Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist Burnout podcast, episode number 30. Hey, therapist, I’m joining you for a hot take episode. You might get these from me every once in a while. Maybe they’ll become frequent if I really get a wild hair. And I just find I’m bubbling with ideas. I am not working a ton because my school contract, which I’m about to start, is coming up next month. So it’s back to school for me, guys, maybe should have a back to school episode. At any rate, I was listening to the Tim Ferriss show, and he’s been doing, like, this ten year special where he has really influential people. And I found these episodes really, really inspirational. So he’s had on a number of different people. One of them who you probably know, Susan Cain. She wrote the book quiet. Just hearing her speak is just wonderful. I think it’s just giving us permission for those of us who have these sensitive nervous systems that may do things more slowly, just kind of are affected differently as we move through the world, that we can go at our own pace. And this idea she had was that, I think, the turning point for her with her speaking, she had a huge fear of speaking. But this idea that she had that really helped her was if there was one person that was listening to her message and if they could get one thing out of it, then that was worth it to her. And it helped her when she had to speak with, like, a group of financial experts. And she was really nervous because she was worried about, oh, there’s a lot of people, like, they’re really smart in this room. They really know what they’re talking about with regard to, you know, whatever the topic was. And so I think therapists identify a lot with this. We often struggle so much with imposter syndrome. And so I just thought, let me jump on when I can and deliver a message to you guys. So I am going to take some hot takes, basically, on the episode that I recorded. Sometimes I record a message and then my brain is, like, bubbling about the recording and I’m like, why didn’t I put that in the episode? That’s normal. So that’s maybe what the place of this is for. I did a squirrely braid episode on anxious generation, which is blowing my mind. And I really talked more about statistics and you, you know, read a lot from the book, and I was like, should I have done that? But I also just thought about the implications for you. Cause I have been thinking through my own screen time and the only implications on my mental health. I did this not so much based on anxious generation. It just so happened I started reading Cal Newport’s book, slow productivity, which I think I just need to do a whole episode on because it’s also, you know, some of the ideas there are really blowing my mind. I talked. I think I found him, and I did an episode based on the passion hypothesis. What is the book that I talked about in. So in episode 25, I talked about Cal Newport’s book so good, they can’t ignore you. And talked a lot about the passion hypothesis and how it’s leading us astray. So then I’ve been going down a Cal Newport kind of rabbit hole of all of his work, and now listening to his podcast and loving that. They kind of dovetail nicely together. So the anxious generation, which is talking about the decline of the play based childhood. And I’ve been thinking about the implications also not, I have children, so I talked about that in the episode, but the implications for the therapist, for you, for myself, you know, a lot of this stuff I’m thinking of, too, the implications on your burnout. And so I kind of rewinded the time back when the pandemic first hit. And I just remember the scrolling that we were probably all doing, just trying to find information, trying to see what new information was out there on Covid when life was going to start again. I remember washing my vegetables because they told us to do that, because we didn’t know what the virus was going to do. And my nervous system was further heightened by doing that because I was scrolling and getting this constant feed of information from my phone. The implications of that, I think, were part of. I almost don’t want to call my burnout burnout anymore. My ideas are just going crazy because my nervous system, I think, hit a limit for a reason. It was because there was so much input of information. There was collective trauma happening, a racial reckoning in our society. But thinking and connecting this point of the. The smartphone, I don’t think we had been through, say, 2010. Had we really been through anything major in our history from 2010 until coronavirus? I don’t know. I’m not a historian, although I love history. But I’m thinking, no, I’m gonna go with no. You know, I know. You know, 911, we didn’t have the smartphone. We certainly had, like, all the three level, three letter news channels, which just don’t watch them. Just any three letter news channel. Don’t go there. We’re not doing that. It’s not for you. That’s what I used to tell my clients who would come in during COVID and talk to me like, you know, this thing is happening. Nothing we need to. We’re not. The three letter news station is not for you. We’re done with that. I would say do them just like that, too. I digress. That makes me laugh. You know, I’m just transporting myself back there, washing the vegetables. I have little children, so a kindergartner, a preschooler, no childcare to speak of. And it really was the double duty of the childcare Covid, the clinical burden of my clients who were freaking out. And I really was untethered to everything that helped support me. And I felt like I had to be there for everything and everyone. And I think that was a unique place. But that’s. That’s the time we were