Creating healthy digital boundaries with Dr Kristy Goodwin

0:02 A listener production. Today I am joined by doctor Christy Goodwin. As you know, doctor Christy is a digital wellbeing and productivity researcher, consultant, speaker and author. Her latest book is called Dear Digital, We Need to Talk. It's a guilt free guide to taming your tech habits and thriving in a digital world. There is no doubt that the pandemic has had major impacts on our life as we know it, and perhaps none more profound than our reliance on digital to live, connect and work. This almost over reliance has left us with a pretty heavy digital hangover, as Christie calls it. So today doctor Christy is here to share some really practical and realistic strategies That's what I love about her, to take back control of technology use and avoid digital burnout. Here is my conversation with Christy. Doctor Christy Goodwin, thank you for coming back for a second episode of Crappy the Happy.

1:08 Thank you for having me back. It's a joy you. Have joined the elite group of repeat guests here on the show. So honored position to be in. But the reason I was so excited to talk to you, Christie, is because obviously your area of expertise is digital wellbeing, and I'm really interested to better understand the impact that the pandemic has had on our use of technology and the impact that that is having on our wellbeing. We're all forced home and to work from home and hybrid and zoom this and zoom bloody everything, you know, rather than doing stuff face to face. So what can you tell us about the impact that the pandemic has had.

1:51 Look, I think we were certainly tethered two technology before the pandemic. It would be naive to think we sort of lived in this digital utopia where we had all our tech habits under control and you know, were really disciplined with our tech. I think we could acknowledge that we really were digitally dependent before the pandemic. But as you suggested, the pandemic most certainly accelerated amplified our digital reliance. It became our conduit for connection. The online world was our conduit for work. For leisure. Research tells us that during the height of the pandemic, the average adult was spending around thirteen point two eight hours a day on screens. And the harsh reality is that even though it's huge, a huge displacement effect and it's having you know, that amount of time is having a significant impact on everything from our vision, to our muscular skeletal health, to our rates of stress and exhaustion and overwhelm, to our levels of focus and productivity. But the harsh reality is that even though and I'm so careful about saying, you know, the pandemic has ended, but as we're sort of finding our new ways of whatever new normal looks like, I think what's happened is that we've got a bit of a digital hangover. Many of the digital habits that sort of crept into our lives have often remained. And I think that our tech habits, both professionally and personally. And let's face it, those boundaries have become obliterated if they ever existed. But our tech habits are really having a profound impact on all of us, often in ways that

3:24 we don't even recognize. You make a really good point there about the boundaries being obliterated, and again, I think we all know that we had issues. With boundaries before. A lot of us are really celebrating that we don't have to go into the office anymore. We've realized that we can work from home. We've got these hybrid arrangements. But there's a downside of that, isn't there In terms of that boundary management. Yes, we feel like we are always on and the research is actually telling us that in many instances we are, especially if you tend to be a knowledge worker. So a knowledge worker is someone who the bulk of their work involves them being on a desktop or laptop computer. And Microsoft published a study in twenty twenty two and they're calling it the triple productivity hump day. Now, before the pandemic, we used to see two humps in productivity, one at around coffee a clock, you know, around ten o'clock in the morning, and one around biscuit o'clock around three point thirty in the afternoon. We are now seeing a third hump in like a spike in productivity, and it's happening between ten pm and eleven pm at night.

4:28 And so we know that around twenty eight percent of people are working after hours. Now we can look at this two ways. A lot of people are saying, look, this is a sign that we have more flexible work arrangements. People are choosing perhaps to look after family members, you know, where they're aged, aging parents or children. In the early hours of the evening and they're choosing to work late at night. But the more likely scenario, and the research is certainly in its infancy corroborating this, is that it's actually a marker or a red flag for burnout people who feel like they're constantly needing to be working. And one of the justifications that people often say, I'm working late in the evening because my day is now peppered with digital distractions, you know, kings of teams, chants, slack messages, emails, going from virtual meeting to virtual or hybrid meeting. But I don't get any time to do deep focused work.

