Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

The digital boundary is geographic.

Keep your phone off your nightstand.

You scroll your headlines.

And when you're working during the day,

You scroll the news.

You scroll because it's like, am I safe?

To decrease that sense, I call it the primal urge to scroll because it's your amygdala.

Is everything okay?

You scan for danger.

And so how do you quiet that amygdala and how do you decrease?

When you're scrolling, what you're doing is the same thing that cave dwellers did when you would have that night watchman scanning for danger while the tribes slept.

It's your primal urge to scroll.

It's, you know, it's a form of self-preservation.

You keep your phone out of arm's reach or you keep it in, if you work in a cubicle in a drawer, so you're not looking at it so that you get that prefrontal cortex to take over again.

Now we are all our own night watchman.

So when we feel that sense of stress and hypervigilance and feeling unsafe, which is what the amygdala's job is, you scroll.

You scroll your headlines.

You scroll the news.

So you're more intentional.

You scroll because it's like, am I safe?