Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Doctor Ron Ehrlich. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording this podcast. They have lived here for 65,000 years. We’ve been here for 230. Well, me not personally, but as a culture. We’ve been here for 230 years. If we make 65,000, that will be quite something. But it is a testament to their elders past, present and emerging, and I pay my respect to them. We have a great deal to learn about connection and respect for people and country.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:41] Well, today I have the pleasure of welcoming back Jocelyn Brewer. Jocelyn is a psychologist, a teacher and a human. This is her own words. Who helps individuals and organisations, be well connected and mentally fit. And she does it, particularly in the context of the digital age we live in. She is also the founder of Digital Nutrition, and she’s also a cyber psychology researcher and consultant. We discuss what that actually means in this podcast. Look, it’s always good to get Jocelyn back. We live in an age where we are literally bombarded, and it’s not getting any easier by digital media, the social media, the news, be it entertainment, we are literally bombarded by it. So how to navigate that, is critically important. And I personally don’t believe we can hear this message often enough. When I look at my own grandchildren, when I see my own daughters and son-in-laws with the children. I recognise that how we teach ourselves first, because modelling is an important part of this. But teach them how to navigate this world, which is increasing exponentially, is arguably our greatest challenge. And that’s why I love to get Jocelyn back. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Jocelyn Brewer. Welcome back. Jocelyn.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:02:11] Thank you so much for having me for the third time. It’s always amazing to chat.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:14] Well, Jocelyn, I think this is. It’s a bit like having a heart check-up every year. I think we need to touch base probably more often than once a year, given the pace of change. But for those listeners that haven’t had the pleasure of listening to the last two episodes we did just give us, I know you wear many hats, and we are going to be talking about some of those hats today. But one of the hats is you are a founder of Digital Nutrition. So just remind our listeners what digital nutrition is.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:02:50] Yeah. So digital nutrition is simply a positive way of considering our tech use. So it’s a philosophy that aligns our tech use to a digital diet. Much like we think about our food diet. So we can think about really curating and shaping, what we consume through technology and particularly platforms like different social media platforms, news, all of that kind of content. So not the devices, but the actual, the, things that we do our screen on rather than our screen time. So getting into the virtual vitamins within our consumption. So it’s just really a way to think about, our relationship with technology because we’ve done so much work on understanding food. So joined us together really nicely.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:03:34] Yes. And just as we can’t go without food, there’s no way we’re going to go without a technology. So learning what we put in our heads, put in front of us is pretty important. You know, when I read an article just before Christmas of 2023, and it started off with the headline smart Phones Obsessions A dumbing Down Australian Kids, OECD, testing reveals. And I immediately sent you an email and said, Jocelyn, let’s get back on and talk about this. And one could argue it might not just be dumbing down kids, but dumbing down the world. What are your thoughts on that? What? How do you respond to that?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:04:16] Yeah. And it was perfect timing because I had just finished teaching my screens in Early Childhood course, which is all about this, and looking at how childhoods have changed and looking at what technology displaces. So while it can be, and a nice supplement and can certainly extend when we’re consuming, the right kinds of activities can extend our knowledge and it can extend our, sort of, interests. It’s displacing a lot of, physical activities. And, even in my course, I talk about, well, it depends what device we’re using. A TV on the wall, for instance, a little person who might be watching playschool or watching, you know, a whole range of, I guess, pro social, educational sorts of things. He’s probably moving around a lot more. I know my daughter, when she started watching TV, which was, you know, probably 18 months old, she would run off to her bedroom and come back with the costume or the toy or the thing to actually then, kind of, you know, play along with what was on the TV as opposed to say, you know, a smaller device that’s really closer to your eyes, that’s, you know, asking you to narrowing is quite passive rather than creative. So, I guess this whole notion of dumbing down is certainly, I would agree, displacing. And the question I always ask is what are we consuming? Because there’s a really big difference between playing a game that is very, very like walks and talks like a poker machine. Sometimes those games versus watching some of the wonderful shows that are being produced specifically for early Learners.