E126 - Is Social Media Dangerous for Kids?

Today Alex discusses the question: is social media harmful for the mental health of young people? In this episode expect to learn:

 - Why human beings are vulnerable to information overload.

- What about social media and smartphone technology could be addictive or harmful?

- Super-powers or metaskills we should be cultivating in our children to deal with an AI driven world. 

- Recommendations around smartphones and social media for young people. 

Dr. Alex Curmi is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

Watch Alex on Adam Lane Smith's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dd6GAsZhQ0&t=1529s

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

Transcript

Welcome back. Today I'm going to be talking about the thing that has captured most of our attention for the past 10 to 15 years. The thing that we now carry with us wherever we go. The thing that Australia has recently decided to ban and people are 16 and under, I'm talking of course about social media and more broadly, smartphone technology.

This podcast is going to be based on a talk I recently gave at school, and that talk was called. Digital adolescents navigating the dangers of the online world. Just to mention before we start, I was recently also on Adam Lane Smith's YouTube channel. Adam Lane Smith is an attachment expert who we had on the podcast before and I went on his YouTube channel to discuss behavior change, particularly behavior change as it relates to attachment style.

So if you're interested in that, I will put a link in the description. If you'd like me to talk at your school or for your organization or on [00:01:00] your podcast, you can email me at Alex crummy therapy@gmail.com and put speaking inquiry in the subject line. So the talk that I gave is called Digital Adolescence, navigating the Dangers of the Online World, and that's a very sexy title.

But what am I actually going to talk about? The podcast is going to be in three parts. Firstly, I want to talk about information, 'cause ultimately social media and everything that comes through our smartphones is information of a kind. So to understand smartphones and social media, first you have to understand what information is and why human beings are vulnerable to information.

And then I'm gonna talk about social media specifically. We'll discuss the question, is social media addictive and is it on top of being addictive? Is it potentially harmful for young people? [00:02:00] And we'll also talk about the idea that social media may not be necessarily the biggest thing we have to deal with in our children's lifetimes.

Actually, perhaps social media might just be the start of a larger emerging problem, which I think everyone globally is going to have to grapple with. Then in the third part, because I didn't want this podcast to just be a sort of negative thing about what's bad. I want to create a positive vision and talk about the superpowers.

I think we should be helping to cultivate in our children, or what I would call meta skills, and I'll explain more about that later. Why is this important? Obviously, we live in a world that's rapidly changing. Throughout human history, things were static for a very long time, and then we have periods where things change very, very quickly.

It seems like, and I'm sure you would agree that we're in one of those periods where things are changing very, very quickly. I'm sure if you went back to your childhood and compared it to your adulthood, things have changed quite a bit in terms of our [00:03:00] information and and technological landscape. Before we get into the podcast itself, perhaps you could reflect on a few questions.

Questions like how much of your time do you spend using your smartphone or social media? I. To what extent do you feel there's a kind of addictive compulsive quality to the use of your smartphone? To what extent do you think your life would be better if you used your smartphone a little bit less? And lastly, to what extent do you think your childhood would've been just a little bit better if only you had a smartphone and if only you got to use your smartphone or social media a little bit more?

So the tone being said there, we're gonna go into part one talking about information. So as you guys know, listening to this podcast, I do like to attack things from first principles. So as I said earlier, social media as a form of information. [00:04:00] And to prepare for this, I actually wanted to look up the definition of information.

It's kind of thing that's hard to define. I found a few definitions. One definition was information is that which informs. Which wasn't super useful. I found that information is data. I found a few different definitions. I ended up coming up with my own definition, which is information as a way of processing and representing reality in some way that can be communicated between people and now between technology.

So you might take a photo of something, like you might take a photo of the building you're in, and that photo is a representation of the building. It's a kind of way of apprehending reality. And this way of apprehending reality in the form of information is quite unique to human beings. We're probably not the only animals that use information, but we're certainly the animals that use it the best and in the most sophisticated way through language and non-language forms like.[00:05:00] 

Even if I made a particular facial expression, that's a form of information, but particularly through language information is certainly what's allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet. And of course, not just information, but information that's weaved into something like a story as is discussed so eloquently.

