Dhru Purohit Show - How Phone Addiction Is Hijacking Our Brains And the Proven Path to Reclaim Focus, Joy and Purpose with Catherine Price

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, BUBS Naturals, One Skin, and Birch Living.  We all know technology shapes our lives, but few of us understand the full impact it has on our minds and our happiness. Today’s episode takes a closer look at why our digital habits matter more than ever. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with science journalist and author Catherine Price to unpack the high stakes of not changing our relationship with technology, especially social media. Catherine breaks down the latest research on how tech hijacks our brains and affects long-term brain health. She also shares what sparked her passion for helping people break free from digital addiction, along with practical tips for understanding our doom-scrolling habits and bringing more joy and real connection back into our lives. Catherine Price is an award-winning science journalist, bestselling author, and leading voice on how to build healthy relationships with technology. Her books include How to Break Up With Your Phone, The Power of Fun, and The Amazing Generation (co-authored with Jonathan Haidt). Her TED talk on fun has been viewed over 5 million times, and she writes the popular Substack newsletter How to Feel Alive. A dynamic speaker and workshop leader, Catherine has presented to audiences at TED, SXSW, Aspen Ideas, Google, Yale, and many others. Across all her work, she helps people of all ages scroll less, live more, and have more fun. In this episode, Dhru and Catherine dive into:  The hidden dangers of our modern world and what’s really at stake (1:20) How your phone quietly hijacks your brain without you noticing (4:20) The latest research revealing the true impact of social media (10:40) The turning point that pushed Catherine into this work (16:50) Why constant news alerts put your brain into “defend mode” (21:21) Simple shifts to bring real connection and joy back into your life (28:45) Why our brains are longing for a version of fun we’ve lost (38:36) What heavy smartphone use is doing to your memory (41:36) The power of a digital sabbath and how to try one (50:06) How to intentionally connect with people without relying on screens (57:04) Are we quietly abusing technology without realizing it? (1:02:11) Why social media may be uniquely harmful for women and girls (1:07:06) Practical steps anyone can take to create real change (1:14:11) Also mentioned in this episode: Amazing Generation book  For more on Catherine, follow her on Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, BlueSky, or visit her Websites: https://catherineprice.com/ and https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book/amazinggeneration This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, BUBS Naturals, One Skin, and Birch Living. Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU to get 15% off any order of MassZymes today.  Support your skin and your health with BUBS Naturals Collagen Peptides. Head to BUBSNaturals.com and use code DHRU for 20% off your order. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Birch has extended their Cyber Monday sale exclusively for my community. Just head to birchliving.com/dhru to get 20% off today.  Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Catherine Price, a pleasure to have you here. You know, I was excited to have you on because you're not afraid to say it how it is and that there's a little war going on, a battle of good versus evil. And we were chatting a little bit about this, but my audience feels like they've been fighting a battle of their own for years to help make their family healthier and protect them from a lot of the forces that are out there that want to promote junk food, junk light, a sedentary culture, and again, an overall world that we live in that promotes unhealthy habits. I'd love to start off by having you talk about the battle that you're highlighting

and championing, especially with the new book, how it relates to this battle that I highlighted that my audience is thinking about. And most importantly, for the battle that you're fighting, what's at stake if we, quote unquote, lose it? Yeah, I would say that the battle that I'm engaged in, and this has to do with several of my recent books, including the new one, The Amazing Generation, is this battle to maintain our humanity in the face of giant tech companies

that want to steal it from us, steal our humanity and essentially our lives, literally from beneath our noses. And I personally feel like the stakes couldn't be higher because our attention, which is what the companies are after, is our most precious resource. So I've spent the, I guess, almost the past decade,

devoting myself to trying to figure out practical solutions for how to live meaningful, fulfilling, fun, and healthy lives. And also to do so myself. This is very much a personal passion and a personal project for me. Talk about some of the players that are on this sort of battlefield, right? And if you could, compare and contrast, how is it similar?

to the same battle that my audience is fighting, that they feel that they're fighting, to protect their own families from a lot of, like, the things that would be impacting their physical health that are there. So let's start off with, who are some of the players that are on the battlefield right now? All of humanity is on the battlefield,

and you can break us into some groups. You know, you have adults who are struggling with their own screen time habits, and that includes pretty much everyone who has a smartphone. You have parents who are dealing with this from the perspective of how to raise their kids, And then you have kids and young people who are making decisions about how they want to use technology in their own lives. And in many cases for the older group, the older young people, if you will, they feel really trapped by where they are right now.

