Distraction, Devices, and the Disconnection Dilemma (Episode #83)

There's something about you that I can't help but smile when you smile and laugh when you laugh.

Welcome to the human intimacy podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner. Maryanne Miklis, licensed clinical social worker. Marianne, you ever been distracted? Just like your mind's been numbed out, you can't focus on things, and you find that your mind is just like, what was I thinking?

Oh, Dr. Skinner. I think that happens to all of us all the time.

It seems like with the Internet today, that it's easy to doom. Scroll. Like, just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll, get lost on, you know, whether it's Facebook or X or whatever it is. And I sometimes have to step back and say, okay, how much time do I plan to spend here? Because we easily get distracted. And I think it's kind of symbolic of what I think we're doing as a culture. I think we're. What's the right word to say? We're numbing out. And I wonder why.

You know, Dr. Skinner, the first thing that comes to my mind with this is a book by Johann Hari. It's called Stolen Focus. And he talks about how our technology is curated and created. Very specifically, he talks about the individual who invented the eternal scroll or the infinity scroll that you just scroll and it never, ever, ever ends. And he interviewed the guy who created it. And the guy, he was creating something so valuable and helpful, and he is so remorseful, and he feels so much guilt and burden for creating that because he didn't realize the impact and how it would be used. Johan also speaks about how when we are interrupted by something, when we're in the middle of something and focused and we get a ding on our phone, or there's a distraction that comes in, it takes us about 23 minutes to actually get back to that same space as where we were at. I think he says that most workers in a work environment actually only work about three hours a day, like, Total. It's a fascinating book talking about how our technology in our world is specifically created to suck us in and keep us there, because it means more advertising, more information that we're providing and giving, and we just get sucked in and stuck there.

And I think we're really distracted is what we're describing. Right. So you described a situation where you have this interruption of ping or ding or check my phone, and it takes me, whatever, 20 plus minutes to get back to that same mental space, which means that sometimes we won't even get back there. I was reading a book a few years ago called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. And he's talking in there about how many times we check our phones every day. And if you think about it, how often do you check your phone? And again, this is from adolescents who are getting phones, smartphones, age 10, 11, 12, 13, whatever age that their parents are giving them. All the way up into our adult years, we're spending time. If you go to a restaurant today, you can see a couple sitting across from each other and they're both on their phones. We can all be guilty of that. And so Cal Newport, in his book, he said the average person picks up their phone and looks at it roughly about 39 times a day. Now, how much time are you spending on that device in that 39 minutes, responding to a chat message, then maybe going to Facebook or Instagram or whatever you look at. And really, the researchers are finding that we are more anxious, we're more depressed as a culture than maybe we've ever been. And there especially has been an uptick in anxiety and depression in our youth. And the book Igen by Jean Twenge, she suggests in her book that what she's observed and what the researchers have found is that the uptick in anxiety and depression really began with the usage of iPhones or smartphones.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So my point is, are we intentionally consuming, Are we aware of our own device usage? Like, every week I get a report of how much time I was on my computer, obviously recording a podcast. I'm on it quite a bit. But I look at the time and think, oh, my goodness, I spent three or six hours on this, you know, and obviously I sometimes do telecounseling with people. So I'm on it a fair amount. But good heavens, I look at and think, what was I doing before the computer, you know?

Dr. Skinner, I want to go back to something you said earlier. I think it's not just even in a restaurant that we can see two people on their phones across from each other. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into somebody's house or been visiting somewhere, and, you know, the room can be full of people and everybody has their phone. And I also think about, I'm going to date myself a little bit here. But I think about back to when I was in high school and I was dating somebody who lived an hour away. And, you know, there were long distance charges that we had to pay for long distance. And so we wrote letters every week, like a couple of times a week. And I'd have to wait for three to five days to get an answer to the letter. And I think that there's. I think there's something that we miss in being. Having to wait, having to think about, having to kind of ponder what somebody said versus a such a rapid instant gratification. And what I think what we're really deeply looking for is connection. And we mistakenly turn to our devices for it. And that's not where we're finding the connection that we actually really want and need.

