What Screen Time Is Really Doing to Your Body with Manoush Zomorodi

26:38Or if I set a little alarm on my phone of like five minutes, take a break. My sense is like I'll be in flow doing some work for something and I'll be annoyed. I'll be like, no, I want to keep working. And my brain just cannot compute. They're like, no, no, take a break, walk around. You'll get back to it faster and do it better than if you didn't take the break. And so how do we convince ourselves, like our slave driving minds, that we need these little breaks? Yeah, so that was really interesting. What people found was they started, the number one way they started was using a timer, right, to remind themselves because they wouldn't remember to take the break.

27:11You'd forget. You'd just forget. Exactly. But what ended up happening is their bodies started reminding them. After a certain amount of time, they started to build that sense of interoception. I just was talking to some researchers who are studying how circadian rhythms can affect motivation. So your body literally will create a clock in you to be like, Yoo-hoo, time to get up and move. You can't concentrate anymore. I love that. That, like, even if our monkey brain is like, I don't want to get up and move, your body will be like, I'm compelling you right now because I need this. And we can start to hear it.

27:49But also, I think there's something to be said. Like, if you're in flow, fine. So skip a break. This is like skipping one break is not going to make that big a difference. And the people who actually succeeded and saw benefits did four breaks a day, five breaks a day. It wasn't like 16 breaks a day. And I think to me, like, we can look at clinical data. We can talk about gold standards in science. But honestly, the best movement is the one you take, right? So, like, if you take one break in the middle of the day, amazing. Start there. If you take eight and that works for you, awesome. We are setting the bar pretty low here and it has outsized effects.

28:31That's what, for one, something that is free, that's easy to do, that doesn't take that long, actually has a huge impact and is good for you and makes you feel good. That seems unbelievably surprising to me and exciting. And so as we take this exciting news and engineer more movement back into our days, we also have to address the specific sensory organs and the parts of our bodies that are under digital assault. Were you kind of surprised when you started to learn the work about how much digital life is reshaping all our sensory organs? Yes. I think I subconsciously and many of us subconsciously knew that something was happening, but we always think like, oh, well, it's just me.

29:14I'm the weirdo. And it's not. I mean, we now know that, for example, one out of three children are nearsighted, meaning they can see close but can't see far. And you think like, huh, we must be genetically passing that on to our kids. No, that's not why. It's because of our technological habits. So I reached out to people who are studying things like this, like Dr. Maria Liu at Berkeley, who literally has been studying what happens to the shape of our eyeball when we spend lots of time looking at a screen, doing near work. And the eyeball, your body wants to help you. That's what I have learned as we go along.

29:56If you're like, I need to look at things that are really close to me all day, your eyeballs will be like, I got you. And they'll form a shape that helps you do that all day long. Trouble is when you're back in class or you go to drive a car or you go to the movie theater, you will not be able to see very far because your eyes are like, well, we don't do that anymore. So that is fascinating to me. And you hear like the 20-20-20 rule, like for every 20 minutes of sitting, look 20 feet into the distance for 20 seconds. She's like, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but that is simply not enough. So she says what you really need to do is get, if you can, it all comes back to every half hour, Lori.

30:42Honestly, every single person I talk to about every part of the body, it's every half hour. She ideally would like you to go outside every half hour and look in the distance at a horizon. I was like, can I look out the window? She said, no, because your peripheral vision will know that there are walls. Like you need to get the full, yes. You need the full distance. Also, when you go outside, even on a cloudy day, you get sunlight, right? They don't quite know exactly what it is about sunlight, whether it's the vitamin D, whether it activates serotonin, the happiness hormone. In animals, they have seen different kinds of retinal cells that actually produce serotonin when they're exposed to sunlight.

