[JOE SANOK] Right around the corner on April 13th, 2023 at 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, I am partnering with Dr. David Hall on Three Therapist Secrets to Making Money in Continuing Ed Trainings, how continuing education income from in-person and online offerings is more achievable than you might think. It’s going to be live April 13th at 2 o’clock Eastern and it’s going to be hosted by PsychMaven. I’m so excited about this. Please sign up over at joe.mavenwebinar.com. Again, that’s joe.mavenwebinar.com. This is The Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 862. [JOE] I’m Joe Sanok, your host and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. What a couple of months we have had. We, back in February, did a bunch of interviews all around starting a solo practice. Then we followed people’s journeys into starting a group practice, and then we had a bunch of group practice bosses that were just kick and butt in private practice and growing their group practices. It’s so exciting to see. Just a few weeks ago we wrapped up Level Up Week where we did over 20 webinars in one week helping you with all those different phases of practice and our community is just bursting at the seams and Next Level Practice, Group Practice Launch, Group Practice Boss and Audience Building Academy. So really exciting things that are happening. I’m actually, right now I’m getting really geared up because next week, so about a week from now in April, I have a bunch of people that are flying into Northern Michigan and we are going to be doing two, a two-day intensive together, so about 10 people. They’re going to be hanging out in my living room. We’re going to dig into their practices. Some of them were doing consulting with me, other folks just bought a ticket for that and it’s going to be so awesome. My friend owns a hotel just a mile down the road and they give us a great deal and they’re bringing people over to the house and it’s just, it’s so much fun when I do these two days, I think this is my third or fourth one that I’ve done where I just host it in my house and we start 20 minutes after my daughters are in school and then we end about 20 minutes before they get home and we just do some awesome planning. So that’s coming up soon. So all sorts of fun stuff happening here over at Practice of the Practice headquarters. Well I am so excited to introduce you to my friend Gloria Mark, who is a chancellor professor at University of California Irving. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and Psychology and studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives, examining multitasking, interruptions and emotions. She’s published over 200 articles and in 2017 was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy, which recognizes leaders in the field of human computer interaction. She’s presented her work at South by Southwest at the Aspen Ideas Festival and her research has appeared in popular media like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, and many others. Her book Attention Span just came out and presents the science of attention plus solutions for regaining focus with our personal technologies. I’m so excited about this conversation today not just as someone that uses technology or as a podcaster, but also as a dad; I have daughters that have iPads. [JOE] So Gloria, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. So glad that you’re here today. [DR. GLORIA MARK] Thank you so much for having me. [JOE] Well, I want to just first hear how’d you get into exploring technology and screens and attention span and psychology? Like how did that all come together for you? Because it’s such a needed niche, but it’s also a very unique niche. So like how did that all come together for you? [DR. GLORIA] So one of my favorite sayings is Chance Favors’ the prepared Mind. So when I graduated with my Ph.D., I was pretty open to working in a research institute. I didn’t feel like I had a need to go into academia. Most people who come out of cognitive psychology programs go into academia. There was a job that I heard about, which was looking, it was a company called EDS (Electronic Data Systems) that was looking for a psychologist to study people’s tech use. At the time, they were interested in testing out new group, new hardware and software to support groups in meetings. My dissertation was in group decision making and it was just a great fit. When I visited there, I was just blown away. I felt like I had stepped into the future and I thought, this is so exciting that this is where I want to be. So that’s how I got into tech. Then I later worked at a research institute, this was in Germany met my husband and we moved to Germany and then we decided to come back to the US and I entered academia. So it was the year 2000 and I had already been studying tech use and human behavior for a few years and then I started noticing something interesting about myself. This was the year 2000, and I noticed that I was just tethered to my computer screen. It was so hard for me to get away and I would grab lunch and come right back to the screen. At the same time, I also noticed that it was hard for me to focus on any single screen. I kept switching screens, I was switching projects, I was checking email, I was surfing the web. So I was asking myself, what’s going on? Am I the only one experiencing