In the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harri information helps us answer very important questions. Questions that are very essential to our survival. Questions around where do we find food? Where do we find safety? Where do we find opportunity? Where do we have to worry about danger Information also helps us answer questions like, where do we find prestige?

Of course, these are very uniquely human things, especially prestige, where we say, you know, something has value but only. In particular circumstances, like a particular item might have value in the spring collection, and then it has some prestige, but not if you wear it in the [00:06:00] autumn. Money, of course, only has value if we as a society decide it has value.

If we reach the consensus, for example, that Bitcoin has value, then it does, and the second we move on to something else, then bitcoin would drop in value. So information is helping us answer all these questions. Where's the food? Where's the opportunity? Where's the danger? Where's the prestige? Information means survival.

But in the case of human beings, it's also our strength. And the problem is when our strength is built on something, often that can mean there's an underlying weakness because you could say we're adapted, we're wired by evolution to seek information because it's helped us so much, we are intend vulnerable to information.

So you could say information is in fact not just. The key to our survival and the key to our strength as a species. But you could also say information is one of our evolutionary vulnerabilities. By the same token, food is one of [00:07:00] our evolutionary vulnerabilities. We need food for survival and to thrive.

So our instincts tell us to eat a lot and eat very specific kinds of foods that helped us survive. Like sugary foods, salty foods, fatty foods, especially because those foods have a lot of energy and those foods went widely available at one point in our human history. Now that we have that food anywhere and everywhere, what do we see?

We see two thirds of people in the western world being overweight or obese because our instincts are telling us to overeat. This food. Food is another one of our evolutionary vulnerabilities. So the key point here being even though information is a strength, we're also vulnerable to it. Now the next question would be, how do we take in information?

And if you take anything away from this podcast, I'd like you to take away this. We basically perceive information in three categories. We either perceive information as a tool or we perceive it as an [00:08:00] obstacle, a barrier, a danger, or we perceive information that's totally irrelevant. I. Now most of the information in the environments that we could possibly take in, we actually put in that third category, that irrelevant bucket.

We unconsciously filter it out. Right now, you're probably focusing on the sound of my voice, and maybe you're not hearing any of the sounds in the background wherever you are, whether that's birds or cars driving past, or the sound of kids playing, you're probably not looking at any of the visual information or not really paying attention to the visual information in your environment.

There's a whole bunch of stuff in the environment that your brain knows unconsciously you don't need to pay attention to right now until, of course, I bring your attention to it. If someone then came into your environment screaming, there would be an obstacle to you listening to this podcast, and then you'd focus on them for a little bit until the obstacle got outta the way, and then you could focus on what you perceive to be useful again, which would be [00:09:00] hopefully this podcast.

So we have these three categories, and the biggest one is totally irrelevant. And the other thing I wanted to appreciate is that information is constantly shaping our beliefs and expectations about reality and about the world and about what we think is possible. But then similarly to two way street, our beliefs and expectations similarly shape how we see information and what we focus on.

In other words, our beliefs and expectations will determine what information we put in the useful bucket, what information we put in the obstacle bucket, or what information we put in the irrelevant bucket. So if you go on social media and you see, uh, posts saying something like, all men are trash. That's gonna shape your beliefs and expectations about men.

And if you've never dated before and maybe you're a 13 or 14-year-old girl and you eventually start getting into relationships with [00:10:00] boys, and your beliefs are that all boys are trash, and if one of the boys you're dating does something trashy, you're gonna focus on that information. That's gonna be the information confirming your beliefs and expectations.

And if you take nothing away from this podcast, just take away. That dynamic, that there's this two-way street between the information we take in influencing our beliefs and expectations and vice versa. And we're always filtering information into one of those three buckets. And the last thing I would say about information is we are of course, biased to prioritize the negative stuff, negative information that's called negativity, bias in psychology.

And there's an evolutionary underpinning to that as well, which is. If you are one of our ancestors, the world was full of danger and generally speaking, you were much better off and much more likely to survive if you paid attention to the, to the negative information than the positive information.

