Ep 63: Scrolling, Numbing, and Losing Focus: How to Take Back Control from Screens with Dr. Mary Donohue

If you’ve ever picked up your phone without knowing why—or felt more drained after “relaxing” with a screen—this episode is for you.

We live in a world of constant pings, scrolling, and screens—but what is that doing to our brains, our emotions, and our sense of control? In this episode of The Starting Gate, we’re joined by digital wellness specialist Dr. Mary Donohue to explore how nonstop screen exposure is reshaping the way we think, feel, and cope.

We talk about how digital overload dulls creativity, trains us to numb uncomfortable emotions, and pulls us away from the present moment. Dr. Donohue shares why even brief “micro breaks” can make a meaningful difference, how to build healthy guardrails around things like social media, gaming, and online gambling, and why awareness—not perfection—is the key to digital wellness.

 If you’ve been feeling overstimulated, unfocused, or uneasy about your family’s screen habits, this episode will help you rethink your relationship with technology—without guilt or extremes. 

Find Dr. Mary Donohue:

Dr. Mary Donohue on Linked in

@drmarydonohue

email: maryedonohue@gmail.com

Find out more about the Digital Wellness Center

thedigitalwellnesscdenter.com

@thedigitalwellnesscenter

thestartinggatepodcast.com

Email us with questions and topics you want us to cover at
contact@thestartinggatepodcast.com

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The content in this podcast is for general reference and educational purposes only. It is not meant to be complete or exhaustive, or to be applicable to any
specific individual’s medical condition. No information provided in this podcast constitutes medical advice and is not an attempt to practice medicine or to provide specific medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. This podcast does not create a physician- patient relationship and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Please do not rely on this podcast for emergency medical treatment. Remember that everyone is different so make sure you consult your own healthcare professional before seeking any new treatment and before you alter, suspend, or initiate a new change in your routine.

Transcript

Ep 63: Scrolling, Numbing, and Losing Focus: How to Take Back Control from Screens with Dr. Mary Donohue

[00:00:00] Before we start today's episode, I would like to quickly read you our podcast disclaimer. The content in this podcast is for general reference and educational purposes only. It is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition. No information provided in this podcast constitutes medical advice and is not an attempt to practice medicine or to provide specific medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

This podcast does not create a physician patient relationship, and it's not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please do not rely on this podcast for emergency medical treatment. Remember that everyone is different, so make sure you consult your own healthcare professional before seeking any new treatment, and before you alter, suspend, or initiate a new change in your routine.

Welcome to the starting day. We're your host, Dr. Kitty Dotson and Dr. Sarah Sheets. Two internal medicine doctors who spent years practicing traditional primary care. Over time, we realized something was missing from modern healthcare, a [00:01:00] real understanding of how everyday lifestyle choices impact overall health.

We'll help you cut through the noise of the countless health influencers and their conflicting opinions because no matter who you follow, the basics of lifestyle medicine are at the heart of it all.

 Welcome to the starting gate. We're your host, Dr. Kitty Dotson and Dr. Sarah Schuetz. today we have a topic that Sarah has actually been waiting to do for a very long time.

Very excited because I feel like it is something that. Actually relates to the majority of people. 

It does, and it's something that is shaping our daily habits. It's shaping our mental health and our physical health. And this is digital overload. So from constantly using our cell phones, scrolling, whether you're into online gambling or gaming, our brains are being changed by what is in front of our face every day.

And we know that there are probably a lot of consequences to that. 

And [00:02:00] luckily they're starting to get attention, over the past five, 10 years, we're actually talking about it, realizing the damage that we're doing, and now we're having to shift and figure out how can we keep technology in our life.

In a healthy way. And so many of us don't know how to do that though. luckily we have an amazing guest today. We have Dr. Mary Donahue, who is a digital psychology expert. She is a TEDx speaker, three time bestselling author and Fortune Top 10 business women to watch. She's the founder of the Digital Wellness Center and really just has lots of experience in this world and helping people navigate technology in a healthy way.

 thank you so much for doing this with us. 

 it's my great pleasure. Please call me Mary. 

Mary, can you tell us how did you even fall into this space? 

Oh there's a couple reasons. [00:03:00] The first is I had a heart attack and I was relatively young except my daughter doesn't think I am.

I was of course, over the hill as all daughters believe their mothers are. And I realized in that moment, first of all, that I had caused myself all that stress. And second of all, the machines that were keeping me alive were the shame. Type of machines that were killing us. And when you begin to look at the world that way and see the duality of digital and of machines, you begin to see the light they offer us, but also the darkness.

And the more I got into it, the more I saw that my stress was compounded by COVID. But that stress is something you create yourself and that digital, particularly social, email, all of those different aspects of our world. YouTube [00:04:00] even is designed to pull us in and keep us there. Unlike hospital machines that are designed to keep you alive but get you off.

So how do we use those machines? Became my question and I became obsessive about my heart rate. Oh, what's my heart rate when I'm doing public speaking? What's my heart rate when I'm doing email? What's my heart rate when I'm looking at YouTube? And once you go down that road, you guys know as scientists, you're like, Ooh, this, it's exciting.

We love some data. 

Give me some data and then I had really awesome companies like Microsoft, American Airlines, Walmart, the Armed Services, all of them say, we'll definitely join you during, and this was, just at the tail end of COVID. Help us reduce the stress in our staff 

 a lot of what we talk about today is the negative downstream effects of like social media, but it seems like you're even talking about [00:05:00] just technology in the workplace in general causing a lot of stress.

A hundred percent. So social definitely is bad for us. But we all know about the dopamine hits. I'm sure you've read Dopamine Nation with emails, with texts, with WhatsApp, with any other way of getting attention on that machine, on that phone. And we don't put it all into one place and say hey, let's just jump back for a few minutes and let's rethink how we're going to do this because we're losing our creative edge and that's killing our productivity and that's lowering our GDP.

