BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health | Dr Anders Hansen #657

0:00Today's Bite Size episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. So, why might you consider bringing AG1 into your life? Well, there are many reasons, such as enhanced gut health and support for your immune system. But one of the main reasons, I would say, is to help you with your energy levels. Now AG1 contains a blend of different nutrients including B vitamins, vitamin C and magnesium which can help reduce tiredness and fatigue and give you a boost in energy. And unlike caffeine, these nutrients actually work with your body's natural energy systems and don't have a negative impact on your sleep.

0:47Right now, during the month of May, AG1 is offering my listeners a brilliant deal. Your first month's subscription will be only£59, saving you£20 off the regular price. On top of that, you'll get a free welcome kit, a shaker bottle, a scoop, five travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 and K2 drops. You can see all details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist and author, Dr. Anders Hansen. In this clip, he explains how our attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in today's world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters.

1:57The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention. and a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard and that's because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product. Every second that we spend on our screens is money for them and they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that and as a consequence, we spend more and more and more time on our screens and today for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours.

2:34for teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours. These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast. And what's the consequence of that? Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much, we don't move as much, and we don't meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep, and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions. So it's in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online.

3:18I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch up with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear that these things are having, for all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem Yet, despite us talking about it, despite them hearing about it, a lot of people just aren't able to change what they do.

4:07Because it's so difficult. Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok, for instance. Every time you turn TikTok on, you have a$10 billion artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out what should I show Wrangham so that he doesn't turn off. because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies, especially directed to children and teenagers without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty because we constantly return to our phones.

4:46I do that as well. And I've just realized that it's not just about characters. These are very powerful stimuli. And the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time because they will be too attractive. This modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful because anything good in life comes from presence. Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work, me and you interacting now with no phones here, just me and you sitting across the table, me chatting to my wife about something important, me chatting to my children, me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh.

5:31All those things require attention and presence if you're going to get the true value of them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, when we cannot maintain our attention. so i guess what i'm trying to get to anders is how do we change things what do we do if we look at the addiction with smartphones if i look at what's happening with children now you can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity you think what actually where does this go in five years in 10 years where do we end up in 20 years you know there's a there's a book called reclaiming conversation, which is brilliant.

6:14I love it. And this whole idea that we're losing the art of conversation, this is one of the things that makes us human. And many kids and teenagers, apparently, according to Sherry and her research, prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I've never forgot that since I read it, where you can edit a text message, You can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, me and you, we have to risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled, right? Maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through. That's the risk that we are running by having this real-time conversation.

6:57But it's also something that is part of humanity. It's part of who we are, right? We're not wired for these perfectly edited communications, are we? Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's boring. But historically, loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food. That's why we have so strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We read one another. We're very good at that. And we try to create bonds, social bonds. and we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now, those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years where we met physically.

7:46And now all of a sudden we meet like this and we can replace some of that with a screen, but we can't replace all of it. It's not just what your face expression on the screen. You know, it's so many more signals that we are constantly registering. And we all felt that during COVID, when we spent so much time on our screens, that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. But most of us felt very lonely and isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredible strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this, the brain thinks that we're lonely.

8:30and as and if we're lonely well then we will die that that's mortal danger and then we feel crappy of course we have to intentionally create some rules for ourself because if we don't we'll end up allowing instagram facebook and twitter to distract us and untrain our focus Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made where you have students doing tests for focus and for memory, and half of them bring their phone into the testing room. The other half leave their phone outside. And the ones that bring the phones with them don't pick it up. They just have it in the pocket. And it turns out that the ones who have left the phone outside perform better.

9:18even if you don't pick it up so it's just by being in the same room it distracts you and the reason is probably that it's providing you with so much stimulation that you must constantly think i'm not going to pick up my phone i'm not going to pick up my phone i'm not going and and then you get distracted and that doesn't matter if you're doing something very ordinary but if you have to be focused at your work or in school you're studying for exam leave the phone outside. There's also been experience made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between.

9:53And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject. And on half of these tables, there is a notebook, paper and pen. And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. And they don't pick up the phone. But it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table, they find the discussion less interesting. They even find the person they're talking to less reliable. And that's probably because they have to think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. So it steals some of your mental bandwidth just by being around. And we feel guilty for this.

10:28We feel, you know, I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time. But we shouldn't because these are incredibly powerful stimuli. And as again, someone is making money from that yeah you also write uh in the attention fix about low-tech parents and you reference i think steve jobs and how you know we've heard this before but i think it's worth reiterating that a lot of the creators of these products did not allow their children on them exactly and steve there was a journalist that came home to steve jobs and he thought that there would be ipads everywhere and you know all the screens in every room and they were they weren't He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads.

