Ep 213: Screen addiction: how can we prevent this with our children? With Dr Nicholas Kardaras

In this flashback episode, we are revisiting my interview with Dr Nicholas Kardaras (episode 100) to discuss screen addiction and children. 

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is an Ivy-League educated psychologist, an internationally renowned speaker, and one of the country’s foremost addiction experts.  He is the CEO and Chief Clinical Officer of Maui Recovery in Hawaii and Omega Recovery in Austin, Texas. A former Clinical Professor at Stony Brook Medicine in NY where he specialized in teaching the neurophysiology and treatment of addiction.

Dr. Kardaras is the author of the best-selling "Glow Kids" (St. Martin's Press, 2016), the seminal book on the clinical, neurological and sociological aspects of Technology Addiction (Smart Phones, Video Games, Social Media, etc.).  Dr. Kardaras is also the author most recently  of "”Digital Madness” where he further discuss the tech addicted world we live in and the harm it poses to our youth. 

He has written for TIME Magazine, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Salon, The NY Daily News, and FOX News, and has appeared on ABC's 20/20, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, FOX & Friends, NPR, Good Day New York and in Esquire, New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. He was also featured on the 2019 A&E TV series “Digital Addiction” and his 2016 NY Post Op Ed “Digital Heroin” went viral with over 6 million views and shares.
Considered a leading expert on young people and digital addiction, he's clinically worked with over 2,000 teens and young adults and has been active in advocating that screen addiction be recognized as a clinical disorder akin to substance addiction. As a result of his clinical training and expertise working with tech addiction, Dr. Kardaras has developed the most comprehensive treatment protocols to treat this emerging global problem. 

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Hi everyone, and welcome back to your child is normal. I'm your host. Dr Jessica Hochman, I hope you all had a great holiday weekend and a really nice Thanksgiving. So today we're doing something a little special. We're revisiting one of my favorite past episodes with Dr Nicholas carderas. Dr carderes is one of the country's leading experts on technology addiction in kids and teens. He's an internationally known speaker and the author of two best selling books, glow kids and digital madness, which have really shaped how many of us think about screens and childhood. I wanted to bring this conversation back, because screen time has only become more central to everyday parenting. We're all still trying to figure out how much is too much, what's normal, what's harmful. How do we set limits without constant battles, and how do we help our kids build healthier relationships with technology? What I love about Dr carderas is that he offers clear and practical guidance, both with big picture advice and steps that families can actually use. So now on to my conversation with Dr Nicholas carderas. Dr cardars, I'm so excited to have you here. I've been reading your books. I'm a big fan, and I so appreciate your time, and thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Can you tell us? Who are you? What kind of work do you do? So I'm a psychologist who specializes in treating young people, young adult mental health, and I've done a lot of addiction work. I've done a lot of mental health work. I've been a college professor. I taught at Stony Brook medicine for about 10 years. I was doing a lot of school district work, I was doing a lot of private practice work, and I was also doing a lot of work running treatment programs. And it was about 10 or 12 years ago that I became one of the first mental health experts. I guess that really started noticing the dark side of the digital age and how it's impacting mental health. So I wrote a couple of books that the first one was glow kids, that became very popular. It was in, like, that's in 13 or 14 languages, and that was one of the first Paul Revere, you know, danger, danger, this trouble of brewing that really started pointing out that there were some some issues that we needed to start being mindful of, because I think most of the adults in the room, most of us, were too smitten by our love affair with technology to realize that it was impacting young people. So that'll coalesced in me opening up a treatment program in Austin, Texas that specializes in treating what we might call young adult distress that looks like a combination of tech overuse and mental health issues and sometimes some self medicating with substance overuse and and it's really young people not able to thrive. I'm not really able to really manage life on life's terms and so, so that's my last 20 year background, just a clinician that's worked with young people, that's been pioneering some of this work, I find what's so interesting is your story, because you came, you came to your field, not directly. You had a different career first, right? I took the scenic route. Yeah, yeah, when I got out of college, I graduated a long time ago. I'm older, so I got out of Cornell back in the 86 and worked in the hospitality field. I was a restless young person who was kind of, I guess you might say, existentially, adrift, like many young people. I remember having seen the graduate with Dustin Hoffman my senior year of college. And kind of relating to to the Dustin Hoffman character and all my friends were going to, you know, investment banking training programs in Manhattan or graduate school, and I tripped into the hospitality field. And so I was working in the restaurant, Night Club World in New York, in lower Manhattan, in the, excuse me, mid 80s and 90s, and fell into some bad habits as as empty young people without direction are prone to do in their lives. And so, you know, addiction became a part of my own story and and pretty, pretty devastatingly. So it almost killed me and my own journey to recovery, which included treatment and 12 Steps and all sorts of things in between, that getting to the other side of that struggle was what led me to go back to school and get my own degrees and being able to help other people. So I definitely put on, I guess today we call it lived experience. I've had some lived experience with struggling as a young person, which I think has only benefited me in identifying and working with it today. And that's actually what I was going to say, is that I feel like you're different. I feel like for most people that I talk to, that scream about the negative, harmful, addictive effects of screen time, because you've actually lived through addiction, and you've come out on the other side. You've come through it honestly, where you know the negative effects that addiction can cause in someone's life and the benefits