So you have that on one side. And then on the other side, if we're going to draw distinctions between black and white, you do have these big technology companies, not all of which are bad. There's many ways in which technology is amazing. We're doing this over our computers, but there are a number of very large technology companies that have made a business out of stealing people's attention and turning it into millions and more dollars for themselves. And they just don't seem to care that much about helping people truly live meaningful and fulfilling lives.

And to bring it into a very literal comparison to or relevance to your audience, when we are on our screens, we're not moving around. We're not out in the world. So there actually is a physical health consequence of this battle that we're our all engaged in. It's really affecting our health on a number of different levels. When you look out there today and, you know, the new book is primarily focused on younger individuals, right? Individuals in that sort of nine to 13 year old demographic who are navigating the space, the amazing generation, and are taking so of the principles that your

co-author highlighted in his, you know, best-selling book, The Ancest Generation and making it practical and a graphical novel for people to really understand, you know, what's going on, what's at stake in a very relatable way. When you talk to people who are above the age of, let's say, 40 plus demographic, what sort of responses do you get when you try to describe this phenomenon that we're going through? Do people get how bad the problem is of how much the abuse of technology, in particular smartphones and social media, have hijacked our brain and our happiness. Well, I am in the 40-plus demographic, so I'm mentally familiar with this group of people.

I think that there is a growing awareness about the effects the technology has had on us. So just as a bit of background, I wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone. I started writing it in 2016. It came out 2018, and there was a revised edition earlier this year. So that's been around for a while. And I will say when I first pitched the idea of how to break up with your phone, first started talking about it, the conversation was nothing like it is today. So I did notice when I spoke to people in those early days and I said, I'm writing a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, though. Even in those early days, no one said, I don't understand what you're talking about.

Instead, most people said something along the lines of, I need to do that. Or they might say, I don't want to break up with my phone because they thought I meant totally dumping your phone. And it's not about that. It's about creating a healthy relationship. but everyone understood that metaphor at a very early stage in our relationships with these devices. Fast forward to today, and we have a much greater understanding among adults that something about our screen habits feels off. And that really accelerated during the pandemic for adults and for teenagers and kids. So I would say that now I think most adults have some awareness that their screen habits

are having an impact on them. I think that in many cases they've heard the same kind of tips and tricks and may or may not have actually implemented them for themselves. I'm happy to talk about some ways to make it more effective. So there's more of a conversation. People are better educated, but I think we still have a long way to go. So I'm excited to talk to you about that. And then since that book came out, there also has been this huge acceleration,

as you were just referring to or mentioned, in the discussion around screens and kids. And that has exploded in large part due to Jonathan Haidt, my co-author of The Amazing Generation, of his blockbuster book, The Anxious Generation. which, as many people may know, is all about the effects that smartphones and social media

have had on today's youth in terms of their mental health and their fulfillment and their happiness. So I'm so grateful for the anxious generation because honestly, when I wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone, I knew people were going to ask me about kids, and I thought, oh, God, I don't know what to say.

That's so insurmountable. It seems so daunting at that point that I really focused on adults. So I'm so grateful that John wrote his book, and then it's been wonderful to have this opportunity to collaborate and create this new book, The Amazing Generation, which is specifically written for kids and teenagers

and for families to read together to get kids to buy into the idea that it doesn't have to be this way. You can exist with technology in a way that keeps what's good about technology without allowing your life to be controlled by it. And you actually can have a really fulfilling life in this modern age that's not totally hijacked by screens.

You know, a lot of the people that listen to this podcast, I've gotten a lot of stories of individuals who are actively working on making their family healthier. They're not purists. They're not thinking that their kids are never going to eat sugar. But often they'll get comments from the outside of individuals saying, sometimes it's their own parents saying, oh, don't worry about this.

We ate McDonald's growing up. You ate junk food all the time. You are totally fine. I'm sure you hear a version of that with phones and technology a little bit differently because obviously smartphones or more recent invention. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, I should tell anyone listening,

I have type 1 diabetes, and my life revolves around calculating carbohydrate counts in foods. So I'm with you on trying to reduce sugar. That's not doing any of us any favors. So stand strong. I mean, that's infuriating when people push back about that. Yeah, watch supersize me if you want to have a conversation

about the effects of McDonald's and that type of food. But I think that there's less resistance now than there used to be to the idea that screens and kids are not a great combination. And that has accelerated enormously in the past year, year and a half since both the pandemic and the anxious generation. So I haven't been encountering that as much as I would have anticipated or that I have in the past.