Paying attention to negative [00:11:00] information and it having a lot of salience for you meant you're much less likely to be eaten by a lion. So that's why optimistic people can often be in short supply in the modern world, whereas. Pessimists can of course be bound anywhere and everywhere. So this is really the background I wanted to understand about information before we start discussing social media itself.

Part two, social media and smartphones. So in this section I'm gonna be talking about the technology itself. I'm gonna be using social media and smartphones interchangeably. And the first point I want to make. Is that the way we consume information in the form of social media on smartphones, I do think represents something of a paradigm shift.

Of course, in the history of information technology, we have lots of different ways information has been conveyed to us. We've had the written word, [00:12:00] the newspaper, the radio, the television, and there's a lot of debate about this. I think it is a paradigm shift. And firstly, what do I mean by paradigm shift?

The way technology improves generally speaking is you'll find there's a slow incremental improvement over time, and then all of a sudden you see a huge jump that changes everything. So for example, if you look at the history of weaponry, you'll probably find you had at one point in time, primitive bladed weapons.

Then one day you have the sword and the sword gives you a power that you didn't have before. It's a paradigm shift. Then at one point, after more incremental improvement, you get the bow and arrow, and that's another shift because now with the bow and arrow you have range, and then there's more incremental improvement, and then eventually you get the musket or the rifle, and all of a sudden you don't have just range, but you also have stopping power.

And then eventually you get the machine gun. The machine gun incidentally. Is [00:13:00] responsible. If you don't know for the way World War I was fought and the machine gun because it allowed someone with just one piece of technology, one man had the ability to kill, say, 50 or a hundred people in one go. It's one of the main reasons World War I is fought in such a stagnant fashion where countries were at a standstill with long trench lines dividing Europe and in fact, to actually allow World War I to come to an end.

You actually needed another paradigm shifting technology, which was the tank. The tank had to be invented because that was the only thing that could allow troops to advance in the face of something like the machine gun. So getting back to smartphones, smartphones are a paradigm shift, I would argue, because they're with us all the time, 24 hours a day.

They're always connected to the internet. They're constantly shifting to our needs and wants in the moment, and they're increasingly getting better at doing so. And [00:14:00] smartphones allow everyone to have their unique media ecosystem, their unique set of podcasts or music or YouTube channels or Netflix shows that they watch.

And therefore, as opposed to something like the television where. Generally speaking, for most of the history of the television, you'd have groups of people at least watching the same thing at the same time. Maybe you'd have families or cultures watching roughly the same thing at the same time. Now everyone has their own unique media ecosystem, and so I.

Everyone's worldview is that much more atomized and the, the stuff you're getting on your smartphone at any one point in time is constantly shifting to match your desires. And it does remind me of the Greek myth of narcissists. Of course, this was the figure of whom narcissism was named after a narcissist.

If you don't know, your Greek mythology [00:15:00] had a prophecy about him that said he would read. Said he would live a really long, amazing life as long as he never recognized himself. And then one day, of course, he recognized himself in a pool of water and fell in love with his own reflection. And eventually he just died staring at himself in a pool of water.

And I think there's something really interesting to learn here. I do think smartphones are a mirror of sorts because they are changing themselves constantly. According to our psychological state in the moment, and it seems like they're only getting better at doing so, and that's why you have a TV show like Black Mirror.

That's why it's called Black Mirror, because the point it's kind of trying to make is the technology is to some degree a reflection of humanity and the human condition, and again, our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses. Of course, there's a huge amount of economic factors tied to this. There's. What we call the economy of [00:16:00] attention.

If you use Instagram, say most people would think they are the customer of Instagram. Instagram is providing them a service which is various pieces of media, and they're the customer consuming that media. But actually, that's not true. It might be true if you paid a subscription fee. For Instagram and Instagram provided you the media in exchange for the subscription.

That would be more like a Netflix model, but that's not happening with Instagram. That's not how Instagram gets its revenue. Instagram keeps the lights on through advertising, of course. So when you use Instagram, you're not the customer, you're actually the commodity. Specifically, your attention is the commodity.