No one is talking about this. No one is talking about the fact that we no longer have imagination and that is because it's being sucked away by digital. You can go to Google, you can go to chat, [00:06:00] GPT, any of these wonderful tools and it makes anything up for you. I have a problem and it makes it up.

There's no more sitting under a tree watching an apple fall and go, oh my gosh, that must be gravity. Now we have to give our brain that opportunity because that's what our brains are designed to do. You know what else our brains are designed to do help people not hurt people. And social is designed with the, if it bleeds, it leads the most horrible things.

Get the biggest views. That was Hearst in during World War I, Hearst, paper Hearst operations. So we're literally repeating ourselves, but we're hurting how our brains operate from a neuroscientific point of view. And if you wanna be bored, I can explain it to you. 

 Yes, please. 

All right, here we go. So in 2007, before the introduction of the iPhone by Mr. Steve Jobs, who I worship, but also has a lot to answer for, but since he's passed on, there's not a lot I [00:07:00] can do about it. But your brains didn't process information this way? We weren't doing calls this way. I would've been in the beautiful state of Kentucky enjoying myself, visiting with my friends, but we would've been chatting person to person and we probably would've been on television.

So we still would've had the video, but we wouldn't have been forced to see ourselves. Then the phone came in and we moved to a digital environment, and with that move to the digital environment, our brains begin to question. There's no. Normal body language. For example, I'm leaning into you when I think about something, I think up into the right, if you're just listening to this podcast, just so you know, I moved my eyes up into the right and I moved my head up into the right, but Dr.

Sarah and Dr. Kitty saw me move to the left, which caused a misalignment in their brain. Their brain said, oh, why is she constructing [00:08:00] something when she's telling this story? Is she lying to me? So all of a sudden, the seeds of trust are beginning to be built within you because I'm not doing what you normally see as body language.

Then what begins to happen is. The more work you do. So the average white collar worker gets approximately 142 emails a day. Of those 40% have to be answered. Microsoft and I did a paper well, okay, I had a couple quotes. There you go. Microsoft did the paper, but I was quoted in a Harvard Business Review and we talked about how many hours a day someone's in a meeting.

And this is whether you're virtual or whether you are in person for work, but you're sitting on a machine and you have a machine beside you. So now this part of your brain, so viewers, I'm just picking from the top of my forehead to just behind my eyes, which is your intrinsic [00:09:00] brain. And that's like filling up with clouds.

But that's where your quick language, your wit is. So when I say, hi, how are you? What do you say? 

Doing well. And you 

good? How's your day? 

Pretty good so far. 

. You pass the test. Hi, how are you? How's your day? Literally, every culture has the same cadence of the same, somewhat six words.

Now, put that on an email out of context, and what happens? With 34,000 people, the intrinsic brain was so full that when I said, hi, how are you? People were like, okay, Mar, I do not have time for this. Not gonna work. And they ignored me. How many times have you ignored an email? Then I said to technology, to automotive, to consulting.

How's your day? And do you know what came back? What's going on? Am I getting fired? Am I getting a new boss? What's happening? [00:10:00] Same six words, two totally different physiological responses. And why that's happening is because your intrinsic brain, I'm just saying it fills with clouds. No sunshine gets in there.

So that stops it talking from your mammalian brain where all your patterns of behavior are, and that comes in. For example, when you're walking in the woods and you hear a howl and your brain says, oh, that's your neighbor's beagle. Don't worry about it. Continue with your walk. Or your brain says, Hey Mar, that's a pack of coyotes.

You need to hustle your bustle and get home. So it tells you what the patterns of behavior are and then that triggers your intrinsic brain so you can run a little faster. The physiology. On the phone you can see none of those signals and all that happens is your brain fills with clouds. Even when we're doing Zoom, people are like, I don't trust her.

She's not having the same [00:11:00] physiological body language that everybody else has when I see them. Actually I am, it's just the camera reverses it. So these are all the problems. And our children are having the same problems because people have said to me, oh, they grew up in technology. Yeah. But their brain is still the same brain that is, has been developing over thousands of years.

Our brain started out as a, I think a third of a pound and is now three pounds, but that takes thousands and thousands of years. So why are we expecting ourselves to not have problems when we've so quickly adapted to this medium? There you go. 

Wow. 

Just breaking down like an email response and you're completely correct.

The normal question that someone would ask me in person, but receiving it in an email, I would respond completely different. And I had never even thought about that. It like, what do, what do you mean? And also why are we doing chit chat over email? Excuse me, but not here 

because [00:12:00] I'm lonely. Like maybe I wanna talk to you.

Maybe I'm having a bad day, but nobody thinks like that 

anymore. 

And the biggest problem I'm seeing in gambling in retail, believe it or not, or even traveling, is loneliness. We're lonely and that makes us depressed. 66% of the world's population, according to the World Health Organization, are suffering from a mental health disorder.

. And what are we doing?

Like how are we solving this? 

And based off that, how does over time , how we interact with the digital world today caused this chronic stress? and how is it different? As it's evolved because I don't feel like I had the same response when I was a kid and interacted with the computer or AOL chat or any of those things versus [00:13:00] the exposure to technology.

Now, , how has that made such a big stress on all of us? 

Volume. Remember when I talked about 40% emails, four to six hours of meetings? Then you go home, you're monitoring your kids online. Your online, your entertainment is online. Everything's online. Your brain needs some space, it needs some sunshine.

And that's what I'm talking about with creativity. And then I also wanna look at the content. When you were a kid, when I was a kid, our news was all about local. We didn't know what was going on in the world and we had to sit and read a newspaper, which is again, time. It takes time to read a newspaper.

You can flip through every, first paragraph, you can see the picture, you can do everything, but that's how your brain processes information. When I first started on television [00:14:00] many years ago, you had roughly five seconds to make an impression on someone. Now you have less than one. Again, time.