5:19 So we're doing that at ten or eleven at night, and it's really not sustainable and having a huge impact. I've been doing a little bit of work over here in the UK. I've was invited to do some work around wellbeing and stress management for a company over here in Amsterdam, and as part of that, I was asked to talk to somebody about possibly doing some executive coaching with this particular leader who was having some issues. And this was just a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed that in trying to set up a meeting with this person, the emails were coming to me at midnight and at five am. And I didn't end up working with her, but in speaking to the management I guess about it. I was like, what is going on here?

6:04 Like this is an issue, Like whoever coaches this person, you know, needs to have some sense that this is what's going on. Because I didn't even work with her, but that was my experience. I was like waking up in the morning and getting an email from her at twelve thirty and this is a working mother with young children. And I did point it out to her. Actually, I said, like, what is going on here? And she said, well, that's when I get my work done, Like that's and she felt kind of that's what she had to do to cope. So what you're saying is that is more common than not, by the sound of. Us, sadly, yeah, And I call it digital PRESENTEESM So in part, I think a lot of people have thought that we've got this extra flexibility. So I'm doing a lot of work with organizations at the moment to help them articulate. And it's not a policy, but we articulate or co construct what I'm colloquially referring to as their digital guardrails. What are the team agreements that you will have around how technology is going to use. So, for example, we talk about after ours communications because many people feel like they just psychologically are unable to detach from their work and they can't. You know, when your boss is emailing you at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, when your colleagues are pinging you on teams at eleven o'clock at night and you're the only one in your team not responding, it causes us to create this hyper responsive culture that is really detrimental not only to our well being but also our productivity. The other thing that I think is happening again because we've taken ourselves out of the office. You know, we used to have sort of very i'm going to say outdated, but sort of metrics of our productivity. You know, if you came into the

7:36 office early and you were seen to be, you know, the last one leaving and switching off the lights at night, there were sort of some tangible measures of what I call perceived productivity. But now with distributed teams, with people working remotely and sometimes in the office, what I think has happened is we've created something called I'm referring to as digital presenteeism, and we want to be seen from an optics perspective, to be responsive. So we're replying to the emails or the team's chats at all hours of the day. And this, I think is just I actually think this is the biggest threat to our new ways of working if we are constantly on and using technology in ways that are completely unhealthy. In your new book, Dear Digital, we need to talk, you gave the example of we'll get to the stuff that you've got in the book because it's so good.

8:22 But you gave the example of if you have your phone nearby, you can be tempted to wake up it, if you wake up at two or three in the morning or something. You could be tempted to just check to see if you've got a response. And I felt so attacked because, let me tell you, because I have moved to the I have moved to the UK, and obviously I'm talking to you now. You're in Australia and I still do work in Australia. I'm in this upside down world where by the time I get up in the morning and look at my emails, the team in Australia has left for the day, so I need to send emails in the evening for them to get So this is just the reality of working on the other side of the world. But I will do that if something's urgent and I wake up at two in the morning, I know it's still work time in Australia, so I'll quickly check so that I can send somebody a reply. And I know it's a problem, but it's very tempting to do.

9:12 It is, especially if it's nestled beside your bed. No, and but we all I think that's really important to acknowledge. Yeah, And also even if you didn't pick it up, even if you resisted the urge to reply to the email, even if we just see our phones or our tablets or laptops near our sleeping space, it can be enough of a psychological trigger for us to just start to ruminate and think, you know, did that tricky client reply to that email? Has my colleagues sent that DM that I need to respond to, And so it can really have a significant impact on our sleep and again our wellbeing. So where we can trying to keep it out of our rooms. You know that old saying our Mum used to say, you know, out of sight, out of mind really can make a difference.