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:05:53] Yes. Well, as the grand parent of five children aged between 18 months and eight years old, I am certainly getting to see what the biggest challenge, I believe, for your generation of parents is moving forward. The other hat that you wear, I noticed, was a cyber psychology researcher and consultant, and, and I know that you’ve written a blog recently, which caught my attention. As a cyber psychologist, how do I manage my six year old’s screen time? So how did you manage? How do I send a six year old’s screen time?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:06:37] Yeah. And look, I struggle myself knowing what I know and having done this work for nearly 15 years. It is a total, well, what it is, is co-designing, actually, because my daughter is now nearly seven. We have lots of conversations where she has some voice. I have strong barriers and she’ll say, why do you get to choose? And I go, those things come out of my mouth like, cause I’m your mother. And I am blah, blah, blah. You know, all that stuff that you promise yourself you’ll never say. But we have a really good way of negotiating this. And I literally talk to her about, like, with her healthy eating. What kinds of shows are good for her brain and not so good for her brain and what she’s learning and what she’s not learning. Now, I’m really lucky she wants to be a vet. So to be a vet, you really need to work pretty hard and you need to like, learn to read. So some of this actually is, linked in so you like, well, if you want to be a vet and we should be watching some shows maybe more about animals rather than kids unboxing plastic toys and all that kind of stuff. That’s not very values aligned. So we have conversations and obviously if you’ve got an 18 month old or a two year old, you can’t have quite those conversations. But you can serve up really specific things in the digital diet and have really clean mealtimes for technology use. So, one of the great things and then one of the problems is that devices go everywhere with us. And really we need to learn. So to leave our devices at home and not to feel that kids can’t be bored or can’t sit in the shopping trolley, say, and just look around and have interactions without high level of sensory stimulus. Dopamine treats, which are usually a part of the online activities that they have. So a lot of it is fostering offline, habits just as much as it is about when and where and what we use with, technology.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:32] Because as you say, they go everywhere and not only do they go everywhere, but they go everywhere with the parents as well. So sometimes it’s a bit challenging for a child to attract a parent’s attention is when.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:08:46] It can be. Yes. So what we see again is that displacement, especially in language acquisition. So if you’re having that call and response kind of interaction, which we know is how we develop language, if you’ve ever seen, the still face experiment where the mother in that instance actually just stops responding, the infant goes into distress because they actually can’t get a read on that situation. And everything we know about human communication is, you know, body language and tone and all of those things give us so much more information than just the words coming out. So, we see sometimes with things like sharenting practices, which is where you share your, your child and your parenting. If you’re having that really fun little interaction rather than just being in the moment, parents are desperate to then get the phone out and then say, do that again and show me again and perform for the camera. And kids learn really quickly that they get positive reinforcement when they do the thing that mum wants them to do. Or dad. You know, it’s not all mums. However, mums are often the parent who are responsible for a lot of the primary care and then creating and setting those screen limits. So it’s things like, you know, my, my child is not allowed to touch my phone. She knows that my phone is really important for work, that it’s a tool, not a toy. And so she knows that my phone is off limits. However, she does get some control of the TV controller. She knows that we do not use, YouTube kids unless I’m in the room with her or we’ve agreed what she’s watching. And that the TV goes off at certain times. I actually have an alarm on my phone and a few alarms in the house that will go off. So she goes, oh, it’s 815. Okay, we have to do x, Y, and Z. So, I guess the old school mantra here is like, you’re the parent. You actually need to be the parent. You need to sit that out and have non-porous boundaries, because kids have all sorts of excuses for wanting to be online. And quite frankly, it’s a gift to parents. A lot of the time in that pandemic, without screens, we would have been in a much tougher position, potentially, especially for families who might live in apartments that they don’t have. We don’t necessarily have the backyards we used to have. I know in my area, most of the backyards in our granny flats, the parks we have issues with, you know, being outside in 40 degree heat on, you know, slippery dips that are made of, steel, for instance. So there’s all of those issues that may come up with this is not about technology or what the big tech companies are doing, but how, how we’ve really responded as a society to, you know, all of these other geographical and geopolitical kind of challenges. It’s big.