Category Archives: technology use

Ouch! Hey! and, Yay!

It can be hard for parents to make the changes they see would be best for their families. Every good idea seems like a Sisyphean struggle.

Sometimes it’s useful to start very small. Let’s begin with a short, very simplified review of behavior modification from Psych 101. We’ve got positive reinforcement (YAY), negative reinforcement (also YAY) and punishment by application – life does something to you (OUCH), or withdrawal, when life takes something away (HEY!).

Let’s say it is noonish on a pleasant day, I have a break, and decide to take a walk outside. I will enjoy the breeze, the birds singing, a chance to move and clear my head. I will come back to the desk feeling invigorated. I have been positively reinforced. I did an action, or stopped an action, that resulted in something good (my uplifted mood).

A few hours later, it will be about 3 PM and I may have the beginning of a headache. I glance at my water bottle and realize I am way behind on fluids, so I drink a few glugs of water. In short order, the headache dissipates. I have been negatively reinforced: I did a desirable action, and something bad went away.

Punishment, on the other hand, is entirely different. If, feeling a bit bored, I decide to scroll through the news of the day, I might feel depressed and then realize I have wasted my break reading bad news (HEY!).  Or, I may notice the beginnings of a headache and, instead of a drink of water, start with a few chunks of delicious, smooth dark chocolate and then (OUCH) my headache may well get worse.

The point of this little meander through intro psych lessons is that, when making changes, maybe it will progress better if you find ways to start with positive and negative reinforcement rather than what will seem like punishments.

For example, let’s say you think that at least one weekend afternoon of family time without devices would be a good start. Teens and even younger children may not agree. Wrestling their phones and tablets away is feasible, but they will consider this HEY!, and their resulting dopamine withdrawal symptoms to be OUCH for them; their miserable behavior may be a big OUCH for you.  But if a family activity inherently means no devices and then everyone has fun, we now have a big YAY in place the OUCH and HEY! What might that include?

Being outdoors in nature, where devices may not work properly anyway. A movie outing. A museum that requires devices be silent and away. Physical activities. Someplace where there is no phone or internet signal. Or just take a deep breath and impose device-off mode around a slice of a day and spend it in actively doing things that would not be improved by device distractions. Have fun. Don’t lecture about how fun it was (that’s an OUCH). If your kid mentions it was pretty fun, you can agree and take that as YAY – an invitation to repeat as possible.

Hard Changes

Most of us have some changes to make. And most changes are not so easy. That’s why people postpone them, or poke at the edges, or just pretend the problem will go away by itself. Sometimes people convince themselves there isn’t even a problem, really; that it just depends how you look at it. Maybe so. But maybe there’s something that needs changing.

Let’s say you have a teenage child, or a child approaching the teens. S/he is cranky, sullen, uncooperative with chores, sulks during family meals and resists being on time for school and other appointments. S/he wants to spend time alone, in the bedroom, with electronics. The child is depressed and/or anxious and/or obsessive and/or perpetually angry. You know the situation will change, one way or the other. Everything changes. If you do nothing, you are gambling that your child will continue down this road and somehow, at 18 or 19 or 20, wake up, shake themselves off like a wet Golden Retriever and come out of their bedroom, smile and say, “Wow! How could I have been so wrong?!”

Yeah, I doubt it, too.

If you have this situation and need to take it on, it can be hard to know where to start. Here’s a suggestion: if the situation is not a crisis, then the most practical first step may be to start with yourself.

You will have to change. Perhaps you have to start the change process by being sure that all the adults in the house are on the same page in your expectations. Perhaps you need to get yourself on the right path.

You go first. You get enough fresh air, and time in nature, and sleep, and healthy nutrition, and balanced physical activity. You strive to do interesting and challenging things in what little free time you have. You will, quite naturally and incidentally, spend less passive screen time. You’ll be leading from strength rather than being a target for adolescents’ favorite criticism: that we adults are hypocrites. You’ll be in a much better stance to steer positive changes for your tween or teen.  

It’s Just an Experiment

You know how it is. You want to make a change. Something needs to change. Maybe the kitchen needs organizing, or you need to sleep better, or be less stressed…whatever it may be. You want to get it “right.” And that’s where the freeze happens. “Right.  It has to be right.”

But what if there’s no way to know what is right for you without experimenting?

