Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 803 | The Science Behind Screen Addiction | Guest: Dr. Nicholas Kardaras | Part 2

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Today we're joined again by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, psychologist and one of the country’s foremost addiction and mental health experts, to discuss screen addiction and the dangers of screen time on our brains. We start off with some of the science of how screens affect our brains, hindering the development of our prefrontal cortex, and the social contagion aspect of social media with the rise of TikTok "ticks," trans anxiety, depression. Ultimately, Dr. Kardaras explains why what he calls "toxic psych metrics" are spiking. We also talk about the differences between television and tablets/phones and why screen time in the past had vastly less dramatic effects than screen time these days does. We discuss the rise in ADHD diagnoses, hyper-fragility, and forming our identities around the internet. What are the consequences of our reality being online, and is it too late for parents to correct their kids' screen time habits? We'll cover these questions and more. You can get Dr. Kardaras' books here: Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance --- Timecodes: (01:08) Introduction to Dr. Kardaras (01:53) Effects of screens on the brain (11:10) TV vs. tablet effects / attention spans (15:48) Delayed exposure & identity (18:25) Generational differences & relationships (27:55) Hyper-fragility & societal bipolar disorder (35:50) Gender dysphoria / DID / affirmation (45:14) What are the consequences of reality being online? (48:15) Is it too late? & advice for parents (53:54) After-interview thoughts --- Today's Sponsors: A'Del — go to adelnaturalcosmetics.com and enter promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order! Naturally It's Clean — visit https://naturallyitsclean.com/allie and use promo code "ALLIE" to receive 15% off your order. If you are an Amazon shopper you can visit https://amzn.to/3IyjFUJ. The promo code discount is only valid on their direct website at www.naturallyitsclean.com/Allie. Epic Will — be intentional about your family, your values and your wishes. Go to EpicWill.com/ALLIE and you’ll save 10% on your complete Will package. Pre-Born — will you help rescue babies' lives? Donate by calling #250 & say keyword 'BABY' or go to Preborn.com/ALLIE. Help us reach Blaze's goal of 70,000 ultrasounds in 2023! --- Links: New York Post: "How social media is literally making teens mentally ill" https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/how-social-media-is-literally-making-teens-mentally-ill-doctor/ --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 502 | Facebook Whistleblower: Dem Operative or Hero? | Guest: Rachel Bovard https://apple.co/3NGBxiI Ep 740 | How Porn Changes the Brain, Kills Intimacy & Harms Society | Guest: Sam Black https://apple.co/42qCIai Ep 779 | TikTok Is Spying on You: Here’s Why It Matters | Guest: Kara Frederick https://apple.co/3pbmgwj --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'MOM10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Dr. Nicholas Carderis is one of the country's foremost addiction and mental health experts. He is a psychologist. He's written two books on how screens are hurting our children's development. And today he's going to talk about that.

He's going to talk about the science behind the damaging. effects of screen time and social media addiction, how the algorithms are pushing our kids towards unhealthy thinking patterns, unhealthy lifestyles, inhibiting them from real healthy social interaction, inhibiting actual debate and discussion in this country. Wow, this was a fascinating, fascinating conversation. A lot of encouragement and tools for you parents too who are trying to develop your kids in a healthy way away from screens. And so you're absolutely going to learn a lot and love this conversation. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoToD Ranchers.

Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com. Code Alley. Dr. Carderis, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Can you first tell us who you are and what you do? So I'm a psychologist who specializes in a variety of expertise in addiction, mental health. My wheelhouse has been over the last 10 years in digital media and how that's

impacted people's mental health. I run treatment programs around the country that I've developed. I've been a professor at Stony Brook Medicine for 10 years. A clinician that has been, I think, one of the first, I was one of the first psychologists that began to sort of raise up the red flag that, or the red flag, a flag of awareness or that there's trouble in the waters of digital media. and our society. You wrote a book last year, it came out, Digital Madness, how social media is driving our mental health crisis. I think a lot of people would probably just agree with that title

that social media isn't great for our brains, especially the adolescent brain, but most people don't really have the words to describe how. So when you've studied this, like what is it exactly about social media and screen time that is kind of deteriorating not just everyone's mental health, but specifically the mental health of teens, young people. Right.

So I wrote a book before that called Glow Kids in 2016. And the first realization is this is sort of a multi-phase process. In Glow Kids, it was one of the pioneering books that looked at, can technology be habituating? Can we get addicted to our devices? And one of the narratives has been, as we've grown mad for our devices, our devices driving us mad. The research, and I included over 200 peer-reviewed studies that looked at how, yes, we can be addicted to devices.

They spike our dopamine in ways that are very habituating in classic addiction, neurophysiology. But addiction was just the price of admission. What we started seeing then is, yeah, we were not only becoming addicted to our devices, and especially younger people were getting disproportionately impacted by that addiction. So what did that addiction translate into? And that's when we started seeing the mind-shaping effect. So the neurophysiology of a young person gets compromised developmentally, the more they're on screens. We have clear fMRI research that shows that.

