One Simple Trick To Stop Doomscrolling - Catherine Price

how many hours a day are most people spending on their phones how many times are they picking them up it's hard to get a firm answer on how many hours with the best statistics I found range between four and six hours a day that people are spending on their phones if you want to go for the middle number there five hours a day it adds up to about 75 days a year it's really a shocking amount yeah I wonder what the comparison is because that's presumably across a bunch of different age groups so if you were to go under 30 I would guess that that number goes up I would also guess that the hours of sleep would go down under that uh I certainly know uh Luke who is a good friend of mine and my tour manager um he regularly manages to double his sleep time with his screen time um so he's 12 hours a day on phone six hours of sleep oh that direction I thought you were going the other healthier Direction no Oh that's oh that's not good does he need an intervention he's a club promoter he he's like he's like patient zero for phone use all of us are so that anybody that used to run nightlife stuff um we just have we basically we hardwired into WhatsApp and it it's very very difficult to get rid of that uh maybe this is me just you know um creating a an excuse for myself but uh yeah if you grew up being some sort of club promoter type person you have maybe the worst neural networks possible for uh phone use it's not good that's a sep categories you have like 18 to 29 year olds 29 to 40 and then you have like Club managers which is correct that's it's a different species technically so yes I had thought about that I'm already learning that's it um and have we got I was going to say when you look at different cohorts uh do boys or men use it more than women do what have we got about teenagers young people does this tend to sort of fluctuate over time yeah I mean the generational thing is definitely true so everyone is spending a lot of time on their phones but younger people which the terms are gen Alpha and gen Z you know basically up to 28 or 30 or so definitely higher than Gen X or let alone Boomers but with that said I do think that older people get off the hook too easily when it comes to screen time because I think most of us have probably had an experience when you're with someone in their 70s and they just have their phone out usually on Facebook like all the time and I recently heard a great word for that which is screen your citizen so oh screener citizen very good yeah very very good yeah and I think you know in terms of gender breakdown like you tend to have different people doing it's all stereotypes right but it's like women tend to be on social media more men tend to be in and young men in particular on gaming more so it depends on the person but those are the general kind of breakdowns but yeah I mean younger people are on their phones more than the much older generations for sure I suppose what's interesting about this is something I only realized a few years ago which is phones come in and they take let's say six hours of our day and I'm going to guess that a lot of what's being studied here is not word processes emails at work it's much more social media sort of casual Leisure Time type stuff but we haven't gained the the length of the day hasn't become 30 hours so that 6-h hour window has had to squeeze other bits of life that 25 years ago existed that has to have been squeezed from somewhere unless you've become more efficient at playing in the park or more efficient at at spending time with your friends or whatever it might be uh so inevitably to put 6 hours of your day onto screens that means six hours of your day doing something else has had to go yeah I think the opportunity cost is something that people need to pay more attention to I will say though that I think a lot of times people are multi-screening and that because I thought about the same thing how does this math actually work you know there's like teenagers are supposedly spending something like seven hours a day on uh screen based Leisure that doesn't have to do with school work I'm like how is that possible if school's eight hours a day so a lot of it is multis screening you're watching TV you're also on your phone you're playing a video game you're also chatting like that kind of multis screening but going back to what you were saying I think that we really do need to think about this in terms of opportunity cost because there are only 24 hours in a day and every time we spend an hour on one thing let alone six hours we end up with six fewer hours to spend on anything else in life and I always say like if you are aware of this and you decide you want to be spending that much time on a screen it's your life but I think that for a lot of people it's not an intentional choice you get sucked in and then you don't really recognize your life is being stolen from you in these little increments that add up to we weeks and months and literally years how can people work out whether or not their time on screens is something they want to be doing us something they don't given that we all do it so presumably at the time we want to be doing it kind of I don't know if we always want to be doing it kind of I think a lot of times it's an automatic habit by this point we've been so conditioned and we could talk more about this but we've been so conditioned to associate our phones with some kind of reward emotional reward usually like the alleviation of boredom or anxiety that we do it on a aut pilot and then we get sucked in and we don't even recognize how much time we're spending but I do think you rais a really important point which is that one of the most effective things you can do if you're trying to quote break up with your phone as I put it or change your relationship with your phone is to become more aware of when you reach for your phone and so I do have a couple exercises I always recommend to people and one of them is is this mindfulness based exercise I call what for why now and what else so www for short and I always recommend people start by putting something on their phone like um a rubber band or some kind of like i' tell woman like a hair tie the point being that when you pick up your phone on autopilot you'll notice there's something on the phone and you'll have a split second of being like why is this thing on my phone and that will be a reminder to ask yourself these three questions and the way that works is you ask yourself what for like what did I pick up my phone for right now like did I actually have a purpose or was it just kind of like an autopilot thing and you might have a purpose but what what did you pick it up for then you ask why now you know is it a times sensitive reason like you actually wanted to send specific text message or email or you really wanted to check something in particular or this is more likely is there an emotional reason behind it like you were you were bored and you wanted a distraction or you were feeling lonely you wanted a connection you know something like that and once you identify this reward that your brain is after that's when you can ask the final question of what else let's just what else could you do in this moment to alleviate or give yourself that reward that doesn't involve reaching for your phone so instead of I would say like instead of checking social media for a quote connection you could actually call a friend or find someone to just chat with you could take a break by going for a walk around the block but I also always say to people you might decide that for your what else you actually want to do nothing which is an excellent choice because our brains need more time to decompress from all the stuff we're putting into them and then you also might just decide I want to be on my phone right now and I really like to emphasize that's fine that's the whole point if you end up on your phone after asking yourself those questions like you've succeeded because you know it's intentional and that going back to your original question is how you know that you're not just sacrificing your life and suffering from opportunity cost you actually wanted to spend that time on the phone what have you come to believe about whether it's best to refer to our phone use as an addiction a compulsion um a habit a dependency I mean largely these are just sort of semantic questions but I imagine that if you were someone smarter than me who knew what those words meant that you that that would actually have sort of important distinctions I don't know that I'm smarter than you but I will say what I know which is that at the moment there's no such official thing as a phone addiction at least in the states like that's not an official term that is recognized by the American Psychiatric association in their their uh Manual of disorders with that said they have materials on their site that talk about technology addiction so that's a little contradiction there so I always am cautious about straightup saying that you can have a smartphone addiction with that said a couple things the devices and apps themselves are definitely designed to be addictive because they're modeled directly off of smart I'm sorry they're modeled directly off of slot machines which are some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented and also there is such thing as a behavioral addiction and gambling actually is the first ever Behavior to be recognized as having the potential to lead to an addic addictive Disorder so if you think about the fact that smartphones and more specifically many apps are deliberately designed to mimic machines and that gambling is considered to be a a behavioral addiction to carry the potential for a behavioral addiction I personally think it's a matter of time before we officially recognize that there is such thing as a smartphone or social media or gaming addiction but I don't think we need to get too caught up in the words because I think there's no question that we are using them compulsively that we have problematic habits when it comes to our smartphone and app