Catherine Price

Looking for an event that will both inspire attendees and offer them practical strategies that will reduce their stress and help them lead happier and healthier lives? Want to achieve better screen/life balance AND have more fun?

Catherine Price, founder of Screen/Life Balance and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun, offers a 2-part workshop specifically designed to help audiences spend less time staring at their screens and more time doing things they enjoy. This customizable workshop (which can be booked as two sessions or one longer session) is presented as an hour-long talk followed by an interactive follow-up session. This two-part format allows audiences to put Catherine's strategies into practice in real time, so that they can create—and solidify—healthier habits in a way not usually achieved in a regular talk format. She is open to combine this two-part series as a one-time, longer workshop.

To complement the talk, we can facilitate a bulk purchase of How to Break Up With Your Phone and/or The Power of Fun to be distributed to your employees not only as a memento of the event, but also as tools to hone these shared skills across your organization. Catherine, who specializes in what she refers to as "science-based self-help," also has numerous additional resources that can be offered to talk attendees to help them improve their screen/life balance and have more fun, including a discount for her online courses, a guide for a 3-day "phone breakup challenge" (a fun team-building activity!), a phone breakup conversation-starting kit, and a "Fun Toolkit" that's designed to help people build more fun into their lives.

In this talk, Catherine breaks down the ideas from her newest book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again (2021, The Dial Press) and reveals why, far from being frivolous, fun is an absolutely essential aspect of a productive, happy, and joyful life. She takes audiences through the definition of what she calls "True Fun," explains why fun is so misunderstood (and what differentiates it from Fake Fun), and uses her background as a science journalist to make a compelling case for how fun can dramatically improve our mental, physical and emotional health—all while making us more creative, productive, resilient, mindful, and energetic.

She then walks the audience through the process of figuring out their own personal "fun magnets," and introduces an acronym she created, called SPARK, that they can use to make more space in their schedules (and minds) and bring more fun into everyday life. Fun can feel like magic, but in reality, we all have the ability to attract more fun; we just need to be convinced that it's a priority and have someone show us how to do so, without making us feel even busier and more overwhelmed. With Catherine as their guide, audiences will leave the talk convinced that If we make fun a priority, we will be happier; we will be healthier, and we will feel more alive—and they'll have a practical plan for how to do so, starting today.

To complement the talk, we can facilitate a bulk purchase of How to Break Up With Your Phone and/or The Power of Fun to be distributed to your employees not only as a memento of the event, but also as tools to hone these shared skills across your organization. Catherine, who specializes in what she refers to as "science-based self-help," also has numerous additional resources that can be offered to talk attendees to help them improve their screen/life balance and have more fun, including a discount for her online courses, a guide for a 3-day "phone breakup challenge" (a fun team-building activity!), a phone breakup conversation-starting kit, and a "Fun Toolkit" that's designed to help people build more fun into their lives.

*While this talk can be a standalone offering, it is also a natural follow-up to Catherine's presentation, "How to Break Up With Your Phone."

Is your phone the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you touch before bed? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,” only to look up 45 minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Do you say you want to spend less time on your phone—but have no idea how to do so without giving it up completely? Research shows that the time we spend on our smartphones is changing our brains in ways that interfere with our sleep, self-esteem, relationships, memory, attention spans, creativity, productivity and problem-solving and decision-making skills. This has negative effects on both our personal and professional lives. In this talk, based on her book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, Catherine reveals the way in which our phones and devices are designed to addict us. She explains how the time we spend on our phones is affecting our creativity, productivity, and relationships, physical and mental health. She then provides practical, hands-on solutions and strategies to help break the addictive cycle and establish a healthy relationship with your phone. This talk—which can also be presented as a hands-on workshop— is relevant for a wide range of audiences and events, including business leaders, corporate events, education nights, students, and wellness experts. Note: Catherine is not “anti-tech.” The goal of the talk is to help people keep what they love about their phones and get rid of or minimize what they don’t.

To complement the talk, we can facilitate a bulk purchase of How to Break Up With Your Phone and/or The Power of Fun to be distributed to your employees not only as a memento of the event, but also as tools to hone these shared skills across your organization. Catherine, who specializes in what she refers to as "science-based self-help," also has numerous additional resources that can be offered to talk attendees to help them improve their screen/life balance and have more fun, including a discount for her online courses, a guide for a 3-day "phone breakup challenge" (a fun team-building activity!), a phone breakup conversation-starting kit, and a "Fun Toolkit" that's designed to help people build more fun into their lives.

If you add up the hours you spend each day interacting with your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop or television, you may realize that you’re spending the majority of your waking life staring at a screen. Sure, much of this screen time is essential, even enjoyable. But there are a lot of other times when our screens reduce our productivity and distract us from things that are truly important to us—whether it’s our work, the people we love, or the activities that bring us meaning and joy. In this talk, suitable for a broad range of audiences, Catherine explains the concept of Screen/Life Balance a term that she coined to refer to the practice of creating a healthy, productive, happy balance between on-screen and off-screen life. She reveals why Screen/Life Balance is essential for our productivity, creativity, careers, relationships, happiness and long-term physical and mental health. She then gives customized suggestions for how to help the audience figure out—and achieve—a personalized and professional Screen/Life Balance.

To complement the talk, HWA can facilitate a bulk purchase of How to Break Up With Your Phone and/or The Power of Fun to be distributed to your employees not only as a memento of the event, but also as tools to hone these shared skills across your organization. Catherine, who specializes in what she refers to as "science-based self-help," also has numerous additional resources that can be offered to talk attendees to help them improve their screen/life balance and have more fun, including a discount for her online courses, a guide for a 3-day "phone breakup challenge" (a fun team-building activity!), a phone breakup conversation-starting kit, and a "Fun Toolkit" that's designed to help people build more fun into their lives.

“Vitamania”: The Strange and Surprising Story of Nutrition’s Most Powerful Word

Everyone is familiar with vitamins – many of us have taken them since we were children, after all, and marketers often use the presence of vitamins as proof of the nutritional quality of their products. But what, exactly, is a vitamin? Where did the word come from? Does the presence of vitamins mean that something is healthy? And how has the word’s popularity affected our overall approach toward food? In this talk, which is suitable both for the public and for nutrition- and health-related professional conferences and educational settings, Price argues that, as both individuals and a society, we’ve been seduced by a word. She reveals the fascinating history of the word “vitamin,” including its surprisingly recent coinage (it was made up in 1911 by a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk), its early use by food marketers, and the many ways it is used to manipulate our buying choices today. Along the way, she demonstrates how we’ve come to associate vitamins with near magical powers, and how, despite having no precise scientific definition, the word “vitamin” laid the foundations for our current detail-obsessed philosophy toward nutrition. She also reveals how “vitamin” has been brilliantly used by marketers and the supplement industry to come to stand in for the much larger category of dietary supplements – leading to a regulatory situation that both threatens the public’s health and defies common sense.

How to Talk So Your Patients Will Listen and Listen So Your Patients Will Talk

Medical professionals who deal with diabetes – whether they’re primary care doctors, endocrinologists, nutritionists, dieticians or certified diabetes educators – are all devoted to improving the lives of their patients. And yet there is often a profound disconnect between caregivers and their patients, with the caregiver feeling as if the patient is ignoring his or her advice, and the patient feeling discouraged, frustrated and ashamed. In this talk, Catherine calls upon her background as a science journalist and her experience living with Type 1 diabetes (with which she was diagnosed in 2001) to explore why this happens—and how it can be stopped.