What the Mental Health?!
What the Mental Health is your new go-to podcast for insightful and relatable conversations about everything mental health. From everyday struggles to deeper emotional challenges, your hosts Nathalie and Tori break the stigma and bring real talk, practical tips, and expert insights to help you navigate life’s mental health journey. No topic is off-limits — because mental health matters, for all of us.
What the Mental Health?!
Our Kids Are Paying the Price for a Phone-Based Childhood
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About this week’s episode
Smartphones and social media have fundamentally reshaped childhood, creating an anxious generation struggling with skyrocketing rates of mental illness and disconnection. Through Jonathan Haidt's powerful book "The Anxious Generation," we explore how this technology impacts developing minds and what parents can do to protect their children's mental health.
• The significant correlation between smartphone adoption (2010-2015) and declining teen mental health
• Why teen girls are particularly vulnerable to social media's negative effects
• How smartphones disrupt four foundations of healthy development: independence, social interaction, sleep, and focused attention
• Personal struggles with setting phone boundaries for our own children
• The challenge of being the parent who restricts phone/social media access when "everyone else has it"
• School-based solutions like phone pouches and technology-free zones
• The importance of modeling healthy technology use as parents
• Strategies for developing media competency in children
If you're a parent, teacher, therapist or just someone who's ever caught yourself doom-scrolling at 2am, this episode offers insights into building a healthier relationship with technology.
Support the show:
WTMH is a self-funded podcast.
- Become a supporter of the show! Starting at $3/month
- Please follow, rate and review the podcast.
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Tori Press
Nathalie Himmelrich
Welcome to what the Mental Health, the podcast where we have real honest, messy conversations about what it means to care for your mind and heart. No topic is off-limits mental health matters, and talking about it is where healing begins. If you like our podcast, we'd love if you'd subscribe, left a review or share it with a friend in need. We are a self-funded podcast and we'll be grateful for your support. If you can spare a couple of dollars per month, it will go a long way to help finance this podcast. You can find all the details in the show notes.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Can you say that again please?
Tori Press:Oh yeah, I was saying I'm a mess.
Tori Press:I was saying that oh, what time is it for you? So it, so it's 8 am for me, so it's like six for you, 5 pm for you, okay, so yeah. So I just two minutes ago shoved my teenager out the door to her carpool ride to her school and um, yeah, I'm just getting my bearings. I feel like every time we meet I've just been through this whole you know busy morning getting the kids out to school Haven't had more than two sips of coffee. It's so weird, because you're at the end of your day and you're just, you know you're ready to wind down.
Nathalie Himmelrich:What do you imagine my place is right now, or where I'm at?
Tori Press:Oh, I imagine. I mean you have a Buddha statue in the background, right? So I imagine it's very calm and serene, like I always, but that's, but that's the impression. I mean, that's just how you are right. Like you, you have this calmness and serenity about you. So I just associate that, like your, your home, home is that way because I've been in it, but I just assume you're that way all the time. But I know, I know, but I know you also.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I tell you... I just arrived 15 minutes ago back from the train, from the other work, commitment and meetings that I had all afternoon and, I'm thinking, 5pm. Are we meeting today, or is that the day that Tori said she couldn't do? It's already 5pm. Do I still have the energy? So this is the ideas we have like. In the morning I would be much more um, energetic and blah, blah, blah. So that's that. What the health?
Tori Press:Mental health we need, we need to what the hell we need to swap times. I'm an afternoon person. I'm an evening person. I have so much more energy then, which I feel like I'm energetic right now, but you should see me at 5 pm well, 5 pm would be really difficult, because that would be, it's the middle, but how long does your energy last in the night? Oh, I crash out probably around eight or nine, as soon as my kids are going to bed. I'm done for the day, that's me okay.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So that doesn't fit with our time difference because we have I know you said eight or nine o'clock in your place well, probably, but now it's eight or nine.
Tori Press:That's still right now okay so nine hour time difference.
Tori Press:So if it's 8 pm, your time, it's still quite yeah, five in the morning or no four in the morning for you yeah, no, no, it's fine, I'm not complaining, it's just um, I, like I said, I don't think there's a better time. I think, um, I just feel like, yeah, but I feel like I bring that energy every time, um, but you make a very good point, like we're all busy. You have a, I have a busy day in front of me. You have a busy day that you're wrapping up. You know, um, I do have a hard stop today at nine, just to let you know. Perfect, yeah, I do we've already started recording.
Tori Press:I know, I know, oh man, life is just that way, right? Do you ever hear the phrase I heard somebody say once life is, or like being an adult is just saying well, maybe next week things will calm down, over and over and over until you die. Wow, well, maybe next week things will calm down. Well, maybe next week things will slow down a little bit.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Is that what you believe?
Tori Press:or no.
Nathalie Himmelrich:It's what I say to myself, though so do you say it often enough that you believe it?
Tori Press:maybe, maybe I'm trying to get into myself. It's true, I think, in my heart. I know that it's not true, but it's, it's almost like it's it's this self-deception that we're so good at as humans, right, um, like um. I think I've maybe talked to you before about the buddhists, the five remembrances, yeah, uh, let's see. Let's see if I can remember them off the top of my head. I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. I am of the nature to grow. I cannot escape death. I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age. I am of the nature to have ill health. I cannot escape being sick. All that is dear to me and everyone that I love are of the nature to change. I cannot escape being separated from them. And number five is my actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Did you just read that somewhere or do you know it by heart?
