I'd like to talk a little bit about technology with the advent of text messaging. So here I'm not going to talk about social media. This is not about social media. With text messaging, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that humans have written with their thumbs.

That's weird, been kind of quirky reflection. But the other one is this is the first time in human evolution, meaning very recently, that we are aware of what's going on with so many other people and we're expected to at least know it and perhaps even respond to it. Clearly our brain has adapted to this new format, but it did not evolve in this format.

You said, and I'll keep repeating it because I love it so much. The more you can locate somebody, the more it reflects their values. So being able to locate somebody in space and time and understand how bounded they are or not to their own emotions or yours is fantastic.

But the fact that you have 10 people in your phone that you're aware of, you're not even supposed to be aware of 10 people at once. We're being forced to navigate a new landscape with all this. My husband and I were talking about phones and text and social media and AI.

And I brought up something to him, he's like, I don't think I, in all the arguments I've heard, I haven't heard that, where I feel like we're changing in a dramatic way our basic evolutionary drive around attachment in a way where attachment has always been the primary evolutionary drive of humans.

And with all the different technological shifts there have been, because people say, oh, there's been this, there's been this, what's never been shifted is kind of the nature really of one-to-one human attachment. We're entering into something really new where let's even say text messages, 20 at once, 10 at once.

Our bodies will always crave what's immediately gratifying over what is long-term good for us. Another way I think about it is our bodies will always choose convenience and ease and gratification over what's good for us long-term. So you think about all these pings coming in. It's a lot of information, this text, that text, this text, this text.

And what you're doing in your circuitry and over time evolutionarily is getting used to the multiplicity of relationships, the multiplicity of information. It's just more gratifying than one-on-one to the point that one-on-one conversation over text or even in person is going to have so much more of a gap than it ever has been in terms of how slow, how low stim, and how boring and awkward it is compared to, especially for kids who get this early, the constant information flow and gratification and stimulation.

I think that's going to have a profound impact, not right away, but over time. And if you add in social media and then if you add in AI, I mean, on the way humans just are even able to relate to each other. So yes, I think like this advancement in technology and what's happening, I think there's always been a trade-off, always, between how short-term gratifying something is and how long-term good something is for us.

Because the things that are really good for humans long-term are the things that involve humans to tolerate frustration. I would say that is the most important skill, I think, for kids to learn. But the world more than ever is built now with insanely low frustration tolerance because we're built for so much information, so much consumption, and so much immediate gratification.

This is actually, I think, the thing that isn't talked about with technology. It's why parenting has changed. It's why so much of parenting is about making kids happy and their lives easy. Because there's never been a generation of parents like my generation where our lives are just so much easier.

We have so much less tolerance for our kids' tantrums because we're on our phones wanting our life to be easier. So we stop the tantrum. We make their life easier. We make them anxious. We make them fragile because of our lowered frustration tolerance. So I don't know where we're landing here.

And by the way, I text. I'm not like a purist here, you know? I am a realist. I live in the world, you know? But I think it's profound how it's changing human interaction and expectations and gratification. My colleague Anna Lembke, who wrote Dopamine Nation, cited some data that humans have more free time now, across socioeconomic groups, more free time for everybody than ever before.

More expectation of immediate gratification. And it's not just the texts that we're getting, it's for some people the texts that they're not getting. They're thinking about the people that they haven't heard back from, etc. The number of tethers, right, exactly. The number of tethers is just astonishing. I had a conversation with somebody recently that popped to mind where it was a little bit, it was like a low friction one that ended in a really good place where I said, you know, the problem is, you know, I was talking about, there's a little bit of an age gap.

And I said, you know, the problem is you think slow is low. Like what I was saying was, I like to just chill. This is something I haven't done enough of in my life because I'm pretty ambitious person and always have been since I was little about everything. But I've learned that like slow isn't low.

I love just like sitting down and like hanging out with the dog or just like slowing down. And it used to feel like slow was low. It used to feel like, oh, nothing's happening or this is depressing or it's boring. And I think in recent years that became more and more the case as I got more and more pulled into technology.

