The Wellness Scoop - How to Break Up With Your Phone and Have More Fun

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

We’re joined by Catherine Price, a science journalist and speaker, to talk about our relationship with our devices, how to achieve more screen-life balance, and the value of having more true fun. We discuss: How our attachment to our phones impacts our stress levels How social media manipulates our brain’s dopamine system The consequence of the manipulation of our dopamine system Practical steps for establishing a healthy relationship with our phone The 3 components of true fun Why true fun is essential to our overall wellbeing The impact of loneliness on our mental and physical health How fun supports resilience The link between fun and decision making & productivity Catherine Price: @_catherineprice https://howtohavefun.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of our mental and physical health to help you make small, simple changes to feel better every day. And today we're going to be looking at breaking up with technology, getting away from our phones, and why we need to have that bit more fun in our lives. There was one researcher I quote in my book who actually referred to loneliness as a fertilizer for other diseases, which is crazy to think about. And other researchers compare the

health effects of loneliness and isolation to those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So eat all the broccoli you want. It's going to be really hard to counteract that. So the fact that when we are having fun, we are having special shared experiences with people means that it is not just something that feels good for us it really is good for us it can help counteract some of the loneliness and isolation that was a problem before the pandemic and it's so much worse now before we delve into today's episode i wanted to introduce you to our sponsor and also a little note on sponsors which is that we'll only be working with brands that I personally use and personally love and that will never promote something on here that isn't totally authentic or that we don't really really believe in. So for the next few months our podcast sponsor

is going to be Simprove, a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. So I've been using it for years and years before I started working with them. I know gut health is such a prevalent topic at the moment and we're going to have a mini episode specifically on eating for gut health at the end of January as I know it's something so many of you are interested in too. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of our mental and physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production and mental health and keeping the right balance of good bacteria in our gut is just so important. Our diet and lifestyles have a huge impact on that but adding in live bacteria can really help too.

The bacteria in Simprove which is a water-based supplement can really survive the long journey from the mouth to the gut where they can then multiply and support our microbiome. I truly swear by it. And I hope you love it too. For anyone wanting to try it, they've shared a 15% off code with us. So you just need to use Ella15, which is valid on Simprove.com for new customers based in the UK, but they also have a subscribers package if you're an existing customer. So our guest today, Catherine Price, is an award-winning science journalist and the author of several brilliant books, including How to Break Up With Your Phone, and now The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again. She's also the creator of an online resource hub, ScreenLifeBalance.com, which is dedicated to helping people set better boundaries with their devices.

She travels around the US giving talks and leading workshops on how individuals and corporations can scroll less and live more to maximize productivity, creativity, and most importantly, improve their mental health. And closely linked to this, we're going to be delving into that topic of fun and the influence it has on so many aspects of our lives. So welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. First of all, congratulations on the new book. It's absolutely brilliant. Oh, that's great to hear.

So before we get into the topic of what you've been writing about recently about fun, I'd actually love to kind of, if you don't mind, rewind a little bit and tap into a lot of the conversations you're having in that first book and a lot of the workshops you're doing about screen time and that balance we have between real life and our online. And you're obviously so well known for helping people achieve that live screen balance. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and why it felt so important to you to write about it. Sure. So as you were mentioning, I'm a science journalist by background, and I actually didn't have very much of an interest in technology before I wrote How to Break Up With Your Phone. I was more interested, honestly, in like nutrition and endocrinology and mindfulness and trying to

live intentionally so that we can be as alive as possible for our time on this planet. But then I had this moment with my daughter, who was at that point a baby that really changed my focus. And that was when I was up late one night feeding her. And I had this moment where I could see what the scene would look like to an outsider. And it basically was her looking up at me at the same time that I was looking down at my phone. And that just made my heart sink. It was not how I wanted to be living my own life.

And it wasn't the impression I wanted her to have of a human relationship. And that's what inspired How to Break Up With Your Phone. Because I realized that at that point in 2016, not that many people were talking about our relationships with our devices, but we all were suffering from the same problems of really spending our attention on these little metal rectangles instead of on the people and the experiences that actually mattered to us. So that's how I got interested in learning more about the effects that our devices and our screens are having on us and then providing people with concrete tools that they could use to take back control. To be honest, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I couldn't relate to what you said more about your children and your phone. And I've certainly been there and I'm sure a lot of our listeners haven't. It definitely prompted me to think more carefully about the way I was using my devices, although I think there's probably still a lot more that I could be doing. But I wondered if you could run us through those top line effects that you're seeing.

