Dr. Doreen Dodgen-Magee
Doreen is a person who is passionate about people living wild, embodied fiery lives even with their devices in their hands. Her research focus’ on the costs of our over-engagement with technology on our brains, bodies, souls, and relationships. She loves using the medium of tech to help people think about how to realistically moderate their use enough to live fiery, engaged, embodied lives. Her books have won Gold and Silver Nautilus Awards and she’s been featured on Nightline, Amanpour & Company, the Washington Post, New York Times and other media outlets. A little bit professor, a little bit nerd, and a lot bit passionate about creating powerful and inspirational experiences for her audiences, doreen tailors every talk to the day and audience in which it is presented.
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Restart: Designing a Healthy Post Pandemic Life
General/Mental Health Audiences
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Restart: Designing a Healthy Post Pandemic Work Environment
Corporate Audiences
Covid, and the resulting quarantine, has had a profound effect on our per
Covid, and the resulting quarantine, has had a profound effect on our mental health and well being. This fast paced, media drenched talk includes an informative (as well as hilarious) review of where we were when quarantine hit, how the lock down impacted us behaviorally, interpersonally, and intra-personally, then gets to work addressing how to use the re-opening of the world/restart of “communal” life as an opportunity for growth and health.
Ideas regarding how to identify and break pandemic habits that will no longer serve us is offered alongside practical tips and tools for thriving. During this talk, you’ll laugh and you’ll cry and, when it’s over, you’ll say, “We really need to take seriously (and work through) what we’ve all just been through.” The best part? You’ll have the tools you need to do so.
ormance at work as individuals and teams. Our focus is impaired, multitasking with home/work tasks has created difficult to break habits, and social anxiety is on the rise. This talk includes an informative review of where we were as work teams and individuals when quarantine hit, how the lock down impacted us behaviorally, interpersonally, and interpersonally, then gets to work addressing how to use the restart as an opportunity for growth and health of our individual employees and teams. Information on how to identify and break pandemic habits that will no longer serve us is offered alongside practical tips and tools for thriving.
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Welcome to my Boredom Party! How 10 min of Boredom Changes Everything
We live in a world that demands our attention in digital spaces and our bodies, brains, and relationships pay the price of our over attachment to devices. While the impact to our brains is real (and not in great ways), the world of neuroscience tells us that we can, with intention, work to increase our abilities to focus, delay gratification, regulate our emotions, and experience greater creativity and relational satisfaction.
The good news? We can do this by growing our ability to tolerate boredom. Eventually, just 10 minutes of what the Dutch call “Niksen” (roughly translated as “to do nothing deliciously”) might just change our lives, work teams, families and world. Packed with ample opportunity for practice and inspiration of how to accomplish this difficult (and wonderful feat), this talk will get you craving boredom in a way you never imagined.
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Deviced! Balancing Life & Technology in a Digital World
General/Mental Health & Health Audiences
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Deviced! Parenting in the Digital World
Parenting Audiences
The research is clear: Americans spend, on average 12 plus hours a day with screens. Since this time comes from time spent accomplishing major personal and developmental milestones, there’s a double impact. We’re missing out on tasks that enable us to focus, delay gratification, and regulate our emotions while, at the same time, wiring our brains to be uncomfortable with the very settings that would help us attain these skills.
Far from tech shaming, this talk empowers audiences by helping them assess how their tech use is impacting their relational, physical, and mental health in order to make realistic plans for how to moderate use and mitigate negative effects. Filled with fast paced media and chock full of inspiring tips and tools, participants will walk away inspired to tend to their embodied lives and mental health without forcing unrealistic digital detoxes.
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The Power of Pause: Turning from Tech Toward Calm
Most people feel a deep desire to set boundaries and be able to step back from the pressures and grind of life but lack the tools to do so. This talk gives a brief overview of the neurological and intra personal benefits of being able to stop, get emotionally regulated, and develop a realistic self care plan, then dives deep into teaching the skills of psychological and physiological regulation. Breathing and boredom tolerance skills are taught and practiced in fun and inspirational ways that leave participants wanting more calm.
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Embodied Rest Experiences
These are experiential sessions where differing forms of meditation and regulation skills are taught and practiced. I’ve typically offered these in tandem with other talks, providing a bit of a break after a lecture and encouraging people to re-enter the space in comfortable clothing and without shoes.
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Self Care for Activists
Every definition of activism is filled with verbs. Action is the name of the game and passion is the driving force. Eventually, however, the need for constant adaptation, the never ending back-breaking pace, the exposure to disappointment and backlash, and the intensity of the work lead to burn out and mental health concerns for individuals and organized groups.