use you know so I think you can kind of use whatever words feel right to you but I always do like to just be very clear for the psychiatrist in the audience that to acknowledge that it's not yet a quote addiction okay um let's talk about what it's doing to our attention span headlines people being unable to pay attention everybody knows this sort of ease of distraction increasing ADHD diagnosis has there ever been any research looking at what phones directly do to attention spans I am not sure that there's been research done that actually has two groups of like a randomized control Tri if you're going to look at your smartphone for 3 hours a day and you are not although there are some interesting longitudinal studies that are ongoing about the effects of screen time on children's brains in particular but I will say I have done interviews with attention researchers such as Gloria Mark and I've talked to people about this and done a lot of research myself and I think it is it would be kind of ridiculous to think that they were not having an effect on our attention spans the probably the number one complaint people bring to me when they say that they're having problems with their smartphone is their attention span is shock they can't focus anymore they can't read a book they used to love reading books now they can't even make it through a magazine article and I think it makes total sense that our smartphones are training us to be distractable for a number of reasons one of them is that our brains actually want to be distractable our natural state is not a state of concentration it's a state of distractability and that makes evolutionary sense because if you think about it if you are totally concentrating on one thing like the pages in a book you have to shut out everything else otherwise you can't that is what attention and concentration is it's the choosing one thing to focus on and ignoring everything else that's great if you're reading a book like in this where I am right now in this room it's safe it's quiet but if I were an ancient human and there were actually things that might want to eat me I actually want to be tuned into distractions because they might represent threats a real life example of that I was once walking on the street talking to my husband on the phone and I was very absorbed in my in my conversation I did not notice when a car pulled up with a group of teenagers in it and one of them got out with a gun and walked toward me and mugged me so that's an example of how concentration actually can be a bad thing my point being that's our brain's Natural State it's where our brains are always going to want to drift to distractability it takes a lot of work to be able to sustain your concentration to do something like read a book so if you introduce this device that is basically a Non-Stop stream of distractions that's going to have an effect and it is distracting Us in two ways you have the fact that your smartphone is pulling your attention away from your real life experience in the way that my phone was when I got m so that's a distraction training you to go back and forth and back and forth but if you think about what we're doing on our phones themselves we are not reading books for the most part on our phones we are looking at Short posts tiny bits of content headlines like you're saying videos that are 15 seconds long and every time we do that we're training our brains to be more and more distractable so the analogy I always use is that it would be as if instead of going to the gym and doing the hard work of working out and developing muscles you actually had a trainer your phone that was encouraging you to lie on the couch potato ships like what you wanted to do anyway so yeah but one thing I will say that is a moment or a note of Hope is that when people do start to break up with their phones and and make a point of trying to get back into the habit of attention building practices such as reading or meditating it's actually astonishing how quickly their attention spans can come back so if anyone out there is like I am a God Like A no hope there is hope it does take work but I've actually personally been surprised by how quickly you can start to see the effects yeah how possible you know a lot of people listening will identify with the terminally distracted person who feels like their phone has broken their brain and then now some sort of some weird prisoners dilemma Stockholm Syndrome from themselves to themselves this thing in their pocket how possible is it to retrain our attention span if it's been nuked by phone use I think it's very possible but I think you have to want to do it so the two things I always recommend to people well in general I say try to build an attention building practice into your day as often as possible the easiest thing to do is just to put your phone in a different room and read a book so I always say you can get two birds for one stone if you get your phone out of your bedroom at night and then put a book on your bedside table where the phone used to be a book that you want to read and then it will be easier to reach for the book than it will be to go get your phone so you can spend the time during your bedtime routine when you normally would have just scrolled reading instead and you can build in some practice for your attention span there it's going to be hard at first but be patient and kind to yourself you also can do something more formal like actually do something like a meditation practice mindfulness meditation in particular where you're focusing on one anchor like your breath or sounds in the room or bodily Sensations and just coming back to it over and over again excellent way to build your attention span but I know that not everybody wants to or feels they have time for meditation so it can be a simple as reading a book and I'd also recommend just try to do one thing at one time you know at a time I noticed for myself that like I'm always like brushing my teeth while making the bed neither is as well done as it could be as a result of that multitasking so just getting in the habit of trying to do one thing at a time can be very helpful in helping our brains start to quiet down a bit and be able to tolerate sustaining our attention for more than five seconds at a time yeah I remember when I first started trying to read as a proper adult after University maybe 29 at this time and I'm thinking I starting to listen to podcasts and I'm starting to sort of take intellectual curiosity a bit more seriously the Classic Party boy tries to be less of an adult infant manopause type situation that lots of guys go through yes I've witnessed that I did not have a name for it but I witnessed it yes manop pause manop pause um and I sat down and I remember when I sat one of the first times that I sat down to try and read my fingers were moving just a little bit like this and I realized that I was just so used to over stimulation and I'm looking at this you know totally static white piece of paper with black words on it and my body is just no my nervous system is evidently regulated for Bings and bongs and Banners and the stuff moving and I you know these words don't even change it's just the same words and then if you don't read them then they don't go away and um yeah that was so you know sort of felt that did you swipe the page did you try to swipe it I wasn't that much of an idiot that being said though you know going back to the compulsion addiction dependency habit thing everybody knows what it's like when you're on a plane and you know that you have no signal and you get the phone out and you swipe up and you do the things and you do the thing and you do your little loop around whatever the apps are and you realize how futile it is and then as you put it away and then you take it like a a sharpshooter pulling it back out of your pocket I'll just you know uh so there's definitely something going on there those milein sheets that we've got are are pretty sort of deeply ingrained um yeah on the plane also that moment when it's like you may now turn your cell phones on and then you hear like but I will say um no I've seen videos of small children toddlers trying to swipe magazine pages that was a serious question because they think it's an iPad yeah wow wow um dopamine detoxes you said sort of retrain attention span be mindful with your use try and do some proper mindfulness keep your phone outside of your bedroom which is the number one life hack that I've been hopping on about on this show for as long as I can remember just put the charger take the charger now and put it in another room and do not try and [ __ ] tell me that it's because you use your phone as your alarm clock radio alarm clocks have been around for like 2,000 years so please buy yourself if not longer if not longer exactly yeah yeah yeah get a sunnd dial you know get a get a [ __ ] roll um window exactly get a window um yeah take your phone outside of your bedroom uh don't detoxes another Super trendy thing I've seen lots of videos with millions of plays on YouTube are they legit do they do anything do they work well I don't like things that have millions of views oh I shouldn't say that you have millions of views on YouTube but you know what I mean when it's like such a trend um with that said okay so I don't like the term dopamine detox in the way that I often hear it bandied about what just I retrace my steps I mean insulted my host inadvertently but what I would say is that yes it is a good idea to try to reset yourself so that you are not so short-term focused and so desirous of dopamine uh stimulation to put it in a horribly phrased way let me back up and explain what dopamine is for a second here because we often talk about it in the wrong way it's not actually like just pleasure dopamine is our brain's way of recording when things are worth doing again and important to pay attention to so it's really a salience indicator and the example I always use is that it actually helps us to remember to do things like eat so if you're walking through the woods and you come across a a you know a bush that has red