Well, I think the biggest effect that our screen time is having on us is just the amount of time it's taking away from us in general. The best statistics I found before the pandemic was that the average person was spending four hours a day on their phones, just their phones, not their laptops or any of the other screens that we spend time on. And if you do the math on that, that adds up to about 60 full days a year, or a quarter of our waking lives. And again, that's just the phone. If you add in television, if you add in computers, I think it's not an exaggeration to say many of us are spending most of our waking lives on screens. So the problem with that is not the screens per se, but it's just the opportunity cost, because every minute we spend doing one thing is a minute we can't spend doing something else.

So any minute you're spending on something like Instagram is a minute that you're not spending time with your kids or doing something that you truly enjoy or find meaning from. So that's the biggest effect, I think. But then if you look at what actually happens to us when we are interacting with our devices, two things stand out to me. One is that we're really in a state of hypervigilance where we feel like we have to be connected at all times. We have to be available to anyone who reaches out to us and we have to immediately respond. We're basically constantly on guard for what really are kind of emotional threats, if you think about it. We just feel like we need to be responsive. And that's actually a very stressful state that likely is increasing

our levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone that's really essential if you're trying to run away from something, but it's very bad for us over time. It increases our risks for all sorts of health conditions ranging from obesity and type 2 diabetes to heart attacks and strokes and heart disease, stress is really bad for us. So that's one effect that our constant connectivity is having on us. It's also making us constantly distracted. So I think the fact that we are having our attention scattered all the time is also one of the biggest problems with what's happening right now with our devices. Because when you're not fully present, you're not really engaged in your own life. And you can't think very deeply, you can't truly be connected with anyone, you know,

our devices are having huge impacts on our relationships, you can't be productive, because your attention gets pulled away by something every minute or two. So I think that those are two of the biggest problems with our relationships with our devices is the effects that they're having on our anxiety and stress levels, and then also on our ability to be undistracted. It was so well put that because I think sometimes these parts of our lives are almost like a undetected issue. You know, we don't know necessarily why we're feeling stressed or why we're feeling anxious. But actually, as you said, there's so much more going on in our bodies than we necessarily realize with this constant level of connectivity and i know one of the other things you talk about with this

attention crisis in the recent book around that topic of sort of fake fun is the dopamine system and how much that's affected by it as well yes our dopamine system is actually how people end up manipulating us into using their products but to take a step back for a second, I think that you really hit on something when you're talking about how we might not even realize how stressed out we are or what the impacts are. And I realized this myself because my husband and I got into this habit, which I recommend your listeners experiment with for themselves, of taking 24-hour breaks, full breaks from all of our screens from Friday to Saturday nights as sort of a digital Sabbath of sorts. And what happened was really interesting. And this is

an experience that I've heard from many other people who've tried this as well, which is to say that the first night when we unplugged, we felt very anxious and jittery and our minds were racing and we felt like we just wanted to check stuff. You know, it felt compulsively drawn towards our phones, even though when we really thought about it, there wasn't really anything pressing at all. But then the second day on Saturday, when we woke up, it was almost as if time slowed down. We couldn't believe how much we had done by 11 o'clock in the morning. And we also felt this sense of calm and freedom that was really rejuvenating to the point

that when five o'clock and sundown did roll around and we technically could put our phones back on, we actually didn't want to. And again, this is something I've heard from many other people as well. And that got me very curious about the idea that perhaps we are living in such a state of hypervigilance and stress. We don't even realize it until we take that away. And then we're amazed by how good we feel. One of the questions I kept coming back to as I was researching how to break over your phone is that I wanted to know how we're being manipulated. Because if you think about it, I don't think anyone would say that their most meaningful moments from their day were the ones they spent on social media. But we keep

going back to apps like that, without even being able to control ourselves. And then we feel bad about it. And we start to blame ourselves for our lack of willpower. But when I looked into it, I realized that it's really not our fault. What's really happening there is that there's very sophisticated companies with very smart people who know how to basically manipulate us and hijack our brains so that we will spend our time on their products. And the way they do that is to copy techniques directly from a different device, namely slot machines, that are widely considered to be the most addictive machines ever to have been invented. So you might ask yourself, well, how does slot machines do it? How come it's so hard to get up from a slot machine once you start playing? And the way slot machines do it is they

manipulate our brain's dopamine systems. So many people have heard about dopamine, but to clarify, it's a chemical our brains use to record when things are worth doing again. So it's a salience indicator. And it's there to help us remember to do things that are essential for the survival of our species, like eat or reproduce, right? Like you see a beautiful raspberry in the forest, you eat it, it tastes good, it nourishes you, you don't die, your brain's going to release dopamine, and you're going to remember where that bush is in the future and seek out the raspberries. So in those cases, dopamine is great. But the problem with our dopamine system is that it's very easily manipulated, it doesn't have any judgment to it. If it encounters a dopamine trigger, it's going to release dopamine, and you're going to want to repeat that behavior again.