this? I started talking to other people and other people started reporting the same thing. So being an empiricist and someone who likes to collect data, I thought I’m going to study this empirically and see to what extent people actually do have a hard time focusing on any screen when they use their devices. Back in 2004 and again, we were using objective measures. We found people’s attention to average about two and a half minutes on any screen, which astounded me. But we kept examining this and computer logging techniques were invented, these were quite sophisticated, so we could actually use this software in the background, of course with consent of everyone so we could actually look at how long people stayed on screens. In the last five years, it averaged about 47 seconds. So our attention spans have been diminishing over the years. Around 2011, 2012, it was about 75 seconds so attention spans are going down and it’s been replicated also by others as well. [JOE] What would you say is the impact of having a shorter attention span specifically on screens? [DR. GLORIA] Well, it relates to stress. We know from decades of laboratory research that when people are shifting their attention among different tasks, we know that blood pressure rises. There’s a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed. In my research we’ve had people wear heart rate monitors and looked at the correlation with the, what the computer logs were showing in terms of screen switching. We see very strong correlation between stress and screen switching. Then we ask people their perceived stress. So we use well-validated questionnaires, if you’re familiar with Cohen’s perceived stress scale, and we find that people’s perception of their stress is consistent with all these other measures. So it definitely has an impact. I’ll mention in terms of performance, performance suffers. It takes longer to do tasks when you’re switching your attention away from them to do something else and people make more errors. [JOE] Wow. So I know one thing that you and I were talking about is the idea of digital detox or setting up blockers on some of the apps. Are there, like what are your thoughts on those things? [DR. GLORIA] Additional detox sounds good, and I know a lot of people currently are talking about doing digital detoxes. It’s like going on a crash diet. You go on a crash diet and it works for a while, but then people inevitably go off diets and then they go right back to their habits. I am an advocate of changing behaviors so that people can have agency over their attention when they’re using their devices. The ship has sailed. We live in a technological world. It penalizes people to block themselves from technology. They cut off connections with family, friends, loved ones. If you’re a knowledge worker of any kind, you need to have, to be connected to get work communications, to get information about the organization. So it’s just not feasible. I am an advocate of changing our behavior, so we have a permanent solution for how we use our devices. You mentioned, Joe, you mentioned the idea of software blockers for blocking distractions. I’m also not an advocate for using this software. You’re taking the agency away from the person and the software becomes a proxy agent for the individual. Again, I would rather have the individual be the one in charge. We’ve done studies where we examined the effect of using these software blockers. A software blocker is basically blocking any site that might distract you, so blocks your social media, blocks, your news sites, your shopping sites, whatever it is. But we find that there are differences, there are individual differences. Of course there are, everything has individual differences. We’re unique in our personality traits, but people who have good self-regulation skills actually get hurt by this blocking software because it takes away their ability to take breaks on their own. It takes away their ability to enact their own agency. What happens is they tend to work straight through without taking any break and we found that it made these types of individuals more stressed, exhausted, even burned out because they just didn’t stop working. Now, it did have a benefit for people who have poor self-regulation skills, and again, the software was doing the work for them. But for these individuals, I would much rather have individuals learn how to take command of their own ability to be able to control their attention and resist distractions. [JOE] What do you think about the argument that people would make against that idea specifically around like ad blockers that these big tech, these big apps, technologies that they’re using AI on such a level to just make our brains explode like we’re in a casino, and that for us to even try to just learn the self-regulation that it’s just near impossible? Like what would you say to someone that would make that argument, that’s pro ad blocker, pro using technology to not allow yourself access to certain types of things? [DR. GLORIA] Well, to be clear, I am for using ad blockers. I do think that using, that blocking ads is very useful thing to do. I use ad blockers, so I’m not in favor of just having all targeted ads coming to us. So the software blockers I’m talking about are sites like blocking social media or news sites or even for some people they might restrict their checking