We spend a lot of time on screens these days, whether it’s for work, social media, or just relaxing with a show. It’s easy to lose track of time, and hours can pass before we know it. But how much is too much? What exactly is the impact on our health and daily lives?
In this episode, I talk with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, Founder of Embedded Consulting. We discuss the impacts of excessive screen time and social media on mental health and the importance of connecting with people around us. Sumayyah shares her struggles with social media and how she observed its impact on her friends and family. Tune in to hear her insights!
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How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. And, today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, as in I know I have my own initiative around this, which is cutting down on people’s screen time. I think you’ve probably seen in the news that we do have a lot of problems associated with the excessive amount of time in front of screens and people come up with different numbers depending on which particular study you’re using or if you’re considering phones, TVs, computers, and everything as well, but, regardless, it seems out of control and anyone that’s old enough to remember the world before smartphones and everything took it over can remember a world where we spent a lot more time relating to each other in person as well as doing things not in front of some form of digital technology and it’s hard not to make a clear connection between that and a lot of the mental health and loneliness issues that we’re experiencing today. So, today, I’d like to bring on someone who is kind of taking on an initiative in the same vein, in the same realm, Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, the founder of Embedded Consulting LLC.
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Sumayyah, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Stephen. Nice to be here.
Yeah, thank you so much, and thank you so much for connecting because it’s always great to meet and connect with anyone else who’s kind of observed the same issue. So why don’t you start by telling me your story about kind of when you first started observing this whole issue, I think it was roughly maybe 15 years ago-ish that we all started in mass adopting these smartphones and excessive social media and the changes started to be visible in everyday life, regardless of whether or not you saw it as a problem.
Yeah. So, I was on Myspace back in the day, 2008 I got onto Facebook, and I didn’t really see it as a problem. I was just like, “Wow, this is awesome.” There was a couple documentaries that came out around like 2014, 2015 that I had watched. There was also a lot of ethical folks and whistleblowers that were coming out of all of the big tech companies. And it was just information I digested but, like most people, I’m like, “Well, that does affect me,” and I would say a majority of my time was spent on Facebook. Twitter was always too fast and I wasn’t even on Instagram at that point, and I had already been a person who didn’t have, for instance, social media notifications in my email and on my phone because it just takes up space and I just hate my inbox just filled with a bunch of junk, but I had been in higher education most of my early career and then I made the transition into diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2015-ish, and it was just interesting because the election was going on, the first election with Trump, and it was a lot of negativity, a lot of just ridiculousness going on from a political perspective. And then, on top of it, I was doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work and I was deeply impacted when I would see injustices go viral or, unfortunately, the murder of a black man go viral, and so when I heard all of this thing about how social media is addictive, how it can impact your mood, and again, this was 10 years ago, so we have way more research now, but it really resonated with me because I just knew I was feeling it and it was like being described to me. And I think this is some of the first times too the tech executives were like, “Oh, I don’t let my kids watch social media or have a phone,” and I’m like, wait a second. So I did the social media diet back where I deleted the apps, primarily Facebook, and within a couple weeks, I noticed a huge difference. I just felt my life get better, especially because I do DEI work for a living, which is really heavy. I just didn’t want to be so engrossed every day and seeing trauma. So, my escapism was like, okay, I’m going to read more, I’m going to maybe watch TV more, and it’s also the time where I started, within a couple years of that, started dancing, Latin dancing.
Oh, nice.
Yeah. So, yeah, so that’s kind of my first time was 2015 right before that 2016 election and I was way more composed over the election and everything at that point. But it’s been a struggle. The past 10 years have been a struggle. I’ve gone through phases where I’m like in it and like I know I’m addicted, I know I’m like unregulated, and then I’ll delete the app and then I’ll maybe only use their browser or my computer or something, but that’s kind of where it all started in terms of my relationship with technology.
And so you’ve noticed some differences between how you feel during those periods when you’re fully in it versus how you feel in those periods when you delete the app, when you’re doing some other things, more reading, more Latin dancing and stuff like that. Tell us a little bit about the difference between those feelings and what you observed?
