The Extra Scoop: Are Our Phones Making us Miserable? 

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0:48Welcome to The Extra Scoop, our expert-led bonus episodes, giving you the need to know on the topics everybody is talking about. That's right. From gut health to sleep, hormones to skin, we are cutting through the noise with top experts, so there is no fluff, just facts. Exactly. It's all quick, practical, evidence-based advice to fit into your busy lives. So this is The Extra Scoop. Let's get started.

1:18As our listeners probably know, our Extra Scoop episodes are all about taking those topics that everybody's talking about and quickly breaking them down for you so that you have got expert-led insights that leave you feeling informed and empowered when it comes to your wellbeing. and one topic that has been on our minds and I'm sure yours too lately is the link between our phone news and our mental health and our dopamine. It's something that's becoming more and more relevant in our very screen-filled lives so we are very excited to explore this today with TJ Power, a neuroscientist, founder of The Dose Lab and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Dose Effect.

1:53TJ's work looks at how our brain chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins shape our mental well-being, particularly in the context of our modern digitally driven lives. So we cannot wait for this one. Personally, it feels very, very relevant to someone who is way too addicted to their phones. So welcome, TJ. Amazing. Thanks for having me. Can I just share something a little personal from Ella and I on this episode? When Ella first rung me about the concept for the Wellness Scoop and when we were chatting about podcasts, she said, I've been seeing things about dopamine everywhere. I really want to do things about screen time, how it impacts me.

2:28So you, TJ, have been, I think you are this goal guest that we've wanted on from day one. So let's... That's so exciting. Well, we're chuffed to have you. So in a nutshell, let's talk about excessive screen time. Is it making us unhappy? Unfortunately, it is. As nice as it is to kind of binge scroll these social media feeds, it does really deplete this dopamine chemical very rapidly. And dopamine is so important for our capacity to be motivated towards all of our goals and all the effortful things we have to do in life. But then also our ability to just feel pleasure from life is impacted by dopamine.

3:05And unfortunately, if we over consume the social media, or we just too frequently check it, we begin to deplete it. And it does affect how we feel. Rats. I know, but there's answers to this. And I still love using social media. I use it every day. So there's solutions. I think it's one of those things. honestly we all know it's true and we all feel it deeply feel it you know when i don't spend time on my phone i am just a better person i think there's that anecdotal element but you kind of don't want an expert to tell you it's true because it's so addictive so now if we kind of we've answered the macro and we can now go into a little bit more detail tell us about dopamine and the various different brain chemicals that we have that you're talking about a lot this dose premise how do they work how are they impacted by modern life what does everybody need to know yeah so if we start with the dopamine one there's this kind of way in which you can visualize it in your brain so you can actually understand what happens on social media versus maybe other healthier activities you do in day-to-day life you have this small area of your brain called the ventral tegmental area and you can think of this as like a little ball that operates as a dopamine factory and it can build little bubbles inside it of what we call dopamine vesicles and then you have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center.

4:20And say, for example, you were cleaning your house, just like kind of a boring, effortful task. In your brain, basically what happens is your dopamine factory starts making loads of these dopamine bubbles to get you motivated to do the activity. And then occasionally it will ship some of these bubbles to your reward center and you'll get this slight feeling of satisfaction. And when you do clean your house, it's not a fun task, but gradually you start thinking, oh, it's kind of good that I'm doing this actually. And like when you finish like cleaning your kitchen, for example, it's a pretty nice feeling.

4:47And you've built some of the bubbles and slowly shipped them to the reward center. Basically what happens when we open social media is we start mass shipping the bubbles from the factory towards the reward center. And because there's no effort involved, we don't build any and kind of replenish the factory, but we just ship loads towards it, which is why it feels so good when you're scrolling and you get loads of stimulation. But if you're ever struggling with that kind of depleted feeling where you struggle with procrastination and you can't seem to get the hard things in life done, whether that's cooking healthy food or things to do with your work or getting yourself to exercise or go to bed on time.

5:21It's very interconnected with the factory being low in these bubbles effectively. So it makes perfect sense because sometimes you can be scrolling and not realize you're scrolling because you literally are consuming content at such a rapid rate. It can be very hard to disconnect from that. And we've mentioned the word, mental health, or, you know, it makes you feel low. Is there any defining research or criteria that is proving that this is actual fact? Do you think this is going to be the sort of thing that will end up in schools in five, 10 years time saying, look, this actively impacts mental health, it should come with a warning?