The customer is the advertiser. I know this because I have a podcast and sometimes I promote my stuff on Instagram, and I know at any point in time I have the option to pay Instagram something as little as 10 pounds and it'll show my content to more people. And of course, this isn't happening at a small [00:17:00] scale, but this is happening at the scale of millions and millions of people.

There's an enormous economic drive to capture our attention at all times. An increasing number of entities that are competing amongst themselves to capture our attention. Speakers like Tristan Harris, who actually used to work in Silicon Valley, talk a lot about this problem. Social media is, of course, as a result, purposefully designed to be as addictive as possible.

And as we've just discussed, the companies involved are perfectly incentivized to do that. And one thing that we know. Social media uses is something called variable ratio conditioning, and that sounds very fancy and sophisticated. The other technology that's very famous for using variable ratio conditioning is called the slot machine.

So when they study mice, for example, they find that if you [00:18:00] get mice to do a task and give them a reward in response. The mice will have different responses of pleasure depending on how you set up the ratio of reward to effort. So if you get a mouse to push a pedal and they get a pellet every time, that's pretty good.

They'll get some pleasure. They get a dopamine spike outta that. If they make it so that the food palate gets released every other time the mouse pushes the pedal in a predictable fashion, they'll get a little bit of a dopamine spike. It's still a pretty good deal, but. If you set it up that the food PT comes out once every six times or so, the mouse pushes the pedal, but in an unpredictable, irregular fashion, hence a variable ratio, you get a huge dopamine spike, and that's essentially the pattern that underlies all of gambling.

That's essentially what gambling is. You pull a slot machine and in all likelihood. Nothing is gonna [00:19:00] happen, but every so often something amazing happens. You hit a jackpot, and that jackpot is the addictive thing that will keep you coming back for a hundred failures. Following that. And now I want you to think about your phone and your pocket.

If you had to think right now about what's potentially happening on your phone right now, probably nothing. Right? But maybe something amazing. Maybe you got that message from, that someone you've really wanted to get a message from, or maybe that post you made before listening to this podcast is getting like 3000 likes, especially because of the way that all the social media posts could potentially be picked up by the algorithm.

This is now all on the table as a possibility, and it's really worth reflecting on the fact that people do design it intentionally this way. Getting back to food, which I mentioned earlier. You might have heard the concept of hyper palatability, which is a similar concept. It's the [00:20:00] idea that foods are specifically designed to be hyper palatable.

Food scientists are working on the problem of how do we make food as a addictive as possible with the right texture and mouth feel and crunch, and. Balance of salt and sweet scientists are working day and night on how to make food hyper palatable 'cause that makes food sell more. And essentially the same thing is happening with social media.

You have teams of people, I believe they're called social engineers at companies like meta. Who are constantly trying to figure out this problem. And of course, periodically the companies will try and do something nominally to show that they're wanting to reduce the addictiveness of these apps, but because these companies are in an arms race with each other year on year, they're destined to ramp up the addictiveness as much as possible.

So all of that being the case, we [00:21:00] can make a strong case that social media is addictive. As I said in part one, of course, we're vulnerable to information addiction anyway. Social media, just like information in general is trying to answer these very important questions. The same questions I mentioned in part one, where is the food?

Where is the safety? Where is the danger? Very importantly, where is the prestige? Whereas the money, so we can make a case that it's addictive, but is social media and other forms of smartphone technology harmful. The gym can be addictive, but that's not necessarily harmful. Is social media harmful? There's lots of data on this, and particularly I would look at the book, the Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Het, who is an American social psychologist, and I.

Really, the anxious generation at this moment is the definitive book on this topic, and that book presents quite a lot of compelling data about how smartphones and social [00:22:00] media may be affecting the mental health of young people. The data presented in the book is mostly post 2010 data or data between 2010 and 2018.

And this makes sense because around 20 10, 20 11, 20 12, what you have is the first time smartphones become cheap. And widely available and in everyone's pockets. And what you see in those years is social media really integrating itself into the smartphone. Whereas before social media tended to exist on laptops and desktop computers, and now all of a sudden social media is existing in everyone's pockets.

