In today’s fast-paced digital world, it has become crucial to talk about healthy tech—where technology enhances your life, rather than controls it. In this episode, Tommy Thompson and Steve Perkins delve into practical ways to have a healthy relationship with all of the different forms of technology that are a part of our lives. Realizing that social media, YouTube, texting, email are a fact of modern life, they explore ways to right-size and engage with tech to add to and improve our lives. Join this conversation as they uncover the secrets to thriving in the digital age without sacrificing our physical and mental well-being.
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Healthy Tech
Welcome back. I think we’re going to have a great conversation with Steve Perkins, one of my great friends, co-podcaster for many years together for us and you separately, Steve. Whenever I want to just have a great, in-depth conversation, Steve’s my go-to guy. He’s the Owner and Founder of Greenhouse Coaching. This is going to be a fun conversation that I think, I hope, will be incredibly useful for anybody reading.
The subject behind this episode is healthy tech. Right off the bat, you may be thinking, “That’s an oxymoron. Tech can’t be healthy.” That’s one of the reasons I wanted to dive into this subject, because technology is something that is a part of every one of our lives, and yet we struggle so much to live with it in a healthy relationship.
The genesis of this episode was an episode that I had with AC Arendale, and you can go back and read it. It was a delightful conversation. She’s the youngest guest I’ve ever had on the show. Towards the end, we got into this discussion of the Gen Z generation and what are the strengths and weaknesses. She commented specifically that the weakness she felt was this struggle with this perpetual distraction that comes from technology and social media and that, from her perspective, there weren’t many practical tools out there for how to deal with this.
That immediately got my mind going. I went, “That’s something that I’ve thought about and struggled with, and I’ve worked so hard to try to find practical ways. That’s worth an episode.” I’m excited for the very imperfect discussion. Steve’s the perfect one to join me on this. Steve, what do you think about this?
Introduction
I have to go straight to the nerd with it, but I think it taps into so many conversations we’ve had around systems. I wish there was a sexier word for it. This, to me, strikes me as a thing that, okay, if I try to do something today that helps, then tomorrow, I’m back to square zero again. It’s a constant restart. I’m always trying to fix it today, do better tomorrow, do better this week, and then next week, I’m starting over again. I am excited for where we’re going to go with this because I know that you have a mindset for, “How can I implement things that will keep working for me when I’m not at my best,” versus just relying on some maximum potential every day in my own self.
It’s so true. I think the other side of the equation is that this whole technology movement is a current that we’re in. That current is going very strongly in one direction. The minute we figure one thing out, there’s a whole force of companies out there that are designed to undo whatever we tried to figure out.
They’re working aggressively, and they’ve got a lot of money at stake in making sure we don’t solve these problems. They’re coming up with new tools, and there’s new technology every day that presents brand new challenges for how we can do this. If we don’t come up with some core things that work across all the spectrums, then we’re just going to be constantly running ourselves into the ground fighting this. Systems may not be a sexy word, but it does get at some of that, and hopefully, we’ll get at some of it in this episode.
I know we’ll do this naturally, but you and I come at this topic with maybe a unique experience, seeing both sides of the coin on this issue because I am one of the perpetrators you just mentioned. I am on the business side of social media and tech as well, trying to get people’s attention, trying to do all the things that help get in front of people, and at the same time, I’m a person with a life who’s trying to manage all this stuff and not be overtaken by it too. I just want to be honest upfront with people and I think you’re the same. I know you’re the same. We think about this all the time from both sides of it, and that just causes you to think really deeply about it as well.
It’s really conflicted. I want people to read this.
We’re doing it right now.
Is technology. I’m thinking, “You really need to read this,” just like everybody else is thinking. It’s totally conflicted, and it’s also conflicted because as much as we want to beat up on technology, we’ll get into this, I love technology. I have a blast with it. It has added so much fun and utility to my life. It’s really important that we talk about this, and I want to get more into this, but that we take the judgment out of all this because otherwise, I’ll just be judging myself right into a hole.
Breadth Of Technology
I think one of the places to begin is to acknowledge the breadth of technology. That is, very often, when I hear these discussions about technology, people jump right to social media. They talk about how negative social media is. When you get down to it, social media is a relatively small subset of all of the technological influences on our lives. If we begin to think, “I’m doing pretty well with social media,” and we don’t acknowledge all of the other places that technology infuses, we’re kidding ourselves. What are some of your favorite go-to technologies?
