5 Ways To Create a Healthy Relationship With Technology, With Psychologist Teodora Pavković
…an international effort to link up people of different cultures. The one thing I value most in my life for teaching me emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance and the relativity of this world is the fact that I grew up in a thoroughly multicultural setting. Throughout my schooling, my 4 closest friends were all from different countries, and of different religions and ethnicities to mine. The “my way is the right way” kind of thinking had absolutely no place in my life thanks to that. So, I would enable people of very different cultures to connect and start a conversation about their differences, and similarities too. I believe that attaining this first-hand knowledge of a person whose life differs to yours makes space for a very special kind of inner peace and a kind of acceptance of differences that can’t be grasped in any other way.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Teodora Pavković, psychologist, international speaker and parenting coach who helps parents tackle the daunting task of parenting in the age of technology with emotional wisdom. She is an advocate for mindful and balanced tech-use, and has spent more than a decade working with children and parents with emotional and behavioral difficulties as well as adults with mood and anxiety problems. She recently spoke at the TEDxPickeringStreet conference in Singapore on the emerging topic of “emodiversity,” and has been interviewed and quoted on platforms such as Huffington Post, NBC News, the Tech News Weekly podcast and the Smart Social Podcast, to name a few.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your backstory?
Thank you for the invitation! My backstory is pretty colorful: I am a true third culture kid, having lived in 9 different countries on 3 continents. I have always been fascinated by human emotions and behavior, and I knew relatively early on that I wanted to become a professional brain-picker when I grew up, a.k.a. a psychologist. My academic training took me to Germany, Austria and Wales and my practical training took place in Serbia and in Singapore, which was where I first noticed the impact excessive tech-use was having on children. After recently moving to New York City I started my private practice, and my work has since been primarily focused on using emotional intelligence, neuroscience research and positive psychology practices to coach individuals and groups on the psycho-emotional impact of technology. I am particularly passionate about working with parents.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
I am struggling to find only one — I guess that must mean that I have had had a very interesting career so far! There was one experience that clearly showed me just how complex and peculiar the human brain is. While I was training at the Institute of Mental Health in Serbia, where I am originally from, a young man of about 17 came in to see me for psychological testing. Prior to meeting him I knew that he’d had some violent outbursts at home, that his parents suspected he may have been using drugs and that he had been making claims about being watched and followed. So, we suspected that he may have been experiencing an episode of adolescent-onset psychosis. I spent a couple of hours with him, part of which were spent asking him formal questions and part of which were spent having a more casual conversation. He came across as incredibly smart, ambitious, and funny — your average adolescent. Once we were done and he left the room, I called my supervisor in and with much self-assurance declared that I saw no signs of paranoia or any related symptom whatsoever. My supervisor, who had just spent some time speaking with the young man’s mother, sadly (and delicately) shared with me that, unfortunately, evidence abounded that he was in fact struggling with a number of very serious psychotic symptoms, but that, thanks to his superior intelligence he was able to skillfully mask them. This was one of my most striking experiences of “don’t believe everything you hear,” as well as “don’t ever believe that you are absolutely right.”
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?
My main project has for the past several months been launching and developing my practice here in New York City. Anyone who has ever done something like that in this city knows just how exciting that can be! I am currently working on a couple of collaborations and am putting together some new material for my teacher trainings and parent workshops. By far the most exciting project I worked on so far this year was my talk at TEDxPickeringStreet in Singapore on the topic of emodiversity.
Between work and personal life, the average adult spends nearly 11 hours looking at a screen per day. How does our increasing screen time affect our mental, physical, and emotional health?
That is an excessive amount of time to spend doing any 1 thing, especially if that thing is staring at a screen. Yes, some of that time is spent being truly engaged, but so much of it is what is called ‘passive screen time’ and what I call ‘compulsive screen time.’ One of the biggest issues I have with the way we talk about excessive tech-use nowadays is that aspects of it are glorified with the use of the term “binge.” I’m not sure how that term, associated with destructive and mentally-unhealthy behavior, got awarded a positive connotation. We don’t take pride in bingeing on food or alcohol, and I don’t think bingeing on online content is very different. To be clear, certain aspects of screen-based devices bring us great benefits — I for one am incredibly grateful for Facebook, because as a 3rd culture kid, I really didn’t have any other way of easily communicating with my friends from around the world. However, I did get to a point where I felt a strong need to very intentionally manage my time spent on Facebook; I was trying to balance spending quality time with my friends in-person and remain in touch with friends in different countries. I simply had to accept that this was impossible and that I just had to deal with the FOMO I felt as a result of that. Ultimately, if we don’t approach our devices and social media with high levels of intentionality, they will begin to run our lives. And this is not by accident — the fields of neurotechnology and neuromarketing, as well as places like the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, combined with the desire of the biggest tech companies to infiltrate every hour of our day, are rendering us completely powerless in relinquishing our tech-dependency. We are fast becoming tech zombies, and even the teenagers among us are noticing this, according to recent polls. Excessive time spent staring at screens can, in the first instance, cause head and eye aches and make us irritable, but then furthermore, if the content we are exposing ourselves to is not truly beneficial it can lead us down the path of serious psycho-emotional problems such as anxiety, inattentiveness and depression, among others.
Can you share your top five ways people can improve mental wellness and create a healthy relationship with technology?
Purpose — what is the purpose of your use of technology? Define the beginning and the end of that purpose and be cut-throat about it if you need to be, when it comes to your daily-usage but on a more macro level too. For example, if you installed Pinterest while you were planning your wedding so that you could find ideas for your bouquet, once you are done with that — uninstall the app. Be mindful about starting to use it as a time-filler or an anti-anxiety treatment; you still have the same 24h in your day that you had before you started using Pinterest.
