How Tech Reliance Is Eroding Human Connection: Practical Steps to Reconnect from Dr. Michael Rich

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. This is my third episode that I'm filming from SYNC. I wish I could film more, but this is my last conversation here. SYNC is the event that's held here in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, where the attempt really is to create a better interaction between humanity and the digital world in a way that basically allows us to get maybe the benefits of technology with more focus on our well-being. One of my favorite events, to be honest, the incredible thinkers and speakers that come together to discuss such important topics is just a wealth that I see rarely as I travel the world.

1:17Today, I'm hosting an incredible thinker about our children. Dr. Michael Rich is a pediatrician, and he's a child health researcher, but also a child media specialist. I don't even know exactly what that means. He is the founder and director of the Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab. So his focus, not only as a doctor, but also as a filmmaker and as a researcher, is to put his 50 years of experience behind creating interactions for our children that are enriching, valuable, but also conscious of their well-being when they're looking at little screens and digital devices. so I asked Michael before we started this recording you know if there are any specific topics you want to focus on and his answer was children well let's just talk about our children and his view was that they are the future but we're not giving them an easy future to navigate so I think that would be first of all thank you so much for being here and thank you for your positivity and optimism and massive wisdom honestly that you shared so far in the conference but I agree with you.

2:37I think we're messing up. I think we're giving them a very difficult world to navigate. So maybe we should start from there. I would say we have messed up, but we don't have to keep messing up. That's a good place to start. Exactly. In the sense that there is no purpose in looking to the past, what has happened to the past. We have been imperfect. We will always be imperfect, but we've got to keep trying to perfect ourselves and our world. And I think that if we say we've done a bad job or it's terrible for them, there's a sense of hopelessness to that that I don't accept. I don't think we are hopeless.

3:21I don't think we are helpless, but we cannot continue to take the easy path. We have to be more thoughtful, not just for our world now, but for the world that it will build. And these young people who are coming up now are going to be running this world. And what we owe to them is a sense of belonging, of purpose, of being heard and having agency, and curiosity and creativity to rethink this rather than, oh my God, it's a mess, right? This is a terrible thing. It worries me when I hear cynicism from adolescents in particular who are on the cusp of taking over the world. And I say, no, you can't think that way.

4:18Don't give up. It is an uprising trend. If you think about it, there is that disconnect. I mean, generational disconnect is always there. I mean, probably I look back at my father's generation and I go like, um, you know, they don't get the world. But you can easily see that most of the talk happening with younger generations is cynicism. It's that, you know, how do you want me to navigate this? What is my interest in all of this? Why do you think that is? I think both because their older generation is cynical too. That's correct. And they're learning by example. But also, because the older generation is cynical, and because the older generation has, in their fear, overprotected them in some way, they don't feel they have the strength or the agency or, frankly, the ability to make things better.

5:15And so why not just be negative? Why not just see this as a dystopian world? And B, as a pediatrician, an occupational hazard is optimism. Okay. That's a good way of saying it. Right. And I see these kids, even kids who are, in some ways, who've been given up on by society as pure potential. Of course. And much of society looks at them as just a pain and difficult. And one of the interesting things that I will do when I'm with an adolescent in particular and their parents are out of the room, is I say, what can your parents do better? And almost always the first thing out of their mouth is pay more attention to me.

6:02I know that. Right? Yeah. Yeah, and interestingly, these are the same parents who say, he never talks, he never tells us what's going on, he's sullen, he's nonverbal, she only has these moods and doesn't talk to me. the kids do want their parents to be present in their lives. So where is it going wrong? Because the parents give up. The parents see them being nonverbal or moody and they give up. I hate to say it, but the other thing is the parents have issues with their devices too. And the parents are staring at their phones instead of looking at and listening to their kids. even when their kids are sitting in silence.

6:48We need to listen to them because that's telling us something too. What do you mean? The silence itself is telling us something? I think we need to be comfortable being silent together. I know. Taking a walk in the woods. Yeah. And one of my big things is we've got to bring back boredom. I cannot agree more. Because boredom is the crucible of curiosity, creativity, imagination, innovation, not just because it gives you that mind space to do it in, but because that's a little uncomfortable, right? Yeah, I wrote about that in my last book, the idea of digital. The reason for our digital addiction, in my view, is a form of an emotional discomfort, prime among which is boredom.