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:11:29] I mean, I think one of the scariest parts and you mentioned YouTube with kids, and I mean, YouTube as an adult is a rabbit hole that is very difficult to pull yourself away from. And I’ve watched my grandchildren get literally sucked into the YouTube there. So we’ve kind of stopped laptops and computers for kids. They watch TV, but they do not go on a laptop. But the thing about it all in digital, in the digital world is the the words business model. The business model trumps everything. And I use that word advisedly. It trumps everything. How you know, we are we need we’re drawn into this attention, aren’t we? It’s addictive.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:12:16] It is because there’s so much to. It’s the hunting and gathering of the modern age. Right. So you’re constantly looking for more information, more I mean, for me at the moment, more healthy hacks and healthy lunches and all of those sorts of things, like it’s really, so embedded in our world. And, I guess, you know, one of my first jobs was as a high school teacher and a commerce teacher. So this idea of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, let the consumer be consciously engaging with what they are actually stepping into. We think it’s free and financially it might only cost you the device. And you know, you know, whatever your internet costs you. But actually we are paying with our attention. We pay attention, we pay with our attention. And that attention can only be spent once. Our time can only be spent once. And I feel like everyone comments on how the world feels like it’s going faster in time, is going faster, and I believe that’s partly because we’re trying to consume more and more and keep up with more and more. We’re not just keeping up with our, you know, village of 30 people. It’s 300 or 3000. And then all of the bits of information which is really cognitively overloading us as well as as adults and certainly as little ones, they’re developing and wiring up brains just that are used to huge amounts of information relative to a generation. And so that’s having, you know, cognitive impacts which look like anything from brain fog to full depth, full on kind of burn out. And yeah, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t necessarily say, you know, mental breakdown. But for some people, that nervous system right down and working with the nervous system is a big way that we treat that highly vagal theory and a lot of that kind of stuff then kind of comes in in my other as a therapist and, you know, practising registered psychologist is, really, really valuable because that is that treatment and that I use with, families that come to me who are really, really suffering around the addictions, I guess, to technical.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:24] But it’s cross-generational, isn’t it? I mean, because, you know, people could come in and, and talk about, oh, my kid is so addicted to the screen, what do I do about it? And I know you have three Ms, and and just as I was looking at those three Ms, which I’m going to get you to share with our listener, it occurred to me there could be a fourth one as well.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:14:46] Good. We need a new one.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:48] Another one modelling. Modelling was this was the one that I.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:14:52] I love it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:54] But give us the three M’s cause this is the. You don’t have to but do give me give me the three M’s because this is something we should chant every morning is our mantra.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:15:05] Yes, I say apply before scrolling right as you’re picking up the phone as you’re logging on. He should be like switching on these kind of lenses. So they’re mindful, meaningful and moderate. So mindful. You’re really present. You’re engaged in what you need to do. You’re not in that kind of automatic checked out zone. mindful meaningful is does it actually align to your values. Is it something that is useful to you. Is it contributing positively? Now look, this space for a bit of junk food and a bit of celebrity gossip or whatever. Fluff that you’re into. But is that kind of central to your digital diet, or is it a trait that you give yourself? So that’s things like, do I need to go and unfollow people? Do I need to go and realign to the values? Do I need to actually go into a values clarification exercise to work out what I do care about? And then moderate. So moderate. It really again speaks to this idea that while we’re not throwing, you know, the baby out with the bathwater, we’re not ignoring time online, but we are focusing on the quality of the content. We still only have 24 hours in the day. And we do need to moderate how we interact in online spaces, because the lack of often eye contact and remembering that there’s a human present means that we sometimes behave in ways in online spaces that are not how we would behave if we were speaking to that person face to face. So some of the kind of bullying and online trolling and just icky situations happen because we forget there is another human on the other side of the screen.