That's where the disorders come from, because your brain is struggling with all of this information, and that puts you into a physiological response, constant fight or flight, which is called chronic anxiousness. All of us can experience that when you're typing, because you're mad and you're typing, texting someone really hard, or you're on your keyboard really hard, your physiological responses shoulders up.

You're folded in I have been known to type like this. Or if you're listening to music, like you put your headphones on super tight, you're just like angry, and that's happening more and more, and your body can only sustain so much. 

So what do we do?

 And that's a question I asked myself after my heart attack. Because stress is something we do to ourselves. It's not like a broken foot where you fell [00:15:00] over something. You can't say, this is what caused it. It's all in your mind. And first of all, you have to wrap your head around that, which was a really hard thing for me to do in the hospital.

And then you have to realize, everybody says, oh, just take time off the phone. Nobody's going to do that. 82% of adults, I talk about this in the book, won't put down their phones to have a bath. They won't put down their phones. Like they feel like they're they need that phone. They need to stay in contact.

They need to be there for people or to get their dopamine hits. That's a genuine addiction. What we decided to do is start with small interventions. Using the phone, using email as a delivery methodology. And that's what I did five years ago. We began with the [00:16:00] support of Walmarts and American Airlines, like just a pilot, and I wrote these silly Billy questions.

Remember, my goal is to heal the world and I like to do it through humor. I started thinking about silly questions. So one of the questions is, are you feeling like a bunny in a hole or a rocket ship taking off today? Now, when that email comes from the Digital Wellness Center or Dr. Mary Donahue, you're like, what?

What? I'm sorry, what? Just that what causes you to stop thinking about work? Stop thinking about your stress, stop thinking, and you're like, what is she doing now? Oh my God, what are they doing now? Okay, fine. I'm feeling like a rocket ship taking off. And then you go to a micro break, which was first developed in Purdue.

Just, a couple states over and saying here's it could be a game, it could be a [00:17:00] fun video, it could be a visual puzzle. But they're all designed using generational anchoring benchmarks. So visual, auditory, kinesthetic, language, timing. Triggers to understanding of body language based on the use of cadence of words, all of those things that we love in science, but can seem very complicated.

But then when you take them and just put them into something like, guess what this picture is, does it look like a letter B, a drill, or a doorbell? You're like, wait, what? None of these things match? And just again, that, wait, what? it's just those moments and you have to start giving your brain those little moments.

I like to think about it, I'm a runner and I like to think about it as those pauses for a drink of water, those pauses just to look at nature around you when you're running. Any of those kinds of [00:18:00] things. 

So that's interesting because I thought when you were gonna say a micro break, that it would definitely be away from a screen, but this is, a break within your digital consumption. 

 Yeah. And when you think of physician heal thyself, you have to think in terms of digital heal thyself. And we're not putting down our phones to have a bath. So I could be preaching to everyone, put down your phones or you could die. Who cares? Nobody's gonna listen to me.

They're like, you're full of baloney. That happened to you? Oh, maybe you ran too much. So yeah, literally. I've had people say that to me and I'm like, oh, okay. But that's fine. But if I say to them, Hey, why don't you just take a minute for yourself? Just one minute. And here's the interesting thing, five years ago we started with about a thousand people.

673 of those people are still [00:19:00] playing, are still getting our emails, and some of them have moved companies and stuff so they no longer have access to our emails. But of those 30% use it every week, every single week. And when I look at that and I look at email, I know that, wow, if we can just change how we look at a medium to look at it as a therapeutic for stress reduction, then we really can heal the world because everybody has email, everybody has a phone.

So that's how I came to start using the Medium as the message. 

And with that project, what results did you all see from those consistent consumers of it? 

This is what we do. We asked Good day, bad day. We had the two questions like, bunny in a hole is a bad day, the rocket ship is a [00:20:00] good day. And we measured how many good days or bad days these people were having.

And then they get a monthly assessment of, okay, you had bad times. We also could measure it. We never do it personally because first of all, I don't want to know your personal information. Second, I think aggregate data is more valuable here than individual data. And by aggregate the full total of everyone without knowing who they are.

And we were able to say to companies, Hey, look, Wednesdays at four o'clock, you have a real problem. And what companies came back and said, how do you know that? Because people keep going back to our emails Wednesday at four o'clock when we send them on Tuesdays. So I don't know what's happening Wednesday at four o'clock and at one of my companies that will remain anonymous, but a major corporation, they found it was a bad manager.

And every four o'clock he had a status meeting on Wednesdays and people hated these meetings and were so stressed out about these meetings and then after these [00:21:00] meetings. So they had to, I think eventually they got rid of him, but he was just mean and he was, I know we don't say that anymore, but there's a time when you're like, okay, enough people are mean.

Get rid of them. So that's how we use it. And now what we're using it for is a pre. Risk

lowering tool. I don't wanna go into all the medical parts about it that, that the doctors have talked to me about, but essentially it's like stretching before a run. So in gambling, we send out these emails and They're from the marketing department to their clients and their clients, freaking love them again, above 30% usage of an email.

And we see them using 'em at two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning. And then we measure the before and after effect, and we come up with what we call calm score. So if a player is calm, we know that they're making good [00:22:00] decisions. If a player is at medium risk, that's probably a good time to maybe think about watching this player and send them an intervention.

Those are the kinds of things that you wanna start looking at and start doing. So when we look in the retail environment and we look at say for example, you're going shopping. If you're going shopping and you're angry, that's not really good for the store. Because you're gonna get mad, you're gonna yell, you're gonna return things, you're gonna do all of those kinds of things.

What we can do now is we created a physical booth called a mood booth that does the same thing, allows you to have a positive, fun experience in that store and builds trust in that experience. So when you shop, you buy what you need, you don't have a stressed out kind of experience. And how all of this happened is I began to visit Walmarts and I'm a big Walmart fan, I began to notice in urban centers, [00:23:00] people were shopping, they were angry, they were moving, and they'd be, arguing with the the associate and.