So if you want to create a product that we will use compulsively, all you do is bake dopamine triggers into that product's design. And once you know what those triggers are, you start to see them all over your phone. So for example, bright colors are a dopamine trigger. You know, it's no coincidence that the red of the notification badges on our phones is the same color as a stop sign, which is also the same color as blood. And for that matter of a beautiful raspberry, it's a very strong dopamine trigger. Uncertainty is another dopamine trigger. You'd think that we'd be more drawn to things that always have positive outcomes, but actually not knowing what's going to happen is very difficult for our brains to resist. Novelty is also a huge dopamine trigger. Obviously, when you check your

phone, you might not know what you're going to find, but you will find something new, whether it's a news story or an email or a new picture from a friend, right? And then also rewards are a very strong dopamine trigger. So in the case of the raspberry, the reward is of good taste and nourishment. In the case of the casino and the slot machine, the reward is the potential of money. In the case of our phones, it's potential social affirmation as just one example. So a like on social media, or again, a piece of new information or an email, there's some sort of reward we're likely to get. So these are really powerful techniques that basically bypass our ability to use our rational brains and tap into something more primal. So if you find yourself compulsively drawn to your phone, which you probably are, because that's how these apps are designed, it's really not your fault. But the more aware you are of how you're being manipulated, the better equipped

you'll be to fight back. So is there a consequence to this dysregulation, this manipulation of our dopamine system? The consequence of this manipulation of our dopamine system is some of the things we were talking about earlier and our inability to remain focused, our feelings of being distracted and anxious all the time. We aren't able to maintain our concentration just for a conversation. We're spending time with a friend and we check our phones. We're with our kid and we're scrolling through social media. There's innumerable consequences to it. So is that because we crave more? Yes. So our dopamine systems are fundamental to habits, but they are also the basis for addictions

because you can get to a stage where you start to develop a tolerance for the dopamine that you're receiving and the amount of pleasure you're getting from whatever you're experiencing, and you crave more and more and more. So actually, when I interviewed an expert in technology addiction, one of the things he said to me was that one of the worst parts about being addicted to technology is that it dulls reality. You don't get the same feeling of joy or satisfaction, for example, out of seeing a beautiful sunset as you do from the nonstop hits of dopamine that you get when you scroll through Instagram. So yeah, it can definitely lead to problems and can make you want more and more and make it harder to get the same fix that you used to get from normal life.

It's a really sad, but I think incredibly true point. So how do you start to kind of disconnect from this? As you said, I think lots of us have put down our phones and feel that kind of disry sensation that you talked about. How do you break up with your phone? How do you break up with that kind of constant need for connectivity and technology in order to experience more of that sort of true sense of fun? I think the first step is to acknowledge it's not your fault. So don't blame yourself. The second thing is to define what breaking up with your phone means. So I'm not suggesting that you go dump your phone in a river, although some people might want to do that. It's more about creating a healthy relationship over which you have control so that you use your

phone when it's useful or enjoyable to do so, but you don't keep getting sucked in because of these manipulative tricks. I think the third step is to get back in touch with what actually matters to you in life. So before resorting to traditional tips and tricks like turning your phone to black and white or putting a timer on your phone, like that's not going to work if you don't have some kind of bigger purpose to what you're doing. You don't want to restrict yourself for the sake of restriction. You want to shift from thinking of your phone as this temptation you're trying to resist and think of it more as an obstacle that's standing in the way of how you

want to live your life. Because once that happens, it's going to be a lot easier to change your habits without relying on your willpower, because you're just going to feel this disconnect between whatever you're doing on your phone and what you actually want to be doing with your life. So if you can get that philosophical shift to happen, it's going to be a lot easier. And you'll end up feeling a bit of anger and disgust towards your phone, instead of this compulsion, and this desire. And that's, I think, the most powerful. But once you do that, once you kind of identify what you actually want to be spending your time and attention on, then there are some things you can do to begin to break your own habit loops and establish habits that make you feel better. One thing I recommend that people

do is start by just putting a rubber band around their phones or a hair tie. And the reason there is that right now we are so conditioned to reach for our phones on autopilot that we often don't even notice we've reached for them until about 30 minutes have passed. And then we look up and wonder what just happened. So if you have some kind of physical impediment on your phone or some kind of physical thing, there's going to be a split second when your brain wonders, wait, why is there a rubber band or a hair tie around my phone? And in that moment, you've given yourself an opportunity to notice that you have picked up with your phone in the first place. Once that happens, the next step is to actually become more curious about what you picked up your phone to do. And I developed this exercise to help people with this that I call WWW, which is short for what for, why now, and what else.

