Author: It’s Time to Log Off

Digital Detox Challenge: Will You Make This Christmas More About Presence, Than Presents?

Today, it’s not just films that portray fairytale festivities, the digital world has also arguably amplified the stress surrounding the countdown to Christmas. With countless festive adverts hitting our screens as soon as Halloween is over and hundreds of Black Friday emails flooding our inboxes in late November, the pressure and urgency to deliver an Instagram-worthy Christmas is inescapable. In the build up to the big day, we’re constantly told what to buy, wear and eat. This begs the question, if we’re facing so much pressure to deliver a flawless Christmas, how much are we actually enjoying it? It’s easy to get lost in the preparations or status of gift giving and forget that the memories made with our loved ones are what we will remember in years to come – not those we showcase on social media.

In a digital era where our smartphones have become an extension of our being and our focus is constantly pulled in multiple directions, we encourage you to give the most thoughtful present possible this Christmas; the gift of your presence. Our #PresenceNotPresents digital detox challenge returns to help you be more mindful during the festive season by switching off and giving your loved ones your undivided attention.

How to Make This Christmas More About Presence, Than Presents

Tip 1: Write Meaningful Christmas Cards

One of the first things we do in the lead up to Christmas is send cards. But, instead of writing an identical message for your long list of obliged recipients, why not take the time to pen thoughtful, personalised messages to your nearest and dearest? In the age of email and hastily written text messages, a handwritten note can go a long way.

Tip 2: Switch Off From Social Media

Give your family your full focus by taking a break from social media during the holidays. If you’re worried about FOMO, the fear of missing out, let your friends know that you’ll be offline for a few days – maybe it will even encourage them to do the same! If you know you’ll be tempted to see what’s happening on your feeds, leave your smartphone out of sight.

Tip 3: Organise Analogue Activities

With a fully festive TV schedule, who doesn’t love to batten down the hatches and enjoy a movie marathon? While cosy afternoons in are part of the festivities, the #PresenceNotPresents challenge is all about making time for analogue activities where you can really engage with your loved ones. From Christmas baking to board games and walks, there are many ways to spend time together that doesn’t involve screens, but will inevitably lead to richer conversation and new memories.

Tip 4: Phone Free Food

Eat, drink and be merry. Christmas is a time for indulging in delicious meals with good company. To savour the food and the friends you’re with, encourage everyone to keep their phones off the table. There’s no worse conversation killer than being ‘phubbed’ – phone snubbed.

Join us in cherishing our most important relationships by giving the gift of time and presence during our digital detox challenge. Start 2019 feeling refreshed and with a better balance with technology.

View the original article at itstimetologoff.com

Suffering From Technostress at Work? Read These Tips

Technostress was coined by clinical psychologist Dr. Craig Brod over 30 years ago, but remains more pertinent than ever in today’s digital world. It describes the stress caused by rapid technological change that requires constant adaptation. This technological stress can be invoked in two ways; either by an over-identification with technology (technology addiction or overuse) or a difficulty in accepting or grasping technology. In 1984, Brod summarised technostress as, “a modern disease of adaptation caused by an inability to cope with new technologies in a healthy manner”.

Technostress at Work and Beyond

On the one hand, technostress equates to the frustration of having to learn how to use and adapt to an increasing number of digital devices and programmes. In the workplace, there are constant improvements and ‘updates’ that require time out of our busy working days. But as Silicon Valley works hard to make tech more intuitive, another interpretation of technostress for today’s digital natives could be understanding how new technology is constantly increasing demands on our time and resources.  Heidi Hanna, Executive Director of the American Institute for Stress writes, “some people feel on-edge from the noise of tech and knowing demands on our time and resources constantly increase with each incoming email”. To this you could also add other forms of technology, like office-based instant messaging and project management platforms that are ironically designed to make us more productive, as further channels that increase the number of demands on our time.

Why is it so hard to switch off? One reason could be due to the increasingly blurred line between work and home life. This means that with the heightened connectivity that our smartphones offer, it’s more and more difficult to ignore messages outside of working hours. As a result, many people might experience a maintained level of stress during evenings and weekends.

Another reason could be how technology has increased our sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out. This is commonly used to describe missing out on social situations, but ‘career FOMO’ has also been quoted as a source of stress for employees. The events we choose not to go to and the office party we missed will likely be documented on social media, as well as being discussed at work. And, while Instagram is often dubbed a ‘highlights reel’ and the social network deemed to have the worst impact on young people’s well-being, doesn’t the comparison-culture of business-orientated LinkedIn also merit some further research? Notifications and updates bombard you after each login with news of someone’s promotion or career achievement, making it easy to feel as if you are lagging behind.

If you think you’re suffering from technostress and digital burnout at work, or are just fed up with juggling multiple conversations across multiple apps, try these three useful tips to help you switch off.

3 Tips for Dealing with Technostress

1. Streamline your messaging

Ever had a conversation with the same colleague via multiple apps and platforms at the same time? It’s unlikely that you only communicate with colleagues, or even clients, via email. To avoid feeling overwhelmed with notifications across different platforms, reduce the number of messaging applications you use to the bare minimum.