31:21So the bad news is if you're an adult and you're already nearsighted, hello, that's me. Sorry, too bad. But the good news is your eyeballs are still growing and forming even into your 30s. So if you are a young person, you can still take breaks. You can still stop the myopia from happening to you. They did a study in China where they made kids go outside for two hours a day instead of the usual half hour for their recess. And they saw a drop in nearsightedness in kids. So going outside and playing isn't just to get your ya-ya's out. This is so you can see because higher rates of nearsightedness or myopia has been linked to blindness.

32:07It's been linked to glaucoma later in life. These are serious issues that we don't like to think about what happens decades down, but we're living longer and we want to live well, right? We need to protect basic sensory organs. I love this recommendation to get sunlight, but I'm sure there are people listening right now who work in some huge office and are thinking like, okay, yeah, I would love to get sunlight, but like, I'm not going to head down in my big elevator in my huge size scraper every 30 minutes. I think there's also this worry that if you're getting up to leave all the time, either to go outside or just to get your legs moving, that your boss or your co-workers are going to be looking at you like, what is wrong with this person?

32:43So any advice for wanting to take these breaks? Well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we used to say like, oh, I'm just going to pop outside for a smoke. That used to be completely normal. And no one would bat an eye if you were like, I'm just going to go out and grab a cigarette. I know that might be shocking to some people now, but that really was normal. So what if you, instead of going to get a smoke break, you were going to get a move break? I'm just going to go take a quick move break. Cool. Okay. See you in five minutes. That would be great. But also we need to start at the top, right?

33:12Like bosses, you need to know that the research is there, that when it comes to productivity, quality of work, worker engagement and satisfaction, people are not happy right now. There's so much talk of burnout. This is something simple you can do that is not a gift to your workers. It is actually a gift to your bottom line because what you will see is higher employee retention, better work, and just a happier office from what we understand. Like maybe there's a meeting and you kick off the meeting with walking around the conference table and sort of giving an update. Or maybe 60-minute meetings are now 55-minute meetings.

33:48You can have that setting in Google Calendar where you build in a buffer of five extra minutes. Or maybe it's okay when you're on a Zoom to turn off your screens and shuffle side to side if you are not expected to present something on camera. It's these really small changes to cultural norms that we're going to need to have in order to make sure that we bring a little more movement, some more breaks, and optimize the way that we work because it's not working now. That is very clear. It's time for a quick break But when we return, Manoush and I will explore What screen time is doing to the rest of our bodies From our ears to our spines To even our lungs And she'll share some simple practical ways To counteract those effects So that we can feel both physically and mentally A little healthier The Happiness Lab will be right back

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38:04As a podcaster, I was the most horrified by the section in your book on our ears. How is our technology negatively affecting our ears? Well, it is really interesting. So Rick Neitzel at the University of Michigan has been partnering with Apple to do the largest study of how people are listening these days, essentially. So you can actually join the study on your phone if you want to. And it's not going to come as any surprise to you that we are listening longer and more loudly, essentially. And it seems like in a different way where we have this thing in our ear in a way that we might not have before.

38:41Interestingly, they didn't find any difference between AirPods or earbuds and headphones. There hasn't been any of that. But I know people who wear them all day long. So there are some people who are wearing them because they're blocking out the world because they need to concentrate. Or, you know, how many people do I see walking the dog and we're all listening to something or going to the grocery store? It's this sort of ambient music, podcasts, news, phone calls, Zooms, all the rest of it. We take sound with us wherever we go, which is cool a lot of the time. However, a couple problems here.

39:17One is that when we're outside, we raise the volume because there's construction or a loud car or whatever else. And we're listening at volumes that are much too loud for us. Whereas when I was in my 20s, you know, you'd leave a club and you couldn't hear for a couple hours. People are having more of that like all the time and they're not even noticing. And there's good news and there's bad news when it comes to your ears. The good news is if you take a break and give yourself breaks from sound, your ears will recover. You have a little cilia, those little hairs in your ears. They get flattened, essentially.