Yeah. So, I would say I observed it being an addiction for me, but also the people around me, like one of my best friends, in particular, I remember being really annoyed with her because she could never be present and she was always on her phone so I just got on my phone because she was on her phone, so we spent a lot of time not talking, and maybe we’d show and share, and I’m of an older generation, I’m 48 so this is when I was in my late 30s, I was going through this, and it would annoy me when I go out to like a bar or somewhere and everyone was on their phone, because I’m like, “Why are we here?” It was noticing how I felt and I felt is just like the constant, “Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?” That’s one feeling of like always having to have my phone by me. I would definitely have some FOMO. I don’t think doom scrolling was a term back then, but ––
No, not quite, but it was happening.
Yeah. I would doom scroll and, again, because I was doing equity work, I would get really upset because I’m like, “Oh, the world, there’s just so many things that need to be fixed,” and it made me feel like I had to fix them and I was one of those people where I was like, oh, if I just go on and comment and make a smart comment, I’m going to help change people’s minds.
And then the saddest part is, when you break the habit, is how many times I knew it was a habit because I would just open my phone and just look for the app because I forgot I deleted it and that’s when I was like, “Oh, gosh, this is an addiction,” and I wasn’t even as bad as like –– I’m sure I was like the average user.
Yeah, yeah. There are plenty of people who are way worse.
Yeah. I didn’t have all the notifications but I felt the weight of what it would do to me.
Now that you’ve kind of observed those differences, when you go out into the world, into the real world, because social media has kind of rewired the way we interact with each other, as you were describing, can you spot a person who’s, as I like to refer to it, chronically online, versus someone who’s kind of made some progress toward having a more intentional relationship with this technology?
Yeah. I see it all the time. I’m very hyper aware of it, even when I’m in a spurt where I’m not doing well, I’m still aware of what people are doing around me. I got so annoyed with online dating, for instance, and I just now learned, like a year ago, that 20 percent, I think, of social media accounts –– I mean, of dating sites are fake.
Bots, yeah.
Yeah, whether they’re bots or sex workers or just people trying to get your information, but I remember feeling really disconnected to people because I was like I think online dating is making me ambivalent about dating, because it’s like you get that initial rush of excitement because those first 70 people in one day that liked you, which are primarily bots, you get all this rush of excitement, and then you get let down because you’re like, “Why isn’t anybody getting back to me?” or, “Why aren’t they asking me any questions?” and on one of my many deleting the app and adding it back and delete, while I deleted, I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna try to meet people in person,” like on the train, because I live in the Bay Area, like on the BART train, on events, and I became acutely aware at how addicted people were from their phones because I made a conscious effort to try to just talk to people in person, especially men, and it was hard because no one has eye contact. No one even notices if you come sit by them. They just don’t even notice someone sitting by them.
They’re just glued into that phone the whole time, right?
Yeah, yeah. So their eyes are on the phone, they’re distracted. There’s no more idle chat. So, yeah, I really was acutely aware of it and it just strengthened my resolve. But, again, it’s not perfect. As much as I’m saying that, I still have –– I have an app on my phone right now because of business stuff, but it’s a constant battle. I just noticed connections with my friends, connections with people I didn’t know was just harder and discourse was more bifurcated in the bubble that you lived in. I think the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a huge surprise to me for the first time where I’m like, “Oh, I live in an echo chamber,” you know what I mean? “Oh, that’s how the algorithm works.”
Yeah, it’s like you’re not getting the full world experience. The internet put you into a world where you think everyone thinks and does things exactly the way you do and, at that point in time, I think now a lot of people are aware that this happens and a lot of people aware that their experience on the internet was not the whole world, that they’re kind of just curating a small portion of the world for your benefit as opposed to what’s actually happening, but back then, I think a lot of people did not realize that that was happening quite yet, because ––
No. We totally didn’t.
Like you said, the 2014, ’15, ’16 time period was like kind of the first rumblings of anyone that may have thought that there could be negative impacts of social media and smartphones. It wasn’t common knowledge.