berries on it and you eat those brightly colored red berries they don't kill you they taste good they're raspberries your brain is going to release a little bit of dopamine to indicate that it was worth paying attention to that bush of berries and that eating the berries was a good idea to do and then you should do it again and that means that thanks to that dopamine the next time you're walking in the woods your part of your brain is going to be to have been trained to pay attention for raspberry bushes so that you can repeat the behavior and eat the raspberry again right so it actually is evolutionarily essential dopamine is it helps us remember to do things like eat and it's released in response to other things like sex so very important for reproduction the problem is that our brains do not choose what to release dopamine in response to it's like a it's just in response to a trigger more like a light switch turning on and off so anytime you encounter something that is a dopamine trigger your brain's going to just release it whether or not it's a good idea and whether or not it's going it's reinforcing a habit that you want so the thing is that if you were trying to create an app or a product that will hook people all you need to do is pack a ton of dopamine triggers into that product and people will start to associate your product with receiving some kind of reward because of the dopamine Spritz that it's getting they're going to seek it out and continue to use it over and over again so the machine that has you know the most dopamine triggers is the slot machine and as I was talking about earlier smartphones are deliberately designed to mimic slot machines by having tons of dopamine triggers in them for example bright colors huge dopamine trigger unpredictability you'd think we'd want to know when something good would happen but we're actually far more attracted to unpredictability and then the anticipation of waiting for to find out if something's good good is going to happen which is why we like watching movies better the first time and why no one who watches Sports ever wants someone to tell them the final score can I give you my my contrarian opinion on uh intermittent schedule reward in that way as well you may of course I think it's one of the reasons why people are drawn to partners that are difficult to date oh yes that's actually I say in my book that this is I say in my book explicitly that psychologists call this intermittent rewards and I call it the reason we date jerks it's exactly that yep yep yeah we are singing from the same himy sheet yes yes and so so to answer your question do I think that a dopamine detox is a good idea I do because I think that we have been habituated to expect constant I don't know if Spritz is the right word I'm not a sprinkling little sprinkling we're we're habituated to receiving dopamine stimulation from dopamine constantly from our phones and that leads to an issue where real life can start to seem boring and a lot of people who spend a lot of time on their phones experience this you were experiencing that yourself when you found yourself like you know twitching physically when you were trying to concentrate on a book so it can be very useful to reduce dopamine triggers in your life so that you can kind of bring your Baseline down a bit back to what would be considered more normal with that said I don't know that the kind of the Silicon Valley version of a dopamine fast is what I would recommend where you know people are like not eating and abstaining from sex and like not watching TV no eye contact raw do raw dogging flights by just looking at the flight map on Loop yes exactly exactly like I mean I don't know if that's your thing go for it but I think that it more effective or more useful thing to do for most people is just to change your relationship with your phone because honestly like that's the main source of what I would consider to be quote unhealthy dopamine triggers it's your screens real life dopamine is actually there for a reason and I think it's actually kind of good to habituate yourself to seeking out real life dopamine triggers you know of the sorts that sometimes people try to avoid as well yes yeah no I agree I did a I did a very comprehensive DNA analysis toward the back end of last year that everyone listening will be sick of me talking about but it was so interesting I'm one of the uh clusters of Al that was identified that is uh non-typical for me like 10 less than 10% of the population I've got is this particular uh combination of them not just individuals that are 10% when you roll them all together you realize just how genetically individual all of us are um it's like 10% 9% 10% 3% 1% 10% you know and you're like [ __ ] when you start to add all of these together it's very you know it's one in seven billion um and mine very very epinephrine norepinephrine dopamine uh struggle to clear adrenaline quickly uh may may find um it difficult to stop be stop tasks once they've begun it's like super like internet dgen focused energy and for me dopamine is just it's the sort of drug that my body runs on largely um and you know that's not to say that the um epigenetic uh situation the soup that I've existed in for the last 36 years uh has or hasn't active ated those fully I don't know how much those switches are on but I certainly know that there's times where um you know you just get locked in on something and you can't stop but as great as that is you're conscientious you're able to focus on tasks this is really really good you're driven you want to go and Chase new things it's like yeah man but that same Drive can be hijacked by Instagram or by YouTube or by World of Warcraft or by a lot of stuff and um it's I I like that you use the berry analogy I remember learning about uh information foraging is did you look at that study was it squirrels in trees with nuts I me probably they do a lot of I think it was I'm thinking about the distracted Mind by Adam gazali and Larry Rosen where they talk about how human beings tend to forge for information in the same way that animals forage for food I imagine it's probably even one of those guys I remember this on Sam Harris's pod [ __ ] like six seven years ago and um there's a an equation that can be done let's say that you're a squirrel looking for nuts in a tree just imagine for a second yes um and you are able to create a an algorithm an equation which is how many nuts have been found in the tree how many nuts are left in the tree and how far away is the next closest tree and from that what you're able to basically create is a predictive model about when the squirrel is going to abandon this tree for another one and try and find the nuts in the next tree because it's working increasingly hard to find increasingly few nuts but in order to go to the next tree that's far away and um yeah the information foraging idea I think is just so interesting because for almost all of human history we had less information than we wanted and then there was there was one day in mid 201010 when the amount of information humans desired and the amount that was available perfectly matched up and then almost immediately the internet just blasted straight through that ceiling and now here we are all with attention spans of 0.3 seconds well yeah I mean it's to just I'm you I'm trying to fully inhabit my squirrel brain right now but it is as if that equation got messed up where suddenly you'll never run out of nuts on the tree you'll never go to the other tree because it takes more work to get to the different tree and the tree you're in is like occasionally popping up with new nuts or in the case of information it's always popping up with more nuts lots of nuts so why would you do anything else you can I mean yeah we've all gone into internet rabbit holes or squirrel holes maybe we should call that sound so much dirtier anyway but where you're like what happened like why I spent an entire day once an entire day searching for kitchen faucets online I mean granted I was working on a kitchen renovation but like I remember being like Oh my God it's getting dark I'm psychotic I have a problem yes someone needs to intervene in my new didn't you wasn't there something I heard you talk about was it Victorian doorknobs as well well yes I I also was very into Victorian doorknobs if you must know um and just architectural elements because I find those to be more interesting than the standard things one might find in Home Depot uh but I did spend a lot of time on eBay looking at doorknobs and hinges after my need for doorknobs and hinges had actually been bouncing from tree to tree um I think I I think I watched an entire 16 minute long video Once on how to make like it was that like sushi roll no it was soup dumplings so that I could make fake soup dumplings out of like Playdoh with my daughter and that's when I was like I don't think that I don't think that was necessary yeah I need waste of time what about memory what's uh what's phones doing to our memory I've heard of Tik Tock Brain before well our phones are messing with our memory in a lot of different ways I will highlight some of them for you one is that in order to make a memory you have to have an experience right so if you are on your phone in the middle of a social interaction you're not actually in that interaction I mean if you're on your phone in general all you really experienc Ing and what is was whatever is on the phone so they're blocking experiences to use John Height's terminology and so if you're not having an experience to begin with there's nothing to store that's one way that they're impacting us another way they're impacting us is that our phones and the amount of information they're feeding to us at all times are seriously taxing our working memory the part of our memory that's holding on to for example trying to remember a phone number or trying to do math in your head that's your working memory it's very easily overwhelmed and so when your working memory is overwhelmed you're also not going to remember things very well that's happen all the time where we're trying to