, you know, they're always in the moment, they're not thinking about yesterday. They're the classic examples of being in the know. But then I ask them, imagine if our dogs were as obsessed with phones as we are. Think how different life would be. You know, every time we come home, they would never greet us at the door. They'd be too busy texting that beagle down the street writing stuff like bol bark out loud or lmto laugh my tail off. You know, every time you take them for a walk, they would always be stopping, taking selfies of themselves every 10 minutes, trying to become, you know, flea collar influencers. Or, you know, they never have any energy, do you know, to chase the ball because they've been up all night binge watching videos on YouTube, you know, how to discover how to work doorknobs, you know, and so when you Start bringing this into people's mind. And we're like, oh, my gosh, we'd be so disappointed. We'd be looking at our dogs like, what are you guys doing? You're wasting your dog lives. You've got so much energy and you're just on the screen all day. Yet we do the same thing, and we never call ourselves out.
- [22:57]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
It's time to call ourselves out. Have you audited your online time? Which parts bring you joy? FaceTiming your parents with your kids? Spending time on Instagram? Which are the good parts and which are the ones that are draining you? Do you even know how much time you spend? Like, texting your phone can tell you
- [23:16]
Jeff Woeser
the statistics are just off the charts. It's just, you know, we now average. It's gone up 5 hours and 16 minutes per day in our phones over one year. That's 80 days. That's like forfeiting all of summer except for, like, one week. And that's just insane. We're doing that. But the biggest one for me is, you know, it's so easy to say we're spending this much time, but it's just about experiences. I guess it even ties in with inconvenience. There's an experience, famine going on because you think of an experience. They give us character, they give us life, they give us perspective, they give us tears. They give us. They give. And the best of all, they give us humanity through a shared experience. And we're not getting that anymore when it comes to the arts. During my presentations, a lot of times, I'll show a picture of Picasso's. One of Picasso's first paintings called man in a Beret. You know, it looks like any painting anyone else has done. And then I show his first foray into Cubism. It took nine years. And that's my worry, is that we're going to remove the apprenticeship. What it means to learn a skill, find a voice, find a vision. And to me, that's just watering down. And that's my biggest fear of culture. I mean, it's fascinating. There's a cultural anthropologist. I didn't know these existed. He looks back at music and he goes, if you asked someone to play, you know, you look at the 50s and 60s, you think rock and roll, you think of the 70s, disco, you think of 80s was punk, new age. You go to the 90s, we grunge in hip hop. He goes, if you ask someone to play a song, you know, music that would reflect, like the 50s or the 70s, they would know what genre music plays, he goes, if you ask a musician to do that for the last 10 years, nothing. And they're just worried about with. I know AI is just kind of new, but it's watering down the culture because AI is not giving us anything new. It's just giving us all stuff from the past.
- [25:20]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
When we rely on technology to do thinking for us, we stop making something new. And that means we lose something called the happy accident. Some of the best ideas in history did not come from perfect planning. They came from messing around and then finding something better. The slinky. That's a great example. It was invented by accident when a spring fell and started walking down the floor. That doesn't happen when everything is optimized and predicted and made for you. And when kids spend more of their time on screens and less time manipulating things and building things, they get fewer chances to discover something unexpected. So I took all of this, the research, the science, the conversations like the one you just heard. And I asked myself a simple what can I do about this in my own life? And actually, these are the things that I already do, but I made a list for you. These are the eight things I do to protect my focus and to maintain my humanity. First, I protect uninterrupted time like it is a resource. When I'm driving, I don't do anything else. No phone calls. I don't listen to podcasts or music. I just drive. I let my mind wander and I start having ideas, thoughts that I don't have time to think about during the rest of my day. And that space when your brain is just allowed to be, that's where creativity lives. So I protect uninterrupted time like it's a resource. Number two, I don't trust myself to multitask. I used to think that multitasking was a superpower, and it's not. That's what the research shows. It makes me feel anxious and busy, and I don't actually get more done. So now I actually say it out loud in a lighthearted way. I tell people I'm not a multitasker. I can't even follow a recipe if my husband is talking to me while I'm cooking. And I do this at work, too. If I'm looking in a child's ears and a parent asks me a question, I'll say, can you ask me that again in just a second? And honestly, this is working out great for me. Number three, I use voice or in person conversations for anything emotional, because text takes away your tone, and that changes how we interpret meanings. There's research that shows the exact same message is rated as more thoughtful and empathetic if you hear it as a voice recording compared to reading it as a text. So if something matters, I never text it. Number four, I am intentional about not always being available because it's not just our attachment to our phones that's the problem.
- [28:01]
Jeff Woeser
It's.
- [28:01]
Dr. Wendy Hunter
It's the expectation that we feel like we can be reached at any time. There's workplace research showing that people who feel pressure to respond after hours have higher stress and a harder time disconnecting from work even when they're not working. Your nervous system does not fully rest if it thinks that it might be interrupted. So put those phones away. You do not always need to be available. Number five, I treat sleep like it's a non negotiable thing. I have a bedtime, I stick to it. It's between 10 and 11pm and it's not optional. We know our bodies release melatonin like clockwork. And we sleep great when we respect that rhythm. Yes, screens do interfere with that. We know that. So the goal is to put your phone down about an hour before bed. But here's a twist that most people don't know. As we get older, our eyes filter blue light better. So adults are affected way less than kids by blue light. But not true for kids. Their healthy eyeballs let in all the digital light. So that means this matters even more for them. Number six, I pay attention to how I use social media, not just how much how I use it. Because passive scrolling affects your brain differently than active engagement. Research shows that when we're scrolling, just watching and consuming, we have more anxiety and lower well being. But if we're interacting, commenting, connecting, it's way less harmful. So it's not about the time, it's about how you're using it. So pay attention. Number seven, I train my attention like a workout. When I go for a walk, I force myself to notice small details. The color of a flower, the shape of a leaf, the way the light hits something. Because attention is something you can make stronger. There are studies on expert bird watchers that show changes in their brain. They have a better ability to notice detail even as they get older, their focus is better. Just because they're a bird watcher, they chain their focus. What you practice, your brain gets good at even focus. And there's even research showing that mindfulness practices like meditation or just chilling out can improve things at a cellular level. It actually increases the enzymes that are linked to protecting the ends of your chromosomes. And for you nerds out there, I'm talking about telomerase number eight. I prioritize real world experiences over digital ones, especially for kids. Our brains respond differently when we live something versus when we watch it. Real life interactions create stronger emotional responses, better connection, better memories. So the takeaway here is simple. Watching life is not the same as living it. This is not about getting rid of screens, it's just just about being more aware of what they're replacing in our lives and making sure we protect experiences that matter. I want to say a huge thank you to Jeff Woeser for such a thoughtful and eye opening conversation. He's also funny. You can find more about his work and how to connect with him in my show Notes if this episode made you think about your own habits or your families, send this to a friend who's figuring this out too. We're all navigating this together. For more from the pediatrician next door, find me on the web@ pediatriciannextdoorpodcast.com if you've got a question about the weird things kids do, send an email to helloediatriciannextdoorpodcast.com for a chance to hear your voice on the show. I'm Dr. Wendy Hunter and I I'm the Pediatrician next door. This show is produced by Red Rock Music. Make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever it is you're listening. I'll be back next time with more.