About something. And one thing in particular struck me is it was before Christmas and there was a nice middle-aged man buying oatmeal crisp. And at this particular Walmart, oatmeal Crisp was on for $4 and 44 cents. I had been observing, the standard observe, don't get involved, don't do anything protocol that you have to do as a scientist.

And I had been observing for about 90 minutes at this point, and I was like, oh, somebody else buying oatmeal crisp, yay. And the girl said to him, oh, I'm sorry, you can't get the $4 and 44 scent deal. And tears came down his eyes and I was like, oh, I'm gonna start to cry. What's going on? And clearly he was under so much stress [00:24:00] and the associate dealt with it really well.

She said, you know what? Don't worry about anything. All you have to do is go back and get this size of oatmeal crisp. We'll just leave everything. Here you go. Get that crisp. And that was kindness. But what I thought of was, hey, if I had one of those old fashioned rides, like we used to have a pony ride where you put a quarter in and you could feel good and the kids would get a special treat, maybe I could do the same thing.

And that's where the mood machine came from. And then, other instances where people were lonely and they weren't smiling at people. And then I see that in smaller stores and smaller towns in larger Walmarts, however, because they have a larger space, neighbors greeting neighbors from a surrounding towns and that changes the whole vibe at the cashier.

Like I even saw almost a fist fight at a cashier because one guy didn't move quick [00:25:00] enough to get to the self checkout. 

 So it sounds like that it's really because of the environment we're in and the chronic stress that is just from sunup to sundown because of us always interacting, it's learning to put in these micro breaks.

And sometimes those micro breaks might also include technology, but it's coming in a positive reinforcement model instead of this constant negative that we're all exposed to 

a hundred percent. And I think, there's new laws coming out now, keeping children off phones, getting CH phones outta schools, all of those things.

I couldn't agree more. I definitely advocate for adults. We need to use our phones for positive reinforcement 'cause we all need some positive reinforcement. But in school, children should not be on their phones. They should not be near their phones. Their brains need to develop. Do you know that young men and women's brains don't even develop until they're in their twenties?

So what are we [00:26:00] teaching them with the horridness that's on their phones? 

 Tell us more about what we, Sarah and I both have younger children. Yes. So I know that's something that I worry about and many parents are worried about. What do we specifically need to be on the lookout for for our kids when they're looking at screens and how can we try to make it the best experience it can be, 

first of all time.

I understand your children might wanna watch tv or watch like Netflix or Paw Patrol or something like that. How much time are they spending on that screen? And you have to decide what works for you. By the way, I am the meanest mother in the world. I am the only mother in the world that did not allow screens during the week.

That was huge tragedy in my daughter's life. And that was just from me seeing how she as a 12-year-old [00:27:00] this was many years ago, she's not 12 anymore was exposed to a predator. And, but she thought the predator was a nice person and the predator wanted her to take naked pictures of herself.

So immediately I called the police. I did all the things you're supposed to do. I was very aware, but. Again. Okay, so now she's had this really negative experience on the phone. She's gonna have to use the phone for the rest of her life. How do we change it? So we started making the picture game. She started using her phone for pictures of her week of her day.

And then I travel a lot. So I would do hot and cold with her, with visual pictures that my husband and I controlled. So you can do this with your kids and start teaching them to use their phone for good. So for example take pictures of people in the family, silly Billy pictures, for example, if they're slurping spaghetti, if they're feeding the dog and they've spilled something or they [00:28:00] fell on their bum, get funny pictures.

And then at the end of the week at Sunday night supper, have a picture of the week. That's a fun kind picture. Of the week. So what you've just done is first of all, use the phone for fun. So when you take an image of yourself, realize you're not perfect, you are going to slurp spaghetti, you are going to fall down on your bum.

When you're feeding the dog, you're going to slip on ice. And that just happened to me recently. And laugh like you're going to do these things. And we're so used to picture perfect and kids are seeing picture perfect. That's not how we roll in real life. So that's lesson number one. Lesson number two is this phone can be fun.

When you put controls in place, here is my control. The picture has to be fun. No one can be hurt. Here are the guardrails, and number three is gamify it. [00:29:00] You create the picture of the week, but you're having supper talking about this machine and what you had on this machine. And then you go to, again, sounds crazy, but you go to the Walmart and get the picture printed and you can put it on your fridge.

Other things, school is doing a lot of things. So you have a throwback night where you actually read a book and you say, okay, this is how mommy or daddy or Uncle Mark learned, and how can you show me how to do it better with this book? Again, gamification, because our kids are taught gamification from the second they're out of the womb basically.

 I saw a very sad thing. I saw a baby who was nine months old playing with a phone the other day at the doctors, and it took all my strength not to grab that phone and throw it across the room and yell at the parents. I did not. But what we have to start doing is behavior modifications. So yes, [00:30:00] this is the phone.

Yes, this is how you use it. Yes, it can be used for good, but yes, it can be used for bad. So start creating those family rules. And I always talk about the supper table where you have conversations or the breakfast table. Our family did a little bit of both with daddy. It was at breakfast with supper, it was at mom.

My, my husband was a journalist, so he was never there at night. That was deadline. Understanding how you have conversations with your kids about everything they see on the phone or on the big screen. Say for example, it's an inappropriate show on Apple TV or Netflix or something, you're gonna have to learn to deal with that because when you and I were kids, that was never allowed on the screen.

these are just some of the warning signs you have to do, but make it fun. The minute you say it's like alcohol and it's the devil or any of those things, kids wanna do it. It's just kids. So let's just say like my friend's family said no [00:31:00] to alcohol. And then you know what happened.

So I don't want that to happen with phones. Make it fun, show them how to use it. And last but not least, show good behavior. Don't be always on your phone. When I see a mom pushing a baby in a stroller on her phone, I'm like, dude, that's time you are never ever gonna get back. And what the hell's on that phone?

That's so important. Unless you're an oncologist, have a patient dying and are looking at the pharmacological ramifications of chemo. You don't need to be on that phone. 