Basically, the prefrontal cortex, the executive functioning part of our brain, that part behind our forehead, it begins to shrink in the same way that it does with chronic substance addiction. So it compromises things like our impulsivity, our decision-making. And it creates a highly impulsive profile over lifetime. So we've created addicted people who can't manage without their devices. But then now we were seeing that predictive algorithms that are very predatory attack vulnerability because the name of the game is engagement. So if the predictive algorithm smells or senses that the user has body image issues or is politically

predisposed a certain way or has other underlying vulnerabilities, it sends content that really exacerbates those vulnerabilities. And this was shown by Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower that came out about a year and a half ago. And she pulled the curtain back on Mata's own research with Instagram that showed that the predictive algorithms of Instagram were attacking essentially vulnerable adolescent females that were to a level that was increasing their suicidality. So suicide rates for British girls were going up 12 percent and for American teenage girls that were going up 6 percent.

So it was making people more depressed, more suicidal. But then we started seeing psychiatric influencers who were really popular on sites like TikTok who were getting billions of views, the TikTok torrets phenomenon, dissociative identity disorder, the gender dysphoria issue. All these psychiatric issues were spreading via digital social social. contagion. And so we've always had social contagions and basically the definition of a social contagion is behavior that spreads via social means. And so something like smoking is a social contagion. If your friend smoke, you're likely to start smoking. But now we started seeing the impact of influencers who were having millions of followers that were now shaping via social contagion means their devotees. And we started seeing huge social.

spikes in personality disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, suicide, all the toxic psych metrics were spiking. Yes. And there's so much in your answer that I want to unpack and ask questions about going back to what you said about the addiction to social media or the use of screens of young people hindering the development of the prefrontal cortex. And that isn't, that's the part of the brain, right? that's not developed fully until about age 25.

Is that correct? Correct. So you mentioned impulsivity because the prefrontal cortex is what allows us to kind of foresee the consequences of our actions, to make better decisions, right? To have a little bit more discernment. Go ahead. Right. Consequential thinking. It's called if then thinking.

So it allows us to consequentially think. It allows us. It's basically where our critical thinking and our decision making lives. It's a big part of who we are developmentally as human beings. Right. And so any parent especially can, even if they don't have the language for that, they understand that their toddler doesn't have impulse control or even their teenager who just started driving.

There's a reason why insurance is high for these young people. It's not just a lack of experience. It's also a lack of ability to be able to see how they're driving consequences or driving actions could have certain consequences. So you're saying that screen usage. is inhibiting the development of a part of a brain that is already, it's like already kind of competing. It's already trying to,

it's already trying to like take its proper place in a person's decision making. And this is making it even more difficult for young people to be able to mature in that way and then to make proper decisions. Is that what you're arguing? Yeah, it stands to development. to the prefrontal cortex. And if you want to get a little bit more technical on it, there's really two ways that the brain imaging research shows that it does that. As our prefrontal cortex develops into, you very accurately said, our mid-20s,

there's something called the DGM, which is the dense gray matter. And the dense gray matter is essentially the robustness of that part of the brain. What we've seen in MRIs of chronic substance addicts and chronic screen addicts is the DGM tends to shrink. So essentially you're shrinking that part of your brain and that you need to be full and rich and robust. That's one aspect of the neurophysiological effect. The other aspect that has to do with what's called the myelination or the myelin sheath of the brain.

And that's sort of the insulation cable of our neurons. A strong myelin sheath allows our brains to be to communicate well, to function well. So things like dementia and Alzheimer's are myeline sheath abnormalities. So what we're seeing is that the myelin sheath with chronic substance addicts and chronic screen addicts begins to show it's called microstructural abnormalities. So it shrinks the gray matter of the prefrontal cortex and it attacks the myelin sheath in ways that really stunt development. And that was, I think, the most shocking part. You know, I'm a parent as well.

So, you know, I'm a psychologist. I've taught neuropsychology, but I'm also a parent. So I've got skin in the game as as one of the. those. And I think that's what shocked most people. Most people thought, all right, screen time, little Johnny and Susie are getting kind of too habituated to their little phones. But they weren't really, you know, once people started seeing in black and white the brain imaging research, that was the sort of Houston. We have a problem moment for a lot of folks that started realizing this is more significant than I think most people, most of the adults in the room anticipated

because most, I think the problem was most of the adults, most of us of a certain age, conflated modern tech with television. And most of us grew up on TV. So we thought, all right, these are just smaller TV sets, but they're not. Because of the two fundamental differences are they're much more interactive. Yeah. Right. So they're immersive and interactive in the ways that television ever was.

So thus, they have a much more impactful effect on our brain. Hey, this is Steve Deaste. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we've been. believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Do you find that TV screen time has the same effect on a young child's mind as phone screen time,

considering like the kind of animation and the kind of content that kids are now getting from television, it is a lot more immersive, it's a lot more interactive, it's a lot more entertaining, it's a lot more addicting. So do you find that the gray matter in the brain response? the same way when there is a child who is addicted to TV versus a child who is constantly given an iPad? So the person who did all this ADHD and screen time research was Dr. Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington. He's also the editor of the JAMA Journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics. So he's a pretty well-respected researcher.