There's various graphs in the book. So looking at just a few examples of this data, what you see is. Since twenty ten, a hundred and forty 5% increase in major depression among girls in the us. 161% increase since 2010. In boys in the US you [00:23:00] have another graph showing 134% increase in anxiety since 2010 in US undergraduate students.

106% increase since 2010 of depression in US undergraduates. You have a 72% increase since 2010 of A DHD in US undergraduates, and 57% increase in bipolar, 100% increase in anorexia, 33% increase in substance abuse, 67% increase in schizophrenia, all in the same population of US undergraduates. Another graph showing in.

US adults aged 18 to 25. 139% increase in anxiety since 2010. And one of the criticisms of this thesis that smartphones are worsening the mental health of young people is that perhaps because all of this research is done by self-report, perhaps people are just talking about mental health [00:24:00] problems more rather than actually having mental health problems more.

But in response to this height presents more data saying, for example, emergency room visits for self-harm. 188% increase in girls in the US since 2010, going to the emergency room due to self-harm. 48% increase in boys going to the emergency room for self-harm since 2010. And then lastly. When you look at something like daily time with friends by age group amongst people aged 15 to 24, you see a huge decline in daily time spent with friends in, in that age group.

Again, since 2010, there is some criticism of, of this data and, and Hyde's thesis that it is social media and this kind of technology that's contributing. The main criticism is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. That just because these two things are happening at the [00:25:00] same time, the introduction of smartphones and the increase in mental health problems with young people and adolescents, it doesn't mean that one is causing the other.

Of course it's worth remembering that when it comes to large public health problems, it's very difficult to do something like a randomized control trial to prove that causality. Like if you look at the way it was proved that there was an association between lung cancer and smoking. That was similarly done by correlational studies, like, like the ones presented here, rather than by studies that could prove causation because you can't really meaningfully do a randomized controlled trial.

It to be considered unethical to do that. And because you're looking at huge populations of people. Another criticism is that height is just cherry picking studies, but I don't really see evidence of that. Actually, if you look into the book, he presents lots of different studies from all around the world.

I quoted the ones in the us, but he also mentions results from the UK and other countries around the world. [00:26:00] Other arguments are that. There's lots of things going on besides smartphones being a thing, and social media being a thing that it could be down to war or economic inequality or other social tensions, but it's worth pointing out that there have always been problems like that and that often actually in times of stress, even times of war, people's mental health actually often improves.

Because society's band together, there's a lot more solidarity and people feel like they have something to unite for and something to fight against. Whereas actually the problem with smartphone is that because they're so atomizing, everyone feels so alone and and isolated. And of course, as illustrated by the last piece of data I pointed out, the daily time spent with friends.

The technology aspect. There's only one side of the coin here. There's another really important side of the coin, which is what is it that smartphones are getting in the way of, and Heights talks about [00:27:00] this a lot, that it's not just the use of the technology, but what the use of the technology is preventing, namely kids and adolescents, spending time with each other, socializing in person, doing real hands-on activities and learning through those.

We'll discuss that more in part three. But getting back to the technology itself, I think height presents quite a compelling thesis that actually smartphones and technology is quite disruptive to the mental health of young people. And I think the data is quite compelling. And the next question will be how, what are the mechanisms?

How does this technology interfere with the mental health of young people? There's a lot of possible mechanisms. Those are things like sleep disruption. You know, the more you use these technologies, the more likely it is that the child is gonna be getting less sleep. You have body image issues.

Interestingly, a report within Meta that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Actually indicated that [00:28:00] some 30% of girls that use Instagram feel their body image is negatively affected by using Instagram. And of course you can imagine how that could be the case if you have young girls using Instagram and when they're using it, they're seeing posts by hundreds, if not thousands of adult women all the time.

And comparing themselves. You have online bullying through social media and it's worth noting that, of course the the female adolescent style of bullying. It's really easily amplified by something like social media bullying based on shaming, rallying, gossiping, creating groups and excluding people from them.

