Unless you live on a remote island it’s highly likely that modern technology presents you with daily challenges that can seem overwhelming. We all crave peace and rest but social media, news websites, email, and Netflix seem to have other ideas. In this final part of our current series, I want to offer you some strategies about how you can start managing the way that technology shapes your daily life. It’s not easy but it’s possible.
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Transcript
Well, Hey everybody.
Speaker:Jonathan Doyle with you.
Speaker:Once again.
Speaker:Welcome back my friend.
Speaker:Welcome back.
Speaker:Welcome back.
Speaker:It is good to be with you.
Speaker:My individual listener.
Speaker:Well, it's not just you, it's you and my mum.
Speaker:She tunes in every single day.
Speaker:So to both of you, I say welcome.
Speaker:It's good to a.
Speaker:It's good to have you both back.
Speaker:Now I love it.
Speaker:I love it.
Speaker:I love having you guys on boards, everybody welcome.
Speaker:But I do like to think that I'm talking to individuals here and I know that I am.
Speaker:So thank you for the privilege and pleasure of your company and time.
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Speaker:the coaching space of many years.
Speaker:And what's going to happen is we are going to jump on a call.
Speaker:We're going to identify where you feel stuck.
Speaker:You're stuck somewhere.
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Speaker:financial life for some area is just stuck and you are not moving forward?
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Speaker:That's going to move you forward.
Speaker:So if you have a nagging sense that life.
Speaker:Has a lot more for you then often somebody like me as a coach can
Speaker:help you really move forward to go and check out that coaching link
Speaker:and book yourself a time today.
Speaker:Friends, we are on day three of a three-day process.
Speaker:If you haven't listened to the previous two days, what have you been doing?
Speaker:You have missed an extravaganza.
Speaker:Of content.
Speaker:For those good people that have been listening, we've
Speaker:discussed everything from.
Speaker:Middle ages, cosmology to coyotes in San Francisco.
Speaker:Over the last two days.
Speaker:Go back and check it at all.
Speaker:They're not making it up.
Speaker:I am doing this three-day process because I felt in my planning phase that.
Speaker:Many of us are struggling with overwhelm, anxiety, stress, depression.
Speaker:As our world gets more complex.
Speaker:So this three-part series was looking at.
Speaker:Weakened social connections.
Speaker:We looked at social connections on day one second day yesterday, we looked
Speaker:at a weakened level of exposure to nature and why that's really important.
Speaker:And today friends.
Speaker:And let's talk briefly about the impact of technology on and sort of the impact
Speaker:of increased technological complexity.
Speaker:You know, I'm talking about, you know, that, that multitasking
Speaker:social media life, where we are just transfixed by little glowing
Speaker:screens for large parts of the day.
Speaker:No judgment.
Speaker:Not judging anybody.
Speaker:Because it's a, no matter how disciplined you are, it can be so hard.
Speaker:I said to my daughter the other day, You know, she's 15.
Speaker:And I said no.
Speaker:And I said, always remember that these, these apps.
Speaker:Uh, devised by some of the world's most brilliant behavioral psychologists.
Speaker:And design, you know, people that are absolutely brilliant on UI and UX,
Speaker:user interfaces and user experiences.
Speaker:So it is no surprise that even the strong most strong-willed amongst us can be,
Speaker:have our lives progressively hijacked.
Speaker:By texts.
Speaker:So a little bit of data for you first as we talk about it.
Speaker:I did a bunch of research and according to a large study at UCLA.
Speaker:University of California, Los Angeles is one of the world's
Speaker:preeminent research universities.
Speaker:The average person, one of the latest studies in the developed
Speaker:world spends, wait for it.
Speaker:Drum roll, please.
Speaker:Uh, seven hours and 11 minutes looking at screens per day.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:You heard that right?
Speaker:Seven hours and 11 minutes looking at screens per day.
Speaker:That works out to second drum, roll a third of your life.
Speaker:He third of your life.
Speaker:Maybe we can contextualize that by thinking about the end of our lives,
Speaker:thinking about when we get to the end of our lives and we suddenly go.
Speaker:I just wasted a third of it, staring at a small screen.
Speaker:Again, no judgment.
Speaker:I mean, we all struggle, right.
Speaker:But on those incredible numbers, seven hours, 11 minutes a day.
Speaker:Some of you will be less.
Speaker:Some of you could even be more.
Speaker:Third of our lives.
Speaker:The other interesting thing is I lead into, this was one significant study
Speaker:argued that we are presented with 34 gigabytes of data per day 34 gig.
Speaker:Of data per day.
Speaker:Which is the equivalent of reading a 100,000.
Speaker:Would book.
Speaker:A hundred thousand word book.
Speaker:Of content and data coming at us on any single day.
Speaker:So I would like to give you a couple of frameworks here.
