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Join us in this episode as we explore the challenges of balancing social media and device use with the essential aspects of life. Our guest, Dawn Baker, an anesthesiologist, shares her insights from a recent physician wellness conference where she discussed this very topic. We’ll delve into the benefits and drawbacks of social media for medical professionals, strategies for setting boundaries, and ways physicians can model healthy habits for their families and communities.

Dawn Baker is an anesthesiologist.

She discusses the KevinMD article, “Social media: Striking a balance for physicians and parents.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome back Dawn Baker. She’s an anesthesiologist, and today’s KevinMD article is “Social media: Striking a balance for physicians and parents.” Dawn, welcome back to the show.

Dawn Baker: Thanks so much for having me on again, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So Dawn’s been on, we’re talking just over a year ago. Go to KevinMD.com/podcast to hear her story and prior episode. Today let’s go right into your most recent article about social media, striking a balance for physicians and parents. For those that didn’t get a chance to read this article, tell us what it’s about.

Dawn Baker: Yeah, well I wrote it because I was inspired to give a talk on this topic. It’s not something that I’m an expert in, but really research is me search, and I wanted to know more about social media and how it’s affecting work-life balance.

Since I have this non-clinical arm of the things that I do, I’m an anesthesiologist clinically, but I’m also what I would consider an expert in work-life balance. I’ve written a book, do a lot of talks, and also coach people on work-life balance. And I wanted to know how social media is impacting our health and wellness and how it can affect us. So I did a lot of research on this, read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, and wanted to share it with the audience.

Kevin Pho: All right. So tell us about your research. What did you find?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, well I found out that, it’s not really a surprise, but social media is definitely impacting us in both positive and negative ways. We’re connected in such a broad way that we weren’t before, and we can share ideas, get our messages out to an audience that we wouldn’t have necessarily been able to reach 10 years prior.

But at the same time, social media is addictive, there’s definitely a lot of evidence for that. It’s impacting the physical health and mental health of us and of our children especially. And it also takes away time from other things that we need for our work-life balance and to feel healthy, just like sleep, time for exercise, downtime with family and things like that.

Kevin Pho: So as you know, we’re talking about this at the end of June, and I think just last week the surgeon general called for a warning label on social media platforms. So tell me what you thought about that warning label. Did you think that went too far, or did it not go far enough? What are your thoughts on that?

Dawn Baker: I think it’s a good first step. It was something that was talked about a lot in the brand new book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I highly recommend that book to people who have children and want to find out how social media might be impacting their kids.

But I think that, like I said, I think it’s a good first step. It’s something where we’re starting to nationally recognize that this is a problem. Do we need to go further? Yes. I do think that some of the ideas that are put forth in The Anxious Generation are to have phone-free schools, to have age limits on who can sign up for social media accounts, and to have verification things in place so that those ages can be verified.

Kevin Pho: Now, you recently in your article wrote that you went to a physician wellness conference and you got a little bit of a perspective about how social media interacts with the physician population. What did you see there?

Dawn Baker: Well, a lot of people need to use social media for building their businesses. I went to a conference where a lot of people have side businesses, and then also people have clinical businesses where they have a big arm of patient education.

And social media, the internet, is something that we kind of have to use, if we’re in a modern business nowadays. And so that’s the hard part, because things that aren’t good for us, like smoking and alcohol, that you can abstain from, are different than, I would argue, social media, internet, and like food for instance. We have to find ways that each of us can moderate them, and something that will work for us. And each person is individual as far as how they adopt habits and how they respond to different inputs and expectations.

Kevin Pho: So when you talk to clinicians about how they could incorporate, or how they can best use social media in their professional life, what are you advising them today?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, well I definitely tell people that you need to know a lot about yourself. Like I was saying, how do you moderate things? So look at how you do, for instance, with food and diet. Are you the kind of person that needs to have really bright line rules, or are you a little bit more of a person that needs to have the ability to eat anything that you want in moderation? That can help you to figure out what kind of boundaries that you can put in place for social media.

And there are a lot of different ideas in the resources out there that I list in the article. I’ve listed a few different books there that will help you to figure out ways that you can moderate. So there’s temporal methods, there are physical methods of putting your phone or your devices away at certain periods of the day. Or categorical things, like, well, I’m only going to use this particular type of social media, this particular app is my favorite, and so I’m going to only post on that and I’m going to forget the other ones or not worry about them.

So it really comes down to understanding yourself, how you respond to different habits that you need to moderate.