Of course, the more typical male adolescent style of bullying is more around physical challenge and direct physical confrontation. That's much less possible on the internet. It kind of happens a little bit on video games, but really the female style of bullying is so easily amplified. By social media, you have the avoidance of [00:29:00] discomfort.

The fact that people now have a technology they can dive into to avoid the discomfort of everyday life, that's actually so important to learn. The discomfort of falling down and picking yourself up again, of learning those new hands-on skills. And of course, we have information overload. As I mentioned earlier, we're vulnerable to information, and now you have a portal through which you can have information.

About every bad thing that's happening all the time. And of course, as we learn, we are particularly vulnerable and we find it particularly easy to pay attention to negative information. And now we can see it all, even if it's happening thousands of miles away. So we understand a little bit more about social media and, and smartphones, how they're addictive, and indeed how they're in fact designed to be addictive, and the mechanisms by which they're addictive.

We've made a case that they are likely to be harmful for the mental health of young people and adolescents, at least on some level. And [00:30:00] we've discussed the mechanisms why that could be the case. And what I'd like to point out now is, I haven't even mentioned artificial intelligence yet. The algorithms that something like TikTok are very sophisticated and they're very good at showing people what they want according to their interests, but they're not artificially intelligent.

So what's gonna happen in the next. 10, 20 years. I have no idea. And that's kind of what I want the third part of this podcast to be about, which is what are the positive things we can do? What is the positive vision we can try and cultivate for our children in an extremely uncertain world? Part three, superpowers or meta skills.

So what do I mean by meta skill? Because the future is so unpredictable, I, I don't know what skills are going to be important for children in 5, 10, 20 years. 20 years ago, I might have said writing an essay. If you can write a really good essay, that's a really good thing. That's worked out [00:31:00] for me pretty well.

Is it going to work out for your children? I have no idea. You could have said five years ago, perhaps it was coding. Coding would be a good idea. Now that seems less certain. So the skills that children are gonna need, I'm not so sure, but what we can comment on is the, the meta skills. Meta just means on top of, so what are the skills that are the basis for all the other skills or the master skills?

What are the skills that make us really strong, adaptable as human beings, and will help us to dynamically respond to this constantly changing environment in the next few decades. A lot of this is based on my work as a psychotherapist, and I picked some of my favorite meta skills, which I'd like to share with you.

The first one is delayed gratification. I've talked about this before on the podcast. Delaying gratification is the art of trading the present for the future. It's the basis for all hard work. It is the basis for achieving [00:32:00] competence in anything really. Delayed gratification shows the power of time and what someone can accomplish with time.

I. If you think of something like investing money, if you spend five pounds a day, say on a cup of coffee, and then you decide you want to invest that money, instead of buying the five pound a day cup of coffee, you put that money in a low risk investment fund, like say the s and p 500, and you wait 40 years and that money becomes something like 350,000 pounds.

That's the power that you can achieve with time and and delaying gratification. It really illustrates. A small piece of discomfort daily in the short term can add up to an enormous amplified reward in the long term. This is the kind of thing illustrated by the marshmallow experiment, which is a really interesting psychological experiment done in Sanford in the seventies, where they put a child in a room and present them with a marshmallow and say, you can have this marshmallow [00:33:00] now, but if you wait 10 or 20 minutes to have this, then we'll give you another one in 20 minutes time.

Firstly, could you even imagine putting a kid in a room alone with a marshmallow and expecting them to wait 20 minutes? Now, it's really indicative of the fact that that that was quite a different time. And what they found was obviously there were children who could wait and children who couldn't wait.

And what they found with this study, it's worth saying there are some replication problems with this study. But what they found in this one was that the children who could wait for the second marshmallow, it was a major predictor of life success because it showed that. That child at a very young age could delay gratification.

They could trade the present for the future, and that's a huge skill we all want to be teaching to our children. A little bit of discomfort now can adapt to a huge reward later, and I actually think that's a good way of selecting what activities a person should do. Like think of all the activities that you do.