So here's how it works. When you reach for your phone and you notice that you've picked it up, you ask yourself what for? What did you pick up your phone for? You know, what was your purpose? Did you pick it up to send an email or to check something in particular or to buy something? Did you even have a purpose? Because many times we don't have a purpose. The next question is why now? So what made you reach for your phone in this particular moment? It might be time sensitive, like you needed to buy a present for your friend because their birthday is in two days. But in most cases, there's probably going to be an emotional component to it.

So you'll notice that you picked up your phone because you were feeling anxious and you wanted something that would soothe you for a second, or you were bored and you wanted a distraction, or you were lonely and you wanted a bit of a sense of connection. And then once you notice or you understand why you reached for it in that moment, what your brain was after the next step, the final step is the one where you actually get to take back control. And that's where you ask yourself, well, what else? What else could you do in that moment to achieve the same result? So if you're feeling anxious, could you do something like make yourself a cup of tea? If you need a distraction, could you maybe get up from your desk and go for a walk without

your phone for 10 minutes? If you need connection, could you skip the social media spiral and maybe actually use your phone to call a friend? You know, you start to give yourself alternatives. And you might conclude that maybe you just don't want to do anything at all. Maybe you just want to sit with your emotions or do nothing and give your brain a chance to breathe. Like that's a wonderful option to take. And you also might go through all these steps and conclude that you really do want to be on your phone in

that moment. And that is completely fine. As I said before, our point is not to restrict ourselves for the sake of restriction. It's just to make sure that when you do reach for your phone, it's the result of a conscious choice. So if you reach the what else and you're like, you know what, I actually really do want to be on my phone, go for it. That's success. So those would be some of my first suggestions. And then you can move on to these more practical things you've probably heard before. Like, for example, if you know an app is very time-sucking for you, if it is what I think of as a slot machine app, such as social media or the news, or maybe even email, get it off your phone. I don't keep any of those things on my phone because I know that they would be problematic for me.

So instead, I just check them from a desktop computer. Or if I truly do want to use a problematic app on my phone, I just reinstall it for a second. And then I delete it again. Or I look at it through the browser on the phone, I just make it a little bit less convenient to engage in the things I know are problems for me. Very similar to the idea of that if you're an alcoholic, you probably shouldn't leave beer in the refrigerator. That's not going to make it easy to stick with your sobriety, right? So if social media is a problem for you, don't have Instagram be the first thing that you see when you look at your phone. Oh, hi there. I'm Norma, the unofficial mayor of the town of Destiny.

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offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. I think we're so quick to, as you said earlier, blame ourselves, blame our lack of willpower. But it's incredibly challenging when these things are right there in front of you, you know, blame our lack of willpower. But it's incredibly challenging when these things are right there in front of you, you know, for 18 hours a day and think a bit of self-compassion and awareness and kind of mindfully constructing things to support the decisions you want to make are so important. To touch on a theme that I know you touch on in your podcast,

I think that there's an analogy to be made between our screen time and food, where we make the mistake of thinking that all screen time is bad, right? And then we beat ourselves up for any of it. But that'd be just as ridiculous as saying that all food is bad for us. That's not the case, just that some foods are more nourishing for us than others. Some are junk foods that maybe we're compulsively drawn to, and we binge eat, and then we feel gross afterwards, maybe we want to avoid those, you know, and we have to eat food. It keeps us alive. There's things on our phones and our screens that at this point in modern life, we really do need to do or they actually make our lives better or more efficient. So I think there's a more nuanced way to think of it. Absolutely. And I know that looking at that continuum of apps and ways of

using our phones and technology that make us perhaps struggle a little bit more and kind of perhaps heighten that anxiety, that stress and can leave a day thing a bit lackluster. I know you talk about true fun being the kind of antidote of this and stopping that dulling of reality. Can you let us know what you mean by true fun? Sure. When I wrote How to Break With Your Phone, one of my main takeaways there is that ultimately our lives are what we pay attention to, that our attention is our most valuable resource, because we're only going to remember what we pay attention to. We're only going to experience what we pay attention to. And so we need to be very

