#23 Healthy Boundaries

#23 Healthy boundaries
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Welcome to episode number 23 of Diff'rent Points. I'm joined with my co-host Catherine Llewellyn and I'm Roy Colin and today's question is health boundaries. So a few things came to my mind, but I always like to pass it to you so then my mind starts thinking differently.

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When I saw this one and I thought healthy boundaries, I thought a big one for me. And I think the boundaries I most need to pay attention to are the boundaries I have with myself because most of the people in my life do behave themselves really well and they don't go across boundaries that I want them to go across. But with myself, a big example for me is looking at screens and scrolling.

And it's a boundary that I've been paying attention to on and off for years and I've not got it absolutely mastered. I think it's probably to do with an addiction actually. You know, people say with addiction, you're never no longer an addict, you're a covering alcoholic or whatever it is that you were.

I think with screens and scrolling and things like that, the addiction to that I think doesn't completely go away. At the moment, it's pretty good in the sense that it's within certain timeframes and I'm doing what I need to do in my day and I check my emails when I check them. It's not a problem at the moment, but there have been points in my life when it has been a problem and almost a whole day you disappear with me just looking at stupid stuff.

Cat videos, by the way, I think are not stupid stuff. I think they're absolutely vital to our health and well-being. So that's not wasting time in my opinion.

But yeah, I think this is an important one and I don't have the answer to it and I think it's something to do with the fact that the technology and what's available for us to look at on screens and the fact it's so entertaining and compelling and well-designed has outstripped our ability to cope with it properly. Most of us have now got alcohol managed or smoking cigarettes managed or whatever other substance we may be taking, we've got it managed. We're not doing it all the time, we just do it when it works for us.

But those things have been in our society and in our culture for thousands of years. We've had plenty of time to adapt and learn how to utilise them, but we haven't with all this tech stuff. So for me, that is the biggest one at this point in my life.

How about you, Roy? Well, I'll just kind of touch on what you said first because I'm like the tech companies intentionally are doing this to us. So we think there's something wrong when we're going, oh, I'm spending so many hours. So what I would suggest is, one, track it and try to reduce it weekly.

Two, the way that they're working, and I've seen even WhatsApp is doing it now as well. Like Facebook, you go in and you try to, yeah, you've seen something and you've realised that's not for me and you scroll on, but then it puts a little box down the end plane and you're going, I don't want that. And there's times where I need to write a message to somebody.

So I'm working on something, I go into Facebook and then I see a shiny little dot and before I know it, I go, all right, get back to work, close the Facebook, then go back to what I was doing to realise that's why I opened Facebook to write to somebody. But I'm conscious of it regarding being on the screen. I read books as opposed to reading PDFs or listening to audio.

I like to step away, have the physical books and step away. But when we're talking about healthy boundaries, what came to mind for me was people. Like there's some people you can handle them for like three, five minutes, have a little chit chat and that's it.

There's others you can manage a day, but when it exceeds that, you couldn't do a weekend with them. And there's others after a week, you see that things get a bit different. And I think to protect yourself, instead of kind of trying to be Mr. Nice Guy, know your boundaries and know where people stand in them and stay away from the ones that are sucking your energy or just not bringing anything to your life and increase the ones that when you walk away from you, you just feel energised and you're ready to take on the work.

So that's what. Excellent advice. I'm even forgetting that was me that was actually started this show.

So I'd have to say, yeah, give us a thumbs up, five star rating and just think yourself like that's the main focus of this show is like, we want you to answer that question yourself. Maybe if you're with your partner, do it together and just see it's a nice way of doing it. So we usually say, give us a five star rating, thumbs up and a comment.

And what I would say is usually when I'm doing the podcasting thing, most people say, I don't know how to do it. If it's Spotify, there's three little dots. You have to have played an episode, three dots and you give a five star rating or in the episode itself, you can comment.

I see him, Catherine sees him. We're happy to respond when we see something like that. And if it's Apple, you just scroll down and you say rate this show.

Of course you can give a five stars. I mean, unless you don't like us, you give one, but you know, it's all okay. We're not going to cry over.

And then you can give a nice comment as well. And we see all of them. So until next week, take care or next episode, whenever that is.