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:37] It’s a bit like car rage, isn’t it? I mean, some people behave in ways in their cars that if they were face to face with that person.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:16:46] Never speak to them like that. I am totally guilty of that. And my child calls me out on that. She will say, mom, that’s not very nice.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:57] I can’t believe that, Jocelyn. But, but anyway. But the fourth theme is moderation modelling.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:17:02] Modelling. I love it because.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:04] That is a really big one. You know, we might complain about our children’s use of technology, but hey, who’s modelling?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:17:12] Absolutely. And our phone use is kind of contagious. So you will notice that as soon as somebody in a group gets their phone out, it gives this implied permission then that other people can do it. And I used to watch this at my kids dancing lesson. They were very clear like no phones because little people dancing and doing stuff sets up some risks there. But they’d always be a random grandparent who maybe hadn’t looked at the sign, or was just so in the moment of capturing their kid, they get their phone out and sure enough, like dominoes, everybody else would get their phone out and they’d be filming kids. In this situation where, you know, it was a very clear request. Not to. And I had to be that parent who was like, you need to put your phone away? But that is really fascinating, too, because, we have this kind of guilty sort of sense of we shouldn’t, but we are compelled to because of that. I guess we want to capture a lot of things often, and we forget. Again, I just think that makes us not so mindful as being really present to just encoding into our memories that that moment.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:18] Now, just before we came on, we were just touching on AI because artificial intelligence is a development in the last 12 months that has really transformed.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:18:29] Well, it’s it’s been publicly, I guess, launched in the last 12 months. It’s been, you know, in existence for 30, 40 years. It’s just the degree to which once ChatGPT was launched on to, you know, I guess publicly launched. Yeah, about 12, 13, 14 months ago how rapidly that has changed. And I sort of have a joke that every time somebody mentions chatGPT I have to have to have a drink? So we’re starting a bit early today by talking about ChatGPT before midday. But, yeah. Look, it’s it’s something that, again, as consumers, we need to be aware of. I just launched an e-book yesterday, and literally I put on a no AI or generative language models or large language models were used in its construction because I know that a lot of people are just using these, platforms to, you know, you feed it a little cue, we’ll ask it to do a particular thing, and it will most often comply unless you’re asking it something nefarious. And it has been taught not to, you know, do naughty things to some degree. Then, yeah, a lot of the content that we’re seeing, a lot of that, even news on some sites are being written by AI. So we really need a whole new literacy around that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:46] Boy, now, there is a challenge. I mean, yeah, that is letting the genie out of the bottle there. And.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:19:53] Absolutely. It’s now ranked as one of the top ten existential threats. So you know what is likely to end humanity in the in the next hundred years? AI is definitely on that list, according to, Katrina Wallace. Yes.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:06] And of course, you know, I mean, it has incredible potential. I mean, everybody could end up with their own highly qualified research assistants in life, and that would be wonderful. The only problem is it could, if it got into the wrong hands. And given what goes on in the world, sometimes that’s entirely possible. It could wreak havoc. It could really wreak havoc. And and also, you know, we were just talking also about, the AI dilemma. So we looked at that Tristan Harris and Aisha Ruskin’s Centre for Humane Technology. And they did the Social network. Yeah, but they also did the AI Network recently and talked about its impact on Snapchat. Tell yes. Share that story because it’s pretty scary.