9:56 It was a good thing for me to realize because it has prompted me to start keeping my phone out of my room. In fact, I made a note like by an old school alarm clock so that I don't have to keep my phone beside my bag, because that's one of the strategies, isn't. It It is? And I know a lot of people resist this strategy. So another alternative if you just can't break up with your phone, if the idea of going back to an old fashioned illuminated alarm clock just will not work for you, my other golden rule is that if your phone has to come into your room, there's no other alternative for alarm clock. My two golden rules with your phone is that it must be on silent or do not disturb mode, and it also has to be put out of your line of sight. So put a book over the top, put a magazine over a poppet in a drawer so you can't see it again.

10:40 Because our brain is making cognitive associations all the time we scan the environment. In fact, our brain's processing around eleven million bits of sensory data. Every second, ten million of those come through our eyes, So just seeing the phone can be that sense for us to start thinking about it. So on silent, we know that in Australia of one in five adults are woken up each night because of alerts and notifications, huge huge impact on our sleep. Yeah, that happens to me too, So good reason to get the phone out of the bedroom. I'm just thinking, Yeah that actually that happens to me. Christy. In the new book, you said some really interesting stuff that I was not aware of about the impact on our physiology. You use the term our human operating system, which I love. You should trademark that if you came up with it, a human operating system, and how technology compromises it, like how technology basically undermines our natural biology.

11:43 Before we get into the details of that, just some really specific examples you gave were things like the closeness of a zoom call, like how many times we will sigh in all of this science stuff that I wasn't aware of. Can you talk us through some of the impact that the technology has on our physiology? Yes, so some of the ways that we're often not aware of. I think two things have happened. I think our tech habits have eroded some of the biological buffers that we used to have naturally be baked into our days that helped us to manage our stress and our focus. We used to sleep more, We used to be more physically active, We used to get way more sunlight, more time with human connection. Even the way that we breathe has been changed by our screens. As humans, we are designed biologically to sigh roughly every five minutes. It's a built in biological mechanism that helps us regulate our stress response.

12:35 We do it while we're awake and we're unaware that we're doing it, and we should do that roughly every five minutes. But when we are looking at a screen, be that a laptop, a desktop, or our phones, our sigh rate falls off the cliff. What does this tell us? We're often breathing in a really shallow way and we've activated our sympathetic nervous system, so we're often just stressing ourselves just by using the technology in the first place. Another way that it affecting our biology is that we have a really narrow gaze, be that whether we're looking at our laptop or our desktop or our phones. Our eyes are on a very narrow surface area. Now, as humans, we are biologically designed again to look at things in the distance. We are designed to look at the animal or off in the distance, or the sun rising or a ball flying towards us. But again, when we have a very narrow gaze, it sends us trigger to our brain that we're in a heightened stress state, that something is potentially wrong. So that's the first thing that's happened.

13:34 We've eroded some of those biological buffers. The second thing that I think has happened at the same time is that we've introduced little micro stresses into our days now, things like alerts, notifications, video calls, as you suggested, working for long stretches without a break, all of these little things on their own would be relatively harmless. But what's happening is they're accumulating in our days. You know, we go from one virtual meeting to the next, with our phone, pinging with emails, you know, permeating our days. And for example, as you said, video calls we know from brain scans actually cause our brain to release cortisol, like we're in a stress state. One of the reasons. There's a whole lot of work being done into why why do we get zoom fatigue or zoom doom as they're sometimes calling it.

14:21 And one of the really fascinating reasons is because we usually sit around sixty centimeters away from our screen. Now, sixty centimeters is what anthropologists call at intimate social distance. Sixty centimeters is reserved for love, making, cuddling, comforting, wrestling, or pretty much the same thing if you start to think about it. But all of a sudden, we're sixty centimeters away from a colleague or a potential client, and so it's really jarring and taxing for our brain. So all of these things are happening and we're often unaware that they're having such a profound impact on us. Yeah, that stuff I found so interesting, and I think particularly as a psychologist, you know, often talk to people about how you might not even realize that you're not breathing or that you're breathing too rapidly, but your physiology knows that you're breathing too rapidly, and then it sends a signal to your brain. Your brain says you're in danger.