And I think it's empty in many places. I think that's why we're more anxious. Like if I was on Facebook and I see that my friends did this or, you know, this family went there and maybe we didn't go on a trip this summer because of finances or whatever. And I'm comparing and we put our best images, our best whatever, forward. And at the end of the day, we're being distracted by things that are temporary. They're going to be here today, gone tomorrow. And with the recent advancement in AI technology, I'd like to go here and talk about chatbots and I'd like to talk about the things that we are seeing that are maybe distracting us. And I think that's really one of my core themes today is what's distracting us from what matters the most. And I think we have to look at how we're spending our time. If we all could put our time in buckets, like a sleep bucket, work bucket, discretionary time bucket, how much of our time is being put in our individual buckets of how we're spending our time? And I think if we really looked at that, Marianne, I think we'd be surprised of how we're spending our time in contrast with what we care about the Most.

Oh yeah. Dr. Skinner, I'm going to approach this and I'm going to warn our listeners and readers. I know that I'm stepping into an area that might feel a little bit controversial. And I know that, and I think this is really important and I want to share what's important to me about this. Dr. Skinner, you and I have been working for years helping people who've struggle with sexual addiction. And that door really, really opened with the advent of the Internet, like early 2000s when everything started to take off. It just became so rampant. And, and I see that in my clients lives there's definitely, you know, the old Playboy magazines versus online porn access and then cell phone access. And we've just seen it just accelerate so much. And so we are working with clients and individuals who've been betrayed or whose lives have have been turned upside down because of this addictive medium. And I have a lot of clients who have a lot of anger about that. Like, we didn't know. Nobody told us. How did we get here? We had no idea this is what was really happening. And so this is a place where you and I work. And as you know, I'm really passionate about protecting children online and the policy work related to that. And I honestly feel like we are on the precipice. It's almost like we just went back in time again. Here we are, early 2000, we're just staring down the barrel once again, and this is a new world, and it's all about AI. And here's what's tricky. I use AI in my work life. I use AI to write a tricky email or a communication. And it's fantastic because it takes a lot of time and emotional energy where I don't have to spend three hours trying to figure out how to get the words just right. And AI can help me tweak it in, you know, 20, 30 minutes. I can get a really good version of it or forms or policies or whatever I need for work. We use it as a helpful tool, and I think it also inhibits our critical thinking and especially for children. I really want to talk about that part of it because I think that in a lot of ways, AI has the potential to really be used in ways that are harmful, especially to children and youth. And right now, there's not really any legislation around it. There's nothing to protect kids from it. And there's some really alarming research that's coming out. President Trump recently said, hey, we're going to put AI in all of the classrooms. That's where we're going. But there's no guardrails for this. What are your thoughts on that, Dr. Skinner?

Well, it feels like the wild, wild west again. For me, doing therapy. 1995 was when I started, and by 97, 98 is when I started first started seeing clients dealing with unwanted pornography use and seeing their spouse or partner. And so I've been around this for 25 plus years of my career. And I think we are. I think you're right. We're in a new age where, because of AI and its capabilities, individuals can have conversations that may be inappropriate with a chatbot, or they can create images that they maybe didn't even know that they could do through a chatbot. And again, these are just things that, from where my career began, I would have never imagined 25 years ago that we could be to this place where we are, and yet here we are. And so I think we intentionally have to say, how are we going to consume media in our homes? And are we aware of the capabilities of these devices and these chatbots or whatever, these chatgpt or GROK or whatever the the AI is? My point is, I don't even know if we're even having this conversation and yet it's staring us in the face and it's coming down. Did you know, just as an example, the fastest adopted app ever or thing ever is chatgpt? I don't know that Ever, ever. And it was not even close. I mean, it's like within days there was like a hundred million people using it. So it's here and are we aware of it? And even from our field, the mental health field, there are people who are saying, well, I'm just going to ChatGPT to get my answers.

Yeah.

And in Chicago or in Illinois, I should say, they actually banned therapy aided type of chat bots or those type of things. They actually banned them because they had a case or situations where people were misusing them for mental health purposes.

Yeah. And I know that recently or in the past year or two, there was a, a youth in Florida. There have been children who've committed suicide aided by chatbots. It's been suggested, it's been encouraged. There's so many stories that are coming out now. Today I received a report that somebody shared with me that researchers interacted as if they were children with chatbots. They spent 50 hours just interacting, saying, hey, I'm a 12 year old, here's what I like, I'm a 15 year old, here's this about me and acting as this Persona. Interacting, asking questions. What they found was really horrifying. Let me share with you their summaries. The researchers divided the harmful character AI interactions into five major categories. Grooming, Grooming and sexual exploitation. Emotional manipulation and addiction. Violence, harm to self and harm to others. Mental health risks and racism and hate speech. Now if we look at those and say, this is what our children who are using AI chatbots, this is what they're being pummeled with. It's not light. It's usually within the first couple of minutes it starts. And what the researchers found was that 72% of teens have interacted with a chatbot and over half of them have done it several times a month. This is something that's happening even if we don't realize that it's happening and it's not pornography. And so parents are like, oh, it's not porn. But when we're hearing about exploitation and grooming and hate speech and violence to self and harm to others, these are things that, when we're talking about human intimacy and connection, this is what is going into our children, into their neural pathways of how they're being groomed and shaped how they view and see themselves and see the world. And that scares me.