It wasn’t –– yeah. I’ll say just kind of where that journey led me is in 2023 I was laid off from a job. It’s been on and off over the past 10 years, I’ve been just vacillating. 2020 was a big moment where I think a lot of us, even if we said we didn’t want to be on technology, just got on it. So I finally joined Instagram and so I was just spending a lot more time online. My anxiety was through the roof. And I was like, okay, this is the pandemic, but it was like a culmination of things. I was going through perimenopause, which causes a lot of mental health issues, which I wasn’t aware of. I’m on my phone way too much. And I’m an extrovert. I’m a social person. I used to be an extrovert, now I’m an introvert, but I’m still social. It was really rough and I was really depressed and things got better, of course, but things I really liked during the pandemic is like, for instance, me and my Latin dance people, we went to go dance in a park and wear a mask, danced outside, that really helped with social connection. But, yeah, definitely burn out on the Zooms and all that stuff. And then in 2023, I was laid off from a job and I was going through a really difficult time as a single mother to a special needs child and I did not work for a whole year, probably about 16 months, I didn’t like work work. I do take in maybe like 10 to 20 hours a month. And I was slipping into a lot of depression based on my family situation and it was really difficult to manage. And, of course, my depression was getting bad and then my anxiety was getting really bad and I had just given up on deleting the apps, because I’m like, “Well, I’m home and whatever,” and I just really leaned into it and I got to a point where my depression was so bad, I was having really, really dark thoughts. And I knew it was bad because I made a couple posts on social media where some longtime friends or maybe friends I don’t talk too often actually reached out to me and was like, “Hey, what’s going on? It looks like you’re having a tough time,” and that’s how social media kind of helps too because those friends may not have reached out to me so they reflected back to me how bad it was and how they could see it, even though we always tend to post the good things.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And even though I was struggling and I would say that times were tough, I wasn’t sharing the extent that they were tough. And it got to the point where I was unable to find a caretaker for my daughter so I felt trapped so it made me even more isolated from people. There came a point where I was like I can’t take care of my daughter anymore. She was extremely violent. She had broken one of my nanny’s hands. I couldn’t go to work full time. I just was stuck. I felt stuck. And so I made the decision to put her in a group home and that was the best thing I could have done because I was one of those people that was very proud and always wanted to show the good part and my daughter’s disabled but it’s fine and I would say she could get violent but I didn’t say she was hitting me every day and that’s the problem with social media and my type of personality, where it’s not that I’m not an honest person or share but I’m a proud person, so I didn’t want people to feel bad for me. So there was a day where I was just like I can’t do this anymore and I knew that social media was not good for me and I was like I had to delete all the apps again and this time, I was like, for a long time, because of my mental health, and I set up a WhatsApp group.
So technology can also foster connection if you use it in the right way. Share on XSo I set up a WhatsApp group of my closest friends and family and a couple of the longtime friends that had reached out to me and it was about 20 people, and I made a video, again using technology, and I said, “I am not in a good mental health place, I’m having very dark thoughts, and I need help,” and this is from a person who didn’t like to ask for help, and my community, my community stepped up to support me. And they had always been there but, unfortunately, I didn’t know what to do until it was like crisis time.
So it got to that point.
That’s why I utilized my community. They all were supportive but I just had trouble accepting help. So now that I had a goal of getting my daughter to another place, they stepped in. One person helped book people to come visit me, because a lot of my family in particular doesn’t live here in Denver. The local friends here, they came and brought me food and cooked for me and several of them watched my daughter for me so I could just go and have an hour just to go for a walk, just go get out the house.
Yeah, take care of yourself.
Yeah, and take care of myself and the overwhelming amount of love and support that I got was amazing, and it just made me think about how important community is and not just showing up fake and I’ll help you, because that was me, I’ll help you but I’m fine, and that really changed my career again. So, I got in a DEI work in 2015 and then now, going through this experience of my daughter is safe now, she’s in a great place, I am in a good mental health place, I was very, very, very, very, very close to a mental breakdown. I didn’t know how close I was but I was, and it wasn’t until she left that the onslaught of how bad things were because I had to, like, okay, just a couple more months, just a couple more weeks, doing what I had to do to get out of bed, and then my body completely shut down after my daughter left. I got really sick for months. I was in and out of the hospital, and the stress was just coming out of my body in like all of these ways and it just made me feel grateful that I had people, people that loved, people that showed up for me, and it made me realize how much, even though I had all these friends and stuff, how much I was pretending that everything was okay and how much I was downplaying the situation and how close I was to losing it all, and that was another big moment for me to just understand not just how to use technology in a way that is helpful to me and not harmful to me, and then also the value of community.
