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by Christine Carter

Is Screen Time Toxic for Teenagers?

Screen time is a likely cause of the ongoing surge in teen depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Some days, I can see how profoundly anti-social technology makes my family, adults and teens alike. We joke that our kids get “screen stoned”—spacey and despondent, or irritable and aggressive. We may laugh, but it isn’t that funny. I know what all that screen stimulation is doing to my teenagers’ brains, and it’s concerning.

I know I’m not alone in worrying; half of parents surveyed in 2018 said that they were concerned that their “child’s mobile device use is negatively affecting his or her mental health,” and nearly half thought their child was addicted to the device.

Here is what we know: The spike in the amount of time teenagers spend on screens is a likely cause of the ongoing surge in depression, anxiety, and suicide that began shortly after smartphones and tablets became widespread among teenagers, around 2012. By analyzing multiple data sets—all large-scale, long-term scientific studies, not one-off surveys—demographer and psychologist Jean Twenge has clearly shown that American teens who spend more time online are more likely to have at least one outcome related to suicide, like depression or making a suicide plan.

The numbers are enormous: Nearly half of teens who indicated that they spend five or more hours a day on a device (like a phone or laptop) said they had contemplated, planned, or attempted suicide at least once—compared with 28 percent of those who have less than an hour of screen time a day.

Twenge, who has analyzed the data more closely than anyone, writes that “the results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” Obviously, there is a toxicity to screen time—although not everyone agrees with this message.

The smartphone controversy

All the research I’ve seen on new media and teens indicates, in one way or another, that there does in fact seem to be a “dosage effect.” Some smartphone use, for example, is totally fine, but after a certain point it can become toxic.

And yet sometimes even the researchers themselves deny this toxicity. For example, Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote in Greater Goodmagazine recently that “there is no compelling evidence that spending time online has a deleterious effect on teens’ mental health.” I was surprised by this, and so I took a look at the large-scale study published in Psychological Science in 2017 that she references.

It was loaded with evidence that spending a lot of time online is correlated with lower well-being in 15 year olds. As you can see from the graph, taken directly from the study, the more “daily digital screen engagement” (here, that’s smartphone use), the lower the teen’s mental well-being (which includes how happy, connected, resilient, and self-confident they feel). The relationship is very clear, and very linear: After a little less than an hour a day of time spent on a smartphone, their well-being begins to decrease.

Doubters are quick to suggest that depression may cause teens to spend more time online rather than the other way around. But Twenge and other researchers have considered that possibility, and they hold that it just isn’t the case.

For one thing, a fair bit of research suggests that screen time (especially social media usage) leads to unhappiness. For example, there are several studies that have all found basically the same thing: The more people use Facebook, the lower their happiness (and the higher their loneliness and depression) when researchers assess them again later. It wasn’t that people who were feeling unhappy used social media more; it’s that Facebook likely caused their unhappiness.

The other thing is the timing of it all; if feeling depressed causes people to spend more time on their devices and not the other way around, then why did depression and suicidality increase so suddenly after 2012, when smartphones became much more widespread?  “Under that scenario,” says Twenge, “more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones—an idea that defies logic.”

Logic-defying or not, the idea that unlimited technology use is not harmful will always have its staunch defenders. “Drawing a causal link from such correlational evidence requires a bit of a leap,” Peter Etchells, a lecturer at Bath Spa University, told Wiredmagazine:

You’d never be able to account for all the factors that might impact on things like depression and suicide, so you can’t say definitively that, if social media goes up over a period of five years and depression and suicide go up over a period of five years, one is causing the other.

Etchells posits that people are becoming more open to talking about their experiences with depression and suicide, and so they are more likely to report them to researchers. But this reasoning still doesn’t explain the twin spikes in screen time and angst. Surely a hypothetical shift in attitudes toward talking about depression wouldn’t show up as the largest mental health crisis we have ever seen.

When we resist the idea that new technologies can be harmful, we rule out a more full understanding of their toxicity. And if we don’t understand how they are shaping us and our kids, we can’t adapt to them in healthy ways.

by Christine Carter

How to Fulfill New School Year Resolutions

Help your kids reach their goals this school year. (Or set some goals for yourself!)

Now that our summer break is wrapping up, I’ve started asking my kids about their hopes for the coming school year. Every year at this time our conversations remind me a little of New Year’s Eve with adults – lots of optimism, but initially no plans concrete enough to justify faith in their intentions.

