S.U.N.: Lisa’s Three Keys to a Happy Summer

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Reena Ninan:
Episode 173, Lisa’s Three Keys to a Happy Summer.
We are almost here. I can taste it, but Summer should have started three weeks ago.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh man, is that the truth? We are so close on our end and as much as I love making my kid breakfast before school, I also love it when she sleeps in and I get to enjoy my coffee a little longer.

Reena Ninan:
Tell me about it. The school rush in the morning is really something, but I wanted to get a take from you, Lisa, your hot take on how you want us to think about this summer and what should parents focus on. I know I’m struggling right now. I feel like my kids are middle school. They need to be focusing on a little bit of academics more so than they normally have in the past, but what’s really important when it comes to the summer?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, first of all, I love summer. I’ve always loved summer and for me, I think it’s a time of restoration. It’s a giant reset. And Reena, I’ve been thinking about this. If we’re going to get serious about restoration, we probably need a corny acronym to help us.

Reena Ninan:
I love a good acronym. That’s how I got through school.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So I came up with this corny one and I actually Googled it. I was like, somebody else has thought of this, but weirdly somebody else hadn’t. And the acronym is S.U.N., Sun. And there’s three things that I think if we focus on them this summer for ourselves and our kids, they apply to everyone. I think everyone’s going to come out of the summer feeling fabulously restored.

Reena Ninan:
That’s so great. So tell me what they are.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so S. No surprise here, sleep.

Reena Ninan:
This is the hardest one. Also, by the way, for some parents like myself too, I’m struggling with sleep.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Everybody struggles from time to time with sleep. You know how I feel about sleep. I am obsessed with sleep and this is not just because I am looking for something to be obsessed with. It is because the research is so, so clear, Reena, about the impact of sleep. We had that fabulous episode with Lisa Lewis not long ago, where we did a deep dive.
The research I want to add, and this is really research that changed my life, is that we can study sleep so easily because all we do is we bring you into a lab, give you a great night’s sleep, give you a bunch of measures, bring it back in the lab, keep you up all night, give you the same measures so we really know what we’re looking at.
When we have slept well, we needless to say, have more energy, better focus, better attention, better mood. Less likely to injure ourselves, less likely to have any kind of accident. We like ourselves better, we like everybody else better. That finding cracks me up. We’re more creative. It’s unbelievable what sleep does for us. And so if we think about restoration, there’s no conversation to be had about restoration that doesn’t involve starting with sleep. Another way to put it, you could do all the restorative things in the world and if you haven’t slept well, none of ’em are going to count.

Reena Ninan:
But can I say this is the first to go in summer.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes.

Reena Ninan:
Sleep is always the first to go. And I want to have a little less structure. Okay, stay up a little bit later. It’s the summer for goodness sakes, your cousins are over, you’re out on vacation. But it’s also a fine line from completely losing the plot and going the other way.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Exactly right. Just when we need it the most or could theoretically get it the most, it can start to fall apart. And I’ll just add, it’s really hard when it’s daylight at 9:00 PM in some areas to convince everybody that they should start getting ready for bed. That that is hard.
So one thing that we know is it’s okay for kids to stay up a little later in the summer, especially if they can sleep in a little later and all we want is enough runway before the school year starts to get their schedules back on track. So I would say probably it’s less about keeping rigid bedtimes and more about just making time for sleep and then making sure that it’s good sleep, that it’s cold enough for sleeping. Sometimes that keeps people awake is that it’s too warm. So if it can be cold enough for sleeping, if there’s no tech in the bedroom, that is something that I believe in really strongly.
It also can interrupt sleep if you’re exercising too late in the day. So I think there’s, however the schedule shifts, if there’s still enough time for wind down and letting the body start to settle, those things can matter. On the flip, we know that people sleep better when they’re active during the day and when they get plenty of light, and so the summer helps us in that way. But what I would say is prioritize sleep. Prioritize sleep. The schedule can shift a little bit, but make sure it’s good sleep and take advantage of the fact that we do ask less of ourselves and our kids often in the summer.

Reena Ninan:
So temperature matters, tech in the bedroom matters. Having time to wind down and making sure you’re moving, there’s some sort of exertion throughout the day to naturally gets you to want to go to bed.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s true exercise not only helps people fall asleep faster, it helps them sleep more soundly through the night. So if somebody is struggling with sleep, I will always start with a recommendation that they bump up their exercise and then of course this seems obvious, but it gets lost sometimes with kids watch when caffeine is happening. Sometimes kids…

Reena Ninan:
That’s a problem for me personally too.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Exactly.