I’ll give you a roundabout answer because you just reminded me of a whole phase of life where I had been working in the high-tech industry, and when you say the word technology, to me, it represented a whole slew of things that had nothing to do with social media. My head went to things that you would see in Popular Science Magazine. Technology advances like flying cars and stuff. To me, that was “technology.”
It was right after I transitioned out of that work. It was this weird shift where suddenly I’m noticing the word tech more focused on social media and our phones. I just thought that was really interesting. It was just intriguing to me that the word tech has taken on a meaning of almost directly meaning social media. When, like where I was, anyone in the engineering world, you think of tech as like the latest advances in toasters and toaster ovens. It is an interesting thing you bring up.
When you say tech, my mind doesn’t go to social media right away, but when you say social media or phone types of things, one of my favorites lately is this app called InShot. There are a few like this, but an app called InShot that’s like a video editing app. It’s crazy how you and I have several friends who do video editing, how it used to require so much equipment, and this one little app can do just everything. It’s really cool.
I have to admit, I am a TikToker. I thought it was a joke at first, and now I’m hooked. I do really like it. It’s funny to me, like why is it so much different swiping this way versus that way, or why does every platform feel so different when, on the surface, it’s the same old stuff? I don’t know, but I do really like TikTok. Did you ever try Clubhouse? For a while, I tried that one. It came and went already, but it was almost like old-school chat rooms around certain topics.
This stuff comes at you in two different ways. You have all of these apps. You have TikTok, X, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all of these different apps, which is one angle on it, then you also have all these devices. Some people go, “I don’t have any problem with my phone,” but they spend hours and hours glued to their laptop or to their iPad, or even to a TV with it.
I have a friend who’s a techie and an early adopter, and he is so into automating his whole house, like Internet of Things. Everything’s automated. He’s got this command center. At every hour of the day, the shades on the windows are doing different things, and he loves it. It’s funny because I came out of that world, but I’m such a late adopter with that stuff.
I totally love that stuff.
He has no accounts on any social media, but he spends so much time on that. Gamers would be another big one.
It’s a huge one. You used the word, “I just got hooked on TikTok,” and that word hooked, or people want to throw in the word addicted. We’ve become addicted to this. Whether that’s technically an addiction or we’re just hooked to it, it has this sense where we lose a little bit of our innate ability to exercise self-control, and it gets out of hand. Time goes by and we’re willing to let it go by because it’s just so addicting or engaging and stuff. That’s the nature of all these things. I think it’s really critical.
The point of this is, as people are reading this, I hope everybody’s thinking expansively, not, “I don’t have that problem,” but, “What is out there that I find myself hooked on that I’m not handling in, a word, a healthy way.” That’s a start. I thought one way of looking at this, because again, I want to frame this issue in a particular way, is to think about healthy tech or to think about technology almost as analogous to the way we think about eating. Just like with technology, I’ve fought weight all my life. I’ve fought self-control all my life when it comes to eating.
Healthy Tech
It’s real easy for me to get into a mindset of thinking about eating like it’s such a negative thing. I need to avoid it. I’m always fighting it and everything, and yet we absolutely rely on food for nutrition. We have to have food in order to live. The issue becomes, how can I have a healthy relationship with food? I think the analogy in my mind carries very much over into technology, every one of us is going to be dealing with technology, and technology we can’t even imagine in the future. The question is, how can we do this in a healthy way? How can we do this in a way that adds life, that nourishes us as opposed to poisons us?
That framing is interesting because it makes me think about the fact that every day, you have multiple times in the day when you desire food and need food. This isn’t like other things in life that happen once a month or here or there. It’s multiple times every day of your life. If we frame it as negative, like you said, it’s something we’ve got to fight, and it’s our enemy, then naturally, multiple times every day, you are putting yourself in this negative position where you’re losing a battle. You and I have talked about this around many topics of spirituality and faith, but I think that’s something to notice here.
I like your analogy because it’s talking about a mindset. If we can get ourselves in a better, healthier mindset about our relationship with food and what’s true and what’s not, then it’s going to naturally start to put our desires in better places versus the mindset of, “This is this enemy I’ve got to fight, and I’m always losing.” Multiple times every day, it’s going to be something pulling you down. I think that definitely carries over quite a bit to tech. Is our mindset around it something really negative? Are we putting our energy towards fighting, or are we putting our energy towards receiving what’s true about it all?