5:58Yeah, 100%. Research is always about five to seven years behind reality of humans and social media is quite hard for research to keep up with there's something called the dsm manual for example which is like the addictive mental health disorder manual and it doesn't yet have social media addiction as one of them like it would have alcohol for example and i think that social media only became truly addictive when tiktok was invented and then everyone copied tiktok if you actually look at your relationship with your phone before covid before tiktok and therefore just all short form video you'd kind kind of go on Instagram, look at some pictures, maybe watch like an IGTV video that was kind of boring to watch.

6:38And you'd get bored quite quick. Your dopamine would get tired of it and you would leave the apps. And I do believe that especially for young people, but for all of us in the world, we do need to consider social media in a very similar way to how society looks at alcohol and sugar and smoking. I actually think it's more significant and more detrimental, the social media, because it's the first thing we've ever engaged with so frequently. Like it's rare to, for example, wake up and nail a glass of red wine as soon as you wake. But it's very normal to wake up and immediately open TikTok or Instagram.

7:09So I think it's really important to consider. Unless you're following the Vogue diet, Ella. Yes, we're talking about that crash diet in the 70s. Yeah, you have some hard boiled eggs and a glass of wine for breakfast. Like what does it dry you out or something? Yeah, literally, it's like ketogenic with wine. It was awful. So bad. Interesting. Very interesting. Look, I think what you're saying there as well is really reassuring to people because it's very easy. And one of the things that Rhea and I talk about a lot in this show, and I feel like it's very connected to your work, TJ, is that we often look at ourselves and we think, am I normal?

7:42Is my behavior normal? Is what I'm doing normal? What is wrong with me that I can't concentrate? Or, you know, I'll notice that I'm with my kids and I should be so present. And for some reason I'm looking at someone's cat on Instagram. You know, you just think like, what am I doing? What is wrong with me? And I also think in part of this conversation, yes, we really want to understand those brain chemicals and the impact and the healthy things we can do. But I think it's also, we've got to normalize that there's nothing wrong with you, me, any of us. These are now highly addictive and the way they're created.

8:14And am I right in saying these short form videos are what really sends our brains haywire basically. Yeah, effectively. And it's so important to normalize it. Like I spend my life teaching about this and researching it with Dose Lab. And I still every day battle the desire to just get sucked into the phone. It's not an easy thing to solve, but I do believe it's solvable. And in terms of the short form video feeds, effectively dopamine evolved for hundreds of thousands of years when we were hunter gatherers as this chemical that would rise when something novel in our environment would happen and would get us motivated to take action.

8:48And what I mean by that is say you're walking through the forest and you see some fruit over on a tree, your dopamine would be slightly stimulated by something new in your environment, then you'd go towards the tree and then you'd get the fruit so you could eat. And maybe three, four or five times a day, we'd see something new in our environment, like the opposite opportunity to maybe hunt for food or find some fruit or some honey or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't be very frequent, the novel experience. The short form video content is just novelty, novelty, novelty, novelty, novelty. So it's like a hunter gatherer walking through the forest and they're just being so many different things the whole time.

9:18And then they would get very hooked. They'd be like, oh my God, I can't even leave this place because there's so much stimulation here. And that's what's happening in the short form video feed effectively. And I do think we then need quite good kind of guidelines and boundaries with ourselves as to how much of this sort of stuff we're going to consume. So how can somebody know and measure? You said these little bubbles are being sent all the time when we're consuming content, but we're not actively aware of it. So are there any common signs that you've hit a dopamine wall, you know, suddenly, you know, the instant hit of TikTok or whatever someone's on is hitting you.

9:54And then you're starting to notice that come down or whatever it is. Is there anything people can look out for when they're in the middle of this addictive process? Like what's the stop gap? Yeah, that's a great question. Effectively, there's two things that will happen. One is it'll actually start to not feel that good, the scrolling like at the beginning when you scroll it when you sit down on the sofa for your like first scroll for a bit like it feels oh i can't wait to have this nice scrolling session what a world do we live in i know that's like the most exciting thing in our day now is just like lying in bed scrolling off you'll feel like a big dopamine stimulation that's why it feels good but you can reach a point when you're scrolling where it's like you're kind of just numb but you're continuing to do it the first symptom would be you feel a bit numb and it's not even that good And the second would be you actually begin to physically find it hard to move your body because there's this big trend on TikTok called rotting where people get like stuck in their bed, rotting.