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:20:55] Yeah. Look. And there are lots of scary kind of scary stories out there. And I guess our news is generated from the scary stories. Not though they lived happily ever after. And, you know, millions of teenagers across Australia use technology today in a really healthy way. But I guess in these situations, we do need to be conscious of when things go awry. And to some degree, like AI is really just programmed by humans. So we need to kind of ensure that the humans who are programming this, diverse and are included, that there’s lots of different perspectives and genders and neurodivergent, you know, different ways of thinking about things included there. So I guess in the AI dilemma, which is, yeah, like, I guess the next version of The Social Dilemma that was put out on Netflix a couple of years ago is really looking at the fact that, my AI, which runs through Snapchat, is part of, ChatGPT and sets up kind of like a chat bot. So for lots of young people who may be quite lonely, who maybe live in, you know, regional areas who are up at 2:00 in the morning wanting to chat to somebody in this particular example, a young person who was about to turn 15 was talking to the chat bot about her excitement, about her birthday and about meeting her boyfriend, who then happens to be 18. And they were looking at, you know, getting into some adult sort of activities. And really, that chat bot didn’t recognise the age difference, didn’t recognise the nuances in what this young person was saying and was really congratulatory and positive about her, thinking about losing her virginity to a much older person. So it was quite confronting and I guess on purpose, because parents often will only respond, when the proverbial has hit the fan because they didn’t know and they weren’t aware. Rather than proactively thinking, oh, my kid could be getting into, all sorts of situations. I think this week we’ve had, data be released that says a huge number of interactions in online spaces are predatory and looking to, you know, really hurt young people, psychologically, but sometimes physically as well. So the predatory nature of some of those, kind of messages that, you know, parents need to be aware, like the number of, kids playing Roblox. Now, Roblox isn’t a game. It’s probably the closest we have to a metaverse. So you go in and there’s lots. It’s kind of like an arcade. You go in and you can play lots of different games in Roblox, and it’s a 13 class kind of space, from my understanding. And there’s lots of different games in different places. And if parents don’t know how to do stuff in those spaces, if they’re kind of like, oh, well, my kid will figure it out, I think that’s kind of dangerous. We don’t have to be perfect at those games, but it’s kind of the equivalent of putting a kid behind a Ferrari and saying, well, you know, I know a bit about how to like, put my seatbelt on, but I don’t really know how to drive this thing. But let’s go see what happens. It’s, you know, we have to have a lot more due diligence around that is my recommendation to parents. But yeah, I think it’s just a whole other level. Yeah. Because of the different applications and the different ways it’s being used for chat bots, for, generating images for deep faking. You know, again, we’ve seen kids, sort of have this, what we call sextortion. So sextortion is basically when you, threaten to, you know, try and get money out of somebody. And by saying that, you know, you have nude photos of them or rude photos of them. And in these cases, sometimes it’s just deep fakes or they’ve, you know, photoshops, but in a much better kind of version, you know, somebody head on to, you know, or in to a sex scene or things like that. So really, really scary for most us that the threat of that kind of imagery being being released.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:24:56] So you mentioned that you’re working with your colleague Kelly in the United States, preparing something for the election because there are such incredible challenges. I’m actually reading in the newspaper this morning that there’s already been some, fake, bots with using Joe Biden’s voice. So what? Tell me what what can you do about it? I mean, what can you do?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:25:19] Yeah. Breathe deeply and not read the news, is one. But obviously we, you know, we want to stay informed. And, and what we need is really good journalism. We need, like, systems and we need to, you know, revalue journalism, rather than getting bots to write the stories, actually, you know. I look at and invest in some of these kind of news outlets, which are, you know, part of which is to have labelling that says this was written by AI, this was generated by whatever. And there I guess, lots of political watch kind of organisations that do, do that kind of work and point that out. So we need to consider funding those a lot more as well as, I guess, some of the restrictions on how we, you know, I mean, there’s different conversations about roles of governments and regulating it. We’re really looking at with things like AI. How do we have responsible use policies and ethical design models? So, Australia’s a Esafety office has had for several years safety by design framework, which should apply to AI as much as any other tools which is building safety at the core of all of these platforms rather than a supplement or something that we tack on at the end that an eight year old would want to do, you know, this thing that was designed for adults. So really building embedded design principles and then legislating for that, which is incredibly difficult on a global level, regulating AI globally is impossible. But kind of comes back down. So I think not personal responsibility because that is really inequitable and very hard to achieve, but educational processes that actually engage people in civics and citizenship with that digital lens over the top.