Tori Press:No, no, I haven't memorized because it's really important. There are the five remembrances. It's just really important to. There are truths that we all know innately, everyone. You know this in your bones, in your soul. We know each of these things are true and yet, as humans, it's so easy to gaslight ourselves into like not thinking about it or not believing it it's. You know, we all feel immortal from time to time, or we all feel like, oh, that's a problem for old people, I don't need to worry about it, I'm not old, even though, you know, every year getting a little older. It's just, they're uncomfortable truths that people don't like to think about, and so we tend to manage to, you know, forget them in our day to day life. And that's why they're the remembrances, because they're true, and you better remember them, okay, mom did you just really know that by heart?
Tori Press:yeah, I did, I really yeah, I'm impressed.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I would also be impressed if you just read it off chat gbt or something.
Tori Press:I'm still impressed no, no, that's uh. Oh, I'm gonna embarrass myself because I always get his name right wrong, but it's tick, nick han. Is that it? The vietnamese the? I know which one you're talking about. Yeah, I'm gonna say I I really apologize for butchering his name, but anyway, it's an old saying, but he rewrote it in a way that I think is very poetic and beautiful. But, yes, it's very easy to convince ourselves in the bustle and hustle of the day to day that, like we're doing things that are very important and you know, everything is really in the instant that you're doing it. Everything is crazy. That's demanding your attention. This is so important. I have to do this. And like, the truth is, you know, in the face of all these major truths, maybe the stuff we're working on day-to isn't all that important. Maybe we're convincing ourselves it's more important than it is.
Nathalie Himmelrich:But I think what we're going to talk about today is important.
Tori Press:Yes, shall, I do it. Tell me what are we going to talk about today? Can?
Nathalie Himmelrich:I do an intro spiel and you can see. If you want to talk about it, sure, yeah.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So welcome back to What the Mental Health?!, the podcast where we dig deep into real stories and science behind our emotional well-being and that of the next generation. So today we're diving into a conversation that's become impossible to ignore.
Nathalie Himmelrich:What has the smartphone, or that tiny device in your pockets, really done to our mental health and, more importantly, what has it done to our kids, teens and adolescents? We're unpacking all of that through the lens of Jonathan Haidt's powerful book the Anxious Generation, which explores how the rise of smartphones and social media have fundamentally reshaped childhood and led to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression and disconnection. And led to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression and disconnection. So if you're a parent, teacher, therapist or just someone who's ever caught yourself doom-scrolling at 2am, this episode is for you. So we'll look at how we got here, what's at stake and what we can do to build a healthier, more connected future, both online and off. So grab your coffee or put the phone down and go for a walk and let's talk about the anxious generation.
Tori Press:Great topic.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So, as preparation, first of all, last time Tori spoke to me about the book and said oh, this is a really interesting book. So I have been not reading, but audio listening to the book, and it's a great read. I can recommend it to anyone. What stood out for you, what would you say, was the thing that made you recommend it to me?
Tori Press:Oh man, I mean, I just think that you know, so I have to say this book was painful to me to read, so for context. And you know, so I have to say this book was painful to me to read, so for context. My children are 11 and 14. And so in a lot of ways they're sort of older. In a lot of ways we've already screwed up with the phone stuff let's just put it that way. Like, in a lot of ways I've already.
Tori Press:I'm reading this book and I'm like, oh, I've already done this and this, and he's telling me not to do this, but I've already done all of these things with my kid, you know. For example, he recommends not giving your child their first smartphone until age 14. Well, my 14-year-old got her first smartphone when she was 12, just as an example, and but I think it's really it's, it's like what I I mean. Well, so one thing that I really like is that Jonathan Haidt talks about that. He's got older kids too, and so he's in the same boat with you, you know, especially if you kind of feel like you've of the phone in your kid's life. So I think he offers a pathway even to those of us who have older kids, but you know it rang true for me in my own experience with my children.
Tori Press:I saw firsthand how much giving my 12 year old a cell phone impacted her mental health. I saw how much it caused her to start isolating in her room and not interacting as much with her peers. I saw her getting more anxious and depressed and you know I don't want to go too much into her personal mental health history because that's her private business. But we can say that, like directly tied to when she received her phone, I saw a steep decline in her mental health. That was very, very concerning.