of coming through it. Yeah, and I think that was one of the things, because I'd been through addiction experientially. I. Was able that's why I think I was one of the first psychologists that started seeing it on the horizon in another manifestation. Because addiction, by any other name, is self, it's it adversely impacts or crushes your life. And while my addiction happened to be substance related, I started seeing this new process, addiction, or behavioral addiction, but it had all the same diagnostic features. It had all the same devastating features. And so maybe that's why I was one of the able to sort of pick it up in the societal ether, more than some of my colleagues were at the time. And that got some pushback initially, you know, initially, because, again, as I said, most of us were too busy saying, gee whiz, Isn't this cool? Look at my iPhone, and not realizing that, you know, little Johnny and Susie were were unable to leave their rooms, or developing all these psychological, pretty severe issues and and not aware of it, under aware of those issues. And can you describe? I think a lot of us know, or we think about it. But what are the ill effects that you've noticed in kids that use too much technology? You know, if we look at this like an onion, the outer layers of the onion first and foremost. And we know now that the devices and the platforms are baked to be habituating. You know, we've, we've pulled back the curtain in the social dilemma and some of the other documentaries, some of the repentant big tech moguls have admittedly said, you know, you know, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, had said, Look, this is designed by this is I'm sorry, addiction by design. This wasn't some accidental byproduct. So the big tech folks knew very well that to best monetize their products, they had to increase engagement. Engagement was the name of the game, and engagement was all about using really sophisticated behavior modification techniques to make their platforms habit forming. So there's a dopamine reward loop that happens. So, you know, we like the little dopamine tickle that comes when we get likes, or when we level up in gaming platforms, or when we get that validation that happens when we get that stimulation. So, so the price of admission to this digital world is habituation. And then part two is, what does that habituation lead to? What are the psychological byproducts of that habituation. And so clearly, depression is the first, most obvious one, you know, and we're seeing the younger cohorts. The younger more connected the generational cohorts are, the higher rates of loneliness and depression that are reported. And so what, to me, what was really fascinating was when you looked at the generational cohorts, starting at Baby Boomer and Gen X and millennials and Gen z's. As you got younger and younger, you started getting significantly higher and higher rates of psychiatric unwellness and and the younger you were, the more plugged in you were, the more depressed and reportedly lonely you were. There was a loneliness epidemic happening, one out of five Millennials saying that they don't have one friend. And when you go up the ladder with baby boomers, people were much more socially connected. And that was that went counter to the narrative, right? Because the Kool Aid that we were being sold was social media for social species. Species. It should have been this amazing thing. It should have been like chocolate and peanut butter, a wonderful combination. But in fact, we saw that the opposite was happening. It was an illusion of connection. And so people started realizing that we weren't evolutionarily designed to be sedentary, screen, staring, isolated, not face to face, communicating and and what really was the proof of concept of really my The sky is falling. When I wrote glow kids in 2016 was covid. Covid bought everybody indoors, quarantined and screen dependent. Screen time doubled and depression tripled during covid. And so we started seeing that these effects were really pretty significant. And then beyond depression, there was developmental issues. You know, if you were giving a child at those really key milestones, 2345, years old, from two to 12, highly immersive, interactive and dopaminergic screens, we were seeing clear research that was showing the ADHD effect, that we were creating a generation that was going to become intentionally challenged. So we've seen spiking rates of ADHD because we've overstimulated young kids during key developmental ages. So as you know, the best thing for children developmentally is hand eye activities, building blocks and working with their with their hands, to be able to not only develop those neuro synaptic pathways that develop those skills, but attention, like language, is a developmental window, and when you start flooding those children's developing brain. Begins with the bells and whistles of hyper immersive and hyper stimulating screen time. You now create a profile of a young person that becomes stimulation dependent. So a lot of parents that I work with are like, Oh, Johnny doesn't have ADHD when he's on his computer, there's laser focus. But then when you know the old thing is, take away the computer, and Johnny's literally bouncing off the walls. So it was depression, it was ADHD, it was anxiety levels. You know, the screen, even though it was a stimulant, also had a sedating effect, a hypnotic effect. So now you started having kids and young people and adults who were using screen time to self soothe, to kind of calm them down. And again, like any benzodiazepine, you can get overly dependent on it. So now without the screen, you can't calm down. And finally, were the mind shaping aspects of technology, depending on how young you were. Now, what we're seeing is, you know, pretty large spikes in personality disorders like borderline personality disorder. Clearly, we started seeing also some psychiatric social contagion effects, where, in the influencer world of digital media, which is the world that our young people are living in, that's their social environment, is the digital world, you really started seeing really, really popular psychiatric influencers, the dissociative identity disorder crowd and borderline personality disorder influencers on Tiktok, the Tiktok Tourette's phenomenon were literally billions of views for three or four Tiktok influencers that had Tourette's syndrome, and then you started seeing that their followers, typically adolescent females, started, now, consciously or unconsciously, mimicking some of their psychiatric distress. So, so, so these were the multi faceted impacts that were happening, you know, all at once in this mass experiment that we've been conducting. It really hit home when you talked in your book about the dopamine, the dopaminergic effects that screens are having on our brain that it acts similarly as anything that