7:38And, you know, boredom is actually a very positive emotion because it basically tells you I'm underwhelmed with the world. So I might as well create a world that, you know, I'm excited about. So creativity is a result. You know, I jokingly say that the boredom in the caveman and women years wasn't addressed with Netflix. It was addressed by chipping stones to create weapons or doing something, right? Or having sex. That's also very, very, you know, a very good solution. Good way to pass the time. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Right. I will push back on something that you said, though, is I don't think the word addiction is accurate in this case.

8:17To devices. Tell me more. To devices. And the reason for that is, first of all, I've had this clinic for interactive media and internet disorders at Boston Children's Hospital for seven plus years now. and we've seen hundreds and hundreds of kids who've kind of gone down the rabbit hole of gaming or social media pornography or what we call information binging which is youtube reddit quora just following threads hold on i i do all of those but porn so i have a problem or at least you acknowledge doing all of them but i do actually so i No, no, no, no. No, I'm an avid against porn just for the abuse of the...

8:59Absolutely. It's a very unethical part. I mean, I understand people cannot be off it, but some people, you know, have to consider the negative impact this brings to others, not to yourself. It's, you know, it's a big thing for me. But the idea is that I actually, I am, interestingly, always between that constant hunger for knowledge where I binge three hours almost every day of YouTube videos now because sadly that replaced my book reading. So it's, you know, interestingly, a more efficient way to get knowledge around, especially current events. So an attempt to understand everything that's happening in artificial intelligence or everything that's happening in the geopolitical world that we live in, the economics of the world we live in.

9:47a book is not as updated as a podcast conversation or a YouTube conversation that happened a week ago. And so this to me has, and I don't feel addicted, but definitely it is difficult to resist. Well, let me sort of sketch for you what we're seeing. Yeah. We've seen hundreds of kids. We have yet to see one that didn't have an underlying psychological discomfort, if you will, that was driving these behaviors. Correct, yeah. We have seen one or more of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, particularly in boys who fall into the gaming thing. Social anxiety, more prevalent in girls and on social media.

10:35Autism spectrum disorder. And depression. So we actually say that a sad patient, which is ADHD, social anxiety, autism, depression, are essentially all of our patients. Wow. So what that tells me is, first of all, the problem is not the device. The problem is not the platform or the application, but they are seeking out comfort from it. They're seeking a sense of not just distraction, but also of mastery. Imagine a kid with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who spends their entire school day feeling like they can't keep up, feeling that they're not paying attention. They can't even pay attention to the conversations in the playground.

11:27They go home and they sit down at a first-person shooter. And not only are they incredibly good at it, they're usually better at it than so-called neurotypical kids. um i use that word neurotypical with quotes because i hate it why do you hate because how do we define typical oh yes 100 percent if you're like if you're like me you're normal if you're not like me you're abnormal sort of thing yeah and i actually see us all as neurodiverse right just in different ways yeah yeah yeah no no two people are the same exactly yeah and and i see adhd actually as a plus a normal variant yeah because if you think about it when we were hunter gatherers and we crawled out of the cave in the morning in search of food and desiring not to become someone else's food yeah distractibility was protective and so we passed down those skills generation to generation until one generation is told to sit down shut up and listen to the teacher right what's up people exactly exactly yeah and yet they get into a first person shooter game and they're really good yeah because all those skills are coming to the fore again so it's quite interesting if you if i can summarize this it's a basic so when when we talk about adhd and i am an avid sort of i caution people of the of the diagnosis because because by calling it a diagnosis, you are assuming that it is a disease or a defect when it isn't.

12:58It's just a different approach to doing things that is very useful in some context, right? And I think the reality is that it's not that there is a rise of ADHD. There was a change of context is what you're describing. A change of environment. A change of environment. Environmental demands. Yeah. So basically, you know, you're a very typical, you're a very normal human. and let's not say typical, you're normal in every way. You have a skill set that's very valuable, but it's not valuable in this context anymore, in this environment anymore. And so we diagnosis and say, let's cure it for you. Here are a couple of pills, pay us a dollar.

13:34Right, and I think we should value diversity, neurodiversity, as well as we do in diversity, in ethnicity, in language, in religion, all of that. We should embrace it and see it as enriching our lives as opposed to being other. Yeah, absolutely. Something to other. And the other side of it is we aren't seeing kids for whom everything is okay who the moment they get onto a Nintendo Switch or something like that go down the rabbit hole. Millions and millions of kids play video games or on social media, etc., and don't get into trouble. Finally, to me, the word addiction, first of all, is not an accurate, It's not a medical term at all.