Tori Press:So you know, just based on my own lived experience this guy knows what he's talking about and based on seeing my children's friends, their peers it's universal, it's happening everywhere, every friend that I talk to, we're all sort of experiencing the same thing and it's just so different from my childhood experience, the way that I grew up which, for context, I'm in my mid 40s, so I was a teenager in the 90s using dial up Internet, aol, and you know that was huge at the time, um, but just the level to which we have taken our social interactions, um out of you know the 3d world and put them online. It's just a scale that I don't think anybody ever imagined, definitely unprecedented and definitely having an unprecedented effect and what's important, in the mental health of our kids, exactly.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So for those who haven't read the book, just a bit of context. So Jonathan Haidt looked at how mental health has declined or what the impact was of the introduction of smartphones, and so he argues and he's got the data basing, that is not just his opinion that the adoption of smartphone and specifically social media, especially between 2010 and 2015, which is when the smartphones really got a hold and also came into the children's hands, create a great reviring of childhood, sort of mentioning the play-based childhood versus the phone-based childhood as those two different ways that children grow up. And so he says that this shift has a profound consequence on young people's development because they don't have as much of the social engagement practice that a play-based childhood or children at that age had. And if we're looking at the time when the phones came and not the flip phones, but when they changed into smartphones this is sort of when it started to happen.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So, for context, my child is 13 and a half and she had her first, let's say, tool or device when she was quite early, quite young. She had an iPad, she looked at videos. At that point she had a phone, but she didn't really got to use the phone as a phone. It wasn't really a thing. She also didn't look at WhatsApp when she was younger, but then, when she was 11, she went to school in the city and in our country, switzerland, she can go by train, by herself. She goes to school, she has the train pass on her phone, and so she started to carrying her phone with her when she was going to fifth grade, 11, no, sixth grade, sixth grade and so. So from that time, she was carrying her phone all the time and in addition to that, she was on a train, and if, if you're on a train in switzerland, most people have a smartphone, most people look at their smartphone on the train, rarely does anyone not do anything or not at least listen with their ipods or headphones. So I think this kind of development I saw for her to emulating those kind of role models that they see, and even though in school that they have to put the phone away for the whole day, at those grades, up to grade eight, they have to lock their phone away for the day until the end of the school, which I think is really helpful.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Um, however, you know, they just still see the older kids and what they do in the break and as soon as there's breaks, everyone's on their phone. I mean, we're, as adults, are not not any good role models in that we're doing the same kind of thing. We've been falling into this trap of oh my god, is this a practical little thing? It's got everything inside, it's got a phone, not just a phone. It's got a camera, it's got a map, everything is there.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So basically, jonathan Hay sort of looked at the mental health decline since the early 2010, the rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm, which have skyrocketed, especially among teen girls.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So he also looks at the difference between how this affected teen boys versus teen girls, which is an interesting part of the book I found, which coincides with the rise of smartphones and social media. So I mean, for me it has really just underlined the things that I see with my daughter. I give you an example just this morning as an example, she goes out of the house to go to school and at that time I say goodbye to her. At the door she already has her headphones on and she's already checking on the phone what music she wants to listen to. She is a big music listener, but she doesn't engage with me anymore and I said take off your headphones or look at me, and then she says, mommy, it says I'm connecting, connecting, connecting because she hasn't chosen a song. But it's that kind of thing that they, they are just so tied into that thing making noise, giving them constant dopamine rushes, and we have to be honest, we're, we're not any better. I mean, for us it's the same.
Tori Press:I mean, we know this, like having um, having a phone just out at the dinner table. It's just like even the presence of a phone, even if you're not looking at it. If it's just there, it's a distraction because it's just sort of always saying hey, hey, I might go off, I might have a notification for you, there might be something here that you're interested in. You know, which is why I really like one of Jonathan Haidt's recommendations is and my kids actually do this in their schools. So my children are both at the same school. It goes from sixth to 12th grade and they put their phones every day in a little pouch. It's a brand called Yonder Y-O-N-D-R. I don't know anything about them other than they provide these pouches that lock and they can only be unlocked at a station. They have a particular station up at the front desk at school. So every day everybody goes into school, they put their phone in the pouch, lock it. A teacher checks it on their way in and it does not come out of the pouch until the end of the school day. They have to take it by the unlocking station and I know that you can't unlock it at home because I've tried. My children have accidentally locked a device in there before.
Tori Press:And actually my daughter, my younger daughter, does not have a phone but she does have a smartwatch, because you make a good point as soon as your child is old enough to start navigating the world on their own. If you live in a city I live in Los Angeles my kids take more of my older one, but you know public transportation, um, and just walkable neighborhoods, so they go and you know they walk to the thrift store, they walk to the gas station to buy a snack. You want to be able to be in touch with them. It's important for safety and inconvenience as a parent, um. So we've kind of circum, we've, we've circumvented this problem with my younger daughter by getting her the watch. It's not nearly as tempting as the phone. You don't have fun apps or games on it, you're not connecting to social media, but I can call her, I can text her, I can reach her if I need to and she can reach me. But I really like that. They put even the smartwatch whether it's a watch, a phone, whatever they lock it up and put it out of sight.
Tori Press:The smartwatch, whether it's a watch, a phone, whatever, they lock it up and put it out of sight, because I think what's so important is just the recognition that it's not enough to simply put your phone in your pocket or in your bag because you know that you're going to be able to access it at class, you know, between classes or at lunch, or you might even sneak it out and check your texts. It's just too tempting. And I tell my kids this is a device that's designed on purpose to be as addictive as possible. They want you to be using it as many hours a day as possible. That's the point. And so there's nothing wrong with you for having a hard time putting it down. We all do. Like you say, we adults are modeling the same behavior. It's really hard because it's addictive. So I think like that's a big part of it I'm kind of jumping from topic to topic here, but I do think it's a really big part of it to like acknowledge how addictive these devices are. And then it's not anybody's fault. Like I tell my kids, when I'm putting restrictions on your phone, it's not a punishment, it's not because I don't trust you or I don't want you to have any fun and I don't want you to connect with your friends. And I'll say this.