we really crave, as rewards, like eating a lot or sex or any engagement that drives humans to feel reward that screens are similar even more so correct. Yeah, you know, I think what woke up a lot of people was there was really clear fMRI brain imaging research that really started showing your brain on screens looked exactly like your brain on drugs. Did you know? So the dopamine reward is the it's the neurotransmitter that's most associated with any kind of addictive disorder, and typically, we tend to associate that the more dopamine activating or dopaminergic any kind of experiences, any kind of substances, the more the higher the potential for addiction. So things like craving, foods like chocolate, have a 50% increase in dopamine. Sex has 100% dopamine spike. Cocaine is a 300% dopamine spike, and crystal meth has a 13 100% dopamine spike, and that tends to correlate with how potentially habit forming they are. Now there's a lot of different addiction ideological theories. There's also genetics, so some people are predisposed towards liking that dopamine tickle more than others, potentially depending on childhood variables, trauma or genetics. But certainly the The culprit is, is how dopamine activating some of these experiences or substances are, and what they found is that screen time was right up there with a sexual experience. It was 100% dopamine activating, excuse me, and this was a study back in 1998 by Dr cope in Nature magazine. And it showed 1998 video games, which were yesterday's generation of stimulation. This was like, not quite, you know, pong or Pac Man, but it wasn't Grand Theft Auto either. They were as dopamine activating as a sexual experience, except worse, that because people were able to engage in these platforms for hours and days, I've had clients who were involved in these different experiences for multiple days at a time. So so the dopaminergic effect was exacerbated because of the length of time that people were playing it and weren't on them. The brain imaging research that was also really clear that a lot of people also saw, was that you saw frontal cortex abnormalities that mirrored addiction, substance addiction. So you saw a shrinkage in the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which is our decision making, and the prefrontal cortex is our executive functioning. It's what allows us to not be impulsive. It allows us to do the if then thinking, and anything that shrinks that part of your brain makes you more vulnerable towards impulsivity. So chronic substance abuse is a double whammy, because if you're addicted to a substance, the more used a substance, the. The more your ability to just say no to the substance gets compromised. Because you're more your decision making center is compromised. Well, we saw the same thing happening with screen time. The decision making centers of the brain were getting were physically shrinking. It was called decreased DGM, the dense gray matter of the brain was physically shrinking as a result of screen time, and most people had a hard time understanding that, because you're not ingesting anything, how is it neurophysiologically affecting us? But of course, we know that things affect our brains that we don't have to just swallow. Trauma affects the brain. Our experiences affect our brain, and this was one of them, and I can see it. I mean, I see myself like there's such a pull to look at my phone. And I think I didn't have a phone until, you know, the last 1015, years. And I think about my children, how are they going to focus on their homework if they have the pull of a screen next to them? I mean, I had a hard time in high school staying focused, writing essays, doing my homework. How are children these days going to do what they need to do with that strong pull towards the digital world? I feel bad for them. That's a good way to look at it. We need to ask ourselves if we, as the adults in the room who have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, because, as you know, that part of our brain develops fully in our mid 20s. So here we are, ostensibly with fully developed brains, both of us and we have, I mean, I know I have a hard time with my phone. It's, it's gravitational pull can be very strong. So how do we expect the seven year old or the eight year old to be able to moderate that usage? That's the problem we we don't fully grasp how problematic this may be for people in a lot of folks who aren't parents, they see things through the lens of their own experience, and they don't really grasp that. You know, when the child is really vulnerable, they don't have the neurophysiological hardware to to moderate or to manage. And so you're setting up a kid for failure when you're trying to set especially very young ages, when you're trying to say, Well, only have your, your hyper arousing sexual equivalent to sex device, for only 30 minutes, and then just stop, just just, just put on the brakes at 30 minutes, it's it's almost impossible. So, so yeah, we need to understand that through our own lens, again, by appreciating how tough it is for the adults to be able to manage some of these things. And what I like about the work you do in the books that you write is you made me feel nervous. To be honest, I was scared after reading the beginning of especially digital madness that learning about all the harms that screens are doing to us, to us as a society, to us individually. But I also like that you offered hope that you have solutions, ideas on how to pull away from it. I'd love you to share the story about your dad, how he was so resilient, even though he had such a difficult childhood. Yeah, and this, this goes back to one of the impacts that I you know we haven't really mention is that, you know, any child that grows up in the digital bubble or in, you know, digitally lubricated lives, well, how does this impact their you know, things that we know. Because I like using the phrase having a strong psychological immune system, right? And a sexual immune system includes things like resilience. You know, Angela Duckworth, a psychologist who's written the book group talk about grit, what develops these, these really important skills or traits that we have that really help us manage life. I mean, we all have to have this psychological immune system. And to me, it also includes things like the ability to critically think, the ability to, you know, I use a philosopher warrior paradigm, you know, the wisdom critical thinking and ethical awareness of the philosopher and the grit and resilience of the warrior, both not just physical grit and resilience, but an innate sense of that and young kids that are raised today, who are essentially living in this instant gratification bubble, living in this binary polarity of social media. Because the other thing that people under appreciate, I mean, we're living through the most polarized political times right now on