And he started doing research on television effects on ADHD back in the 90s. And he's since done it with interactive screens like iPads and Chromebooks. And back in the 90s, if you're, so the key developmental windows for children with their attention is between the ages of 2 and 6. That's when their brain is really developing their ability to attend, to focus. In the same way that language is a developmental window, right? We've seen that if kids aren't exposed to language during a key developmental window, they're going to become lifelong compromise with language. We've seen that with like feral kids who have never been exposed to language. They can never really get language because that part of their brain devoted to language never really got nurtured at that key time.

So it's the same thing with attention. So two to six is that key window for attention. And Dr. Christakis' research showed that for every hour of television, this is back in the 90s, you had a 10% higher rate of ADHD. So if a three-year-old watched three hours of TV back in the 90s, they had a 30% higher rate of ADHD when they got older. they did that same research with interactive, modern tablets and screens, and that effect was exponentially increased. So the ADHD rates were spiking more significantly, which by the way explains our spiking rates of ADHD.

There's a reason why our kids are now being diagnosed to such a great degree. And, you know, one of the counter arguments had been, well, we're just more sensitized to ADHD. So we're just happened to be diagnosing it more. And I can tell you as a researcher and as a clinician who works with young people, we're not just diagnosing it more, it's happening more. You know, anybody I think with eyes can look around and see our kids are much more intentionally challenged.

They're bouncing out of their skins more. If they're not constantly being entertained, they can't focus. And look, put two and two together. I think anybody with reason can see we've overstimulated kids to the point where they become stimulation dependent. Yes. Well, I think that that's true even an adult. And if that's true in adults, someone who didn't grow up,

really with social media. I mean, I had some like crude forms of it. I was born in the early 90s. And so we did have aim at some point. And then later we had texting. But really think, and I think the Lord for this. Like we didn't have Snapchat and Instagram and all of these algorithms trying to constantly vie for our attention. I wasn't addicted to my phone every night before, you know, I went to bed. I actually read books. It might have been trashy teen fiction, but at least it was reading. But I've even noticed, you know, in my own life, obviously, the dawn of real social media, the kind that we have today, was when I was about in college. And so for the past 10 or so years, I have had social media. And I've noticed in myself, I have a lower attention span. I can only read for so long. I can only do one thing for so long. If I'm watching TV, I find myself also wanting to open up my computer or scroll on Instagram. So if that is true for me, someone who really wasn't introduced to this kind of social media until my prefrontal cortex was at least almost fully developed. Of course, that's going to have a huge effect on these kids who have yet to be developed, right? Well, that's such a great point that you're making because, by the way,

guilty is charged also. I'm a few months older than you are, a couple decades older than you are. And it happens to me, too, right? So I've noticed that my own attention wander is much more readily. Nicholas Carr who wrote the Pulitzer Prize nominated Nicholas Carr who wrote The Shallows, he writes in the opening part of his book about he can't go more than two pages without his mind wandering and he's in his 40s. So if it's happening so significantly to us with our fully developed brains, imagine what's happening to these developmentally vulnerable children and adolescents who are much more impacted by exactly what you just said. Yeah. And do you find, like if you were to look at the brain of a 16-year-old. And I don't know if this part matters, but maybe one that didn't

grow up with constant screens, but maybe they were introduced to social media when they were 15, 16 years old. You look at how their brain reacts to that stimuli versus how like a four-year-old's brain reacts to the iPad. Is it similar or is the development that that 16-year-old has? Does that help them at all? Does that make sense? Or is it very simple? similar just in all adolescents, how their brain responds to screens. The four-year-old is going to be more susceptible than the 16-year-old. That's why, you know, one of the biggest mantras that I keep repeating to folks is delay, delay, delay, as parents, you know, as much as you can delay the exposure to the device, because your kid is going to get a little bit more immunized, the older they get. The other part of that is not just neurophysiologically, right?

Not just will the prefrontal cortex be developing, right? Because it just doesn't go from four-year-old to 25-year-old. It's kind of developing its armor and it's neurosynaptically growing. But a person's sense of identity in who they are is a little bit more fully developed. So there's less, you know, what I like to call brain shaping, right? Because a lot of the work and people that I've worked with have been, I've worked, you know, I was an expert witness for a capital murder trial for a teenage kid in Florida who had been, radicalized by ISIS and decapitated a 13-year-old because of this brainwashing effect.

He was a YouTuber who couldn't stop watching YouTube and eventually went down these political rabbit holes where he went from being progressive liberal to white supremac to six months later. ISIS started sending him recruitment videos and decapitation videos and this quote unquote, nice kid turned into this ISIS warrior and he didn't have a core sense of identity. He didn't know who he was. So all these shaping influences were much more impactful. He was basically a healthy kid, but he got brainwashed at 16. You're more likely to get brainwashed at 8, 10, 12.

