SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
When was the last time you picked up your phone? Are you holding it right now? Are you scrolling while you listen to this? Too much screen time can mess with our sleep. It's also associated with depression, anxiety and stress symptoms in adolescence. What can help with that and help you feel better and less stressed is movement. NPR Life Kit host Marielle Segarra has tips to help us start craving movement the way we crave our smartphones.
MARIELLE SEGARRA, HOST:
Y'all, we are way too attached to our phones. I mean, I fight against it. I don't keep a lot of apps on there, but it's still the first thing I look at every morning. I guess it's partly a habit I formed and partly a craving for whatever flashy new content the apps I do have will offer me today.
KATY BOWMAN: You never know what you're going to see when you go on there, and that is maybe part of what makes it so attractive.
SEGARRA: Katy Bowman is a biomechanist, which means she studies how forces affect the body, and she's a movement teacher. She and Diana Hill, a clinical psychologist, are coauthors of the book, "I Know I Should Exercise, But...: 44 Reasons We Don't Move And How To Get Over Them." They say it's possible to retrain our brains to crave movement instead of our phones. Diana says the first tip is to surf the urge to scroll. Urge surfing is a technique that can help you say no to something that you're craving, but you want to avoid.
DIANA HILL: What we know about urges is that they're a lot like waves. They rise up. They get bigger and bigger and bigger, and they come back down again. And the goal with urge surfing is to learn how to get on the board of the urge, ride it, notice that it increases over time and stay on it without giving in.
SEGARRA: So when you're at the gym or on the train or walking down the street and you have the urge to pull your phone out of your pocket, pause. Hold off. Try some movement instead.
BOWMAN: Because you've already decided that you value movement and you want to practice it more, the urge can then become sort of a cue to help remind you, oh, yeah, I wanted to move. And it really helps to identify a few ways ahead of time.
SEGARRA: Do a few stretches or calf raises, jumping jacks or squats. Do a little dance - whatever you want, really. Another technique is to savor your favorite physical activities because we know that by intentionally savoring things that we value, we can train our brains to want them more.
HILL: So much of our mind goes right to the negative. We remember all the things that we don't like about exercise or moving. So we actually have to counter that tendency of our mind to grab onto the positive experiences and keep them around, and that's what we're doing by savoring.
SEGARRA: So, for instance, I play softball, and I love the feeling of the ball landing in my mitt and also the feeling of hitting the ball with the bat. And for Katy...
BOWMAN: I was rowing this morning and just listening to the blade of the oar skim across the water and just - I'm like, this is my favorite part right now. I'm savoring. I am relishing. It's like exercise needs a hype man.
SEGARRA: She says one more technique is to add novelty to your workouts and movement breaks.
BOWMAN: If you take a 10-minute walk, can you take a slightly different walk? Can you take a different route? Can you say, for this walk, I'm going to walk on all of the cracks. I'm going to try to add this element of balance or challenge. Can I add some music? You know, can I invite a friend with me? Or can I ditch the walk altogether and maybe do some vigorous stretching or strength training under a tree?
SEGARRA: If you don't mix it up, it's hard for exercise to win out against your constantly refreshing news feed. For NPR News, I'm Marielle Segarra.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEQUEM'S "FEELING GOOD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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