10:49It's big with teenagers where they like wake up, scroll their phone for hours and then they quote unquote like rot because they can't get out of bed. They just like can't get themselves to initiate action. and effectively if you reach point where you're kind of chilling on the sofa you're scrolling your phone and then your brain says like oh we should go to bed soon or we should go brush our teeth but you can't get yourself to get off the sofa that's another clear sign the dopamine is so low because dopamine riots core literally initiates movement in our body it motivates movement so feeling numb and struggling to literally move and get yourself to do something else is the key sign is there a safe limit before it starts really impacting our mental health Yeah, I would say whenever you're on social media, let's say you're someone that likes Instagram, whenever you could try and consume more effortful content, that would be really useful.

11:38So if ever you can read a whole caption of someone that you like, or if someone posts a story and it's got some text and you need to read that text, whenever it's more effort, it's actually a lot better for your dopamine system because you're engaging more effortful attention, which makes the dopamine spike less. What makes the dopamine really spike is where you're kind of like really zoned out and just banging through the content. So there's that element is try and choose effortful content to consume is really good for your dopamine. In terms of the short videos, I really would say as showing as it is like 15 to 20 minutes would probably be the max your brain could actually take before it's going to begin to enter that pretty depleted type state.

12:15And it's just when you're going to have these scrolling sessions, it's very important to consider like, is there something afterwards you're trying to achieve? And then it's probably not best to have it then. Like for me, my main time, which I love to consume social media is like after dinner in the evening because I don't have anything that I need to then go on to achieve but if it's kind of like you're going to wake up in the morning have your shower sit down at the kitchen table to have your coffee and smash through loads of videos that's going to then really deplete your capacity to go and actually do the things you need to do that day so timing it and making it slightly shorter is really good so this would be why then we've got the rules that I think well I say rules they're not really rules, their goals, aren't they?

12:53That we all put our phone away in a phone holder and we don't look at it for a set amount of time before bed or is it first thing in the morning? By the way, I break both of those. As does the whole world. Every single day. It's very difficult because I use my phone as an alarm clock as well, which I'm sure lots of people do. And I did try to get a loomy like to do it just didn't work so what is the science behind not having that section of phone time in the evening in the morning yeah so there's two elements there and we can also go and see the alarm clock piece because that is a really important piece of the puzzle to solve because it's like the number one reason just to always justify having the phone so in the evening there's this big phrase that's actually becoming a part of psychological research now called revenge bedtime procrastination which is this idea of like lying in bed your brain is very clearly telling you it really wants to go to sleep, but you're kind of forcing yourself to not go to sleep so that you can continue to scroll, that is going to effectively massively burn our dopamine before we go to sleep, keep us awake for longer, and lead to a much lower mood when we wake, a much like kind of flatter, oh God, I can't be bothered for today type experience.

14:04So that's kind of exhausting our system. The challenge with going on the phone in the morning is how it's training the addiction, and that's the biggest thing with the morning one is because if I say, for example, wanting to get you two really, really hooked on smoking vapes, if that was a goal of mine, which it isn't, what I would recommend you do is wake up and hit a vape as soon as you woke, because your brain wakes up and it begins to evolutionarily think like, where am I going to get dopamine from today? Is it hunting or building or making fires? Wherever it gets the first source from, it's going to think, okay, that's my source of dopamine.

14:36And then if it is a vape, or for example in this situation social media we train our brain to get very very hooked on that being our main source of stimulation throughout the day and if there can be a delay whereby our brain gets dopamine from anything having a shower making your bed having a cup of tea talking to your partner whatever it might be your brain is trained towards more effort rather than easy pleasure before we get on to the positives there are ways to kind of naturally support the production of chemicals that really help our focus, our concentration, our get up and go, et cetera, our happiness.