But the older you get, the more we like to think that our sense of identity has developed more. So we can, you know, I use a phrase that I think is apt here. It's our psychological immune system. We have a more developed psychological immune system the older we get. So we're less vulnerable, hopefully. But that doesn't mean that the 20, five-year-old's not going to quit their day job and join the biker gang. You know, we can all get susceptible to cults into weird things no matter what age we are,

but less so. Yeah. You know, something interesting that I found is actually like my parents' generation, it seems, and I've talked to a lot of, I'm a millennial, a lot of millennial friends who have also found this. We won't hold that against you. Go ahead. Yes.

They are less, my parents seem to be like less, less believe. that screens are super damaging to kids. Like I feel like I'm more cognizant of it. Like I'm more worried about my kids even holding my phone or you know accidentally scrolling or being on an iPad whereas kind of the baby boomer generation, it seems, they don't see the consequences of that quite as much, which I don't know, you might think it's the opposite

because they grew up without technology. They understand the benefits of that. But I actually find that a lot of friends my age. Like we're having to convince our parents, like, you know, please don't let them on screens and things like that. Not that my parents are constantly, you know, putting my kids in front of screens, but they just don't seem to see the consequences as much as we do. Have you found that?

Yeah, that's a great point that you make is even though we'll, yeah, yeah, you know, the whole boomer. I'm cusp, Gen X boomer. Yes. And, you know, my kids are, you know, six. I have twin boys who are 16, so I get the boomer comments a lot. Yeah. But you're absolutely right because of what I think, what I said earlier was, again, the older generation conflates modern screens with television.

And so, you know, the boomer thinks this is, you know, I watched I Love Lucy or, you know, I was watching Starsky and Hutch as a, you know, as a 20 year old. So we tend to think that this might be just television. And so that's why we don't fully appreciate it where the millennials get it more because you get it because, you know, the one fact that's interesting is when you look at mental health metrics by generational cohort, like things like depression. The baby boomers have the lower rates of depression and the most face-to-face friends. Then you go down to Gen X and Millennial and the Gen Z.

And the younger, the cohort, the more connected the cohort, the more psychiatrically unwelled they are. So one in five millennials have zero friends. It's a pretty high number to have zero friends. And that wasn't what we were told because I remember the before times. Kind of like you. I remember the before social media times. And the promise of social media, Ali, is you'll remember. remember it was going to be connectivity. It was going to be this amazing new tool for a social

species. So it was going to be like social media for a social species. It was going to be like chocolate and peanut butter. It was going to be this great mix. And theoretically, we were supposed to be healthier because we'd have more friends, more connections. And that's a good thing for human beings. But what we found is that this was a counterfeit connection. That digital connection isn't the same as a face-to-face friendship. And in fact, it robs us of face-to-face friendships because we're so sedentary, isolated screenstaring that we're not really developing these meaningful face-to-face friendships, which really are what nurture our psychological immune system, our soul, dare I say that word.

And so your generation kind of sees that more because you're living it. You're seeing your depressed friends and your friends who can't leave the house and your friends who are getting substance taking more because they're depressed more, where maybe the the boomers are kind of like a little bit underaware of the realities of some of the younger people. Where I've seen it among kind of my age cohort for, and I'm thankful that I'm married, but my friends who are on dating apps right now, they have the kinds of interactions with guys that I just, that, I mean, even 10 years ago or 10 or however many years ago it was that I was that I was dating.

Yes, it was digital. you would text or you would maybe talk on the phone or something like that. But now it seems like with the rise of dating apps, there is even a higher acceptance of what's typically referred to as ghosting or basically interacting with someone on an app, even saying that you're going to go on a date and then just standing that person up or not responding. And it does seem like our reliance on social media, on dating apps for connection, has rather than helped us connect with people.

It's actually inhibited our ability to connect with people on a real level. And it seems like it's made people a lot more insecure, a lot more scared to actually interact with people in person because they no longer have, I don't know, the skill to be able to do so. It does take a certain level of courage. Well, our interpersonal social skills have atrophy because we haven't used them, right? So like you said, the courage that it takes to walk up to, you know, to ask somebody out in the date, you know, that was a skill, right? It was a muscle that you had to develop. And if now everyone is essentially hiding behind the screen, you don't develop those skill sets. It's interesting.

It gets even worse when you talk about sort of dating and relationships with adolescence now when you start talking about things like porn and, you know, kids that, you know, there are 12 and 13-year-olds that have seen hardcore porn that, you know, earlier generations. You know, back in the Playboy magazine days where you had isolated imagery and, you know, And you weren't desensitized to certain imagery. So or certain, not imagery, but even sexual kind of exposure. And so there's a new phenomenon over the last 10 years called adolescent erectile dysfunction. This is a thing that pediatricians talk about.

I was at a conference where this was, you know, the topic. We'd never seen that before. You didn't have a thing like adolescent ED because now what we're seeing is teenagers have been so visually overly exposed to imagery. that, you know, good luck going on the date now with the prom queen or with anybody because now you have these idealized or like overly, well, you know, you've seen things that don't really relate, translate into the real world or don't translate into you having a healthy functional. And we have things like now misogynistic imagery and sort of violence and all those things.

