Reclaim Your Time By Changing Your Relationship to Technology

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctors Pharmacy.

Hear that everybody?

More work in less time.

More work in less time. Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Making time for things that matter most to you is essential to feeling good in your life. Yet so many of us find ourselves too busy and overwhelmed to prioritize those things which bring us joy and keep us grounded and energized. Dr. Hyman spoke to Marie Forleo, creator of the award-winning online show MarieTV and.

Founder of B-School, about finding time for what's most important to you. When people people say, I don't have the time, I'm like, that's probably not the truth. You may not think you have the time, but if you actually slow down enough to track your time over two weeks and half hour increments to see exactly what you do, I guarantee people can find time. One of the phrases I live my life by, if it's important enough to you, you'll make the time. If not, you'll make an excuse. Most of us, especially because of technology, especially because of our phones and social media, I mean, people, the one of the latest stats I've read is that the average American is spending over five hours a day on their phone. Five hours.

And about eight hours overall on screens. Yeah.

So there are ways to do it, but first you have to be really honest with yourself because when you know it's important, it's a lot easier to ignore what's not. And what's not is typically email, social media, news, interruptions that don't mean anything.

So take care of the things that take care of you first. Absolutely. Yeah. And it just takes a little bit of intention. And yeah, it could be the seven minute workout. It could be a five minute yoga routine or 10 minute yoga routine. five minutes of meditation and it's powerful. And the more you do that, it allows you to actually be higher functioning in your life. So you can live the life you love. If you have what I call FLC syndrome, that's when you feel like crap. It's hard to show up for yourself. It is. It's hard to show up for those you love. It's hard to show up for work. Yeah. And you're just sort of struggling and you kind of feed yourself with caffeine and sugar to keep your energy up. And it's this vicious cycle. And I think it's important to think about the time issue because we don't value our time. They're precious moments, right? And we don't get them back. back. All the money in the world cannot get you time back.

You can always find or make more money, you cannot get more time.

Dr. Hyman sat down with Cal Newport, author and expert in the field of technology and its effects on culture, to talk about using technology to support our true passions and values and why he doesn't recommend digital detoxing.

Yeah, I know when I write my books, I literally have to turn off my phone, I turn off email, I often turn off Wi-Fi unless I'm not researching some article. And I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read, or I just print it out on paper and do it, you know, because it's so powerful and I get so much done. And yet, you know, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, I feel like I'm never really productive.

It's attention residue.

Yeah. I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And that's a, it's a very interesting thing because what you're saying is that by using our phones and technology, the way we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function, and.

There'S no such thing as multitasking. Yeah, and even if you think you're single tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad. So I've never had a social media account. I don't web surf, so I don't have like a staple of sites to cycle through when I'm bored. When I work, I work really intensely with a lot of organization. When I'm done, I'm done. I have clear cut-offs between the two. But actually it's good to be bored more because here's the problem. If your brain gets trained this Pavlovian response that every time I get a little bit bored, I get a really nice stimuli that gets rid of my boredom. The problem is when it comes time to do something something hard, almost always a hard thing is going to be boring in the technical sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli. You're focusing on the blank page to try to write something or whatever it is, right? And if your brain has learned, boredom stimulates boredom stimulates, it doesn't tolerate it. And so when I was helping people in business be better at concentrating, I had to tell them, you need to be bored way more often in your life outside of work, or your brain is never going to tolerate the type of concentration we all used to be used to, the sort of the boringness of just doing one hard valuable thing. So I don't think boredom's all that bad, actually. I'm very comfortable with boredom. I'm comfortable concentrating for long periods of.

Time so I can produce more work in less time. This is one of the big advantages of it. Yeah. So share that with everybody. More work in less time. More work in less time.

What are the benefits of doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox.

Yeah.

So the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit. It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to whatever, put my phone away for a weekend or, you know, Sundays, I step away from the phone and I don't use my phone or something like this. But then you go back and start using again normally. And so if you think about this, if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we were addicted to, it's not going to work that well. If I said, I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm going to do, I have it all figured out, don't worry, I'm going to go away and on Sunday I'm not going to drink, but then get back to it again on Monday, is that really solving the problem? This is my issue with just the detox notion or the digital Shabbat notion of you just take a a little bit of time off. And so the lifestyle I often pitch is, and this is the new book, is not digital detoxing, but digital minimalism. Yeah, what is that? So it's a philosophy of technology use that says you should start with your values. What do I value? What's important to me in my life? Then for each of those, you ask, okay, what's the best way I can use technology to help these specific values? And then that's it in terms of your engagement with technology. You can ignore the rest. miss out on the rest. As opposed to this maximalist approach of, if I can think of anything interesting about using this app, I'll download it. If I can think of anything that might be cool about this gadget, I'm going to buy it. Minimalism says, no, no, my life is about doing the things I really care about, really value. Often there's some way that you can use technology very intentionally and very selectively.

That'S going to even boost and enhance those things you care about. You're not trying to take away people's pleasure and experience. You're suggesting that our lives will be improved by actually thinking about this thoughtfully and actually making some choices in our personal life that actually can improve that quality.

Yeah, I think it's a good way of thinking about it. I mean, digital minimalists have nice lives.

Yeah, it's not either or. It's not either or, yeah.

I think that's going to be the key is letting people know, get them away from this sort of cognitive junk food and get them back in control of their life and their values. Get the same skepticism around the technology people have around their food. Get people smarter, more intentional, more selective taking control of their digital life, I think it'd be a lot better.

And it's really a powerful idea that you can sort of reclaim your life and actually improve the quality of your experience and work and relationships and all that. And it's, you know, I think getting the word out there and helping people understand the harms, the technology and what they're being taken advantage of for, I think that can help move the needle.

In order to live a life in which you get to call the shots, you have to become a master of your time. In today's world, this includes establishing a relationship with technology that supports your cognitive health and ability to be present to what matters to you most. Dr. Hyman recommends checking in with yourself daily to ask if you're spending time doing the things that you want to do and that support the life you want to be living. Gaining a deeper understanding of what is truly important to you allows you to then take tiny steps towards establishing daily practices that support your overall well-being and cultivates your very best life. self. I hope you enjoyed this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for tuning in.

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