Instead, I think that a lot of parents and adults have been feeling this in our guts that something is not right, but we didn't know what to do about it. And we felt alone and we felt pressured to conform to what everybody else, quote unquote, seemed to be doing, which was giving their kids' smartphones and social media accounts, or allowing these things to be used in school during class times or during, you know, lunch and recess.

And we knew in our hearts that that didn't feel right, but we didn't feel we could speak up about it. And I think now people are feeling much more empowered to speak up about it. And, you know, I have a background as a health and science journalist, and one of my previous books was about, it's called Vitamania. It was about the history of vitamins and nutrition. And for that book, I really wrote a lot about how important it is to know that what you're putting into your body has been tested for safety and efficacy before you take it because there's a lot of danger. Like you actually do need to have trials before you take something that serves as the purpose of a drug.

But I think, so I never would recommend someone just takes a pill without knowing more about it. But it was really interesting because when I was thinking about screen time, I was thinking that one of the ways that the tech companies try to muddy the waters and make the conversation seem confusing is they'll say things like, oh, but we don't have conclusive evidence that smartphones or social media is conclusively a cause, the causes mental health problems among young people. We have to wait for this study. There's this implication that if we wait long enough,

the academics will figure this out, and they'll be proven one way or the other. They, of course, think that it'll be proven that there's no causal link between these two things. As opposed to what I might say about taking a pill, in this case, I'm like, you know what? First of all, that trial will never be done because you can't actually do a trial

in which you think something is harmful, and then you divide people into two groups and give one group the harmful thing to see what happens over time. And second, we don't need that. This is a situation in which I truly do think we can trust our instincts and what we know is right and what we want for our families and for ourselves. And if you have a hunch that screen time is causing problems, either for your children, your grandchildren, or yourself,

then go with that instinct and do an intervention on yourself and for your family. Worst case scenario, you can go back to your former screen habits, no harm done. But the best case scenario is that we really do make a chance. and we can improve our health and our happiness. Talk about some of the studies for adults, at least, that we do have, then we'll get to kids. What is the cost of this abuse? Let's start off with any ones that you can think of top of mind

that might either remind our audience or be new information for them. Alright, so here's the truth. This time of year, and there's not a problem with this, but most of us are eating very differently than we normally do. At least every so often. Bigger meals, richer foods, more sugar, more, more grazing, more everything. And your gut feels it. If you're noticing a little bit more bloating,

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That's Bubbs, B-U-B-S-N-A-L-S dot com, and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U, that's me, for 20% off. And if they ask you how you heard about them, please support the show and tell them we sent you. Well, there's been a number of studies that have come out recently that actually show that when you ask people to take a break from social media and screens, for normally it's about two weeks, two weeks, three weeks, as it takes a while to actually go through kind of a withdrawal. phase that people actually do report feeling better. They report feeling calmer and less stressed, less anxious, less depressed. And the fact that you're doing this in an actual proactive way, it's not an observational study, it's actually saying, okay, we have two groups of people who are currently users of these things, and we're going to do an intervention where we actually ask a group to step away from it. You can actually conclude that there is a causal relationship there.

So I think that's one of the strongest studies that we have. There have also been studies showing that for teenagers, there's a huge increase in the likelihood of being depressed, clinically depressed for the higher your usage of social media goes. There's another one that you've talked about a bunch, which is just helping people contextualize how much we use our phones and how much of our total lifespan is being eaten away by spending time in front of the screens, which if it was leading to us always being healthier and happier, that's one thing, but obviously many of us know that we can all get caught up in dream scrolling and we don't feel that great. So do you want to share that stat with our audience?

Sure. It's really hard to get a concrete statistic on the amount of screen time people have per day, because first of all, we've got multiple screens, right? Like, I'm on a computer right now. Is that the same as the phone? Is that the same as a laptop or a tablet? But if you do look at just smartphone time, the best statistics I could find show that people are spending roughly four hours a day just on their phones. So not any of those other things, not TV. just the phone. And that adds up to 60 full days a year. So that's two months of your life. There also was a high quality study done of younger people, of teenagers finding that they were spending about five hours a day just on social media and YouTube, just on those two things.

