Is Social Media Ruining Your Mental Health? | Dr K Healthy Gamer

is there something diff different happening to the brain to our compulsion with social media is it right to even say that social media is an addiction is it a compulsion how do you pass all of this apart yeah so I think social media is similar in some ways and different in other ways I guess no surprise right so if we once again the what's similar so the most similar thing is that platforms are developing things that are more engaging it's just what they engage with varies depending on not only the spefic spefic type of game but games versus social media and even within social media you'll see different kinds of Engagement so generally speaking social media engages with a couple of things the most important thing that social media engages with is emotional Activation so if you think about why does a human being switch from let's say Twitter to Reddit or Reddit to Twitter or Twitter to Tik Tok or Reddit to Tik Tok What you tend to see is that if you're emotionally engaged you're going to stay on and if you get bored that's when you switch but what does boredom usually mean people may think it's dopamine but it's not actually dopamine because a lot of people will use a lot of social media even though they feel really bad and the best example of this is some people will like break up with their ex right and then like late at night you're feeling bad about yourself and you start stalking your ex that doesn't make you feel good that's not dopamine then you see your ex out with someone else who's more attractive than you or maybe has a nicer car or something like that and so a lot of people will actually if you really tunnel down and there's Research into this that shows that what is the emotional experience of engaging in social media it's not always positive so if you really look at like what kind of social media crosses your your feed it's stuff that's emotionally engaging we're hearing about war we're hearing about climate change we're hearing about something and some news organizations even like play into this right where like fear-mongering is a thing and and so what we start to see is it's really emotional engagement that social media like really captur um and so the people who are kind of vulnerable to being emotionally engaged will will sort of get caught up in social media another thing that we tend to see is that the human identity and you kind of alluded to this existential point so like social media allows us to create a virtual identity and we can start to get reinforcement of like these years of millions of years of evolutionary circuitry through the internet so I want to be well respected in Psychiatry or let's say in in a society so I became a psychiatrist or medical doctor and even then as a medical doctor like there were times in my life where I was kind of thinking about well like is Psychiatry like is that being a real doctor how will I feel if I say I'm a neurosurgeon which my my wife was like you should be a neurosurgeon and like what does she care she wants to introduce her husband who's a neurosurgeon and I was like well I've decided to do something close it's in the same ballpark but it's a little bit different so we all crave the approval of other human beings and now social Med media quantifies that right do people like me like normally the human mind doesn't really know like there's no way to measure it right you sort of feel it but now I get a 100 likes and someone else gets 200 and so what social media really does is captures a lot of that identity focused kind of people who are concerned about being something self-esteem now we have filters which sort of fix the problem and make the problem worse which is often times what we see in in social media so the more that I use filters the better I feel about my presence on the internet but each time I use a filter I'm not accepting the way that I look in real life and so it'll make the problem worse which is why I think we see some a lot of this like extreme filter using usage that Almost Doesn't you know seems like it isn't real and people can kind of tell why do people do that I think it's because they kind of go down this Rabbit Hole the comparison between are you having fun now and are you still using the technology now it's so interesting because you know I I think about when I do get stuck Doom scrolling through something and if I was to ask myself that question you know after 15 minutes probably or 20 minutes on any social media I'm no longer having fun I spoke to huberman about this and I I thought this was a very interesting reframe I'd love to get your thoughts on this he sees social media usage more as a compulsion than an addiction in your opinion is there a meaningful difference between the two do you believe that this is the case does it even matter whether it's the case or not well I mean what do you what how are you defining the word compulsion he said that it was more like a compulsive action to pull the phone out to look at it and to scroll to cycle through all of the apps because I can't remember his definition of addiction I want to say it is uh continuing to use a stimulus long after the satisfactory nature of the stimulus has been completed something like that I'm going to guess that you'll know the the definition that I'm using yeah so let let's let's talk let's define things okay so let's start by defining what is an addiction so the features of an addiction first of all is that it impairs function so it causes you some kind of damage and the problem with addictions is that they're solutions that fix a short-term problem but damage things longterm so if we we look at a lot of features of addiction like let's say I'm addicted to opiates and what opiates do is they make me feel good temporarily but they cause me problems because let's say I'm stressed about work and I use an opiate or I use marijuana or something like that my stress goes away but it doesn't fix any of my problems and if I let's say get high today and then I don't work on this project or whatever like I I have one less day to work on it so an addiction is is usually a behavior that we engage in that despite the damage that it does to us we continue to engage in it now why do we engage in addictions usually it's because they provide some kind of relief or reward and if we look at social media and video games they're sort of very similar to addictions in the sense that they suppress negative emotional circuitry which by the way is why it's more than dopamine so even if you play a game for eight hours let's say I'm ruining my life and this is an experience