Tori Press:Another of his recommendations is that kids shouldn't start opening their own social media accounts until 16.
Tori Press:And I do have the only child. My 14-year-old is the only one among her peers and I don't know of anybody else who has prevented their kid from getting social media by this age. She's turning 15 in a few months and it feels awful to be the parent who's the outlier, and she's like literally all my friends are on it. They're all communicating with each other on social media. You know I'm the only one who's left out and we've just had frank discussions and I've said look, you know, for all the things I tell you about how addictive the phone is, social media is like 10 times worse. So your brain just has to mature a little bit, and I know that whenever you get together with your friends or your girlfriend, you know you're looking at social media on their phones. That's fine, it's no problem. I know you're going to do it. I just don't want you to have your own account where it is singing that siren song to you all day long from your own pocket.
Nathalie Himmelrich:It's true, your own pocket, it's true, you know. So we're using custodial for our child to um decide which apps she can use at what time, to have different time slots, which um decide which things can be used. It's a continuous thing and we're still trying to figure out because sometimes she can use more than the daily um allocated time. By the way, we we don't get any funding from those things that we've just mentioned. It's just things that we're using. So I mean I don't control these things. It's my daughter's two dads, or her bio dad and her bonus dad, who are looking at the usage because, honestly, it just overwhelms me, just I can't do it. But one of the other things which I found really useful that came out maybe five or even more years ago, a film called the Social Dilemma I don't know if you've seen that which really explains how the phone is made or the apps and the social media are made to keep you engaged, to keep you engaged longer, to want you to come back, to give that loop of addiction, and attention is the new currency, exactly the attention economy. So we're giving up our time and these people benefit from our time on the smartphones by showing us advertising. I mean my daughter. She had YouTube, so she watched a lot of YouTube shorts and then she said, mommy, I don't want to watch that many. So we took it off and she wanted Pinterest and we spoke about Pinterest before, but then, on Pinterest as well, she can watch all these videos, or not all, but some less. But she told me about all these advertisements that she saw. This is a boring ad and like where do you see this? A YouTube short somewhere? Okay, but it's, it's that thing where. So some people might not know, and I want to just elaborate on that, because of the maturity of young people's brain, and specifically the prefrontal cortex not being matured until they're 25, they're much more susceptible to those kind of addictive streams of content that they get. So, yeah, and that is, you know, like this is how the smartphone has shifted in terms of being a teenager and sort of.
Nathalie Himmelrich:He mentioned four different areas that that are sort of sort of core foundations to healthy development which are undermined, apparently, which is independence and free play in personal social interactions, sleep quality and focused attention. I mean, my daughter has ADHD, so I don't have a bar as to how her attention would be otherwise, but definitely, as I can see in myself when I use Instagram for myself and for business. There's this thing that I can just spend time and then realize how much time has gone by. And whenever we are bored, what do we do? People pick up their phones. They rarely pick up their phones. Actually, we shouldn't say people, it's because it's we. We are people too.
Tori Press:Yeah, we all do. Well, we all do it and you know I've explained to my daughter too. You know I have a social media account. That it's.
Tori Press:I am currently not on social media really in any capacity. I have a. I work for a plumbing company doing their design, branding and creative, so I do access it for that, but that's it and which is actually funny. I'll tell this short story. You're talking about Ananda May looking at the ads on YouTube shorts and I actually I felt a little like a villain myself recently because I work for this plumbing company and I was working on some ads for Facebook and Instagram and I was working on reels and you know we're trying to get people to remember who we are so that if they have a leak or a clog, they'll give us a call.
Tori Press:But as I'm working on these videos, you know my mindset doing the creative work and typically my mindset is like what do I want to express? What message do I have here? But when you're making an ad for this attention economy, it's much more. It feels nefarious almost to me because I'm thinking well, how can I like trick people into not clicking away from this ad for as long as possible? I feel bad saying it that way, but it really is. It's like what's going to be the most captivating hook that'll keep people watching this until the end.
Tori Press:And you know, maybe it's only five seconds long, but it really put me in this mindset of like realizing that I'm really trying to capture and keep people's attention and that's what's so valuable. Yeah, and it's the way of the world, and I think it's like I don't think there's any shame or any wrongness right in being a content creator if that's what you do and you know working on like using this technology for business, but I do think we have to to. It's like our responsibility as people to be aware and especially as parents you know, who are custodians of our children's mental health, um, you know to be aware of the effects and what's going on, what it's doing, not to me, what has what really hit home was the part about the effect it has specifically on girls.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I mean, we both have girls, but that girls, more so than boys, are affected particularly by the impact of social media due to the social dynamics, due to comparison, exclusion and online bullying, and more so girls versus boys Boys apparently more into online gaming. I mean, that's generalization, but that's how the studies came up, that's what the studies came up with and that to me, I mean even just the amount of content that you see that is gearing girls into a certain direction. Like my child, she's not interested in makeup, um, but there's a lot of girls at that age who are a lot into beauty trends and they learn which is nice, a lot. My daughter also learns a lot from from youtube or did learns a lot, but it's also the things that might not necessarily be at the age where they have to learn it.