keep track of too much stuff but one thing I find particularly fascinating that's not talked about is the impact that constant distraction has on long-term memory storage so as I was just talking about you obviously can't remember something if you didn't experience it in the first place but the process of actually taking a short-term memory and getting it into the form of a long-term memory in your brain requires your brain to create new proteins and that actually is easily interrupted by Distraction and so and we've all had this happen where you're trying to remember someone's name at a party you get distracted for a second you no longer remember their name afterwards that's interesting in and of itself but the thing I find truly interesting is the impact this could be having on our ability to be creative and have insights and deep thoughts because if you think about what an Insight is I think it's the ability and creativity the ability to take things that don't seem like they're connected and make connections between them but that requires having raw materials to make connections with right so if you don't have any raw materials if you're mental pantry is bare because you haven't stored long-term memories you're not going to have anything to have an Insight make an Insight out of so I find that to be one of the most upsetting potential effects that our screen time is having on us is that it's making us Dumber as a society and as individuals because we no longer have the raw materials we need the memories we need the experiences we need to have stored in order to be interesting insightful people and as a side note I thought when when I first came up with that Insight I guess of my own I thought is am I being too dramatic maybe I'm being too dramatic and then I had the weirdest factchecking experience of my life where I sat down on a train between DC and Philadelphia here in the states and I there was a old man sitting across from me and I couldn't figure out who he was but I somehow knew he was relevant to my work and I eventually figured out it was Eric candell who happens to be the Nobel prize winning biochemist who got the Nobel Prize for discovering among other things that creating long-term memories requires the creation of new proteins in your brain and that it can be disrupted by distraction and so I said and I quote holy [ __ ] out loud on the asella raced across the aisle knelt down next to this old guy he was like oh hello and I was like I wrote this book I was just talking about your work like I literally had just been talking about his work at a conference I'm like is it insane to say that the disruption of the creation of proteins in the you know for in the formation of long-term memories might be having an impact of on our ability to be creative and insightful as a society as a whole and he said yes I think that makes sense yeah it was so weird yeah well the energy match of an old guy chilling out and you being very excited with your new book I imagine was exactly what he I mean that will have made a memory for him I imagine that that's something that's stuck in his mind and certain I certainly hope so I I was like wow what are but I will say one of the reasons I noticed Eric candell sitting diagonally across from me on the train was that I wasn't looking down at my phone so it was very reinforcing for my own my own beliefs in what I already believed in and what I'm trying to convey through my work confirmation bias is a hell of a drug conf I mean like confirmation bias with like a Nobel prize winning biochemist so I think it's like good conf El confirmation bias yeah exactly yeah it's like legit when I first started the show one of the things I was really interested in learning was why life seems to feel like it speeds up as we get older so uh Susanna Hal and wrote some really great stuff on this bunch of people and um gret and Ruben did some stuff too and uh basically what I came I may be wrong neuroscientists May disagree with me but this is my bro science theory uh novelty and intensity uh two pretty um easy ways to what people mean when they say life seems to be moving very quickly is I don't remember where the time went I think that's a better way of putting it because by Design time always moves at the exact same Pace even if you're traveling near the speed of light for you time is moving at the exact same Pace even if you're on the edge of a black hole so your experience of time is at the exact same Pace it's your retrospective memory of what happened during that time which is what you're kind of referring to and there's some points around the fact that as you get older things just don't seem as new and I'm like well that's just novelty and probably intensity as well that you just don't get as excitable about stuff because things don't have that sense of novelty so anyway I was like you know I think one of Susanna's uh piece of advice is um never take the same walk twice so try and sort of turn left when you turn right just go down that street or that side you know go around the tree instead of going right around the tree when you're taking a dog for a walk just little bits of novelty that you can and the intensity piece as well and um yeah I get the sense that because and she uses this really lovely example to explain how a lack of novelty and a lack of intensity can press memories down into a single memory so uh for the people that have got a commute that they take to work every single day apart from that one time there was a car crash or that one time that somebody was set on fire on the tube or that one time that it broke down you know what I mean like apart from those times when something novel and intense happens your last four years of work you know maybe a thousand Journeys to a particular place and a thousand Journeys back from a particular place that kind of just compressed into a single memory like tell me what happened 43 days ago on your drive to work unless it was something novel and intense you probably can't remember it why well because what did you in order for you to be able to remember your life you have to do things that are memorable and worth worthy of remembering and if you're not what what do you expect your brain to do it's very lazy you have to give it a reason to do this stuff all of that is to say I think that largely our experience of our phones is uh it is your commute to work for four years doing the same Journey with nothing happening sure you're given the illusion of novelty and there is genuine novelty in there but it's at such a low level and the actual environment that you're inhabiting is from a stimulation perspective so surface it's so shallow that uh I don't think this is is all to say that your point around if you're using your phone while you're having a novel experience you're watching some band of yours that you've been looking forward to seeing for forever you're watching a sports game you're at your kids basketball tournament whatever it is and the phone is out you I think your brain is going to patent match I've seen this before the screen that's very Salient that's driving the dopamine I don't need to pay quite so much attention to what going on and if nothing else how much mental RAM have you got to be able to you that you're that capable of parallel processing that you're able to with one eye pointing in that direction see your son score score a three-pointer and with this I you know watch Tik Tok I I have many have many thoughts in response to that because screens do make our perception of time speed up so I would say that while time itself is not speeding up as you pointed out I do think our experience of time can be modified by what we're doing it can seem to go fast it can seem to go slow even though it's objectively moving at the same speed and I think that yes to go talk about what you're talking about novelty certainly is going to help create new memories because novelty again is something that makes evolutionary sense for us to pay attention to because it might indicate a threat or a source of food something important to know about so we're going to pay attention to and remember novelty and again that relates to dopamine so we that is an aspect that's going to happen another thing is that like a lot of thing things that are ha well actually everything that's happening on your phone is not a fullbody experience you're just processing it intellectually and usually just through your eyes and I think that's another reason that we don't remember things as well that happen on our phones because we're not it's not a lived experience in the same way there was no physical sensation there was no maybe there was a sound associated with but it's just different than an embodied experience I'd also say that I've heard from so so many people that taking a break from their phones so for example I often recommend people experiment with taking a full 24-hour break for their phones as part of the breakup plan in my book but time seems to slow down when people do that it was something I noticed the first time I tried it with my husband you know we we started off the night we put away our phones at like 5:00 p.m on a Friday got super anxious all of a sudden our brains were like oh my God you need to check this you need to do this you need to buy this and we're like okay brains calm down you know we tried to tolerate that distress went to bed woke up much calmer in the morning and then I remember around 11:00 in the morning being like how is it only 11:00 in the morning you know we got up we made breakfast we had coffee we had a conversation we went for a walk we played with our daughter I was like how's it only 11 normally it would be three o'clock because normally I spend my time on my laptop and I've heard that experience from so many people that taking a break from screens made their perception of time slow down and I asked someone about this Who David Greenfield who founded the center for internet technology and addiction way back in the late 90s I think 1997 so way ahead of his time and he works with people I guess he does use the word Addiction but he