email. Those are the software blockers that I don’t think are very useful. But I will say this, that we found that roughly half the time, 49% of the time, people interrupt themselves. So interruptions originate from within the individual. We have external distractions, we have notifications, phone calls, other people who interrupt us, but half the time it’s something within an individual and urge, a memory to do something, or a habit to get to keep checking an automatic reaction to say, seeing their phone, to check their phone. So half the time the interruptions come from within the individual, [JOE SANOK] Starting with 2020 ones Killin’It Camp we started hearing from so many of you about your dreams of creating new sources of income outside of the traditional practice setting. Particularly, we saw a lot of interest about learning about new income streams that could really scale. So with all that in mind, I wanted to see if you might join me live for a free webinar. Dr. David Hall with PsychMaven was a recent guest of mine on the podcast. In our episode we talked about David’s passion for doing therapist continuing education trainings, and how these can provide an amazing scalable income. I’m going to be live with David for this exclusive Practice of the Practice webinar. It’s called Three Therapist Secrets to Making Money Through Continuing Ed Trainings. It’s how continuing education income from in-person and online offerings is way more achievable than you might think. It’s going to be live on Thursday, April 13th, 2023 at 2 o’clock eastern, 1 o’clock Central, Noon Mountain, and 11 o’clock Pacific. It’s going to be hosted by PsychMaven. Even if you can’t make it for the live webinar, we are going to have replays available. David is an expert in this area and I am so excited to be partnering with him on this. Please sign up over at joe.mavenwebinar.com. Again, that’s joe.mavenwebinar.com. Also, it’s free. [JOE] So I want to go with different phases of life and talk through what you would say would be good boundaries to help improve attention span and also maybe things that we can do proactively. Being a father of eight and 11 year old girls, this is top of mind, my 11 year old just got her first cell phone at Christmas and it’s one of those like gab phones, so it just has texting and calling. But like we signed a contract and talked through what it is that she wants to get out of it and I don’t want to have tons of rules around it. I want her to be able to have some of that autonomy while also saying there’s times when you just don’t use your cell phone. Like, if my parents are over we’re not going to sit on our phones during that time. So when you’re looking at elementary students and tweens and teens, what are recommendations that you have around just what parents can do, what they shouldn’t care about, what they should care about? How would you dive into that topic? [DR. GLORIA] Yeah, that’s such a great question. So kids, their executive function is not yet mature and it’s still developing. The executive function helps people control distractions. It helps regulate what people do. For young kids to be exposed to technology at such a young age before their executive function is mature, is just not a good idea. I am very much in favor of limiting screen time for kids and getting kids exposed to play, that’s offscreen. My kids were raised without TV. We actually, we would show them films, but we controlled the films they saw and how often they saw them and as a result, they learned how to read. So I think it’s so much better to expose children to books and get them to read whatever the books are, children’s books and get them to learn to love reading. because if they don’t have enough time, enough exposure to books or to things offscreen, then it’s so easy for them to get involved with the world’s largest candy store, the internet. So yeah, so my recommendation is to really limit screen time. I mean, the other thing is we’re seeing a lot more instruction being delivered online to young kids. During the pandemic there was a lot of online instruction given, and if kids don’t learn the necessary skills to be able to focus and control their attention, it’s too easy for them to be distracted by other things on the screen. [JOE] Are there hard and fast rules in regards to how much screen time a kid should have? [DR. GLORIA] I had there, there was a colleague of mine and he had a rule for his son, which was 30 minutes of screen time. I really liked that rule. I liked it very much because you can say to your child okay, if you clean your room, then you get your 30 minutes of screen time, or you can decide and you can coordinate with your child when that 30 minutes of screen time would be. Now I mentioned our kids watched films, and that was a family event. we all watched the films once in a while. If they were children’s films, then my kids would watch them alone. But we always controlled the content of what they saw. But if it’s just screen time that’s unregulated, I would definitely limit the time. [JOE] Yeah. There, I’m glad you said 30 minutes. So each day on a school day, they get 30 minutes, and on the weekend they get 60 minutes. But things that don’t count towards that are like, if they’re doing dual lingo, which is the learning a new language or my one daughter, she enjoys making her YouTube channel. So it’s very engaging and creative