Good evening, everybody. How y'all doing? Welcome to the show. Got a great show plan for you.

We're going to spend a lot of the night talking, I guess, about phones. We're going to

later jump into texting from a mental health perspective, though, for couples, especially,

but all relationships. What are the things we should text and not text? And what do we need

to consider so as to not create more

problems? And then later in the show, we're going to be talking about sexting. So it's a show

really focused on phones. What do we need to consider? How do we really flip our perspective on it?

And we're also going to talk about a new law. But before we get into that, I thought, hey, let's open

the show by just talking about general phone use from the mental health perspective. Often we just impulsively grab for things,

not really checking in with what is my core need here, right? And so I noticed that when people

are feeling a feeling, sometimes they just grab for their phone, right, as a way to distract,

dissociate, discount,

minimize. So one of the most powerful things I think we can do is ask ourselves before we grab our

phone, what are we feeling? Lonely? Okay. Maybe we should call a friend instead or go talk to someone.

What are we feeling bored? Okay. Is there anything more meaningful we can do?

Not that the phone is always bad, but I think it sometimes is used to replace some better

coping mechanism, which might actually solve something.

And because the phone can't solve a lot of these issues, we stay on it.

And it keeps in this repetitive pattern. We feel something, we go to the phone

for a solution. It can't provide it. So we stay on longer, keep going back to it. But the phones are

only meant to be utilized for certain really basic things. And I see people even doing that with

apps, you know, on board. So I'm going to go on an app. Really? Well, it might make your life feel worse or more complicated. Also, pay attention your screen time.

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