14:19But if we think about it, it's use of a pleasurable but unnecessary substance or behavior that continues despite negative consequences. And our therapeutic goal is abstinence. Stop drinking alcohol. Stop using cocaine. Whatever. With interactive media, which is the issue here, we can't abstain from it. this is a necessary thing in our day and age. We need to have it for school, for work, for communication, for connection with friends, et cetera. So we see this as much more akin to binge eating disorder, which is eating to comfort other things, you know, your depression, your sadness, whatever.

15:05We don't tell them to stop eating. That's very accurate. They need to eat while self-regulating that eating. And that's the same thing that we move toward with SIMAID, with the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders. And so the final thing is that I worry about the word addiction is, first of all, no parent looks at their kid and says, my kid's a junkie. My kid is addicted until they're so far down the rabbit hole that they look for all the world like that, staying up all night, not going to school, things of that nature. But when we think about addiction as a way of shirking our responsibility for our behavior, alcohol did it to me.

15:50Heroin did it to me. I can't help it, right? And so we actually call this problematic interactive media use because it focuses on the behavior. It does not focus on a certain technology like smartphones or social media because it all works that way. What they're craving is the interactivity. Even with an NPC, with a non-playable character or a bot, that makes them feel that they are in the world. They make a difference. They're making a change. So it's really interesting. And by the way, take half an hour of those three hours you're scrolling on YouTube and go outside and just... I do that too.

16:36I do that too. I mean, it's interesting because, believe it or not, I'm not the kind of person that will wake up in the morning and work nine to five, right? You know, my life is entirely mine. When I work, you know, being in a conference like this or recording slow-mo or whatever, you know, it's several hours a day and not every day. And so most of my life is a curiosity and a research on topics that I find really intriguing and important and timely. And so you can look at those hours, and I actually force myself to do them, believe it or not. You can look at those hours as my research time, right?

17:17And because the world is so fast-paced, I have to do it in a digital medium, not in a book like I used to in the past. having said that uh you know it is it is interestingly tiring at the end of those hours right it's very different than a book so if i spend three hours in a book i come out energized and and and really inspired to do more honestly but when i'm when i'm doing three hours of research on youtube which i have to say is my favorite social platform ever because i can tell it what i want it exhausts me it really takes a lot out of me it's sort of to be able to concentrate and focus there is almost not human.

17:56And I don't know why that is. Well, this relates to something very interesting that I've discovered, which is when the pandemic happened, overnight, we took our clinic from all in person to all virtual, all telehealth on Zoom. Two interesting things happened. One is before we made that change, we had about a 25 to 30 % no-show rate on new patients because the parents would wuss out and wait till the night before the morning up to tell the kid, we're going to take you to Boston Children's Hospital and he's going to take away your games or something of that nature. And the kid would say, no way, I'm not going, right?

18:37I'm not getting in the car. When we went to do this on Zoom, our no-show rate dropped to zero. Oh, wow. Because they feel comfortable and confident and masterful in that environment. That's so interesting. Here's the other thing that happened. I found that I was completely shattered at the end of a day, just exhausted. Yes. Because I realized that when you are in physical space with each other, you're picking up a lot more than just the image and the sound. you're picking up vibes you're picking up body language you're picking up just you know something in the room where you know when someone is sad or someone is confused or some etc um and we have to decode that from this two-dimensional image and the sound coming out of it yeah and it takes more way more effort absolutely it's exhausting and take another step after one of these days i came out of the hospital exhausted kind of rung out i often feel like i'm giving these kids soul transfusions you know because they're they're so desperate they're so in need of whatever you know they're they're sad they're anxious so i walk out of the hospital i turn right toward where my car was parked and there was a brilliant sunset oh and all those cares all that exhaustion just fell away you know how i'm in touch with nature i'm in touch with mother earth and i looked around me and everyone on the street was doing this no one else saw it you know and i'm sitting there saying that's so sad we've narrowed our world we've shrunk our world um and in many ways we have turned over our curiosity and imagination that comes out of boredom to whatever happens to be online YouTube is a great place to get information, but are you absolutely sure it's all true?