Tori Press:Yeah, you have 10-year-olds doing like Sephora, you know, shopping sprees and then showing off all their buys at Sephora and they have like products with retinol and you know, like whatever hyaluronic acid in it and it's like you don't need any of these. I need these things, you know, but you don't because you're 10 years old, you're 11, you're 12. Um, you know. So my, my older daughter actually also was recently diagnosed ADHD. Um, uh, and you know a couple other diagnoses.
Tori Press:And you know, I just see how, how I feel like the phone just fractures that attention even more in to the conversation and say like hey, because your brain is wired just a little bit differently from like a typical brain which I'm not sure what neurotypical truly means but like we have to be extra vigilant about protecting your time and your brain from the effects of this device. And you know, and it's hard and honestly I think that as a parent, we keep talking about that, we're doing all the same things, and I think one of the best things you can do as a parent is to model the you know, more appropriate phone behavior, which is hard, and it's why I had to delete Reddit off of my phone, because it was just too hard for me. I couldn't, I just couldn't avoid going to that app and clicking that button and starting to scroll. It's just. I'm not on social media Facebook, instagram but I am on Reddit and yeah.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Yeah.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So, maybe let's go ahead and be really honest about what is it. What are the things that we do that we know is perpetuating that cycle? You know what's our our thing and then as well, what we're not doing. So not to just assume that we're doing so much I mean, we're talking about this, but in in my case, one of the things that I know in in myself that creates addictive behavior is if I start to watch a show on Netflix that is interesting and it's not too drastic.
Nathalie Himmelrich:For example, the latest one I watched was Orange is the New Black and, okay, it has, like I don't know, five or six seasons and 13 episodes in each. So it took a bit of a time for me to watch. And because it's there, it's on demand, there's no thing that makes you go weekly. And so at some point my daughter asked me mom, why are you allowed to watch so much video whenever you want? I'm like, yeah, that's actually true, it's actually a good point. And you know the facts that I noticed. I mean, first of all, whenever I gave myself a break from work, I would sit down and watch an episode. I wouldn't actually listen to my body, who might be needing rest, sleep or whatever. It was just okay. I'm going to give myself a break. And I started watching a show and so one episode turned into two and sometimes I would get tired. So it's a perpetuating cycle and because it's interesting, I just kept on it and you're overriding your body's natural communication with you you're, and I mean even at night.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I mean I have a partner who I like to fall asleep with, so that doesn't really make me go and watch more videos, but some nights that he was away I would watch these series and it was interesting for far longer than my body actually would have wanted to go to sleep. So, honest, this is the things that I know I'm getting addicted to. It's interesting for me because one of the things I did from the film Social Dilemma, I turned off all the notifications on my phone. I mean that's something I didn't even realize before. I wasn't aware of it. My daughter is much more phone savvy already than I am, but at that time I turned off all the notifications and I have it on silent all the time Now. I mean I have a smartwatch, so when it rings I feel the vibration and I look, but I don't have a sound on my phone at all. That makes a huge difference, because when I hear other people's thing go, ding, ding notification, it's a clear thing of look at me.
Tori Press:Yes, it's your attention and it fractures whatever you were working on in the moment. That's in. I don't know about you. I actually we should do an episode on neurodiversity at some point, because I am very sure not very sure, but I do think I probably have undiagnosed ADHD myself and it's and I really you think. But it's really hard for me, you know, it's really hard for me to get into a solid flow state with my work to begin with and then if something fractures that time it's just it takes that long it might take me 20, 30 minutes to get back to where I was. So like one ding on my phone can cost me 20 minutes and it's just like what. My computer just turned off randomly but it's back now.
Tori Press:Exactly, and my thought, my, my train of thought is broken and I was actually just going to come back with a whole new thought, which was I started, I started talking about when I had I have a large Instagram account that has like a fair number of followers and that I, you know, was very active on between like 2017 and 2021, 2022, been a little less active the last couple of years, but I would get really in my head about even on a week to week basis, sometimes in my worst gosh. I can't believe I'm like admitting this out loud to a lot of people, but like I would check on the number of followers I gained or lost every hour some days, you know, like just checking constantly to see how's the account doing, who shared my post, who likes this one, and then it becomes like well, this post didn't get as many likes as the last one and so this content isn't good. People don't like it. I shouldn't have posted that. It was bad.
Tori Press:And I just start, you know, judging not just the quality of my work but, I think, because creative work is very much an extension of myself and who I am. It's a deep personal self-expression. So it started, I started judging myself and saying, well, I'm not very creative, that wasn't very good. I'm not very clever, whatever, and I was in my 30s. You know, I was in my mid 30s and, having had a pretty analog play based childhood myself, and I was having all of these thoughts that were so disruptive that I was talking to my therapist about them every week. And, you know, ultimately, ultimately, I really couldn't disrupt that line of thinking it, I just was too in my head.
Tori Press:And that's actually one of the major reasons why I have taken an extended break from social media, because I can't be on there without judging every single like and share and whatever I get, and reading the one negative comment in the sea of 50 positive comments and thinking the one negative comment is the true one and everybody else is just lying. You know that sort of thing. And that's a full on adult. You know, maybe not the most like mentally stable adult. Okay, still a grown-up who's pretty functional. Um, I mean, a 13, 14, 15 year old doesn't stand a chance.