works with people who are having serious problems with screen time and he said one of the saddest parts that he sees of what he calls technology addiction is that people's perception of time changes so dramatically life seems boring but what he said is when you're on a screen you kind of dissociate from your actual life and that dissociation actually makes your perception of time speed up all that is to say that if you want to slow down your life or your perception of your life figuring out how to not spend so much time on screens can be a really useful tool and you also made me remember there's some quote I'm not going to get entirely right I think from Williams William James who wrote the principles of psychology in 1890 and I'm sure you've talked about a bunch on your show before but he talks about yeah as time goes on our percept basically our experiences start to smooth out and time speeds up it's this very depressing view of what happens as you get older and so I would say yes that's a very common I mean everyone everyone feels that way that's suddenly GE start to speed up but one thing we can do to fight back is to put away our screens and make a point of as you're saying seeking out novel experiences I would say seeking out fun we can talk more about that if you want that was my follow-up book to how to break up with your phone is called the power of fun um but the more of these real life embodied experiences that we're having ideally with some well they they will by definition have an element of novelty because no real life experience is ever the same twice that that's actually going to make your life feel less like a smooth necklace and more more like a necklace that's made up of little beads that each represent a different experience and that will in turn make it feel like you're like all of those individual little memories will actually make your perception of time different and I would say that we all have experienced this in our own lives if you think about how much better you remember your vacation if you were not on your phone during your vacation if you went on a really good vacation you probably have so many more memories and it probably seemed much longer than the same week or two week period did when you were just in your regular life spending most of your day staring at a scre are just going through the same routine over and over again yeah it's crazy I I always made this point when I stopped partying so much I was I ran nightclubs for a long time and so so I heard you're a different species that's that was that in your DNA test or did they not pick that up no they did they did yeah yeah it's the the clb cocaine Gene I think was actually in there it was strange um that world when I got toward the end of it I realized I'd been away in a lot of holidays in my 20s with the guys i' we'd been to V we'd been to AA we'd Been to Spain we'd been wherever and some maybe including me a bunch of times would go and get so blackout drunk that we could have been anywhere on the planet like this experience could have happened literally in the pub down the road but we decided to get on a 18-hour flight to Vegas to go and stay in a hotel and do all of the things and you sort of create this physiological cocktail that's so potent that it's able to rip you out of the thing that you went there to do to do a thing that you could have done somewhere else and it's kind of the same as if you go on holiday you have the beautiful honeymoon you've spent all of the money youve had all of the time and you are kind of choosing to restrict your ability to make memories to be in the moment from this thing you could have just scrolled your phone at home like if you wanted to go there to do it I mean you know you a domestic honeymoon I'm sure that your wife would have been thrilled at the prospect of that um so just sort of continuing down the stack of impacts that phones have when it comes to happiness health uh more sort of physiological changes what's going on there I mean it's not good there's so many ways that phones are thank you for giving me the time to talk about all the ways that folks are impacting us you touched on relationships and they're having a huge impact on our relationships on our friendships on our romantic relationships how we find romantic relationships but I mean I hear from so many people who are so hurt and so upset by how their partner or their boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband or whoever like how they're paying attention to the phone instead of the other person and that their partner doesn't seem to get why this is such a big deal and I always say if you feel like your partner or spouse or whatever is use of the phone is causing a problem in your relationship you are right like I want to validate that it is a problem they are ignoring you in favor of this third party in your relationship it's having an impact I think it's ridiculous to act like it's not having an impact you know I personally I I God this is one of the bad effects of having written this book I can't unsee it I always say to people like be careful before you read my book or be careful before you start listening to this podcast or because you're going to start seeing things differently and I always say it's kind of like seeing a family member naked like you can't unse oh my God yep far enough you know so it's like once you start noticing how many couples are out to dinner and have their phones on the table once you start noticing how many families have given a phone to their kid or everyone's on their individual phone scrolling like you can't unsee it it's like really honestly setting anyway so that's one thing like they really are impacting our ability to be close with the people we care about the most and if you feel like you're being impacted by that you you are and you're you're you should be listened to so that's one thing um we touched on sleep phones are having a huge impact on our sleep that's a big deal not only does it make us tired but sleep deprivation you know affects our cortisol levels cortisol as I'm sure you've talked about a lot as well is a stress hormone that's very important when it comes to our physical survival because cortisol does things like Elevate our heart heart rate and our blood glucose levels and our blood pressure great if you need to run away from something not great chronically elevated over time chronically elevated cortisol associated with increased risks of everything from you know heart attack and stroke to type two diabetes obesity the list goes on well when you're sleep deprived and that's defined as anything less than like seven or eight hours a night it increases your cortisol level therefore sleep deprivation is associated with the same longterm health risks as elevated cortisol caused by emotional stress so that is one of the many ways in which phones are affecting our physical health because they're getting in the way of our sleep and you know when you look at a phone one of the ways that they do that is that the light that phones give off is a very blue light blue light is the same as daylight if you're looking at a phone or a screen before bed you are essentially telling your brain that it is daytime and that your brain should be awake you're essentially giving yourself jet lag so that's another way it's getting in the way of our sleep also like you were saying people use their phones as their alarm clock that means that they're checking they're touching their phone first thing in the morning because you have to touch the alarm to make it silent so then you're setting your whole day up on the terms of whatever was waiting for you on your phone so phones are dramatically impacting our emotional state for the whole day it's like the first thing we're doing is probably seeing a stressful notification on the phone I could go on there's so many other ways but I think one thing that's not talked about enough also is that f phones are fundamentally changing who we are as people I should be more specific I should say the algorithms on some of our most popular apps are actually training our brains in ways that change who we are as people how we behave what we pay attention to what decisions we make I once read a book that was about algorithms and how algorithms influence our lives by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania at the business school Wharton and he said that he didn't exercise with his students where he had them go through their day and figure out how many of their decisions were influenced in some way by an algorithm from the time that they woke up in the morning like if they had a smartwatch that picked the time in their sleep cycle to wake them up to how they got to school like did they use a map app how did they choose the clothes that they wore that day was it because they randomly wandered into a store and picked something that they wanted themselves or is it because someone was recommended to them or they saw a photograph and a sponsored post on Instagram how did they find the person they're dating and are in a relationship with etc etc you start to realize as he put it in that book that algorithms are silently rearranging our lives and I think that that is really important for us to keep in mind I mean obviously Free Will is its own discussion of whether or not we have it to begin with but I think when you interact this much with algorithms there's no question that even if we had free will we're giving it up to algorithms and that becomes even more of a concern when you consider the increasing role that Ai and chat Bots that are encouraging us to get into relationships with them are having on our lives so to me that's maybe the most upsetting thing of all the effects on us that our phones and apps are having is they're fundamentally changing the experience of being human what's your you know you you released a version of this 2018 another one is coming out 2025 but I is out it is available now it is available now in all good book stores and but I imagine that there'll need to be another version probably very quickly within the next two to three