Here’s the thing: Intentions are never enough. Even full-blown goal-setting isn’t worth much if you don’t do it right.

It’s a mistake not to set goals in a way that’s proven effective; just vaguely wanting to do well in school, make the team, or be class president will not get kids where they want to go. But kids don’t know this; how could they? We parents need to teach our older kids, our teens, and our college students how to change their behavior in a way that helps them reach their goals.

Enter behavioral psychologist Sean Young, who knows more about behavior change than anyone. Using Sean’s framework – as well as the research I wrote about in my book “The Sweet Spot” – I’ve freshened up my plan for how my kids and I set our goals (and inspire behavior change). This framework can obviously be applied to many different types of goals, and I’ve created a goal-setting worksheet to make it all easy here.

NOTE: The example below is from the worksheets that I helped my daughter Macie complete last year around this time. Happily, Macie accomplished her goals and is headed off to college this week! Before she goes, we’ll complete a new worksheet.

1. First, state the big goal. What would you like to accomplish in the next three months or so?

Macie is a high school senior applying to colleges this fall. She knows she needs sleep to be mentally and physically healthy – and to do well academically and athletically. Specifically, she hopes that she won’t get caught in a cycle of exhaustion this year, where she oversleeps and then has to rush out the door in the morning, skipping breakfast and generally not starting the day well. Her dream is to get eight to nine hours of sleep each night and get out of bed as soon as her alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m. on weekday mornings.

2. Next, break this larger idea down into long-term goals. Long-term goals take up to three months to accomplish. Macie’s long-term goal is to have a 30-day “streak” of getting eight to nine hours of sleep each night and getting out of bed within five minutes of her alarm going off in the morning.

3. Break it down again into short-term goals. These goals should take one to three weeks to accomplish. Macie’s first short-term goal was to outline for herself specific morning and evening routines in 10-minute time increments. Those specific plans helped her see what she needed to do to get to bed by 10:30 p.m. and wake up by 6:30 a.m.

4. Now break goals down into very specific, ridiculously easy baby steps. What can you do today? Tomorrow? Here are the baby steps Macie took:

  • Get an alarm that doesn’t bug her (that she won’t resist setting).
  • Ask a parent to enforce the family rule that phones are charged outside of bedrooms. (We let that slip with her over the summer.)
  • Set her alarm for 6:30 a.m.

5. Set up the environment to make things easier. Our environment dramatically influences our behavior. We like to think our behavior is all our personality and preferences, or that it’s the strength of our ironclad will that determines our success. But actually, we are hugely influenced by the people, places and technology that happen to be in close physical proximity to us.

This means that to be successful in reaching our goals, it’s very helpful to set up our environment to make things easier, to create what are called structural solutions. This usually means removing temptations. For Macie, it meant getting her phone out of her bedroom at night (where it would keep her up) and while she was studying (where it would distract her so much she couldn’t finish her homework by bedtime).

6. Involve other people. We humans are often more motivated to do things that we might otherwise resist if it makes us feel more of a sense of belonging, or if it deepens or increases our social connections. In addition, involving other people can provide added motivation–a little external willpower as we establish new habits–getting them to do stuff they’d rather blow off.

For example: I make sure Macie is out of bed in the morning. If she is not, I annoyingly sing “rise and shine.” She is too old for this, and it bugs the heck out of her to have me hovering in this way. This is sufficient motivation for her to get out of bed before I arrive.

7. Identify why the goal is important. Help kids think less about what they want to achieve and instead focus on how they want to feel. Identify a “why” for the goal that will motivate them over the long haul.

We do better when we let go of our logical reasons for why we want to do something. Why? Because research shows that good, solid, logical reasons for doing something – like exercising because we want to lower our blood pressure or ward off cancer – don’t actually provide lasting motivation. It turns out that emotions are far more motivating than achievement goals in the long run.

So help kids shoot instead for a feeling a certain way. For example, maybe they want more confidence or calm. Macie wants to get out of bed on time because she wants to feel “on it,” “well-rested” and “disciplined.”

8. Make the new behavior a part of their identity. Macie wants to be able to say, “I am a person who is well-rested and self-disciplined.” She’s tracking the days she gets into and out of bed on time, so she can look back and see, “Yup, I’m on it!” Collect evidence that your kids are the type of people who do whatever it is that they are trying to do.