Nathalie Himmelrich:They don't stand a chance, yeah because, even though our brains are at the place where they are fully grown, fully capable, it doesn't make it in the sense different that our authoritarian voices are still speaking through that. So I mean online culture platforms like Instagram and TikTok. They promote unrealistic standards. They make it that you addictively scroll because you want to find more or constantly compare, and that harms your self-esteem and your mental well-being. That doesn't matter, because our brains are fully there. It just feeds into those underlying authoritarian voices that we have.
Nathalie Himmelrich:What am I doing wrong that I don't get more likes? I haven't figured it out fully yet. And to me, what happened? It's already a few years back.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I said I had a divorce with Facebook because I realized how much time of my life, of my working life, I was calling that working life. I was on Facebook and doing all these things, continuously posting, and I have a page with 25,000 followers on Facebook and the people that are helping me with, with what I'm offering. Otherwise, they say, oh, you should harness your social media platform. I'm like it takes a lot of my life, which I'd rather just keep speaking on podcasts with you or with my guests. I mean, really do I want to spend that much time and so on Instagram, where I post about my podcast, yes, I'm there, but I'm not a good model at all because I post not enough or not the right way, or I don't know. I actually don't know and I don't want to know enough, because that means hustling even more and I really rather have a good podcast conversation or a good podcast lesson.
Tori Press:Natalie, I'm scared to release this podcast because it means that I'm going to have to get on social media to promote it, and I really haven't still found my like, happy, healthy place and happy, healthy way of using social media so much, expressing these things that were like deep in my heart and soul that I wanted to share about and express, and I just nothing was better than talking to people who could really relate to what I was saying. And, you know, just normalize so much of these human experiences that you know I talked about there and that we're talking about here. But I'm, I love it. And yet I can't stop the addictive, self judgmental part of my brain from just kicking in and activating every time I even open the app. And so I'm really scared to release this podcast and have to get on social media to promote it. I'm really not looking forward to that part. Maybe we'll figure it out All in.
Nathalie Himmelrich:On the project and maybe we'll figure out a way to do that. But I think you know, one difference that we can see, or I can see, between these young girls that we're shepherding and us is that we are seeing what's happening and we're taking steps away from, I mean, my daughter saying I don't want to watch that many YouTubes. I was quite astonished because otherwise she's really good at perpetuating her own um fun or um dopamine brushes that she needs or things she needs, um, but there's, there's ways that she's quite emotionally and otherwise mature to see. Okay, that's not doing me so well, but I mean we are able to just say, okay, what am I doing?
Nathalie Himmelrich:For example, for me, since that next Netflix, I don't, since that Netflix Netflix show that I watched, I consciously didn't start another one because I and I didn't even know that Orange is the New Black was interesting. Until I watched the first thing, I was like actually it's not that bad, because first of all, with the title I was not impressed. But I consciously didn't start a new one because I felt, ok, I don't want to be, I don't want to get roped into another one that I binge watch.
Tori Press:Yep, yep, and they're so good at that because, you know, I, I mean, I think, what, what was the first show? I feel like it was like 24, back in, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, maybe. 24 with jack bauer was like the first show that came out that, like every single episode always ended on a cliffhanger, and that was back in the day where, you know know, you still had to wait to the next week to see the episode, right, so you couldn't just go on. And then somebody over at Netflix, when they started streaming, producing their own TV shows, figured out like hey, we can end every episode on a cliffhanger and release them all at once. And then you have, like you know, you end up with an eight hour block of people binge a whole season of a show in one day Not me because I have kids and I can't, but my friends who don't. It's like that's just a totally normal way to spend a Saturday. And I'm not saying that, I'm not envious.
Tori Press:But it's also, you know, it's really gosh if you sit and think about the number of ways that we're being manipulated and our attention is being manipulated kind of scary.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I also want to look at the solutions he proposed and see if those are possible and what we think about those. I mean the first one, and you already mentioned delaying giving smartphones to and social media access specifically until the age of 16. Well, my daughter already has a phone and she will never give it back, so that's not going to happen.
Nathalie Himmelrich:But I think what can we do until then? And for me and this is also what I teach is media competency. So to say, ok, well, what does it mean? For example, she comes home and she's constantly listening to either music or stories or podcasts. Now, I think that's not bad. I mean, we listen to radio, CDs, lps we also did listen to music, but she has access to the world and she listens to a lot of podcasts. I don't think that's a bad idea. But what I'm trying to teach her is don't keep your phone in reach, put it somewhere away. And the good thing is I have my partner is into energetics and he can actually measure the frequency and the radiation of the phone and what kind of influence it has. And he has looked at it with her, shown her that when the phone is away two meters and more, it has. And he has looked at it with her, shown her that when the phone is away two meters and more, it has significantly less radiation.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Yeah, so that impresses her for sure. Well, and then the phone is with her because obviously she needs to change the song or whatever, but as much as possible we are telling her and she's listening to the logical, or you know the cognitive reasons for things to do them differently. So I mean, we have her. Her phone goes off at 7 30 and it goes under the station in the kitchen. She doesn't have it in her bedroom overnight. We don't have phones and devices while we are on the dining table. So there's small things that. And, yeah, she has her dad, who lives with the phone a little bit different, and she's aware that he has less presence with her than I do and she's mentioned that. So to some degree we can only do as good as we can because they're influenced not just by us but by their surroundings, by other people. What about you in terms of that first solution part? What do you think you can do? Given that we're, I mean, your younger daughter, will you give her a smartphone before?