Yeah. And that’s one of the things that I lament has been kind of on the decline for quite a while. When I was young, I read this book called Bowling Alone, which was actually written in the year 2000, and this book only really covered, at this point, the internet was just in its early days, there was no social media yet. It only really covered the impact of mostly television and suburban design of infrastructure and how longer and longer commutes, more time spent alone in the car but particularly television has had on our communities between, say, 1950 and 2000, and there’s been a lot of trends since then. One of the things that I lament most about social media’s impact is that, first of all, it gets us into a way more fragmented conversational pattern. So the types of conversations that are really going to support you, the types of conversations that you need in a time like that, I can see when I interact with people who are chronically online, they’re more likely to interrupt you, they’re more likely to change the subject, abruptly than someone who’s spent a little bit more time focused, as you said, even if it’s something like reading instead of looking at 35-second long videos on TikTok. But at times like this in our lives, what we really need, it’s not just at times like this, I feel like at all times but especially at these times like this, what we need are the people to really talk through things if you have a struggle, and this is something that it took us a while to learn too, the phrase –– it said about Instagram, that in Instagram, you’re comparing your entire life to someone else’s highlight reel and that’s a problem. It’s like, “Okay, look at me, I just climbed another 14er,” or, “Look at me in the winter, I’m skiing,” “Look at my dog is so cute,” “Look at me with my 25 friends out at the clubs one night,” but people were never going to show like I just had a bad interaction with my boss and I’m just sitting here mad at the computer. That post never goes online.
I got it pulled over for a DUI last night. I am having really dark thoughts. I think for me too, the FOMO. I had a daughter with extreme special needs, extreme, and I was comparing myself to people with children that are typical. And I was always ambitious so I had all these accolades in terms of work and money. But you know what didn’t help me when I was near mental breakdown? Is my money, because I had money and I couldn’t get anyone to watch my daughter because she was too violent. So I knew that was hurting me to be comparing myself to I am trapped in my house with my daughter with very few options and everyone else is out there living their life and they’re all having fun.
Yeah, oh, my God. That’s the worst feeling, like you see it, everyone’s doing something amazing, everyone’s either presenting ––
And I’m the only one struggling. I’ve been trying to lean into vulnerability for a while, but I am steadfast in it now, because I am tired of glossing over things. I am tired of hiding my pain. I am tired of hiding behind a proud face and a vacation video of me having a great time when I’m dying inside. When I started to share what I had been through with people, they were like, “That’s so awesome. What do you think got you through this time?” and I’m like, “People.” I had to make the decision to give my child up.
That can’t be easy at all.
No one can make that decision for you. And even though I knew I was going to do it, my daughter’s 14 now, I knew I was going to do this once she was five years old because she was so difficult to take care of and she’s a big person and she was violent then. And I always told my friend, yes, I know I’m going to have to do it but to make the actual decision, my sister had to step in and take over for me, because when it came time for it, I froze. I froze. I couldn’t do it. My daughter ended up attacking both of us, even though we were going to the group home process, and she gave me a concussion. She really attacked my sister. We got my daughter calmed down. We got her into her room and down for a nap. And my sister, I just kind of went back to normal and cleaning up the house and everything, and my sister’s like, “What are you doing?”
Yeah, how are you just going back to like ––
Yeah, but I was used to the violence. I was used to this, and it took my sister to say, “You don’t have to live like this.” I needed someone who loved me, who cared about me, who wasn’t in the situation to look at it from the outside and tell me I didn’t have to live like this. That gave me the courage to do what we needed to do to expedite her getting out the house really that day. And it’s what I wanted, but I couldn’t make that phone call. I couldn’t –– because I downplayed how bad things where, I couldn’t say, “I’m in danger, I am scared for my life,” because she’s my child. I would run in a burning building for her. But I needed that support of all of my people saying this is the right thing to do, you have to do it, and pushing me to a decision that I wanted to make. And this is where community helps us.