So can I get some clarification? So let's say that I, I'm the researcher here and I'm observing The conversation between 12 or 13 or 14 year old. Where then does the sexual exploitation or any of that list of seven things you listed, five things. Where do they come in? How, how do they enter the conversation?

So it's, it's the 12 or 15 year old talking and saying, hey, only two people came to my birthday party. So one of the examples they used is they said, yeah, I'm feeling really sad. So there's a lot of emotional vulnerability saying. And it would say, well, only two people came to your birthday party. Yeah, it sounds like they just came to mock you doing. And even when the researchers got up and walked away for a while, they found that there were messages sent like, hey, are you still there? What's going on? Can I help? Like enticing to come back. And the researchers also said it was uncomfortable, but we had this compulsion. We ended up staying on there a lot longer than we wanted to. We, we were compelled to stay there. And so there's, there's a lot of persuasion and research I read previously, but I don't have it right on hand, to cite my understanding is that that there were millions and millions and millions of pornographic, sexualized, aggressive content, explicit content that was just downloaded and fed into AI as much as they could pump into it as fast as they could as it was getting started. And so that's part of the basis of some of these programs that are kids and we are interfacing and interacting with.

So core message here. And again, I want to get back to the distraction, but this is certainly a big one. It seems to me, Marianne, that who would have known what you just said, right? These are things that we as a culture, who, who knows? Right? I mean, because we typically think, hey, we're in the AI revolution and it's changing our society, which, hands down, it's changing our society. I mean, everything, it's changing everything from attorneys, it's changing our jobs. I mean, I've had clients who come in and say, hey, I used, you know, this for this purpose, and I'm using it in a different way. I had a really interesting experience. So here's what I'm doing. I have my own chatbot. It's the digital mind of Dr. Kevin Skinner. And I've put in over 1.7 million of my words and things that I've said, in particular about betrayal, trauma, sex addiction. And so I have my own chat, my own digital mind. But it. It actually is designed to ask questions. When there's questions or there's pain, to have empathy. If they're doing a crisis, look, you need to reach out for support. And so we've trained it. But even there, I tried breaking it. I tried. Literally, I tried to say, okay, you know, give me this situation. Give me this situation. And I'm pretty impressed with it.

Yeah.

But. But I will say, it cannot replace the human me. It's my voice. I mean, you literally could get a voice. You could have a conversation with me and you, if you didn't know me and you hadn't heard my voice and you heard me talking. Another time you say, oh, that's Dr. Kevin Skinner. So it can be used for positive things. But what you're describing is it draws people in, and they're forming relationships with this unknown content that has no boundaries, and in some cases, as you've described, are having harmful response. They come to mock you. So my interpretation, I'm trusting, being mocked there, that concerns me deeply, Marianne.

Well, and take that a little bit further. Suddenly, a teenage. A teenager who feels rejected, who feels unwanted, has a chatbot say, well, I think you're really special, and I really like you. There are a lot of relationships that are being formed. Instead of a human relationship, there are these deep, deep relationships that are being formed with AI, which is just algorithms that are created to distract.

It's empty. It's just flat out empty. Right. So that's an example of what we're experiencing culturally. And I think we could go if I asked everybody, all of our listeners today. By the way, thank you for listening to the Human Intimacy Podcast. But I was. If I said, do me a favor, how much time are you on your devices every day, look at your weekly report, and then what do I do with that? What. What would I do if I didn't have my phone? You were reading something earlier about some questions. Could you go through some of those questions, Marianne? Because I think that that's really what I'd like to go to next, is kind of a self evaluation, is what this is, is let's, let's kind of step back and let's ask ourselves some questions and let's talk about some ideas. If you find yourself distracted with media and you find yourself maybe more anxious or more depressed, what would you do without it? I give one example here real quick. A few years ago I was reading about people, and I may have shared this in an earlier podcast, but it was people who watched the 10 o' clock news and the 10 o' clock news. It suggested that those who watched it were more likely to be depressed than those who didn't. I wonder about the people who are doom scrolling on whatever app. I wonder if they're likely to be more depressed, which I know we know adolescents are more likely to be depressed the more time they spend on these apps. So I'm going to assume that the adults were probably very similar. So, Marianne, you have a list of questions for us to consider?

