Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist Burnout podcast, episode number 29. Hey, therapist. It’s just me today. I am talking with you about my summer reading. So I don’t know how much I’ll get into with all the books I’ve been reading over the summer, but I am going to talk with you first about anxious generation. And if I get to talking about slow productivity, I will because I think they’re related and it might just be. I start recording and my discussion of slow productivity will be in another episode. Okay, so I want to jump into this. So if you haven’t heard of the number one New York Times bestseller anxious generation by Jonathan Haidt, I hope I’m saying that right. That’s h a i d t. It’s blowing my mind. It’s literally blowing my mind, y’all. And I know it’s about pretty much like Gen Z and younger people that we may be working with or have in our lives. I have young people that I have in my home. So I think it’s applicable to us as parents if we are parenting, but also if we have young people in our lives just to be aware of the changes that are happening. I think it was last year or the year before the surgeon general put out a warning for youth mental health. I’m just going to bring that up. Okay. So if you go over to the US Department of Health and Human Services, they have a section on youth mental health. And on that they have the full advisory. So you can download that and that’s free. You can look at that just to see I’m screen sharing. So perhaps this might be on YouTube. I can do what I can do to podcast y’all. So one day YouTube will happen. But if I get my stuff together and get it on YouTube, maybe pop over there. There is a YouTube channel for the therapist Burnout podcast. It’s there like your episodes are there. So if you listen to stuff in YouTube, you can find me in there. But I have maybe have like zero followers. Who knows? They have a one page summary. So if you don’t have time to read like the 100, 200 pages that it is, they have a one page summary. I don’t find that as helpful. But you might, might look at that. Besides looking at the full advisory, I feel like there are a lot of statistics in the full advisory that are really helpful to know and this happened. And I’ll get into this. This happened for the pandemic. I know in the pandemic we heard a lot of changes to youth mental health and maybe attributing that only to the pandemic. But this rapid increase in mental health disorders and symptoms has been on the increase for quite some time. Just one statistic from this advisory. In 2019, one in three high school students and a half of female students reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase from 40% from 2009. As a parent of two young boys, I think that’s super concerning. I know that’s for females and that’s where we’re seeing the big increases, but I think we’re seeing certainly increases across genders. And I don’t know if they have any information about LGBTQ youth as well. But typically, we know we’re going to have increased rates of depression, anxiety and the like. The advisory, I recommend you take a look at that. So it was kind of on my radar when I heard about that advisory. It might have came out last year. Don’t quote me. It’s probably right in here. When it’s from, it doesn’t say the date, but I think it was last year. I’m not sure. So just, I think, check that out. They have some ways to take action and some things that we can do then. So I work contract for a couple of school districts in my state, and someone gave me this book, the anxious generation, and I was like, oh, that’s interesting. I kind of been kind of on the pulse of what’s happening in youth mental health since I started working again with teenagers. I’m going to talk about some statistics. So even if you don’t get the book, which I find really, really helpful, you can pop over to the website, which is the anxiousgeneration.com. so they have the book and they also have the research. The research. And in here I am looking at the evidence, which has some really nice graphs. And that’s why I wanted to. Alright, so we are diving in to the anxious generation website. Certainly. I think grab the book. It’s going to be beneficial for you just to understand kind of what’s going on. So I’m looking at the evidence tab in@anxiousgeneration.com so this first graph they’re showing starting in early two thousand ten s. And so the big thing I didn’t put together that I also started to put together, and this is kind of one of the premises of this book, is that what happened in 2010, kids got smartphones. And I don’t blame parents. Like, we had no idea that giving kids a smartphone would equal them having a large mental health crisis. It’s not the fault of parents, however, it’s at the advent of this technology that all of these things start happening, right? We can see these dramatic increases are starting to happen. So they’re kind of laying the evidence that there is a mental health crisis among our youth. So I think for a long time, people were thinking, I don’t know, maybe they’re just complaining Gen Z, or they’re complaining more about their mental health or more mentally health aware. Who really knows? But I feel like there’s been these rumblings for a while that there’s something going on with Gen Z. We’re not quite sure what it was. Starting in the early 2010s, major depressive episodes in the last year for us teens. So around 2010, you know, if