15:15 Up the cortisol and this is all happening outside your conscious awareness. So what you're talking. About is exactly that the narrow focus. They're not breathing without even being consciously aware. We're putting ourselves into this heightened stress state, which has so many impacts on our physical health. We know that sleep and breathing properly and all of those things are so essential for our overall wellbeing, every aspect of our well being. It's basically making ourselves sick. I think many of us at the moment are what I call ousted. So I think we're overwhelmed, we're under the pump, We're stressed, we're time poor, exhausted and distracted.

15:56 And I think the reason why is because we're using our devices, be they professionally or personally, in ways that are completely incongruent with, as you mentioned before, our human operating system. As humans, we have some biological constraints. I sometimes say, you know, our HS is our biological blueprint. We cannot outperform our biology. And the harsh reality is that we're using technology in ways that are completely out of alignment with how we are biologically and neurobiologically designed as humans. And that's why I think we're seeing it globally. It is certainly an issue pronounced in Australia at the moment, but rates of stress, exhaustion and burnout are at all time highs. And I think one of the reasons, it's not the only reason, but one of the most significant contributing factors, is most certainly our tech habits.

16:48 Yeah, you made the point. Also, you just reminded me that social connection is so important for our health and wellbeing. I mean, I know, I wrote a whole book about it, but online interaction cannot replicate the physiological effect of face to face interaction. All of that oxytocin and all of the hormonal changes and the things that happen in our body when we are face to face with somebody don't happen when we're looking at somebody through a screen or talking to somebody through a screen. I think people don't realize some of this stuff. I mean, I probably never even thought about it myself, but it's really important. It is, and we, as you said, we just can't replicate face to face connection online yet. And a lot of people are saying, you know, the metaverse and AI will soon see that that change. I don't know if we will, And I don't think there's any research available at the moment that tells us that we know from the available research that text based communications, be that a you know, WhatsApp message or a text message or a DM will not create, as you said, oxytocin, that social bonding hormone in our brain like we get when we meet in real time. And I think an experience often we can relate to is that this is why. For you know, there are a host of reasons why we found lockdowns really hard, but lockdowns were hard because we didn't get that face to face, in person connection with others. Yes, we're all chatting with our friends and on family zoom calls and doing all the other digital replicas, but they are absolutely no substitute for face to face connection.

18:21 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you apps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. The thing I love most about you, Christy, apart from all your really cool little terms and slogans, which really helped to remember some of these important points. But it is that you are very realistic and very pragmatic in terms of technology is here to day. We're not getting rid of it.

19:01 We're not doing a digital detox, digital minimalism like it doesn't work for people. What you instead present are realistic solutions to people, and that is what you've outlined in your newest book. This is why I love your work so much. I love simple, practical, workable. And so you have come up with four pillars of digital peak performance, basically four things that we need to consider in order to be able to use our technology in a way that is healthy. Can you talk us through what they are? Sure? So, I think in order for us to thrive in this digital world, we have to learn to live with technology, but to do some ways that is aligned with our human operating system. So the first pillar is all around establishing digital borders and boundaries. You know, where are your no go tech zones? What places and spaces will you use it? Are you going to have a digital curfew? Are you going to have a digital depot like a landing zone in your house where devices might go it night? So that's the first pillar. The second pillar I call adopting neuroproductivity tactics, and the idea is that we have to start to work in ways that match how we are designed to work as humans, but to do so in this digital landscape. So, you know, how do we manage virtual meetings, how do we manage out and structure the cadence of our workday now that we've often got more flexibility around when we work. The third pillar is all around disabling digital distractions. We know that being distracted puts a huge dent in our productivity,

20:33 So it's all about taking back control of our focus or what I call in our book our FQ, our focus quotient. And then the final pillar, the fourth pillar, I should say I think is probably the most important, but I'm also going to acknowledge it's the hardest one to achieve, and that is unplugging, you know, engaging in digital disconnections, so not a detox, but actually intentionally carving out time where you switch off. Yeah, as it okay if we just unpack those in order, because I think this is people really want this kind of information and these tips because we're all out of control with our technology. We all know that we're struggling, but we find it hard to find a solution. So digital borders and boundaries. You mentioned before the term guardrails.

