Baby steps to mental health Digitally Lit #192 – 4/6/2019 Hi all, my name is Ian O’Byrne and welcome to Digitally Literate. In this newsletter, I try to synthesize what happened this week so you can be digitally literate as well. I posted a couple of other things this week: The Technopanic Podcast – My…
This short essay was written by Oliver Sacks shortly before his death from cancer in 2015. In this essay, Sacks notes the parallels between the modern world he sees around him and E.M. Forster’s prescient classic 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” in which Forster imagined a future in which humans lived in separate cells,…
The company knows your addiction to its devices is making you miserable.
From The Outline: The next version of iOS will also now have built in time limit controls, so that users can parent themselves about how much time they spend on Instagram or on Facebook, cutting in to the Explore Tab k-hole after an hour or two and letting them know it’s “time to move on.”…
Expert tips for cultivating lasting fulfillment
An interview from Evernote’s Taking Note blog on happiness, screentime, and balance in our lives. Some ideas of interest: First, we need to stop thinking about happiness as a single monolithic concept. There are different kinds of happiness — and some are more fulfilling and long-term than others: Short-term happiness: Psychologists refer to this as “hedonic” happiness, derived from the…
Technology has transformed the way we live, work, communicate and entertain ourselves. At the click of a button, we can conduct transactions, get information, learn new skills and even find love. Our generation has seen the most drastic jumps in technological advances and this has not only changed the way we perceive the world but also how our brains receive and process information. We seem unable to tear ourselves from our smartphones, tablets and innumerable social networking platforms, going so far as keeping our devices near us all day.
From PsychCentral: We now have shorter attention spans and are more distracted. We’ve improved our ability to multitask (at least we think we have). We’ve become tech addicts. Our face-to-face interactions have been undermined. We’re becoming more forgetful. Citations: Newport, F. (2015). Most U.S. Smartphone Owners Check Phone at Least Hourly. Retrieved from http://news.gallup.com/poll/184046/smartphone-owners-check-phone-least-hourly.aspx Galasso Bonanno,…
Biggest increase in diagnoses seen in teens
Major depression is on the rise among Americans from all age groups, but is rising fastest among teens and young adults, new health insurance data shows. So what is possibly behind the data? “Many people are worried about how busy they are,” said Dr. Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital. “There’s a…
How many times every hour do you check your phone? Five times? A dozen? More? How do all of these micro-interruptions change your day? Do they make you less productive? Effect your well-being? How might your life look if you were able to take control of the distractions? To literally silence your phone and dedicate…
How do the Australian Department of Health and Ageing’s new screen time guidelines sit with the latest research about screen time? In this blog Jane Mavoa highlights the problems around a lac…
Screens’ have been part of children’s lives for well over half a century, and we have been asking questions about their effects for just as long. The types of problems mentioned in guidelines in Australia and elsewhere, are not new, with many often mentioned in ‘limitations’ sections of published research. Surely it is time to move on from acknowledging, then ignoring,…
Everything you ever wanted to know about screen time, likes, and pull-to-refresh.
You don’t need to see the stats to know it’s hard to put down your device—the muscle memory of pull-to-refresh, the devil of the red notification on your shoulder, the rush that follows a flood of likes, the Instagram envy, the FOMO, scrolling endlessly by screenlight instead of falling asleep. Except that actual experts are…
Finances, family, work, and especially, rush hour traffic. These all contribute to a US population that is constantly on edge and stressed by the 24-hour cycle of life. And this is without discussing politics. American adults experience stress in many ways and combat it through a variety of methods — from medications
Meditation has been shown to help in stress reduction, and westernized mind-body practices are in vogue more than ever. But there’s one aspect of meditation in particular that might prove best for beating stress: a focus on openness and equanimity, known as acceptance training. A Carnegie Mellon University-led study offers the first scientific evidence that mindfulness…