I've gotten that from my kids too, and I've told 'em that's enough screen time. And then they're like, then that means you can't look at anything either.

 Good for you. 

I have a 

question about, you mentioned amount of time, honest on a screen, and I've noticed, you know that scientific brain, and I'm wondering if this is worth an experiment, is with your kids. And it may not even be like regular recommendations, but if my [00:32:00] son is watching TV.

His behavior before being exposed to a screen could be great, gets exposed to a screen, and then even if it's not that long, behavior is different after the screen. How do you try to navigate that? Is the answer that they shouldn't be on one in general because it's changing their, behaviors because they were actually on it?

Or does it mean it just need, you need to keep on making it shorter and shorter

 first. There has been a study done on that. I've been trying to think of the name of the people that did it. And they demonstrated for children it's tends to be more negative behavior, fast-paced behavior. Like just no, no behavior. I wanna be on my screen behavior. But also in adults, if you look at yourself like it's easier to just sit on the couch than it is to get up and do something.

So what you have to start looking at is the environment. You'll know your child best and what times are best. However, this is an opportunity [00:33:00] for conversation, which is something children crave, which is, Hey, I've noticed something really interesting. Even if they're four, can understand this.

 . Every time you get off the TV, you have bad behavior. Why is that? Give them pause for thought and say, that's hard for me because say for example, I'm working from home or I have to create dinner, so how can we find a solution to this? What do you think is a solution? And you'll have naughty children that'll say, there is no solution.

I'm just gonna be like that and say, okay, then I am going to come up with some solutions. And other children come up with the most creative ideas maybe I should watch one Paw Patrol and then do a picture and then watch a Dora the Explorer. You're teaching them about themselves and control for themselves with [00:34:00] machines, and that's what you really like. Unfortunately, and we started this podcast with me saying it must be so hard. You have to build that in the same way you build in alcohol awareness, the same way you build awareness of predators.

The same way you build awareness of nutrition. It's now come to you to start teaching digital. There's not a lot of me out there. So how do we give this back to the world? 

 That's a very good point of it. Things that we talk about a lot on the show, nutrition, exercise, we've emphasized how important it is to display those behaviors for your children and when it comes to nutrition, having them in the kitchen cooking with you, and this is the same thing and really trying to help instill the ability to make healthy habits around technology from a very young age and including them in that decision making helps them in the long run when they're adults.

' cause that's things that we didn't [00:35:00] necessarily learn. We're kinda on our own trying to figure it out because we got zero guidance on what to be doing. 

What we're seeing of the children, like my daughter that was had a phone or a, an iPad when they were little is they use it as a pacifier and that's not what we need.

We need to have agency over our feelings. And I love what you just talked about, cooking in the kitchen, doing all those things. But we have to teach our children now agency, or they're going to just be on that thing forever. My mom used to say to me, you have to stop watching TV or your eyes are gonna fall outta your head, or something like that.

And I always thought, God, mom, your eyes can't fall out of your head. Everybody knows that science. But yeah, I was that kid. But I stopped. It's not as easy to stop on digital because it's [00:36:00] designed to be addictive. 

Yeah. And I think so many adults are using it as pacifiers. When you're stressed or you wanna zone out, you get on Instagram or something and distract yourself for a minute.

And so how can adults do better for themselves, especially people that are finding themselves on social media a lot, how can they break that cycle?

 That's a really hard addiction to break. a couple people I know have just taken Instagram off their phones or taken LinkedIn off their phones and it doesn't work because they end up missing so much of what's going on but for other people it works really well.

What you have to start to do is become aware, so start to get data like you were just talking about with your children. Start to actually keep a log. How often are you going on social media? And I mean with a pen, a paper, and a [00:37:00] book. And write down. I went on Sunday night from seven to nine on Instagram, and I watched 47 videos on Bully Dogs.

Okay, just log it. No judgment. Just log it. And then you start to look at all of those logs and you start to see, and you have to decide if that is really where I should be spending my time. Because know this, you have just made Instagram so much money. How much money have you made? What? What's in it for you?

What did you just do that benefited you? But I know how you benefited the social media site because now they can say our people that interact with our site are there for four hours. That means you made X amount of dollars. That means we can charge X amount of dollars for advertising. once you start to have data, you can see, do I have a [00:38:00] problem or don't I have a problem?

And that's where you should be working with your kids too. And the kids can actually begin to see and make it, I used to have a growth chart for Gia when she was little and sorry, that's my daughter. Ja. And n Now what I would start to do is, okay, how much time are you spending? I used to call it wasting time.

She would watch this show called Dance Moms and it would drive me crazy. I just hated the show. But I would say, okay, here's how much time you wasted. I felt like saying, here's how angry Mommy got, and now here's the other things you could have been doing. you make the decision on how much you wanna watch this show.

, Let's say someone does this and they realize they're spending three or four hours a day looking at social media, what would you recommend to them as far as what step to take next? 

Replace it with something. what do you want to [00:39:00] replace it with? What have you always wanted to do?

Have you always wanted to write a book? Have you always wanted to read poetry? Have you always just wanted to learn meditation? Or have you always wanted to walk to the Krispy Kreme and get one of those donuts? What is it that really inspires you? And try doing it for five minutes. And then again, journal.

How did I feel before my activity? How did I feel after? How did I feel when I went on? And just one word. You can do it on your phone, you can do it in a book, you can do it, whatever. But I want you to start to notice your feelings because your feelings are what equate to your stress. And you can begin to take control of your mental health by.

Lowering or making decisions. Maybe you wanna increase your social media. Maybe you wanna be an influencer. Okay, but how does that make you feel? It's all about you. [00:40:00] It's not about others. Take some time for you and figure that journey out, if that makes sense to you. 

And if you find yourself really being one that is addicted to it, meaning like you try, but still you're just like, I cannot stop grabbing this.

Do you find any benefit in some of the blocking apps or now I've seen advertised the Brick, these different options that help people if they truly feel like, I've made the observations, I know I want change. I know I need to do this, but I still can't stop myself. Where do you go in that step?