years once AI has fully kind of got its grip on social media have you thought ahead have you got an idea and everybody was worried 12 months ago 99.9% of all content on the Internet is going to be AI generated as of yet I don't know if that's something that's happening I don't know if getting into relationships with chatbots is something I have my own pet evolutionary psychology theories about why that's not going to be a concern um what have you got in terms of predictions for how AI is going to change our relationships with our phones screen social media dopamine stuff like that yeah well first of all thanks for uh raising my anxiety levels about having to create a new update of this book in two years Chris I really appreciate that three in a decade that's what you've got to do in a decade no I we'll just have things implanted in our brains by that point um yeah so I have thought about AI it keeps me up at night frequently and I very much value my sleep and get nine hours a night at least so this is upsetting to me that AI is already impacting me in that way um it's gonna have a huge impact on how we interact with our phones and apps or more specifically how we spend our time I think so you know Tristan Harris who's the um former product philosopher at Google who now runs the center for Humane technology he was featured in the social dilemma the movie about social media he used to talk about how social media in particular Was a Race to the bottom of the brain stem where the goal was to steal our attention from us he Now talks about what he calls the not the attention economy but the intimacy economy which is not porn which people often think when I bring it up but it's rather creating an algorithm that makes us feel as if we are in a relationship with it and so we start to interact with it not as a machine but more as a person and we are very vulnerable to that psychologically we are built to want to trust things that and to answer questions about ourselves and want to get psychologically intimate with with people if you have an AI chatbot that is able to do that I actually am deeply concerned about that there already have been plenty of examples of people who become obsessed with the boyfriends or girlfriends they've created for themselves on things like replica or character AI you know there are there are teenagers who have died by Suicide as a result of the relationships and the interactions they had with some of these chat Bots that they created but I think that it's very easy for me at least to see a situation in which it really can become a form of Mind Control if you can get into a relationship like say I was a bad actor like a foreign adversary or something what better way to have mind control over entire population than to get people to have relationships with the chatbot driven by an algorithm that I've created a good way I mean if you think the birth rates are declining too quickly already this is this is really PL them well that's true too I mean people are definitely not having as much sex as they used to because of their phones have not seen studies specifically looking at that but like let's be realistic like they totally are anyway the AI thing I don't know I would push back on I'm interested to hear why you don't think it will be a problem in terms of relationships but I've noticed that it's even started to get pushed out I mean the the the aggressiveness with which some of the social media platforms are pushing these things is kind of crazy like I hate social media as you might have gathered by my line of work but I did look at Instagram the other day and I noticed I noticed a very Buxom suggested for you person quote unquote in the middle of like my feed after one post and I thought that's interesting I wonder why they're suggesting that person to me she had like a flower in her hair was kind of a Hawaiian look I'm like oh it's not a person it's an AI chat bot and I clicked into it so now my Instagram thinks that I've been chatting you've been pixel you've been pixeled that's it you're going to Beed for the rest of time was like oh my God they're pushing they're pushing this another thing Tristan Harris pointed out is that this was two years ago so ancient history Snapchat had started to pin an aot AI friend at the top of people's friend list and one thing he made a point he made in a talk he called the AI dilemma is that that AI friend is always available that AI friend wants to keep talking about your problems with your girlfriend you know that AI friend is always there for you and I even started noticing this myself if you know if I use chat GPT for something or like ask for feedback on stuff it's so affirming it's never like hey Katherine actually that's a really dumb idea it's always like great point you know so I can easily see many of us falling into the ease of these fake inter well I don't know I guess they're real interactions but our interactions with these AI Creations versus the awkwardness that it takes to have a real life relationship or the discomfort somebody who's unpredictable and sometimes doesn't think that your ideas are amazing yeah exactly and I and sorry I'm rambling you got me on a thing but I will say also that I recently rewatched the movie Her with Walken Phoenix um I don't know I watched um oh you haven't seen it what's that uh [ __ ] what's that other one about the billionaire guy who gets the Koda to come and live with him oh oh my godx ma yes I watched that on a plane have you seen that one yet I have not it's too it's too much it's too much that's pretty close to the Bone for you for your work your line work but seriously like her I believe came out in 2013 it's about walking Phoenix falling in love with an operating system which is basically an a what we would now think of as an AI you know character and I remember seeing that around 2013 and thinking wow that's really crazy like that'll never happen I watched it like six months ago and I was like holy [ __ ] that's like that's a year from now like it's so spoton and so upsetting let me give you my my bro EP reasoning for why I think we shouldn't be as worried as we might think now I actually question though first what do I call I'm not a bro so what do I call my reasoning I don't know what they you can be bro you're you can be a bro it's basically any type of Bro Science is just this is me postulating a totally unsubstantiated idea that I thought of while I was in bed that's what it means it's a notion it's a you could say I have a notion I have a notion um my notion is at least for men I don't know if this is the same for women I would actually guess that when you're talking about females and female attachment uh you they will be the ones who have maybe at higher risk of something like a chatbot uh because of the level of sort of emotional affection and attentiveness the reason that I think it's not so much of a risk for men it's the same reason that guys don't flex the only fans models that they subscribe to as if they're their girlfriends and it's that very fundamental to the reason that men look for a partner is the signal that they have been chosen that presumably this other individual could have selected a variety of men but they selected me and the issue that you have with subscribing to only fans is that anyone with the price of a cheeseburger can per month can subscribe to the only fans and the same thing when it comes to a chatbot that there's no Prestige associated with having an AI girlfriend now it may be able to sedate your feelings of loneliness it may be able to do whatever but I don't think at least for men at least for most psychologically typical men I don't think it is a long-term viable solution now my uh white pill take my white I don't think a solution I don't think anyone's saying it's a solution but sorry go on something that's just going to be sorry a a solution in that um it would satisfy their desire for connection and attachment in a way that would preclude them from actually going and seeking in the real world over a long amount of time I don't think because there isn't the prestige there isn't the amount of selection that's gone on that of that being said I do think there's a white pill here especially when VR comes online and if we can get good chat Bots good VR headsets Etc I think that you can create whoever does this will be very very rich if you could gamify the flirting process with a very highly dextrous accurate virtual dating environment where you can say and move and it can detect body language and tonality and what you're saying and it can respond in real time dating is one of the few things you don't get to sandbox you know you can practice free kicks for football all day long you don't get to practice going up to that girl in the bar you just have to every time that you try to practice it is game day over and over and over and over again whereas I think that overcoming approach anxiety which is one of the Myriad of reasons why I think there is a sex recession at the moment overcoming that if you've been you dude I'm level 55 on flirt AI uh I I got this in the back I'm like a black belt or whatever um and I genuinely do think that it would help to give guys the confidence to be able to overcome that approach anxiety so there are some white pills in there but why would you buy so I I hear what you're saying and I hope that's true although I also sounds like you're like the reason guys want to have girlfriends is because it makes them look good so putting that aside you know hopefully some men also more reasons there's many many many reasons a couple more reason we can talk about that later if you want but I don't know I think I genuinely am concerned even at the level when you start to hear some of the voice chat Bots that already exist and you start to see seen any of those all I've spoken to is chat GPT I'm gonna guess that it gets much more oh if you want to flirt with a fake thing you have a lot you could have a great night because yeah you can do exactly what you're talking about know what I'm doing this evening then yeah exactly oh no this is this is a bad influence