mindful about how and where we spend our attention. And I felt pretty good about that realization. But what I didn't realize at that point is that that powerful though it may be is actually only the first step. Because once you recognize the value of your attention, the next step is to figure out what you want to spend your attention on. And in many cases, we've gotten so used to allowing our time to be filled for us, that we've lost sight of how we want to fill our time. And that's exactly what happened to me. I realized that once I'd cleared out space by not spending so much thinking about, well, what actually makes me feel alive? Like, what are the moments when I really feel engaged and present in my own existence when I experience joy? And one of the experiences that came to mind, which actually was directly inspired by How to Break Up With Your Phone, was a feeling I was getting in this guitar class I'd signed up for. So I had asked myself this question, I encourage everybody to ask themselves as well, which is what's something you say you want to do, but supposedly don't have time for? Because when I broke up with my phone, I ended up as most people do with more time. So my answer to that question was, I wanted to learn the guitar. So I ended up signing up for this class. And it quickly became the highlight of my week. And I realized it wasn't the skill that I was acquiring.

It was the feeling I was getting of being in this group of people. In this case, it was other adults, most of whom were fellow parents. And we were just playing around together. There was no point to it. Our only purpose was to play. And this was giving me this sense of buoyant energy and joy that was carrying me through the rest of the week. It was not just lighthearted pleasure or amusement. It was actually really profound. But the best word I could think of to describe it was fun. So that's how I got interested in writing this new book. I wanted to understand better what this feeling was, what fun actually is, so that I could have more of it. And I quickly realized that I would have to come up with a better definition than what was in the dictionary.

Because if you look in the dictionary, it will say something like it's just lighthearted pleasure or enjoyment. But when I reflected on my own experiences, and then when I gathered stories from people around the world about their own memories that they would describe as having truly been fun, there was this much deeper joy to them. And I eventually came to conclude that the real definition of fun or the definition of what I call true fun is the confluence of three states. And those states are playfulness, connection, and flow. So playfulness doesn't mean you have to play games. Adults clench up if you say playfulness. It just means having a spirit of lightheartedness and not caring too much about the outcome. So for example, in my guitar class, we were not trying to be professional musicians, we were just goofing around, you know, we were a bunch of

grownups singing the theme song to Moana while trying to play barred F chords on the guitar, it was not pretty, but it didn't matter, because we weren't trying to be perfect. It was very freeing in that sense. The connection can happen with yourself, it could be a connection to your authentic self, because that is a fundamental element of fun. We do feel connected to our authentic selves. It could be a connection with your physical body. But in most cases that people told me about, the connection was with another living creature.

You know, usually a person, sometimes a dog or a cat, but it was a special shared experience. And that was true for introverts as well as extroverts. And then the third component of fun flow is the feeling of being so engrossed in your present experience that you lose track of time. So it's what people are referring to when they say that they're in the zone. The most quintessential example is an athlete in the middle of a game, but you can have flow in any sort of activity. Like even right now, having a conversation with you, I'm totally focused and present and engaged. So I'm in a state of flow. So each of those states, the playfulness, connection

and flow are really good for us on their own. But when all three of them happen at once, like if you make a Venn diagram of the three of them, the overlapping part is what happens when we're having fun. And does that have a measurable physiological impact on our health? It probably does. No one has studied it because it's amazing how little research has been done about fun per se. I think in part because we typically think that fun is frivolous. So writing a grant proposal about studying fun is probably not going to be as successful as writing one about cancer. But the other problem is that we haven't, up to this point, had a very good definition of it, for the reasons I was saying before. But if you look into the research that does exist on playfulness and connection and flow, yeah, it strongly suggests

that fun is not frivolous at all. It's actually really good both for our emotional and our physical health. You know, it reduces our stress, it brings us closer to other people, it gets us into a psychological state of openness, where we're able to be more creative, you know, and then it also just makes us feel alive, which really, at the end of the day, I think is the most important part. Absolutely. And I think it's also the most relevant part, obviously, there's a huge mental health epidemic really going on massively exacerbated by the pandemic. And so it feels even more relevant, I think, than than ever before, certainly to me by the pandemic. And so it feels even more relevant, I think, than ever

before, certainly to me at the moment. But I asked the question, because I know, as you said, like, if you break down those three component parts, I think probably most of us have come across some interesting conversations and bits of research about the power of them, particularly social connection. I think that's one of the things that seems to have really come to the forefront. Originally, when we thought about health, we thought about broccoli, we thought about going on a treadmill, you know, we thought about in this kind of very binary, quite basic way. And I think what we're seeing now, you know, all the studies from blue zones and things like that, that actually that social connection is so fundamental for our well-being in every sense of the word.