I think, in a similar way to eating, some of our relationships with social media and with these things can be very guilt-inducing. Just like with eating, what we’re talking about is something that is, on a daily basis, if not hourly basis, a guilt-inducing, condemning force in our life if we don’t figure this out well. I think the one place where the analogy breaks down a little bit is, for most people with food, we have the benefit of getting full. If we eat a certain amount, we actually are totally fine with stopping for a while, and we don’t necessarily want to eat 24 hours a day. Most people don’t. Technology, I think, on the other hand, is designed so that we don’t hit satiety on it and that it can grab us for much longer periods of the day and keep on pinging us throughout the day, which I think in some ways makes it potentially, at least, a little bit more insidious than the food issue.
Definitely. Similar to food, I think there’s a dynamic of, again, it’s a mindset thing, but realizing who’s the boss here. I think it can be easy, as the default, to think that food or that tech is the boss. I have to respond to it. I had a conversation with a friend who was getting pinged and pulled in multiple directions by people in his life who wanted him to go meet them over here, then go do this, then respond to this text.
As advised, it was easy for me because I was the third party, but I’ve worked on this a lot in my life, and I was noticing, wow, you’re letting everyone else pull you in these directions that actually he shouldn’t have been pulled in. He should not have been doing any of those things, and yet he was doing them because someone else pinged him. It was like a notification effect.
When you really strip it back and think about the mindset, he was a little bit operating with the mindset of, “Every notification is my boss,” when the truth is he’s the boss of those notifications. If he adjusts that mindset, the whole day could run totally different where he’s able to, in a healthy, positive way, say no to those things, put them in the right place, and put priorities where they go. It all started with the mindset, but that’s what I mean with this. Are we always in a fight, or do we put our energy towards receiving what’s true? What’s true in this case is that he is not the boss, or the notifications are not the boss of him, but that’s a different place for him to put the effort.
It’s so funny. I remember distinctly I went on a golf trip with a couple of friends and shared a room with a good friend. One of the practices that we’ll talk about that I’ve practiced for a long time is I have all notifications turned off except for texts, and I don’t get many texts at all. I can handle that. I have everything turned off. The whole pinging effect is not a big deal for me because I just don’t get pinged.
On the other hand, he has pings on for everything. That night, we went to bed, and he not only had the pings on, he had them turned on at a really high volume. That night, he’s learned to just sleep through everything. He just slept through, and he had different alarms set at his home where we were, such that it pinged every fifteen minutes. Throughout the entire night, every fifteen minutes, I was hopping up to this ding while he just slept through, and I went, “Oh my gosh.”
I could not do it. I could not do that.
I didn’t. Anyway, we all have had different experiences that we can laugh at or, frankly, that probably really frustrated us, usually with how someone else is managing technology.
Definitely. It’s an interesting story, too, because you think he was able to sleep through it because he’s conditioned himself to that environment and that reality. I think that’s a big part of this. That’s a big part of what you’re conditioning yourself to versus, to your point, you’re going to willpower harder than all the big tech companies and the billions and billions of dollars that get poured into marketing. You’re not going to win. Put your effort elsewhere. Put it towards a new setup for yourself, towards conditioning yourself better, towards these other rhythms.
Three Core Questions
One of the things that I’ve tried to guarantee myself that I want to do in this show, in honor of AC, who brought up this issue, is that I want to get really practical and offer some very practical tools. I want to talk about one more framing of this before we get into what are some really practical tools that I’ve found helpful as I think about the places technology, that all of these things play in my life. The reason I’m breaking it down this way is because I think everybody has their own issues. Your issues, what might tempt you or be an issue for you with TikTok might not be an issue for me at all, or someone else for YouTube.
I want to break this down in some ways that allow us, individually, whoever’s reading, to say, which one of these is what I really struggle with? It’s a way of evaluating each one of our relationships with technology. It’s real simple. It’s just simply by asking a couple of questions. They’re typical questions. The first one that I put out there, which is just more of a reflection question than anything else, is to ask the why question. Why are we engaged with the various technologies that we’re engaged with? That question is not asked with the assumption that there’s a negative answer to it. There might be a very positive answer. There’s nothing wrong with relaxing with technology for a while.
There’s nothing wrong with using technology to enhance relationships and to stay connected to people. There’s nothing wrong with having fun or engaging with comedy, but there could be something wrong with getting our identity out of it and being consumed with likes. There could be something wrong with how it turns us against people. There could be something wrong with engaging, obviously, in something like pornography.