9. Make the behavior more enticing. We human beings pursue rewards: a pretty little cupcake, attention from a mentor, a sense of accomplishment. When our brains identify a potential reward, they release dopamine, a feel-good chemical messenger. Dopamine motivates us to pursue the reward, creating a real sense of craving, wanting or desire for the carrot that is being dangled in front of us.

Rewards need to be immediate or, even better, built into our routine when possible. Macie loves her bed; hitting snooze instead of getting up is its own reward, which makes getting out of bed much more difficult (and who doesn’t relate to that?!) So I’ve worked with Macie to praise herself enthusiastically when she gets out of bed on her own using what B.J. Fogg at Stanford calls the “Yay Me!” reward.Even something as small as a short mental victory dance can trigger a little hit of dopamine, enough to tell your brain to repeat whatever you just did. She is basically giving herself a pat on the back and noting how “disciplined” and “on it” she is.

10. Make the behavior more habitual. Once we do something on autopilot, everything is easier – we don’t need much willpower to enact our habitual behaviors. Can you help kids make the behaviors related to accomplishing their goals habitual in any way? Do this by anchoring behaviors in existing habits or routines, or even a schedule, using a when/then statement: “When I do x, then I will y.” For Macie, it starts at 7 p.m.: “When it’s 7 p.m., I will put my phone in the charging station while I study.”

What are your kids’ goals for this new school year? What are your goals? Now that you have a framework for how you and your children can achieve those goals, you can lead by example to turn talk into something more.

If you need support setting and achieving your goals, I hope you’ll check out our Brave Over Perfect group coaching program! At only $20 for 3 coaching calls and two months of online support, it’s a no-brainer. Learn more or enroll now here.

by Christine Carter

Flow Class: Finding Meaning at Work

“Success is about getting; significance is about giving: we make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”

–Satinder Dhiman, Seven Habits of Highly Fulfilled People

Social psychologists define meaning, as it applies to our lives, as “an intellectual and emotional assessment of the degree to which we feel our lives have purpose, value and impact.” In a stunning series of studies, Adam Grant proved that briefly showing people how their work helps others increases not only how happy people are on the job but also how much they work and accomplish.

Grant’s most famous series of studies were conducted at a call center with paid fundraisers tasked with phoning potential donors to a public university. As anyone who’s ever made cold calls knows, work in a call center isn’t easy. People receiving calls are often annoyed and can be downright rude. Employees must endure frequent rejection on the phone and low morale at the office—all in exchange for relatively low pay. Not surprisingly, call center jobs often have a high staff turnover rate.

In an effort to see if he could motivate call center fundraisers to stay on the job longer, Grant brought in a few scholarship students (who presumably had benefited from the fundraisers’ work) for a five-minute meeting where callers could ask them questions about their classes and experience at the university. In the next month, that quick conversation yielded unbelievable results. Callers who had met the scholarship students spent twice as long on the phone as the fundraisers who had not met any students. They accomplished far more, bringing in an average of 171 percent more money.

In another study, Grant found that having fundraisers read an account from scholarship students about how they had been helped by the fundraisers’ work significantly increased the amount of money they raised. But reading an account from a previous fundraiser about how the callers themselves benefited from their work as a fundraiser did not. The difference? A shift in the callers’ beliefs about the social meaning of their work, and an increased sense of their purpose, value, and impact.

These studies are remarkably counterintuitive. We assume that Westerners are best motivated on the job by our own interests— money, prestige, what’s in it for us, what we’ll get, not what we give. But actually, these studies show clearly that we humans are best motivated by our significance to other people. We’ll work harder and longer and better—and feel happier about the work we are doing— when we know that someone else is benefiting from our efforts. It turns out that one sure path to finding your flow–to both ease and strength–is to find the social meaning in your daily activities.

 

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing “lessons” from this online class here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

How to Ditch the Drama in Your Relationships

“You are unimaginably cruel. I could never have done something like that to you.”

One of my clients—we’ll call her Sara—received that in a nasty text from her ex-husband, who was angry because their daughter, a young adult, had excluded him from a milestone event. Instead of confronting their daughter, the ex-husband was pinning his daughter’s actions on Sara.

Understandably, the accusation consumed Sara.

Even when we aren’t provoked by such high-emotion personal conflict, these days it’s hard to escape the daily dramas playing out all around us. Personal dramas are served to us via text and email—and if our own lives are peaceful, we need look no further than Twitter for President Trump’s conflicts, or our smartphones for the latest metaphorical (or literal) trainwreck.