for her, so things like that. But doing games or watching kids YouTube or things like that, it’s half an hour a day during the week and an hour. Are there other things before we move on from kids, tweens, teens that we should keep top of mind regarding attention span and screens? [DR. GLORIA] Well, I saw a statistic that was just mind-blowing, which is that kids are exposed to screens at very young ages, even at the age of two. It just, it teaches children that this is normative behavior to be in front of a screen. So I think we have to be very, very careful about what we’re teaching our children. Screen time should be limited. It should not be the norm and children need to learn to be very intentional when they’re in front of a screen. It’s not just something you sit in front of and you can do whatever you want, but you have a purpose. I think that’s a wonderful purpose that your daughter is doing her own YouTube channel. So I’m very much concerned of the exposure to children such young ages, and especially for long periods of time. I would like to see that change. [JOE] Well, I mean, basically I have this podcast to make myself feel better about myself and my parenting. So thanks for affirming that. I appreciate it. Well, let’s talk about adults so people that are business owners that are listening that are they’re busy, they’re parents. What should adults think through when it comes to screens and attention span? [DR. GLORIA] Yeah, so there are things that people can do to develop agency. One of the things that you can do is to become aware of your automatic actions. We have all automatic actions when we use our devices. We’re just habituated to picking up our phone when we look at it, when we’re, to checking email or checking news or social media. The goal is to make these unconscious or automatic actions to bring them to our conscious awareness. We can do that by probing ourselves. I call this developing meta awareness, which means an awareness of what you’re doing as it’s unfolding. So it’s becoming more intentional about what you’re doing, so whenever I have the urge to say, check a new site, I ask myself, do I really need to do that right now? Why do I need to do it? It’s usually because what I’m doing is boring or I might not have any good reason to do it. It’s just a habit. But when I ask myself that question, when I probe myself, it can help stop me in my tracks and get me back on course. Sometimes I do have a need for a break, and it’s okay to do some simple activity. In fact, I find that doing simple road activities can relax people whether it’s online or offline. My favorite activity is I play this anagram game, which is really simple, but it relaxes me and I do it strategically when I need to pull back from work and replenish and then I do it to calm myself. But I have to be very strategic because I can’t be on there for a long time. We can’t do these rote activities for long periods of time. We have to probe ourselves to know when we feel refreshed, and then it’s time to get back to work. The best break of all is to take a walk in nature, absolutely the best thing we can do. But it may not, circumstances may not allow, getting up walking around is a great break. It’s a great way to refresh, but it’s also just not bad to do some simple road activity as a way to pull away from work, get yourself replenished. One, one other strategy that I find works very well is the idea of practicing forethought. What that means is considering how your current actions are going to affect your future self later in the day. So if I’m going to spend 30 minutes on social media, what is my day going to look like at 10:00 PM? So I want to envision this very clearly. Am I going to be sitting on my couch and reading my favorite book, or watching my favorite show, drinking a glass of wine, feeling fulfilled, like I accomplished what I wanted to or am I still going to be working on my overdue report on that deadline? So, thinking ahead think about our future selves a few hours later in the day, and think how your current actions will impact that. [JOE] How much does a mindfulness based like hobby help with that, like meditation or really focusing on awareness? Because I know for myself, the more that I’ve meditated. Initially there’d be all these thoughts that come into my brain and that monkey brain, and now it’s getting a little better. But even just walking back from dropping off my daughter at school in the morning I’ll be walking through the snow and thinking, okay, just stay focused on the moment and then within 10 seconds I’m thinking about my day or about the coffee I want to drink and then I bring myself back. Is there research that points to the, a mindfulness-based habit or hobby helps with our attention span as part of the equation? [DR. GLORIA] Well, there is research that suggests that it can help us de-stress. When we’re de-stressed, we can focus our attention better. In general, when people feel positive, they can do more. There’s a psychological theory, it’s called the broaden and build theory, that when people feel positive, they can generate more ideas, they can take action. When you have negative thoughts, negative wellbeing people are more paralyzed and they can’t take action. So meditation in that sense, if it can create positive wellbeing can help us focus better, can help us regulate our attention better. [JOE] Well, one