Dr. Lisa Strohman: Screen Time Can Be As Addictive As Gambling

0:01 do you have any sense of how frequent we have violent Tantrums being thrown when devices are taken away I would say if devices taken away from any level of child that's had access to it without the boundaries put on I would say it's it's very common I would say probably 80% of my families that come in or have have experienced that and what do this look like give me some of the horror stories uh doors being kicked in by

0:28 children where parents have locked themselves in into their bedroom kids who have threatened gotten Knives Out of kitchens saying that they're going to kill their parents children telling their parents that they were going to go kill themselves and it was going to be on their hands it gets very very dark very quickly because you're taking away something that that to them is almost like an appendage to their life it's their whole world it's their whole world

0:50 are there strategies to mitigate that heading in if you're if you feel like there's a chance that this might be the response what do you do yeah so I I mean I've created so many different things but like I do like this digital detox kind of program where I'm like you can't just go from everything to nothing think of the non-stick pans we all use them and then all of a sudden they were like toxic or you know we're not supposed to

1:10 use them I'm still using them right well I might get the cancer what are you going to do right we get the noge I like eggs with less oil yeah go yeah thought ceramic fine so but when you learn something and now you're you've been educated on it it's like how do we bring someone with us we talk about it and we sit down and we're like hey let's look look at these things and I think a lot

1:31 of it's going to come from our parents just taking the time to sit down and say hey like let's look at how this looks like for everybody else in society we're no different we're in the same boat yeah here's my screen time I'm doing too much why don't we try to do this like let's create a goal at the end right like if we can manage to do this at the end of that let's say we use our screen time

1:52 less than two hours a day or our kind of junk screen time right the gaming and the social and all of that stuff let's do less than two hours a day that's what we sign actually shows like we're not going to damage yeah we're not going to have structural or neurochemical like impact if we can reduce it to that then hey how about at the end of the month we take a trip do something fun with that you want

2:11 to do bound it with like some sort of tether we want to a reward for that for them and and how do we attach what we need as people into that right we need to have connection we need to have people around us and maybe it's hey I'll take you and your friend to the water park or to whatever something not on screen yeah we'll go to Dave and Busters yeah is that still a thing does that exist it is

2:34 I think it is yeah nightmare in a box digital detox is there a digital methadone is there a thing take this away but give you this other slightly addictive thing that's not as bad for you well kind of to me it's time and like replacing it with things that are of equal value to them which is hard if they used it too long right I mean there are things that you can do there's a great reset summer camp does like a

3:01 whole program he's a great guy and he basically goes to a campus and he does a whole digital detox like with the kids and they have like no access but it's super expensive yeah it's super expensive and it's almost like a kind of a rehab for kids what is happening is and this is no joke rehab centers are actually creating Pathways to bring in people in order to be in that same kind of 12-step program with these addicts which I think

3:27 is a total nightmare like you do not want your kid to do that in my opinion cuz now we're taking a tech addict and we're introducing them to maybe a fentanyl addict like probably not a great idea it's already hard enough as parents I wouldn't do that path I think that the interim of the methadone piece right is if I'm using my phone this many hours Let's just try to do it a third of that and let's just see if we can do

3:49 that for a week right can we put some time restrictions on it I've got my 20year olds right they'll put in I'm like how much are you using your Instagram right and my patients and they're like 6 hours a day I'm like let's try to like pull that back right and so they learn that they can put like a reminder on and they're like my gosh this is so easy and then all of a sudden it doesn't seem as onerous to them and

4:10 they start to make choices and they're like you know what I'm just not grabbing it all the time like I'm thoughtful like I want to check it in the morning I want to check it this time it's almost giving them power back and you just can't go from everything to nothing particularly with an adolescent mindset or a young child you have to do kind of piece it back and be kind of tricky it's like putting the veget vegetables in the food

4:30 when they don't know it's there yeah it's it's it's put a little cheese on it right right blend the cauliflower into the potatoes yeah um was there a moment for you where this came into sharp Focus where it became clear that kids experience and interactions with technology was playing such a devastating role in their lives it starts way before I was in The Graduate School program JD PhD I was at the FBI I happened to be assigned in quanico in

4:59 the Pro filing unit and so I was working in casu child abduction serial killer unit uh I was doing homicidal uh it was terrifying I was looking at these white Vans picking up kids right that's what we all thought was the danger zone uh at the time Louis free was the director and he was like hey we we could use your help women are getting abducted would you be a visiting scholar and so I came on with national

5:21 center missing exploited children and so I was there doing my research and like I got into this unit and Coline happened and when Coline happened which was the the first national like great tragedy I think that we we all kind of paid attention to that's when I saw Harris and cold and what they had posted online and then 20 years later if I look at that that was the Genesis for me cuz I sat there in the room with these agents