There are all sorts of wrong things, and there are all sorts of right things. I think it’s helpful to just mull on the question to begin with of why. Why are we engaged in some of the technologies? We might have different answers for different technologies that we use, but getting some clarity on that begins to answer the question, is this a problem right on the front end?
Yeah. I just want to emphasize your point there to take out the judgment because, doing a lot of coaching, I always notice what happens with different personality types. There are multiple personality types that are straight towards the self-criticism and the guilt. It’s almost funny. Even when you talk about their personality type, the first thing they point out is the flaws with their type. Personalities aren’t about your flaws. That’s part of it, but that’s not it. It can be helpful to just write down your whys and then cross out any judgment words you’re writing down. It’s just an observation exercise.
I actually wrote down the phrase as I was thinking about this. Don’t judge change, because frankly, a lot of people I know that are really quick to judge themselves, stop there. It’s like, “I beat myself up enough. I’ve done all the negative stuff. I can just move on.” To your point, I think it’s more helpful to simply take the judgment out of it and to address what do I want to change, kind of without the judgment piece of it.
The first question is why. The second question is what. Not what technology, but what parts of technology are we engaging in? I love to look at sports things, particularly golf things. I go, “That’s great. I have a blast with it. Really fun.” My wife loves to look at videos on elephants. She has a blast with it. It’s really fun, but then there are other places in the what question that we can go that are not life-giving. They’re not healthy.
They’re places that take us in wrong angles. What you mentioned with TikTok is a perfect example. TikTok is something that has got some phenomenal content on it and then it’s got some incredibly awful content on it. To simply address TikTok without saying, “What on TikTok are you engaging in,” is missing the point.
One example for me that’s, again, a little bit different from just social media is, for me, just the very act of pulling out my phone and opening it is a big one. It’s become such a habit. Just so much of my life happens on my phone that if there’s ever a dead second, my tendency is to just pull it out for no reason. It’s just the habitual thing. I noticed it one weekend when we took my daughter and some friends to a high ropes course thing at the zoo. We were all completely unplugged for several hours and in nature, and it was just fun.
When we got home, I pulled out my phone, and I don’t even know, checking emails or texts or something. There was no purpose. There was nothing I had to do there. I’m just checking stuff. I paused and had one of those moments like, “I was so relaxed and in a better state when we were at the high ropes course than I am right now suddenly inside with my screen on.” It was just an interesting thing to notice. It was just the fact of pulling out the phone. It wasn’t even the specific app or social media that I was looking at.
That gets to that second question, which is when. When are we engaged? If we are like what you described, when is all the time. It’s every moment. If when is every time I go to the bathroom, I pull it out without thinking about it, then that maybe is an issue to think about. That when, I guess, gets at the question, is there a when not somewhere in your equation? That crosses over to the third question of how much are we doing it? It’s the classic that I love to say, “Too much of a good thing is still too much.” If it is playing too big a place in our life and the stats around technology are mind-boggling in terms of how much we engage in something electronic in our life, it’s worth addressing on this.
Too much of a good thing is still too much if it is playing too big a place in our life. Share on XThe really three core questions are, what, what technology, what is this stuff? Is it life-giving stuff or is it not? When, and how much on that? My encouragement would be for each person to ask, which one of those questions is your Achilles’ heel? Is it the how much question? “I don’t really do bad stuff on all of this, but it’s just all the time.” Is it the when question? “I’m looking at my phone while sitting down at meals with all my friends. It’s the last thing I do at night, the first thing I do in the morning.” That’s the when question. Is it the what question? Which one is the one that you really want to tackle as the worst of the issues for you?
Which is it for you?
For me, I think it’s primarily the how much question. I’ve got some practices that often are pretty good at putting the phone away for some time, but I am just like what you described. The minute I come back to my phone, if I didn’t say this right now, the minute I finished this episode, I’d be picking up my phone to check something that I checked an hour ago that hasn’t changed just because it’s this insidious habit. It niggles at me all the time. That how much is just something that takes the joy out of it.
I know mine is somewhere in there, too. I think the when is probably the current one for me because I need to have a little more boundary of when I’m on versus off. Right now, it’s a little too much all the time. I’ll do the same thing. It would be pretty funny if you had just some video capture of how often I’ll open my phone, check the weather, the stocks and my email again, all these things that, to your point, I just checked. Nothing happened. Nothing’s changed.