So not schoolwork, not internet research, just social media, including YouTube. And that's about 75 full days a year, which if you think about it, and we have actually an infographic in the amazing generation showing this visually to kids, that's basically your whole summer break of 24-hour days, like not even just your waking life, like full days, your whole summer break will just be on social media and YouTube. And I think that doing that kind of calculation for yourself can be very eye-opening, somewhat horrifying, but also really motivating because we have a limited amount of time on earth. You know, how much of it do you really want to be spending on a screen? You know, I think it's worthwhile, just to a brief moment, set the context with your personal

story. You know, you got into this space specifically, even though you'd been a writer for a little while when you had an aha moment of how much time you were spending on the phones. And I believe it was right around the time that you just had, your daughter was born. I had started out as I was saying more doing nutrition health, I mean, very much inspired by my experience with type 1 diabetes. I'd written this book about vitamins and nutrition. I did not anticipate writing anything about technology. You know, I used technology, but I didn't really think one way or another about it. But then about 10 years ago when I had my daughter, I just started having these moments. where I noticed that I would be up with her in the middle of the night.

Actually, in the room I'm speaking to you from today. And I noticed her looking up at me, and I was looking down at my phone. I also have a background in mindfulness, and I'd written a bunch about mindfulness-based stress reduction. I was trying to cultivate self-awareness. So I was kind of trying to notice my behaviors and trying to check in with myself regularly about whether or not my behaviors in the moment aligned with how I wanted to live my life. So I was kind of in that mindset.

I was horrified, you know, because I've got this little baby who's looking up at me, her one of her two primary caregivers, and I'm looking at my phone. And I wasn't looking at social media. I was looking at doorknobs because my husband and I had just in a kitchen renovation, and I had been looking for all these little, you know, architectural details to work into this kitchen.

You can judge that as you will to begin with, but the real irony was we had finished the kitchen renovation. There was no reason. It was just as meaningless as scrolling through Instagram on my phone. And when I realized this, two things ran through my mind, based on my science journalism background.

One was that I knew that babies can only focus about 10 to 12 inches in front of their faces, and that's thought to be so that they can bond with the primary caregiver who's holding them so that they can have eye contact. And so that very much disturbed me. I was thinking, oh, my goodness, I'm actually breaking eye contact with my daughter

and not creating that opportunity for bonding that she's evolved to have by virtue of how far she can focus. And then I also thought about this experiment that if anyone wants to cry, after listening to this podcast, just to an internet search for the still-face experiment. There's a two-minute video about this. And it's an experiment that's been replicated numerous times where experimenters, researchers, took a parent, in the case of this video, it's a mother, with their baby,

and had the parent interact with the baby normally for about two minutes. And then for two minutes, they asked the parent to go totally still-faced, meaning that no reaction, just impassive, total blank face. And they recorded what the babies did in response. And it's really difficult to watch, because at first, baby's kind of confused, you know, why is its mother not responding? But then as these two minutes go on, the baby becomes increasingly distressed to the point of trying to get out, the baby's in a kind of car seat, like an infant seat, to get out of the seat and is making these animalistic

shrieking sounds because the baby is so upset that their bond with the person in front of them has been broken. And then in this particular video, the mother is then allowed to interact normally. You can tell how emotionally taxing it's been on her too, and they start to interact. and the researchers point out you can repair this relationship, but the question is what happens if you never repair this relationship. And as I said, that experiment has been replicated. They've done studies where they found that the babies actually have a spike in cortisol during this very brief time period, meaning that their stress hormones are actually getting released because there is, you know, anguish physically happening. And there's also been a study done that's a similar

idea where researchers have asked parents to play with their toddlers, build Legos with them, and then to do something that all of us have done one time or the other, which is look away from their kids and then scroll through their phones for two minutes. And they had hidden cameras recording the kid's response in that situation. So kind of an updated still face, but with a phone and a playing situation. And the kids immediately pick up on that. And they immediately try to get their parents to pay attention. And I think in one of the more heartbreaking examples,

one little girl just notices what is happening with her parent and just sits on a chair and folds her hands in her lap and just waits and hoping that her mom will pay attention to her again. So that's what kind of ran through my mind. But I didn't want to live that way. And when I looked around to see if I could find a solution, I found a number of books at that point, not as many as there are now, but there were a couple of books that talked about the problem of screen time. Like Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is an excellent book I recommend to everyone.