the societal level, and so we're seeing people that are extremely on either side of the political divide, and one of my hypotheses is this societal black and white thinking has been driven by our immersion into social media, which in its DNA is baked in to be polarizing, because they call it an extremification loop. But in this, the understanding of big tech was that engagement is driven by emotional reactivity. And that emotional reactivity comes when, when what, what the algorithm thinks that you like is, is regurgitated back to you in an amplified way, because eventually we'll get bored. And so they have to keep amplifying and amplifying the intensity of the content, whether that's political. Content or what have you. So now you create this sort of what you rarely see YouTube videos or anything that are nuanced or thoughtful discussions. It tends to be the real emotional hair on fire content, and that does something to us, both individually and societally. So we're this very black and white, very reactionary, very emotionally dysregulated society right now, and so the kids that are growing up through this cauldron of emotionality are highly reactive, highly emotional, highly triggered. You know, the stereotypical Safe Space trigger warning population that we stereotype, but the stereotype but the stereotype is based on reality. I was a university professor for 10 years, and you saw each progressive cohort was getting more and more capable of even handling University content, and so I contrasted that with my father. You know, my father was a World War Two. You know, he was 14 when the Nazis invaded his village in Northern Greece and saw some pretty horrific atrocities. And had a walk barefoot from, you know, it was a two day walk from northern Greece to Athens, and saw the adult men in this village lined up and shot and killed. And, you know, trauma with a capital T and and in a certain way to his benefit. You know, we understand that that being exposed to adversity can be a really an important thing that that most human beings have to go through, because through adversity comes resilience, and when we don't build those muscles, when those muscles are allowed to atrophy in the easy chair of digital leisure. There's there's a problem there. And so we have young people who are now not leaned into their resilience or not been not had to struggle. And I blame, to some degree my field as well. I write about this in digital madness, where the therapeutic industrial complex, to some degree, has fed into the problem. We've demonized adversity. You know, there's the whole aces paradigm that adverse childhood experiences and and then, you know, I think it's a slightly, well, not slightly. I think it's a flawed model, because the ACES model that looks as at the boogeyman as being childhood adversity as the problem, but if the intervening variable that gets missed is developing coping strategies and the abilities to be able to deal with that adversity is actually it's the old Nietzsche saying that that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And now, of course, there's there's adversity that is the tipping point that could be traumatizing and crosses that threshold where I'm not talking about severe sexual abuse or things like that. I'm talking about, you know, being able to metaphorically fall down and pick yourself back up without being helicopter parented or bubble wrapped in a way that becomes unhealthy because, like the child that isn't allowed to be exposed to germs in their environment, they don't develop a viral or a healthy immune system. And I know many pediatricians advocate you know, don't, don't put your child in a bubble, because that's not going to allow their immune system to thrive. Similarly, with from a psychological standpoint, let's let our kids scrape their knee and have to work through that, because that's healthy for them, but that's not been happening over the last 10 to 20 years as much, and the digital cocoon is part of that. I think about that all the time, because, as you mentioned, we're living in this world where teens are depressed and anxious more than ever. And I think about contrasting that was someone like your father who really saw true trauma. And if you think about it, the time we live in now is probably easier than it's ever been. I mean, I know we just went through a pandemic, but really it's, it's the times are the best they've ever been. You know, life is really generally easy in a comparative sense to what your father went through or prior generations. You know, everywhere from prehistoric man through the middle ages through our parents' generation, we're living in comparatively easy time, and yet we have young people who are paralyzed oftentimes. I mean, I've worked with some young clients who just really paralyzed by life, unable to cope. And you know, again, it's a bit of a stereotype rooted in reality, but things like words and language are traumatizing. You know, if you can't, I hate to say it, but you know, always at the forefront or the vanguard of our culture is humor, right? And now we have cancel culture and and folks who you know really can't handle language. And you know, Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor, writes about this in his book, The coddling of the American mind. And this is this back to, back to about 2010 2012 the iPhone and the iPad in that that time frame, that was when university and university administrators started. I. Identifying Well, students started saying that certain language or words were now triggering and traumatizing, and administrators are charged with the safety of their students. So now they started developing the safe space trigger warnings environments to protect students from these ostensible harms. And so rather than saying part of the university experience is to hear Opposing Viewpoints, process that intellectually challenge it, engage in debate the Socratic dialectic. Now we're going to wrap you in a warm blanket and insulate you from a word that or an idea that you might find challenging. And so when that cohort made it through university, by the time they landed into the job market, they were entirely ill equipped to handle an irritable boss or the demands of a deadline or all those things that you know, people have traditionally had to work through. This generation was now suffering from increased depression and and unable to unable to cope, and wound up in vicious cycle mode, by the way, going then deeper and deeper into the digital world where there was, there's a lot of escapism. The one part we haven't talked about is the escapism people have always, historically escaped through drugs and alcohol or other means. But now it's push button escapism, where if you can't handle life and life's terms, I can just lose myself in my digital rabbit hole and off we go. That's very true. I think a lot of people listening to you say that