Dr. Faye Begetti

But the second piece of that is to make sure you have good habits.

So you are accessing that content in the right situations and for the right reasons.

And what I mean by that is that, I mean, you could be accessing amazing content, but if you're accessing it times that you should be focused or times that you should be sleeping or times that you should be spending time with family, that can be detrimental.

I think it's okay to take an intentional break to use technology, even for entertainment, and to do what you want to do.

But unintentional checks...

either for avoidance of a difficult task or because it has become some sort of coping strategy to manage difficult emotions, can have a negative impact.

It really takes some untangling at the individual level to see what people are doing that may be negative and start to adjust their pattern to a more beneficial one.

This is really interesting and certainly a lot of people do.

Certainly there was a recent UK study that people recognised that there were challenges and even young people said that they feel that the benefits of being online do outweigh the risks.

Now, there was a somewhat interesting study, actually, where they took people and they did anxiety and depression scores and they grouped them into high risk for depression and high risk for anxiety.

And they looked at how worried they were about their phone use and what they found that people who were very worried about their phone use tend to have these high levels of anxiety and depression.

But what's really, really interesting is that when they measured their phone use objectively, the relationship was much, much smaller.

So people who are worried about their phone use do not necessarily spend much longer on their phones than people who are not worried about their phone use.

I mean, that could be interpreted in a number of different ways, but one of the things that the authors of the study determined was that the narrative, the constant anxiety and fear-inducing narrative in the media may well be a mediator of why people feel so bad when they're checking their phones.

There's nothing worse than scrolling on your phone and thinking it's going to do you harm.

It ultimately ends up being

a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm not taking away from any of the challenges and negative impact of technology itself, but certainly the worry and the narrative in the media adds to that.

And it's a little bit like in medicine, because I work as a doctor in my medical practice, we have something called the nocebo effect.

where somebody who reads the entire list of side effects in a medication is more likely to experience them and that's not necessarily a trick or that they're lying to us it's just the brain becomes primed and hyper vigilant to notice all these things and then attribute them rather than being a normal part of life to attribute them