For all the chatter the past few years about science, and following science, there seems to be a misunderstanding of what science is. Science is more of a verb that a noun. It has more in common with, Hey, let’s try THIS and see what happens, than with learning a few things and deciding that’s it – that’s all there is to know.  You can see the difference in real time when SpaceX runs another experiment with the super heavy and the personnel there are excited about how much they’re learning and thus able to improve, while some people in the press call it a “failure.”  No, “failure” would be not doing or, having done, failing to study and learn. That’s failure.

At an individual level, let’s say you decide to take guitar lessons. You have no idea how to do anything with a guitar, but it’s been a long-time dream. Unless you are younger than five, you surely wouldn’t pick up the guitar, strum at it, and wonder why you didn’t sound like Carlos or Angus or Eric or Brian or whomever. You would have to spend many hours, experiment after experiment, building and reinforcing the new neural connections and fine motor skills that lead to the ability to play guitar. You would not call the outcome after the first, or tenth, or thirtieth, lesson a “failure,” properly, unless you gave up in impatient disgust and stuck the guitar in the closet, where it will peek at you through the clothes hanging in front of it and reproach your surrender until you sigh and try again or give the guitar away.

If you are looking at making a change, and feeling stuck, reframe what you are doing as experimenting.  Move the coffee mugs to that cabinet, over there, closer to the coffee maker, and see how you like it.  Buy a battery-operated alarm clock and leave your phone in the kitchen overnight for a few weeks and see what happens. Try turning screens off during meals, or leaving the audio off in the car, for a month or so.

Start the experiment, and then pay attention. That’s a critical part of an experiment. What happens in the absence of the old behavior? What seems better? What’s harder? What is your theory on why it’s better or worse? Can you build another little experiment – not a long-term commitment – on this one? It’s an experiment, for goodness’ sake, not a marriage.  That is science, and that is a way to get unstuck, make changes and work around any lurking perfectionism.

Why didn’t you call me?

The Mystery of the Missing Phone Call

If you leave voicemail and I do not call you back, odds are it is because the voicemail did not come through, or, as sometimes happens due to cell phones, it was impossible to understand.  During 2024, there was a week in the autumn in which my cell phone record clearly shows no phone calls and yet later, several people complained about having called and receiving no call back. Their number popped up showing they’d called during the week in question, but the cell phone call logs of that week showed no such call. These things happen; it is regrettable and out of your, and my, control. If there is no call in a day or so during the business week, please call again! 

If you email me and ask me to call you, I will email back and invite you to call me. Sometimes people find this annoying or avoidant. I have two reasons for this.

First, I cannot be sure that whomever is emailing (or texting) is the person in question. That is why we therapists have requests about not sending confidential information by text or email.  Believe it or not, several times in my over quarter-century in practice, people have left voicemail or email with a name and number that was not their own. They had decided that “Alex” was in need of a therapist. In their imagination, leaving unsuspecting me a message to call “Alex” was a way to have “Alex” unexpectedly encounter a real, live therapist and jump at the chance to make an appointment. This is not how it ends up, believe me. On occasion, people have called and directly requested that I call some family member or friend, and I decline. I appreciate the honesty in the latter case, but it is still inappropriate.

Secondly, I cannot be sure that I will be calling when it is safe and private.

Thanks for calling!

Random Life Lessons

Here, on a beautiful autumn day, are a few life lessons I’ve picked up on the way…perhaps one will be useful to you.

Walking in the morning, before sunrise, can lead to being stopped by law enforcement, who, upon getting a look at me from the front (wrinkles and rosary beads) say things like, “Oh. I thought you were a kid out breaking into cars.”  Wearing a reflective vest and a skort, instead of baggy gym shorts, has solved that problem. Either that or I have succeeded in looking old from behind. The lessons: be reflective and dress appropriately to the task at hand.

Don’t save special stuff for special occasions.  Eventually someone else will just throw your treasure away or it will end up, sad and dusty, on a thrift store shelf. Use it up, whether it’s that fancy cocoa mix someone gave you at Christmas or your grandmother’s crystal. Drink sweet tea out of a fancy goblet.

Not from personal experience (see a prior post about this issue) If you change your hairstyle and/or color on a regular basis, you might not be the best candidate for a tattoo. The same goes if you try to destroy or at least hide any photos of you from five or more years ago because you can’t believe you left the house looking like that.