Reena Ninan:
Trying to cut down from four to two cups of coffee a day. It’s crazy.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Or maybe just bump ’em all before noon. Right?

Reena Ninan:
Okay.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Just cut yourself off at a certain point and kids sometimes late in the day will end up drinking something, a soda that then keeps them kind of wired through the night. So we should keep an eye on that.

Reena Ninan:
So what do you have for us? For U?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. I think this one’s going to be pretty obvious. Unplug.

Reena Ninan:
Okay. This is a hard one, but okay.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is a hard one, but here’s how I think about it, Reena, if we take advantage of the fact that routines shift in the summer, demands can sometimes shift a bit in the summer. It lets us play with routines around how connected we are and our kids are to digital technology.
So if you think about your summer ahead and what your work life looks like and what your kids’ life looks like, where are some pockets? If you think it through, and I’m thinking this through too, where new routines, at least just for the summer, could be established around where the tech is and how much we interact with it?

Reena Ninan:
Maybe in the morning because I feel like the later in the day also as parents who are maybe working from home, it’s impossible. I need the time. So I’m giving them their phone, their iPad, the video games because I need the time to work.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So let’s be realistic about where it makes sense to stay plugged in. It can work for your kid, it can work for you. What if, and I’ve been sort of noodling with this idea, what if over the summer we said to our kids, everybody’s going to check, can look at their tech first thing Saturday morning, later Saturday afternoon, but most of the day Saturday we’re going to take off or most of the day Sunday we’re going to take off. What about that idea of instituting one day a week in the summer where the whole family says, let’s step away from our phones?

Reena Ninan:
We did this in Maine, and I was shocked at how much they stopped using the iPads and didn’t even ask for them once we started doing it. But what do you do if you’ve got kids sort of in the high school age where texting is their lifeline? It’s like taking oxygen away from a child.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, exactly. So it may be one of those things with an older kid that’s hard with an older kid and you know I feel very strongly about this. If you have not established that their phone and computer never goes in their bedroom or certainly not overnight, maybe the summer is a great place to do that, that they unplug at least through the night.
My dream is that if this gets established in the summer, it then rolls into the school year and the kid doesn’t go back to having tech in their bedroom overnight. So maybe that’s the rule. If the rule has been, no rule around having tech in the bedroom, maybe for the summer you say, you know what? For the summer, if you’re going to sleep well the S in S.U.N., we’re going to unplug through the night. Let’s get it out. Okay, so you could institute a day that everybody takes off with an older teenager. It may be that you just institute that the knights are off from tech, which a lot of kids are still engaged late into the night, which isn’t helping them.
What about family vacations? What do you think the whole family goes on vacation together so there’s no socializing to be set up. What do you think is possible under those conditions?

Reena Ninan:
It’s a different summer. This is the first summer I feel both of my kids have cell phones, so they’re pretty good about their phones not being on, but when they go somewhere they want to snap a photo and they want to text it to their group of friends.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, isn’t that interesting?
And I think we forget about that. The phone is also the camera and it’s how I stay connected to what’s happening even if I can’t be part of it.
We’re going to take a couple short vacations this summer as a family and one of the things I’m thinking about is that we come to agreement about sort of points in the day when everybody can check and that we all observe those points in the day. So maybe once over breakfast, once around lunchtime, once at dinnertime, but then it goes away so that in the actual vacation itself we’re together. What do you think about that? Would your kids go for that?

Reena Ninan:
Totally. I think they would absolutely go for that and maybe if it’s something that we’re going out to see that they want to take pictures of that’s historic, maybe we make an exception for that and put it back in the bag or something like that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think these tiny things make a huge difference because, Reena, what I’ve been finding is that on the weekends now, before the school year has quite ended, I am trying to step away from my phone at least for some chunk of the weekend, four hours away from my phone feels like a vacation.

Reena Ninan:
It’s funny you say that. I have been consciously doing the same because I started to feel like I am chains smoking because I’m so attached to my phone and I don’t feel good, and when I isolated, why am I, and so I’ll turn my phone on if there’s some emergency at school, I’ll get the phone call from the school nurse or whoever, but I just am finding that I personally need that now.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Reena Ninan:
But let me ask you for a friend, a very good friend of yours who maybe might be doing a podcast with you on a regular basis.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Whose name rhymes with Meema Linenan.

Reena Ninan:
Could possibly be.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Could possibly.