Tori Press:Well, no, so she's. She already knows that she's going to have to wait until 14 for her first smartphone. We've talked about it. There is, of course, that's a hard thing to do, by the way, when you have two kids, because she's like but Claire got a phone when she was 12. And you know, her 12th birthday is approaching in a couple months here and you know well, I'm sorry, it's not going to be you Like, I've learned more.
Tori Press:So you know, we point out that the younger child often gets more privileges earlier than the older kid, just that sort of the nature of things. Certainly she in many ways is, you know, she has exposure to things that her sister didn't at the same age, just because she has an older sister who's doing two older kid things. So that's part of you know. But I said, well, you know, sometimes parents learn and you know you don't get things to work out in your favor. So this is one of those rare occasions. But you know, we've just sort of said it's for your, it's for your mental health. And we point out to her, like, look at how, how hard of a time the other three of us in the family have putting down our phones and focusing on, you know cause she'll often complain Everybody's on their phone except me and cause I don't have a phone. And I say you know what, lucy, you're right, why am I on my phone right now? I want to spend time with you. So I, you know, put it down.
Tori Press:So we've just, you know, we've been, we've been upfront with the kids about the rules and why and why we're saying this, what, where it's coming from, not just like laws handed down from on high for no reason, which is sort of how I felt as a child when my parents would give me rules. And you know, yeah, with Claire, since she's already got one, you know we have time limits, much like you. No phone in the bedroom. We are really trying to do no phones at the dining table. However, it just seems that somebody always brings a phone in their pocket to dinner and then somebody always has a question and we don't know the answer to the question right away. So the phone pops out and we start looking it up. So we're trying to put a stop to that, but it's really hard. It's just. It's not the world that we live in. Information is in your pocket at all times. It's just we're habituated to you know, to looking it up and doing that.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So the other thing he suggested was to encourage more outdoor play and real world interaction, and I find that a bit of a challenge because, just looking at my daughter, she's quite happy to be on her own and like the school life and the social life takes a lot of her energy so that when she comes home she's like, okay, mommy, just leave me alone. And she wants to do some craft, she wants to be on her own, she wants to be left alone and she wants to listen to music, podcasts or things like that, so that I find myself challenged with in her case what about you? And she wants to listen to music, podcasts or things like that, so that I find myself challenged with in her case.
Tori Press:What about you? Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe I don't know how it is in Zurich, but here in Los Angeles I think the issue is that there's just a lack of third spaces for kids that are appropriate. There's a lack of third spaces for everybody, especially when you're a family.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Do you know about the third space?
Tori Press:Okay so. So you spend most of your time at home and work right, but a lot of times people need, you need a third space to go to, to connect with people. That's not work and it's not home, it's not your family, it's just a place to go to socialize, to connect, so that you're not so isolated, as I think a lot of us are, and especially now in post COVID when so many of us work from home. So work and home are the same place, right For a lot of us. So you know it used to be.
Tori Press:Third spaces might be something like a church, like belonging to a church community. We aren't religious, so we don't belong to any sort of a church or religious organization, and I think by and large, less and less people are religious. So that's sort of fallen by the wayside. If you think about I don't know about if this aired in europe, but the old 70s tv or 80s tv show cheers, where they all meet at the bar after work every day, like that's a third space, um, and people really need third spaces for their development as like whole social beings, right, um, but there's just such a lack of that, and kids in particular in a city like I think you know it's different from my now. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. I'm raising my kids in the city of Los Angeles, so it's very different. But I mean it's a different context. But I also think it's just a different world.
Tori Press:More parents are working and so kids aren't like out and about. You know, kids just come straight home from school and go into their house. They're not out congregating in the street or playing in the neighborhood in the way that they used to. They're not like walking to the library together necessarily in the way that they used to. I think that they just come home from school and if they're going to socialize with their friends it's on the phone or the iPad or maybe on video games.
Tori Press:But it's just the ease of digital like communication, the ease of connecting digitally, has sort of replaced, I feel like, this need that we have for third spaces except it hasn't replaced it at all because we need to interact with people in three dimensional space, especially kids, because there's just so much like nuance of facial expressions and tone of voice and energy, like the energy exchange is huge and I feel like we sort of have an energy exchange here. It's nice to run FaceTime or Zoom, and we're seeing each other's faces and you know all those responses. But there is a tangible not tangible, but you know there is an energy exchange that flows between people in in-person spaces and it's I think it's really damaging to the human psyche. I think we have evolved to need that aspect of communication. It's a huge part of our makeup as social creatures and we're totally depriving ourselves.
Tori Press:so when I mean there's a reason that, like they put each other sorry, sorry, just, but you know. There's a reason that, like solitary confinement is a punishment, it's all, it's torture because humans need to connect with other people. But this phone connection is just, it's a facsimile of, like the real thing.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So when are you coming back to Zurich?
Tori Press:I know, I don't know when I'm going to be.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I'm coming to Europe, yeah it's not far.
Tori Press:I know it's not too far. I'll just hop on over from Paris. I wish, just before your train ride.