The one that’s just so funny, you blink, and a new temptation grabs you. I’ve been pulled into the whole political piece, checking to see if there’s any new scandal out there, and so I check to find out what’s going on, and there’s nothing life-giving about that. I think I’ve got all of the problems when it comes to that, but I realized without thinking about it that just one certain thing caused me to jump into it that first time that I thought, “I need to follow up and see if anything’s changed on that.” All of a sudden, I found myself jumping at this all the time. Even just reflecting for the sake of this episode has caused me to go, “No. I’ve got time to put the brakes on. This is not how I want to live,” but it’s tough. I think as much as we work on this, both you and I, we both probably have to confess we’re not always very good at it.
Levels Of Control
The people who talk about it on podcasts struggle with it the most. Can we get into the levels of control? I think this is really interesting stuff.
Yes. The levels of control. This is what I think AC was getting at when she raised the problem of this. Putting words into her mouth, I think what she was saying is that the only tool that I know that I have to apply to this is my willpower. That just doesn’t work all the time. She’s incredibly sharp and diligent, and she’s probably ten times better than so many people, but any of us, if I tried to deal with all of my food addictions and desires just by way of willpower, I am going to get sunk on it. What I sense is that first level of control, which for many people is the only level of control that they tend to apply to it, willpower doesn’t work very well for many people.
I’ve noticed there’s just such a cultural awakening to the fact that we’re a very action-oriented society in this modern America. It makes sense. We have grown up thinking the only way to do life altogether is through action and applying oneself and going and doing. It’s interesting. I’m going through the same thing of realizing actually there are other forces than just my willpower, but that was very much the air we’ve been breathing for multiple decades.
When the problem’s small, sometimes you can get away with that. When it’s not an addictive thing and it’s just a small little change you’re trying to make, you can perhaps get away with willpower, but it doesn’t work on things where there’s just a strong current running with it. The second level, to me, of control that we attempt to use is what I would call a really popular word. It’s boundaries. We put boundaries on these things. That’s a word that’s thrown out in so many contexts, but boundaries on relationships, we put boundaries on our eating.
We put boundaries on these different things, and boundaries, I think, is a great second step towards this. However, boundaries, often, I think the way we use it is just willpower on steroids. It’s a way of saying, “Okay, I’m going to put a habit, a plan to say I’m not going to pick up my phone for the first 30 minutes of the day. I’m going to put boundaries on how I use my phone and not use it.” That’s great. It’s a clear plan. You know what you’re doing, but then you’re still somewhat subject to your willpower of, “Am I going to be able to adhere to the boundaries?” The boundaries are good. They can help with a whole lot of things, but I think for many of us, we’ve found that the boundaries are easy to cheat on.
With personality types, on most assessments or frameworks, I’m one of the most extreme where boundaries do not work because I am absolutely going to do what feels the best in the moment or break the rule because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a flexibility thing. Personalities that are more flexible and adaptable. They don’t care about the boundary or the rule. It’s like, what’s happening right now is what I’m going to adapt to versus someone like my wife, Ashley, who’s very much wired to stick to rules and to follow them. Boundaries work a lot better for her because if she sets it, she’ll follow it. She’s just wired to follow the plan. Yet, to your point, she still breaks her own boundaries all the time.
The thing is I’m probably much more like Ashley. I still just cheat all the time on these things that I’ve set boundaries for. Occasionally, I’ll get a high level of determination on one particular thing and really stick to it and get this reputation of being very disciplined, but it doesn’t really work on technology because it’s coming at you from fifteen different angles.
It’s designed to be all of those things.
The third level of control is what I really love. It’s a word I haven’t really heard used on this. It’s a word that isn’t talked about much. It’s to apply governors to our desire for control. For many people that go, “What are you talking about? The governor for a state? What state are you talking about?” For machines, a governor is an external mechanism that is put on that you can’t cheat on.
For instance, many of our cars have governors on them that prevent the car from going faster than a certain speed. The cars are designed to go faster, but you put a governor, an external thing, and whether I want to or not, I can’t go faster than what that governor is designed for. That’s a different type of animal. Now I’m not relying on my willpower. If I can find a governor to put on these things, I’m not relying on boundaries that I can easily violate or not, depending on how well-disciplined I am. I’m simply putting something external on that I can’t cheat on.
It makes me think of growing up with go-karts, and you just wanted it to go faster so bad, but they put the governor switch. What does that look like, though, when you apply that concept to tech?