15:10I'm very curious to take like a very, very macro view of this. Obviously, we're all consistently taken aback by the statistics of how much as a collective we are currently struggling with our mental health. And obviously, the data only gets worse as you go down generations. As someone that's so tuned in to this conversation on the impact of our phones and our screen time on our mental health, do you find yourself not to be reductive and say like the sole cause of the mental health catastrophe that we're having at the moment is social media? Of course, that's overly reductive. There's so many factors at play and a huge number of macro events that are very overwhelming for people.

15:52But do you find we're not having a serious enough conversation in terms of the impact that this is now actually having on a societal level, obviously on productivity, on economic growth as a result, on the NHS. It feels so silly to be sitting here saying, looking at TikTok, such a massive issue. But actually, when you start to look at the impact it's having on our brain, on our habits, it feels like a serious issue is smoking to some extent, but it's not necessarily getting that cut through. I definitely do think it's as serious as smoking. I definitely hold the perspective of being more serious than smoking.

16:29I'd probably rather society smoke than like mass consumed social media, just because of how challenging all the downstream effects of being hooked on our phone are. And you're right, there's a multitude of things that are impacting our mental health in the modern world. Food, for example, is another huge component of it. You're doing beautiful work to try and move towards more natural ways of eating, which I think is a really key part of the puzzle. And I think overall, as a species, we're just deviating from nature in so many ways. And our brain and body was brought up for hundreds of thousands of years for a very specific way of living life.

17:02And with every decade that passes, we're going further and further away from that, whether it's with our food or sleep or sunlight or movement. And then now technology is a really big component of it. And you have with the phone, yeah, this kind of dopamine depleting component, which does kind of just depress our brain and make it a bit flatter and affect our mental health. But a huge proportion of why the phone is creating difficulty is the fact that it's leading to us not doing a lot of other things. Like if you take your average teenager that we work with in schools, yeah, like scrolling TikTok in their bedroom every evening for five hours is not great for their dopamine.

17:39But it's also like what would they have been doing before five hours of TikTok every evening, which might have been playing sport or socializing or contributing to their family or doing work or reading. And it's all the things that are now getting put on the wayside behind the idea of our social media is my main source of pleasure in my life. And there's this other chemical we can explore, this oxytocin chemical, which is this love hormone, which really is the core of what humanity is looking for. Like that's the thing we want most as a species is love. We want love with our partners, with our kids, our friends, our families, communities.

18:12There's nothing that's really a more positive experience in the world than love. and so much of our time in the modern world is spent choosing dopamine over oxytocin and that's really challenging for our mental health because every time you lie in bed with your partner both scrolling your phones instead of like talking or cuddling or connecting in like a more physical way in those moments you're choosing dopamine over oxytocin and that's happening all the time in all relationships whether it's with kids or friends or intimate relationships and it's meaning our body's getting lower and lower in this love hormone, more and more addicted to pleasure.

18:48And then the downstream effects are coming from there. So yeah, I do reckon it should be deeply considered. And I think it will in the decades to come. I think something like that adolescence TV show really sparked and like struck a chord with humanity because I think deep down we know there's something going on here. I couldn't agree more. I also think it's so interesting you say we're choosing dopamine over oxytocin, but what happens as well when, and I find myself really, really reacting poorly to this, I often end up consuming unintentionally bad news on your feed. And it stays with me. There's been a lot of heavy, tragic world events since COVID because we're seeing more than we ever saw before.

19:28When we grew up, I probably wouldn't have known the details to the extent I do now. Obviously, it's important education. We know details, but do we really need to be seeing it every time we turn our phone on something that's heartbreaking, something that's so tragic. And I find myself, I'm so deeply impacted by it. I cannot shift it out of my head for a week if I've seen something really sad. I think a lot of people are experiencing that. So what happens to our brain in terms of dopamine, oxytocin, when this is also thrown into the mix? Yeah. And this is why, like, if you really come down to it, the phone is so at the core of a lot of the emotional difficulty we're facing because it's not just like kind of addiction to scrolling videos of cats and stuff like that, but it's also like the kind of news you might be consuming.

20:16The cats are pretty cool too. News itself is again following that rule of novelty and novelty stimulates dopamine. And when, for example, COVID began, the addiction to the news was mental. Like when we had like Boris Johnson sitting at that table and it was at 6 p.m., it felt like you had to watch it. It was like, it was obviously very fearful, but there was almost like this weird excitement energy in your system of trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But what really happened is our brains got very hooked on the news because they're trained to like be very aware of fear and stuff.