And desensitization to all that. Yeah. Well, there was a trend of younger. girls like, you know, I don't know, 13, 14 years old on TikTok, I don't remember. It was called some hashtag or some viral thing that they were all talking about in these separate videos about how they like to be choked or that their first sexual interaction was a violent sexual interaction. Look, that doesn't just come out of nowhere. I mean, that's, they're being presented with that. They're being told that that's what it takes to be attractive. That's what it takes to be

sexy. Or that's just what sex is. You have to be okay with that in order to be acceptable or attractive to a guy or whatever. And you're right. These kids, they're being introduced in some cases to pornography at nine years old. And of course, that's going to affect your sexuality. That's going to affect yourself image. It's also going to affect how you relate to other people if you primarily view them as objects rather than people with, as you said, souls. There's so many consequences to social media that I think we don't see. And what you said also is such a good point just how pornography used to be different. Like you used to have to like you saw on the side of the highway and maybe the middle of nowhere those very smutty dark like XXX, you know, buildings.

And you would pass by them like, oh, I wonder he would ever step foot in somewhere like that. That's so embarrassing. Like there was a proper stigma around that kind of thing. You had to go out of your way to hunt for the kind of sick stuff that now is readily available on TikTok. There's no stigma. It's all in secret. And a kid can, you know, go down the rabbit hole that you described alone in his bedroom and his parents might not even know. And adults, too, adult relationships. I've worked with a lot of couples who, you know, now because of the easy access and ubiquity, like you said, there's plenty of husbands out there who are porn addicted and it's distrung their marriages. And it's just part of that thing. And, you know, I think the larger cloud of social media, the one thing that I talk about in my most recent book is I really, you know, because now we start talking about AI and predictive algorithms and this very intentional attack on our, again, psychological vulnerabilities.

I've really grown to, I've grown to understand social media as almost a sentient living organism driven by predictive AI controlled algorithms that feed off of our most. lizard brain emotional extremism. And so it'll because emotional reactivity feeds engagement, right? If you tickle that part of my being that gets an emotional response, that's going to

increase engagement. So the social media is acting like a heat-seeking missile that attacks emotional reactivity, whether it's political, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's whatever the content is that can get a rise out of us. Then we feed the beast

attacks us, then we feed the social media organism. Our lizard brain feeds it, then it feeds us back in what's called an extremification loop. And so round and round it goes and it creates this polarity chasm where like if I'm left leaning or if I'm right leaning, it's going to amplify those propensities because it's going to feed me more and more increasing content in either direction because again, reaction, emotional reaction is the name of the game. You're not going to get nuanced, well-thought-out, reasoned content because that

That doesn't raise the thermostat of my emotional reaction. And so social media thrives off of this hyper-emotionality. And so what we're seeing is I'm treating 17 to 30-year-olds in these treatment programs around my one program in Austin, Texas, and particularly we treat tech addiction type of issues and social media issues. You're seeing young people who are much more highly emotionally reactive, who can only see things in black and white, who have a really hard time. time seeing nuance and and discerning things.

And so they're essentially like hardwired, emotionally reactive nuclear bombs. They have meltdowns and they're collapsing and they need the safe spaces and all these stereotypical things we've read about. So there's this fragility that we've now baked into young people. And I'm convinced it's a social media driven fragility. Yes. You know, that is so fascinating because of course I've seen that. And I've never attributed that to kind of what social media causes, that black and white thinking.

I mean, I'm sure there are a variety of factors. I think a lot of kids are learning to think this way also in their college classroom. But it probably is already baked in at that point because of what social media promotes. But I've noticed that in my interactions, not with all students on college campuses or all the young people that maybe like message me things. But if you do try to discuss with them, like a very maybe. complex topic like any of the culture war issues, whether it's abortion or whether it's gender and try to just move them past the talking points, like move them past the maxims that really don't make any sense. Move them past kind of the circular reasoning that they're

regurgitating. Their response is anger and frustration and name calling rather than saying, okay, well, this is how I think about it. It's almost like they are completely incapable in some cases of formulating an original thought, a nuanced thought, and actually taking what you say and then responding to it in a way that is thoughtful, I find that it's almost impossible for a lot of young people to do that at all. And I never thought about it being attributed to social media. Well, that's exactly it. So this hyper fragility, like you said, talk about any hot topic issue, intersectionality, whatever that may be. And Jonathan Hyatt, I think, talks about this well as well.

And he wrote his book, The Codling of the American Mind. He's the NYU professor. And he's created the Heterodoxy Academy. So back in the before times, again, I'm an old timer. And, you know, back when I was at university, you can talk to people who have dissenting opinions and have really, you know, informed, interesting conversations. And nobody collapsed on the floor, sucking their thumb or was in tears or was raging at you. Right.

You would say, okay, what about this point? What about that point? And then you'd go and get lunch together. So now you're having this, and again, it looks very much this, a particular personality disorder called borderline personality disorder. And then digital madness, I think what I wrote was that I think we have a societal diagnosis of BPD where because the symptoms of BPD are black and white thinking, very emotional reactivity, not clear sense of identity. And it looks like the societal diagnosis is that. And if you look at some of the complex things that I mentioned social media does. And so Jonathan Hyde talked about that he began to see the safe space trigger warning fragility at about 2010 around the advent of iPhone, social media, you know, our deeper immersion into technology.