could probably relate to those words, right? Yeah, it's life's you come home and life's you get a stressful day, you just go on Tik Tok or whatever the social medium of your preferences and lose yourself absolutely right? You know, it's not, you don't hear about it as much. But, you know, seven, eight years ago, Second Life was, was kind of a more of a thing, too. And you heard a lot of stories, and there was a lot of, you know, Second Life was a platform where it was essentially a synthetic, digital alternate reality, where you would pick an avatar you if you hated your life, you could create an avatar that could be a rock star or, you know, a movie star, and living, you know, amongst other avatars in the synthetic landscape. And there were people who would come home from work and would plug in and live their essentially Walter Mitty fantasy world in Second Life, and spend their entire non working lives in this virtual reality because it was a more palatable reality than the lives that were their actual lives. And a lot of the gamers that I work with in my treatment program in Austin, their gaming is a sort of a version of that. It's, it's the profile is I don't feel empowered in my life. I feel dead end. I feel depressed. My life kind of sucks. I don't have social connections. I don't have meaning or purpose in my life. But when I play Final Fantasy 14 and I'm a galactic warlord conquering, you know, universe zeta, I feel empowered and I feel a sense of purpose and meaning. It's all fake, but it feels real. You feel important. It feels like meaning in your life, but it's all a fantasy, right? So sad, actually? Yeah, I was just thinking when I was a kid. Do you remember that saying sticks and stones can break your bones, but words will never hurt me? Yeah? What happened to that saying? I think that was Dave Chappelle title of his last stand up with sticks and stones. I think that was his last title, exactly because that same went out the window where we were supposed to be able to manage language, but language now became, you know, violence and, yeah, there's hate speech, but it was, again, we've become extremely thin skinned to our psychological and societal detriment. Yes, so that's what we're that's what we're. People like me and people who run mental health clinics are kind of picking up the pieces. Where? But what do you do if you get, if you work with someone who this is so baked into because this has been a long, slow, burning development, you know, if you have somebody that's from the time that they were born. Were raised this way. These are, you know, these are not easily fixed. This isn't like depression and take a happy pill. These are kind of the way the person's become essentially hard wired. And so how do you redo the wiring to make them less so? So it's challenging, and that's where we talk about things like dialectical behavioral therapy for long periods of time, and to try to try to change the course of history in that person's life so that they're not in this state of mental unwellness. And I think it's so helpful that you are bringing to light all of the negative effects and things to think about from living in a digital media world. But what I also really appreciate about you is that you offer hope, that while you bring the negative aspects to light, you also give solutions and ideas on how we can do better and how we can as a society, come away from that. So for parents. Listening. What would be some general advice you would give if we want to raise our kids to be more resilient? I mean, the first one would be delay. Delay, delay. Because prevention, in this case, is, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You know, once, once a young person's kind of crossed that tipping point when they need treatment. I don't want to say it's too late, but it's a lot easier to prevent the problem than to treat the problem. So what we find is that we have better outcomes the older that kids are when they get exposed or given their own portable devices. So my first advice to most parents is don't drink the Kool Aid that your infant needs to have an iPhone and an iPad, a Chromebook in the crib, or two years old, or four years old, you know, because part of the Kool Aid that we drank, part of what we were told was screen time can be educational and and that, I think a lot of insecure parents felt that this was sort of a digital arms race. And if little Johnny and Susie didn't get an iPad, and by age three, they were going to be behind, right? That's the buy I hear from most parents. I didn't want my child to be behind. And the reality of it is that these devices are so idiot proof that you know, you don't, you know, no one's going to be behind. You know, because we know. Not only did Steve Jobs not give his own kids an iPad, but when you read about the most powerful minds in big tech, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google boys and Jeff Bezos. There were Montessori students. You know, they were the opposite of a high tech child. So first and foremost, if you can delay, delay, delay, you know, there's a wait until eighth movement, where parents wait until eighth grade to give their kids phones. And, you know, of course, your kid's gonna work on the computer at a desktop and then that's what I have, a 16 year old twin boys now. And you know, in middle school, they had a desk, you know, they had a desktop computer, but wasn't in the room. And we gave them phones. Mom, in seventh grade, we gave them a gap phone, which was my listeners who may know the gap phone doesn't have Wi Fi capability, so you can't do social media or gaming, but you know you're also not, it looks like a smartphone, so you're not going to be you're not you're not going to get stoned in the classroom by the other kids who are stigmatizing you. So delaying is the most important thing. Now, if, if, if you haven't had the chance to, and this is in the night, get it. Most parents are trying to do the best that they can for their kids, and if you were, one of the parents who did give your two year old the tablet, it's not too late either. You know, you could still also pump the brakes later in life, and the key is to just try to backdoor in countervailing activities. Now it's a challenge, because once a kid becomes habituated to the hyper arousing, immersive realities of their screen world. It's harder to get them to want to go out and play baseball or play musical instrument because the gravitational pull of the device does is more powerful than playing the violin. So ideally, you bake in some of these other interests earlier on and rather than trying to introduce them later on, because, hey, don't play the World of Warcraft, because here's a violin you could play. It's going to take you three years to learn how to play, and that's not an attractive sell to some kids. But nature is the other part of it. You know, engaging in nature activities