Nathalie Himmelrich:So the third one in terms of a solution was ban phones from school during day.
Tori Press:So you mentioned that from year 12 till year no year, from 6th to 12th grade at my kids' school.
Nathalie Himmelrich:They all put the phone in those pouches.
Tori Press:I wish that they're both at school with their pouches right now. I would show it to them.
Nathalie Himmelrich:That is really cool so they have their personal pouch that they need to take to school, and what if they forget the pouch?
Tori Press:It's really cool. So they have their personal pouch that they need to take to school. And what if they forget the pouch? If they forget the pouch, then they have to hand in their device at the front desk for the day and then go pick it up at the end of the school day, and they really hate doing that. Even though they can't access it in the pouch, they still like to have it with them. So my daughter gets very upset when she forgets her pouch.
Nathalie Himmelrich:That's a good idea, so you buy them yourself or the school provides them.
Tori Press:No, the school provides them. So one thing is, I think this idea is harder to scale. My kids go to a school where there's about 150 kids per grade, I think, and so it's really small and it's easy. Everybody knows, everybody right, it's just 150 per year by name.
Tori Press:That's the lot. Yeah, oh gosh. I mean compared to. My younger daughter recently switched schools and her middle school that she started the year out was 700 kids per year. Oh my God, 700. So, yeah, so it just depends on the size of the school. You can imagine it's a lot easier to keep track and check individually. You know 150 kids per grade that they put their phone in their pouch because they're kids.
Nathalie Himmelrich:They come in the door and they have to show that it's locked standing at a.
Tori Press:you know they have. They have a lot of teachers and staff that are standing at a podium, I guess you would say. And then you know there's multiple checkpoints and they're just watching every kid. Show me your yonder, and the kids will just hold it up, wave it at them.
Nathalie Himmelrich:Okay, put it back in your backpack and so the kids don't buy a second yonder and put something in there and keep their phone in their pocket. I'm sure that they try everything, but they do.
Tori Press:One thing they also do, though, is they do random yonder checks. So they'll just have somebody just show up in a class and show me your yonder and that your phones are in their yonder, so they open it and look inside. Yeah, I mean, I don't think they open it and look inside.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I'm not sure.
Tori Press:Well, I think I think I would, but I think anybody who's caught with a phone, like if, if a teacher sees you with a phone, that's out of the yonder. I mean it's like they they'll bring the hammer down because this is, you know, yeah, exactly. I like that they smash the phone with the hammer. I wish. I like that um, but you know what's nuts yeah go ahead Sorry.
Tori Press:But, like, what's crazy to me is that the school got pushback on this program. There were parents who didn't want their kids to have the phone in the pouch. So I don't know, maybe that's judgmental, but I just feel like it's so good for the learning environment, I guess. I just feel like it's really hard. It's a very hard problem to solve because you have parents from all different walks of life, from all different places, and some parents really really want their kids to have a phone and they don't want their kids to put it away during the school day, and so it's a collective action problem. Right, I talked about my child being the only one in her peer group who's not on social media. It feels really bad to feel like you're depriving your child of a primary means of socialization that her peers are using, and so I understand why some parents don't want to.
Nathalie Himmelrich:I mean, there's countries who ban phones from schools, there's different countries who go that route and I think that's actually great. I mean, yes, we as parents and educators are there to make community-wide changes, so I think that would be, I would support that. I mean my girl in her class and, as I said, up to year eight they have to put it in a locker in the classroom, sort of like a phone locker. Yeah, but some kids already take a second phone and put one phone in the locker, have a second phone. I mean, they're trying to to work this thing around all the time, or oh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's not.
Tori Press:It's not going to be a solution today, but um, no, but it's important to talk about it and I think it's really important to, like, educate people in a. I think you know, for me, one of the most important things is to educate it. Educate people in a non-blameful way, because I think, at the end of the day, we are all victims of these companies that have been vying for our attention and have been creating devices and apps, um, that are intended to addict us. And I don't know, maybe you know victims isn't the right word we use. This technology is great. It serves a lot of purposes, um, but I think it's really important to keep in mind that, like, it's designed to capture your attention in this way and um, so if you are addicted to your phone, it's not your fault but I think the system is working as intended.
Tori Press:I think what?
Nathalie Himmelrich:invited me listening to this book was to not just look at my daughter and her behavior but but reflect on my behavior, and I do that anyway. That's sort of by deformation, professional as a therapist, um, but to to look at myself and say, well, where am I falling into the trap, even though I know so much, at the same time not criticizing myself, but also where am I making changes for myself and for her? And I think that's what we're opening this conversation for people to.
Tori Press:Yeah to be continued. There's a lot to talk about here well, thank you for the conversation today yeah, likewise what the mental health.
Nathalie Himmelrich:thanks for joining us for this episode of what the Mental Health. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, we'd love if you'd subscribe, left a review or share it with someone who might need it too. We are a self-funded podcast and would be grateful for your support, so if you can spare a couple of dollars per month, it will go a long way in helping finance this podcast. You can find all the details in the show notes. For more resources and ways to connect with us, check out the show notes. You can find a link there to just send us a message, or connect on IG under Revelatory and my Miss Bliss, or through our websites. And remember you are not alone on this journey. Join us next time for more real talk about mental health. Until then, stay kind to yourself.
