Sunday Serenity: Endless Scrolling

Good evening, Cadre family. Jason Lennox here. Happy to be here on Sunday, our first Sunday of 2024. I am your resident recovery champion and I'm here to talk about everything related to recovery, mental health, wellness. And, you know, I'll share that. I believe that we're all in some form of recovery from something. Tie into that a little bit here with tonight's live. So, you know, the, the title here is endless scrolling. And first of all, I want to acknowledge that there's some real irony in me sharing about scrolling and just kind of the mobile and technology sharing from a phone.

And if you're on the other side receiving this, then you're on a phone. So I will just clear that up and, and talk about that irony right away, though you'll see soon enough here that there is a way to. Hey, JC, good to see you. Good to see you. Junk food junkie. There is a way to consume content to use our mobile devices and do so in a way that still allows for serenity. So Sunday serenity. So I want to share a little bit just about why I thought this was important to talk about scrolling and how we use these devices that we, we just have so much access to these days.

I read a book earlier this year by Johann Hari. It was called Stolen why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again. It's one of the more transformative books I've read in quite some time and really informational, too. I learned a lot about technology and how it's designed. Hey, Chris, good evening. Good to see you here. How technology is designed and the way that our attention is captured and essentially our attention is worth a dollar sign to somebody somewhere. So very interesting.

So if you are a reader and you're looking for your next book, that one is very enlightening, eye opening, just a great book all around. And a couple of the stats that I wanted to pull from that to share again about why I think it's important to be mindful of how we use technology is it distracts us and it takes us from our focus. There's a statistic in there that says that when we get pulled away from something that we're focused, focused on whether that be by an email, a text, a notification, it takes, on average, 23 minutes to get back to that state that we were in that state of focus, 23 minutes.

So you can imagine that as we go out through our days and we constantly have those, we might not ever get back to it 23 minutes later. So that's one stat, the other one was very eye opening. And there's a little difference between people who are in school, college, and then adults. But on average, somebody in school, a college student, focuses on one task at a time for 63 seconds. So just over a minute. And then you take the average office worker, an adult like me, someone who's in an office most of the day, focuses on a task for an average of three minutes.

So three times as much, but still not very long. And so those are some of the statistics that just made me go, wow, we gotta do something, something different. And so three things I wanna share with you that I do personally that I found incredibly helpful in terms of limiting the amount of unwanted time. I'll say, because these devices, if you're watching this, you're hoping to come here and get something out of this. There are many reasons that these things keep us connected and many good reasons to be using devices and technology, but that unwanted time that we spend here is what I'm talking about.

And so three things I do. First of all, my notifications are off. I don't have any notifications on. Hey, happy Sunday to you, sherry, good to see you here. I don't have a single notification on. In fact, the only thing that will make my phone make a noise or interrupt me is if it is on loud and it's a phone call. That's the only combination. And usually my phone is not allowed. The phone call would then show up on the screen. So all my notifications are often. It's been that way for a year or two.

Incredibly helpful. Now, I still get in the apps, I'm still looking, you know, and I can see the little red on there if I do open my phone, but I don't get interrupted by that buzz, that buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz like I used to. And so that is huge. That's number 1 second is, and I actually just started doing this last year in 2023, is I set specific times that I will open my phone and check all my applications. And I usually limit that to about five times per day. So a couple hours after I get up, six or seven in the morning, then usually about my lunchtime, which is about eleven, and then perhaps once in the mid afternoon, once in the evening, and maybe briefly before I go to bed.

But I set those very specific times and that's a documented item on every single list of my to dos on a daily basis. And so that's. And I don't always follow these things, by the way, but it's there and it forces me to continue to think about them. And the last thing I'll say that I do, and this is something that I find effective in every area of my life. And my work is I track, I regularly track the time that I spend opening the apps, using the apps. So if you have an iPhone, that's screen time, I believe if you have Android, it's like digital well being or something like that.

But there are apps on our phones, all of our phones, that will tell us how much time we're spending looking at screens and looking at the different apps. And now I exclude, and I do this on a weekly basis. And I don't measure what was my daily average for the week. And every time that I get back to very stringently following that five times per day, I realized a significant difference. And I did. At the beginning of the year, I went from, you know, three and a half hours on my phone, excluding the maps and the, you know, the youtubes and the things that I use when I'm working out.

I'm not really looking at my screen, but about three and a half hours. And now this week I was down to under 2 hours and so it practically cut it in half. But again, tracking and measuring my, and I would invite all of you to try that. Take a look. Sometimes it's a little scary to do that, but that's what I do. So no notifications. I set five specific times per day that I will actually look at my phone, respond to messages, to emails, to things like that that aren't related to work, and then I measure the heck out of it.

I look at it on the back end and say, where am I falling and where I'm aiming to go? And that continues to push me in the right direction. And the three things I get from these practices, I get serenity, I get peace, and I get focus. I pointed back to that book from the beginning that I shared, stolen focus. I'm able to focus more, I have more peace because I'm not constantly looking, looking, looking, opening apps, scrolling, scrolling that can take hours of our days and I'm guilty of it. So serenity, peace and focus, those are incredible things.

Junk food, junkie. You go to bed, you put it in airplane mode. Yep, there you go. A lot of research on the way we use our phones before we go to bed and how that impacts our sleep. So some people don't even keep their phones in their rooms. But anyhow, very good, very good point. So call to action here as we step away into a new week. If you're a reader, go grab that book, Johann Hari, stolen focus. Why you can't pay attention. Transformational. So much good information in there and so much that I could take away.

And I think we all can, as we understand how technology works and how we can create more peace in our lives. And then, you know, the other three things, give it a try. Not all of them. Turn those notifications off. Set yourself five. Maybe you're used to checking it every hour. So, I don't know, bring it down to ten times a day, eight times, but just give that a whirl. And then most importantly, go take a look. Now, what's the baseline? What kind of time are you spending on the phone through that screen time app or the digital well being?

And then set a goal track that over a few weeks and see how that goes. So, yes, sherry, the mental health, you know, this plays such a big role in our mental health. There's a, I'm going to just pull up a stat here. You bring up a good point there. There's just the algorithms. In the way that technology and social media uses some of these things is really, we start seeing something that seems a little bit believable, and then as soon as the algorithm realizes that we're tapping into that, we'll see something a little more extreme and a little more.

And next thing you know, we're not in a great place mentally, and we're believing things and seeing things that are very far from the truth. So that happens on both ends of the spectrum in terms of where we stand politically and just in life in general. So that's what I got this week. Junk food junkie. Yes. I'll put the book title in the community feed and just make a note to reference this if you want some more information. But a lot of good data, reach out if you want some of that. That book is filled with statistics.

It's really a research driven book where the guy ran around the world collecting a bunch of data from people who study attention. So again, the irony is here. Now, ten minutes later, we've spent holding these phones and these devices in our hands. But again, but there are a lot of good uses of technology. This is one of them. And what I'm talking about is limiting the things that we don't necessarily want, need, or that don't serve us well in the end. Hope you all have wonderful weeks. Great being with you.

Thank you for joining. And as always, we will see you one week from now for Sunday serenity. You're welcome. Thanks, Sherry. Have a great week, everyone.