Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage

In a world that’s increasingly dominated by screens, how does reducing screen time impact our mental health and our connection to the world around us? In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Joan Savage, a multifaceted author and former professor, who transitioned from academia to pursue her passion for writing. She best known for her gripping murder mystery novel Red Fever, which she published after overcoming a challenging journey, supported by her community. With a background in business management and a deep commitment to mental wellness, Dr. Savage spent years researching the significant impact of virtual reality on mental health, particularly for vulnerable populations like young boys and military personnel. Together, we explore the pervasive issue of screen time and its effects on our lives. Dr. Savage shares her insights on how social media and technology can lead to feelings of isolation, and the importance of community in overcoming these challenges. She also discusses the balance between seeking validation online and forming genuine connections in a digital world. This conversation is full of meaningful insights and tips for fostering authentic relationships while reducing screen time—so you won’t want to miss it! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my initiatives here in 2025 and something I’m trying to showcase is helping people cut down on their screen time. We’ve been seeing a lot more people take notice on how much of the excess time that we’re spending in front of what’s often referred to as attention grabbing or addictive technology is really impacting the lives we live as well as the mindsets that we adapt, so I’m going to be bringing on some guests from time to time that have their own really unique stories about how cutting down on screen time has changed their lives. Today, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Joan Savage. --- Dr. Joan Savage, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s wonderful. So, Dr Savage, like myself, has a lot of different initiatives in life. I think, traditionally, we’ve always thought of people as their job title, or at least for maybe about 100 years in the 20th century mostly where it’s like, okay, you are a broker, you are a data analyst, but we also know that, in life, people are way more than that so I want to start out by introducing you to my audience as all the different things that you’re a part of right now that you have done recently and are doing. Great. Too many things, I think. Well, as long as it make you happy, right? And it does, yes, you’re right. So, yeah, so you start by telling us about all the different things that you’re –- yeah, all your different things. So my –- I’ll try to do things backwards chronologically. I feel like that makes a little more sense. So, right now, my full-time job, I guess, is I’m an author. So, a year ago, I released a murder mystery. It’s got a little bit of eroticism in it but mostly it’s a murder mystery. It’s called Red Fever and it’s my first attempt at fiction so that was a nightmare getting it published. I was really blessed to have just so many beautiful people in my life to speak into that and help me get that done and give me the courage to resign from my job as a professor. I was an adjunct teacher for about three years at Florida Tech and I was so, oh my gosh, that job came at such a time when everybody was looking for a remote position when COVID had hit so I have no complaints about that. Although I never wanted to be a teacher, that’s just –- it fell into my lap. I knew it was what the universe was guiding me and, in COVID, everyone wanted to be home so I loved it. I took it, again, it wasn’t anything that I’ve studied for, it was business tech and business management. I think they saw technology on my resume and they were like, “Oh, she can teach this,” but it’s nothing I ever wanted to do. And then from there, I was working, I spent about six years getting my dissertation. So my full-time job was a research assistant at that point, and I mixed, and I think this is where much of my experience will be able to benefit your podcast here, I spent about six years being –– I want to say maybe a life coach is the best terminology for it, because I wasn’t technically a certified therapist. I mean, I was in school, although I worked with psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists and counselors who worked with me to help me develop my dissertation and part of that was, and I call it –– it’s mental wellness and virtual reality. So the suicide rate that we’re struggling with is just so high in certain genders, certain age groups, certain jobs, so like our military, any civil servant, really, firefighters, cops, physicians, really high suicide rate. Young boys. Young boys are like one of the highest right now and it’s just awful. So the whole reason behind this becoming a research assistant and working on this particular field and dissertation was because the idea I had about virtual reality is you can come on there and you can look like a dog and talk like a cat and I cannot report you. So, as a physician, if you killed a patient, I mean, let’s say you got drunk and you did it, you killed a child or you killed a patient, how do you live with that? You can’t. That’s impossible. But yet, if you tell somebody, it can be used against you in the court of law. So what do you do? You live with it. We’re social creatures, we have that herd mentality, we’re meant to be together, we’re meant to share and lift each other up and hold each other’s burdens. And so with that, the idea behind this virtual environment which you can come in and you can share those things with me and I can’t report you so if you are thinking about suicide ideation, you can tell me, we can talk it through. You have a group of people who are your support system and none of us really know your first name. So it’s not like we can –– we don’t even know if you’re a real cop or real military or real physician, we have no clue, but we just let you be who you want to be. And, statistically, the more you talk about something, the less likely you are to commit that crime. Commit the issue, whatever you want to call that. So suicide, if you’re talking about suicide ideation, the more you’re talking about it, the less likely you are to actually go through with it. So that was the idea behind offering these incredible environments that I would build virtually and then just invite people to come in. So I made them fun. I would go off the latest movie like Harry Potter. I’d have Defense Against the Dark Arts. I mean, J. K. Rowling, she openly talks about the Dementors were based on depression so it was like Defense Against the Dark Arts, how do we overcome depression? How do we work through these things that nobody really talks about without attaching a mental illness to it and then just ruining your lives? Once that gets out there, your life is destroyed. So I wanted to avoid all that and that was the idea behind this research. And it was right before COVID. I mean, literally, the month before COVID is when I graduated, and I had so many people come against me, including my own mentor, tell me that therapy and anything like that would never go online. Oh my gosh. It’s a weird time for anyone to say that. Like I said, the month I graduated was December of 2019. COVID was right there in that time and everything went online. And the funny part was I had to bring in legal from my university to help me graduate because they were so adamant that therapy could never go online and would never go online. And I believed the opposite. I saw everything going online, and this is even before COVID. I just knew that’s where we were headed. And everything was being –– and, again, this is about your podcast, social media, everything is online now, everything we want, everything we need, every relationship now we can find online. So I saw that and I took advantage of what could be negative and to try to make it into a positive to give people the help that they need. Well, it sounds like what you were trying to do is come up with like, okay, so someone’s trying to commit suicide and the suicide rate was increasing dramatically even before COVID hit. There’s actually a –– I map it to 2012 which was the year that smartphone penetration in this country reached 50 percent and if you look at the charts, the frequency of suicide, anxiety, depression, all those terrible mental health outcomes, start to skyrocket a bit around 2012. So we’re seeing the skyrocketing pattern of –– and suicide is obviously the worst manifestation of it, the worst of all because that someone actually decides to kill themselves and you found out that the more people talk about it, the less likely they are to do it. But, of course, people are not going to talk about it unless there is some level of anonymousness. Yeah, anonymity,. oh my gosh, And once you start that pattern, it’s like anonymity, yeah, anonymous or anonymity. So you created the service or was this just a research around the service? Both. So I started with my masters, where I actually built a –– because, again, young boys were really struggling with suicide. I mean, not just ideation, they actually were successful. In fact, men are more successful than women are. Women are twice as likely to do it but men are more likely to be successful doing it. So, to me, that kind of evens it out right there. So I had this –– my professor, a friend of mine –– my mentor, myself, and a friend of mine, and this is for my masters when I was at Indiana University, Purdue University, and we decided –– so I can’t bring –– boys were, at this time, video game,...