39:51If you have some quiet time, they will come back to life. However, if they're constantly assaulted, they will die and they will never grow back, ever. You don't get more cilia. So there is a concern, you know, will there be rising rates of hearing disorders, essentially? And what we know is that when you have trouble hearing, that makes you more susceptible to dementia, to falling. You're also just missing out on conversation in life, on hearing the birds, all those other things. So once again, it comes back to giving your body breaks. And so those are our sensory systems. But beyond our sensory systems, we also need to address what technology is doing to our posture, which you've argued has two big physiological effects.

40:41One is on our spine and the other is on our lungs. So let's start with our spine. How is our technology hurting what our spine needs to feel healthy? There's some really interesting new work being done to understand the connection between how we hold ourselves and various organs. So this is Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh, who has found that actually our adrenal glands, those are sitting right on our sides of our stomach, right? And these are the glands that squeeze out cortisol, like when we're nervous, when we're excited, we're like anxiety, right? Squish, squish, squish. It turns out that there is a system that is linked between your abdominal muscles, the adrenal glands, and a section in your brain.

41:26So essentially, we're talking about, you know, why do people feel more relaxed after they do Pilates or yoga? This is the science as to why. There is this connection between our organs, our muscles, and our brain. They are all hardwired and talking to each other in ways that we are just starting to learn, which is fascinating to me. So his whole thing is, if you don't use your core, and what do you do when you're slumped in front of a screen? You're not using your core. Your spine is almost in this cashew shape kind of slumped over. Yeah, exactly. You're compressed in some way. Then there's also the fact that when you're seated like this, you compress your diaphragm.

42:04That's where you want to fill it up with lots of air so you can oxygenate your brain. When you don't take in enough oxygen, you don't feed your brain and there starts to actually be a buildup of CO2, which is when you start to lose focus. You get tired. You get foggy. Can't concentrate, feel exhausted, anxious. Any of that sound familiar after a couple hours on a screen? So familiar. And one of the things I was so struck by in your work is just this connection between like what we're doing with our spines and our breath and our mental health. You know, we talk so much on this podcast and I talk so much with my students about increasing anxiety in young people.

42:42And we often think that, again, that's because of the content of what we're seeing on our screens. We're seeing all this anxiety provoking stuff. but it might just be the way that we're sitting when we are looking at our phones where we're hunched over that's kind of not allowing us to activate our core muscles that's literally causing us to secrete stress hormones literally causing our brains to reinterpret how we're breathing as anxiety it almost made me think like i wonder how much of the anxiety crisis we are seeing in young people we could alleviate if we just got them to sit upright and activate their core muscles.

43:11100%. I mean, that to me is what is so frustrating and exciting about what you're talking about. If that is one simple thing that we can do at a time when we feel so overloaded, you know, between the headlines and the economics and AI, there's a lot to be stressed out about. But if we can feel just the tiniest bit better, and really all it is is getting up for five minutes and moving around and giving your ears a break from sound and giving your eyes a break from looking at a screen and really taking some full breaths and making sure we're moving our limbs a little bit more. And if that can give us a reset to get on with our day and maybe feel a little more in ourselves, happier, joyful, like we can concentrate, like we can make better decisions.

44:05To me, I like to call that the mind-body-tech connection. And, you know, we hear mind, body, spirit, and we accept that this is a holistic thing. But technology is as much a part of our lives as anything else. It is our lives, right? So how do we manage that sort of cycle that we put ourselves through? We have to be more intentional. It's that simple and that hard. But it also means that we can also be agentive, right? And I think this is the thing we forget. I think sometimes when we think about our body's relationship with technology, it's like, well, I got to get rid of my phone. But this work is really suggesting there are forms of stress management that just take five minutes every hour or so.