21:15 Can you talk us through what you mean when you talk about putting guardrails in place for our technology? Sure? So I think we need to do this at an individual level, and something I'm also challenging organizations to do is to establish their team's guardrails. I have a hunch that we will soon see legislation, and not just in Australia but internationally we're already starting to see it around the right to disconnect. So I think individuals need to come up with where are the places and spaces where devices will go? When will you switch them off? Where will you go when they're switched off? Will you have an auto responder on not only just d emails, but you can now have an auto responder on your text messages, So when your phone's on focus or do not disturb mode, people will get an automated reply if that's something that you choose to do. So coming up with some parameters, and what I often say is we need to communicate our tech spectations to others as well.

22:09 So you know, does your immediate family know that you're hopeless on applying to text messages to call and instead to call you if there's something urgent. With organizations, what I talk to them about is coming up with a communication escalation plan so that if there is an urgent, time sensitive, critical issue, there will be one mode of communication so people can actually switch off at night and feel like they don't need to be triaging their team's messages and their emails and they're WhatsApp messages before they get into bed each night. So just coming up with some parameters around that and communicating that as best you can to others. You're so right, though, see you with your little slogans and words t expectations.

22:50 That is such a such a good term. Sometimes it has to come from the top in an organization, doesn't it, Because people at an individual level feel like if that's the expectation in the workplace, that they don't know how to manage that. So when I often go in and either deliver a keynote or a masterclass, a lot of individuals will come up to me and say, Christy, I really want to implement this, but it's really hard to ignore my boss when he or she is emailing me late into the night, or when everybody engages in the text pile on all the teams responding to the team's chat, and you don't want to look like, you know, the slack person who's literally ignoring or choosing not to respond. And again, when we understand our psychology as humans, our most basic psychological driver is relational connection. We are hardwired to belong, so we don't want to engage in any behavior that would possibly socially ostracize us. So even though we know we shouldn't have to or we don't need to respond after ours, we often feel compelled to do so because we don't want to be ostracized from the group or frowned upon and sort of circling back to that digital presentees, And we might even want to win favor, so he might want to be seen to be responsive. So I think again, these guardrails are critical. But what I'm hearing from teams who are implementing them, and some people are calling them team agreements or digital norms, they only work if leaders are walking the talk as well. It's just so critical that we get organizational buy in with those as well.

24:21 We had a friend over here from Australia. Just recently over here on some work and he's recently started a new job and it's a great job. He's a high level position. He's really excited about it. And he missed a call from his boss while we were talking to him, and he said, I'm just going to leave it, and then we ended up having a further conversation and he said he doesn't know what it is with his boss, but anytime his boss has a thought, like even if they've got a meeting scheduled for two hours time or later this afternoon, anytime his boss has a thought, he feels. The need to immediately communicate it. And so he'll get just get this random phone calls from his bos, which obviously he feels like he has to answer. Yeah, phone calls or emails or whatever, and it'll go nowhere. It'll be couldn't this have just put You've made a note and we could talk about this later.

25:09 So he's kind of got it on his agenda that once he's settled in and warmed up that relationship, you know, like got a more comfortable relationship, that they can start to have this conversation. But in the meantime, he's just like kind of missing. Every other call as a way of kind of putting some boundaries in trying to manage upwards to just not reply to everything, because then by the time he does talk to his boss, the it wasn't an issue anyway, like it didn't need to be communicated immediately. But I think there are those individuals too. The technology makes it so easy to just shoot off a text or an email or we feel like it gets it off our plate or out of our head without thinking about what that's putting on the other person. So I think we all have a personal responsibility there.

