A Harvard professor recommends three strategies: no devices for the first hour after waking, during meals, and the final hour before bed. Device use disrupts melatonin production at night and suppresses oxytocin during meals, weakening social bonds.
There's a lot of neuroscience research that shows how you can actually moderate your device use that will revolutionize your relationship to the devices. You could solve this problem with basically 3 steps: tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech fasts. That's all you need to do. And the tech-free times are first hour in the morning, meal times, and last hour at night. That's all you need. Why? Because of the neural programming that's going on first hour of the day, the neurochemistry of what's actually happening while you eat, which is that you're looking into other people's eyes while you're having a conversation. We're evolved to do that over the last 250,000 years since the beginning of the Pleistocene. Homo sapiens have actually communed with their kin while they shove pieces of yak meat into their mouths around the fire.
They put it in there. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If you see your phone on the table, it cuts off the neuropeptide that, that is occurring to bond you to others called oxytocin. You cut the oxytocin flow by looking at your phone. Literally, experiments that show this.
So what you said, first hour mealtime, and it was the last hour. Last hour.
Last hour. Because that's when you should be communing with your babies and your wife. And also, you don't want to interrupt the functioning of the pineal gland, which, as you know, melatonin, etc., you won't be able to wind down. You'll be stressed out.
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