11:12And remember, Steve Jobs is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us ever. And he himself was cautious about using it too much. That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that if you are looking at a screen more than you are looking at someone's eyes, you're doing something wrong. So the CEO of the company that makes the most money from screens says, don't use our products too much. That says something on how incredibly addictive these things are and how naive we have been in implementing them so widely. And again, especially toward children. And as I said before, I think the main impact of digital life on our wellbeing is not what we do online, but what we don't do when we are online.

12:08We don't sleep as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet. But there is a big caveat to this, and that is overusage of social media seems to be dangerous for teenagers. For girls in the age 12 to 13, boys 14 to 15. That's probably because this is a time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think that part of your life, you really desperately want to belong to a group. and we have compared ourselves to a small group during all of human history. You know, there were 50, 100 people who you met during your entire life. That was your tribe or your band. And you compared yourselves to perhaps 20 or 30 of them who were around your age.

12:52And now you compare yourself to the entire planet. And there's always someone who is smarter and better looking and more successful and richer than you are. And you feel that you are worthless. I am not good enough. And you get this signal from your screens five or six hours every day. And you have your friends' photos. And for every photo on Instagram, there was 100 photos that was discarded that you don't see. And if that wasn't enough, you have a whole army of Instagrammers and influencers who get paid to show their perfect life. Yeah. And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough.

13:35The thing is… It feels lonely and then you feel like you're being pushed out of the group. And that is registered in the brain as something that is extremely dangerous. And that's why you feel so bad about it. You know, the problem is Anders, the way I see it is that we can know this with our rational brains. we know we're comparing you know the highlight reel of someone else's life to the mundane reality of our day-to-day life we know that we hear it you've said it I've said it but I still don't think knowing it makes a jot of difference because you can know it but your subconscious when you're scrolling you're still picking on this idea that their life is better.

14:25Their life is better. One morning, this is about, I don't know, a few months ago, I broke one of my rules. I was on Instagram very early. I don't know why, but we're all human. We're all seduced by these devices. And I saw something, I can't remember what it was, but I started to feel bad afterwards. And then I was making a hot drink in the kitchen. I thought, wow, wrong and nothing has happened, right? Literally nothing has happened. You're still here in your house. Your wife and kids are still sleeping. The birds are singing in the garden, right? Nothing has happened apart from the fact I went on Instagram for a few minutes.

15:05So nothing in the real world changed. Yet my mental state changed from scrolling. and I was like this is utter madness yeah and if you take a step back you let someone who you have never met who you will never meet make you feel inadequate yeah because they had a better looking toilet or more expensive vacation or a nicer car or what have you I mean that's that's insane and of course it happens to me all the time as well but the more you think about these things When you read about it and you have to hear it many times, you have to hear it from many sort of different angles and present it in different ways.

15:49Then you start to seeing it being played out in yourself. And that's why we have to create distance to it. I'm not going to let any big American companies steal my focus because they're making money from my eyeballs staring at the screen. So what's your approach to deal with smartphone addiction and a lack of focus? I mean, how do you as a busy professional? I'm incredibly cautious about my focus. Focus is something that is very, very vulnerable. If you've lectured, you probably noticed that you could have a couple of hundred individuals listening to, and then one comes late, and everyone is looking at the person who's coming late.

16:31What does it matter if one person is late? Well, that's because we are not, the brain didn't evolve to be focused. It evolved to constantly scan your surrounding for danger. it's just something there there there there there so we are incredibly easily distracted and focus which is so valuable in today's society is something that is very very that's hard for us and when i do my most important work when i think the stuff that i really think is valuable that's when i am really in a deep focus mode and i want to protect that preserve that and then i have the phone outside. That's not going to disturb me.

17:08So you've taken preemptive action. You keep the phone in a different room when you're trying to do deep thinking. James Clear, the author, talks about the same thing. He says even if his phone is in the next room, so maybe just three seconds to get up, walk there and get it, even just having it in the next room means he's significantly less likely to look at it. Exactly. It's like candy. And therefore, I can't have it around all the time. So I don't have it in the bedroom. I don't have it when I work and so on. And I try to be aware of this Achilles heels in my psychology, which are in reality defense mechanisms or survival mechanisms that have become Achilles heels in our modern society.

17:53And everyone must find their own way of sort of working through this. But it's incredibly fascinating to learn more about it because you understand yourself better. and if you understand yourself better well then you can work around what's difficult for you it's a constant uphill battle but I mean if we want to feel as good as possible then we have to do this Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family and if you want more why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest if you enjoyed this episode I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email.

18:35It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.