and camp and outdoor nature is the antidote to the indoor child and and, and I write in my book about how we evolved from the 70s into the indoor child. Parents became very fearful because of 24/7 news cycles that developed in 1979 1980 was CNN, and as Ted Turner invented CNN, and all of a sudden we had, instead of half an hour of News, ABC, CBS and NBC, we had 24/7 news cycles, and they had to fill those hours with, well, with the old news axiom, if it bleeds it leads. So a lot of it was fear news that terrified parents of child abductions. So all of a sudden, parents who became fearful created a short leash for their kids. And now the evolution of the indoor child developed, where most of us of a certain age were raised as outdoor kids and just be home by sunset or be home for dinner. That's changed. Now kids are just tethered to a screen device. Fearful parents feel that their kids are safe indoors, where meanwhile, we know that there's all sorts of predatory things happening on the computer. That's so true. It's worse, worse being home on your screens, potential for danger. What gives me hope is that I'm seeing that there's a younger generation of young people that are beginning to own their autonomy. For example, what I find to be one of the most effective tactics when working with a 16 year old or a 19 year old who feels that they want the right to be able to game or be on their device a million hours a day or whatever. No young person likes to be told what to do. Every young person has an innate sense of independence. They want to be you know, what they perceive as a rebel or and when you pull back the curtain and you explain to them how they're being monetized and exploited and really just a commodity by big. Heck, when you provoke that sense of really, you think you're you think this is your choice. You have very little choice in this whole experience. Then you get a sense of like, what I'm being I'm being played like that. And if you can create that sense of of pushback from a young person, there's a grassroots movement of young people who are going Luddite, who are getting flip phones voluntarily, not through it via their parents, who want to own their autonomy. And that's good to see, because they're beginning to get that this has been a mass not only a mass experiment, but also a mass enslavement, but in a certain sense, you know, waiting online at the, you know, the Apple Store, you know, for two days for their next generation of phone to come in. I call it a form of Stockholm syndrome, where we've been enslaved. You know, we're Patty Hearst to the news Liberation Army, but now we've, we've fallen in love with our captors. We've deified Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and and you know, Elon Musk are all you know, they're, they're the rock stars of our society, but they're the ones that are keeping us in these digital cages, these sugar coated digital cages that we've been trapped in. So if you can get a young person to see that you're in a cage right now, and there's a whole great big world out there, there, we want to help you experience you want that dopamine to be experienced with the wind blowing in your hair by riding a bike or playing a sport or or just being with other people, the dopamine that comes just by face to face interaction. No, I love everything you're saying. I mean, first, it's so true. I can feel it myself. When you pull back the curtain and you hear about the group think that's happening, it does make you want to pull away from the screen. So I think that is such a good tactic. I agree, educating the youth on what the potential negative effects are, and what I find so interesting to back up what you said about delay, delay, delay, delay, that's exactly the same advice that's given for alcohol and kids. That's now the message that we give to children is delay, delay, delay, because of the addiction potential. And I'm just thinking about what you're saying the beginning, about how it's the same interaction on our brain as any kind of addiction. That's, it's, it makes sense that it would be the same advice if parents could begin to conceptualize their devices as being very powerful pieces of technology, and I analogize sometimes with like a car or an automobile. I love my car. I don't think my car should be banned, but I don't think my, you know, when my kids were seven, they shouldn't have gotten the car keys because they weren't developmentally at that stage yet. So we have to begin to start thinking about age appropriate technology. And so when I go to an airport and I see a two year old, you know, just with and they're like in mission control, the headset, the screens in their face and and, and the parent feels, you know, it's the digital babysitter, let's face it, and the parent, if they only realize how much they're stunting their child's natural urge. You know, there was that one study recently with children with infants, rather, ages two to four, who weren't able to play with blocks. They didn't know what to do with blocks anymore because they were being so used to being stimulated. If you're exposing children that young to screen time, they're they're being wired just to seek stimulation, but they don't know how to self soothe or create their own entertainment or do their own thing. They're just these vessels that are stimulate me. And when I worked with some of those kids, as they've got older and adolescence and young adulthood, they are profoundly easily bored. There I call them not interesting and not interested. They have no innate curiosity, and nor are they very interested in conversationalist because they've just been consumers of entertainment. They've been entertained since cradle to college. And if it's not entertainment content, God forbid it's a book that they have to, you know, use their minds. It's engaging ideas that might challenge their paradigms, boring. So it's so true, and I think I'll hear that from my children all the time, I'm bored. If I have them turn off the computers or turn off their screens, they'll tell me, I'm so bored. I'm so bored, I don't know what to do. And honestly, oftentimes, my husband and I will make them go outside in our backyard and we just say, you got to figure it out. So that's, that's the other Thank you for saying that. That's the other antidote, you know, because they one of the antidotes to this whole problem is, for some reason our generation is so uncomfortable with our kids being bored, like, you know, we have to have the five TVs on the car, because, God forbid, the kids got to, you know, have a conversation while they're sitting in the car. But there's a boredom movement. There's this idea that boredom is wonderful for children because it forces kids to then be creative, right? Because creativity is what builds neurosynaptic pathways that are really powerful. So if your child is bored, now he's got to play make believe