The beauty of it is that many of the technologies we use have, way back in the settings, governors that we can apply to help us. It’s really interesting. The designers of many of the technologies, Steve Jobs, Musk, and so many of these people, when they designed these technologies, the very first thing they said was, “These things are so good. My kids are never using them.” They set these things up. They knew how addictive they were, and they wouldn’t allow their own kids to use them.
Ultimate Technology Governor
Let’s talk about the ultimate governor. You have a five-year-old. You don’t give them a phone. That’s a governor. That five-year-old can’t use it. However, there are governors for us as adults. There are some that have become real favorites for me. I’m really talking primarily in the iPhone or iOS universe. I think there are comparable things in the Android universe, but I just don’t know exactly how to get to them, but if you go into settings in iOS, you can scroll down, and there is screen limits. I think that is what it’s called. In there, it has a feature called downtime.
With downtime, you can go in, and you can tell the device, your iPad, Mac, or iPhone, exactly when you are allowing it to have access to you. You can sit there and let’s just say you want it to be extreme. This is a very extreme example. You could say, “I really want to avoid all technology.” You could go in and say, “The only time I want to allow anything, allow access to any of these things, is from 4:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon.” You could cut it off so that you couldn’t access anything. You could try, click all you want, and just not be able to use any of those things except for that one hour. That’s an external governor.
An external governor that I think is actually very useful that the airlines have come up with is airplane mode. When you get on an airplane, you’re supposed to put your phone and your iPad on airplane mode, which means there’s no access to the internet. You can do that at home too. You can say, “For the next three hours, I’m going to put on airplane mode.”
What I like about downtime is I have a one-time decision that I can control five days a week, and I can do it differently for each day of the week. I can say, “Come 9:00 at night, cut me off and cut me off until 5:00 in the morning or 6:00 in the morning.” That way, I don’t have to exercise any self-control other than that one time of deciding when I’m going to put the limits on. I can have different limits for Saturday and Sunday. I can put it on all of these different mechanisms, and I find that really helpful.
One of the places that I use this, in particular, is because I particularly want to put a limit on the access to all of those things that tempt me in the last hour and the first hour of the day. If I can protect the last hour and the first hour of the day, I am helping myself so much in my addictive nature. I know pretty much what time I go to bed each night. All I have to do is set downtime one time to say, “Once I get to this point, it cuts off,” and then it won’t cut on until an hour after I typically get up. It’s a tool that’s incredibly powerful.
I really like that specific. It’s a bit of a hybrid of the things you’ve mentioned. It’s got some boundaries in there as well. It makes me think of, this wasn’t an intentional decision, but I’ve just fallen into this over time, where throughout the evening, I’ll dim the lights. I should probably get someone like you to automate it by this point. I don’t know, I go around, and I’ll be dimming lights just naturally through the evening. I don’t even think about it. In the morning, I have this thing. I don’t always use it, but it’s basically an alarm clock. What it does is it phases the light in, like the sunrise.
All of this came out of leaving the corporate world, realizing just how much so many norms in the corporate world just really mess with our health and our well-being. A lot of it was like being online, answering stuff that’s really triggering and intense until you go to bed, and then waking up late to a meeting, and everyone’s expecting you, and that jolting nature right before bed and right when you wake up, just how the far-reaching implications that had on my health. I was trying to undo a lot of stuff. One of the things was the light. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to notice that the sun slowly goes down, slowly comes up. That’s what we’re meant to have. I don’t need to read studies about it. I don’t need to look at research.
It’s just obvious. The sun does that, and yet we have light switches to go from totally on to totally off. The light coming down, it just helps me calm down and ease into sleeping. Also, wake up in a more calm and steady way. I was just envisioning that as you talked about it. What a cool way to approach tech. You’re winding it down by not having those triggering things in your face right before sleep in the morning.
What a cool way to approach tech that you're winding it down by not having those triggering things in your face right before sleeping. Share on XThe beauty of that particular feature is you can customize it to say, “I want you to cut off everything except for this.” You can go in and say, for example, “I really want to cut off all of the social media, but I still want to be able to text or I still want to have access to some feature.” You can actually go in the downtime feature and tell it what you want to preclude and what you want access to, which is really helpful. We all have different issues. We all have different desires, so the ability to customize that is great. That’s one feature that I use, another one.
Another really good one is there’s a feature in that same area called app limits. You can go in and say, “I only want to be able to use this app for this amount of time on a particular day.” This would be really good for someone who says, “I really do well in terms of all this. I don’t have many issues except for TikTok. TikTok just gets me, or X really gets me, or Instagram really gets me. I have a hard time exercising self-control.” You could go to that particular place and say, “Give me one hour of Instagram a day.”