And then I did a little bit of a technology distancing experiment, if you will, have this wooden box that someone made for me and I put my phones in there and it's so amazing how once you put the phone in a different container, it like completely changes the relationship to it.

I don't get it. But anyway, again, physical barriers to make, to take emotional steps, always a good idea. And I just realized like slow isn't low, like slow is awesome. So I totally agree that the circuits of our brain have now adapted to expect immediate gratification. I like to think, and maybe this is a false wish, but I like to think that there are components of our brain that are hardwired enough through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that might be able to recognize and appreciate the slow moments and not feel like slow is low, meaning slow is depressing.

But I do think that if one is weaned in, raised in an environment where you expect things quickly, well then, you know, it's going to feel like the horse and cart compared to the car at some level. I do, I agree. I think that's right. And I think for parents who have young kids, I think these are such powerful and empowering things to think about when your kids are young, because I think it's easy to think, "Oh, okay, so I'll deal with this when my kid gets a phone." It's the circuits around even how your kid will use the phone, how much you're going to be able to set boundaries with your kid when they get a phone.

All these have to do with the patterns early on, right? So if we go back to slow is good, frustration and frustration tolerance is the name of the game. It requires a lot of inconvenient moments that matter so much for how not only your kid learns to tolerate the frustration inherent in life, but I think this is really important, how your kid learns to feel capable.

Kids only develop capability from watching themselves get through hard things. They don't develop capability by being successful, ever. In some ways, it builds up this pressure and a fragility if that's been the only thing they have. And when we think about this whole generation who's so anxious, kind of so fragile, I really believe the antidote to anxiety is capability.

And I'll give an example, like we steal our kids' capability all the time when they're young in the name of short-term convenience for everyone. So here's an example, like I remember this day, my oldest who's now 13, he's like three and he was really into puzzles when he was three.

Puzzles are like really hard, right? He was working on it, something like, "I can't do it," you know, the classic whine, which I just want everyone to know, like no part of me is like, "I love that sound." No, like nobody likes whining, okay? But to me, those are our like bang for our buck moments.

You know, they're not our easy moments, they're our bang for our buck. My kid is going to learn something about how to deal with situations they don't think they're capable of completing. That is such an important lesson. And I have a fork in the road. I can either do the puzzle for him, which gives me short-term convenience, stops the meltdown.

But beyond frustration tolerance, like one of the things I really remember thinking when my kid was young is, "If I do it for him, I'm stealing his capability." Because if he can get through this and kind of get to the point where he says, "I did a puzzle I didn't think I could do," that's incredible.

So I remember this because it felt so -- he's still whining, but there are these moments as a parent, and this is what I like to help parents with. Our wins are not based on our kids' reactions. Our wins happen when you just know there's this amazing feeling you have as a parent.

I know that was important. I know it. And I remember saying to him with this puzzle situation, "Sweetie, I'm not going to do the puzzle for you." And I want to tell you why. The feeling you get when you think you can't do something, kind of take a deep breath, maybe take a break, maybe even the next day, watch yourself do that thing, is literally the best feeling in the world.

It is the best feeling. It becomes addictive. And I will not take that feeling away from you because I believe you're going to get it. I could cry. And one of the things -- I feel like people hear the story like, "Riley, Riley, okay, Becky, great." You know, I do not do that all the time.

Sometimes I finish the puzzle. But when we think about what we want for our kids later in life, it might be, "No, I'm not getting you a phone yet." How a kid reacts to that situation, it's not just about a phone. It's kind of, "Well, have you always just done the thing for me?

Have you always just given me what I want? Do I have any ability to feel like I can tolerate frustration and wait and figure things out?" That all layers into how kids react to not getting a phone, how kids approach hard math problems, how kids do or do not sit down to start their English essay that is difficult to do.

And all that stuff, you can start building those skills in the teenage years, don't get me wrong. But the leg up your kid has at 14, when they've been basically building those life and academic skills from the start, and they've built their identity around capability, like that's what I want to give every parent and every kid in the world.