Most of us are, at the very least, distracted by drama. Despite our best intentions, we have trouble looking away. Biologically, we are hardwired to love the novelty, stimulation, and social information that a constant feed of drama provides.

But the 24/7 drama isn’t pointing us towards meaningful lives. And it keeps us from the stillness and reflection and deep conversation that make our lives meaningful.

There is another problem with drama. Having a constant source of it leads us, unknowingly, to take on disempowering roles in our own lives, roles that hurt our relationships and foster feelings of powerlessness, shame, and superiority.

How does that happen? In 1968, a psychologist named Stephen Karpman developed a social model, the “Karpman Drama Triangle,” to map the dysfunctional behavior we predictably display when we get sucked into interpersonal drama. Karpman recognized how entertaining and addictive our relationship conflicts could be—despite being psychologically harmful.

Karpman teaches that there tend to be three roles in a conflict, hence the formation of a triangle:

1. The first and most familiar role is the victim. This is not an actual victim, mind you; it’s just someone who feels like they are being victimized, or someone who is actinglike they are being persecuted. Victims often feel oppressed and helpless. Deep down, they tend to feel shame. They are often self-pitying. They act as though they are powerless, and as such are often our neediest (and most toxic and draining) friends and relatives.

2. Victims typically identify a persecutor, someone whom they believe is victimizing them. Persecutors are made out to be controlling and critical. When we take on the role of persecutor ourselves, often we act angry, rigid, and superior.

3. Every victim has a rescuer who works diligently to save them from mistreatment. Although it can feel good to play a rescuing role—because attempting to help others can make us feel good—rescuers don’t really help. Although their intentions may be good, they are the ultimate enablers, keeping victims stuck in their roles as victims.

All of these roles are tempting because they give us a sense of power (even if it is falsepower). Victims get to claim innocence, they gain the doting attention of their rescuer, and they avoid taking responsibility for their own lives and their own outcomes. Persecutors get to sit in the power seat, feeling superior.

Rescuers feel righteous anger and empathy, and so they also get to feel superior to both the victim and the persecutor. And while rescuers avoid the negative shadow that hangs over victims and persecutors, the rescuer role is not healthy, either, because focusing on someone else’s conflicts is usually an excuse to ignore their own problems. Rescuers usually have a stake in keeping the victim feeling helpless and weak. In the end, the rescuer keeps the victim feeling like a victim by giving them permission to avoid changing or taking responsibility for their own lives.

These roles are so ingrained in our cultural milieu that we don’t even see them; we just seamlessly (and unconsciously) step into them. But they are like junk food, providing only temporary stimulation and a quick shot in the arm of power, leaving us weaker in the long run.

So, what can we do instead of taking on these dysfunctional roles?

1. Don’t engage

When Sara got that nasty text from her ex-husband, he was playing a victim role, while making Sara the persecutor. (He had engaged a mutual friend as a rescuer, who was also texting Sara, encouraging her to help her ex repair his relationship with his daughter).

Sara needed reminding that getting involved in a drama like this is always a choice. One option was to just ignore her ex-husband’s nasty text, or opt to send her ex-husband straight to the source, telling him to please talk to their daughter directly. And then Sara could silence the text conversation on her phone.

2. Question the prevailing beliefs

Having been pinned as a villain, Sara understandably had a hard time not engaging.  She felt that ignoring the texts coming in by the dozen would only make her ex-husband more justified in his anger. She wanted to defend herself against his unfair accusations.

More than that, though, Sara felt truly sad for her ex-husband, even though she understood (and supported) her daughter’s actions. Sara really felt her ex-husband’s hurt, and she wanted to help him, or at least soothe his pain. She wanted to intervene, even though she’d never been successful in doing so in the past.

Perhaps the most important stress-reduction tactic that anyone has ever taught me is not to believe everything I think. For Sara to stay out of the Karpman Drama Triangle, she would have to question her belief that things would get better if she tried to fix the situation—if she swapped her persecutor role for a rescuing one. I find The Work of Byron Katie, whose simple strategies are similar to cognitive behavioral therapy, works well when we need to question our thoughts and assumptions.

In this case, Sara was a lot less tempted to engage in the conflict when she questioned the assumption that her involvement would actually help. She came to see that her involvement would actually create more distance between her ex and their daughter.

3. Take on a different role in the conflict

We can also always shift the role we are playing in a conflict from a dysfunctional one to a constructive one.