 I think all of those are great. I think also though, actually talking to someone is a really good idea about how much time you're spending on it, because that indicates loneliness. You're so busy worrying about the virtual life that in your for real life, you're probably a little bit lonely. So why don't [00:41:00] you go for a walk and talk to your dog, put your iPod, ears things in, and just talk to your dog, but you're really not talking to anybody.

I have been known to talk to God about things like that when I'm walking on the beach. Whether you believe or don't that's your choice, but it's like a feeling. Talk to a friend, talk to a therapist, talk to your physician, talk to anybody, but. You need to care for you. This is a very serious addiction.

We, I work with therapists who have 12 year olds that are dealing with phone addictions, that are dealing with gaming addictions, and that are dealing with gambling addictions 12. So you have to start thinking about you care for you. Also, think about it in terms of longevity and the quality of life you wanna have.

What is your quality of life? How do you want to be, how do you want to look in 10 years? [00:42:00] The phone makes you look older. Nobody ever tells you this. Think about how your body is when you're on your phone. So I've got my phone. If you're just like, and your head is down, your neck is down, your shoulders are down, how does your posture look?

Does you also have a double chin when you're doing that? Just, for women over a certain age, you know what I'm talking about? And so you need to think about that. Is that what you really want? You're sedentary. You're now probably looking like you have a double chin most of the day you have sore shoulders and you have a sore neck, and your eyes are tired.

thinking about what you're saying maybe a good way someone could approach it would be to just use the screen time limits that are on the phone. I use that and I almost never, bypass it. You can say, I want more minutes. I almost never do that, but at least I guess it'd be a good place to start and you could just take that time to reflect.

You can choose to [00:43:00] watch more, but you have to at least take that second to reflect like, how do I feel? How do I feel about the fact that I want to look at more? And even if that is, I still want to do it, at least you're taking some time to stop and actually think about how you're feeling about it 

 just make a couple notes about it.

So that you can go back and say, gee, I'm consistently feeling like this. What can I do?

I'm seeing a lot more online gambling as well. Yeah. 

Especially with sports. And I feel like there's always a sport in season. 

I agree. 

Is that going up or is it just like it's more noticeable 'cause people are doing it on their phones? 

We work in responsible gambling with some really amazing companies, but it's also the prevalence of it.

People have been gambling since the Egyptians. Ben Franklin started the first lottery to build a hospital in Philadelphia. Gambling [00:44:00] has always been part of our society, but what's new again, is the phone. We're dealing with the ability to be watching, say, for example, a. Basketball game and you see a player slightly limp, or you're reading on a blog that player might have a sore ankle or something like that, and that'll change the odds.

So you're gonna bet this way or bet that way. All of it is just wow. So much information. And then you make a bet. And that happened to my brother playing football. That's how I got into gambling was online gambling. He did it in what's called the black market, where there's no regulation and there's no government oversight.

And he also did it when we had regulation where I live. So there was a period of time where we had no regulation, then we had regulation For online gaming, you always need regulation for online gaming. You've gotta get rid of those black market people because he was, he could put down [00:45:00] $17,000 'cause he read on some blog because he was tired.

'cause you're not gonna gamble when you first wake up in the morning and you've gone for a run and, of course it was the end of the day, he had a lot of beer. It was Thanksgiving and he bet $17,000 on the kick of a football based on something, he read somewhere on a blog. Wow.

Was that a good decision? No, and that's what I've designed micro breaks to do, to stop or to limit those bad decisions 

that would be , something that someone would have to opt in. To wanting. So it'd be someone that would say, okay, I am probably doing this too much. I want to put these roadblocks up.

Or does that come up automatically for people? 

It can come up automatically, but one of the ways we do it is not just in the gambling environment. If we go back to what I was talking about before, just like we have to teach ourselves [00:46:00] guiderails for nutrition and physical health. We have to begin to teach ourselves guardrails.

And there's a real interesting phenomenon is that we all know in the back of our minds when we've had enough and it's whether we take advantage of that. So we partnered with TikTok. And we created responsible gaming and stress related ads. You're about to make that bet.

Are you doing this? Are you doing that? And hey, just take a moment, give your brain a chance to level off its dopamine, and then bet, click here. And TikTok gave us permission to have someone leave TikTok go to our site, and then they can go right back to where they were before. TikTok believed two people would do this, maybe three if we had, a hundred thousand people.

234,000 young Gen Z men watched what we created and over a [00:47:00] hundred thousand clicked on our button. So we continued to do this. And why that's important in terms of gambling is. It has to be part of the customer journey. We're recommending it's an early part of the customer journey so that people can give themselves that agency and then leave it somewhere on your website or somewhere in your gambling app where you just come back to it.

You just go, oh my gosh what have I done? I don't, I shouldn't bet this. Okay, let me just click here and make sure I'm making the right decision. And it takes less than three minutes. And in trials by outside obviously academics and researchers. . We work less than three minutes to reduce you from a stress, to take you from a stress state to a happy state.

Three minutes. We work faster than Tylenol, so it's really good for social media and we're consistently seeing that kind of buy-in on social media where people say, okay, I need a break. I'm gonna go. And then do they [00:48:00] go back? Most often we don't see them going back, but you don't. We see them doing, we referring a friend to that brand.

So that becomes a customer acquisition. 

Fascinating. And speaking of this, I think this is what I have developed for my own boundary when it comes to shopping over time, because I'm one that was like, whatever emotions oh, I'm shopping. But I finally taught myself, leave it in the, the actual cart, come back to it later.

If later today you still want this item, purchase it, not then it was just an emotional decision. So it's almost something that I had developed for myself as a boundary, but that was easier for me. Because I don't have a shopping addiction, but it makes, it, makes so much sense because that method has worked for me for so long.

that pause, I'd probably buy 75% less just because I paused instead of immediately hitting purchase. 

that with food as well. That's something that we talk about a lot with patients is, snacking habits, et [00:49:00] cetera. Like just making yourself pause before acting. A lot of times the emotion goes away, and then you're able to make a better decision instead of the immediate response.