you’re looking at this graph on here, we’re seeing, let’s see, percentage of twelve to 17 year olds. And so it looks like to me in 2010, that was 12% of us girls were experiencing a major depressive episode and 4% of boys. By the time 2020 hits, this is kind of the spike it was 30% of girls had experienced a major depressive episode in the last year, and for boys, 12%. So while we are seeing these big increases for teen girls, we’re also seeing it for boys. If we’re going from 4% to 12% for boys, I think we can’t discount we’re also seeing it in boys, but it’s much more dramatic of a change in our girls. Again, we’re seeing a sharp increase in anxiety and depression in our undergraduate students, starting about in that 20 time. So about, you know, anxiety and depression about 10%, like 10.4 for anxiety and then 9.7 for depression. And then this only goes to about 2019. So that was before the pandemic. We’re talking about 20% of us undergraduates are saying they have a depression, and 24% endorsed having anxiety. This was super interesting. It definitely affects younger people more than older people and Gen Z harder than any other generation. If we’re looking at the us percent anxiety prevalence starting at 2010, you know, for 50 plus, your line is pretty much going to stay at that 4% mark. Like, that’s not really changing, however, for Gen Xers, which I guess would be 35 to 49. So from 2010, about 5% and then 7.8 in 2020, and then we’re seeing a more dramatic increase for whatever, 26 to 34 year olds. So from about 5% going all the way to 11%, and then we hit the skyrocket. So it looks like this chart really is almost going off the graph for 18 to 25 year olds. About 7% in 2010, all the way up to 18%. So huge, huge increases. So it’s not just self report data. So some of that, like, well, are they just self reporting more? No, we’re also seeing behavioral data. We are seeing an increase in department emergency department visits for self harm for ages ten to 14, and huge difference for difference for girls, again, going from about 100 per 100,000. And then in 20, 2634. Boys also increased a good bit from 49 to 134. They also have data for 15 to 19 year olds as well. So it’s not that they’re just going to the emergency room, they’re also being hospitalized more, which is reflective of more severe symptoms. Girls that are hospitalized for self harm, huge increase from 2010, so 14 per 100,000 people, all the way to 113. And they’re just also showing that the female emergency department visits aren’t unique to adolescent girls. And so, just thinking about boys, the rate of suicide is actually increased. So suicide rates for younger teens, 15 to 19, has also increased for both genders. So we’re seeing a dramatic increase of death by suicide from 2010. So about the rate of 11.7 per 100,000 individuals. And that rate increased to 14.83 and it also increased for females. The author did note that suicide rates today are higher for adolescent girls than any point that they were previously recorded. And other graphs are showing that they’re also seeing this in the UK and other places. So it’s not just an american problem, we’re seeing these rates of increase. I’m not going to give you all those statistics, but we’re seeing increases in other countries. Australia is seeing a dramatic increase, as well as New Zealand, Canada, Europe and worldwide also seeing a dramatic increase. They’re saying the crisis goes beyond mental health. It also impacts academic performance, sleep and times with friends, in person and exercise. So this is in population health. And the article was us. Trends in social isolation, social engagement and companionship. I’m not going to go through this whole article. I know the research is telling us that basically we’re spending more time alone, we’re spending more time on devices, we on average. And this was in this book, there was a graph in this book that showed how much less time we’re spending with, like, having eyeball time with people. On average. We’re spending, I think it was saying about half as much time as we did previous to the advent of the smartphone. This is really affecting the entire population. I’m going to pause here because they also put in this data on sleep. This is going to be a crazy little squirrel brain episode. Sorry, not sorry. And so they linked this sleep data graph, and this is from the monitoring the future data set. So, monitoring the future is an ongoing study of behaviors, attitudes and values of Americans from adolescents through adulthood. For each year, they have a total of about 50,008th 10th and 12th grade students that are surveyed as part of the main study. The study conducts annual follow up surveys with a subsample of each graduating class. So it’s a very large study. So these data sets are huge, which I think illustrates the point here. For 12th graders that are sleeping less than 7 hours a night from that time of about 2010, we kind of start seeing the increase more in 2013, going from about 40% saying they’re getting less than 7 hours a night. So 40% are saying that for males, 30% for females, that spikes up in 2021 to over 50% of females and over 40% of males in the 12th grade subset. I’m just going to click on this exercise one too, because I am also a certified personal trainer and I teach fitness classes and I’m always kind of looking for information on exercise. I’m going to think that they are saying it’s lower than it