ExclusiveTake a hike to escape the harmful mental effects of the digital world

Welcome to Epoch Insights with Tiffany. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Today we talk about screen addiction as a current problem of not just young people, but people of all ages, and notice how people immediately pull out their phones and look on their screens, and just to observe how it has changed the way people interact. Of course, I'm almost too young to remember a time before people had the whole world on the internet right in their pockets, but I know about this time from watching old movies and television shows, and of course those are all scripted and not necessarily everything is accurate to life, but you can see how people seem far more impatient waiting in lines or in elevators. They either are friendly or even uncomfortable, but a high level of impatience and discomfort has been lessened. The edge has been taken off of just the natural energy of humankind because you always have something to do. There's an article about that in the Mind and Body issue of the Epoch Times called The Internet's Toll on Teenage Brains, and it has some interesting statistics. Because of social media in particular, there's such a high and fast reward rate. You post anything and within a few minutes, some friend of yours will have liked it, and that gives the part of your brain that is usually reserved for winning money or taking risks to say, oh, something good has happened. But if you have that too much, suddenly you want more and more, and things which would have brought you satisfaction or pleasure in the past have little to no effect on you because you become more and more of seeking validation, especially from your peers. And I think that's one reason why you see so many people, especially young people, to just seem like nothing matters to them and nothing has any impact. They don't get excited or they aren't happy. It's a sort of one note because the digital gratification is the only thing that matters. There's another article that's on the same page where this one ends, and this one is called The Nature Cure for Mental Health. Now when I saw that, I was thinking about some old books that talked about the more medicinal or actual physical side of a nature cure, but it's basically just saying leave your phone at home and go hiking on a trail. The benefits, both mental and physical, of being out in nature, hiking around, or whatever other kind of physical outdoor activity you enjoy. Nature therapy, also known as shinrin yoko or forest bathing, has been shown scientifically to improve mental health. And these suggestions are, firstly, it's never too late to start. Hiking is not just a young person's activity. There was an 80 year old whom she met at a campsite who does a multi-day solo trip every year. Do your research and start small. A walk in a local park can gradually build to a two-mile hike in a wilderness area, and then a half-day trek up to a full-day excursion. So if you start small, you can end up wanting to hike more and just enjoying that some more. This reminds me of a couple of old movies. One of them is Mr. Hobbes Takes a Vacation from the early 1960s. It's about this family where Mr. Hobbes is the father, played by a middle-aged Jimmy Stewart, and his wife is Maureen O'Hara, and they take their children and they try to make it a family reunion, inviting their two grown married daughters and their families to join their younger daughter and youngest child, a son, so they all can have a wonderful time together. However, it quickly proves to be not as much fun and not as much family bonding as Mr. Hobbes thought it would be. They're in a ramshackle beat-up old house on the beach, and the son just is very upset that there's no television set. He brought his own, but he can't seem to get any connection, so he can't get any service, and he's very dismayed about that and just sitting around and sulking, and Mr. Hobbes is like, oh good, I'm finally going to get that boy away from the TV, because he's just a television addict. His father has an opportunity to bond with the boy, and he invites him. Actually, it's the son's idea to go out in a little boat and see an eclipse, and as they're out together on the water, they have a great time talking about sports records and just some quality father and son time. That's similar to going on a hike, to get out there in nature away from technology, whether it's a television set or a computer, and enjoy doing something real together. Specifically about hiking in nature, that reminds me of a movie called Mr. Scoutmaster, which is from 1953. In that movie, Clifton Webb is a very intellectual man who gives programs on television which are all about high-minded topics. However, his good job may be in jeopardy when his sponsor says that he's not relatable. The people that they want to be watching, young people, think that he's a square. They're not interested at all in his highbrow things, so the sponsor challenges him to get to know what young people do, what they like, what they think. Since he and his wife are unable to have children, he doesn't have much interaction with young people, much to his wife's sadness, because she's a very sensitive woman who longs to be a mother. He decides to do some research by buying a bunch of comic books from a couple of Boy Scouts, give recommendations of what they think are just the neatest thing you can read these days. He's appalled by the high level of violence, although it's really cartoon violence, in these comics and the outer space and monsters, and he says, I think that we're going to have a generation of mass murderers and psychopaths. He eventually is sort of hoodwinked into taking the job of being a scoutmaster of a group that's similar to the Boy Scouts, although they don't use that name, and he acts like he's taking this job merely to help out a local minister who needs someone who's brave enough to lead these very unruly boys. Little does he know that the gentleman has an ulterior motive. Clifton Webb's character just wants to be around the boys so that he can find out what really makes them tick and why they don't like his show. Of course, it starts out rather rough when he is introduced as this celebrity, and the boys know of him, and they start asking him, oh, how do you write your show? And he said, well, sometimes I write it with my heart's blood, being very metaphorical and philosophical, and one of the lads, surprisingly disrespectfully, says, I think you need a blood transfusion, and they start chanting, he needs blood! It's ridiculous, but he gets them all into order by beginning to sing the national anthem, and that spark of patriotism makes them shape up and stand in detention. But what really gets those boys to go from being just a bunch of hoodlums to a group of fine young men is taking them out hiking. He brings them out on trails, and at first some of them are just wimpy about it, falling in a little tiny creek, this one boy saying, I'm drowning! He says, you could stand up, young man. And he demands that they march and hike and learn how to tie knots and make fires, and the experience of getting away from their comic books and whatever else is influencing them to act that way, basically they realize he won't take that kind of nonsense. So they learn how to do some real things, and it makes them into fine young boys and young men. There are so many good lessons that we can learn from these movies and television shows from generations of old, the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, even the 60s, not really that long ago if you look at the history of the world, but some of those things can seem like they were made a very long time ago just because the world has changed so much since then. But amazingly, when you see those old shows or movies or books when they're talking about a utopian future with all this technology, you only see the good. You only see people in great proficiency using these technologies for good purposes. It's only in the dystopian futures that you see what is reality, that people have tools but they don't use them to improve themselves. Instead of just using it so that you can stay connected to your loved ones and friends, it makes you more distant because you've lost the ability to communicate with your voice and to be comfortable talking to other people. You lose the comfort of making eye contact and just being friendly in a normal human environment. Watching the old tv shows like My Three Sons, the stereotype is that the teenagers are always on the telephone talking constantly. It's like, oh, when you get married, your children are going to have a phone going out of your ear because they're just constantly talking to their friends usually. But it's interesting how although we still say young people are constantly on their phones, it's not talking anymore. As a matter of fact, many young people have the attitude like it's not appropriate to call someone unless it's a big deal. Like, if you call someone, be like, um, what do you want? And of course that isn't the case with people of an older generation. They realized it could just be to say hello and how nice that can be. But I think it's important to stay connected not only to our literature of the past but to use technology like the television set and movies to stay connected to our past and realize what has happened in the last hundred years, how we use it, and most importantly that we don't let it deprive us of our humanity, our kindness, our human connections, and as this article highlights, our sanity. It's important for parents and families, loved ones and friends to find ways together to realize whether perhaps some people have an actual internet addiction which can negatively impact their mental health and lead to other serious forms of addiction such as substances and to realize that technology can be a useful tool if we use it as such and we don't let it take over our whole lives. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If you enjoyed this video, I hope you'll like it, subscribe to the channel, leave a telling me what you liked about it, and share this video with your friends. Above all, I hope I encouraged you to take a walk outside today and get away from technology. Just enjoy the timeless beauty of nature.