Yes. And that is something, as I totally agree with you, we don't think of at all. We all know intuitively that feeling lonely and isolated feels bad. We've experienced that over the past two years quite a bit. We all know that. But what I think we don't recognize, very few people internalize, is that it's not just something that feels bad for us. It actually is really bad for us physically. So when we're lonely and isolated, it actually affects our bodies down to the level at which our genes are expressed, which basically means it affects which genes are turned on and off when, which in turn determines whether or not we are

healthy or if we develop diseases. There was one researcher I quote in my book who actually referred to loneliness as quote, a fertilizer for other diseases, which is crazy to think about. And other researchers compare the health effects of loneliness and isolation to those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So eat all the broccoli you want. It's going to be really hard to counteract that. So the fact that when we are having fun, we are having special shared experiences with people means that it is not just something that feels good for us. It really is good for us. It can help counteract some of the loneliness and isolation. There was a problem before the pandemic, and it's so much worse now. I mean,

you may know this, but in the UK, you guys actually have a minister of loneliness, which as an American makes me kind of laugh because it sounds very Harry Potter. And I just think like, what are those business cards look like? But I think that we might want to compliment the minister of loneliness with a minister of fun. Because if we all were having more fun, we wouldn't be as lonely. And we actually would be physically healthier. It's actually a health intervention, which is crazy to think about. It is, but it helps. I think it helps reframe the conversation. Because as you have touched on, I think so many people would say, well, I don't have time to do that guitar class or go to that Zumba class or whatever it is

that's fun for them, who knows? Maybe lots of us don't even know what that is because we don't feel we have the mental or physical capacity to even explore that because our days are so jam-packed. So I do think it almost in understanding the fact that it has such a true impact on our mental, physical health

is a good way of pushing us to realize we should go and explore these things. We should find a way to create a healthier balance with our technology and with our devices to find that time to switch off and be present. And almost having the seriousness allows the space for the more lightheartedness and to truly have fun. And one of the other things I wondered, does it help support resilience as well? The more we know how to have fun and the more that's sort of ingrained in our bodies, in our mind, does it help us be more resilient at those times of life that are really difficult, which naturally we will all have? Fun is enormously helpful for resilience. And that is something that we get wrong about it because we often think that fun can only happen when we're already doing well. But the opposite is also true. If you

are having fun, you will be better equipped to handle whatever life throws your way. There's this theory of, it's called the broaden and build theory of positive emotion from this woman named Barbara Fredrickson, which puts forth the idea that positive experiences don't just feel good in the moment. They actually give us resilience that then helps us cope with periods of future stress. So if you're able to prioritize fun and open yourself to opportunities for fun in challenging times, it actually will help you get through them. And I've certainly found that to be true for myself. I, as you've gathered, derive a lot of joy from playing music together with people. That was obviously something that became much harder to do during the pandemic.

But I made it a priority. I continue to make it a priority. You know, some of my friends and I started to just make music videos together on our phones using an app that let us play our parts independently so we could end up with a full song. And that was not as joyful as playing music together in person, but it still was fun. And it helped me get through the tough, isolated moments of the pandemic. And those experiences give us this feeling of joy that then helps us in future periods where we're just feeling really isolated and alone and down at

whatever the latest stage of the pandemic has brought. So it actually is enormously important and helpful for our resilience. I think another thing we get wrong about fun is that we think that we have to stuff more activities into our already overwhelmed schedules and lives. And as a result, we almost can feel, I don't know, resentful if someone brings up the idea of having fun, because we feel like how could we possibly do that? So I want to emphasize that there's actually opportunities for fun all around us that are much smaller that really just require a shift in our mindset. And I think that's why it's so useful to think about fun as the confluence of playfulness and connection and flow, because there are opportunities for those three states

and pre-existing moments of them all around us. Just as one example, someone recently told me about how he had had a full two hours of what he described as true fun, just by sitting on a park bench with his nephew, trying to catch leaves as they fell off of a tree. You know, it was free. All he needed to do was notice the leaves and reach out for them. And for me, that was a beautiful, literal example of the metaphor that I have in mind, which is that there's opportunities for playfulness and connection and flow floating around us all the time. And the trick is to learn how to reach out and grab them. Yeah, it just makes me think, as you said, these tiny moments in our day,