was. Yeah. Results are saying that age and period effects are strong and all outcome studied. Physical activity consistently decreases with age across the study period. Age trends and obesity have reversed in recent years, with older adolescents now more likely to have obesity than younger adolescents. So what happened? Why are we seeing this? So decline of the play based childhood is one of the big reasons. It starts kind of in the 1970s that social trust collapses among adults. The play based childhood starts to dissipate as parents become more fearful and overprotective and less willing to let their kids spend time with other kids unsupervised in the real world. Interesting graph we can kind of see from 1978. This increase in time spent with screen based activities, sports and homework is where kids are spending their time. And this dramatic decrease in socializing out of the home and outdoor play. This is a great graph, I think, for anyone who is parenting right now. Okay, this is us mothers. But I’m gonna say this is probably applicable to fathers as well. But the hours spent parenting per week in the US has a dramatic increase from the 1990s to post pandemic times. So our hours spent in 1970 were 13, 1980s. In the eighties, it was like, you know, for college educated and not educated was about, I don’t know, eleven to 13. That was around the time of my childhood as well. You know, I became a teenager in the mid nineties. So I always joke, you know, what was my mom even doing when I was out playing? She’s probably drinking tab and, like, reading a Cosmo and talking on the phone, and I’m outside just living my life, living my best life. And I think it was kind of this joke that they didn’t care about us. You know, they just let us go, and that was just normal because it is normal now to not do that, to not let our kids out of the house. So for college educated folks, time spent parenting per week increases to 20 hours, as opposed to around twelve, and then for less educated parents, 16 hours. So still we see that dramatic increase. And I think with lower, less education, perhaps it’s because they’re working like they’re. They’re working more, and so they don’t have as much time where they choose, you know, not to take the income hit, to provide more supervision for their children. I was just really shocked by that amount of that information that mothers actually spend more time parenting than they ever did also, you know, a big contributor, probably to burnout and this next one. And kids are starting to spend less time with each other. So meeting up with friends every day from 2010 kind of goes down from 40 minutes for girls and 44 minutes for males, all the way down to 31 minutes and 20 minutes for girls. And they were doing less stuff than they have historically done. Okay, so percent of high school seniors who had ever tried alcohol, gotten a driver’s license, had sex or worked, dramatically goes down. So those that tried got their driver’s license. So in 2010, that was, like, 74%. And then all the way down to, like, 60% in 2020, which I guess teens aren’t getting their driver’s license as much. That’s a thing that’s happening. Interesting. Tried alcohol, 71% all the way down to 60%. Having sex was 62%. Down to 57%. And those who are working around 68%. And all the way down to 57%. And I think what they’re saying on this website is that the overprotection in the real world increased, and a new and exciting virtual world opened up to kids. The old play based childhood was being replaced. And so these next graphs are the rise of the phone based childhood. The virtual world arrives. Smartphones and social media platforms are adopted faster than any communication technology before it. And so this is kind of an interesting graph, too. Like, the share of us households with specific technology. And so they’re talking about radio. So, like, by what? Like, 1950s, most people had a radio, tv, so smartphones. Most people had one by 2020. So the play based childhood officially ends as teen social lives move onto smart feel smartphone filled with social media apps. And so daily social media users. For 8th grades, that increases to. In 2014, that increased to 74.7%. And in 12th grade, that was 81%. By 2015, one in five american teen girls use the social media more than 40 hours a week. By 2023, more than 46% of teens report being online almost all the time. What do we do with that information? I think, you know, first, I felt kind of scared. You know, for someone who has a ten and eight year old and kind of on the precipice of them being exposed to social media, I am not going to have them have a smartphone at least until high school. So the recommendation on this book was no social media until 16, which I don’t know if anybody’s done that, you can let me know how your kids handled it. But I think as more and more of us kind of get this education, that especially around the time of, like, 14 and 15 year olds, social media has really dramatic effects on their mental health. And I think for you as the therapist, you as the person that is also on social media, our rates of mental health diagnoses has also increased. Not so much for 50 plus, but for those of us that are in our twenties, thirties, and forties, which the majority of people that listen to the podcast, those that squarely wear this audience, is. We are in that range. If I’m thinking of burnout, what’s happened with social media, what’s