Kevin Pho: Now, among your physician colleagues, are you seeing any negative impacts that social media has on that particular population?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, social media, just like a lot of things, is impacting our time management. And oftentimes we’re in a state of kind of a low-level distraction because of social media, so we’re not necessarily getting deep work done. And on top of that it can impact, like I was saying, sleep habits and other things that we need to be well.

So when I coach physicians, a lot of times I’m trying to help people build into their lives downtime, or stillness time, which is what I would call it, so some sort of a mindfulness practice. And social media eats into that time. We’re all very busy people, we have a lot of time that we’re spending clinically, a lot of time that we need to spend with our families. But what time can you get just by yourself? And if you’re spending that time scrolling, you’re wasting it in a certain way, when you could be renewing yourself, spending some time in silence, doing some exercise, some movement practice, some breathing, or some sort of other exercise.

Kevin Pho: So let’s get back and talk about how social media is affecting our patients. When I used to talk a lot about social media five, 10 years ago, patients were getting a lot of their health care information on social media, and it was up to us to dispute or talk about what they’re reading online. Now, through your research recently, how do you think patients are processing health information that they may be finding on social media today?

Dawn Baker: I think what you’re mentioning is still definitely an issue, because there are so many voices out there that there can be misinformation and disinformation.

The other thing is that social media causes this kind of a lack of filter, that in-person interactions between a doctor and a patient, or just two people, would be different. Whereas when there’s the internet and a faceless avatar and just a name there, there’s vitriol that comes into place, there’s a lot of negative commentary that people wouldn’t necessarily say. When we’re talking face to face, things are just done differently, education is done differently.

It’s also, social media is asynchronous. So we’re right now having a conversation and it’s synchronous, we’re able to see each other, we’re able to see body language, we’re able to respond to each other. But even just a text thread too, social media is another example with comments, it isn’t at the same time, it’s not real time. And so that can impact a level of understanding that definitely needs to be there between a doctor and a patient.

Kevin Pho: What kind of advice do you have for parents? And I think social media is one of the biggest issues when it comes to parenting. I have two teenage daughters and social media is a constant topic. And what kind of advice do you have for them? Because is it simply temporal and limiting time, when a lot of their peers have unlimited access to social media, and there’s a lot of peer pressures that can impact how much they use social media? Talk to us about some of the obstacles parents have when dealing with social media and their children.

Dawn Baker: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I definitely am interested in this part of the whole discussion as well, because I have an eight-year-old daughter and it’s not going to be long before she’s asking for a phone. And honestly, when I am interacting with my phone and her possibly at the same time, I want to be a good role model. So that was part of my impetus for really learning about this.

And the thing that we have to remember is that this is uncharted territory. No generation of parents before us have had to deal with this issue. And so we’re navigating it in real time, and reminding our kids of that, and explaining to them that we’re going to modify these rules as we go along, but we do need to have some rules and boundaries as a family.

And working together based on the interactions, the type of family that you have, the number of kids in your family, how old they are, is just going to be different for everyone. So temporal, you know, no phones at the dinner table. There might be other kinds of things that you can do, people buy little lock boxes and they put their phones in there whenever they’re having a meal together. There are lots of options, and they definitely are explained in the books that I share in the article.

But as far as the bottom line, I think we need to just give each other grace and talk to our kids in an open way, in that sense that, like, hey, this has not been an issue before, there’s not a lot of information about this, and we’re just trying to keep you safe, we’re trying to keep you healthy.

And the more people that understand that this is a problem, the more that they talk about it with their family members, the more the peer pressure thing is going to be less of an issue, because more people are going to be aware of it and not just going to be allowing a free flow of phone use at all times of the day. You’ve got to strike a balance somewhere in between that authoritarian, no you cannot use a phone, and then it becomes a forbidden fruit, and then just being super permissive and allowing your kids to do whatever they want on the phone.

Kevin Pho: Is social media so addictive that maybe it requires more than an individualized approach? What do you think about top-down approaches? Like, I think California, I was just reading, they’re talking about banning cell phones in schools. Or should there be even any governmental policies regulating social media use? And I know the surgeon general with a warning is kind of a step towards that. Should there be some type of graphic warning about addiction before they open up a Facebook or Snapchat? So I guess the question is, what are your thoughts about top-down approaches to regulating this problem?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, I think the information top-down approach is really the best way to deal with it, because if you put in some sort of a ban or a restriction, people are going to find ways around it. But if you put that information out there, I think that’s the best way to solve the issue at the moment.

Now, as far as schools go, I think you can make an argument that having phone-free schools is a really good idea, because it causes a lot of distraction and can cause behavioral issues and other sorts of problems in school. But that’s different than placing an entire ban on a social media app or a particular phone or a device or something like that.