2. Reduce your availability

Always replying to emails at the weekend? Have you become accustomed to getting back to your colleagues’ Slack or Skype messages after work hours? If you’re that person who can always be relied upon, try to set limits around your work-related messages. Turn off your notifications at a certain time, or if you’re feeling the need to be more drastic, delete your email app for the weekend! 

3. Stop media multitasking

With so many different channels to communicate via in the office, it’s easy to flick between applications, inboxes and ‘boards’ before realising you’ve accomplished very little ‘work’. Turn off pop-up notifications on your laptop and allow yourself to be fully engaged with the task at hand. Worried about missing something? Set aside regular slots to check email.

Tech is designed to serve us, but if it’s leaving you feeling stressed and overwhelmed in the workplace, these tips are a good place to start re-balancing your relationship with the digital world.

View the original article at itstimetologoff.com

Is Mindful Social Media Use Linked to Improved Well-Being?

The impact of social media is a hot topic, especially in regards to its influence on the well-being of young people, today’s digital natives. Some of this year’s hard-hitting headlines include: Social media and celebrity culture ‘harming young people’, Social media sites are damaging children’s mental health, headteachers warn and Six ways social media negatively affects your mental health.

Research conducted around body image, self-esteem and cyberbullying is compelling and many are suggesting that social media is a contributing factor to the rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people. Facebook, however, claims that it’s not that simple. In this article, we explore research presented by Facebook and determine why they suggest that mindful social media use is linked to improved well-being, while passive scrolling is deemed damaging to our mental health.

The difference between actively engaging vs. passively consuming on social media

According to a Facebook Newsroom article published by David Ginsberg, the company’s Director of Research, and Moira Burke, the social network’s Research Scientist, there is interesting research to suggest that the way in which we consume social media has an impact on our well-being. They highlight the results of one experiment conducted at the University of Michigan which noted that students who were asked to read Facebook for ten minutes reported a worse mood at the end of the day compared to students who were asked to engage on the platform by talking to friends or posting. Ginsberg and Burke cite another study from UC San Diego and Yale which investigated how frequently users clicked on links and liked posts. Their findings showed that people who clicked on four times as many links as the average user, or those that liked twice as many posts, reported poorer mental health than average.

So, is social media good or bad for us?

According to Ginsberg and Burke’s summary, if we are to use Facebook and other social sites, it’s encouraged that we do so in an active way. There are many ways to make your social media use more mindful. It could mean decluttering your feed to remove people that you don’t engage with, but feel that you compare yourself against. It could be trying to limit the frequency in which you open your social media apps to passively scroll through your feed, and instead prioritising answering and sending messages to good friends.

Arguably, this is useful advice – most of us have probably found ourselves in a scrolling cycle that leads to comparison and wasted time. But, a point in Facebook’s article deserves more attention. Ginsberg and Burke state, “Another theory is that the internet takes people away from social engagement in person”. It’s a great starting point to be more mindful when consuming social media, but where does positive screen-based interaction pit up against positive human face-to-face interaction? When delving deeper into the second piece of research from UC San San Diego and Yale cited above, there are some key quotes to consider:

• “Our results showed that although real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being.“
• “Although “liking” other people’s content could be reflective of attention to other’s positive posts, which could lead to negative self-comparison, updating one’s own status and clicking links would seem to suggest that the relationships we found are simply a matter of quantity of use.”

Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study, American Journal of Epidemiology

Undoubtedly, social media usage is difficult to measure and self-reported results can contain bias. However, these findings highlight that while active consumption of social media is better, a large amount of time spent on social media, rather than engaging face to face, can still be damaging to a person’s well-being.

In short, yes, quality interactions matter online, but they still matter more in person.

View the original article at itstimetologoff.com

5 Simple Mindfulness Exercises To Try Instead of Scrolling on Your Smartphone

If you’re an iPhone user and have recently updated to iOS12, you might have noticed the Screen Time feature in Settings. And after opening this new app, you might have been surprised. It visually sets out just how much time you spend on each app across different ‘categories’ each day. The likelihood is, you’re spending more time scrolling than you think. In Ofcom’s annual Communications Market Report, it was reported that, on average, Facebook users spend 27 minutes per day on the platform. That’s a pretty significant proportion of our day for just one platform. This leads to two important questions: what else could we be doing with this time? And, how often is our scrolling distracting us from being fully present?

If these questions have got you thinking, it’s worth considering how you could feel more connected with yourself and learn to ditch (or at least reduce) digital distractions. To get you started, we’re sharing a few phone-free mindfulness exercises that could help you feel more present in everyday life.

Take a Break from Your Smartphone with these Mindfulness Exercises

1. Walking

Walking, or even running, is a great opportunity to practise mindfulness. The Mayo Clinic calls exercise ‘meditation in motion’ due to its endorphin-creating tendencies, how it helps reduce stress and encourages you to focus on your movement. Instead of walking and smartphone scrolling (mind that lamp post…), focus on how your feet feel on the pavement or grass, how the breeze feels on your skin and take note of any smells in the air around you.