can we just try and appreciate that 10 minutes more? We had someone on recently and we always ask our guests, what's the one thing you do to feel better every day? And hers was taking time to make lunch. And it's like, could you just take those 10 minutes, put on some good music, make your lunch, sit and eat your lunch. It's delicious. And there's a flow state of concentration and you could seek and have music. It just, it makes you realize that you could take these little moments throughout the day. And instead of seeing them as just another thing to do, could they be something where you actually take more from them, which kind of leads me to my next question, actually,

thinking in my mind about ways I could have more fun every day with work-life balance. That's a question obviously a lot of people have on their mind. And do you think trying to open your mind up to this sense of possibility of fun throughout the day allows us to feel like we do have a little bit more balance in our lives? I think it definitely makes it easier to maintain better work-life and also screen-life balance, as I call it. Because the thing you'll find when you start having more fun and more everyday moments of playfulness and connection and flow is that they feel so good that you're going to be less drawn to the other stuff. It's almost like remembering what really good food tastes like. Suddenly you're not going to want to eat the junk or the tasteless oatmeal because you'll be reminded of how wonderful life can be.

So I find that that's one of the nicest consequences of reorienting ourselves towards fun is that the more you do so, the easier it is to stick with some of the other habits you're trying to establish, such as reducing the amount of time you spend on screens without even trying. It suddenly becomes effortless because you've shifted how you want to be living your life. And one of the other things you said in the book is the more fun you're having, the better your decision-making gets, which I thought was so interesting. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that. I think that fun can help us make better decisions in at least two ways. One is that if you start paying attention to the activities and the

settings and the people that bring this feeling of playful and connected flow, you can then prioritize them. So if you're faced as we all are with limited time and a lot of choices, you can make better choices about what to spend your limited time on simply by paying attention to the things that make you feel like you're having fun. And then in a more physiological way, having fun can help us make better decisions because when we're stressed out, we make really poor decisions. And there's actually a reason for that. It's because the part of our brain that's responsible for decision making, the prefrontal cortex, kind of goes offline whenever it gets really stressed out.

It checks out. And we've all experienced this ourselves. When you're feeling really anxious or fearful or stressed, it becomes very difficult to make good decisions. We have tunnel vision. But if you're relaxed and more open, your prefrontal cortex is able to do its job and you actually can make better decisions. So it's the difference between being stressed out and coming home from work and just eating

an entire pint of ice cream because you have lost the ability to recognize that's not going to make you feel good ultimately. And being in a situation where you're already relaxed and feeling fulfilled to begin with, and you're not even attracted to that pint of ice cream to begin with. And you're also saying how it can make you feel more productive, which I know in a way feels ironic, given the context of fun, but it sounds like it's a similar situation, that ability to regulate your emotions more effectively and have that better sense of focus would by nature make you less distracted. Yes, that's true. And then fun also helps us become more productive in a different way, which is that it helps

us to actually take breaks. And that rests the part of our brain that was trying to do the work. So, for example, typically what I used to do and sometimes still do if I'm feeling stuck on a project I'm working on, on the computer, is that I'll just go to a different tab on my computer and I'll check my email or I'll read the news. Then I don't actually feel refreshed at all. And then I become less and less productive as the day goes on. And the problem there is that I'm not actually taking a break from what I'm working on. I'm using the exact same part of my brain to just do

something else. That's itself not productive, and that tires my brain out more. If you actually step away from what you're doing, and engage a different part of your brain and do something that gets you into more of a state of playfulness or connection or flow, then you're likely going to come back to the task you're trying to work on feeling much more refreshed. So for example, one of the consequences of writing this book, for me personally, has been that I've started to learn how to play the drums, which is a totally new skill set. And really, I find it so enjoyable and so fun and a guaranteed way to slip immediately into flow. And if I can get myself to turn away from my computer and just practice the drums for five minutes during the time I might otherwise have spent reading the news or looking at my

email inbox, I end up coming back much more refreshed and much better equipped to go back into what I was trying to do and actually get it done. And that's because I'm using a different part of my brain and I'm giving myself a true break. So counterintuitive though it may sound, fun actually can help us become more productive. It makes so much sense. I mean, as we said earlier, it's weird in a way to pinpoint all the kind of mental and physical health benefits and wellbeing benefits of fun. Cause it, as you said, it feels kind of counterintuitive. Fun should just be intrinsically fun instead of having lists of benefits. But actually I think there's concrete reasons really help us realize that we've got to make more space for that. So as we sort of wrap this up, just thinking about people who have