Offering a compassionate space in which to honor the audience members for their work while also affirming the need for rest and care, this talk offers an opportunity for groups to take a collective breath, assess their current needs (individual and communal), and make a realistic and practical self care plan. Filled with both calm and inspiration, ideas and validation for the seeming impossibility of it all, this talk will change lives and culture by enabling activists to keep going without losing themselves.
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Does Giving Life Mean Losing Mine: Parenting While Whole
As children and teens suffer with greater levels of depression and anxiety in a world that expects more of them, caregivers are left bereft of help or comfort in the impossible task of parenting.
Giving practical tips for how to have hard conversations, get to the root of issues, and communicate well within their families, this talk will also emphasize the strong need for setting the stage for health, self care, community building, and boundary setting as a parent. Parents will leave inspired to model mental health management for their children and to care more effectively for themselves as their greatest parenting tool.
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I Belong to Me: Maintaining Mental Health in a World that Cares Less
Counter to the teachings of many American subcultures, we can’t healthily belong to anyone else before we belong to ourselves. When we belong to others first, we give up our own critical thinking, unique views, and, too often, put our well being and sense of self in systems outside of ourselves. This leaves us prone to anxiety and depression at the least and to control and abuse at the worst.
Belonging to self, also spoken of as having an internal locus of control, doesn’t make someone selfish. Instead, it enables them to live wild, fiery, engaged-with- others and doing-important-work lives from a place of groundedness, discernment, and effectiveness. Learning to take breaks from the curated spaces of social media and news, to settle into comfort with oneself, and to create a realistic self development plan will be encouraged and facilitated in creative and empathic ways.
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De-vicing Your Awkward, Big, Boring, Beautiful, Post Grad Life
Commencement Address
10 minute talk overviewing the way in which technology enables us to overextend and live outside of our skin with inspiration for balancing the demands of modern life with a rich and interesting embodied life.
See Dr. Doreen Dodgen-Magee in action.
author, psychologist, researcher, and speaker
Doreen Dodgen-Magee is an author, psychologist, researcher, and speaker. Her new book Restart: Designing a Healthy Post Pandemic Life has been featured on Amanpour & Co, CNN, PBS and in the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, & Well and Good. It also won a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards. Her first book, Deviced! Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital Age, was awarded the 2018 Gold Medal for Psychology by the Nautilus Book Awards. Publishers Weekly said about her book: “Psychologist Dodgen-Magee makes a detail-rich, persuasive case for the need to embrace technology yet also ‘make some conscious decisions about what place we want technology to hold in our lives.’…This educational, encouraging book leaves its audience with a plethora of helpful suggestions.”
Doreen’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Utne Reader, Psychology Today, and Health magazine as well as other popular press outlets. She has been interviewed and quoted in articles for the New York Times, Time magazine, Salon, the BBC, Vice, and Apartment Therapy. In addition, Doreen is a popular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs, morning television shows, and celebrated podcasts such as Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness and PRI’s Innovation Hub. She also has a loyal following for her personal blog, her Psychology Today blog, and her other social media platforms.
A prolific, sought-after national and international speaker, Doreen offers various talks and workshops on numerous topics related to the impact of digital overuse on health. Her continuing education workshops for medical and mental health professionals consistently sell out across the country. Displaying her ability to capture the attention of diverse groups, she is frequently re-booked for the following year when she speaks at universities and schools.
Dodgen-Magee is a national spokesperson and Senior Survivor Fellow with Everytown for Gun Safety. She is also a lead consultant with Covid Survivors for Change.
As a clinical psychologist, Doreen has over thirty years of experience working with individuals and groups in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, as well as with people of all ages throughout the country and internationally.
Our speakers get attention.
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Helping Teens Adjust to Phone-Free SchoolsSchools across our area are going phone-free this fall and that has many teens feeling a little anxious. Doreen Dodgen-Magee, Psy.D., author of "Deviced: Balancing Life and Technology in a…
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As masks come off, big, conflicting emotions come on. Here’s how to manage them.Author Doreen Dodgen-Magee has a few suggestions. She’s the author of the book “Restart - Designing a Healthy Post Pandemic Life” and she spoke with OPB’s Paul Marshall.
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Psychological Flexibility: How to Face Change and UnknownsAs masks come off, big, conflicting emotions come on. Here's how to manage them.
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COVID Left Us Languishing. Here’s Why We Should Care.The opposite of thriving, languishing renders us apathetic. Relief is possible.
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How to Design a Post-Pandemic Life (For You and Your Kids) | Amanpour and CompanyPeople in many countries are finding their way back to pre-COVID-19 life. Navigating all this may become a lot easier with the release of psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee’s new book, "Restart:…
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Opinion: Tech addiction is real. We psychologists need to take it seriously.Doreen Dodgen-Magee is a psychologist in Portland, Ore. She is the author of “Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World.”
