Transcription:
Supporting Youth in Achieving Digital Wellness

Scott Webb (Host):  Emerson Hospital has teamed up with Turning Life On, a local grassroots movement to create a digital wellness program. Digital wellness is using technology with intention to achieve optimal physical, mental and spiritual health, enhance relationships, safety and privacy and increase our ability to learn and be productive. The goals of this partnership are to increase awareness of the many impacts that devices have on youth today and to provide research backed tips that empower families to make healthy choices about digital media use. Through this podcast, our guests will discuss the six pillars of digital wellness and how we can support our youth in balancing their device use to optimize their overall health and development.

This is the Healthworks Here podcast from Emerson Hospital. I’m Scott Webb. This series will feature Adrienne Principe of Turning Life On and we will also be joined by Kelsey Magnuson, Community Benefits Coordinator at Emerson Hospital. And Kelsey, I’d like to start with you today. How did this amazing partnership between Emerson and Turning Life On develop?

Kelsey Magnuson, MPH (Guest):  The basis of community benefits is really our community health needs assessment. And part of that is our youth risk behavior survey and that’s a huge project that Emerson has been doing for many years where we work with local school districts to survey their students on lots of different topics. And so in the most recent survey, in 2018, we surveyed over 11,000 students. And out of that, we saw that about 20% of youth responded that they have social media accounts their parents don’t know about. And over half said that their parents don’t monitor their social media accounts.

And we saw that these responses were associated with other risky behaviors, things like getting less sleep at night, increased use of pornography, poor grades, and so we kind of looked at that research and we also saw that based on other research, that there’s been an increase in anxiety and depression rates in teens. And so, we look at these two factors and we’re concerned about phone use, and Adrienne and her colleagues came to the hospital to start conversations about these same concerns of how Smart phones were affecting development of kids today.

And so, we’ve really evolved from just that conversation of Smart phones to raise awareness about digital wellness and how to use technology in a way that optimizes our health. And we talk about the word digital to mean screens, phones, tablets, laptops and our social media and online activity.

Host:  So, Adrienne, what about this partnership between Emerson and Turning Life On? What are your thoughts about that?

Adrienne Principe (Guest):  When we think about our kids’ digital media use or phone use; it can be overwhelming. Back in 2017, I had the same concerns about not really my kids’ social media or Smart phone use because they were pretty young at the time but looking down the road at what was coming, and the information that we were getting from mostly mental health professionals about how teens were using social media and the impacts it was having. There has been a rise in depression and anxiety and other mental health indicators. So, that was a real concern to me, and I wasn’t quite sure how to address the issue, so I got together with some other women here in Concord and we decided to launch a platform called Concord Promise with the goal of uniting parents around delaying Smart phones until at least eight grade. What we also wanted to do through the mission of Concord Promise was provide education. Because we felt like there was a lot of information out there that wasn’t getting to parents.

So, we really were focusing on education. Through that first year, and my experience with Concord Promise; other communities reached out wanting to launch similar movements in their own towns. And my children were entering middle school. They didn’t have Smart phones, but it didn’t really matter because most of their friends did. Through my work with our partners in multiple different professions from pediatricians to mental health experts to digital wellness experts, I started to see that this is a much bigger issue than just Smart phones in middle school. And so, I launched Turning Life On to just address the broad topic of digital wellness. I mean we talk about digital wellness, oftentimes people say oh does that mean Fit Bits and using digital tools to monitor your health. And it’s more about the activities that we’re doing online and developing our ability to make intentional and healthy choices about digital media and how we’re spending our time online.

As Concord Promise, when we talked to Emerson Hospital, and Kelsey showed a real interest in developing a broader digital wellness program, I was definitely interested in using our partnership to help parents understand digital wellness and to empower them to teach their kids and make smarter choices about the way that they’re using digital media.

Host:  Kelsey, as we talk about this partnership, between Emerson and Turning Life On, why do you find it to be so relevant and important right now?

Kelsey:  We see our community hospital as being in a unique position to bring members of the community together and address health issues on a local level. So, I saw different groups having similar conversations and really wanted to be able to bring people together. So, we need that input from the pediatricians, and the mental health professionals but we also need input from the schools and parents and community agencies who are trying to address this at all different levels. Our mission is to improve the health status of our community, but we know we can’t do that alone. We have to bring others in in order to have a larger impact and so, the research is already showing these strong impacts of devices and social media on kids today. And as it continues to grow, we see this partnership as a way to bring that information to the public with tangible ways to improve our overall health.

We actually were able to bring together many different professionals to discuss this topic back in February before COVID, the group was made up of pediatricians, mental health professionals, school staff, including administration and school resource officers and parents to be part of that conversation.

And so, there’s lots of current resources but all of these groups really need to come together to address the issue as a community and not just each entity individually. Because then we can come together as a group, we can make more of an impact and that’s really what we see as the role of the hospital in all of this is being able to bring the groups together and share the information to parents and schools and our community partners.

Host:  Yeah, it’s really a great team approach and we’ve talked about digital wellness a number of times and Adrienne, let’s got through what are the six pillars of digital wellness?