Speaker:The first thing that I wrote down was this, I think it sounds really good.
Speaker:It says this biology changes glacially.
Speaker:Technology changes exponentially.
Speaker:One more time.
Speaker:Biology changes, glacially technology changes exponentially, which means what.
Speaker:If you're a regulation that, you know, I go on about this all the
Speaker:time that the bodies we inhabit.
Speaker:Uh, we're about 350,000 years old.
Speaker:The last significant evolutionary shift for us.
Speaker:Into what we are called these days, homosapien sapiens
Speaker:was about 350,000 years ago.
Speaker:So our bodies and our brains have not changed much.
Speaker:Over the last 350,000 years.
Speaker:If you went back 350,000 years, you would find that the early homosapien
Speaker:sapiens had pretty much the same body and brain structures that we have now.
Speaker:So biology changes, glacially.
Speaker:But of course, I think we can all agree that technology changes exponentially.
Speaker:So, what does it mean?
Speaker:It means we've got these bodies that still think we're living back in cave times.
Speaker:But we have brains that are confronted with this vast amount
Speaker:of technological complexity.
Speaker:So one of the things that I came across in the research course was
Speaker:especially around social media.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:This is the big one, right?
Speaker:For so many people that, uh, There was some research done on FOMO, which I think
Speaker:almost everybody's familiar with FOMO, of course, standing for fear of missing out.
Speaker:So the basic process with social media impact for many people is
Speaker:we spend huge amounts of time.
Speaker:Looking directly into the lives of people.
Speaker:We don't know.
Speaker:And we'll probably never meet.
Speaker:And at some level often thinking that wouldn't our lives be awesome.
Speaker:If we just looked like them had what they had lived, where
Speaker:they lived said what they said.
Speaker:Uh, it's understandable.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:W we, we compare as a species.
Speaker:We look at all these images and we think, oh man, like if I had a Bentley,
Speaker:If I had that push, I would be so much happier.
Speaker:That's why I think Tony Robbins is really great because he says the number
Speaker:of billionaires that he's worked with that are just completely miserable.
Speaker:Now I agree that if you're going to be miserable doing it in a.
Speaker:You know, a hundred million dollar mansion is probably more bearable than doing it.
Speaker:In a Tony.
Speaker:Uh, you know, apartment somewhere.
Speaker:So what's the old saying that being rich doesn't make you happy,
Speaker:but it makes being miserable.
Speaker:Bearable.
Speaker:But it's just interesting tonight that many of us seem to think that that most
Speaker:of our problems could just be solved if we had what somebody else had.
Speaker:And of course,
Speaker:Social media serves that up for us on a massive daily basis.
Speaker:But this FOMO, this comparison engine that I talk about sometimes.
Speaker:Is psychologically associated with lower mood, lower life satisfaction.
Speaker:And interestingly, it's not associated with age because a lot of people think,
Speaker:well, let's just teenage kids, right.
Speaker:They're just looking all this stuff and they get denied.
Speaker:You know, they get upset and they get low self esteem.
Speaker:The research says it is actually not associated with age.
Speaker:There's a, there's a negative correlation to age.
Speaker:So basically it affects everybody.
Speaker:You can be in.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:40 50, 60 seventies beyond and still look at stuff and think,
Speaker:oh gosh, I haven't achieved that.
Speaker:I don't own that.
Speaker:Or I didn't do that.
Speaker:And it's also, this is religious in cross-cultural.
Speaker:It's not just the developed world.
Speaker:It's a human thing.
Speaker:It's across all cultures.
Speaker:That this living with this, all these images and all this comparison.
Speaker:Affects us all.
Speaker:Uh, just quickly in children, the research on social media addiction
Speaker:and technological addiction.
Speaker:Listen to these if associated with low academic performance, lack of
Speaker:attention, low creativity, delays in language development, delays in
Speaker:social emotional development, physical inactivity and obesity, poor sleep,
Speaker:quality, social anxiety, aggressive behavior addiction to technology itself.
Speaker:That actual addictive behaviors.
Speaker:And higher BMI, higher body mass index.
Speaker:You know, a few weeks ago, I was talking to these young people and I
Speaker:may have mentioned this on a previous episode, but they were telling me.
Speaker:That most of them have flat screen TVs in their bedrooms.
Speaker:The parents have raised the white flag and hand that over in flat screen TV.
Speaker:And some of these kids are telling me that they really into the horror genre.
Speaker:And, you know, Have you, if you've noticed this it's the so much of that
Speaker:content being cranked out through Netflix and apple TV and all those places.
Speaker:But what they were saying is that most of the Macado going into their
Speaker:rooms at 10:00 PM on a school night.
Speaker:And watching like w like incredibly graphic, intense horror films to like
Speaker:midnight 1:00 AM and then falling asleep, checking their phone a few more
Speaker:times and falling asleep at 2:00 AM.