that I had firsthand right was failing out of college and like how could I forget failing out of college I could play video games so it's not even that the game is fun at eight or nine hours but that suppression of the amydala and the lyic system is like kind of there so we know that a lot of what makes video games addictive is like the fact that they push problems away temporarily which is very similar to all these other substances like if I get drunk right I'm not worried about anything so in that way you know that's what an addiction is now a compulsion at least the the technical term of like a clinical term right so if we're talking about obsessive compulsive disorder in that way a compulsion is usually a behavior that we engage in that has some kind of effect on our cognition so so it like it I have to do something to make me feel a particular way and what I would say is there's absolutely like a habitual that's maybe what I would use there's absolutely a habitual or a conditioning aspect to technology usage which they're very good at and I don't know if you've ever had this experience but this happens to me all the time where I will realize that I am not liking what I'm using like a particular device for and then what I'll do is close the app and then open it right up again so we are absolutely being conditioned but this is also where if you kind of look at it the circuitry is a little bit different there's habit circuitry there's dopamine reward circuitry there's like suppressing our amydala and all of that stuff is active when it comes to technology usage so I think it's kind of like all of the above presumably that's what makes it so powerful the fact that you have all of these different networks all coming together into this perfect uh blend yeah absolutely and why is it coming together so so profoundly it's really interesting because there's like there's almost this darwinian slug match going on right now between platforms so if you look at like Tik Tok versus YouTube shorts versus Instagram reals versus whatever Google's going to come up with at some point or I guess they've got YouTube shorts um you know so what are all these platforms doing they're actually competing for your attention the prize that they get is like your mind and so like whether Google wins Tik Tok wins or Amazon wins or whoever wins the one guaranteed thing is that there's definitely going to be one loser and that's actually you you are going to lose control of your mind which is exactly what happens and even then I don't think the platforms are evil I mean maybe they are but that's hasn't been my experience I think it's just they have a product right and everyone wants their eyes on their product and so what they're figuring out is how can I engage people by tapping into a different you know Circuit of the brain how can I help condition someone to use my app so it's not just about dopamine it's not just about em it's emotional engagement it's dopamine it's habit formation all that kind of stuff even pings and notifications they're good at that given that we are hopelessly outgunned up against billion dooll companies with machine learning algorithms some of which are the most powerful ever designed in human history and an entire team of software Engineers behind every single button press how can people set healthy boundaries around gaming and social media so I think thankfully we've we've got a lot of good answers so I think this is where prior to going to medical school I spent seven years studying to become a monk and the cool thing is that like what the monks if you look at sort of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and like meditation and mindfulness they really figured out like how the mind works and in a different way from like the West so in the west we sort of looked at a thousand different minds and we sort of said okay if we average them all together like what floats to the surface but in the East they had sample sizes of one so they're like okay how can I understand where my desires come from how can I get control of my desires a lot of that stuff is kind of baked in and what I actually find is the most effective is starting with some of those principles so understanding first of all that all of Technology really causes one problem causes you to lose awareness so anytime you get sucked in and in fact this is why we want to use technology right I I want to go into a video game and I want to get sucked into the video game I want to binge watch shows so if you look at like HBO and Netflix or whatever right they're like really want us to binge watch and we love binge watching so if you look at the common element to all these things it's a loss of awareness so the more that we can cultivate awareness of things the better off we'll be and there's there's good evidence from this from the world of Psychiatry as well so if you look at like addiction Psychiatry what we find is that if you ask someone who relapses they'll say yeah I was sober for six months and then I don't know what happened I just relapsed but what you really discover and and we sort of see this is that people who are vulnerable to addiction have a lack of awareness of their internal emotional state and as emotional stressors rise and rise and Rise they like reach a particular threshold that causes them to relapse so a big part of what we do clinically when we work with people is just raising awareness and so I'd say the first thing if you want to set a healthy boundary is like be aware of yourself why do you reach it for it in the first place like are there particular times of the day that you reach for it stuff like that is there an emotional state that you find yourself in that causes you to get your phone out or to open up social media on your laptop or to start watching Netflix or to start playing a video game absolutely so a simple example of this is like if you think about 30 years ago if I was trying to study I would get distracted right I wouldn't be able to focus on the textbook and that's okay I would get distracted for like a couple minutes I'm sitting in a library I don't go anywhere I don't do anything my mind wanders I lose five minutes I lose 10 minutes and then I come back to the text I'm like all right time to get back to work now what happens is even a 30- second distraction I'm studying I pull out my phone and I click a button and then my mind is sucked into this like you know pipeline of like attention grabbing behavior and five minutes becomes three hours and so even a you know 30 second attentional lapse now costs me an hour of time okay does that mean therefore that we just need or the