what if this podcast is is the turn your life turns for the worst but like it's it's already possible to do that I mean my I haven't used VR headsets that do this but there's such already like the the realism of the voices of of being able to to have an interaction with like a AI generated voice like that already is so sophisticated even within the past couple months that you could easily spend your evening tonight having a quote phone conversation with the you know beautiful woman and then I think you know maybe right now the video is not quite there but give it six months like I actually genuinely think it will be quite possible and in many cases more appealing to a lot of people to have those relationships and I would also say again going back to the scam idea that you can scam people by doing that so if you think about what's happening to older people in terms of financial scams but also people taking advantage of lonely women or men who you know really want to feel wanted and love but they like it's so easy to have them fall in love with a fake character whether to be a dick or because you're trying to scam them out of money wow yeah I mean imagine if Andrew Tate had had access to this AI technology when he was sex trafficking a couple of years ago that would have been insane well that's also really terrifying right like and then oh my God we get we could get dark very quickly welcome to what it's like in my head before bed it's like not fun it's amazing I getting nine hours of I was going to say nine hours of sleep imagine what could happen if I wasn't this dystopia 10 hours that would 10 hour all the time um what else is happening sort of more deeply you happiness health memory attention spans stuff like that sort of beliefs sense of self existential crises like is there there must be something that because you know all of this are kind of sort of disperate contributions but it's not it's not necessarily talking about our felt sense of ourselves what the story is that we tell ourselves about this we're talking about polarized World we're talking about people that struggle to talk across the aisle the you know um risk aversion that people of God about all this sort of stuff what about what's happening more deeply what what deeper changes are happening to to us from our use of screens I mean I think all the things you just mentioned are pretty deep you know like look at what's happening in the United States right now we're so polarized It seems impossible to talk to someone across the aisle and there's so much misinformation I think one of the biggest impacts is that there's no shared definition of the truth anymore and actually a story comes to mind that seems relevant I was at Ted a couple years ago when some of these first AI things were being rolled out there was something um there was a guy there was a company that had this like fake Tom Cruz like deep fake Tom Cruz and they had these videos Deep fake Tom Cruz and part of the reason they chose to do a deep fake of Tom Cruz is there was someone on their team who kind of looked like Tom Cruz and so they had him do stuff and they used AI to make it look like he was really Tom Cruz but I remember talking to him and trying to ask I was like are you at all concerned about what you're creating because it's like all fun in games of all you're doing is pretending to be Tom Cruz doing stuff but you're essentially making it so that we no longer can trust that anything we see or hear online is true and what happens to society and the world when we can no longer trust anything unless we were there in person like and he was entirely not willing to engage in that he actually stepped into my face and I think if I was a guy like there was a group of people watching this I actually think he would have punched me he did not but he was like this is no different from just photoshopping a Christmas card it was like a weirdly antagonistic interaction but I think it was a very valid question and obvious question that I was asking is like this generative AI stuff that we're using now like we're playing with fire like you can see what's happening to us we're in I mean it's terrifying to think the direction that the world is going in the world that know the direction the United States is going in regardless of what side of the aisle you're on I I think that this is again fundamentally changes who changing who we are as people who we are as a society how we treat each other you know how we spend our time and it it deeply bothers me I mean thank you for listening to me because my my husband is is a little tired of this conversation this is like all the time yeah okay I've I've stepped in as a surrogate ear to to hear the complaints for a little while no look I the 10 I mean do you feel that way or you like a okay you should upset you look the 10th episode that I ever did on this show was with Kai way the founder of the Light phone um This was um I think episode eight was called a hacker in your pocket how your phone is stealing your attention this was all off the back of Tristan Harris's uh first conversation with Sam Harris um and that was my first introduction to him and then he go on to get his Netflix show and then and then he goes on Joe's show a couple of times once with Daniel schmachtenberger which was like a really odd conversation that I thought was super interesting but I didn't predict and um I've been worried about this for a long time I have I would say over the last seven years since thinking about this deeply kind of got pain fatigue with it that you sort of run out of steam a little bit and there's so much stuff that's capturing your attention the the lack of novelty of complaining about the same thing over and over again you know what I mean which is presumably why your husband switches off because you've been talking about he off I just think he's like I'm like hey want to chat and he's like I know where this is gonna go you like rather yeah um so look I am I'm I'm I'm really concerned I have been concerned for a long time I would go as far as to say that um the most since 2013 the most reliable New Year's resolution theme that I have made has been some form of digital minimalism that I have tried to create different structures and some of them have worked really well sleeping with my phone outside my bedroom I've done since 20 I don't know 18 17 something like that and it's one of the most powerful habit changes like single decision habit changes I think I go as far as to say I think you get an instant 20% Improvement in your quality of life just by making that one decision because your sleep improves your morning and evening routine improve like all of the millions and millions and millions of things um and I am you know I am concerned about this I also had uh Stuart Russell on the show um Stuart wrote The Textbook the AI textbook that was translated into I think 130 languages and was the the one that every person every AI programmer read and um he taught me this interesting thing I'd love to work out whether or not it's true with you um which was algorithms have two ways that they can become better at getting us to click on things one of them is to better predict our desires so to learn what it is that we like and to put more things that we like even if it's stuff that we hate but uh learn what we click on and put more things that we click on in front of us the second way is to nudge our preferences to be more predictable so he was teaching me about this sort of diadic relationship that you have where if because all it is is the blackbox has one optimizing function like click through right and maybe watch time for YouTube something like that um and it will find ways to do it that are relatively novel and one of the really novel ways that he thinks is happening is it's not just that it needs to become better at predicting what you want but that it can make you more easily predictable is this something that you've looked at um you know I think it's a different way of saying what I was trying to get at before and I like the way that you're phrasing this it's very interesting because this is what I say when it's changing what it means to be human and it's changing who we are is exactly what you're saying because I think I never thought about this particular way the optimistic way to look at this is that algorithms are learning who we are and predicting what we want that gives us a lot of agency that is happening but I think what's happening more and more is exactly what you're saying they're actually changing us to be more predictable it's this homogenization of who we are and I've heard that from so many people and you see it around all the time if you look at how I think all people but if you think about young woman in particular the kind of the Instagram look I mean people are literally getting plastic surgery to look more like influencers on Instagram that's an physical example of what you're talking about the algorithm fed them more pictures that showed them quote beauty of a certain kind and they're actually shaping their bodies with scalples to look like that so yes I think that's really important to recognize and I think the result is that you end up going back to what we were talking about before in terms of memory and creativity you end up with a much less interesting Society you you end up with people who are more the same who don't have independent creative thoughts who don't who all look the same and think the same and act the same and talk the same because they're being fed stuff on algorithm by algorithms much more homogenized culture i someone wrote this I really should go back and and read it someone wrote this article about why uh where have all the Emos gone and it was basically the the death of subcultures that in order for you to have a a sort of fashion philosophical musical subculture flourish uh it needs to it needs to have time to stick about and when you think just across the course of a single year like like like it's hot girl summer then it's feral girls summer then it's brat summer then it's you know ding ding ding there's no time for it to