Community helps us do the things that we can’t always do for ourselves. Share on X
Yeah, and, sometimes, when we’re making these big leaps, whether it’s like this worry that you’re disappointing someone, worry that you’re doing something that doesn’t feel right, or even the fear around someone, say, starting a business, starting a new endeavor, quitting a toxic job, quitting a toxic boss, we oftentimes need the community of people who are both loving and objective in a way because they’ll say, first of all, “Okay, you’re really frustrated by this situation or you’re really saddened by this, but you’re not wrong,” because I think one of the first things people often hear is, “I’m wrong. I should want to do whatever it takes,” even if it involves risking my life every day for my daughter, or someone who has that cushy office job that wants to quit because it’s really not making them happy and feeling that that’s the wrong thing to do because so many people want it for someone to say, the community around you say, “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with you wanting a good life for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you wanting to do the thing that you’re truly passionate about bringing that to the world,” because although there are the occasional person I encounter that can just, on their own, just one day, just like that’s what it should be like, “This doesn’t feel right, I’m gonna go,” I think the vast majority of people I talk to are people that at least need someone to, I don’t want to say validate it, but need someone to make them feel a little bit like reassured that they’re not being ridiculous and not being selfish and not being all the other words that people will often say.
Well, and let’s be clear, if we are measuring our life against Instagram, we’re always going to feel incomplete. And the reason why we need people is because it’s biological, like we as humans, as animals, as mammals, we cannot live without each other. We can’t live without physical touch. We cannot live without social interaction. So much so we’ve evolved for this is that without it, without social connection, we have increased rates of heart disease, chronic disease, diabetes, etc. It is harmful to our health from a mental health perspective. It wasn’t just that I had people supporting me and multiple people, because everybody has different opinions, and everybody is good at different things. Some people were good at just giving me an encouraging word. Some were good at listening. Some were good at advice and helping me with paperwork. But if you only have one person to depend on or two people, that’s a lot to put on one or two people, so the fact that I had it and I could spread it out and I could go to the right people, because guess what? We’re not all good at –– I am not a great listener. I am working on it, but I’m a fixer, I’m the get shit done person, so when I needed someone to talk to, I go to my good listeners. When I needed help like with paperwork and like all the crap that I needed to do to get my daughter where she needed to be, I went to someone else so that’s part of utilizing your community. It’s not just relying on one person. Even though my story is unique, I love that you said that it is about no matter what you are going through, whether it’s your job or it’s a relationship or whatever, what I want people to know is my new term I love and have adopted is life be lifing.
Life be lifing.
Life be lifing. My story is unique. I know that only 0.0003 percent of people have my exact story. However, you might be going through something different, a job loss, broken heart, abuse, whatever. You might still just be fighting your childhood trauma. But we cannot do this alone. When I say that I would not be here, I would not be here if I didn’t ask for help. I was so close to the edge and I get this overwhelming feeling of gratitude that I got through it, because when you’re in dark times, you don’t see a way through, and I just want everyone to know that this too shall pass. This too shall pass. Whether it is the good times or the bad times, everything is going to change because that is life.
Relationships are about sharing and supporting. Those are the two roles. I wasn’t sharing enough so people weren’t helping me enough. I started to share more, people helped more, and I allowed them to help. If you need to work on your relationships, start by sharing. Start by supporting them. If you have the bad habit of being a terrible listener, when someone has their problem, you don’t want to hear about it but you want to tell your problem all the time, that’s not a relationship. We all need friendships that we can lean on and family members. And we are humans, we were built for it, and if you think that you can go through this life without it, it’s why we’re so disconnected. It’s why loneliness is an epidemic is because we think having followers and, quote-unquote, “friends” is real life, and it’s not real life.
No, it’s not. And so you’re taking your experience now and have started a program to help others on the journey of the habits around the screen time, because I think as a lot of people have mentioned, I think a lot of people are familiar with the phenomenon of the parasocial relationship, which is where someone watches an influencer’s video twice a week and they have this illusion that they formed a bond, but your favorite YouTube influencer is not the person that’s going to be there for you that you can run your tough situations by, nor is like anyone like really online, like you have to have a little bit more of a relationship with that person to be someone that you can go to and either ask for help or support or even just help each other with endeavors like the ones we have around helping people cut down their screen time. So with your initiative, you’re bringing it to other people, you’re helping other people cut down on some of this false relationship building, in a sense, and so they have some time to actually spend on true relationship building.