For 2010, still amazingly relevant. But I couldn't find a solution. And so that's what led me to write how to break up with your phone. I wanted to create a solution both for myself and for other people whom I knew we were struggling with the same problem. Everybody knows that when you eat too much sugar, You feel like crap, you can't focus, you're sort of edgy, you know, there's all sorts of downside effects that you feel inside of your body. You talk about a concept called Defend Mode that, in a way, highlights the state that your body and your brain gets into when we are abusing technology.

Can you outline what Defend Mode is? Sure. So this is from the Amazing Generation. And it's a term that John Haidt, my co-author, incorporated into the book. So we talk about how for, and this isn't reference to kids, but it's true for adults as well. We can go through life in one of two modes. Discover mode where we're open and we feel confident. We feel curious.

We don't have this stress response. We're not fearful. Or we can go through life in what he calls defend mode, which is where we are anticipating these potential attacks, where we're constantly on defense. We're worried about what might be lurking around the corner. And what we're saying in the book, and this is true both for kids and adults that I just said, is that a lot of times what happens online, the types of interactions we have online,

encourage us to go into defend mode, where you are worried about potentially being bullied by strangers, for example, or your peers, you're worried about how you look. You're just constantly worried about a potential danger that might be waiting for you, you know, ready to attack. And it is much better, both feels better in the moment, but also is better for you physically and in terms of what you can do and accomplish in your life.

If you instead go through life in this more open, confident state, discover mode. So one of the goals of the amazing generation is to help kids understand physiologically what that feels like to be in these two states and to give them practical strategies for how they can actually go through life more in discover mode. And it's really important for kids too,

because the more you're in this defensive state, this kind of preemptively stressed out state when you are in your early teen years, which is a period of immense brain development, the more likely that's going to stick around when you're an adult. So if you can learn to be, learn to be in discover mode more as a young teenager, you can actually become more confident,

less likely to become anxious when you're in adults as well. And it's worth pointing out, like it makes evolutionary sense that we have a defend mode because, you know, historically, there were literal threats lurking around corners that might want to eat us. But now it's all stuff that's online. There's certainly a lot of legitimate dangers online for kids, too. But in this case, it's normally this kind of social anxiety that is really heightened online. You mentioned it applies to kids, but it also applies to adults as well. One version that I see with a lot of adults, I heard you talk about a term screen your citizens. I think it was a screen your citizens, right?

Like we talk about phones being a problem with kids, but they're a problem for adults and they're a problem for, you know, all sorts of people. But one way that I see that this defend mode impacts adults is with our smartphones, these news alerts. There's a lot of people that have these news alerts. As much as we talk about, you know, big tech and 100% it's there, there's also the news, which is fighting for our attention. And if it bleeds, it leads. We all know that's saying. And there's constant alerts of people who feel like they're being, you know,

a good, informed citizen, but largely they're getting, there's a Reverend that I met many years ago at Agape Spiritual Center here in Los Angeles, Reverend Michael Beckwith. And he had a great quote that he shared on, I think, on the Oprah Winfrey show, one time. And he said, you know, the news is a common denominator of the worst things that are happening in society. It's easy to look at a kid. And yes, it's a hundred percent an issue, you know, TikTok alerts, Facebook, Instagram. And I think along with that, there's the adult equivalent. There's many adult equivalents. It's not like adults are not on social media.

But there's this healthy one that a lot of people celebrate, which is constantly letting the news dictate your attention. But I feel like that puts us even as adults. into this defense state where we're expecting the worst from everybody and we're not present to the beauty that could be around this. You have any thoughts on that? I have many thoughts on that.

I completely agree with you. I would say one very concrete thing I would highly recommend that your listeners do is to get the news off of your phone and your watch if you have a smart watch because then you're just going to get a little snippet of stressful news without the full context.

And it's going to be on your wrist because I think you're completely We feel that in order to be, quote, responsible citizens of the world, especially with all this going on right now, that we have to be on call to all of these news stories. Maybe that made sort of sense back when it was a daily newspaper that arrived on your doorstep and you read it with your coffee and then you put it away and you didn't think about the news in the same way until the next day when you repeated this ritual. But that is not what happens now. We were in a 24-hour news cycle where, as you're saying, you get alerts constantly. And those alerts are not actually there to make the world a better place. They're there to make money for the newspaper companies.

