Dr. Brandon Vance
speaker
89 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Brandon Vance’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Nice. So much, David. That was so nice.
You've really inspired me because you lay out things in such a clear way and such an accessible way. And I know you all have talked before about just reading, feeling good, that there have been studies on that as being very helpful in terms of depression. And I've also found that groups and the pandemic also inspired me with that, that
coming together in groups of people has all those added benefits of community and of support and even an accountability. So that's been very fulfilling to run some groups.
Yeah.
Well, from a few places. The first inspiration was a patient of mine, and we can call him Elias, and he has OCD and we've done a lot of exposure therapy. In fact, he does exposures every day, which is wonderful. But then after he had made lots of progress with that, he began to talk about that his phone, he just used it all the time.
And Instagram reels, these short little video clips where he'd spend sometimes hours looking at those. And then he'd realize afterwards, gosh, I spent all this time and I would like to not be doing that. And yet I need Instagram to communicate with people. And so what do I do?
And so, of course, having studied with David, I took a paradoxical approach and we looked at the positives of him doing that. And then we did a bit of a role play. about triple paradox, and we can get into that later. But he, at that point, wasn't very motivated. He couldn't talk back to those reasons to be using Instagram Reels. And so I didn't push it. I didn't try to get him to change.
He's also a very social person, and I thought that a group contest could be really helpful to him. Meanwhile, I was asking, so we have a baby who's now 21 months old.
Yeah. He was met David before. And yeah. And my wife, Rosa, and I were talking about parenting, and I've wanted to be a parent for, you know, 20 years. And I thought I'd be a really wonderful parent, and I think I'm pretty good. But I was asking her, what do you think I could do better in terms of parenting?
Just wanting to keep in touch with each other as we go on this journey of bringing up Lansipa. And she said... I'd like to not have him see you using your phone. And boy, that just brought up a lot of sadness. And I realized that I was like using my phone around him, like looking at my phone and he was experiencing me some that way.
And it was for all kinds of different reasons and I can give excuses and reasons, but really I don't need to be doing that around him. And I don't want to be, but I was doing it mindlessly. Part of this inspiration for the group is for myself, for me to stop doing that, and also to give me motivation and accountability to stop doing that.
I noticed that, and this goes for a lot of my patients and a lot of people I see, that it's really easy when one's waiting in line or even using the bathroom to pick up your phone and look at something, whether it's checking email, whether it's a reel on Instagram or Facebook, whether it's some message or some news or quote doom scrolling, people going through negative news.
And these devices were meant to addict us. And they literally teach principles of addiction in developing tech programs. And so I thought that I've heard that from so many people and to be able to free ourselves from what I'm calling mindless tech use, I think
A lot of times, tech is built into our lives, and we may use it for communication, we may use it for work, we may not be able to completely give it up. And so this group isn't oriented toward that, but it's oriented towards, in a sense, freedom, being able to make an intentional choice about using it or not.
Yeah, so it can range from binge watching a TV series, watching something, and then the way Netflix and other online kind of TV programs go is that they'll just go to the next episode, right? And you'll have cliffhangers and you'll want to see the next episode and you see the next episode. So some people stay up until three or four in the morning binge watching TV.
It could be playing video games and getting consumed by those. It could be spending every spare moment connected to your phone. And it was heartbreaking. A few months ago, I was in a diner, and I saw a family walk in, three kids, two adults. They sat down at booths, and the two adults just started staring at their cell phones.
And the kids were crawling all over the place trying to get their parents' attention. And the parents were so absorbed in their phones. I don't know what they were doing with their phones. So those kinds of things... to free ourselves up from that. And as I say, they're quite addictive. Principles of addiction, a substance is more addictive the quicker it hits your brain after using it.
That's part of our learning. So if we're reinforced right after doing some behavior, we tend to do that behavior more. When cocaine was refined from coca leaves, it became much more addictive. Same with alcohol, same with heroin and so forth, right? And they've used those principles in developing things with screens. So video games and TV programs and phone reels and stuff.
So you get these short bites of something that can be reinforcing or can create an intense emotion like news that's really bad. And that then encourages us to do that thing again and again. And it can be very hard to let go of and also hard to get perspective on. David, you've mentioned... how the cognitive distortions can be, in a sense, the opposite in addictions.
So for example, I might, if I'm depressed, I might have a negative view of the future, or I might mental filter and only look at the negative things. Whereas if with addictions, I might forget the consequences of something. I might filter out the negative and only look at the positive. So...
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