  • Victims can become creators. Instead of succumbing to the temptation to wallow in the unfairness of it all, we can go from problem-oriented to outcome-oriented. What is it that we want to gain in this situation or relationship? When we take responsibility for the role we play in challenging situations, and for our lives, we trade the false power of victimhood for the real power that comes from creating the life we want.
  • Persecutors can become, or be seen as, challengers. Persecutors are people (or situations) that force the victim (now a creator) to clarify their needs, and focus on their own learning and personal growth. Challengers always tell the truth, even when it is painful.
  • Rescuers can become coaches. The key difference between a rescuer and a coach is that the coach sees the creator as capable of making choices and of solving their own problems. A coach asks questions that help the creator to see the possibilities for positive action, and to focus on what they do want instead of what they do not want.

Sara ultimately decided not to try to protect her ex-husband from the truth by making excuses for their daughter, nor did she try to placate him with pictures from the event. By telling the truth, she’d become a challenger instead of a persecutor. And by refusing to soothe and placate, she declined to be a rescuer, even though this made her ex very angry.

She did offer to take on a coaching role, by asking her ex what type of relationship he wanted with their daughter, and then asking him how he might take steps to get there—but he wasn’t actually looking for coaching or to create a new relationship with their daughter. In the end, because he wasn’t getting what he wanted out of Sara, he kicked her out of his drama triangle, leaving her alone in peaceful silence.

For Sara, that silence was a blissful ending to a painful conflict.

GreaterGood Tiny LogoThis post originally appeared on The Greater Good Science Center website.

by Christine Carter

Parenting Video: How to Foster Grit

This video is the 4th in a series about fostering academic success from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. It covers:

  • Why relieving kids’ pain also takes away their power
  • The single biggest predictor of success in college — and how you can foster it

Parenting Practice: Celebrating Mistakes

Here is what we need to teach our kids:

(1) They have the power within them to recover from mistakes.
(2) Mistakes are not something we need to hold onto and feel bad about forever. Embarrassment (or fear) is only temporary. Feeling bad does not help us learn and grow.
(3) Sometimes we learn things from our mistakes that we couldn’t have learned any other way.

To teach kids these three things, we aren’t just going to let our kids make mistakes, we are going to celebrate them! How? Take turns telling about something you did recently that could be considered a mistake:

  • How did you feel while you were making the mistake?
  • How do you feel now?
  • What did you learn?
  • What would you do differently next time?
  • What good came out of the mistake?
  • See if you can tell about your embarrassing moment, or mistake, like you are telling a joke. If you play this game at dinner, why not toast your mistakes and all you learn from them? To the mistakes we all make, thank you for the learning, may I someday laugh at myself!

“The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested―and your personal growth realized.”

–Katie Couric

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If you would like to download the audio version of this video to listen to in your car or on the go, click the link below.
DOWNLOAD THE AUDIO VERSION HERE.

 

This video is the 4th in a series about fostering academic success from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. Watch the rest of the videos here.

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by Christine Carter

Chase Meaning, Not Happiness

These days, a lot of people don’t feel totally in control of their choices and their priorities, especially at work. But you do always have the freedom to choose your beliefs about what will make your life worth living.

As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning upon returning from a brutal concentration camp, where he lost his whole family, including his pregnant wife:

Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

What did Frankl mean by this? He meant that every day–whether we are in a concentration camp or not–we have important choices to make about whether to submit internally to the powerful forces around us; the forces that will rob us of our essential selves if given the chance. To Frankl, it was what prisoners chose to believe and the way that they pursued meaning that gave them the will and strength to endure.

The same can be said of us, living our privileged lives, although the forces that threaten to rob us of our freedoms are obviously much more benign.

Usually, we think we are choosing to pursue happiness, claiming it as our inalienable right. But mountains of research demonstrate that we humans do better pursuing fulfillment and meaning than we do by pursuing happiness.

Frankl was right on many fronts. It turns out that our happiness, success, and productivity at work are dramatically affected by our beliefs about how our work benefits others.

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing “lessons” from this online class here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

Flow Class: The Problem with Pursuing Pleasure

This video is from a series about how we choose to spend our time in my online course, Science of Finding Flow.

“Compelling research indicates that the pursuit of happiness—at least by modern definitions, with our emphasis on pleasure and gratification—won’t ultimately bring us ease and it most certainly won’t bring us strength.”

Join the Discussion

What about you? Do you equate happiness with objects and experiences? When you find your flow, what is it you want to be doing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing “lessons” from this online class here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!