Reena Ninan:
How do you stop yourself from being on your phone at night? Because it’s like the after nine o’clock that kills me. I can shut off during the day, but then I realize, oh, I need to buy that swimsuit for my son or I need to get this and I need to. And so I’m then doom scrolling and I find that hard to do. So how can I expect my children to shut down when I’m sitting there scrolling through and knocking out stuff online?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And also I’ll add to this, it’s fun. Right? That often at the end of the day I will sit there with my computer in my lap looking at clothes. Right? Just it’s fun. I’m just, it’s kind of mindless and I need something mindless. I think the issue, and this gets us back to the first one is it’s going to keep us up, Reena. If I’m looking at clothes at 9:30 and you’re looking at whatever you’re looking at at 9:30, it will delay sleep onset. We know that, the combination of stimulation, light, all of it not good. So I think we really work backward from the first letter, S, how much sleep do we want? And I have had to make a very rigid rule. I shut it down at least 45 minutes before I go to bed so that I can fall asleep quickly. So rather than being, and I love thinking this way against the tech before sleep, what time do you want to fall asleep? Walk yourself back 45 minutes, hold yourself to it.

Reena Ninan:
Sun, S.U.N. for sleep, unplug. And now drum roll. You’re going to tell us what the N is.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Nature.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, yeah. I will say that that did catch me by surprise, but I’m fascinated by this.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, Reena. The research on nature and its restorative power is so interesting.
So interesting. And I want to break down the research, but what I love is summer is a great time for nature. We have more time to be in nature. Often kids get to go to camp, sometimes in nature. We can take more bike rides as a family. Nature and summer are good friends.
The research on what certainly I have the experience. I don’t know if you do. When I am out in nature, I just feel better.

Reena Ninan:
Totally.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right. Can you describe what it feels like for you when you get out into the woods or out by the lake or out by you’re by the coast?

Reena Ninan:
Meditative. It’s something meditative. When I’m walking and I’m in nature and there’s no, it’s meditative. My parents are from India and somebody was explaining to me that there are different stages of life as you’re working and building and one of the last stages is you’re no longer sort of in public life all the time, but you withdraw into nature and there was a more spiritual, I’m not doing it justice, but the way this person explained to me is just naturally your life moves to that stage and you feel closeness more…

Dr. Lisa Damour:
With nature.

Reena Ninan:
In a way that you wouldn’t when you were maybe 20 or 30 or building your career or 40 with three kids and a dog and a mortgage.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s probably because you get smarter and you realize I need more time in nature.

Reena Ninan:
I think so.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right?

Reena Ninan:
There is something renewal, renewing about it. Right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Yes. Let me then take the less beautiful, less spiritual, less philosophical line on this and just give you the straight up science as it has been looked at.
So there are two things that there’s broad agreement about the impact of being in nature. One is that it reduces stress and the other is that it improves our ability to pay attention when we come back inside.

Reena Ninan:
How so?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So these are the key things, like what’s the finding and then the why. Okay, so let’s start with the attention one because it’s what you’re describing a little bit about that restored and ready to be back at something. So here are the study findings and then I’ll tell you we always get the findings and then we make guesses about why we found what we found.
So the way these studies work, I think they’re really cool. I like the details of the methods. There’s a way that we can measure attention and it’s basically digit span and it’s a subset of the IQ test, which when I was a graduate student, I gave tons and tons of IQ tests. I could make extra money as a graduate student by giving IQ test for a school in our community. And one of the ways that we measure attention is we have a digit backward test. So basically, Reena, I would read you a series of digits, but they’re not in order. I just read you a bunch of digits and then your job would be to say them to me backwards. So it’s a quick and dirty, but actually quick and actually very accurate measure.

Reena Ninan:
So you’re going to give me a live IQ test. This is just…

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No, I’m not doing it. I’m not doing…

Reena Ninan:
You know better than to give me a live IQ test.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I wouldn’t put you on the spot like that. You would crush it, but I’m not going to put you on the spot.

Reena Ninan:
You’re a good friend.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So we can use digit backward as a way to see how strong is a person’s attention capacity.
So for these research studies, we give everybody a bunch of digit backward measures and we see how strong their attention is. We give them a score on attention, we then stress them out. We ask them to do mentally fatiguing things, give them challenging problems. Then half of the research subjects go for a walk in the woods and half of the research subjects go for a walk through a city and then we bring them back and we give them the digit backwards test again. The people who went through a walk in the woods do really well on digit backwards, their ability to pay attention has been restored. The people who go through a walk in the city don’t do very well on digit backward. Their attentional strength is weakened.