Emotional Savviness — I teach and coach on emotional intelligence because it is a skill that is essential to every person, young and old, in order to live a truly full, meaningful and intentional life. The ubiquity of technology makes this skill all the more vital. It’s important to say that there is nothing necessarily wrong with technology itself, but the issue is that, as is the case with sugar, alcohol, cigarettes and heroin, technology is fertile ground for escapism and addition. Get to know yourself as best as you can so that you can recognize when you are using technology to merely alleviate boredom or anxiety — all that does is provide a brief fix. Shift towards using technology in an intentional way, and towards dealing with your psycho-emotional difficulties in ways that will actually help resolve them and better the quality of your life.
Social connection — lots of young people today are struggling to find the balance, between being with friends in-person and being with them in-virtuo. The generation that has been born into technology simply has no idea where that balance lies, because ‘device-in-hand’ is the norm for them. And when I use the term ‘balance,’ what I really mean is a dis-balance that favors face-to-face connection. The scales need to tip towards spending more time with people in-person because our brains can only fully develop while being directly connected to other brains.
Distraction — it is hardly uncommon to see a group of friends or a family having a meal together, with one or more members checking their device frequently. And being absent. Presence is the place where joy resides, and this is not just a phrase you will hear from holy men and women, because neuroscientific research has also shown this to be the case. Train yourself (yes, it unfortunately does require actual training) to be present and attentive when you are with your friends and family and keep your device(s) tucked away so that you can’t reach out to check it(them) every few minutes.
Resist the Pressure — the limitless nature of social media imposes on us this sense that we must be ever-present on it (here comes that FOMO again!). How many of us have felt that pang of anxiety after skipping even just one day of posting content online? I find it incredibly important to switch my detectors on for this sensation, be very mindful when it arises, and take intentional action to counter it. Breathe through it, remind yourself that there is no such thing as “having to” post anything, and go on with your day.
51% of Americans say they primarily use their smartphone for calls. With the number of robocalls increasing, what are ways people can limit interruptions from spam calls?
This is a question that will probably be better answered by someone more tech-savvy than myself! I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a start-up out there working on this very issue right now. In my case, I get around it by keeping my phone on silent at all times, and not answering calls from unknown numbers — whoever needs to reach me will find other ways to do so. Thanks to technology, there is no shortage of ways!
Between social media distractions, messaging apps, and the fact that Americans receive 45.9 push notifications each day, Americans check their phones 80 times per day. How can people, especially younger generations, create a healthier relationship with social media?
The exciting thing is that they seem to be tuned-in to this issue far more than we give them credit for. Recent research has shown that almost 50% of teenagers are aware of the fact that they are hooked on their phones, and many have even taken steps to address this. The most recent report from Common Sense Media (“Social Media, Social Life”) has given us a wealth of encouraging information, such as that almost a fifth of teenagers actually don’t use any social media at all. This is perhaps the most extreme way (and shown to have a negative impact in some cases), but it is certainly a legitimate way of avoiding the unhealthy aspects of social media use altogether. What I find to be somewhat discouraging is that the same report has shown that the preference for in-person interaction has gone down from 49% in 2012 to 32% in 2018; however, what is crucial here is the skill of emotional savviness I mentioned earlier. It is crucial to teach children how to recognize different emotions in themselves so that they can recognize that tipping point of excessive tech use so that they can step out and spend face-to-face time with their friends and family instead. So, those are perhaps the two most important ways young people can create a healthier relationship with their tech: learn to recognize and label their emotions and when they no longer feel good due to excessive tech use, seek out a face-to-face interaction with another person.
80% of smartphone users check their phones before they brush their teeth in the morning. What effect does starting the day this way have on people? Is there a better morning routine you suggest?
Well, there you have a habit that certainly doesn’t encourage presence. If you start your day with this kind of mental absence you are likely to feel tension and anxiety first thing in the morning, which then sets that precedent for the rest of your day. Especially given the fact that people do this with a certain expectation — when they pick up their phone they are waiting for that work e-mail, a reply from a friend, or to read the overnight news. There are many better ways to start your day: if you are so inclined you can do some journaling, a brief meditation, you can explore feelings of gratitude and intention-setting for the day, or if you are more inclined to high-energy activities you can go work out or go for a walk first thing in the morning. You can also speak to your partner or child, take a shower, or simply lay in bed and stretch for the first few minutes after you wake up. Leave your phone out of reach for at least the first 30min of your day.
Can you please give us your favorite life lesson quote?
So many incredibly wise things have been said about life and living! One of my favorites is a quote by Dr. Steven C. Hayes (developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) that I have on my website, which says: “If you’re waiting for yourself to feel good before you can live well, you might wait the rest of your life.” The fact that those two things — not living well and (yet) feeling good — can coexist, is fascinating to me.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
It would have to involve an international effort to link up people of different cultures. The one thing I value most in my life for teaching me emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance and the relativity of this world is the fact that I grew up in a thoroughly multicultural setting. Throughout my schooling, my 4 closest friends were all from different countries, and of different religions and ethnicities to mine. The “my way is the right way” kind of thinking had absolutely no place in my life thanks to that. So, I would enable people of very different cultures to connect and start a conversation about their differences, and similarities too. I believe that attaining this first-hand knowledge of a person whose life differs to yours makes space for a very special kind of inner peace and a kind of acceptance of differences that can’t be grasped in any other way.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
I most frequently share content via Twitter (@PsycoachTP), followed by Facebook (@1beackon) and LinkedIn. For more information about my approach and background, and to find out how to work with me, I invite them to go to my website at https://www.teopcoaching.com. They will also find my blog there.