25:55 Yeah, absolutely, And why teams and slack and email have been growing exponentially, you know, we know research tells us that Microsoft users said twenty point six million more emails in March twenty twenty one than they did in March twenty and that's just Microsoft users. So our use of technology has grown exponentially. And what happens, as you said, our digital load increases, and it's because it is so easy, as you said, we want to cognitively offload that. So we fire off the message and we almost handle the problem to someone else. So I have encourage people to you know, instead of firing off the team's chattel, the slack message. If there is urgent an urgency to it, then of course do it, but maybe flag it as being urgent, perhaps right when you need a response by There are other sorts of things we can do. But if not having a document. Now, I'm a mum to boys, So the word dump has all sorts of negative connotations, so I call it a brain sneeze. So can you have a brain sneeze document where you literally just add those little random thoughts that come to you and then when you have your next team meeting or when it is a more convenient time to have a longer conversation with someone, bring those things up so you won't forget them.

27:06 But you also haven't handballed the problem to someone else, because handballing it creates a snowball effect because they then reply and then off we go down that sort of digital vortex. The second pillar you mentioned was tell me again it was like working with your biology more effectively. YEA, So neuroproductivity tactics, so working the way our brain and body is biologically designed. So I talk about a lot of things, but two points that really stick with a lot of people The first one is that we are designed biologically to work in sprints, not marathons. The part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex that does you know, all have a heavy lifting especially if we're a knowledge worker. You know, it solves problems. It's impulse control and working memory.

27:48 Our prefrontal cortex, we know, has between a four and six hour battery life per day, So we are biologically not designed to sit down and pump out twelve hour days doing really mentally taxing war. We are designed we have something in our body called an altrade in rhythm, meaning that we go through peaks and troughs roughly every ninety minutes. So we're designed to sort of and it's a roughly ninety minute period, but we're designed to work in a sprint and then do something restorative and or do some lighter work what cal Newport talks about in terms of shallow work, and then we're designed to do another sprint. We're not designed to be, you know, machines that just keep going and going. The second product neuroproductivity technique that I think I think this is the silver lining of the pandemic for knowledge workers, given that we've now got a lot of us, not all of us, have much more flexibility around when we work. We have greater schedule flexibility. The silver lining of the pandemic is that we've now got a greater opportunity to align our workday with something that we call our chronotype. Are you feing you with that term, cass, Yeah.

28:52 I think so. Is that like basically whether you're more of a morning person or a night person? Yeah, So it's determined by your PR three gene and it dictates, as you said, when you're most focused on alert and also when you naturally would want to fall asleep. Now, the trick is that, now that we're not all bound to a nine to five work day and we've got more flexibility around how we structure our day, we want to try and align the cadence of our workday so that it works in concert with our chronotype. So, if you are the early morning person, can you try and get some of your deep work done during that time? And the trick is, whatever your window is, we be that an early morning person, maybe you're a middle of the day or a late afternoon or evening person. The real trick is that that window, whatever it is for you, is the time of the day where you have to build a fortress around your focus. You need to eliminate as many distractions as possible so you can get that focused work done. Because we know when we are distracted, it takes the average adult around twenty three minutes to get back into that deep focused state. It's called the resumption lag. So if you think about an average person's day, you know it's the ping of emails, it's your phone pinging, it's WhatsApp messages. We're just parenially distracted.

30:09 I'm all about at the moment, like getting to know you, like working in a way that is best for you, like really doing that self analysis because not everybody is productive and focused at the same time of day. So when you know yourself and you know yourself best, then you've got the best chance of putting those guardrailsers you say in place. None of us loves to get to the end of the day and feel like we all do. I do every day practically like what did I do today? Because I feel like all I did was respond to distractions, just deal with distractions all day, Like it's not good for your self esteem. We just we want to be productive and effective. So there are ways that we can increase our chances.

30:52 Yeah, and as I said, I think this really is the silver lining, particularly for knowledge workers. I recognize that, you know, frontline workers often don't have any sort of locus of control over when they work, but it was estimated that before the pandemic, around eighty eight percent of people had work schedules that conflicted with their chronotype. So, you know, we had people getting into the office at eight thirty because that was their start time, but they're you know, their chronotype really wasn't firing on all cylinders to perhaps midday. And so I think from a productivity and a wellbeing perspective, if we can start to work the way we're designed, huge benefits for both individuals and their organizations as well.