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:13] Gosh. Jocelyn, when I hear you talk about, you know, getting regulations in place globally, I have to, take a deep breath there. Yeah. And when I hear you talk about, we need responsible journalism, I hope to take another deep breath. And when I hear you, we use the word news outlets. I have actually stopped using the word news outlet. I call them the media outlets. They’re not. They’re not news outlets. I think it comes back to, something which someone Alan Savoury actually said. If we’re expecting the change to happen, the change has to come from the ground up, because it ain’t going to come from the top. I mean, I just cannot see regulations keeping up with the corporate push on government to, to not do that. So I know that you talk about hacking back against digital distraction and you talk about internal strategies and external strategies. You know, can we just touch on some of those? What about some internal strategies for dealing with the digital distractions we are all bombarded with?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:28:23] Yeah. So this one again, sort of like I was saying before, is really about our values alignment. What do we want to have come into our psyches. What do we want to know more about. Less about. And this is not about ignorance is bliss. And I don’t want to know about, you know, impacts of colonisation, which again, in the wake of Invasion Day, we could, you know, look at some of the information that kind of comes out around those sorts of things. But it’s really about saying, well, I can control what I consume. I can control how much time I spend, I can control whether I follow someone or not. I can also control whether or not I have other kind of ways of, I guess, looking after myself. Right. This is about maybe self-care and you know, what our brains can actually, deal with because, the expectations that some people have around what their bodies and their brains will do I sometimes find extraordinary. We are so rest resistance. And a lot of my clients would be like, oh, I just have all of this stuff to do. Why can’t I do it? I’m like, cause you are really tired and you need eight hours of sleep a night, which doesn’t fit into your to do list very well. You know, there’s external strategies as well. Like I take Instagram off my phone from Monday to Thursday, so I simply don’t have it there. I find that really good for my headspace. It helps me get to sleep because I don’t have all of these little stories running around. And I also use like time boxing and different other little strategies to support me during my day to work and focus when I need to focus. So there’s lots of tools and, you know, hilariously, apps that can support you to manage your tech use as well. So, yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:06] I noticed you also include in your, in your, prescription there non-sleep deep rest.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:30:13] Yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:14] Which I love, I love, I think, you know, big breakthrough by Andrew Huberman. Yeah. You know, all that, but I think a thousand years ago, it was called, yoga nidra. But yes, it’s funny.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:30:27] You know, closing your eyes and going within and not seeking all of these external sources of reinforcement. I mean, one of my personal goals this year is to actually just anchoring and trust. The skills and the wisdom that I have accumulated over, you know, nearly 46 years on the planet, rather than constantly be feeling in lack, like, I need to go grab the next thing, or free download or buy into a membership program and actually just sit with what’s there. So, you know, having done yoga, but yeah, 25 years, a lot of that is just sitting with the silence or sitting with the noise in your head and waiting for, you know, the, it’s kind of like a, snow globe, right? When we’re all I find when I’m offline, a lot of that, just settles and I can kind of be with myself again.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:31:17] Because just for our listener who hasn’t been aware of non sleep deep rest. It is just really that being quiet, scanning the body, breathing quiet. Close your eyes. Scan your body. Relax. Rest. Don’t underestimate the power of rest.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:31:34] And just shutting down that one sense, like closing your eyes and not having that visual bombardment can help free up some, you know, basically mental space, right? If it was a computer is like shutting down one of your applications. So giving yourself and again give rather than taking, you know, these opportunities to actually honour our neurobiology rather than kind of constantly feeling like we need to like whip it into doing more harder, faster because of, you know, sort of world of productivity obsession we live in.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:32:10] You also introduced me now people will have heard of FOMO. Oh yeah, fear of missing out. But you introduced me to finding your Jomo.