Kevin Pho: So when you talk about social media with your fellow parents or with other physicians, are you encountering any pushback to some of your opinions in terms of your concern about social media? Are you finding people who say, you know, we shouldn’t worry too much about it, and I don’t like it when anything is banned? Are you encountering pushback when you talk about social media?

Dawn Baker: Well, I definitely think the complete all-out ban, like I said, is something that people can push back on. People are very in tune in this country to personal freedoms.

However, at the same time, I have not had any physician parent or otherwise parent come up to me in this discussion and say, oh, I actually think you’re wrong, I don’t think they’re addictive, I don’t think they’re a problem. Everyone thinks that there’s a problem there, and that it’s something that we need to work on and moderate.

Kevin Pho: So when you talk about a top-down information approach, what would be some key points that you want parents and children and even other physicians, what do you want them to know about social media that they may not be aware of previously?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, awareness that, number one, it is addictive and engineered to be addictive. There are people who are sitting in an office and their whole job, they’re getting paid six figures a year to try to figure out a way for you to spend more time on social media. That’s like their entire job. So it definitely is addictive.

And then the other thing is that there is burgeoning research that we are experiencing an epidemic of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and self harm, especially among teens and tweens, and it has gone up since the advent of really the ubiquitous smartphone, the iPhone.

And that research is out there. If you don’t believe me, you can find it. Jonathan Haidt has a Google doc with Jean Twenge, who wrote iGen, another very good book, and they constantly update that with the research. Some of the research is super robust, but not all of it is. But it’s out there, there’s definitely a signal. So I think those are the important things to know and to have awareness of.

Kevin Pho: Let’s talk about the other side of the coin. Let’s talk about some of the benefits that social media has. As a physician, I know that I found other like-minded physicians who have say side gigs and do similar things to what we do, have passions outside of clinical medicine. I think it’s wonderful for community building. I know that social media certainly helps marginalized teens find community. So talk about some of the benefits social media has, so we could just give a more balanced presentation, so it’s not all bad. So talk about some of the benefits.

Dawn Baker: Yeah, absolutely, it’s not all doom and gloom, and I really enjoy being on social media. I have found some great communities on Facebook of women physician moms, and there are just tons of them. If you need help in a certain area, like you are an anesthesiologist and you’re struggling with work-life balance, there’s a group for that. If you have a certain political leaning and you’re a physician mom, there’s a group for that. I mean, and this applies I’m sure to non-physicians as well. So there are huge communities, and we can connect with people and get some perspective that we wouldn’t normally have been able to have gotten in the past.

And then as far as physicians with businesses as well, you can reach such a wide audience without being someone that’s quote famous. So you don’t have to be on TV to be seen by people all over the country and all over the world. So in that sense it’s very valuable.

The issue is that we just need to make sure that we’re mindful about our use, and that when we’re using it for these good things we remember why. Why are you on social media? Are you on there for the camaraderie and the connection and the community, for getting ideas and inspiration about, for instance, having a better work-life balance, parenting? Or are you on there because of patient education? What is your main reason for being on social media? And if you find yourself scrolling and not really being in line with that why, then you should get off and go take a break.

Kevin Pho: So what do you see as the path forward? How do we thread that needle, balancing the benefits we see as social media with all the harms we talked about? Where do you see the next six to 12 months going?

Dawn Baker: Yeah, I think that the first step is really for people to become aware of this issue, and this is happening now. So I’ve got this article out, we’re doing this podcast, there are these books that have come out that I mentioned in the article that are just new, you know, they’re within the last couple of years. This is all raising awareness that social media and apps can be potentially harming us. So that’s the first step.

And then the second step is to be mindful and be intentional of your use patterns. You can even just look at your phone and see how many hours you’ve spent on certain apps, and some people have never done that. So open it and look at that and think about that number, and if you want to be spending that time, that precious time that we have, because time is our non-renewable commodity that is very important to all of us. If you want to be spending that time doing that, or if you want to modify what you’re doing and spend your time doing something else that you’re missing in your life.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Dawn Baker. She’s an anesthesiologist. Today’s KevinMD article is “Social media: Striking a balance for physicians and parents.” Dawn, we’ll end with some of your take-home messages to the KevinMD audience.

Dawn Baker: My take-home message in terms of social media is really that we need to be intentional about why we’re using social media and what we’re using it for, and paying attention to how much time we’re spending on there, and if we want to really be spending it. And it’s going to be different for everyone.

Kevin Pho: Dawn, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming back on the show.

Dawn Baker: Thank you so much for having me again.