Your Leadership Influence: Do You See Digital Device Use as a Public Health Threat?

Publication: The Bismarck Tribune

Author: Grant Corsey

Date: Nov 9, 2024

Read the original article HERE.

North Dakota top health official calls digital device use 'largest public health threat'

BISMARCK — North Dakota’s interim health chief is making a yearlong push against what he calls the state’s most urgent public health threat — the constant pull of cellphones and other digital devices.

In a training for leaders in Health and Human Services, Pat Traynor on Thursday detailed the health “crisis” facing the state and country from constant distraction by phones and other electronic devices.

“Our use of technology and devices is probably the largest public health threat that we have out there,” Traynor said. “We have a lot of health threats. You know, we have chronic disease, we have cancer, we have, you know, all sorts of other problems. But I think digital device use is perhaps the greatest challenge facing us all, because we are, as a society, completely dependent on these things, and we're excessively using them to the point of interfering with our daily activities of living.”

Designed to addict

Traynor said the training he gave was about awareness, not shame. Trillion-dollar companies have meticulously designed cell phones and applications to capture and keep our attention, according to Traynor, and there was no warning attached to them by the U.S. government telling Americans what they were exposing themselves to.

“They designed them to be 100% irresistible,” Traynor said. “So the big thing is: no shame at all. That's how they were designed, to capture our attention. That's their economic model. … We need to put those things away and start enjoying life. We were meant to enjoy life as humans, with human connection.”

Traynor called on sobering statistics to highlight society's habits around electronic devices. One in three people can only focus on a task for 10 minutes or less without being distracted, a typical employee is distracted every 40 seconds, and a typical college student today can only stay focused for 19 seconds at a time. He said that the overuse of screens has even been shown to lead to a decrease in IQ — also known as an intelligence quotient, which is a measure of someone's intelligence found from specific tests — according to his presentation.

This diminished ability to focus is caused by people’s relationships with their devices. The average person spends 7 hours a day in front of a screen, and the average worker wastes between 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours a day on the internet at work, he said.

“We've spent years and years upgrading machines, but have we upgraded us humans?” Traynor asked. “Are we capable of taking this much information into us all the time?”

 “Humans aren’t equipped to deal with this level of sophisticated distraction,” he continued later in his presentation.

Some people struggle with multitasking, and constant notifications pull people out of their “flow” — when they are fully focused and engaged with the present — according to Traynor. This not only damages some people’s ability to be productive at work but also their ability to fully engage with the people who matter most to them.

“It's taking our life from a life of purpose and meaning to a life of distraction,” he said. “If you bring yourself distracted every single day, you can't focus on the things that matter in life … So you can't be fully present in any interaction with your wife, your spouse, you know, your co-worker, your friend, your son, your daughter. It's a serious, serious issue impacting all of us.”

Children are the most vulnerable

The effect of devices on children is especially concerning to Traynor. He said their brains are more susceptible to the addictive nature of the devices because they are still forming.

“The right thing is to keep these away from kids at the early stage,” Traynor said. “They've literally changed learning and play-based childhoods.”

Now, he says childhoods are more and more technology-based, and children are not learning the social skills and other important skills for development that come from play.

Gov. Kelly Armstrong’s administration being willing to take action to address this crisis is part of why Traynor took the position as the head of HHS in the first place. Traynor is on a one-year civil service leave from the Dakota Medical Foundation, which developed the “battle for your attention” curriculum used in Thursday's training.

“I was really impressed with Gov. Armstrong and Lt. Gov. Strinden when they put forward the phone ban bill,” he said. “That was a defining moment for me, that this is an administration I could work with, because they have great courage about talking about tough issues.”

Traynor said every parent needs to know that children's overuse of screens has been shown to increase the likelihood of suicidal ideation.

The bell-to-bell cellphone ban in North Dakota schools went into effect Aug. 1. Schools are responsible for coming up with their own method to enforce the new law.

What can we do?

First, people can be aware, Traynor said.

“If you pat yourself down as you leave the house, it's like, ‘where's my phone?’ when you get in your car, you probably are addicted, and might have a bit of a problem, because you can't go anywhere without it anymore,” Traynor said.

He emphasized multiple times that phones and digital devices can be amazing tools. But he encouraged people to think about what they want their relationship to be with their devices and to question what benefit they are getting from the way they use their phones, tablets and computers.

He said it can be beneficial to simply take note of what notifications people receive from their phones throughout the day that pull their focus. Are those notifications that people want turned on? Would it be beneficial to simply turn those notifications off?

Or as a more proactive example, people can take steps to put phones away, maybe even lock them away, when spending time with those they care most about, to ensure they can give their full focus to those people.

“Let’s feed our focus because that’s important to us, and let’s starve our distractions,” Traynor said.

He said he wants HHS to be an example for other government agencies and private companies in the state. His goal is to make North Dakota the healthiest state in the country, and he sees addressing digital device use as a key part of reaching that goal.

By training leaders in HHS, Traynor said he hoped they would bring this awareness back to their teams and departments and hopefully help the whole agency develop healthier relationships with their devices.

“I'm excited about today, because we have an opportunity to impact … 2,600 employees at HHS, another 1,000 at the county that we work with that do eligibility across the state. So that's 3,600 people that have kids, that have friends, that we can create a ripple effect throughout North Dakota so that we're aware of this addiction to distraction with these devices,” Traynor said.

Section Chief for Healthy and Safe Communities at HHS Kim Mertz said the training was timely for her not only professionally, but personally. She said that she has felt her team being pulled in many different directions at work and hoped what she learned at the training would be able to help them with the distractions they face.

“My key takeaway, I think from today, is that, you know, we're kind of all in this together,” Mertz said. “It's not just me struggling with this, it's all of us together, and everybody wants the best for yourself, for your team, for the people we serve.”

Chief Human Resources Officer Marcie Wuitschick called the training “awakening,” and said it had helped her see that her device usage is higher than it should be but also lower than she had expected.