listened to you today, and they think, you know, I need so much more of this in my life, what are the kind of practical steps to change that sense of fun in our lives? Because I think so many of us, and I certainly think I would include myself in that, probably wish they were laughing more, like having a kind of freer sense of self and fun in each day. One of the easiest ways that you can start to orient yourself more towards fun is to adopt a practice of noticing daily delights. And this is something that I do each day in my own life that really has a positive impact on my mood and my well-being. I got this idea from this book called, appropriately enough, The Book of Delights by this poet named Ross Gay. And the idea is

really simple. As you go through your day, you just make a point of noticing things that delight you. Anything that delights you. It does not have to be deep or profound. And when you notice something that brings you even the smallest sense of delight, you stick a finger up in the air and you say out loud, delight. And that might seem silly and feel silly. And indeed it is silly, but actually saying things out loud, accompanying it with a physical gesture has been proven to help us savor our positive experiences and actually take advantage of the boost they give to our resilience and our feelings of joy in our everyday life. So it's actually really important. And even better is if you share your delights with other people. So for example, I think one great use of technology, a positive thing to do on your phone

is to use your phone to start a delight text chain with your friends or family members. And if you notice something that delights you and you're able to take a picture of it, take a quick picture and send it to someone with a caption that says delight. I've got a number of these text chains going on right now. And it's really lovely because every time I receive one of them, I myself feel delighted. And they're really small. Like for example, I've got a friend who lives in Boston here in the States, and it was a snowy morning, and he sent me a picture of a frost crystal on his windshield of his car. And that said delight. And I thought that was such a

beautiful example, because there's two approaches he could have had when he saw that his car was covered in ice. One was to say, wow, I'm really annoyed. I'm going to be late now I'm going to have to scrape the snow off of my car. This morning's off to a bad start. Another approach was to notice the crystals and how beautiful they were and then be delighted by them and then take a picture of it and share that picture with me, his friend, whom he hasn't seen in person because of the pandemic for more than two years. And he chose the latter path. And as a result, it brightened his morning a bit and it brought me a sense of delight and it made me inspired to notice more delights in my own life than two years. And he chose the latter path. And as a result, it brightened his morning a bit. And it brought me a sense of delight. And it made me inspired to notice more delights in my own life, and then to share them with other people. So I think that's a very simple and accessible thing

that all of us can do right now starting today to boost our spirits and incorporate more of this feeling of playful connected flow into our everyday lives. And Catherine, if we could just finish off, we love to ask people for three easy take homes for listeners. If there were three things you wish everyone knew about having fun, about breaking up with their phones and living that more joyful life, what would they be? I think the most important thing to take away and just to internalize is the fact that our time on earth is finite, you know, as existential and depressing as that may be. But that establishes what the stakes are here, right? Like, we're not just talking about turning off Instagram for the sake of saving a moment

or two. It's so that you can actually be present in your life. So that, I think, is the most important takeaway. I also think a takeaway is that it does take work. I mean, it takes work to create an intentional relationship with technology that's deliberately designed to get you to have an unhealthy relationship with it. It does take work to turn away from anxiety and stress and fear and carve out the mental time and space to focus on fun.

But then my third takeaway would be that it is worth it. It is so worth it. My life has changed dramatically for the better as a result of writing these two books. And I've heard from many people around the world who've had the same experience. So I would say to take the plunge, have some faith and try it and notice how it makes you feel to spend less time on meaningless things on your phone and more time engaging with your life. Because the more you do it, the easier it will seem and the more alive you're going to feel. I'm feeling very inspired, I have to say, after this.

And so final question, and I can maybe guess what the answer is, but we ask every guest what the one thing that you do every single day to help you feel better is. I'm thinking it might be the guitar, but I might be wrong. Well, what I was gonna say to that is the delight practice, actually, is that I try to notice things that delight me and it's easy and it's available all the time. And it has really

made a positive difference in my life in terms of making me focus more on the opportunities for playfulness and connected and flow that exist. And also connecting me with the people in my life that I love and that I don't get to see as often as I would like to. Catherine, thank you so much for your time today. It's honestly been so insightful. And I really do encourage people to try Catherine's practice of delight. It's, I think, going to really inspire all of us. I'm certainly very, very excited to try it. If you do try it, we would love to see it. So do tag us on social media. I will just check with Catherine if she thinks that is a good use of social media. I think a good use of technology. I actually do support that. It's what social media is supposed to be there for, to actually connect us and help us be with each other in positive

ways. Well, thank you all so much for listening. We will see you back here very, very soon. And if you do want to look into the book, it is called The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again, and I really highly recommend it. Have a lovely day, everyone. Bye. Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.