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:32:18] Yeah, the joy of missing out. So just knowing, like I can’t be in everything and actually being some of the things or, you know, being a part of all of the things. It’s absolutely exhausting. And sometimes, again, doesn’t meet your needs, doesn’t meet, you know, like what your needs. But doesn’t, kind of feel your cup in the way that it might. Like, I joined the membership thing last year, and it was good for a little while, and then I went, actually, this is just not for me. And I jumped out of it. So, again, you’re limited to that amount of time. And, you get to choose where you put your attention and who you spend time with. You know, it’s it’s also about the associations that you might. And again, that kind of goes back to some yogic principles around association. And, you know, the communities that you build that are aligned to some of those values as well. So, I find myself regularly going, oh, this has nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with our humanity, right? Like our psychology. And that’s what I find fascinating, because it’s easy to say, oh, it’s because of my phone. And I think it’s a lot more empowering to say, yeah, it might be, but if we step back from that, what can you control? And you can control your values. You can control to some degree the actions that you take that step towards that. So lots of the principles in acceptance and commitment therapy that pop up there.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:38] I mean I think one of the most liberating things is turning off notifications on the phone and also unsubscribing. Spending the first five minutes of checking your emails is actually just an exercise in unsubscribing from whatever you gave your email address for, for, you know, some purchase that you made. You don’t even remember. I mean yeah.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:34:02] I have an email address just for that stuff. So I have a completely, you know, Jocelyn’s newsletter at blah Blah is where I send all of that stuff so I can, you know, get the 10% off your first purchase. It’s not getting into my really important inbox, which is, you know, kind of drives my life to some degree. So simple, simple hacks like that. Right? And that’s what I use to sign up to all of the social media, because once that email address is out, there’s all sorts of hacks. And again, in the news this morning, we have the name of the Medibank hacker being announced and cyber sanctions being used in Australia for the first time because of these nefarious actors that are part of, you know, bigger cartels and bigger kind of scary things out there. And, you know, simple things like having a password manager, having 16, character, really complex passwords. If you don’t have that by now, that’s the one thing that I would recommend that you invest money in is to make sure you have a password manager, because once somebody you know, you’ve used the same cat and dog combination, probably across hundreds of platforms, by this point, once they get into one, they get enough information, they get into the next, they get more information, and suddenly they know your mother’s maiden name, all of your pet’s names, every street you’ve ever lived in, and they can steal your identity. So simple things like that. I’m currently in the process of explaining and showing my mother how to use one.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:38] Oh, you can explain it to me. To. I mean, what’s the password manager that I should. You’ve said things there that I just thought. Oh my God, yes, I’m getting I’m getting off line. I’m going to do this right away.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:35:49] Yes. I’m also buying a block of land, Wiseman’s Ferry, and never, ever speaking to anyone.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:55] I’ve been thinking about that too, so don’t worry.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:35:58] We’ll go halvsies in that, right? Okay. We’ll have a timeshare tiny house in the middle of nowhere. But. Yeah. Look, a password manager is literally a kind of vault which will store all of the logins and the passwords, unique passwords for all of the places that you put your footprints across the internet. So I’ve been using one probably for about five years and several on the market. I won’t name a particular one. Do your own due diligence with that. But in effect, you remember one very high level password that you make up yourself and that you put that in, that then unlocks your vault. And then the vault stores all of the, login sites, the login details, and then your password. So I have my credit card stored there. At last count, I had about 412 different sites across the internet that had different unique passwords. It will also go on and tell you when your password has been compromised and where you need to upgrade that password. So there’s a site called You’ve Been Pawned, where you can basically put your data in and it will tell you on what sites you have been hacked and what sites you then need to go back in and log in and get, you know, improve your password.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:13] Is that all one word you’ve been pawned?