When you start to get close to it, it’ll actually ping you and say, “You have five minutes left.” All of a sudden, you go, “I didn’t even realize I’d been scrolling for 55 minutes,” or whatever the case may be. That’s a different thing. That’s not so much the when. That’s the how much of one particular thing. You could go in for every single one of these things that you have an issue with and put on that external governor to say, “I want it to control me. I want it to help me exercise the self-control that I know on my own I’m not going to exercise.” That’s another good tool.
That one, I’ve definitely seen some people use, and it really helps them.
My hope is that in reading this, number one, that we won’t feel judged in terms of this, that we’ll take the judgment out of the issue, but in taking the judgment out of the issue, that maybe everybody reading it could make one positive change to make something more healthy. That could perhaps spur a second change. Sometimes, it’s just making people aware that these tools are available. A third tool, the Apple universe has a feature called focus that you can apply. That’s something that you have to use your willpower for, but you can say, “I’m really wanting to concentrate for a period of time, two hours on this project.” You just click on focus, and you won’t be disturbed or something.
It just really helps with that notification scenario we talked about, where the ping is what pulls you in. It reduces the amount of times that you might get pulled in versus the intentionality of going to an app.
It’s great. I’m so glad you mentioned that because that’s, to me, one of the most important and easiest external governors. It’s just turn notifications off. Turn off every notification. Every time these apps, you load one in, “Can we notify you?” Just say no. Your default answer is no, unless there is some particular emergency need for you to be notified about something. Just say no to every notification. All of a sudden, you’re freed up instead of being interrupted all day long.
One of the most important and easiest external governors of technology is just turning notifications off. Share on XCompletely. For me, I have so many apps on my phone that I’m using for work. I always have notifications off, and any buzz, ping, or noise is all off, but I do keep the red badges on because I need to know when there are messages or something there I need to check. To me, that’s where something like focus or even airplane mode helps. “For the next two hours, I’m going to be working on something and focused.”
That’s when I might want even the red badges to go away because seeing them there is going to be way too tempting to open it up. I wouldn’t say this happens every time, but I had a time where I actually forgot for a while that there would be messages in there waiting for me. I thought, “That’s weird. Usually, I don’t have this long of a time without any red bubbles,” and then I realized that’s because I have it off. Case in point, it was helpful that it untethered my brain from that for a while.
It’s great. These are just simple little tools. Let me throw out just a couple more. I’m putting a lot out there. One external governor that you can put is practicing what, to me, is the Law of Proximity. The Law of Proximity is something that I thought of a while back. It says that which is closest to us gets our greatest attention. It’s one of the reasons a phone is so difficult because there’s nothing closer to us than a phone, which is touching our body virtually all day long. We see a sunset, pull out a phone, and take a picture. How do you offset that?
Which is closest to us gets our greatest attention. Share on XYou have designed periods of the day where you are not with your phone. The ones that I would suggest, and other people have suggested this, this is not new with me, is to charge your phone in a different room each night. I charge my phone in my closet each night. The charger that I use for it is there. If I want to charge my phone, I have to leave it in my closet. If I don’t, it’s going to run out of battery. My phone, every single night, goes in there.
By the time, therefore, I’m getting in bed, I can’t access my phone. The same thing when I wake up. I can’t look right next to me and see if something happened. I have to at least wait until I get to my closet. Someone who wanted to go a little further could say, “I’m going to put my phone charging in my basement or by the coffee pot,” or something. Using the Law of Proximity in reverse is very helpful. One that I think many people would benefit from is using that law of proximity around meals.
Suppose families were to say, “We’re going to have a technology basket, and with each meal, we’ll all put our phones in there. It’s just a habit that we all do so nobody’s tempted to grab it, particularly if you have notifications turned off. You’re going to put it in there.” All of a sudden, it’s not there. I know you think about this for walks. Don’t take your phone with you.
I definitely don’t take my phone with me on most. We definitely do the meal thing for dinner. That’s one of those rhythms that I actually enjoy versus, “I got to do the thing.” I find that I really enjoy that because you can feel it, even in your body. You can feel a little bit of the relaxation, and the disconnect feels good.