If there is something you really want to do, and it’s realistic for you, then pick a reasonable time frame (say, one year) and reverse engineer backwards all the way to tomorrow. If you want to achieve “X” – your G.E.D., your master’s degree, a marathon, writing your first book – there will be something specific that you do and/or don’t do tomorrow that is different than yesterday. Then the next day, you will, again, do/not do something different because you have this goal. If it’s your G.E.D., and you want to pass by one year from now, then the first thing to do is look up where to go for information. Then call the place. Then go. Then decide what you will give up to make time to study. Then do that: give up some of that time to study. Learn how to study (a lot of people get to college without knowing how to study; no shaming). And study again and again. Enlist people who will encourage you because it will be hard and discouraging and there will be people who try to pull you off course.

Don’t spend time around people who discourage you when you are trying to become a better person. If you have thought things through, and realized you must change some habit or adopt a new plan for life, and wise people agree it is a good move, then be very skeptical about the motivation of people who try to interfere.

Unless you have doctor’s orders to the contrary, odds are that alcohol is not your friend. Remember when Pinot told you what a great dancer you were at your cousin’s wedding?  Or how some kind of brown liquor helped you straighten out that miscommunication with your in-laws? Yeah, not your friend. Besides, alcohol is eager to share bad things: disrupted sleep, increased risk of cancer (it’s a major factor in a number of types of cancer), dementia, prematurely aging skin and who knows what else. Disclaimer: I don’t drink and I’m not in recovery, which means this one comes from 1) observing life and 2) reading the medical research.

Be wary of people who think it is funny to scare animals. A guest who tries to frighten your cat because it’s “funny” when the cat’s fur stands on end needs to go away and not visit again. This is a red flag, no matter how “nice” you thought this person was. They exert power by terrifying others; is that nice? No. If a five-year-old could easily explain it, I shouldn’t have to say another word.

The above does not include the person who is willing to make an absolute ass of themselves trying to scare a squirrel, bunny, rat, lizard, etc., out from under their parked car so they can leave without killing it. 

Try, if you can, to be patient with people who act as if they didn’t need to let you know about something they wanted you to know about because they put it on social media. Give yourself permission to explain that you don’t spend time looking for something you ought to know on social media. Unless you do, in which case you have bigger problems, perhaps, than missing one person’s newscast.

And, in closing, bear in mind that one person’s life lesson is not necessarily yours…but then again, maybe it could be.

Life-Changing Hacks

Confession: I really dislike the term “hack.” It sounds awful, like a data breach somewhere, drenching the dark web with the personal info of thousands of people. It also used to mean someone whose work was poorly done and usually rushed, or the work itself. Somehow it became slang for “something you can do to make things easier/simpler/better.”

So be it, then.  In the spirit of openness (in which I score extremely high in personality tests), here are seven “hacks” for a happier life:

  1. Spend at least 15 minutes a day sitting in silence. For me, it is prayer time. This is a powerful early-day practice. If you are religious, this is a good time to sit with Scripture, a devotional book if you use one, and a small notebook in which to write a brief response as part of your prayer. For some people of faith, opening with a short Scripture reading and sitting silently in a contemplative mode of prayer is better.

If you are not religious, use it as quiet meditation time, focusing on breathing in a way that feeds relaxation and focus.

Why it works:  The research on the benefits of such a meditative practice is robust: brain health, heart health, reduced depression and anxiety symptoms. For people of faith, it becomes an opportunity to listen and reflect on God’s presence in their lives and how they are called to live. Taking a few moments to formulate your thoughts and write to God can help anchor you into the experience. The act of writing – words of gratitude, questions, fears – helps with focus and invites you to be in dialogue.

  • Go on a news fast.  If something horrible that actually requires your attention happens or is imminent, like a hurricane or other disaster, you’ll find out about it. Otherwise, just skip the news for a week, or two, or more. Then titrate your dosage:  15 minutes a day, checking into two or three varied sources.

Why it works:  repeated exposure to what are often the same events, or people discussing those events, has the neurological effect of repeated distressing experiences and amplifies your stress level. By quickly reading, rather than watching and listening, you will be better able to glean information without being overly stimulated emotionally.

  • Once a week, avoid all electronics except:
    • Live interaction with loved ones at a distance
    • Shared experiences with family or friends such as watching a movie together, which you can then discuss over a meal.

Why it works:  you will necessarily be spending more time in the real world, either resting, being creative, or otherwise having your life rather than passively observing others’ lives.

  • Go outdoors every day, preferably in the morning.

Why it works:  Morning daylight helps with brain chemistry; it contributes to a better mood and improved sleep by getting your melatonin system set properly.  It is also a good time of day to get your beneficial Vitamin D exposure (check with your physician) and to take in the benefits of exposure to nature: the sky, the sights, sounds and smells of plants, the sight and sounds of animals.