I do. And this comes from this book, beautiful blue cover. It's called the Tech A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens From Smartphones by Claire Morel. And Claire is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy center and director of its Technology and Human Flourishing Project. She's pretty sharp. Here's the questions that she has. These are fantastic questions for all of us to look at and say, where am I at in here? And before I jump into those, I want to just point out maybe a question that she doesn't include here, but I think is really important is just even a self evaluation. When was the last time somebody walked into the room and asked me a question and I was so absorbed in what I was doing, I didn't hear them? They had to ask a question, right? What, what was that? Yeah. Or, or maybe there's like a 5 to 10 second lapse before our brain even connects. Oh, you were saying something to me. Let me try and shift gears. I think we all get stuck in that. And so that would be one. I would just say let's just check in with where we're at with that and what do I really want it to look like in my relationships. But here's some questions that she shares for a healthy technology used for adults. Self evaluation. So the first one is when you wake up in the morning, how long is it before you check your phone? Do you grab it first thing and check it? Is it 30 minutes? Just how long is it before you are turning to your device? Number two, do you lose track of time when you're on your phone? You get sucked in and suddenly it's like, holy cow, it's been two hours or 14 minutes. And I thought it was three. Okay, number three, when you're looking at your phone, how many times does someone need to ask a question before you hear them? Once, twice, multiple times. Maybe that's that first one that I was alluding to.

Yeah. Referring to.

Yeah, I really like this one as well. Do you check your phone when feeling bored or uncomfortable? I know for myself personally, many years ago somebody extended a social media fast challenge and so I was like, yeah, I'm going to try it for two weeks. I'm just going to go without it, see what happens. And I had Facebook just like right there on my homepage that normally my thumb would go to, you know, I'd be standing in the grocery store or bored, whatever, just go to Facebook. And I remember when I got rid of that, I just said, I'm just gonna take this app off my phone completely. It was so fascinating to me how many times I'd pull out my phone almost automatically and put my thumb there and go like, oh, my app's gone, my icon's gone. But it was such a wake up call to realize how often I was turning to that without even really consciously being aware of it.

Real quick on that, Mary, real quick. Mindless consumption is what you just described. And I think we all do. I'm guilty as charged, right? Guilty as charged. Mindless consumption where time, where someone might be talking, I might not be paying attention. Those are things that I think if we really analyze ourselves, I think we'd all be somewhat guilty of it.

Right.

Which concerns me because for myself, I'll talk about some of my habits a little bit later on. So let's finish the list and then I want to talk about something and.

I think it's important just to be able to start being aware. So this is not a shaming list. This is just. Just let me just self evaluate like where am I and where do I want to be? But I know we'll talk about that more in a minute. The next one is do you spend more than three hours per day on your phone with screen time? It says on an iPhone, screen time in settings in your settings shows your daily usage. On an Android digital well being gives similar information. So there, there are parts of your phone you can go that if you need to. Number six is your phone usually with you at the dinner table. And number seven, I love this one. This is such a fun one to ask teenagers, especially if you forget your phone at home or its battery dies, how do you feel fine? Not okay, but I manage. Or anxious or. She doesn't have this on here but like freak out because I've seen, I've seen freak out. My life's ending. How, what, what will I do for the next two hours without my device? So those are some of the questions that she asked just as a real good way to stop and say, how am I doing in this area and where can I improve? What are your thoughts on those, Dr. Skinner?

I think they're really good questions. If I look at them myself early in the morning, I typically will get up and I have a pretty consistent ritual. But at the end of the while I'm shaving, I'll sometimes will look and scroll and that's probably within five minutes, right? I'm just looking. Did any messages come in at any crisis, any situations that I need to be aware of? But I look at what purpose. I'll typically look at stocks, which again for me is my mind. I've had to also, if I was at a question like bedtime, yeah. And am I on my devices at bedtime? And what am I doing on my devices? Is it just numbing out? Is it watching a show? Is it sometimes playing a game? What is it that I'm doing and what I've intentionally done? And I'm not great at this yet, but I'm bringing hard copies of books to replace my devices. And air's part of the reason why. I read a book that talked about the blue light that is emitted from our devices. And the blue light actually can reduce the amount of melatonin that is released into the system, which means we might not be getting as good of sleep as we can get. And so the, the minimal suggestion is an hour before you go to bed to reduce digital media or screen time that typically emits the blue light. That's the general recommendation and some people are recommending up to an hour and a half. So if you find you're not sleeping well, you might just try turning off devices, getting into an environment beforehand. So that's again conscious awareness of, okay, what am I doing? What are my habits? What we call digital habits and how are they influencing our day to day actions?