happened with the mental health rates? I think this certainly has something that we need to look at. So some of the recommendations. Another book that I’m reading, that slow productivity was to really lament our consumption of social media. Essentially, he’s. And this is Cal Newport’s book on slow productivity. He was talking pretty much about make your phone what the iPhone was designed to be like back in 2010. So when it first came out, it was really supposed to be the communication tool. So we can text people, we can call people, we can also look things up online anywhere. So we have the information at our fingertips. The problem with social media is that we immediately get that dopamine hit. We mindlessly go there, and then we are living our lives essentially online. We’re constantly online, which doesn’t allow our brain to rest. So if we’re not allowing our brain to rest, and for me, as a certified brain injury specialist who work with really overwhelmed brains, I really had to help people and educate them on how the phone might be adding to their cognitive fatigue and how they wanted to limit or reduce as much as possible their screen time. I understand they want to communicate and connect with other people, but if these rates of mental health tell us anything is that social media does not make us feel more connected. So if it’s not making us feel more connected, what is it actually doing? It’s making us feel addicted, essentially. I mean, that’s what we’re seeing in the research. We’re addicted to the phones. And we know, I think everyone pretty much knows, that the phone is addicting. These apps are addicting. The algorithm is designed to make you spend more time on these apps. If they’re designed in that way, then we have to design our lives in a way that helps to protect our brains from that and our kids brains from that. So I think I’ll kind of look at some of the recommendations that he puts in place for our teens and for just humans in general, because I think it’s helpful. So they give recommendations for parents of young children ages zero to five. So basically, I think, you know, in chapter three of this book, they talk about that attachment theory tells us that children need a secure base, a reliable and loving adult who will be there for them when they need. But the function of the base is to be a launching point for adventures to be off base. So where the valuable learning most likely happens, those adventures are going to happen with other children in free play. And when children play with a mix of ages, learning is deepened because the children learn best. So older children can benefit from interacting with younger children. Your own interactions with your child don’t have to be optimized. We don’t have to have all these enriching experiences. You know, think of the eighties moms with drinking tab and watching magazines. They were good enough. We know the research on good enough parenting that as long as we meet the basics of what our kids need, we don’t have to create the play experiences that they need to have. They need to do that on their own. And I think that’s one of the premises of this book, is that all of our working as parents to try to have these experiences is actually more detrimental to our kids, even though we’ve kind of been socialized to think that we’re doing the right things. And also just pay attention to your own phone habits. So what you do often matters far more than what you say. So not giving continuous partial attention to both your phone and your child is important. Trust your young children’s deep desire to help out so letting them help, letting them have some responsibility is really helpful. So their expert advice on screens is clear. So from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry until 18 months of age, limit screen use to video chatting along with an adult between 18 and 24 months old. Screen time should be limited to watching educational programming with their caregiver for two to five. Limit non educational screen time to about 1 hour per weekday and 3 hours on weekend days. Six and older. Encourage healthy habits and limit activities that include screens. Turn off all screens during family meals and outings, and learn about using parental controls. So for parents of children six to 13, this was really helpful for me to hear. So if you’re a parent, I just want to empower you that we’ve been socialized to keep our kids in the house and this book is really encouraging us to let the kids out. Practice letting your kids out of your site without them having a way to reach you. While you cook dinner for your friends. Send your kids out with theirs with the grocery list to pick up more garlic, even if you don’t need it. Let your kids out of sight, untethered and that you will come see this is doable and it’s great. And they encourage you to hold off on giving them a phone. You could give the kids a note that shows they have your permission to be without you. So I’m thinking of having my kids get put themselves on the bus for next year. I have a third and a fifth grader. I think I have to talk to the bus driver about it. Like, hey, this book is telling me they need to do this. They need to have more independence. One is almost eleven. I think they can manage it. I think they can get on the bus. What if they miss? They come back home, I’m late to work, whatever. Make it work right. Encourage sleepovers and don’t micromanage