It's like water between beers is really what I've developed for digital. 

Great analogy. Yeah. 

I totally agree with you about snacking. By the way, can you talk to my husband? 

Yeah. So are there some red flags people should be aware of to know I probably need to be taking these micro breaks, like in the realm of gambling, in the realm of their social media use.

Is there something they should look for? 

You know what, I am so not qualified to say that I design systems for mental health. But I know that there are phenomenal organizations out there that definitely have cure the red flags on their website. But I can talk to it as a digital thing and the red flag is your mood.

How are you [00:50:00] feeling? Are you feeling anger? Are your hands clenched? Are your shoulders up? Like just some quick self-awareness questions that we never ask ourselves on digital, and we need to start asking ourselves those questions because your brain is telling you're in a stress state. Just breathe.

And if you need that water between beers, here's an easy trick. Breathe in and you could test this on your watches. Breathe in for four counts and breathe out for five counts. So let's just do this right now. So just settle. Put your bum bums on your chair with your feet on the ground. I do this with kids.

I used to be a nursery school teacher. Loved it. And feel your weight and your bottom. Just go side to side.

 And as you breathe in, keep your hands on your tummy. So I'll count you. Breathe 

one. [00:51:00] Breathe in, 2, 3, 4, and breathe out. 2, 3, 4, 5. Let's do that again in 2, 3, 4, 5 out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And just bring yourself back. Move your body side to side.

 Open your eyes, shake your hands, and you're good. How do you feel? 

Better. Better. I'll tell you one thing I noticed how I was feeling too, as far as digital is I noticed when I was having all the popups either on my laptop or on my phone that I was getting so distracted and I would feel anxious and then I would had trouble getting done what I was trying to get done.

Like especially on my laptop, I'm trying to get something done and I keep [00:52:00] seeing you've got this email, you've got this email, and then I had a hard time getting it done, so I try to take those off and that was helpful for me. 

Yeah. 

Do you usually stopping popups? 

I forgot popups are still even happening, so that's a great call out.

I never ever, like the popups and even I move my phone if I'm on a conference call or something like this because my immediate response is, Ooh, what does Doug have to say? Ooh, what's going on? Ooh no, Mary. Just focus. Just pay attention to who's in front of you. Pay them that compliment. 

 it's one of the reasons that having phone, watch, computer, all those things around you at once, and they're all going off, it is just not conducive to you end up getting stressed no matter what.

It can be non-stressful popups or communications, but it causes stress just because you're being distracted and your brain doesn't wanna be distracted. It wants to focus on what's in front of you. Going back to our little breathing exercise, is that [00:53:00] because I, it's something that I always recommend to patients a lot, it using breathing exercises, especially in stressful moments and helping manage some of that tension.

Is that also something that you find helpful for people that are in a profession that is very high tech all day long, is taking little breaks just to do some breathing to help reduce some of that tension They may not even be aware of. 

Breathing, small movements, chair movements. And yes, because we designed a lot of our micro breaks for Microsoft and Microsoft sales team, and we started with our first study in 2019 using two or three minute learnings to see how that helped them, not just with their stress, but to increase their sales.

Because I'm sure you realize that in sales the last quarter, the last month, you are just like, I've got to get that to get my bonus. That's my focus. [00:54:00] But what we did is used education, teeny tiny little education bits as a micro break. And what we found is not only did they exceed their sales goals, but they had a better relationship because it was all on communicating digitally with your.

target audience, they had more fun and they were less stressed. That's exactly what you want. And so I'm sure when you work with your patients, some of them may want movement, some of them may want breathing, some of them may want learning, some of them may want by neural beats. We just won something a global award, top 100 award globally for our sleep protocols.

And that's a whole other thing that, that digital has really messed up are our sleep protocols and our content choices before we go to bad.

Are these types of protocols and suggestions available for anyone or really your company just works with other companies? 

What we're doing [00:55:00] is, big believers in sharing our information which is a CEO I'm sure my board will be kicking me, but we have an email program people can sign up with for, to get these exact emails we're talking about, where you get all these different things and you get access to them for $7 a year because we want every single person to be able to afford it, every single person to be able to use it.

Most everyone we know has an email, so that is why we've chosen to deliver that. Large corporations tend to buy us and put our content in their apps. And then we're now having a physical booth where you can just walk up and do this yourself. It's just like an old fashioned mood ring, but it's called the mood booth, Dr.

Mary's mood booth. And hopefully it'll be in retail and on cruise ships soon where you can see it. But again, it's just designed as a delightful little break in [00:56:00] your day before you shop, before you gamble in a casino or when you're in a casino. There's a couple casinos we're looking at putting it in.

I'm really interested in everybody connecting with me. The best place is probably LinkedIn Dr. Mary Donahue. But and giving me your ideas of where you wanna see this and how you wanna see this move forward and how it can help you. And, everything we do is family friendly.

It's all G rated. Okay. It's not the stuff we do in Ireland, but that's a totally different culture. 

That's funny. And I know we mentioned up front that you have a book. Can you speak a little bit on what any of our listeners are like, Ooh, I really like this topic. What could they get from your book?

The book is message received and it talks about how each generation perceives information through technology, , what their stresses are what sentence cadence you should use with them. How do you best communicate good news and bad news with them? How do you have a [00:57:00] difficult conversation with them?

, It was available in bookstores and it was available on Amazon. Unfortunately, it came out the second round of COVID and nobody cared. So I know that Amazon still has some, but most people that read it. Quite enjoy it and there's some lovely testimonials from major corporations like Lululemon, Microsoft, Walmart, all of those.

If you it's all evidence-based. It's based on research with 34,000 people. 

Sounds like a read. We needed to 

Very impactful. 