You and I have done this one together, and I do it sometimes still, leading offsite type of retreats and offsites for leadership teams at companies and make them put the phone in the basket on the way in. It’s always the funniest moment because everyone’s having a mini-crisis, “What? I need to be able to check that,” and yet every time, without fail, afterward, people are so glad because they accomplished weeks’ worth of work in one day simply because it was focused without being pulled in all those directions.
I think, to your point, it’s actually a great point. With any of these things that you start to practice, don’t expect to enjoy it at the beginning. That first time you put your phone in a basket for a meal, you’re going to just go, “I don’t want to do this. This isn’t fun,” or your phone’s not around, and you’re like, “I missed this incredible sunset,” or something like that. It isn’t going to feel good. We have to actually break the addiction, and breaking addictions is never enjoyable. However, all of a sudden, you said without even thinking about it, “Now I’m really enjoying this.” That’s a sign of healthiness, right?
Yeah.
A couple of others that I’ve thought about. These are a little bit further down the line, but some people might really enjoy them, too. Small hacks. I’ve done this at times, and it’s a little bit of a nuisance that tells me that I’ve got an issue with it. I move my most addictive apps to the second, third, or fourth page on my iPhone so that anytime I want to go to it, I have to go through the hassle of scrolling over. It’s like this little reminder to me, “You’ve got a problem.”
It’s such a good one.
It’s so obnoxious.
I love how it’s such a hassle to swipe three times, but yet it is. Something about that feels like a hassle.
It really helps on those things where you get out of a meeting, you just pull out your phone to use, and go, “I got to go.” That’s a good one. You can turn a color off on your apps. You can turn the sound off. For many people, that just makes it a little bit less appealing. Here’s one that I think a lot of people would benefit from. Turn off likes. You can go into Instagram and many of these things, scroll down in the settings, and say, “I don’t want to be able to see how many people are liking my post.”
That’s a tricky one.
It is, but wouldn’t that be healthy?
I love that idea. Right away, I’m thinking of some places I might want to try it, where it’s going to be tough at first, but wow. That would actually be pretty helpful and, I bet, eye-opening.
It would shine a light on some of our motivations and what’s going on internally. We did these things. A couple of last thoughts. When we have a habit that is less than optimal that we want to replace or get rid of, the best mechanism is to replace it with something else along the way, potentially something else that is more appealing. I’ve heard you talk about this many times, and it inspired me. Taking walks. When you, Steve, decide and build a habit of regular walks in your day to create some space, space from the stress and the technology, it is infusing life into you.
For many of us, we need to rediscover the joy of reading. We need to rediscover the joy of nature. We need to rediscover the joy of walking. I’ve been reading a book that’s talking about some addiction, and it talks about people who work to get off drugs. If they have something life-giving to go to, they can get off the drugs. If the only reason they’re doing drugs is because their life is miserable and they’re bored and have nothing, then they don’t get off the drugs because the drugs are the only place they get stimulation. The really big answer is get a life. Get a life that’s worth more than the technology.
I think it’s such a great place to end because it is active, and going back to this idea that we’re such an action-based culture. As people, you’re right. We’re wired to think, “If that was doing something, and I’m just supposed to do nothing? That’s really hard.” It makes me think about the time period when a lot of people were trying to quit smoking, and so many found a replacement with coffee or something where you had to take your hand and put something up to your mouth because so much of the habit was that. You go to something else that allows you to move. That’s what it’s been for me with walks.
It’s movement. It’s a healthier type of action. That’s still movement. It’s not nothing. There’s that adage, “When you’re physically tired, do something mental. When you’re mentally tired, do something physical.” I just did it before we started. I went out for a walk, just a couple of times around the block, but it really helped me get in a better state, kind of reset, relax, and get away from the screens and the to-do lists. I think you’re hitting on something really powerful there. What can you move toward that’s healthier?
Part of this episode is to say there are tools out there. There isn’t a one-tool-fits-all. We need to step back and look at what we need to do. Because technology is not going to go away. Social media is not going to go away. What is it that we need to do and decide in front of these things that are going to move us into a healthier, life-giving place with the tech, with the inevitable technology in our lives? I hope there are some really tangible ideas for people to use from this. It gets beyond feeling bad about it and judging ourselves as not having any willpower.
This was great. I have some takeaways in my notes here, too. Thanks for having me on to chat about this.
Great. Thanks for engaging with it. I hope this has been a helpful dive into the weeds on something we all struggle with. We’ll see you next time.
Important Links
- Steve Perkins
- AC Arendale – Past Episode