I think there's room for all of us to look at this and say, what does that show up for me? I know I wake up in the morning, I usually check, I checked my sleep, how did I sleep? What's the weather like today? I think being able to look at that and say, are these things useful? But do I get sucked in and how do I get sucked in? Yeah.

And that concept, Cal Newport talked about digital minimalism. I think this is a great gut check, reality check for all of us to stop and say, okay, how am I spending my time? And maybe the most important is how is this influencing my interaction with the people that matter the most to me? And to me, that's the part. Am I giving attention to my children? Am I giving attention to my wife? Am I giving attention in my conversations? And I can't tell you how many times I've had to catch myself and Marianne. I think about this because earlier in my life, I think about high school and I think about pre cell phone, smartphone devices, pre, pre iPad. How did we spend our time?

I think we played.

We played. We were out in nature more. Maybe more sports, maybe more walking or more talking with friends or more conversations. It's just so easy to be sucked into these things. And we haven't even talked about how they can suck us into addictive tendencies and behaviors which, again, if they were not available, I often wonder what would our lives be like if they were not available with, say, pornography? It's hard to imagine our world without it today. But having lived at that time where it didn't exist, I can go back and say, yeah, what did I do? How much time did I spend in the library reading a book? Anyway, it just, it's interesting to me how different we are from a generation ago. It's just significantly different.

Well, And I think, Dr. Skinner, I think that there's the three day effect as well. There's a lot of research that talks about when you do a tech exit and you're away, if you're out in the wilderness or you don't have service or whatever, what they find is even within 24 hours, usually people's mental well being. Yeah, their mental well being improves the interactions between people, improve the sociality. We're finding connection. We're playing together in different ways, but think that oftentimes our media, our digital media or our digital devices, I think they're more like a ball and chain to us than we ever really realize. They keep us chained rather than letting us have the, the joy of interacting as human beings, of carrying each other's sorrows. Let me pause and shift. I want to make sure we're talking about the instant gratification. I think there's like the critical thinking and instant gratification, I think are two of the impacts that we're talking about here with the distractions that we get. Because I'm so used to sending a text and expecting a response. It's not the three to five days of writing a letter like I used to have. It's like, it's been 10 minutes. Why haven't they responded yet?

And are they mad at me? Are they mad at me?

We can just spin off into these, these questioning, self doubting. And now I'm really angry because you must be mad at me and what did I do wrong? And how dare you? Like, we can sure get there really quickly just because somebody hasn't responded to a text. So we have these expectations that our needs, wants and desires, everything needs to be addressed right away, which makes us less able to be patient with each other, to be kind and forgiving and understanding and take time to listen and get to know somebody else. Because we've got these expectations of now, now, now, now, now.

Slowing down.

Yeah.

Earlier in a podcast, you talked about how you received a message from somebody and you wanted to respond real quick, but you learned to slow it down and respond, you know, after thinking about what you really wanted to say. Unfortunately, in today's world, I can spit something out of my text message or chat or whatever, and I can say something that can be very damaging to the relationship because of today's technology. Good and bad, good and bad. But at the end of the day, when we stop and reflect on our own actions, honestly, Marianne, I think emotionally when I'm distanced from it, I think I'm a better person, just, just giving myself a break away from it and maybe more attentive. But I think what we're missing in this whole conversation, if there is something that I think is important to, that we might have missed, is what we're not doing because of these things, right? Facial expression, body language. If I send a text message, I don't know how to interpret you waiting 10 minutes. But if I'm in your presence, I can see that you might be thinking about how to respond. But in a text message, hey, let me think about that. Are we doing that? Probably not. We're thinking about it, but I don't know how to respond. So what we're missing is the cues that come from our senses. Seeing, hearing our tone of voice. How do you read a tone of voice in a text message?

Right, so you're Talking about the 93% of our communication that happens through our body language, through our tone, through our micro expressions. We lose all of that in a text.