Speaker:So, not only are they affected by the content.
Speaker:But just the sleep patterns and all that stuff.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:You know, this is not a doom and gloom episode.
Speaker:This isn't just.
Speaker:I'm not saying we need to just get rid of everything, but I think we
Speaker:can probably agree that unless it's very carefully managed for most of
Speaker:us, this technological technological complexity can be quite overwhelming.
Speaker:I guess we're going to ask yourself is isn't a net benefit, right?
Speaker:Is it a net benefit?
Speaker:I can probably look into my own life and say in January, yes.
Speaker:I'm going to talk a little bit about.
Speaker:You know, my approach.
Speaker:I much to my own detriment.
Speaker:I slowly got rid of basically all social media, I guess you could say YouTube.
Speaker:I still have, but.
Speaker:I've already is I just slowly backed off it.
Speaker:And if I use it again, I'll have a team managing it for me.
Speaker:So I won't be having to deal with it all the time.
Speaker:So I'm somebody that has walked it back and walked it back and walked
Speaker:it back deliberately, consistently.
Speaker:Tried to use it less and less.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:You know, on a tangent, something, you know, that, um, you know,
Speaker:I've got an obsession with sleep.
Speaker:The last few years, I've been really big on this getting really high quality sleep.
Speaker:And, you know, so I don't use devices in the evenings.
Speaker:I'm with my kids.
Speaker:I'm like, no, we, we shut them down by 8:00 PM sort of thing.
Speaker:Nobody's on devices after that time.
Speaker:And, uh, just setting a culture around that so that our bodies can
Speaker:adapt to the, to the sleep windows that we need them to adapt to.
Speaker:So practically.
Speaker:Let's talk about some action steps here.
Speaker:So if you listen to this going, you know what, you're right.
Speaker:I'm using it too much.
Speaker:It has, it is having such an effect.
Speaker:What do I do?
Speaker:I would begin by offering you this.
Speaker:Can you possibly consider.
Speaker:Building into your life dedicated on building into your life.
Speaker:A dedicated, ongoing commitment.
Speaker:To deliberate times of silence and stillness.
Speaker:See what I think the technological overwhelm is doing is literally
Speaker:that it's an overwhelm problem.
Speaker:It's like, it's just, we're never off.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It's just reading this new site and then chicken socials and then this
Speaker:email and then that thing and that thing and that thing and that thing.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:So few of us have disciplines of real times of stillness and quiet.
Speaker:So I spent a lot of time in my hometown, the city here.
Speaker:In the cathedral here.
Speaker:I'd probably try to get there most days because it's just such
Speaker:a beautiful building and it's so quiet and dark and still.
Speaker:Uh, try to get in there most days.
Speaker:Uh, as I said in yesterday's episode, most days I'm up around 4:00 AM.
Speaker:I have these training runs, training walks, cycling, trying to get out.
Speaker:And even now I've been backing off having headphones on when I'm training.
Speaker:Just to allow my, my own thinking to.
Speaker:To unfold.
Speaker:So if you do not currently have dedicated times of silence and
Speaker:stillness fringe, this is a discipline.
Speaker:Many of you listening might go to a gym, right?
Speaker:You'll occasionally or regularly go to a gym because it's a discipline.
Speaker:It's like you recognize that your physical.
Speaker:Body is an important thing.
Speaker:You want to invest in it, but our spiritual, emotional, psychological
Speaker:wellbeing also requires discipline.
Speaker:Having experiences and times where we, uh, disconnected from technology itself.
Speaker:And I get the RNE of me saying that while recording a podcast for you
Speaker:to listen to on a digital device.
Speaker:Sorry about that, but I'm hoping that it's good content.
Speaker:That's going to help you to grow.
Speaker:Uh, I also would offer you the practical step of deliberate attention often
Speaker:said to people wherever you are, be all there, wherever you are, be all there.
Speaker:This relates to what I call single task focus.
Speaker:I don't know how many of you use brown noise generators, brown noise generators.
Speaker:Most music apps, Spotify, apple music, Google music.
Speaker:Uh, YouTube, if you type in brown noise generator, you used to be
Speaker:that white noise was a thing, but apparently brown noise is much better.
Speaker:I think I first came across this through listening to this guy from
Speaker:Princeton university who does three, four hour blocks a day of intense work.
Speaker:And in those four hour blocks, he's headphones with brown
Speaker:noise and I use it all the time.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:But I'm not in the studio in the office or doing other stuff.
Speaker:I actually spent a fair bit of time at the national library.
Speaker:We're here in Australia and I've got these really good headphones.
Speaker:I use brown noise generators.
Speaker:And I'm increasingly not taking digital devices to the library.
Speaker:So not taking a laptop and hoping to get in there tomorrow.