them. Although if the phone, if the friend brings a phone, hold onto it till the friend leaves. So they’re not having a phone based sleepover. Makes sense. Encourage walking to school in a group. It can begin as early as first grade if the walk is easy and there’s an older child to be responsible. Safe routes to schools and organization that can help make sure there are stop signs, bike paths, crossing guards, and so on so to allow kids to get to school. I remember doing this so I can’t remember the age I started walking to school, but I was a walker for my entire elementary school and middle school. So no one drove me to school. No one walked me to school. I feel like I remember my mom walking to me to school as a kindergartner. But again, they’re saying first grade, so maybe around that first grade mark is a good time, like, practice the route for my kiddos. They’re fine. I, they know where to go. I’ve yelled at them about the road, like, don’t go on that road. It’s like 50 miles an hour. Stay back. You know, have to let it, let them go. Another idea, if you drop kids off with other kids at a spot that is five minutes away from school, let them walk the last leg by themselves. Cool. After school is for free play. Try not to fill up most afternoons with adult supervised enrichment activities, like sports. Find ways that your children can hang out with other children, such as joining play club or going to each other’s homes after school. Going camping. I thought this was a cool idea, going camping, because oftentimes it’s really normalized for kids when you’re camping to just roam. So I’m hopeful that we can do some more camping before the summer’s out so my kids can just roam and be practiced, like letting them kind of have a run of the place. Also, another idea is to find a sleepaway camp with no devices or safetyism. So safetyism is really, you know, over protecting kids that they don’t really need it. They need time to do these quote unquote, risky things that we usually did in childhood to experiment and to kind of have their own ways to socialize. Another idea is forming child friendly neighborhoods or play burhoods. Even if your neighborhood feels empty today, it doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. You can find one other family to join. You can take simple steps that will activate common desires among neighbors and reanimate the blocker neighborhood. Organize a block party with some activities for kids. So that’s really cool. I like those ideas. He says. The cure for such parental anxiety, like when we worry about our kids, you know, like for me, thinking about what my, my rising fifth and third grader putting themselves on the bus. And I fear, like, them getting too close to the road or making a bad choice, getting hit by a cardinal is exposure. So we know this as therapists, right? It can take a few times. Just realize that all of our kind of worrying will be assuaged eventually when they’re able to do the thing that we want them to do. Basically, less is better experience on screens for children in elementary and middle school. So there are time limits for eight to twelve year olds. That’s where I am with my kids is that they spend between four to 6 hours a day on recreate. So it could depend on the context, social media, video games, chats, tv and so forth, so forth and context, time of day, multitasking and so on. They encourage us to learn how to use parental controls and content filters. Focus on maximizing in person activity and sleep, then on total screen hours. So sleep is super important, providing clear structure for the day and the week, and look for signs for addiction and problematic use, which is in the book for teens. Again, we’re going to increase their mobility. I mean, that was huge. They’re talking about, we just need to let them have more independence because on the whole we’ve been prone to safetyism, of increased safety for our kids when actually they are safer than ever. So there’s research that there are less child abductions, there’s less harm happening to children, but still, we’re still protecting them from things that aren’t harming them. So increase their mobility. Rely more on your teen at home, so really giving them more responsibility. Encourage them to find a part time job. Find ways for them to nurture and lead, such as being a babysitter, camp counselor or coach. Consider a high school exchange program. Find bigger thrills in nature. Let your teens go on bigger, longer adventures with their friends, with a group, backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking. Consider programs that run a month long or with organizations such as outward bound, etcetera. Another suggestion is to take a gap year after high school. Many people go directly from college without any sense of what else is out there. So can they get a job and save up money? Travel? Volunteer? So definitely teen years should be a time of loosening restrictions on as they mature. When you transition your teens from basic phones to smartphones, talk with them and monitor how the transition is going. Continue to set parameters within which they have autonomy, such as maintaining family rules without phones and when they can and cannot be used. Teens high school students are more likely to be sleep deprived than middle school students. So help your team develop a good evening routine where the phone is removed from the bedroom and they at a set time each