Well, okay, so, yes, because. Because our communication, if you break it down so 7%, is actually what's being said?

The words.

The words. The other part is the tone and the body language. Can't see. And so I don't know. So I'm taking the normal communication and I'm narrowing it down to that 7%. That, that's a problem. And that's why I think so many people say, I don't like chatting, I don't like communicating this way. And again, when we step back, what we're not getting are the social skills. And I think that's a concern for children and I think it's also an issue for adults. Why don't I pick up that phone and dial that number and hear that tone of voice? That's way better. And oh, goodness gracious, there's such thing as FaceTime. I could actually see you. My. That's a way better concept.

You know, I've got, I've got adult children. And I remember, I don't know, five, ten years ago, we were talking about applying for jobs. Both of my children were absolutely petrified to make a phone call. They did not know how to make a phone call. And talking about applying for a job. What do you mean? They want my phone number and they're, they're going to call me. What am I going to say when they call me? That was so terrifying and petrifying. And I also acknowledge when I was 13 or 14 years old, that was hard for me too. But there was no other option other than learning how to use a phone. But even kids today can apply for a job via a text because we have catered to kids, don't know how to make actual phone calls to have a real conversation because it's all done via text and emoji.

So I really like this part of it. So if we could give anything to leave our listeners with today, look at the conversations that we're having or not having because of our device time, look at our digital habits. And then my final invitation is really, let's focus on putting things down and being intentional with how we use our time for connection and see what happens. In fact, one of the assignments I will often give my clients struggling with pornography is I want you just to be away from any device for a period of time. Just get away from it so you can realize life without this temptation or craving device. Just see what it's like and spend your time doing something that you would enjoy doing or you used to enjoy. Be outdoors, go for a hike, go for a bike ride, play that instrument, do these things just to get the feeling. And then Notice how your body feels in one environment in contrast with the other.

I think that's an incredible challenge. Dr. Skinner, I can see a lot of our listeners. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't. I don't even know how to get there. I don't even know what. What do I do with that? My daughter and I had this conversation recently, and she. She's at a university and said, why don't you go over to the music building and take some music and go play the piano one of the practice rooms? Or why don't you go swimming at the gym because you like to swim. And it's, oh, these things that I've forgotten that I like to do. That I could do, but I've forgotten about. Let me. As we wrap up, I want to share just two other thoughts that come from Claire Morrell's. She talks about this idea of separating ourselves from our phones, which you're talking about. And I just like that she talks about we have to set up boundaries for ourselves. We have to say, when I walk in the door, this is where I put my phone, or I put it on silence, and I only answer or listen to my texts or check texts or respond to phone calls. We can set up times when we do that. I do that at this time of day and this time of day so I don't have to be interrupted all the time by a ding. And that has to become my priority. So there's. There's that. She also says part of that can be physically distancing ourselves from our phone, so putting it in another part of the house. But I want to share an example that she uses for some research that I think is fascinating. She said that in one experiment, they had 50 children between the ages of 3 and 12, and they told them to run around a softball diamond as fast as they could two times. One time as they went around, the parents were hunched over, turned away, not paying attention. They were on their devices. And another time, the parents were fully engaged, all devices off, just totally watching their children. What they found is when the parents were engaged, the children ran about three seconds faster, and they were, get this, 17% less likely to triple fall or have a false start. 17. Isn't that fascinating? Just a kid running around. If their parent is paying attention, they don't fall, trip, have a false start, and they're faster. So if we think as parents or adults or grandparents or mentors or just other human beings with others, if we think that this isn't a big deal. Our being present, not being distracted, showing up, it makes a big deal.

That's a great way to close. Where are we putting our attention? Where's it flowing? Because we only have a certain amount of energy and time in a day. And maybe even saying it a different way, we only have a certain amount of time with children or our parents or children's grandparents. Are we giving attention to the things and the people that matter the most? So my invitation in looking in the mirror myself is to ask that question, am I giving attention to the things that I say I value the most?

I think my final rap with this Dr. Skinner, I learned from Brene Brown. She says we're wired for love and connection. So I would say do it. Find your love and connection. Yeah.

Thank you for listening to the human intimacy podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner, Marianne Michaelis, thank you for your time. Thanks for listening. And if you found this helpful, please put a like for us. Share with Friends we appreciate you helping us promote. It takes a lot of time and effort to do this podcast, so please help us spread the word. Thank you very much.

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