And that's when we started pathologizing language and started saying language was dangerous. And we needed to protect ourselves from this harm. And that's when university administrators started saying language is no longer free speech. Language is now harmful. And I think we did such a disservice to university students. I was a professor for 10 years. And I saw it each year. I taught at a graduate school.

I mean, these were graduate students that you couldn't, I mean, they would have breakdowns if, you know, you said a wrong word. Right. And it was new. This wasn't something that we had seen. And so people like Jonathan Hyden and myself, I'm attributing it to this new landscape that we've created that is really just created this fragility. And then when they get out of college, they can't live life on life's terms. They wind up in places like my treatment program because now they're depressed, isolated, wanting to commit suicide in front of a screen for 14 hours a day, escaping, you know, numbing themselves through a variety of digital escapism and or self-medicating through other substances as well. if you're highly impulsive because of the way, excuse me, if you grew up on this, you're going to be

not well in a variety of ways and just not able to function in the world. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing Gen Z is having a really hard time functioning. It seems like that too. And a lot of parents, you know, I've read a lot of testimonies from parents who will say, you know, my child was, you know, a normal girl, a normal guy. And then they went through these hard adolescent years, which we all did, by the way, but they started spending more time on their phone. And maybe this parent was a little naive and said, I didn't really know what they were doing on their phone, but I thought, you know, it's fine. Or maybe even there were a parent who said, I thought I was checking their social media apps. And then one day,

over time, this person, this young person, teenager, seems to have developed different kinds of mental issues, seems very depressed, very anxious. This is something that we see a lot with a rapid onset, so-called gender dysphoria, especially among girls. And these parents are saying, what the heck? Like, you were just a normal girl, like to grow things. And all of a sudden, you're wanting these hormone treatments and things like that. I mean, there's a whole world, I think, that young people can get sucked into, just depending on where the algorithm takes them, that can completely kind of transform who they are as a person. I think we as parents like to think that that's not possible, that we've laid a good enough foundation. But,

I think we underestimate just how formative those teenage years are and how susceptible these young people are to a completely new change in identity that is brought to them by social media. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, when, you know, it used to be like the cafeteria in the high school used to be, you could see the different clicks and different identities, right? There were the jocks and, you know, all the different groups. And so every teenager is going through this sort of a search for identity.

Who am I? And it's been the right of passage historically. forever. But the way that social media has now changed that. And you're exactly right with things like gender dysphoria. I mean, we've been gaslighted as a society. Gender dysphoria is a real thing. I'm a clinician. I've worked with genuine gender dysphoria. But it's so, the real article is so extremely rare within the society. We've seen a 4,000 percent spike in late onset gender dysphoria of female to male. That's not explainable by,

and there's no traditional explanation for that other than the social contagion effect. And so you have vulnerable teens looking for identity who now fall down, whatever rabbit hole that it may be. So you may now, and let's face it, we're also looking for community in the sense of belonging. And so, you know, we, I remember we had a client at our clinic who she was depressed because all her friends went off to college

and she didn't. And so she was going through, what we would call moderate depression, not even severe clinical depression, but she was feeling alone and empty and and a little bit rudderless. And she just fell down a BPD rabbit hole, a borderline personality disorder rabbit hole. And she started identifying with this group. And a lot of BPD women tend to be very histrionic and over the top. And so their videos online, their social media tends to be really popular because it's performative and it's entertaining, as is something like dissociative identity disorder. which we used to call multiple personality disorder. So now there's influencers online who have DID who have 100 alters.

Now again, I've worked with the real deal dissociative identity disorder. You know, what we used to see in the movie is Sybil and Three Faces of Eve. Real dissociative identity disorder, sexual trauma and childhood, you create a sort of alter identity to complementalize the trauma because you can't really live day to day without trauma. But it was very rare. And typically you had a handful of alter identities. Now you have these influencers who have 100 identities across the LGBTQI spectrum. And they're really popular because they're very performative.

And people tune in, young people tune in to watch what's called switching. So when, when, and they call themselves a system. So system Susie is now going to go from 28-year-old white female to 45-year-old black male. and that switching is very entertaining because it's like this dramatic performance. So a lot of this is performance art. A lot of it is attracting people and now they start sort of emulating these psychiatric symptoms

with the late onset gender dysphoria, which I'm calling now in many cases pseudo gender dysphoria. And the proof in the clinical pudding, which I think it's important that I hammer this point home, I treat these issues. And in my clinic in Austin, we've had people that have come in with gender dysphoria, diagnoses and borderline personality disorder diagnoses.