aify and sit and really sort of establish what the boundaries are this is what we are and this is what we are not and this is the kind of person that is this kind of person and you sort of accum like a little cult type thing passive cult that kind of accumulates people and uh you know Goths Emos sporty kids whatever I don't know this may be uh I am not down with the kids moment but I don't see I see a much more homogenized young people culture now and um I get the sense that that's because the pace of change is super high and also you don't have as much opportunity to actually individuate because everybody is everything everyone is seeing all people across the world and it's this sort of Western Hollywood polished come America influence and that's kind of it that's it it across the world yeah I think that that's that's true in many ways I think also that the subcultures that do exist if they start to become an identity that exists online that itself can start to get homogenized you know when you see people who are like goth and you're like well there's a look like everyone looks the same within that subculture it's kind of interesting to think about I also think it's interesting to think that the like Rebellion what is rebellion today for young people like one of the biggest forms of rebellion is to not be on social media and not be on these platforms and to take a conscious stance and public stance that you are not going to be part of that culture because you want to maintain your own identity which I think is interesting and it actually gives me some hope in my bedtime ruminations if I think there's a growing number of young people who are like I actually don't want to be like everybody else and one thing that defines what everybody else means is constantly being on your phone on social media in particular and so I'm going to take a stand by not doing that and I'm going to become a unique individual by because I am not part of that [Music] M what has been the or what are the highest impact habits that you still rely on now six years hence seven years hence to help with phone use well for sure keeping my phone out of the bedroom and charging it in a I charge it in the closet and that's really helpful I also don't have problematic apps on my phone you know like for me email in the news are my biggest problems I'm not I've never been sucked into soci media so I don't have email or the news on my phone it's also just doesn't make sense to type an email with your thumbs like that's just annoying so making my phone as boring as possible is very useful I would also say mindfulness has been enormously helpful for me I've done a lot I mean some of my previous work was about mindfulness mindfulness based stress reduction so basically just training myself to notice my own emotional triggers and to notice when I'm on my phone and then to non-judgmentally ask myself like do I want to be on my phone right now so doing the www the what for why now what else exercise with myself um that has been very useful I will also say though that a big thing I think is missing from a lot of these conversations is that we focus so much on taking the phone away but we don't talk about what are we going to replace it with because you're going to end up with this huge void when you stop using your phone so much and this is what I went through myself and what many people I I speak to go through who people who go through the breakup plan of my book are like oh my God all right I reclaimed time for my phone now why am I existentially depressed which is what happened to me so I think we really to focus on what do we want to pay attention to you know I mean because one thing my my biggest personal takeaway from writing how to break up with your phone was that our lives are ultimately what we pay attention to because we only as we were talking about experience the things we pay attention to we only remember the things we pay attention to and so anytime we're making a decision in the moment about where or how we're spending our attention we're making a much bigger decision about how we want to spend our lives and that to me was so important I'm not a tattoo person but I have a bracelet that I had made that actually says pay attention as a reminder to myself because I think that that you know how we spend our days is how we spend our lives like it adds up but I think that one of the biggest things we need to do is to really figure out what is our what else in a broader sense not just the what else in the moment when you automatically reach for your phone but what's your what else in life like what do you want to be spending your time and attention on and I would also say the more you can figure that out and the more you can prioritize those things the less you're going to want to spend time on your phone your screen time will naturally decrease and so I actually think one of the this is a long way of answering your question one of the most effective things I've done is to really try to think about what do I want to spend my time on and to make space and time for those things and then screen time naturally decreases and also the more fun genuine what I call true fun and I can talk more about that if you want the more fun you're having in your real life the less attracted you're going to be to your phone because you're going to realize that it is actually not real true fun it's kind of like junk food and you want more of the stuff there's a some really interesting stats around people that get bariatric surgery and out the other side of it the suicide risk is really really high now bariatric surgery is a pretty big deal and sometimes the American healthc care system leaves gwes in them and and surgical equipment and there's complications and that you know there's there's pain and there's things like that and then you know after any major surgery there's a bit of a suicide risk but with bar atric surgery gastric bands it's way more and the one of the reasons for that is that people had an emotional problem they ate to stop themselves feeling the emotional problem mhm they now have a restriction how much they can eat and they still have the emotional problem so their one coping mechanism has been taken their primary coping mechanism has been taken away from them and it made me think about the phone situation that being a human is hard you you are permanently in states of mild discomfort uncertainty fear anxiety that just appear as a a natural byproduct of of day-to-day life and you use your phone as a crutch or buttress to help support you through these times to distract you to give you something else to focus on to make you feel good to give you a little drip of dopamine and um yeah if you aren't prepared for the sort of impending emotional existential crisis that's maybe going to smash you in the face you're going to go back to the path of least resistance which is to pick your phone up again yeah no I completely agree and yes it leads to existential despair it makes me think of the reason that people use drugs and alcohol in particular right it's to to avoid pain and seek pleasure like we're trying to sooe ourselves and get rid of pain and as you're saying pain and discomfort and awkwardness and distress are inherent parts of the human experience and our phones are serving I truly believe as drugs so going back to where I think of like can you be addicted to your phone that's one of the reasons I think yes you can because we're using them as drugs if you take away the drug you're going to have withdrawal and you're also going to have to deal with whatever it was that you were using the drug to deal with and that's really hard so I you know in I'm in the midst right now of running this phone breakup challenge for my subscribers on substack we're spending a whole month going through the 30-day plan of the breakup from my book together and it's been very interesting because one of the main things people have been talking about is how they're excited that they're spending less time on their phones but they're noticing their levels of anxiety and distress are increasing because they've taken that source of soothing you know self soothing away from themselves so I truly believe that breaking up with your phone and creating a better relationship with your devices will change your life for the better but there's going to be a dip like I do tell people you're using these things for some reason they're serving a purpose you know you're mindless scrolling it's there for you're doing it for a reason and if you remove that you're going to uncover what that reason is and you do have to be ready to deal with that but I can assure you that if you can get out of that pit and discover what you truly want to spend your time on you're going to feel more alive not like great all the time but you will feel more alive you'll feel everything more so good Katherine price ladies and gentlemen Katherine I really appreciate you I want to bring you back on I need to talk about fun I've been talk about fun formally trying to bring more fun into uh my life and all of the stuff that we do as a Brit I feel like we're um culturally predisposed to be a very unfun uh group so um you're funny but not fun I would love to talk with you more I mean the funny the the funny compliment please come on you're making me blush um but yeah fun I'm gonna bring you back on and we can talk about that but let's leave this one here bring it into land um people might want to sign up for the mailing list for the substack they want to check out the book where should they go what's going on my substack is called how to feel alive and it's where I write about how to scroll less and live more you know phones fun Community all those things so that's Katherine price. substack do.com and that's my main internet home and then the book we've been talking about is called how to break up with your phone and it is available well I hope I hope wherever books are sold everywhere books are sold everywhere books are sold Katherine until next time I appreciate you thank you do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out