44:42One of the things you talk about in your book is this idea of we can think about posture as stress management. That like if you're feeling stressed out, just have this moment of like, let me get up and walk around when I sit back down. Let me make sure I'm not hunched over like a cashew the whole time. This is powerful stuff because it's giving us a way to fight back that we can actually control. You know, I can't control what's happening in the international news. I can't control the spread of AI. I can't control the bad things happening in the world. But I can definitely control whether I'm hunched over.

45:10I can definitely control whether I hop up from the desk five minutes every half hour to kind of get a little movement. These are things that are within our control to stop the stress cycle. I am smiling right now because how nice is it to think that there is something that you can do? Because I think what you just talked about is this sort of prevailing sense right now is that, like, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to be a person in the world functioning? And I want to be careful, though, that we don't say, you know, this is on you, individual, because it feels like much of the responsibility is.

45:43We want our structural changes. Exactly. But just knowing that I can do something to make a difference in my own body or just knowing that I'm not making it worse inadvertently through my choices that I'm not paying attention to, just remembering that I can have interoceptive awareness, that feels really powerful to me. Yeah, I found it so interesting. So that neuroscientist, Dr. Saib Khalsa, has been studying the effect of floats. Those are those like saline baths where you, you know, pay 45 bucks and then you lie there naked. And the idea is like no sensory input whatsoever to sort of reset your nervous system.

46:16And he's like, you can do this at home. Like, go into your bedroom, put down the shades, put your phone out of the room. Don't listen to anything. Don't try to meditate. Just try to literally take everything away and just let your muscles relax and breathe and let everything just sort of be. I was like, what, for five minutes? He was like, actually, no, try to go for 45 minutes once a week. He said, that's a nice goal for you. I was like, okay, thanks. But he was like, we're going and taking in so much all the time. What if you just don't do anything? like for 45 minutes a week. I was like, that sounds really nice.

47:01So that's not doing anything for 45 minutes. But of course, we all have this time in the day where we are giving our body the natural reset of not doing anything, which is the domain of sleep. We've all kind of heard that blue light is really bad, but you've argued that the culprit might be something else. What do you mean? Yeah. So I sort of got deep into the data to try to understand. I thought that blue light was the problem, too. I was like, OK, so what is it about blue light that does this to us. And actually, the thinking has changed a lot in the sleep research world. So this idea of blue light being like, you know, espresso for your body before you go to sleep came from one particular small Harvard study where it was a group of undergrads who were looking at iPads at the highest, brightest setting for hours before they went to sleep in the sleep lab.

47:49And even they didn't actually miss out on that much sleep. It disrupted some of their sleep, But also, like, I don't know, if I was looking at an iPad for three hours at the brightest setting, like, that would definitely be a problem. Generally, what they're starting to find is it's not the blue light. It's the habits that these screens put us into. So, oh, my God, we were watching Mad Men again last night. And how much did we want to, like, just keep watching the next episode? That's what Netflix wants us to do. And so what do we do? Let's just watch half of the next episode. Oh, wait. And then we watch the whole episode.

48:23and there we are going to bed 45 minutes later. Oh, we shouldn't have looked at a screen before bed. No, you shouldn't have stayed up and watched another episode. Like, let's be real. So really, like, what they're saying is it's not really the blue light. And frankly, that light is not that strong. This does not apply to kids. Kids, definitely their eyes are in a different way. They are changing. They are forming. The light needs to be low at night. There are some people who are very sensitive to light, In which case, you know, dimming the lights, following the sun is really useful, sort of bringing your body down.

48:58But at the end of the day, we have to take a hard look at ourselves and our own habits and not blame the blue light as much as the siren's call of what is going on on those screens. And also, a lot of us are using our technology to self-soothe before we go to bed, right? It is harder to maybe try and do a muscle relaxation or read a really boring book with a cup of chamomile tea. That just doesn't sound as interesting as scrolling on Instagram and, you know, mindlessly sort of trying to zone out. The problem is also that we use our phones to self-soothe when we wake up in the middle of the night.