20:47And it was providing us with the source of like what could potentially create fear and stress to our health, our families and so on. And yeah, it's cool to have a good idea of what's going on in the world. And maybe you like following all the political stuff. But I think it's really important just to be conscious of how frequently do you need to actually consume these things? Like if you said to yourself like every Wednesday, I'm going to watch the news for an hour and I'll have a good idea as to what's going on in the world and be updated when I have conversations with people and have some awareness, that's cool.

21:13But if it's kind of like every time work is a bit boring or every single meal you're eating when you have your phone in your hand and every time you're watching TV, you're just consuming, consuming, consuming, our brains are just getting into a very kind of fearful and flat state. And that's really tricky for them. And that's why it seems so basic to think so much of the answer to this modern mental health is just coming away from the phone. But it really does have a massive, massive impact at calming us down. I mean, I resonate with it so much. Last week, when all the stuff with the US was happening, and the tariffs and the trade war and the kind of fear to the global economy, I just found myself addicted to refreshing the news, like every 30 seconds.

21:51And as you said, I'm just sitting here nodding, saying, I absolutely, I felt deeply fearful and flat, because I was suddenly spending so much time on my phone, as though I could have any impact on it whatsoever. Do you know like why? Yes, it's very important to understand. But to your point, you could have taken a period of time at the end of the day to read in detail as opposed to having minute by minute live updates. And it's almost as you say, it's like you're getting high on the fear. It's intoxicating, it's addictive. And it's, it's as you said, it's then what you're not doing instead of that, you're not going to exercise, you're not going to cook, you're not going to connect with someone because you're addicted to the phone.

22:27And so it's so simple to say all the phones through of everything. But to your point, what we're doing on our phones is what we're not doing elsewhere. And I think that in and of itself is very, very telling. But moving to the flip side, what should we be focusing on to support our mental well-being, thinking about how do we harness our brain's chemistry for the good, get ourselves feeling more focused, more connected, more excited, get more get up and go. Just staying in the phone lane, then we can move to even behaviors beyond that that can also help balance things. But we had this lady, for example, called Julie the other day that sent a big message who's been through a lot of the dose stuff and very, very addicted to her phone, like classic sort of like seven hours a day of scrolling social media, which is really normal to almost be at these numbers and was struggling with many of these symptoms, kind of feeling anxious, scared, low, flat, stressed out, overwhelmed, all these kind of emotions that are very common now.

23:19And began this concept of really getting good at physical separation from the phone. And that really is the answer. It's just learning to not always have your phone right by you. Because if you're trying to sit on the sofa and go, right, tonight, I'm just going to watch a movie. The movie is going to get boring now because we're so addicted to dopamine that you will pick up the phone as soon as the movie is a bit boring or the TV show is a bit boring or an advert comes on. And the same when you're working on your computer, as soon as it gets hard or too easy, the task you're doing, you go for the phone.

23:46And it's really important just to have a bit of a new framework in your mind of like, it actually is okay to be bored and to like not be always in hyperstimulation. With that being said, a lot of people then try that and they'll say like, for example, go on a walk and not have stimulation or like try and chill on the sofa and like read for longer than two minutes because that's normally how long we'd read before we picked up our phone again. People actually now find it very uncomfortable, the boredom, because our nervous system goes like, where the hell is that nice stimulating dopamine? I mean, in a very similar way to like when you have some drinks, if you have drinks like early in the afternoon, if you have alcohol early in the afternoon, like on like a particular sunny day or whatever it might be, you'll notice that if the alcohol begins to wear off very quickly, you get a message saying, give me more alcohol because it begins to feel quite uncomfortable when the alcohol wears off.

24:33The phone does exactly the same thing. So part of it is physical separation from the phone and beginning to just actually develop the ability to be like, oh, it's okay. It's okay to be bored. I'm okay in this like de-stimulated state. And we have this thing in our lab called the boredom barrier where we basically see that if people stay in a state of boredom on a walk or chilling at home or eating for longer than 10 minutes, they actually become comfortable again with that experience. But for many of us, we actually never go past 10 minutes of boredom. We never even feel it. So I'd say that's step one is this physical separation and acceptance of boredom.