And in my treatment program, it's two months residential and there's no technology. There's no phone, social media. When they're away from those influences, a healthy number of those people by the end of because we do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy and we do a lot of dialectical behavioral therapy, which is the type of therapy you're supposed to do if you have borderline personality disorder. By the end of two months, they're no longer, the gender dysphoria has gone away. For many of them, not all of them, but for many of them, you see that's gone away. You see the borderline personality disorder is not there anymore. That shouldn't be because borderline personality

disorder, if you have the real thing, it doesn't get cured in two months. Gender dysphoria, it doesn't get cured in two months. Right. And so if something goes away after you're off of social media for a few weeks, that means that you didn't really have the disorder to begin with. Yeah. So that's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing that a lot of these kids are just sort of consciously or unconsciously mimicking these behaviors or these disorders because they're now aspirational. Right. It's cool to be trans now. There's a whole host of social pressures to go down that path. Yeah. And like you said, it's a loss of identity. And it's a loss of community too. These people think that they're finding real communities through the, you know, BPD community or the trans community or. whatever it is.

And so you're getting affirmation. There's also, I think I speak as a non-psychologist, but I think there's a part of the brain that also, I mean, that likes affirmation. It seems like something is released when you get affirmed, when you're told, wow, you're incredible. You're so brave for posting this. Look at you being a part of the destigmatization of, you know, gendered before, whatever it is.

And so it's not even just like the mimicking that I think goes on. it's also the affirmation of a new identity, a sense of belonging and purpose that these people become addicted to and attached to, which is why I think it's so hard for them to release it and it becomes so real in their mind. That's it. That's beautifully said. You know, I think we're all looking for a team to belong to, right? Nobody wants to not be picked for a team.

And that goes back to evolutionarily. We needed, you know, the sociologists use a term the tribe survived. It's baked into our psychological DNA to need. need community and connection because we had strength in numbers evolutionarily. We were not the strongest or the fastest species. And to survive in prehistoric times, we needed a community. And so there was strength in that community. And so that's been baked into who we are. So now when you're looking for community and you're isolated in front of a screen, you don't have genuine community. And you have potential pathways or rabbit holes that you can fall into.

It's exactly what you said. It's kids and young people who are looking for a team to join. You know, and 25 years ago, these were young people that might have been joining a cult or finding a genuine, more meaningful community, whether it was faith-based or, you know, a sports team. You know, where I live locally, the high school couldn't feel the football team last year because there weren't enough kids, young teenage boys willing to put in the effort because gaming is easier. It takes effort to try out for a football team and go to practice every day. takes effort to date like you mentioned before. It's it's it's it's changed things so dramatically in ways that are not not very good. Yeah. You know, I there's a lot that I want to respond to what you said.

We only have a couple more minutes. But I spoke at a university the other day in California. And there were a group of protesters outside who and I didn't engage with them. But there were people, you know, that could have come to the event that we did an entire Q&A. And we had a couple people from the other side of my position who came in and asked me questions, although it was very much a, okay, you're not even hearing or responding to anything that I'm actually saying. You're just saying things that I've heard a million times on social media. But the crowd outside who was yelling at me, calling me a coward for not coming up to them outside and, you know, I don't know, hearing their chance or something, I'm thinking, you know, why didn't they come to the event? The event was open.

We could have had an interaction, but I'm thinking it takes more. effort. It takes a lot more effort, a lot more energy, a lot more courage to actually face someone that you disagree with, have a conversation with them. Of course, it's easier to stand outside and say your stupid chance. Like, there's no effort. There's all the virtue points in the world that comes with something like that. But it just takes too much effort to have the difficult conversations that we need to have as a functional society. So I guess my question to you is, because I don't think that we have even seen fully these chickens come home to roost. I mean, like only now are we starting to see what it looks like when a young child has been on an iPhone basically since

toddlerhood and is now growing into an adult. I mean, we've kind of touched on these things, but if you were to like quickly summarize, like, what's the consequence of this? What is the, what's the societal consequence or even the individual consequence of our kids having their main form of reality being on their phones? Yeah. Reality. blurred kids who can't function or like you said you know talk about those college kids in California think about that they don't even have the ability to have a rational discourse with you right they have to be their lizard brain worst right they have to just spew venom because that's all they're able to do I think that's all they've been primed to do at this point so the reality

is that we're you know we're going to be a society gone mad you know look at I look at the Navy promotional video where you have a drag queen that's that's right that's the upside down part of the society. I never thought that we'd be at a place where, you know, up would be down. You, there would be no such thing as a woman. You know, you speak so powerfully about these issues. You know, we need warriors in this cause and we need the adults in the room to speak up and to say, speak truth. And the rest be damned. I'm at a point in my career, you know, where I don't really care what, you know, I'm secure and what I do. And I feel it's my moral and ethical obligation to speak truth and to say the emperor has no close.

I'm not going to use pronouns or say, because once you give into the little, you know, everybody in the university that I was at has to do the pronoun signatures and I'm not willing to do that because it's absurd. And so I am seeing grassroots pushback. There are young people. I'm sure you've seen them on campus. There are young people who are, there's a grassroots movement of an awakening of saying this is absurd.

And hopefully that that grows because if the other side keeps. this trajectory going, we're going to sort of implode as a society. This is sort of the end times of Rome. What is your encouragement advice to two groups of parents? We got a lot of moms to listen to this podcast. Most of them are probably in my age. I've got just little kids. But then you've got some that are teenagers or their kids are teenagers.