  • Clean up your diet.  Experiment with giving up highly processed junk foods. If you are a “one toe in the water” type, pick one change at a time and stick with it. Add a small change a week. If you are a “cannonball into the pool” type, go all in: get rid of the chips, the fast foods, the super-sweetened snacks.  See how you feel after a couple of weeks, after the worst of the withdrawal has passed and your tastebuds start to recover.

Why it works:  junk food is addictive, hijacking your dopamine system; it leads to erratic moods both because of the direct up and down of dopamine and the very complex relationship between the gut and the brain. The research here is abundant and easy to find; simply put, you’ll feel better. Your energy level should be more stable, helping you feel more energetic and, without that brain/body overstimulation from processed snacks in the evening, you may even sleep better, which leads to number 6:

  • Be religious about sleep.  If you are a 7-hour-a-night person, get those 7 hours; if you are a 9-hour person, get the 9.  Since you will be consuming less electronic media you should be able to squeeze out the time.

Why it works:  Sleep is essential. It is when your brain, and the rest of your body, does a lot of its clean-up and repair work. Your brain uses sleep to sort out information, store memories, and do important work such as using your new, improved, healthier diet to rebuild your stress-and-junk-damaged hippocampi, amygdala, etc.  Try to go to bed and get up at around the same time every day. If you are skeptical, then be scientific about it: do this as a four-week experiment and then assess the outcome.

  • Be committed to a daily exercise routine appropriate to your health requirements.  Your physician can give you info on recommended guidelines and any limitations or considerations you need to bear in mind.  There is no one routine for everyone, but unless you are on doctor’s orders to remain resting and sedentary, there is something you could do in this area. You may have to start slow; you may have to scale back because you are burning out; you may need to add variety so you are addressing cardiovascular health, strength, flexibility and balance.

Why it works:  Well, look at the data!  We are engineered to move, not to sit for hours.  Regular exercise is good for physical and mental health, can help with social well-being for those who exercise with or around others, afford time in nature, and help with sleep and digestion. 

So, there you go.  Seven simple hacks for a happier life.  Most of them cost nothing; even healthier eating could start with a money-saving switch of water in lieu of sugar- or artificially-sweetened prepared beverages. So – all simple, all potentially free. Since it doesn’t cost anything – what’s the harm in giving it a one-month trial run?  If one month of free, simple changes could mean more well-being in multiple areas of life, that seems like a great bargain – cheaper than coming to therapy and paying me, or someone else, to tell you the same thing.

I could tell you, but you’re not going to like it: Anxious Youth

As you know, this column isn’t intended as psychotherapy or professional advice. It’s information and entertainment, and, I hope, the spark for some conversation with someone who can help with a problem. The problem here is anxiety in all its forms.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, about 31.9% of youth have some sort of anxiety disorder.  This would include diagnoses such as generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, panic disorder, and trauma disorders. It’s hard to believe this is accurate; if it is, then as a culture, things have gone horribly wrong. 

We know a lot about what works, and what doesn’t work for anxiety.  Isolation, the vortex of doom the internet can be, the misguided or malevolent support of random strangers online, endless social networking, and a sedentary, sleep-starved, junk-fed existence don’t work.  Overscheduling doesn’t work. Avoidance doesn’t work. Irresponsibility doesn’t work. So do the opposite.

Get off the devices except for schoolwork.

Get enough sleep. Go to bed at a set time, get up at a set time. Every day, even weekends.

Cut down on activities.

Read real books. Learn about other people’s interior lives via good fiction (that’s a primary reason that we read classic literature in school; to understand more about how other people think, feel, and respond to life’s events). Then talk about them. That means parents should read them, too.

Get physical activity.  A healthy young person needs at least two hours of activity a day, and ought to be standing, moving around, and active a big chunk of the rest of the time.  

Learn useful skills.  For example, everything it will take to manage one’s own money, car and home.

Socialize in person, often while doing something purposeful (whether that’s a sport, volunteering, or other activity).

Spend a lot of time in nature. If it can’t happen just about every day, plan a four- or five-hour chunk on the weekend.

Have chores and responsibilities for young people.  No, “school is not their job” and therefore nothing else is to be done around the house. How are they going to learn necessary life skills? Plus, who wants a spouse or roommate who thinks going to work covers them for any contribution to home and family life?