night. Okay, so that’s an overview, a really squirrely overview of this book. I just wanted to reflect some of the information about, for people who are parents, you know, I heard some feedback that some of you guys are interested in hearing more about the parental burnout piece of your own burnout. So for me, part of my burnout, it happened in the pandemic. My kids were preschool age and kindergarten, and I went from seeing clients on telehealth to going at home, where we didn’t have a lot of support at that time, I just found that wherever I was, I was on. You know, when I got off of the screens at work, when I was on as a therapist, I wasn’t on as a mom. And I think that’s that constant caring that can be part of our compassion fatigue. We’re not only caring for clients, we’re caring for our kids. When we get home, I have to be able to emote at home with my kids and not kind of crumble into the ball and get into a black hole of Netflix and wine, which is maybe what my brain wants to do, but I can’t do because I have kids who need me to be present for them. And so that was a huge piece of my burnout. As they’re getting older now, I think certainly I’m wary of messing them up with screens or doing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing. So I think it’s constant pressure on us to feel like we’re getting it right as parents and also as a therapist. And sometimes I think it just. It’s too much caring that we’re doing. And so being able to have time in your week where you can put that down, have one day where your kids are in school, and you don’t have to care for anybody, you don’t have to do therapy, you don’t have to care for them, if that’s possible for you, if it’s an afternoon, whatever it is, having touch points where you feel like you can get some deep rest from Carrie. So, also, what I’m taking from this anxious generation is that I know we’re also impacted by social media. And I was just looking at some posts on LinkedIn because that’s where I met, you know, that’s where I do my social media promotion. I was struck how therapists now feel like they have to constantly be on and updating their content for social media to be marketing, which really wasn’t something I had to do when I first started. So I started in my private practice in 20. What was it? 2012, 2013, something like that. 2013. And it really wasn’t a thing. Like, people. Therapists weren’t posting on wherever they posted, I don’t think, really think. Instagram was huge then. Not really. So people weren’t really posting about their practice. They were doing traditional ways of marketing. They were meeting with a group of other therapists. They were going to doctors offices. You know, for me, I trained in this area, so I got a lot of referrals from where I trained. And so keeping those referral sources alive were some of the biggest things where I found clients. I also found them from psychology today. I know people have said that doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know if it works anymore. And I was insurance based when I started, but I did transition off panels and I found some people would typically fine, they would want to come to me for my specialties if they paid private pay. So, you know, if they found my specialty in brain injury and trauma, they really wanted that, or if they wanted EMDR in general, they come for that. But typically it was my specialty they were looking for. I digress. But I hope you’ve gotten something out of this episode about the anxious generation and how it’s impacting potentially you as a parent with the people you work through or yourself, because I feel like it was some useful information for all of us. All right, so later on in the month, I really don’t have much of a plan. I’ve been interviewing a lot of guests, but I am excited to get a burnout story to you, hopefully next week, and then maybe I’ll do an encore episode. I’m going to take some time off, and then I’m going to have a episode on termination and ghosting, which I feel like added to my burnout a lot. I talked about clinician grief a good bit on the podcast, maybe just one episode. So I feel like talking about it still is really helpful because I don’t see clinicians talking about when they lose a client either to death, death by suicide, or when they’re ghosted, which can be feel really bad, too. So I think talking about that and how we can get support for each other because we don’t talk about it much. I know no one talked about it in my training when it happened to me, like when I lost a client, for example, I really felt like there was no support for that. I mean, I talked with my husband, who is a psychologist and consulted, talked to my therapist. I did those things, but I feel like I needed more through that. Yeah. So that’s kind of the focus for the month, and then we’ll, we’ll continue on. All right, so find me on LinkedIn if you’re there. I also have a couple of freebies if you want those. I’m just going to put my link tree in this week, which gives you my link to my money guide for therapists who are done with one to one, and we can go from there. All right. Have a good one.
Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Joy after Burnout podcast. Be the first to hear new episodes by following the podcast in your podcast player. This is an informational podcast only. Any information expressed by the host or guest is not a substitute for legal, medical, or financial advice.
