Ashlyn Harris
speaker
188 appearances
15 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Ashlyn Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I think it's, you know, you can get some degree of pleasure through social media for sure. And I think it's true just for any dopamine hit in our life. You can get addicted to anything that is the source of fleeting pleasure, from food to cocaine to alcohol to gambling to shopping. And there's healthy use, healthy involvement in all of these activities, and then unhealthy.
And it really just depends on the circumstances of your own brain, your own life, and it's a thing everybody has to work on for themselves. as it pertains to like practical things that work for me with technology addiction. One is just being pretty disciplined about putting it away at a, you know, usually at the end of the day, I try to put it away and have a proper evening with my family.
Don't always succeed at that, but I notice when I do it, I feel better. And that leads to the second piece of advice, which is As you know, I'm a big advocate of meditation, as are you.
And I think the self-awareness that can be generated through contemplative exercises like meditation can help wake you up to the fact that you will feel better if you don't get sucked into your phone for prolonged periods of time. And that can – the brain is always looking for pleasure.
And if you can show the brain that there's what my friend Jud Brewer calls a bigger, better offer, which is that it will feel better to connect to your family most of the time because sometimes our families are annoying. But it will feel better to connect to other people, to read a book, to take a walk in nature than it will to, you know, attach your arm to the –
IV drip of FOMO that social media can be. And so I think meditation is a great way to do that. The final thing is, see if you can ask yourself this question. And I get this from a woman named Catherine Price, who wrote a book that I recommend called How to Break Up With Your Phone.
She encourages people to ask themselves, to try to get in the habit of asking themselves a very simple question when they're when they find their zombie arm reaching for the phone, what do you need right now? What need are you trying to fulfill when you pick up that phone?
For me, it's often because I'm bored or I'm in an uncomfortable situation or I'm tired and I don't have the wherewithal to do something or I'm lonely or I'm hungry. And actually, if you run that program, you run that algorithm internally for yourself, You know, you're only going to remember this 10% of the time.
But if you can remember to do it some percentage of the time and ask yourself, what is it that I'm actually going for here? You might realize, actually, the phone is not what I need right now. And for me, I found that really helpful. Doesn't work all the time, but it helps.
It's not my phrase, but it's from this guy, Dr. Judd Brewer. And he's written some books about anxiety and it's called The Bigger, Better Offer.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure. And I think it goes to something really important, which is personal growth, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, is hard and messy. And perfection is not an offer.
And I think just knowing that and even hearing Jay Shetty talk about making mistakes and getting his shins cut off by a laser as he walks into the bedroom with his phone is useful because people need to know It's not a straight, unbroken, upward trajectory. That's not what this is about. There was a great tweet, or I guess we call them exes now, or whatever. There was a great ex, yeah.
There was a great ex the other day from a Zen Roshi, Roshi Joan Halifax. She's this incredible human being, and she posted a picture that was basically a bunch of squiggly lines just going nowhere. And then the caption was, the path. That's the thing. This is messy. We are messy animals, and that's okay.
And what I think is important to know is that growth is possible, but it is impossible without making a bunch of mistakes. And if you can get that into your head, you're better off. So how do you get that into your head? There's a bunch of research that I've become increasingly interested in about the possibility of reprogramming your inner dialogue. Most of us have really nasty inner weather.
I sometimes joke that if anybody said to me the types of shit that I say to myself, I would be punching that person in the face, and yet I talk to myself in quite a scathing, venomous way, and I know this is not unusual. So what can we do about it? Well, you can get into the habit. You can develop – and again, this is a data and evidence-backed assertion.
I'm not just making this up, nor is it an original observation. But what I've learned is that you can get into the habit of talking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. And – There are some little hacks that make this easier. One of them is to actually refer to yourself by your name. So, Jay, I know you just got distracted in meditation, but...
Dude, as you know, getting distracted is a part of meditation. If it was possible to clear your mind, then we'd have lots of people walking around with no thoughts. But that isn't possible. What is possible is to focus your mind for a few nanoseconds at a time and then start again and again and again. And we are very good at giving advice to other people, but not taking our own advice.
And so this technique, which is called distance self-talk, where you use your own name to create some distance, can allow you, Jay, or me, Dan, to give ourselves the advice that we're so willing to give other people and then actually to hear it. Does that make sense?
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