Learn mindfulness meditation skills, to slow down the stress response and “step back” from anxiety-provoking thoughts. This facilitates the cognitive restructuring of cognitive-behavioral therapy, in which new ways of thinking and behaving are identified and rehearsed.

…and try cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), preferably with at least one parent learning, too, to be coach and to help the parent. Anxious parents tend to teach their children fear-fueled ways of thinking and behaving, and anxious parents are apt to facilitate avoidance.  Avoidance is like jet fuel for anxiety. Find a licensed mental health professional who will work with you as a family to teach the skills. Keep in mind that CBT will work much better if the other parts of life are in healthy, working order – proper sleep, nutrition, exercise, etc.

To expand on an earlier point: parents, often your anxiety feeds your child’s anxiety. If you are behaving as if the world is a terrible, dangerous place, do not be surprised if your child responds the same way.  Making changes together to have a healthier, less anxious lifestyle will help the whole family.

I could tell you #3: Screening the Screens

#3 in a series: I can tell you, but you’re not going to like it.

Once again, I’m the fun-killer, offering information for your recreational purposes that you might not like hearing.

Thus far, I’ve discussed getting more sleep and more physical activity as ways to help children who seem restless, unhappy, unable to focus (except for electronics, usually).  If you have been experimenting with those changes – perhaps for your children, perhaps for yourself – and a few weeks have gone by, I suspect you have noticed a few changes.

You may be sleeping better and waking up more rested and alert. You may be naturally less reliant on caffeine and high-sugar foods to wake up or to get through your day.  If you were tracking it, you might also notice that you are spending less recreational time with electronics. If you were managing these changes for a child, you experienced some degree of pushback, possibly to the level of an addict being denied their drug of choice, because the brain becomes addicted to the rewards of social media, video games, etc., and it will take time to replace that addiction with healthy patterns.  If you were able to persist, within a few weeks you probably noticed positive changes in mood and behavior.

Some studies have supported the approach of adding positive changes before taking things away. For example, if a person needs to quit smoking, eat healthier and exercise, success is most likely to accrue if exercise is added first. This becomes an additional reward and incentive, and can help buffer the withdrawal from nicotine as well as withdrawal from addictive, highly processed foods. In that spirit, it seems it could be easier to have begun helping a child heal from the cultural damages that contribute to anxiety, depression, attentional problems, etc. by adding positive things (sleep, exercise and play) before directly taking away negative things (specifically, the largely unsupervised world of the online universe).

If your child has any unsupervised screen time, it is almost guaranteed they are seeing things you do not know they are seeing or want them to see. End of story. You think you have adequate controls, and firewalls; and somewhere far away, people with far more expertise in technology than most of us are busily creating pathways to circumvent parental controls.

As I have shared in other columns, one of my little escapes in a long work day may be a two to four-minute clip off the internet of some old movie: a dance scene from Mary Poppins, a short scene from Much Ado About Nothing, a few moments of Branagh’s Henry V, the latter not cheery but stunningly well done and quite grounding, as examples. These are my typical fare: dancing penguins, singing suffragettes and Shakespeare, but sometimes up will come next some horrible thing – R-rated, violent, hideous – so terrible that even shutting it down immediately is too much exposure.  From this I hypothesize that if you think your kiddo is happily watching perfectly clean children’s videos and do not supervise, you don’t know. You do not know whether some horror or corruption that was carefully created and marked with the right key words to intrude on that corner of the market is slipping into the stream.

Under the best of circumstances, if it were an hour or two of tap-dancing penguins, it is on too much time to surrender to passive entertainment without being selective. Most people will not just absent-mindedly pick up any book and read it for a couple of hours and then look up, surprised and resentful, when interrupted for food or water or homework. The internet, however, is something else: the endless parade of “talking” kittens, so-called “influencers” and worse contrive to steal time every day from many people. It’s not all bad, of course; I listen to educational lectures when I’m on the stationary bicycle six days a week. I’ve encouraged people to watch “The Chosen.” I’m in favor of well-researched educational programming. I’ve done car repairs under the tutelage of a mechanic on Youtube and am still stumbling through beginner Spanish with the internet, too.

If you are unconvinced about the use of the internet, watch the documentary, “The Social Dilemma.”

Cutting back on tech time is hard. You’re probably not, initially, going to like it, and odds are your child will fight you – hard.  We’re talking about your child’s well-being: their physical health, mental health, intellectual development and social skills. It’s worth the trouble. Try adding the deliberate reduction of entertainment with electronics to the improved sleep and physical activity habits.  Then see what happens.