31:32 Yeah. Absolutely, which brings us to distractions. That's like number one, isn't it? Like I know it's third on your list, But turning off notifications is so crucial, like limiting the ability of technology to pull on our attention because we know that as soon as we get that ping or that notification which is wired to respond to it. Are there other things apart from kind of switching off going through your phone and switching off distractions. What do you suggest, Christy. We have brains that are biologically designed to go and forage and hunt and get information. But the problem is today information is constantly thrust at us, you know, alerts, notifications, pings and dings, and our brain actually can't differentiate between a team's notification and a tiger chasing us because they come to us. Our brain perceives it as a potential stress.

32:23 All so really important that we try to eliminate as many distractions as possible. So when it comes to notifications, my three golden rules. First one is disable all non essential notifications. You know, do you really need to be getting LinkedIn notifications? I don't think so. You certainly do not need email notifications, Please kill those. My second rule is that we can now with most apps platforms that we use, we can now bundle or batch our notifications, so rather than them dribbling in throughout our day and parenially distracting us, we can nominate specific times of the day where I get all of my WhatsApp or all of my teams notifications. And the third rule is to create what I call VIP lists, So when you put your device on focus or do not disturb mode, everybody gets blocked apart from those people who are on your VIP list, so be that perhaps it's aging parents or an age care facility, or children in childcare, or your partner, or maybe it's a colleague and you're working on a time sensitive project and they will need instant access to you, but everybody else gets blocked. So we've got way more flexibility around how we better manage distractions. And the good thing with that is we get peace of mind knowing that I can go sort of offline part in the put, I could get some focused work done, but have that almost reassurance that anything critical will still get through to me.

33:44 Do you know one thing I used to have set up and I actually had to turn it off, was I had like my mother and my husband in as emergency contacts in my phone, but my settings were said that when I was on do not disturb, I didn't get any notifications from anybody except my emergency contacts. But what happened was if my mum was just texting me to say I'm coming past, you know, can I call in? And I was in the middle of like a podcast recording, I'd still the phone would still read the notification would still for the most non essential thing. So what you're saying is you can there's something else that we can do that stops that from happening. Yeah, and there's a lot more customization these days, so sometimes you can even have it automatically sunk with your calendar.

34:26 So if you're saying family time, you're going on a date with your partner, or if you block out meeting time, it can automatically activate do not disturb mode if they're sunk together, so you again take away some of the thinking or the heavy lifting. You don't have to put those rudimentary steps in place. Another little microhabit that I found really helpful when I know I'm likely to be distracted by my phone, and we all have days like that, especially when we're tired. You know, when we're tired, our self regulation which our brain doesn't work. That's why we make crappier food choices on those days when we're tired. I turned my phone to grace scale mode, and I am the first to say that Instagram is really boring in grace scale mode again, just creating a little bit of a psychological distance from us wanting to pick it up, you know, logging out of apps again, or we're doing is creating some rudimentary steps, but we're creating a bit more friction. The problem while we all get sucked into the vortex is it's almost a frictionless experience. You know, you don't even have to type in your passcode anymore.

35:29 You just hold it up for facial recognition, and off you go down that vortex. I think I said to you last time that one thing that I did was I would, if I really wanted to be not pulled into social media for example, like I would just delete the app off my phone for the day or for the weekend, like I. Would delete Facebook, delete Instagram. And it was really surprising to me how often I would just automatically reach and try to open it, Like I probably wasn't really aware of just how compulsively I was reaching for those apps until I removed it and didn't have acts to it. And the other thing that I do is I, for whatever reason, I have personal email, which is set up as an Outlook account, Like I use Outlook on my phone and I have Gmail for my business, So I will remove the Gmail app from my phone so I can't get we still get personal emails, but I can't get work ones. So and I noticed that one day I accidentally added my work email to my Outlook and I suddenly started getting all of these work emails on a weekends.

