Professor Jonathan Haidt, who is the head of ethical leadership at NYU Stern School of Business, is famous for his important work “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
He has identified the period of the twenty tens as being the era when the tech companies with their super powerful new mobile phones, in conjunction with their hundreds, if not thousands of apps, super fast global interconnectedness and a plethora of computer games all linked together into a nefarious network, which has caused as many problems as it has helped resolve and whose masters seem to lack any interest in or concept of a duty of care towards their young and often immature clients.
Professor Haidt has pointed out that as young people turned their backs on the sports fields, swing parks and trees for climbing in favour of the their phones and computer screens. This new virtual world began to deprive them of the very life challenges and difficulties which had helped to turn previous generations into well rounded practical individuals capable of coping well with life’s arrows and slingshots.
Professor Haidt reminds us with that well known saying which says that “a child who has never broken a bone is a child who has never lived”.
Thankfully Professor Haidt has not only explored the terrain and parameters of this problem in an important book which is one that all parents and everyone dealing with young people should be encouraged to read, but he has devoted a significant part of his book to ways for helping tech damaged individuals reset their lives and substitute real time endeavours for virtual reality, to create a happier and healthier lifestyle.
Here at the Glasgow Complementary Medicine Centre, we use Homeopathy and Hypnotherapy, as well as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and meditation to give young people tools and techniques to help them break out of this particularly nasty vicious circle.
Our Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Self Hypnosis, Journalling and Meditation, can give young people tools that they can work with to reclaim their realtime lives and even take the best that the tech world has to offer so that they can use their smart phones or computers in a more creative and less addictive manner and thus reboot their neural pathways and lives at the same time.
A young client at the clinic, when being pressured by her parents go to bed at night, will now protest that she still has to do her daily self hypnosis session. This has helped with her anxiety levels, particularly at school.
Can we help you or a young person in your family? Get in touch today!