We all know that sitting for hours of screen time is bad, but can we fix it?

I think a lot of us don't realize how much pain we live in because of our interactions with computing.

Ultimately, it's a culture change.

NPR's Body Electric, a special interactive series investigating the relationship between our

tech and our bodies.

Listen in the Ted Radio Hour Feed wherever you get your podcasts.

It's funny, my daughter this year and her Mother's Day card wrote to me, thank you for helping me be optimistic.

And it made me cry, but it also made me laugh

because if you had told me even five years ago, but certainly ten years ago, and definitely 15 years ago,

that anyone would accuse me of being an optimist, I would have laughed. I'm sure my own mother would have laughed.

I would probably call myself a recovering pessimist ever since I was a child. I think I've practiced

what I would call self-protective pessimism, which is something that so many of us do. You know we imagine the worst case scenario

and we expect the worst because if it turns out well then we're pleasantly surprised instead of disappointed.

And if it doesn't turn out well, then we were right and we do love to be right

even if it's about something negative.

You know in some ways thinking negatively before we even know what's going to happen

is just robbing us of that period of joy before we really know how something will turn out.

Would you consider yourself a self-protective pessimist or do you tend to imagine the best-case scenarios?

I'm Emeliana Simon Thomas, the science director at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, filling in for Dackerelian Science Center

filling in for Dacker-Keltner this week.

Our guest today is Poet Maggie Smith.

Her works have been featured in the New York Times,

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