5:47 listening to these profilers and I thought oh my God nobody is paying attention to how technology is influencing psychology and how psychology will be influenced back and that's where it started for me what was it about that event that had a technology component where we are developing as people and as children specifically we need to find purpose we need to find our value who am I am I going to be loved these are all just very very developmental phases that we

6:17 have to go through and so these kids are looking at that and even today we have what we call columbiners and it is an ability to come in and jump in and be a part of something so that's the part that I saw looking at quars down in DC 100 agents pretending to be young kids online and pet was trying to pick them up and I just thought a catfish yeah cat fishing in the beginning like and and it

6:39 was wow yeah it was right in the beginning all horrible I know know I know you were basically working in hell is what you're saying oh I had night terrors my husband was like thank God we don't have weapons in the home like from A Soulful place it was it was very tragic that's what has empowered me to like help others I think that there's ways to step out of it to come back to the technology part I'm be a little more

7:00 skeptical in a lot of ways than probably I would otherwise be because I'm such a tech lover so I'm like no it's not the tech it's the people what were those two broken young men doing online that you think played this causal role I think we both can be right I think we like I don't think that we have to say that it is 100% Tech because it is also people and it's fundamentally is do I belong

7:25 and so when you look at these two gentlemen they were isolated they were ostracized they were not accepted by their peer group there's a lot of work now we look at incels inv voluntary celibate groups um young men follow same principle of they just need to feel needed if I wh back and say all right on a campus if we had 1500 kids at a high school let's say and there's problem number one yeah and there's a cohort

7:49 right like of of maybe the the jocks and then the Nerds and the whoever right but you had a place and you belonged to a place so if you fast forward to today you look at our kids today they're competing against 5 billion people online every day how do how do you find a place and how do you matter so that's what I saw back then in the very beginning that was like these kids just want to matter and they're trying to

8:15 find a voice you bristle at using the term technology addiction so I actually want to take a little time and get your definitions of things because I think we throw words like addiction around a lot so I guess first is like how do you define technology so alltech is not developed equal as you know so I look at technology and I say all right is technology kind of like a food pyramid so on the base of it do we have

8:38 educational media do we have literary media do we have all of those things the top of the pyramid the donuts and the ice cream and all the stuff that we really really love like we just need to limit that kind of media there is a lot of good that Tech can bring I can take a class of kids or a group of kids and I can take them to mchu Picchu and we can walk through some of the most beautiful

8:59 places on Earth with a headset and never got on a plane so there's a lot of really good purpose that we can find in Tech so you know I'm I'm not going to vilify it all but I think you're not a full Luddite I'm no I'm not no no and then how do you think about addiction and we talked about this with Dr Drew who introduced us give me a functional definition of addiction so addiction is

9:19 a dependency or something that we need in order to move forward right and there's substance addictions and there's process addictions so the substance addictions are pretty easy we're putting something into our body a process addiction is actually something that we're participating in so gambling technology all of those things that that's a process it's the same dopamine reward pathway in your brain that gets highlighted and gets excitatory but it's different than the substance addictions and our friend Drew and I we've talked

9:46 for years about is the kids getting wired in at this early age of technology that dopamine push is that priming them and getting them ready for more substance-based addictions which is what we're trying to find out now is there a higher level of addiction so that's how I look at it and how I explain it I just personally hate labeling kids I am anti- label psychologist in my practice and because I think people aren't to be

10:10 trusted they'll they'll live up to that label if you give it to them there is this really weird feedback loop with labels I hate them too is that something that uh psychologists just love to do like why does that happen so much I think you have to look at the money we have the diagnostic statistical manual that's our Bible in Psych DSM 5 now right right and you look at it and it's ridiculous if you look two versions back

10:33 homosexuality is a disease process really like are we do are we getting it right every time why are we doing that right so I look at it as a guide for insurance because Insurance Works off the DSM insurance pays off the DSM and so it's this framework to help us understand as professionals like this group of something could be an issue like Spectrum Disorder which used to be autism right we're not going to call it that we're going to call it Spectrum

10:58 Disorder because 's this is a myriad of different issues that we could have we don't have to like label it in these different categories so I think it's a guideline but personally I'm a probably not the typical psychologist but the only reason why you would have to do that is because you're going to get it for insurance based reasons in order to get reimbursed and get paid and so that's what irritates me because I just think that we we cannot abandon that

11:23 generation and say Here's your label you need to learn how to live in it if you like this clip you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at dad Saves America so be sure to hit the like button subscribe and ring that Bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week