You mentioned something at the beginning you said that we were losing our imagination. What would you recommend that we do or something that we can do on a regular basis to try to help our own imaginations 

Start with five minutes. Don't pick up your phone. If you're in an apartment, look out the window. If you are in your house, look out your front door. Your back door. If you can go for a five minute walk, maybe it's six. [00:58:00] Just let your brain settle. What happens is, depending on where you are at work, your dopamine is either very high or very low.

And like anything, it's off balance. And what you need to do to bring creativity back is to begin to balance that. And then after the first five minutes, I want you to walk for six minutes or sit for six minutes and look for a bird. Look for a dog. Look for a bunny. Have one line of focus and what you're gonna find is problem solving becomes a lot easier after you do that and creativity starts to occur. Look at Einstein. Einstein spent every morning from eight to nine in bed or in the bathtub.

His wife brought him his eggs in the bathtub. He just sat and thought, he also went for walks. You had to walk with him at the university to be able to, and he just thought [00:59:00] about things. When we look at the great economists of our time, they use the bathtub too. I'm a big believer in a bath. I take a bath every night.

Oftentimes with no phone, no digital, I just sit in the tub and calm myself. And the other thing you can do is if you don't have time during your day, if you're a busy single mom or single dad, if you're running around all the time, if just get a small bowl of water. , Just big enough to put a foot or two feet in it with warm water and sit at the edge of your bed at night and just put your feet in that water for five minutes.

Put on a timer, five minutes, and you'll be amazed at how much clarity you have the next day. And all of this comes from my uncle who was in the Air Force and then he went to, he became a stockbroker. And what they used to do at the end of every day is they'd share their problems with [01:00:00] each other before they went home.

And when they got up in the morning, they came back to work and they said, what kind of solutions did you come up with those problems? And I find it hap it still helps me. Now if I have a problem, I write it down before I go to bed. I soak my feet, I soak my body depending on where I am. And then in the morning, I just table it.

Okay? It's there. It's hard not to think about, but it's there. It, these are really big problems. I faced my daughter with a heart attack. I've faced my husband's mother and brother dying. I like all of these major problems. And every night just table it, soak your feet, go to bed. Boom. And what you'll find is your brain loves the challenge.

Works without you. Your brain's yeah baby, I can do this. And it does. Now, it may not work the first night, it may not work the second night, but it does work. Even Hilton did this. Hilton wanted to buy his first property [01:01:00] and he put a bid in and then he went to bed and he was nervous about the bid.

He couldn't think about the bid and in a dream, he came up with another number that was like 149,000 and he went back to the people and said, look, you've got my SEAL bid. It's wrong. Can I give you this? They let him, guess what? He beat the other person by a hundred dollars. Now people say that's divine intervention.

No, it's not. It's his brain working out the math of that property, what the person wanted, what's the likelihood of somebody else bidding. And then it was that mammalian brain I told you about in the beginning and then coming up with a solution. So there's actual evidence. For all of these things, we're just not using them.

So use them. Don't I sound like a mom now? 

Yes. 

I find that great. 'cause they're all things that I have picked up on when I made my best decisions and have a creative brain or all these things that you just mentioned, but [01:02:00] so many times we instead choose a distraction when we have a stressful decision.

And that doesn't actually help us think and process to make a good decision. 

That's why recess was developed. Recess was developed so kids could reset. And we don't take recesses anymore. Recess was developed because the kids were sitting in the class, , even in the early days of the one room schoolhouse, and they were like, okay, this is not going well.

They only have so much attention. Boom. Go outside play. They can come back, they can focus, they can get their work done and look at how many breaks we have in a school day. You get into school, you're there for an hour and a half. You have recess, you're there for another hour and a half, you have lunch, you're there for another, an hour and a half, you have recess.

Another hour and a half, you go home. those are how little brains learn. We should use that exact same pattern. Earlier. We were talking about time for digital. This then that this, then that. So that the little minds can absorb their creative energy. [01:03:00] They're our future. This is what we should be focusing on right now.

I really like calling that recess. 

I do, I'm gonna start doing that when we, when you and I are trapped 

in recess thinking some things, I'm gonna say recess and we have to run outside. Yeah. I love 

that. Please do that. Great idea. 

And I'll say what I took away from you, from everything you were saying today, and you can apply this both to yourself as an adult and to your kids, is first to just observe yourself.

Observe the time you're spending doing something digital. Observe the environment in which you're doing it in. Observe the feelings that you have before and after. And then have a conversation with your kids. You could have a conversation with yourself or the bird in the tree, and then think about how you feel again, and then decide what you wanna do from there.

 Think about you, stop thinking 

about the other [01:04:00] people. 

Especially as young mothers that you guys are just, there's so much on your plate right now, and now I've just given you more by creating digital guidelines and digital recesses and all of those things.

But you've got this. Just give yourself some time to be creative and you'll think of way better solutions than I have. 

That's great. 

This podcast was everything I hoped it would be. 

Oh, thank goodness. So thank you so much because I really do like your approach thinking about learning how to keep technology in your life, but learning how to do it in a healthy manner versus the ultimatum.

Of just being like, I just don't want it at all, which is very unrealistic in today's world. And so this has been extremely helpful. I think our listeners will have learned so much. And if someone that's listening wants to connect with you, what is the best way to connect with you?

You can find me on LinkedIn, as I said, the digital wellness center, the website, you can [01:05:00] send an email from there. It's the digital wellness center.com and I will never make a title that long again because it takes so long to type in and I put in so many mistakes. The other thing they can do is Gmail, Dr.

Mary e. My middle initial is Eileen, so it's e donahue@gmail.com. Go ahead, either one, you can easily find me. And happy to chat with people about this. It really is my life's work and I really, I want people to, I wanna bring joy back in a very harsh world, and the only way to do that is to give them, those digital guardrails.

Thank you so much for giving us some digital guardrails today, and thank you guys for listening. Hopefully this was helpful to you as well. Talk to y'all next week. See you next time.