And that group is thinking, well, I can't. I can't stop my kids from being on social media at this point. you've got two sons, you said, who are 16 years old. And then there are also like the moms of kids my age that you're like, oh my gosh, but like the screen helps me cook dinner or whatever it is. So what's your like encouragement and advice, hard truth to parents when it comes to how they treat screen time, social media, all of that with their kids? What should we be doing?

Yeah. I mean, for the younger, for the younger moms, for the younger kids, it's delay, delay, the older your child before they get a portable device, the better, right? for the reasons we said earlier, because it'll give them a better chance to develop their own sense of identity and their prefrontal cortex development. For the ones who have teenagers already, it's not too late to really give countervailing forces, sports, music, clubs, community, things get your kid engage as much as possible because the more countervailing forces you have in the young person's life, the less the gravitational pull of the screen is the kid who doesn't have a sense of purpose,

a sense of meaning. That's the kid that's going to get more lost in some of these things. So it's basically being a proactive parent, not a helicopter parent because I think the helicopter, I've worked with a lot of tech addicts who whose parents who are overly had their boot on their necks and the kids were escaping sort of hovering parents. So, you know, it's kind of a fine line to be a proactive parent without being a helicopter or bulldozer parent. You know, one of the most successful parents is a good friend of mine who's a good friend of

professor also had these wonderful kids grow up and I said what was your secret and he said well benign neglect um because I think sometimes we as the parents are uncomfortable with our kids finding their own path right so there's a fine line with let me give you some support without doing everything for you because the more I bubble wrap you the more I'm going to make you not I'm not going to build your psychological immune system but I do need to make sure I'm trying to point you in the right direction but I can't walk for you I can't fill out your college application for you. So, but these are challenging times, right?

We're all trying to sort of figure out our way forward, but that would be my best advice to really be careful. Yeah. For the little ones especially, for the little ones especially, don't have any devices until they're at least 12 or 13. Yes. And, you know, I mean, not to keep going, but I've just noticed that with my kids that when you give them the opportunity, even if they're like, no, I want to watch, you know, whatever

it is, cartoons, which my kids don't have any, like, devices or anything, but even just TV. Like, if you just kind of get through that may be tantrum or that frustration that they have and redirect their attention, they're still at the age where they will learn. They do learn how to dedicate their attention to something else besides the screen. They can do it, like their minds, I think, are still elastic enough to be kind of retought. And so I like also if I can add one thing to that, you know, all the research shows reading, right? If you can make your kid a lover of reading, this research that shows, you know, reading competency at age seven and love of reading at age 15 are the best predictors

of lifelong success. Yes, I believe that. If you can. But then there's a competing research that shows kids who are on screens are three times less likely to like reading because let's face it. Reading is, it makes reading boring, right? If you're playing hyper immersive video game, this and digital world, that, good luck reading war and peace. So carving out time to read with your child if they're young and giving them wonderful books when they're in middle school. And still that love of reading, yeah, you could do some TV and some other digital stuff when they get middle schoolish and past. But if you can bake in the love of reading, that's the one sword that will best immunize your, your, your, your, you know, one for the rest of their lives.

And parents of teens, it's, it's not too late, right? Like, if they want to, if they've got a 15, 16 year old at home, they haven't been monitoring their social media or screen time or anything, even though it's more difficult. It's not too late for those parents to start reassessing how they're parenting in that arena, right? Absolutely not. It just might be a little bit of a higher climb, but absolutely not. And it's worth the fight.

It's worth the fight. Yeah. And more details on this. You've written books about them. So I just really encourage you guys. I'm guessing they're wherever books are sold. Last year's book, Digital Madness, and then Glow Kids written in 2016. So all the science and different tips and things like that you've already written about.

And I just really appreciate that. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. And thank you for what you do, by the way. I really appreciate your efforts with all this as well. Thank you. Thank you. Wow, I told you guys, you were going to love that conversation. You know, I don't always get to say everything that I want to say because I want to make sure

that my guest is able to articulate their position fully. But one thing I was thinking that I just wanted to follow up on, he mentioned how in prehistoric times, the advantage of the human species was that we formed community. And that is how we survived. Of course, I would say as a Christian that God made us that way. He made us as communal beings. He made us to need fellowship.

That's why when God made Adam, he said, it is not good for man to be alone. and then he made Eve as his helper and saw that this was very good. And also we see that because we are made in God's image as we read in Genesis 127, that means there is a part of our need for fellowship that is reflective of God himself. And that is reflective in the nature of God, that he is Father's Son, Holy Spirit. He is eternally, constantly in communion with himself. And because we are made in his image, we are not meant to be in isolation.

Like you even read in Jesus's life that he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness into isolation so Satan could tempt him. Of course, he used the power of God and his own divinity, his own godness and the power of the word of God to fend off Satan's temptations. But he was pushed into isolation for that temptation. And so all of these things, I think, indicate to us that real, in person, interaction and not the isolation and the fake connectivity that we see on social media is actually embedded into the human psyche by a loving creator who knows what's best for us. As with all things, science is constantly just trying to catch up to God. All right, that's all I wanted to say. Thank you guys so much for listening. We'll be back soon. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening

to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

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