Jocelyn Brewer [00:37:15] Yeah. I can send you the link, I think they might be tricky and spell it n a D or something like that. I’ll send you the link. You can pop it in the show notes, but that’s something to, you know, go and have a look at and one of the password managers actually, own that site and run that site. So.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:34] Because I remember years ago using I fiend ignorance completely, I’m not as ignorant is that I started using LastPass a while back. I got a beautiful back with a I got a bit slack with it.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:37:46] Don’t get slack with it. It’s really easy because everything then just gets every time you set something up, you can probably set it up so it tries to pull it. It notices where there’s a password line and also how you use LastPass. Okay, it is a little bit tricky when you first start using them to just to wrap your head around them, partly because they need to be watertight. They can’t be something that’s just so easy to do. Yeah, that’s part of the problem, I guess. And we do need to sometimes uplevel those skills and remember how to login and how to get the extension into it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:38:18] mmmmm

Jocelyn Brewer [00:38:20] Worth the investment.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:38:22] Worth it. Absolutely. Look, I know you have so many great resources that you offer people because and ironically, they’re all online, but yeah, but, you know, you can only be in one place at a time. You mentioned your screens in early childhood, so I know you have other ones, but I also noticed you’ve started this Sensible 60.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:38:43] I wasn’t going to mention that, but it does work in beautifully with all your Unstress work. Look, this is literally a direct response to a thing called the 75 hard, which you may or may not have heard of. 75 hard is 75 days. Hard challenge. I think Tom Gleason should be promoting it, quite frankly. He, where it’s one size fits for you, it’s. You must drink 4.5l a day, 4.5l a day. Like, that’s a lot for most humans, but it’s certainly a lot if you already drink no litres a day. It’s a really big step. So, exercise 90 minutes a day. Where’s your rest and recovery day? So to me, that was just no science. And the, the headspace, the mindset, all that was really gross. So my partner and I, last we started doing the sensible 60, which is six domains. You choose one main one and over 60 days you slowly, incrementally kind of work towards your goals on that. It started off just about anything that we were doing and yesterday turned into and I launched a 41 page e-book which walks you through the processes, some of the reflective processes that I do and also the preparation processes. So the people who really want to change their nutrition, it’s impossible to do unless you change your ability to cook. For me, I just I need to learn how to like be innovative with food. And so go back to valuing spending time with that thing. You need to plan around it. So that’s just launched. The e-book is free. There’s a free webinar that goes with it to walk you through. And then there’s some coaching. If you wanted to get the support in 60, where I actually help you set that up and then help you make it happen. And this potentially be connected 60 because, a lot of what I’m noticing, with women that I work with and even myself in my own community is the loneliness that people are experiencing where our friendships have fallen apart. The world is really. Busy. But we’re lonely, so I want to do the connected 60 next. But.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:40:43] Fantastic.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:40:44] Slow and steady, Jocelyn.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:40:47] This is part of the irony of our digital world, where you can literally have thousands of friends, and likes. But you could be as lonely as, you know, and loneliness, particularly after the pandemic was shown to be equivalent to having 15 cigarettes a day. So not good for one’s health. No. But, that is on your website JocelynBrewer.com yes. Yes. Not dot com dot AU, Jocelyn Brewer one word dot com.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:41:18] That’s it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:19] Jocelyn. It is always such a pleasure to connect with you. And such a wonderful reminder of our ability to take control. And with so many of your resources that we will of course, be sharing those with our listeners. Thank you so much for today. Yeah.

Jocelyn Brewer [00:41:35] Awesome. Thanks again.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:37] Well, as I said, I love getting Jocelyn back as a regular guest. Because I do believe this is one of our greatest challenges. How we interact, how we utilise, media, digital media and how we moderate it as well her three M’s, which I think we’ve expanded into fourth, if you have children, is to be mindful, to find meaning, to moderate your use. And the fourth M is to model good behaviour. I love the, the also the sensible 60s. Now you can go on to the site Jocelyn Brewer dot com or look at digital nutrition. to find Jocelyn’s material her courses and you know, she talks about how to hack back against the digital distraction with internal and external strategies, but introducing the sensible 60s. And I love this because it’s so, Jocelyn, a 60 day journey to shape your lifestyle positively and sustainably without the dude. Bro. BS. By psychologist Jocelyn Brewer. Anyway, we’ll have links to all of that. I hope this finds you well. Until next time. This is doctor Ron Ehrlich.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:42:49] This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.