Speaker:I won't be taking a laptop.
Speaker:May not even take my phone.
Speaker:One of my daughters comes in to study as well.
Speaker:And, you know, I'm figure if the house burns down that Karen will text her.
Speaker:And I w I don't need a phone.
Speaker:So I use.
Speaker:Which case I take in books and journals and I read and
Speaker:study and read and take notes.
Speaker:With the brown noise generator.
Speaker:So it's a deliberate time of single task focus, single task focus.
Speaker:So there's some of the practical stuff.
Speaker:And I just think, you know, learning to turn devices off early in the evening.
Speaker:And I can remember looking back.
Speaker:I used to get up early as a sign.
Speaker:I know I'd sort of read news websites and, you know, look, I'll
Speaker:be really honest since my, I don't read any mainstream media now.
Speaker:I don't trust it.
Speaker:So I don't read any of it.
Speaker:Um, I read a lot of sub stack.
Speaker:I read a lot of high-end, you know, A lot of people that have left mainstream media,
Speaker:and these are really good journalists.
Speaker:Who've got across the sub stack.
Speaker:So I try to get my news through.
Speaker:A mix of intelligent.
Speaker:You know, high quality journalism.
Speaker:So I've learned to just stop time-wasting on clickbait.
Speaker:So if you find yourself clicking on this thing and you know, kind of be
Speaker:honest with you, I'm going to lose a couple of lists and see, but I don't
Speaker:get the whole Royal family thing.
Speaker:I don't get it.
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:I don't get it.
Speaker:It's like.
Speaker:People that just you've read it, all these stories about hairy admitting.
Speaker:I'm going to really like, come on.
Speaker:There was so many great figures of history and incredible women
Speaker:and women doing great stuff.
Speaker:And so many people are just like, click, buy it off to click buy.
Speaker:This is your life.
Speaker:This is your life.
Speaker:It's precious.
Speaker:Why squander it on?
Speaker:Less than crucially important things, you know, anyway.
Speaker:Just lost a few listeners.
Speaker:I'm sorry.
Speaker:Love you.
Speaker:Please.
Speaker:Come back someday.
Speaker:But I just think that we're given this one precious life and I'm learning.
Speaker:To approach it with a sense of deliberateness and urgency.
Speaker:And I think maybe here's a summary technology has to serve you, right.
Speaker:It has to serve you.
Speaker:And if any aspect of it is not serving you.
Speaker:Then you're okay to move on.
Speaker:You're okay.
Speaker:To just slowly.
Speaker:Oh, I wish I could give you some kind of X-Factor trickier, but there isn't one.
Speaker:It's just, I think where I've got to is.
Speaker:Looking at what's important in life, which for me is like, Living well,
Speaker:living intelligently reading the great books, you know, being present to the
Speaker:people that I love being physically well.
Speaker:Being deliberate about my life.
Speaker:You know, I talk a lot about the influence of someone like
Speaker:David Goggins has had on me.
Speaker:And one of his quotes, it pops up every day on my computer and my phone pops up.
Speaker:I've got a few things that pop up each day.
Speaker:And one of them is this quite racist approach every
Speaker:day with a sense of urgency.
Speaker:Approach every day with a sense of urgency.
Speaker:And I just think, yeah, you know what?
Speaker:I find myself ever goofing off and wasting time and like, come on, man.
Speaker:Seriously, like.
Speaker:This doesn't mean I don't enjoy life.
Speaker:Like I'm running around all the time.
Speaker:Like superintendents, like I'm an intense dude.
Speaker:I always have been, but I want to live fully.
Speaker:I don't want to hand over any of my time to things that are.
Speaker:Uh, not really worthwhile and fulfilling.
Speaker:So friends at the end of this long episode, I'm just saying
Speaker:too, if it isn't serving you.
Speaker:Then consider what it's places in your life technology.
Speaker:You know, we've got this gift of this microphone, this computer, this
Speaker:internet, where I can put this stuff together for you guys and send it.
Speaker:So let's use the good parts, but let's start to get tougher and everything else.
Speaker:All right, that's it.
Speaker:Please make sure you're subscribed.
Speaker:Go book yourself a coaching call.
Speaker:They are absolutely worth it.
Speaker:You are going to get, you know, some real help for me to grow,
Speaker:to move your business forward.
Speaker:Your relationships forward your health forward.
Speaker:Gum book yourself a call and we'll get a dumb, all right, everybody.
Speaker:That is it for this three part series, I've got a whole bunch
Speaker:of more great stuff coming.
Speaker:Reach out to me, this is a topic you'd like me to cover.
Speaker:Send me an email.
Speaker:jonathan@jonathandoyle.co dot C O.
Speaker:And I'd love to prepare something just for you.
Speaker:All right, everybody.
Speaker:God bless you.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the daily podcast and you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