Reena Ninan:
Isn’t that something because there are probably senses and mental capacity taxed in every sort of direction, right? That’s a busy place.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.
So that’s the finding. Okay. Then the theory is, well, what is it about being in nature that restores the ability to focus your attention? And there’s a couple ideas. One is when we’re in nature, it takes us away. That sense of just a departure from the busyness of our houses or the busyness in our offices or the busyness of what are phones even, right? This is also you want to add unplug to this, that being away allows for a reset so that when you come back to the things you need to pay attention to, you have more force to do it.
The other way we think about it in terms of why it supports being able to pay attention is that nature often is inherently fascinating. I think about you living by the water. If you just stand on a beach, you can watch the water and the sky, the things you’re paying attention to take no effort. That nature gives you lots to attend to. That’s easy to attend to and the ease of that refills your attentional power and lets you pay attention when you come back to whatever you were doing before you went out in nature. Isn’t that amazing?

Reena Ninan:
That is so fascinating. I’m also thinking about a girlfriend of mine who’s been trying to get me to meditate every day and swears to me you’ll see a difference. You’ll feel a difference. And I think maybe it’s the same concept of walking in nature that you’re shutting down and really for a few minutes turning your brain off in a way.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
The other findings about stress and the way we do these research studies, again, I just love the wonky details. We bring people into a lab and we show them a stressful film for about 10 minutes. Just something that really gets them wound up and then we show them one of six different sets of images. At one end, the set is all nature. Images of nature.
Let’s say that set one, set six is all images of cities and then sets 2, 3, 4, and 5 are sort of an array between them. So two has more nature, some cities set, three has, you could picture it. So extremes of lots of nature, lots of cities and everything in between.
While they are looking at these images, we have them hooked up to physiological measures of arousal. So we’re not asking their opinion about whether they’re getting less stressed, we’re using objective measures. So we can look at heart rate skin conductance, which is the electrical activity of the skin, which is a proxy for arousal. And what we find is we stress people out with movies. If we show them nature pictures very quickly, their stress levels come down.

Reena Ninan:
Wow.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
If we show them city pictures, their stress recovers much more slowly.

Reena Ninan:
It’s so telling, it’s so telling. It’s like I can understand why, but hearing you say it and spell it out is something else.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s pretty incredible, right? I mean, so I love the science of this.
Okay, here’s the theory on this, and again, theories, we don’t really know and there’s always some disagreement or some questioning.
The theory on this is that fundamentally we are biological animals and we have an evolutionary preference for nature. We come from nature and when we are in nature, it actually activates something ancient, familiar, easy on us. There’s no evolutionary history of living in buildings and cities. There’s something in the theory about why does it reduce the stress? It’s like it takes us to some ancient familiar centered place. And I think this is maybe what you were describing about as people age and become wiser, they just go back to where we began. So Reena, that is my recipe for summer, happiness.
Sleep, unplug, nature.

Reena Ninan:
I think this is wonderful. I think it’s so good, Lisa, but how do I implement this in the summer? I love this on paper, but my practical mom side is like, what? They’re going to bite me on the sleep. They’re not going to want to unplug and taking ’em into nature is asking for it. This is so boring, mom, I can hear it. When are we going back?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m with you. I tried to get a bike ride going this weekend. No one would take it with me. I was like, come on, it’s gorgeous, right? This is easy. Okay, so Reena, if you want something to happen in your life, you got to plan it. You’ve got to put it on the calendar.

Reena Ninan:
So true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And I think that if I were to go home and say to my family next weekend we are taking a bike ride, I would get buy-in or I would get…

Reena Ninan:
Giving them a heads up.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
…more buy-in. A heads up.

Reena Ninan:
Heads up saying this is what we’re going to be doing. This is what’s going to happen.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Just getting out in front of it. So to the degree that we want to bring S.U.N. into our summers,
I think everybody should look at the family calendar and make some plans and maybe get everybody on board with, okay, what are we going to do to make sure that everybody’s sleeping better? Is there one improvement everyone in the family can make? Let’s write it down. Let’s commit to it. When are we going to unplug as a family? Is it always going to be an hour before bed? Is it always going to be most of the day on Sunday? Is it always going to be most of the day when we’re on vacation, what are we coming to agreement about and we need to be in nature at least every weekend, if not several points in the week. If that’s available, where can we book it in?

