Ross A. Laird

Modern humans have been around for perhaps as long as 200,000 years. We have been using screen-time technologies for about a decade (with the exception of television, which has been part of the Western lifestyle for slightly longer).

We are animals. Our well-being depends upon bodily movement, expression, and integration. This is what both current and ancestral research consistently demonstrate: our relationship with our own bodies is central to every aspect of our development.

Modern Challenges

Obesity, ADHD, cancer, diabetes, addictions of all kinds, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, trauma: all of these challenges are correlated with diet and exercise. In fact, healthy diet and exercise are the only two factors that are almost always linked to improvement across the domains of health and wellness.

And yet, in Psychology and Counselling we remain seated in chairs, and we seem content to explore insight and the inner life. That's fine; but insight alone cannot heal the fractured nervous system. Only movement and physical challenge can do that. With the average Canadian youth already seated in a chair and watching a screen for more than 40 hours per week, more chair-sitting seems like a poor idea.

Final Thoughts

• In the coming years, technology addictions will replace many other kinds of addiction.
• Technology addictions are similar -- and yet, in some ways, very different from -- other addictions. Technology addictions require new and innovative approaches (many of which would also be applicable to the treatment of substance addictions).
• Counsellors, social service providers, parents and mentors who wish to understand and deal with the challenges of technology addictions must be willing to enter the cultures of technology.
• The body is the instrument of our consciousness. We should use it better.