Some of them are gonna involve a lot of comfort upfront, and then give you some [00:34:00] sacrifice on the back end. Like if you eat a huge pizza, that's a huge amount of comfort immediately. And then two hours later, a huge amount of regret going to the gym is the opposite. You, if you go to the gym, you have to pay a bit of discomfort upfront, and then you feel really good afterwards.

And the actual long-term benefits are of course good. So you can actually profile activities based on comfort to help you understand what activities are really worth doing, what activities are actually sustainable. So as I said before, delayed gratification is the foundation of hard work. Social media can of course take away from that ability to delay gratification, especially if you've never developed it because social media is not showing you what you want in 10 or 20 years.

Typically, it's not showing you the s and p 500 fund. You could be growing. Social media is showing you what you want right now, all of the time. The second meta skill I'd like to talk about is focus, and I'm sure. Everyone can attest to this. Even if [00:35:00] you're really talented, even if you have everything going for you, building a career even in something you like is extremely tedious.

It takes an extended amount of time focused on one or a few things, and there's gonna be times when it feels so easy and natural, and other times when it feels so, so challenging and tedious. You can delay gratification all you want. If you're doing that over lots of different activities and not focused on one thing, you're unlikely to achieve that much success.

Whereas if you can take that delayed gratification and focus it on one thing over a long time, that's the thing you can build a career on. So delayed gratification is the basis of work, delayed gratification and focus that can translate your work into something successful. Which brings us to meta skill three.

Critical thinking. Essentially, what critical thinking is, is the ability to develop one's own perspective by first really [00:36:00] understanding someone else's perspective, critiquing it, where are they going wrong, what do they have, right? And then using that to inform your perspective and having your perspective grow and mature over a long period of time.

Critical thinking requires time, space, and depth. Like if you read a book about Freud, so you can learn about who this guy is and what he thought about and what you think he got right or wrong, and then you might read a book about Doki and you can learn about his perspective. Then you can read a book critiquing Dostoevsky's perspective and so on, and you can reflect in between.

With social media, you can't really do that. It tends to be broad. Shallow overpowering. Obviously there are forms of social media and things like podcasts where you can learn deeper, more interesting stuff, but if you're new to it, if you're a child, of course, it's much, much harder to develop your own perspective.

And casual [00:37:00] use of social media doesn't tend to be conducive to that. So if delayed gratification and focus make you successful, then critical thinking can make your success truly innovative. 'cause you're not just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, but actually you've studied the other things people are doing and you've learned to critique it and innovate on that.

You've learned from all those people and now you can make hopefully something totally new and originally yourself. And the last method skill I'm gonna talk about is social skills, which of course we know is hugely important for children. And half the reason we even send our children to school is so that they can learn social skills.

Quoting the Self-Help book, which I'm a big fan of, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Social Skills are the ability to understand and be understood, to really, really understand someone, what is their perspective against, similar to critical thinking, and then to be able to express [00:38:00] yourself in a way that's spontaneous, authentic, engaging, persuasive.

This dichotomy is the foundation of social skills. And it's what allows a child or an adolescent to begin to resolve conflict, especially in-person conflict, to understand and navigate social hierarchies like a classroom or a school or a friend group, or eventually a company. And ultimately to create win-win relationships.

And that's the ultimate secret to socializing, whether you have a marriage or a business partnership or a friendship. The aim is to create a win-win relationship that can stand the test of time. The previous skills I mentioned can make you into a successful, innovative individual. Adding social skills will turn a successful individual into a successful team or family or company, or society or country.

Now, social media can make socializing, unfortunately, quite [00:39:00] abstract, quite punishing, quite disconnected from reality. With online socializing, you get a lot of the downsides of socializing, like the possibility of shame and criticism sometimes on a very large scale in rare occasions. And yet the upside of socializing is kind of diluted because as we all probably know from our experience, posting something and getting like 300 likes, although it gives you a weird high when it happens, is somehow not as good as a handshake.

Or looking in someone's eyes or a hug or real in passing contact with someone. So in many ways, online socializing is the worst of both worlds. It dilutes the upside and can amplify the downside. So those are the four meta skills I want to mention today. Delayed gratification, focus, critical thinking, and social skills.