of the last questions that I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [DR. GLORIA] Well, the favorite piece of advice that I got was quite early on, before I went into psychology I had actually studied fine arts, and I had a remarkable teacher. He was absolutely remarkable. We had a drawing class, and we would do drawings, then we would put them on the wall for critique and one day he pointed to the absolutely worst drawing. There was one drawing that just stood out as being terrible. It was just terrible. He pointed to that, and in a booming voice, he said, “Who did that? Who did that drawing?” Nobody would fess up because nobody wanted to admit. Finally, one person admitted, it wasn’t me, it was somebody else, and he said, “Congratulations, you had the courage to fail.” He said, “All of these other drawings up here, they don’t have merit because they’re safe. They’re too safe. Nobody took a risk and you had the courage to fail. You took a risk. Congratulations.” I just, that stayed with me and I love that advice because we all need the courage to fail, to take risks and to realize that only by taking a risk can we learn something more, can we go deeper into ourselves? So that’s stayed with me. [JOE] Such a great piece of advice. Gloria, if people want to get your book, if they want to connect with you, what’s the best spot for them to find you? [DR. GLORIA] You can go to my website, which is www.gloriamark.com, it’s all one word, Gloria Mark. You can learn about the book. You can sign up for my newsletter where I talk about the topics we talked about today and also much more topics related to everything from becoming less stressed to being more productive. You can download the first chapter of the book so you can get a taste of it and see if you like it. And I would love to hear from you. [JOE] Well, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. This has just been amazing. So many great tips. So again, get the book. The book is Attention Span and you can find it wherever you get your books. Or check out the website. Gloria, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. [DR. GLORIA] Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. [JOE] I always love just talking with people that have so many different specialties that go into their interests that maybe were based in psychology, but then really specialty areas that are just so unique. As you think about dreaming big start capturing those thoughts, start diving into Ted Talks and going down those rabbit holes to just find interesting things. One thing I’ve started doing is when I’m going to a place where I’m potentially going to be bored, I will bring a book that, a tangible book that I want to read when I’m waiting around. For example recently my daughters wanted to go into Claire’s in the mall and I had my time in Claire’s in the mall when they were looking at all the glittery hair things, but they wanted more time in the Claire’s store. So I brought a book with me and to just do that instead of be on my phone, it just has helped me fill up some knowledge that maybe I wouldn’t have got a couple pages in my brain. So whatever you do, take some of this knowledge today that Gloria has given us and implement it. Also, we have some pretty awesome things coming up. So one thing is that our next Ask the Expert which is where we bring in experts. We’ve brought in Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, and some other amazing people, every single month we do this. This is open only to our communities, so people that are in our paying communities of Next Level Practice, Group Practice Launch, Group Practice Boss and Audience Building Academy. So if you are in one of those communities you get access to Ask the Expert. A small group of people come together with experts. In the first 10 minutes or so, I ask them questions and then the rest of that hour, people just ask questions of the expert. Actually, on April 19th at 1 o’clock Eastern, we’re going to be having our Ask the Expert with Gloria. So if you want to dig in after you hear this and you are in one of our member communities just make sure that you are subscribing to that calendar. Go into circle and make sure you register for the event. Make sure you get the text messages because we have some robust things going on in our membership communities. That is right around the corner. Also on April 13th, which actually let me just look at the time, let’s see, that’s going to be actually in two days, I’m going to be hosting a webinar with David Hall, so on April 13th and that’s all about how you can take your expertise and create continuing education events that you can make passive income off of on either recorded events or in-person events. So we’re going to talk about how to host your first ever continuing education event. You can register for that over at joe.mavenwebinar.com. And that’s totally free. David and I are going to be presenting how to host your first continuing ed webinar and actually back in episode 857, so just a couple episodes ago I interviewed David about his story in about hosting your first continuing ed event. So make sure you sign up for those things if you’re in our communities. If you’re not, the David Hall one is open to anyone, the one that’s Ask the expert that’s going to be just for our communities. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.