and. Now your child's got to pick up a stick. And now the stick is a sword or or they got to create with blocks. And so once your child starts creating, and so boredom is the mother of invention. And those are the things that we've been robbing of our children because the kids at the airport staring at the visual imagery that visual content is being created for them. They don't know how to use their imagination anymore, because their imagination has been is being drilled into their heads for them. So again, when I've worked with 16 year olds that have been raised on screens and you ask them draw me a picture, or you ask them to write me a story, blank stare there, but you know, now that we're beginning to wake up as a society, now we're like drunken sailors out of waking up and having the hangover, we're realizing, Oh, wow, maybe that, maybe this vendor that we've been having with digital media, you know, there's, it's wonderful. It's great, you know, but we've got to put some guardrails in to protect the more the more vulnerable. Yes, yes, no. And what I find interesting too, is I talk to parents about the ill effects of screen times, and they are aware of them, but they have a really hard time setting limits, like when push comes to shove and their kid is asking for the screens, they have a really hard time saying no. I say this all the time. It's hard to be a tech cautious parent today. You know it takes more effort. It definitely takes more effort. So it's much easier to raise the white flag and say, Okay, here's your device. You know, it's much easier to to fall into that the long term. You know, it's short sighted parenting, because, okay, you'll quiet the savage beasts for that short period of time, but you're again, you're like, as I said earlier, creating this dependency on simulation. So you're, you're, you know, that that volume will work, but if you take it every day, you're going to get dependent on that Valium. And so that becomes the problem. And that's what we're doing with our kids. It's sedating them. It is doing that for the period of time, but it's, you know, but being proactive and finding those alternate activities for our kids to do. So then the big one also is modeling what we preach. You know, we can't tell our kids to be off our devices if we're head deep. You know, there's a thing with neglected parenting where a neglected child has worse outcomes than an abused child, and so this digital neglect that's currently happening, what they found is that a child experiences neglect more profoundly if you're in the room than if you're not even around like it's a little bit older now, but especially when they're younger, you don't want to be in the living room with them on your device, tuning them out while they're trying to pull out your pant leg, or they're trying to get your attention, because then the internalized feeling is that thing is more important than I am, and then that becomes internalized as a not very good sense of identity for that child, because it's better if you weren't around, if you went out to the store to get a groceries, the child perceives it as okay. There's some other activity that's happening. I'm not feeling the rejection as profoundly as I am when my parents is five feet away from me and they're ignoring me. So that's interesting. That sense, if you really have to do some work related screen time, go to your office, go to the car, close the door, but don't do it while you're sitting next to your child, because that gets internalized in a very unhealthy way, so better to finish your work at work, stay late, maybe right then come home and be fully present with your kids. 100% Yeah. And I am interested too. You mentioned that your influence from philosophy also helped shape the way you think about screens. I love when you mentioned about Plato and going on walks and how that's where he did his best thinking. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on your influence from ancient philosophy. Yeah, and just in my struggle with addiction, you know, I had studied philosophy more, you know, Western Civ, 101, back in my undergrad days, but I really found it more experientially powerful. You know, anybody struggling with an addiction issue faces this existential crisis, who am I? What am I? And you have to really lean into that exploration. And it was a key part of my recovery, quite honestly. You know, in philosophy, you don't necessarily have to answer the meaningful questions, but you have to ask them. And in that journey of searching comes certain growth. So the idea is to become more self reflective and self absorbed. And in our selfie world, we're much more self absorbed and narcissistic than we are self reflective or compassionate. And so philosophy teaches us a few things. It teaches us both the maybe the nature of existence. You know, there's the cosmology and ontology the nature of being. Who am I at my core? Those are important explorations for people to find deeper intrinsic meaning, rather than meaning through extrinsic leveling up video game worlds or how many likes or views you have, having a core sense of identity that's informed. By a value system that is meaningful for you, and philosophy has a roadmap on how to develop that. And again, critical thinking civic responsibility, you know, it's this idea of, you know, caring for our neighbors and how we are all members. We're all in the same lifeboat together and caring about thy neighbor. And what you're seeing in a lot of digital media, the byproduct of a lot of digital media immersion is self centered narcissism. And when you think about it, it's almost a sense of magical thinking. This is I've really, truly come to see it as this too. Think about a kid, eight, 910, years old, and we have predictive algorithms that feed us what we what the algorithm thinks that we want. If you're a kid and you search for something on Google, and all of a sudden, everything in your digital world starts reflecting that search. It's almost like a form of Magical Thinking, because in the digital world, the world is created and curated in your image, and so the world does revolve around me. Some of them think that they are there. They're again narcissistic there. They have very little compassion for other people. It's a lot of it's all about me. Ism and philosophy comes at it from a different perspective and and can help at least start a dialog of like, true values and what's really meaningful in the world. And I think about how you mentioned the importance of serving others, how that gets you out of your head, and it's an antidote to feeling like life doesn't have purpose or meaning. We're up against such a challenge. If kids are at home and on their screens, how are they possibly serving others in a meaningful way? Yeah, that was part of the beautiful part of 12 step programs. You know, 12 step programs is a lot of addiction tends to be about, you