49:35I know I am guilty of this. I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm feeling anxious and I'm like, oh, let me look at my phone. And now I'm looking at my phone and that's going to keep me up. So for the chronic insomniac like me, who feels like when they wake up in the middle of the night, they need their phone to self-soothe. Their phone is their only friend at three in the morning when no one's talking to them. Yeah. What's the first step to breaking that feedback loop? Well, you've heard it before, right? Don't keep your phone in your bedroom, blah, blah, blah. OK, I don't ascribe to that.

50:00I have elderly parents and I have a kid away at college. I keep my phone next to my bed for emergencies. But I do have it set so that only their calls can come through. so I will not you know be woken up by spam okay so I'm gonna let you in on my secret technique which Saeed Khalil would say like pretend you're in a float right while you're lying there and you're awake I pretend that I'm on a first class airline flight and there's no wi-fi on the flight and all I can hear is the rush of the engines and there's nothing I can do and isn't it great that I upgraded to this bed that lies out flat I am so lucky I'm just gonna lie here and just like bask in the luxuriousness and wait for my destination.

50:41That is my own sort of personal hack. Mine, when I'm doing the right kind of thing, is a hack where I imagine that I'm in this one hotel room I stayed at where I could hear the ocean outside. It was this gorgeous hotel room on Puerto Rico where you could hear the waves outside. And I'm just imagining what the waves sound like. That, when I'm doing it right and not waking up in the middle of the to look at Reddit. It works pretty well for me too. Oh, that's nice. That's really nice. So we definitely need more sensory resets to support our physical and mental health. But Manoush says it's not just about five minute breaks or even a full night of sleep.

51:17We also need longer stretches of downtime, time to reconnect with ourselves and make better decisions. In her book, she calls this kind of time the neutral zone. I will say that phrase is not from me. It is from a consultant, actually, a couple decades ago, he's no longer with us, who studied how corporations, how did they make it through big transitions? And what he found was that the companies that survived big upheaval actually didn't rush from like, okay, there's layoffs, we're reorgying, this is what we're doing next. They actually went through this space of sort of absorbing the shock of change, sitting with it before deciding what to do next, sort of taking the time.

51:59And in my personal life, I try to think of it that way, too. Like, there might be times in your life when you feel like you are spinning your wheels a little bit. And actually, this is a really important time because we need to give ourselves space to think through what just happened, process it, start to imagine what could be next. Maybe it's something that doesn't occur to us straight away. Maybe you need some long, boring walks. Maybe you need a couple months of, you know, just not trying to strategize your way out of a situation, just sort of allowing your brain to make sense of the world you're in, the place you're going.

52:36We think we can process as quickly as our technology can, and we cannot. And, you know, Claude and ChatGPT, they might try to talk you into doing something, and they might sound really convincing, but at the end of the day, that gut feeling, there's a reason why it's called the gut feeling. The gut and the brain are connected. There is a wholeness, a whole body sense that we need to tap into in order to make sense of our lives and figure out how we go forward. technology isn't just affecting our minds it's also shaping our bodies the way we sit scroll stare and listen can significantly impact how we feel but as we learned from manush today small changes like a boring walk or a quick sensory break can make a meaningful difference in our physical health and our well-being if you'd like to learn more about how to improve your body's relationship with technology be sure to check out manush's new book body electric the hidden health costs of the digital age, and new science to reclaim your well-being, which is out on May 5th.

53:39If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at happinesslab at pushkin.fm, or leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlarisantos.com. That's D-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-S-A-N-T-O-S dot com. Next week, we'll continue our season on how to spring clean your well-being with one of my favorite episodes from our Happiness Lab archives. This time, we'll look at what happens when life gets too crowded. We'll share some evidence-based ideas for clearing out your busy schedule and making room for what matters most.

54:17I just taught two classes and had two hours of office hours. All I'm thinking about is, when am I going to drink water? When is my next nap? You're just literally, it feels like survival. That's all next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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