36:25 Oh oh my god, what have I done? So I kind to quickly quickly remove that because I don't want to get those ones on the weekend. But you're right, there are all these things that we can put in place so that it takes the thinking out and it actually just removes the temptation almost. Yeah. And another really simple one if you like that technique, is taking your tech temptations off the home screen of your phone. Like you may not want to go to the links you did cass of deleting it, but if you have to move it to the fifth screen on your phone, Quban Kyleenberg from The Resilience Project says, take it a step further and pop in a folder and call the folder things will later regret. So every time you have to go in and find that folding, you get a little pang of guilt. But again, we're just creating more friction because that home screen on your phone is prime real estate, so keep it there for the sort of bare necessities other people find a really simple but powerful tool is having a screen saver. You know that asks you, now, do you really want to pick me up? Or you know, what are you missing out on again just to guess, to question our behavior? Hmmm.

37:32 Interesting. And then the final one is unplugged. As you said, it is the toughest one. How often should we be unplugging? How do we do that knowing how difficult it actually is. What do we need to put in place to make us feel better about unplugging? What are your suggestions? So I want to be really clear, I'm not saying you have to do a digital detox, but we need to have pockets of our day and our week where we psychologically detach from technology. Because I don't know about ucas, but I have never ever come up with a creative via or a complex solution to a problem in an Excel spreadsheet or in my inbox. My ideas germinate when I'm in the shower, when I'm going for a swim, when I'm going for a run, when I'm on holidays with no Wi Fi. And we know we have to turn off our prefrontal cortex and we have to engage in what's called the default mode network. We used to call it daydreaming, And so now I think we have to be so much more intentional about doing this, because so many of us say, I'm going to go for a walk and I'll pop my ear pods in and I can listen to a podcast or an audiobook at one and a half speed. And we actually don't have any pockets of time where we meander with our thoughts, you know, any bit of white space. Today we pull out our phone. So it's again just making intentional time at a bare minimum. I think we need at least an hour or two at minimum, you know, the absolute minimum effective dose of that a week for healthy wellbeing.

38:55 Yes, we do. And I was just as you were talking, trying to think about the last time I unplugged, and I. Probably can't really remember. I think I used to be much more conscious of that, and it's just something like most healthy habits. I guess it's just something that has just dropped off and been forgotten. And reading your book just really reminded me of how important it is to come back to that and to kind of take control of that again and to make sure that I am not having my phone in my room that I am not turning it on and looking at it the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, because all those bad habits have crept back in for me, like I'm sure they have for a lot of people. Yeah, I'm describing exactly what you're talking about as the digital hangover. You know, some unhealthy tech habits crept in during the pandemic, But I think what's happening now is that we've almost held on to some of those habits, and that's why we're seeing this digital hangover with some unhealthy things that we could change.

39:52 Yeah, and hopefully this conversation has been a good prompt and reminded to everybody who's experiencing the same thing. Your new book, Dear Digital, we need to talk what I love about it. Like I said at the beginning, it's so just clear and practical. It's not a long book, you know, like loaded up with complex information. It's just really straight to the point, and it's full of practical suggestions. What I also love. About you is that you are available not just to help us as individuals, but obviously going into organizations and helping for people to make those changes from the top down. So you're always available for keynotes and workshops and all of the things that you do. Christy, thank you for coming back again today and sharing your expertise. It has been really, really fabulous.

40:40 Thank you for having me, And thank goodness for technology, because we wouldn't have this conversation without it. We wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for technology, after all of that, without sixty centimeters away from each other's screens on Zoom. You can find out all about doctor Christie's work at her website, Doctor Christigodwin dot com. Her book, Dear Digital, We Need to Talk is out now in all bookstores. Obviously, don't forget that my Audible original, The Imposter Solution is available right now exclusively on Audible. If you're an Audible subscriber, you can listen for free. If you're not a. Subscriber, you can have a thirty day free trial, and you can still listen for free. I'm at cast don dot com. Connect with me on Instagram and TikTok cast on Underscore. XO always love to hear from listeners. Send me in your questions for my next solo episode and I can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Craby to haveby listener