know, the behavior Look, can look very selfish, and oftentimes it is because, you know, the the addict is serving their own addictive need and sometimes to the sacrifice of their loved ones. And it can be very selfish addiction. Can be very selfish pursuit. And then 12 step world you step in, and all of a sudden, one of the mandates of a 12 step program is helping another person that's one of the steps. And it shifts the lens from navel, staring looking inward to how can I help another human being? And there's something magical that happens when you start helping other people. It puts things in perspective and and that's where a lot of the work we do in my Austin program, Omega recovery is group centered for the for the first time for a lot of these young folks, because a lot of them have come out of covid they were doing like remote schooling. Their colleges were remote. And now we're putting them into groups, and we're forcing them to work together, to care about one another. These are all new experiences for most of them. It's amazing part of the healing process, amazing. I am so impressed with the work you're doing. I am so impressed how you've personally grown your story, I think is really fascinating, and I'm so proud of you, honestly, to come out of an addiction, from such a low and then to have written two books, to have a recovery center, You're so thoughtful on these really important issues. So thank you for all that you're doing. Thank you for trying to raise awareness about all these issues and trying to do the work that you do, which I think, you know, we all need to be wrong in this boat together, because it's going to take a concerted effort from people like us to sort of awaken the the digitally drunk society that we're in, to kind of, you know, sober up and to kind of say there's more to life than than this glowing screen. So thank you for what you're doing. Oh, absolutely. And please tell us about your recovery center. Tell us. Tell us about the program that you offer in Austin. Yes, it's called omega recovery. We've been there now for about six years. It's it's residential and also outpatient. So about half of our clients are from different parts of the country. It's six to eight weeks. It's but people have stayed longer. And it's really, it's, it's the profile, I would say it's for failure to launch young people set age 17 to 30. So if you're a young person who's not thriving, typically, the profile looks like somebody who did well or okay through high school because of the parental hovering or helicoptering. And then when they went off to college, they just fell apart. They either didn't leave their dorm room, they started either they would stay online all the time, they would either self medicate a little too much, they would fall into depressions. And those are all bi directional forces the depression would feed the more screen time, the more screen time would feed the depression, maybe a little self medicating to top it all off. And so typically, they would flunk out of school, or they would wind up back home in mom and dad's basement and unmotivated and capable of getting a job, and just now what? And so that's a that's the basic profile of our residential treatment. Program, and those are tough cases to work with, and that's why I'm a big advocate of delay, delay delay, because you want to really address that issue before you get to that point, you know, before somebody's life kind of, and I've worked in some extreme cases where, you know, really almost like a form of catatonia, where the person was they come into our treatment program, almost zombie like, unable to communicate. And then I've had clients who've had derealization, depersonalization, where they didn't know there was it looked like a form of psychosis. The I've had, I write about this in Glo kids. I've had clients who've had gaming induced psychotic breaks, where they thought that they were in the game, and the predatory algorithms that attack young adolescent girls body image by sending them hashtag 100 calories or less, or skin and bones, hashtags and and because it's like looking at a car wreck, it's it's, if you've got any body image issues and you see something that's going to exacerbate your eating disorder, you can't look away. You can't look away, even though it's making you worse. The evil part was their own internal research, as Francis Hochman demonstrated by pulling back the curtain on their internal emails, they had done their own research showing increased suicidality, 12% increases in suicide in British girls and 6% in American girls because of Instagram. Hey, should we dampen down the algorithm and make it less predatory? And the response was, hell no, that'll decrease engagement. Yeah. So, you know, harmful by design, profit over people. Profit over people. So true, and I'm I'm thinking, too for typical treatment centers, like if you go to a drug rehab, the answer is to be sober, but it's really, yeah, abstinence is the answer. But how can you truly be abstinent with screens when they're everywhere? I mean, that's such a challenge, and that's where it's very similar to treating an eating disorder, right? If the problem issue is somebody with an eating disorder, we analogize it like this all the time. You know, the person that's developed a disordered eating profile, they can't be food abstinent. They have to develop first a healthy relationship with themselves and then a healthy relationship with the problem, substance, food. Interesting. Similarly, you might need to be abstinent from if you're a gamer, and your brain is now wired itself that you're going to get that same dopamine high. If you've, you've hardwired yourself to be compulsive with your gaming. You might have to be gaming abstinent, but not computer abstinent, right? You could research a paper, and you could do all sorts of other entertainment on a computer. If you have, you could watch movies, but gaming is your third rail, all right, so, so you might have to be gaming abstinent, but not necessarily, but, but it's challenging because, you know, you get on the computer and it's like asking an alcoholic to be sober in a bar, you're right close to the action every time you open up your screen, so that that's one of the biggest challenges With this whole thing, finding the balance right? Yep, wow. Thank you so so much. I just appreciate the awareness that you brought on this issue, and I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing, and thank you for having me and and onward and forward with with our collective fight. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Ask Dr Jessica. Also, if you could take a moment and leave a five star review, wherever it is you listen to podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It really makes a difference to help this podcast grow. You can also follow me on Instagram at ask Dr Jessica. See you next Monday. You.