20:44It is curated by someone else as well as by you because you can't possibly see everything that's uploaded. So there is a curation process that goes into that algorithm. But how do we re-inject a sense of cognitive dissonance in what we are accepting online. And I'm not saying that to criticize you. I'm saying that as a dilemma that we all need to struggle with. So let's get to the root causes of this. The idea that I was actually chatting with someone, again, admitting my faults here. I go through dips and rises of interactions with my devices. On one extreme, for example, I do 40 days of silence every year where I have minimal, like I can't say I completely drop my devices, but I limit them to, you know, 20 minutes a day in the first, 40 minutes a day in the first week, 20 minutes a day in the second week.

21:45And then sometimes I go for a week without a device at all and so on. And it's a wonderful experience. But on the other hand, sometimes, especially when I'm traveling like this, there's so much to catch up on. and I made this stupid promise to always respond to my followers on social media as much as I can. I can't do it anymore. But then I realized that most of the time, habit-wise, my drive back to an airport or my drive from an airport, I don't even notice the streets at all. I literally do not know where I am from the airport to the hotel. and you know where's the joy of traveling if that's how it is especially if you're in a new place right you're just following the gps and i'm not even driving no i'm i'm normally driven i'm just looking at my i'm just looking at my phone oh i see yeah answering messages and so on and i i have to admit to you that idea of wasting those experiences that i might never have ever again you know there are cities that i know for a fact it's not likely that i'll ever visit again is just puzzling for me.

22:56Because in all honesty, there is more joy to be found in being in the real world. And in all honesty, there is no rush in answering those messages. And in all honesty, that from an ROI, a return on investment point of view, I'm really getting the worst return on investment. But it's still somehow unmanageable. Somehow it just becomes a habit. I will exponentially increase the anxiety around that. Go for it. Which is, if you feel that anxiety about not seeing a new city or a new place, think about not seeing your two-year-old. Correct. Who will never be two-year-old again. I know that for a fact.

23:38Right? These are precious, precious times. Yeah. And we've lost kind of our mooring, in a sense, of what's important. Yeah. And, you know, we are attracted like moths to the flame, you know, to the latest bright, shiny thing. And when you really think about it, how many of those emails really matter? How many of them really matter? In comparison to someone's child or loved one, none do. You know, and much as you would, you know, like to be in touch with your followers, is that relationship giving enough back to you? Are you getting your ROI on that relationship is the question, right? It's no criticism of them as people, but it is such an attenuated relationship.

24:32It's such a weak relationship compared to being in the same space with a toddler who wants to show you something in a book. So there seems to be, I mean, if we talk about kids specifically, there seems to be things to be learned and done for the child, but also lots of things to be learned and done on the parents' side. Absolutely. Can we discuss a few of those? Absolutely. Well, I think, first of all, instead of seeking the latest killer app, we should develop what I call our killer bees. Those killer bees are be mindful in our use of screens and actually in turning them off when they are not the best tool for the task.

25:20Be balanced in our screen versus non-screen time. We can no longer do that with screen time limits because I would argue we can't even measure screen time anymore because we move in and out of screen so fluidly. how many hours or minutes did you spend in front of a screen yesterday? I couldn't tell you, and I study this stuff, because we don't use it the same way we did in the era of television, when you watched a program and turned it off. We're in and out all the time. They're in every space we're in. They're in our pockets or on our wrists. So instead of saying, I'm going to have screen time limits, I suggest that we have minimal non-screen time in a day, which you're doing already, right?

26:06Which is really important. Hold on. Did you guys get this? This is a very, very important tip in my mind that, you know, measuring screen time is not the answer anymore because honestly, if you look at my day-to-day, other than the time when I was recording a podcast, I was constantly on my screen. Even if I'm talking to someone, you know, I'm still in the back of my mind trying to respond to someone on WhatsApp and then rushing to the bathroom and then just checking if I got that message and so on. So reality is the answer is the opposite. It's not to measure your screen time, it's to measure your non-screen time, which has to be almost ritualistic.

26:46It's like there is, and I simply, because my co-author, Alison Unstressable, will say, have a phone graveyard, put your phone somewhere. I don't have that because I have my phone with me all the time. The only way to do it is to literally switch the damn thing off and start measuring if I spent an hour without it or not. Turn it off and put it in another room. Yeah, exactly. Put it in a place you can't see it. Because no, seriously, what you do when you can see it is you wonder what's going on on it. You're missing, right? So I've got two more killer bees for you. And this is an important one around your child or others you're with.