Yeah. So, basically, after I went through this with my daughter, I was like how can I use my story to help other people? And the more research I started doing on telling my story, because, to me, it was just a story about community. That’s it. Ask for help, lean on your community. But then the more research I did on the loneliness epidemic and on how our technology habits are impeding our ability to connect together, it kind of all came together into a wellness initiative. So I’m a former diversity, equity, and inclusion executive, and I am doing some of that consulting but I decided to also work with companies and helping them work on the loneliness epidemic from a company perspective and how we engage as teams and how we get work done and how we build trust, because without social connection, we, as humans, it’s hard for us to build trust, especially if you’re on Zoom and you’ve never met some of these folks that you connect with. And I am so blessed to say that three of the four local people that really helped me, they’re former co-workers that helped me, who didn’t know me very long. They knew me like three, four years. So when I looked at all that, I was like, okay, how can I help organizations look at this? And it came down to my story on like everything I did for wellness, because I literally tried everything. I’ve had my chakras aligned, I did psychedelic therapy, everything to get to where I am and feel. I decided to launch that in a program that I’m offering to individuals and I also will be offering it to companies. It’s a wellness cohort, a health and digital wellness cohort, and it kind of puts together all of the areas that impact our wellbeing. And by wellbeing, I mean mental health and our physical health. And this has nothing to do with weight and New Year’s resolutions, all that, it has everything to do with I was eating really shitty food and food that I knew I shouldn’t be eating but I was so depressed and I had so many health issues. When I cleaned up my diet, I stopped being in and out the hospital, period. I’m not joking. I was in and out the hospital. Food affects our mental health. Our food is not great and it’s full of crap and most of us are addicted to sugar, like myself. That deeply impacts my mental health. I’m less focused, I have more anxiety when I eat correct. So that’s nutrition. And then fitness. I had friends that would come over and be like, “Okay, I’m coming to get you. We’re going on a walk.” Just getting out and walking and being in the sun and going salsa dancing, those things helped me get going again. Then we’re doing inner work. I worked with a therapist this entire time. My therapist is the one that told me to find out what was the process to get my daughter into a group home three years before I even needed it. She’s the one that helped me do affirmations and everything so that I can manage my anxiety and ADHD and all that stuff. And then another segment is our digital wellness. So we know the data, I know you know the data, Stephen, just the negative impact being online has for us. And not just with our phones, video games, binge watching shows, doing all this stuff where we’re at home, not outside, not in nature, not with people, so we’re actually starting the program with digital wellness where we’re going to be practicing how to limit our social media and technology habits throughout the five-week program. One of the last categories we have is social connection. So, again, community. I told you that helped me. So I basically put everything that helped me but also that is scientifically proven to have an impact on our physical and mental health. I don’t think most people know that social media has an impact on our mental health. A lot of the data is directed towards children. I don’t think people know diet, the impact diet has, and I know that people, a lot of people don’t even know there’s a loneliness epidemic or they don’t realize that we need to be touched every day. We need people in our lives to help us make us feel better. So that’s why I created the program, it’s five weeks, and we’re basing it off of the atomic habits framework for people like me who aren’t so disciplined in taking care of ourselves. We might be disciplined in other areas but it’s really hard for me to get up and meditate every day. It still is, but meditation was a huge part of my recovery.
That’s one of the habits that I struggle with a little bit in the sense that I know I should meditate more regularly and I tend to just meditate when I think of it or when I have a spot where my brain is really jumbled.
Or I do it until I feel better and I stop doing it because I feel better. And then I start to feel worse. So this program is really for people who don’t have it together, who struggle with putting their wellness first, who know they need to do something about all these areas, and I have fantastic subject matter experts on each of these topics, and this really isn’t about me, it’s about people creating a plan that works for them, and my story is just the precipice of helping me create something that people can utilize to help themselves, because I don’t want anyone being this close to a mental breakdown. I don’t want anyone having the amount of dark thoughts I was having. I mean, it’s really scary, so I really want to help people. If you’re unregulated, you got aches and pains, if you know you need change, I highly recommend doing this program because it’s about total wellness.