There are a number of other meta skills I [00:40:00] would've liked to mention and maybe I will discuss on a future podcast. My favorite meta skill is probably the ability to be rejected and not have it be a big deal, but also the ability to appreciate the present, the ability to approach life strategically, the ability to emotionally regulate all quite useful meta skills.

And I think intuitively we can begin to understand how excessive use of technology can interfere with those. On the point of emotional regulation, actually one of the parents at the school I spoke at told me that they found when their children were using too much technology and social media, actually, they were prone to huge mood swings and volatile emotions.

And after they stopped using the technology for a bit, even though it was hard, and they did throw some tantrums when they initially stopped, they actually became a lot calmer over time. Abstaining from this technology, I. This kind of report that how you accept technology causes people to be a bit more emotionally [00:41:00] volatile.

That's something you see at least anecdotally, quite a lot when, when researching this topic. So following everything I've talked about in terms of information, our vulnerability to information, social media, technology, it's potential addictiveness and harms, and the meta skills I think we should be promoting in children and adolescents, what would I recommend?

I do think the recommendations can be quite flexible. The research does seem to suggest that dose is important, like the amount of screen time someone has is an important factor, not just whether or not someone uses this technology at all or not. So I think the recommendations can be flexible, but ultimately I think it's about creating a new norm and a new culture.

It's really hard for a family to regulate social media smartphone use alone, because of course, the first thing that the children are going to worry about is that they're going to be excluded or bullied because they're the only ones that don't have access to this technology while all their [00:42:00] friends and relationships do have access.

I do think it makes sense for families and school communities to get together to think about how they can create a culture of banning, or at the very least, heavily restricting social media and smartphones at home and at school. I could potentially imagine a situation where this technology could be used in a very limited way and perhaps as a reward in exchange for doing other things, which are good.

Certainly, I would be very aware at this point that we're dealing with a very, very powerful technology and up until this point as a society, we really haven't thought about how to use it at all. And also I think we need to give some really, really serious thoughts to the other side of the coin, that it's not just about restricting social media and smartphones.

What should we encourage instead? And I think what we should encourage is something like independence, free play in-person, socializing. [00:43:00] We think of play, generally speaking as trivial, but plays such an important part of being a mammal, actually playing as how we learn everything from those social skills to how to resolve conflict, what to do with our physical bodies, especially growing up.

Play is really important for adults, for couples to get along better for strengthening friendships. So it's not just about stopping the technology use, but what are the important things we encourage instead? And it's also worth noting that of course these technologies will have a place in adopted.

Inevitably, most people would not give up their smartphone entirely, even though they might think that reducing its use would be beneficial in some way to their mental health. You have to build that foundation first. You have to build those skills and meta skills. If you have an adolescent, say 16 or 18 or 20, who has that foundation and they've, they've learned those [00:44:00] meta skills.

They know how to delay gratification and they know how to focus and they have some social skills and some critical thinking, and then you give them a smartphone where they can, they can use that productively. They can build a business. They can create an investment portfolio. They can start a media company on a phone.

These are really, really powerful tools. It's just that you do need a foundation before you start using them. Even then, of course, you have to be careful, and as I said earlier, developing these meta skills is going to be even more crucial in a world with emerging artificial intelligence, where we really don't know what's going to happen, but if we help people build these skills, these master skills, I think.

That gives children a really good start at being able to dynamically respond to these problems. And lastly, I would say we do have an opportunity as a culture in this particular time in history, to set an example for for other people and really lead the way on this problem. And I would encourage communities and [00:45:00] schools to get together to start to do this.

You obviously hear about what's happening in Australia in terms of heavily restricting or banning social media use and as. Countries and other smaller communities and pockets of people start to work on this problem and get good results that could be broadcast to other groups of people and who knows how fast we could start to get a handle on this problem.

So I hope you found this useful. Any parents in the audience, I'd love to get your feedback. So feel free to email me at Thinking Mind podcast@gmail.com. Do you agree or disagree? With the content we've discussed today, all feedback is welcome. This is The Thinking Mind Podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, self-development, and related topics.

Thank you for listening, and we'll see you here next time.