2. Mindful Eating

When was the last time you really savoured what you were eating? Mindful eating encourages us to pay more attention to the sight, taste and texture of what we’re feeding our bodies with. Many of us are guilty of eating with a fork in one hand and a smartphone in the other. But, with three meals a day, we have plenty of opportunity to take a break from our digital devices without implementing too much change in our routine.

3. Body Scan

No, it’s not what happens at the airport. The ‘body scan’ exercise is a popular meditation method to help you slow down and focus on how your body is feeling. It involves lying down and noticing how your body comes into contact with the floor or bed. Afterwards, you slowly mentally scan up or down your body, focusing on how each area feels in turn. The objective is to wholly focus on your body, switching off from other thoughts and distractions. It helps you to identify tensions and, like other forms of meditation, it helps to train your attention – something that our smartphones are always vying for. You can do the body scan mindfulness exercise yourself, or you can follow an audio guide.

4. Mindful Observation

This is a great exercise to help you become more aware and appreciate the natural world around you. We’re so used to rushing from one appointment to the next and hiding behind screens that we miss the little elements of beauty in everyday life. It could be the first shoots of Spring, the brightness of the moon, or just the shape of a flower we pass on our morning commute. To practise mindful observation, pick a natural object that is around you and focus solely on this object for a couple of minutes. Don’t look at anything else except your chosen item. Try to imagine you are seeing it for the very first time and visually explore it. What do you notice?

5. Mindful Listening

Instead of visually focusing on an object like in mindful observation above, mindful listening draws on another sense; sound. It’s easy to get used to ‘background noise’ and learn to tune it out. So, this exercise encourages you to really listen to the sounds around you, whether they be sirens or birdsong. Try not to let your mind wander, bring it back to the sounds whenever you get distracted.

Practising mindfulness isn’t as intimidating as it seems. If you don’t want to, you don’t need to invest in guides and meditation music; number 2 and 4 can be done almost anywhere and are perfect for your lunch break. These exercises are an opportunity to take back some of the focus that our smartphones pull from us each day and in turn, hopefully, we become more mindful of falling into what founder, Tanya Goodin, calls the internet’s black hole.

View the original article at itstimetologoff.com

How to help your teen, and you, log off

Everyone with teenagers has witnessed the close relationship they have with their digital devices. Often, as a parent it can feel like a constant battle to separate your child from their screens.

Now it appears that teens themselves are becoming more aware of their overuse of devices. New research from America reveals that 54 per cent of teens (13 to 17-year-olds) feel they spend too much time on their phone, but when asked the same question only 36 per cent of their parents felt they needed to cut down on screen time!

This month sees the launch of Stop Staring At Screens written by Time to Log Off’s founder Tanya Goodin. In her new book, Tanya outlines ways you can help you and your teen to both log-off and find some digital balance. Here are four of Tanya’s top tips.

# Lead by example

So many of our worries about screen overuse seem focused on our children, teenagers in particular. Yet how many important family conversations and moments are we missing out on as parents because we’re looking at our smartphone, tablet, or laptop? We expect our teenagers to cut down on their screen use but don’t do it ourselves!

Remember as parents our children model our behavior. We lead by example, if we don’t want them to look at their mobile during a meal then we shouldn’t either. Agree on a set of screen rules for everyone, and remember everyone in the house needs to follow the rules. No exceptions (that means you too).

# Out of sight

Another good rule of thumb is that when talking to a teenager at home put your phone away, completely out of sight, and fully focus on them. This way you and your teenager will both feel engaged and present when you chat.

You could create a tech box in the kitchen where mobile phones are stored, or suggest that everyone leaves their phone on the hall table when they come home. This rule should cut down on mindless scrolling of the internet and social media for you and your teenager creating more free time to do things together like bake, go for a walk, do an exercise class or watch an old movie.

# Screen curfew

It’s a fact, the blue light that shines from screen devices disrupts our sleep. And no-one likes dealing with a grumpy, tired teen who’s had a bad night because they’ve been on their smart phone until the early hours. Or perhaps you’re just as guilty and watch Netflix on your mini-screen late into the night?

Either way, a screen curfew would benefit you both. Why not agree a house curfew for a time in the evening when all digital devices are switched off? Get everyone in the family relearning screen-free alternatives for relaxing in the evening such as reading a book or having a hot, non-caffeinated drink. It’s guaranteed, you will all sleep more a lot more soundly. And better sleep means less arguments.

# Stop the noise

Even if you have a rule at home that devices should be put away when everyone is together, the sound of gadgets pinging or vibrating can be very hard to ignore. Start by suggesting you turn off all sounds when you’re together as family. Even better, why not turn off your screens altogether?

If this rule sounds too radical start small, have one total screen free night a week as a family, say Friday night, and build it up gradually. Soon, you and your children will feel it’s more normal not to be constantly reaching for your phone. And less noise in your home will also give you and your children a host of added health benefits including better sleep, reduced stress and improved memory.

* Stop Staring At Screens by Tanya Goodin (ILEX, $12.99) is out now.

View the original article at itstimetologoff.com