in. Another moment of my week was going to a trampoline park. I called my brother and I was like, I don’t know when my last visit to the trampoline park is, but it’s not today. When I called him, there is like, this is about 06:00. My kids are older, so they don’t do all this anymore. But it’s just, it just brought me back kind of that time around Covid, but it was 06:00 and there was this, like, three or four year old little girl that was, like, literally beating her mother. The mother is like, red as a beet, just trying to get out there doing the football hole, carrying her daughter out there. And I was like, whoa, thank God I’m not in that place. But I think part of it also was me just with this heightened attention of me trying to not be glued to my device. And I’ll get into my recommendations and thoughts, but everyone is just staring at their phone. All the parents look so depleted in this trampoline park. The kids are having the best time. The kids are looking at their parents and wanting to say, can you watch me? Hey, mom. And they’re not looking at their kids. And it’s not one parent. It’s not like the one parent in the corner staring at their phone. It’s every single parent. I think I saw, like, one set of parents that weren’t glued to their phone nearly the entire time. I’m just pausing with that because I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like we’re parenting alone, that it’s just us. And that was so a part of, like, me going through all this. I know that someone messaged me recently that wanted me to talk more about parental burnout. And so here we are. We’re talking about it. I don’t know why I’m getting emotional with thinking about phones and parents. I think because I know what that’s causing for the parent. I know what that’s causing for the kids. I know that. I’ve been there. And that was what I was doing to kind of numb out was just scrolling on my phone. And I think I’m thinking about the time where I really wasn’t present for my kids. If I’m being honest, it really takes behaving differently than everyone else to be more present in today’s world, 100%. I know that as therapists, we are teaching other people to be more present. But we are in a world that is untethered from human presence. And of course we’re affected by that. Of course we can fall into the dopamine hits of our phone. That is normal. You’re human. And so I just wanted you to think of those implications of how it might be affecting you and maybe taking some steps to try to get untethered from this device. That’s really making us sick. So some ideas on that and implications on burnout was to reduce your time on social media apps. So I have, like, after reading Cal Newport’s book, I guess I’m doing a separate episode because this was all, like, emotional and ranty. So reduce your time on social media apps. So I’ve deleted all the apps from my phone. So if I want to look at Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, I never been big into TikTok, but I used to be more into Facebook or Instagram than I had in the past. I have to look at it on my desktop to do that. That means I’m sitting a little more on my desktop lately, I found. So I don’t know what kind of hack I’m going to have to put in there to put the guardrails on my desktop, but that’s one thing I’m doing. And another idea from his book was really to kind of. He calls it the four year method to put plug in your phone somewhere so you’re nothing. Literally carrying your phone around with you all the time. Because it’s just so, like, we don’t even think about it. We ping our phone out, we scroll the things, we press all the buttons. We’re on all the apps, so we’re doing all the things before we know it. We’ve been on our phone for who knows how long. So one of the methods to be more present is to plug the phone in or to have it be somewhere not on your person. So if it’s in, like, I carried a purse when I was at the trampoline park. I tried to keep it in the purse. Like, I took it out. I did read a little bit because I was, it was 2 hours, and so I meant to actually bring my kindle. That was another suggestion to, like, bring a book or bring a kindle. And I brought it, but then I thought I brought it, but I left it somewhere, so I was gonna bring a book. That didn’t happen, but I read a book on my phone. So, yeah. Another idea is to kind of leave the phone in the cardinal so you’re not looking at the phone. Bring a kindle if you want something to read or whatever. Use your phone’s tools to reduce your screen time. So in my Android device, I have a digital well being section where I can set screen time goals and try to reduce what I’m doing. And I think just bring awareness, like, what am I actually doing on my phone? And it gives you, like, a breakdown, like how much time you spent on each app that you are in and what you can do differently. Yeah, and the third one I wrote down was actually, I actually just talked about it. So first, like, reduce your time on those apps. Consider deleting them. Yeah, consider deleting them. Use your phones tools to reduce your screen time. The digital well being app, it was kind of interesting to. To look at that again and then use the phone for your method for your. I feel like sometimes my words go together and I don’t know if you know what I’m. For you, I’m going to have to do Google pronounce. Okay. At any rate, that is my hot take of the week. Maybe you’ll get them every week. Still not decided on that, but it’s good. So I will talk with you guys next week.
Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Joy after Burnout podcast. Be the first to hear new episodes by following the podcast and 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.