Adrienne:  we compiled a whole mountain of research about digital media and health and evaluated anecdotal stories to identify these six pillars of digital wellness. And by balancing digital media, with consideration for these pillars; we can optimize holistic health. So, the first pillar is physical health. And digital media is impacting the way our brains work particularly our memories, abilities to sustain attention and build our knowledge base to support our critical thinking. And probably most listeners have experienced this physical impact of digital media. It’s also impacting our eye health, our posture and our sleep. So in this pillar, if we focus on protecting eyes and sleep, building cognition, promoting physical activity and avoiding digital distraction, we can optimize our physical health in relation to digital media.

When we sleep less, our mental health suffers. Which brings us to our next pillar which is mental health. And research shows an increase in mental health disorders including depression, anxiety, nonfatal self-harm and suicide. Studies also show at least a correlation between social media use and these disorders. The comparison culture, that has emerged on social media as well as the increase in cyber bullying and FOMO which is the fear of missing out seem to contribute to the problem. When we use digital media to optimize our mental health, we prioritize our self-worth, we build resilience, and commit to positivity.

So, the next pillar is spiritual health. Because of persuasive design, which is the way in which media is designed to capture and hold out attention; balancing time online and offline is really challenging. It’s also challenging for parents and teens to evaluate every app and platform that’s out there. So, families can identify and develop a strong value system. They can encourage digital media use through the lens of their family values. To optimize our spiritual health, we can align engagement with our values, we can cultivate purpose through online social activism, we can find peace through balance and disconnection and commit to digital citizenship.

A commitment to digital citizenship, also overlaps with our fourth pillar which is privacy and safety. This is a big topic which of course includes protecting our data from intentional sharing and unintentional data mining. There’s also concern that data collection online can follow kids into adulthood. Sharing online data can also result in harassment and cyberbullying. We also want to think about exposure to inappropriate content, like media violence and pornography and dangerous stereotypes and racism. Online sexual exploitation and abuse is a growing concern as well. So, achieving digital wellness as it applies to privacy and safety includes minimizing impacts of dangerous online content and protecting personal data.

The concern with pornography really impacts every pillar including our next pillar which is relationships. So, we know mental health and relationships and conversation are all so interrelated. It’s important that teens balance technology and commit to time offline so they can develop a strong sense of self. We know that adolescence is an important time for developing self. Anybody who has kids can attest to this. in order to having strong relationships, we must first understand ourselves and that way we can share our opinions and feelings with each other. So, teens also need to practice having conversations. That’s a skill that they build through adolescence. And building strong connections needs to happen in person. So adolescence is a time to learn these skills but that learning again, must take place offline. So to achieve digital wellness in this pillar, we must strengthen our relationships with ourselves, engage in meaningful social connections and share authentically.

Our final pillar is learning and productivity. So, there are many ways in which technology can enrich the learning experience. Research also shows that the presence of an over reliance on technology can negatively impact knowledge acquisition, test scores and grades. Research also tells us that there is real value in writing by hand and reading offline. Particularly for comprehension and memory formation. So, this pillar encourages enriching the learning experience with technology, expanding knowledge, pursuing focus work and shaping creativity.

So, those are our six pillars.

Kelsey:  And from a hospital perspective, we see those six pillars as really all key aspects of our health that we want to optimize, and we see them as interconnected. Our physical and mental health are connected with how we engage in relationships and how we learn impacts our overall health and wellbeing and so we see all these different pieces as key aspects that we are hoping to address through this partnership.

Host:  As we wrap things up here for this episode, what are the next steps moving forward with the partnership? I’ll start with you Kelsey.

Kelsey:  Our goal is really to create a community conversation and a research backed system for engaging and supporting our youth in achieving digital wellness through all of these pillars. So, we want to bring lots of different perspectives together continuing on our conversation that we started back in February and really getting all of this input to be able to have a collaborative approach to this vast and what I find very interesting topic.

Adrienne:  So, as Kelsey said, we’re gathering all the stakeholders to discuss this topic so that we can use anecdotal evidence to support the research that we’re doing on the impacts of digital media use and will use the research and that anecdotal evidence to guide the solutions and suggestions we put forth.

Host:  That’s really great and I’m so excited to be a part of this series about digital wellness and this partnership with Emerson. As a dad myself, with a couple of kids upstairs in their bedrooms attending “school,” I’m putting in air quotes right now, it’s really interesting and fascinating and I’m so glad to be a part of this. So, I look forward to our next episode and you both stay well.

Turning Life On and Emerson Hospital are working together to convene teams of parents, teens, clinicians, and mental health professionals to discuss digital media use, challenges and best practices specific to our digital wellness pillars. This work will offer anecdotal evidence to further support our research based suggestions. And if you’re interested in getting involved with this project or learning more, please visit www.emersonhospital.org/digitalwellness. And thanks for listening to Emerson’s Healthworks Here podcast. I’m Scott Webb and make sure to catch the next episode by subscribing to the Healthworks Here podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever podcasts can be heard.