Total wellness. And I think a lot more people are understanding this connection, the whole mind, body, spirit. I think there’s a lot more people who have kind of maybe only focused on the physical aspect and ignored the mind and spirit part of it, but there are people who have done it the other way as well and not necessarily seeing even how food affects, when you’re eating certain foods, I know I tend to eat Doritos a little bit more than I should ––
Oh, those are my guilty pleasure, dude.
That’s a tough thing ––
And I have high blood pressure. I have high blood pressure and they have enough sodium to last you like a week.
But they’re addictive. I mean, you eat one and you want to eat 50 more.
You got to look at preservatives and salt and sugar are like notifications in social media. They are built to be addictive.
They’re built to hook you in more.
And they’re harmful as hell to our bodies. But, boy, are they so good, and that dopamine rush they give us.
Oh, my gosh. I mean, it’s crazy. So, Sumayyah, I’m so glad that you were able to take the experience that you had, very intense, very intense low point and what dragged you to the place where you really needed to change something, and then bring it to a program that you use to go forth and help others and have the inspiration to help people with it. If anyone wants any more information about the program, anyone listening, what will be the best place to go?
I’m sure we can put the link in your bio to the website, and then just look me up on LinkedIn. I have some links there to my information. Or they can look at my website. It’s Embedded Consulting LLC. Just look that up and you should be able to find me.
Embedded Consulting LLC. And then if you want to see the bio on the website, if you’re not aware, this podcast’s website, actions-antidotes.com and you can see this as well as any other episodes, transcripts, and bios. Sumayyah, thank you so much for joining us today, for really getting vulnerable with your story, because that’s something you’re really practicing what you preach around saying, okay, we all have this vulnerability that’s not showing up on Instagram, not showing up on probably other socials too, that’s just the one that I’m on the most, and by the most, I mean six minutes a day, being really vulnerable, and then also explaining how you’re helping less people to have to go through that in the future.
Yeah. And what I’d like to leave everybody with is that there’s a statistic that people think that right now in the evolution of humans that this is one of the worst times in the history of the world. And I would just ask anyone who thinks that, why do we believe that? Is it because we’re doom scrolling? Because all of us who are on this Earth have ancestors that migrated, that traveled, who were enslaved, who were in servitude, who had family members that died of a cut on their hand or scurvy or whatever, who didn’t have running toilets, on and on and on, and I’m not dismissing the challenges we have but why do we believe that? We believe it because we have access to technology that has all the shitty things about humans at our fingertips all the time, and we are a resilient species and this too shall pass.
One hundred percent. And there’s also a book I recommend for anyone that thinks that called Factfulness. It came out in 2018 by several Swedish authors, and the book actually explains a lot of reasons why the world isn’t as shitty as people think with statistics around things like literacy rates and poverty rates, things that globally have actually improved quite a bit over the last century. So, please, if you’re dismal about the state of the world, please take a look at that book. And please, everyone else, I would like to thank everyone out there for listening today, for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes, for opening your hearts and minds to another one of the stories about people that I interview who are following their passions and hope that you find the inspiration and not only get vulnerable but ask for help and then go out and follow those passions.
Thank you so much, Stephen.
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About Sumayyah Emeh-Edu
Sumayyah Emeh-Edu (she/her) is the Principal Strategist of Embedded Consulting, where she helps organizations develop better connection, belonging and productivity through digital wellness and team building. She has over 20 yrs. of professional experience in Leadership roles within HR, Program Management and Business Development within higher education and corporate sectors.
Sumayyah has successfully supported consulting clients such as Amwell, Oracle, One Medical, NPR station KQED, and Blue Shield of CA and has been a featured speaker at University of San Francisco, AllBirds, TrueCar, PBWC, TechInclusion, and The BetterMan Conference. Sumayyah most recently held corporate roles as VP Diversity, Inclusion & Social Equity at Canopy Growth which had employees throughout North America, UK, Germany, Australia. Prior to that, she was a DEI Business Partner at Charles Schwab.and DEI Business Partner at Charles Schwab.
Sumayyah has a Masters in Project Management and held multiple roles in professional and community organizations committed to education and supporting underrepresented groups. She resides in the Denver metro area in Colorado with her 14yr. old daughter. In her spare time, makes and sells upcycled jewelry. She also enjoys an active lifestyle including salsa dancing, gardening, hiking, and pickleball.