most robust solution to stop yourself from using computers and social media is to go places where you don't have your phone and you don't have video games is that the is that the most robust tactic well so I I mean I think it's kind of like a lot of different things right so we we um I think it's first of all cultivating more awareness of of the present and how you feel and what your triggers are and then at the other end they're absolutely environmental aspects so one thing that you know I'll tell people is that if you're trying to get get work done it's a good idea to silence your phone or even move it to the next room um I I'll tell people also like for example if I'm working with patients who are having trouble with sleeping at night to tell them hey keep your phone like at the opposite end of the room or even outside of your room and then everyone sort of asks me like but what if there's an emergency what if I get a phone call in the middle of the night and then I turn around and I ask them how many times have you gotten a call in the last two years that someone has needed your help within five minutes right and the answer is almost always zero unless I'm working with a doctor in which case like you know we have pagers still um so I think they're absolutely kind of conditioning things or environmental things that you can do using grayscale being really aggressive with notifications um but also like the physical location of your phone and this is the other thing that that platform developers are really good getting good at so if you think about Biometrics the thing about Biometrics and face ID is it actually reduces the time to access your phone so now even like the three seconds that it used to take or two seconds to put in your code now you just have to pick it up and it it knows it's you even that friction has been removed yep that's what they're doing removing all the friction okay so we have understanding your triggers understanding the mental states that you get into the emotional states that you're in um whether it's been a hard day at work whether this is some sort of coping mechanism because things are stressful or you're just tired or whatever what are the precursors that happen before you then descend into using technology in a way which after the event you reflect on and wish that you hadn't done there are some environmental cues and factors that we can use uh distance being one of them in that you can't use a screen that you can't put your hands on or see uh so keeping it away sleeping with your phone outside of the bedroom is there anything else when it comes to good boundaries what are the other longest levers yeah so I think the other thing to consider is that so we think about this as like a problem has a solution we don't think about boundaries as skills that are built up right so if you think about like a muscle like how do I lift more weight I need to maybe do more weightlifting and if you kind of think about how do I hold a boundary against a technology that is becoming more and more invasive you get stronger at holding boundaries so what I'll do is I'll also give people exercises and this largely comes from the meditative tradition so you can like formally sit down and meditate but there's a lot of exercises that you can develop based on the theory of meditation my favorite thing to have people do is no more phones in bathrooms so like everyone takes their phone to the bathroom now and if you just like think about it like if I like say that and people are listening to that the instinctive reaction is going to be like oh my God don't take that thing away but like what are you going to lose what am I going to do while I'm pooping Dr K you're GNA do what human beings have done for Millions ions of years prior to the development of Technology be with the poop just be with it so so what's happened in our society as a whole is we have become intolerant of boredom yes so if you want to get control over every bit of technology in your life you have to learn how to not fear boredom and give yourself small doses of boredom you know don't take an audio book the next time you go for a walk or don't listen to music or something like that right and and just start to like pick particular discret things don't watch things while you eat um so so there are all kinds of things that you can sort of set kind of certain lines and then really practice those and then your mind will literally become stronger so your ability to restrain your attention and tolerate boredom will increase is that something that you see reflected neurologically psychologically is this something that actually shows up in the literature somehow oh absolutely so so one simple examp in so many ways so let let's talk about literature in different ways so the first thing is let's talk about let's say psychological literature so we know that for example people with ADHD have difficulty restraining their impulses and they tend to get highly distracted so we know that meditation for example helps people with impulsivity and improving Focus that we kind of know if you sort of think about it what is the practice of meditation it's like literally practicing focusing on a neurological level we know that there are brain corelates with things like ADHD like frontal lobe dysfunction so the frontal loes are are Master Control parts of the brain that they can sort of restrain and direct our attention and so what happens when we do things like meditator some of these practices is that we learn how to like it strengthens our frontal loes and there's even data that shows that it it strengthens sort of the inhibitory circuits of the brain so our frontal loes can go and put the brakes on a particular impulse and then even if we're talking about old old old literature so we're talking about the Sanskrit literature from like 5,000 years ago there's this this one thing there's this one principle called abas which means focusing on one thing at a time and thousands of years ago they were like hey here's a technique to focus on just one thing at a time and you can kind of practice just doing one thing at a time and so there's a lot of scientific stuff from everywhere from Clinical literature to basic science literature to even like old stuff we'll get back to talking to Dr K in one minute but first I need to tell you about manscaped if you are a gentleman who needs to trim his sensitive areas and you are still using an old face shaver from five Christmases ago what are you doing join us here in the modern world there are purpose-built tools for the job and the manscape 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