Always online: Therapeutic approaches in the age of chronic screen use

The “always online” trend and increased screen time during the pandemic have exacerbated various issues, including the adolescent mental health crisis, loneliness, declining social connections, reluctance to grow up, and difficulty detaching from devices.

Schools, hospitals, and therapy rooms are witnessing the impacts of constant online presence, highlighting the need for a collective therapeutic approach to managing screen use. This training, will look at the modern clinical approaches for helping people of all ages build better relationships with screens and technology so they can build more balanced brains. Areas of focus will include:

• How addictive algorithms capture our attention, making us more erratic, irrational, distracted, and self-focused
• How dopamine reshapes our reward pathways and how to rewire the reward circuitry
• How constant screen use rewires our social instincts and changes our relationships
• How excessive exposure to screens and technology changes the stress-threat response and impacts our ability to self-regulate and co-regulate