27:27Be present. Yes. when you're with them and you're on a phone you're not present you're not there for them and then you probably saw this one coming finally be bored i love that one embrace boredom because it will make you a richer more creative more curious person you have no idea i mean i michael i told you about my silent retreats most creative time ever because by 4 p.m when you've been sitting in nature for the last four hours and you know somehow you're like itching for a netflix series or a or a video game or uh those moments when you basically tell your mind we're not going to do that your mind works and suddenly goes like oh remember that thing we've been reflecting on for the last six years here is something that i want to share with you it's that it's those moments of boredom that makes a massive difference yes i have a dear friend and colleague who with her family for more than 12 years now has observed a digital sabbath i love that so 24 hours a day 24 hours of every week they put it all away she's a filmmaker she's a web designer she's a creative person in the world of screens and she finds that it makes her creativity greater, her energy greater, and it lowers our hyperstimulation.

28:56And we're able to sense the small things, the delicate things, the ephemeral things much better than when we are staring into that demanding screen. And to do it together with ones that you love is actually a brilliant idea. Absolutely. And in fact, one of the interesting things is, even though we all really depended on screens during the pandemic lockdown, she and her family felt it was an oasis in anxiety for them to have that, to continue it through the pandemic and just know that that was time they had with each other. and her kids are wonderful and she feels enriched by it as opposed to deprived.

29:43For sure. I mean, the challenge, if you really think about it, is that we've mixed, there is value that comes from those devices. Like you rightly said, we cannot completely remove them. So if you decide that next Sunday, I'm not going to touch my phone, but you're expecting a delivery or you want to order food or whatever, or your kids are doing something fun and you have to just switch on and take a photo. It seems that there is almost an impossibility to disconnect altogether, but actually it's possible. I mean, fine, you can basically make sure that no deliveries are organized on that day and that you cook that day, right?

30:25Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, if you think of all the photos we take. That's another one. How many times do you go back to that? Never, ever. But the photos you take here, they last. Yeah. They last. In fact, one of the things I talk about in my book and to my patients is we have to observe three Ms of taking care of things, which is model the behavior you want to see in your kids, because they listen to 1 % of what we say and about 100 % of what we do. Mentor them in the use of these devices and applications. So the reason I use the term mentor is mentors learn as much from the mentee as the mentee learns from the mentor.

31:12And a lot of parents won't sit down with their kid and play a video game or explore social media or whatever, because they don't feel comfortable being the student. They don't feel comfortable not knowing something about it. In fact, I've had parents tell me, I'm much more comfortable with the sex talk than the internet talk. What do you mean? Because parents are always like, oh, my kid's nearing puberty. We've got to do the sex talk. I think it's because whether correctly or not, they believe they know something about sex, but they are fearful that they don't know enough about the internet. Right?

31:48So they really don't want to go there. And as a result, many kids just are basically free range online because their parents aren't engaged with them in their digital lives. And so I think that's really important. And it brings up the third M, which is monitor them. That doesn't mean be in their face or in their digital space all the time because that's what parents say. I don't have the time. And I'm checking out. And the kids say, I don't want you in my space as private. But the reality is that to a 13-year-old, privacy means so mom and dad can't see. They're oblivious to the rest of the world, which are going to do much more harmful things to them.

32:33But ultimately, if you have their usernames and their passwords and you can monitor them, their behavior is different. It's just like random drug testing in the workplace. Right. If you know as a worker that you could ask be asked for urine at any time, you're not going to be smoking weed. Right. Because it puts your work, your job at risk. So the same thing happens with kids. But here are the goodies. If you can observe the three M's, even partially, you can reach to a kind of mastery of these screens for the kids. And mastery means using them effectively, purposefully, and turning them off when they're not the best tool for the job and making memories.

33:22I argue for all the time, for example, you spend on YouTube, how much of it do you remember with as much poignancy, with as much power as just a moment with a child or a moment with a loved one of some kind? we make memories from our real life experiences those experiences on screen are relatively attenuated that's very true huh there nobody ever looks back and says oh i remember that time when i was watching youtube three years ago right yeah right no we're just sort of letting it flow over us and there are interesting things in it that catch our interest etc and we may put them away somewhere and may be able to recall them but the experience isn't remembered it's not making memories of the experience human interaction is so much richer yeah i i'm you know i'm i'm remembering the times when my kids were uh were kids basically i have to say they didn't have smart devices with them all the time was 19 mid-90s basically and we would be driving home every weekend after lunch and we would play songs everyone would pick a song so the four of us my wife ex-wife now and my two kids then we all four all four of us would vote on which song did we like most.