Reena Ninan:
I love this. This goes back to so much of this podcast of what you say, which I was not aware of as a parent before, is you’ve got to have these conversations, you’ve got to set them up. You can’t expect them telepathically to fall in line and be like, okay, we’re going to go. So setting them up and kind of being like, this is what I want to do. Let’s start with once a week, let’s see how we can do it. But having that conversation with your family.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yep. I love what you said. You can’t expect them telepathically to fall in line. We have this great idea and like, okay, everybody we’re going on a bike ride and they’re like, no, we’re not.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, I telepathically expect ’em all the time to do things and then I get angry because they don’t.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No. So what if we say, all right, here comes the summer, here comes the S.U.N.. We’re going to make this happen.

Reena Ninan:
I love this. This is really helpful, Lisa. I love an acronyms because I love acronyms. See, I’m already losing. My brain has already shut down.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You need to be in nature. You need to be in nature. I prescribe nature for that.

Reena Ninan:
I feel it. Lisa. Oh, S.U.N. sleep, unplug, nature. That is just so good. You know what else I’m excited about? This new resource that you have on your website, Rosalie the Robot at your fingertips for any parenting issue. Tell me more about this because I’m going to be on the site.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Reena, I’m so excited.
Okay, I have just launched Rosalie. Rosalie is an AI powered librarian who goes through all of my work. Three book manuscripts our 170 plus podcast transcripts, hundreds of articles, newsletters, to answer questions for parents and to help people find resources. So when people go to my website now they can find, you’ll quickly find Rosalie, you can ask her questions, you can ask her all sorts of things and she will give you a short answer and then she’ll list a bunch of resources for a deeper dive. Go listen to this podcast, go read this article. Go watch this video. Reena, I have to tell you where her name came from.

Reena Ninan:
Tell me.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is so fun. So I’ve been working on this AI robot for a while with this incredible company to help make this happen. And I was talking with a friend about the fact that this robot was coming to my website and my 13-year-old daughter was sitting there and she was like, well, does it have a name? And I was like, not yet. What should it be named? She said, Rosalie, it’s Rosalie. It was obvious to her that it should be Rosalie.
I’m so excited about her because I know that people want answers and want help and she’s got good common sense and it’s all grounded in my work. And then she will point you to where in my work and so often it’s one of our podcasts, you can take a deeper dive.

Reena Ninan:
I love that you’ve got the podcast audio, so you can listen right there. You’ve got video from your special 10 to 20 site. You’ve also got, if you want to read a chapter from your book, that was so cool to me because I’ve earmarked and got sticky tape like many people on your books, on chapters and things, but it automatically tells you what chapter in the book to go to, which is fabulous. So this is great and it reminds me of Rosie from the Jetsons. That’s who I think of it as when I’m using it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Me too. It’s so funny. I think for us, Rosie the robot on the Jetsons is such like, of course, that’s not who, my kid doesn’t even know about her. So I sort of thought like, this is perfect. Rosalie is the modern Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons and she now lives on my website.

Reena Ninan:
Well this is fantastic, Lisa, and everyone go check out Rosalie and where can we find it, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
drlisadamour.com.

Reena Ninan:
I’m excited about this one. Something else I’m excited about is a secret project you have been working on that we are going to do an entire episode on the movie “Inside Out Two” is coming out and you have been one of the psychologists on the film.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s true. So Reena, I was under a non-disclosure agreement and I did a really good job of keeping it to myself, but I almost exploded. But here’s what happened. In 2020, in May, 2020, I got a call from Pixar and they asked me to have a meeting with them to start thinking about the follow-up to the most wonderful movie ever “Inside Out One”, which was called “Inside Out” at the time, came out in 2015. So I get on a call with Kelsey Mann, the director, and Meg Lafav, the writer, and they’re holding untangled and under pressure because Riley’s 13, the main character’s a teenage girl. And we have been in a four year conversation about this film and I am so excited about it. And I have joined Docker Keltner, who is this brilliant psychologist on the faculty at Berkeley, who was the psychologist on the first film. So Docker and I have been consulting all along the way on this film, and he’s going to join us next week to unpack it all.

Reena Ninan:
It’s going to be awesome. We’re going to have an inside look in the making of “Inside Out Two”, from a psychologist standpoint. Exactly what this mom wants to hear. Well, congratulations, Lisa, you have just been working hard at this and congratulations for keeping the secret too. It’s not easy.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Thank you.

Reena Ninan:
Secret Keeper.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m very excited to have Docker with us next week.

Reena Ninan:
Yes, I look forward to that episode, the Making of Inside Out Two next week. Thanks so much, Lisa. See you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.