Now, as a journalist and someone who believes in the importance of having to press, the strong press, I do think we should support journalism, but I would also say we need to protect our brains. Because one of the things I find interesting about our brains, and this ties into defend mode, is that we are naturally programmed to focus on things that stoke anxiety and fear. That is why it makes sense to show us things that make us feel anxious and scared because we'll keep paying attention to them. So it actually, it's not Pollyanna-ish at all to suggest that we consciously shift our brains over to something more positive. It's actually a survival strategy for the modern era. And I would offer to people, because I've gone through this whole process myself, I took the news off my phone sometime in 2017, like the news apps.

I just took them off and I haven't put them back on. It doesn't mean I don't check the news. It just means I don't do it through an app on my phone. I don't have any notifications. I try to make it a conscious choice. But I'd encourage everyone to ask yourself, what good is it actually doing for you to be constantly reading these notifications and finding out about all the bad stuff that's happening in the world?

Is that actually helping anyone? Or is it actually draining your energy and making it less likely that you can do anything yourself to make a positive difference in the world, you know, in your local community or globally? I personally think it's really draining us. It's making us miserable. and it's also reducing our ability to do anything to change things.

If you don't want to listen to me, I would suggest that a viewers listen to or watch the documentary, Mission Joy, that's what it's called. It's a documentary from a number of years ago about their friendship, which was beautiful. And there's a clip from it that really stood out to me where they're talking about how, if you look at the news, I believe it's the Dalai Lama.

He's saying, if you look at the news, you would believe that there's only bad things happening in the world, and you would miss all these moments of positivity and joy and delight. You know, and I think it's important to think, about who was saying that in this context, because the Dalai Lama has not had an easy life, you know, or Desmond Tutu. Like, they both had very, very difficult backgrounds,

but they so clearly were and are able to find joy in life and to spread that joy and to make a difference in the world through their ability to focus on the positive. And to me, that's a really inspirational message. I really encourage others to explore for themselves as well. And it starts with getting the news off your phone. You know, both in the new book, the graphical novel, amazing generation, but also your other work that you've published, you've talked about the

themes of us forgetting both for kids and also adults. It's a big problem, how to have fun and how technology can get in the way of that. And in a way, we almost have to remind ourselves about the process of having fun. Big picture. For my audience that's there today, what are some things that you can suggest in. Because, again, we know this is a problem with kids. We also knows it's a problem for adults. It's a problem for everyone that's there. And sometimes we forget, well, what is an alternative look like?

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I think one thing to keep in mind is that it makes sense that we're reaching for our phones and social media so often because we are longing for connection and we are longing for fun and we want to feel joy. And companies have promised that we will find these things through their products. And in reality, what we often get is a fake sense of connection, loneliness,

a feeling of isolation and just feeling that you're like rotting your brain and wasting your time. So what we want is this good stuff that you're talking about, what I call true fun. And when I was writing my book, The Power of Fun, about Fun,

I came to realize that fun is actually a way more powerful force than we give it credit for. It's a word use very casually all the time in conversation without really thinking about what it means. But if you were to ask people or yourself to tell you stories of times in which you had the most fun, which I actually encourage listeners to do either on their own or the next time they have a conversation with a friend or loved one is just say, tell me a story about a time where you

had so much fun. And just notice what they tell you and notice the energy they give off and notice how it makes you feel just to be near them when they're remembering this feeling of fun. And I think, I mean, I'm smiling, just remembering this. experience myself, because there's something very profound about true fun, something that erases human differences, brings us closer and I think is a force for good in the world. But what I realized is we define it incorrectly. So just to give you briefly my definition of fun, and then I can speak to how you can actually have more of it as an adult, is that I think that fun is the confluence of three states. When I give talks about it, I show a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles,

and one of the circles is connection. So I collected stories from people around the world about fun experiences and the details were different, but nearly all of them had these three elements. So for connection, people described this feeling of having a special shared experience with someone else. And that was true even for introverts, which was very interesting. Like, the majority of introvert stories also had other people in them. Another element was playfulness. And so I don't mean that you have to be silly. That makes adults so uncomfortable to think about being playful, because I think that we think that you have to be childish. But it's not being childish. It's just rediscovering the ability to be childlike in the sense of

finding things to laugh about, you know, not taking life too seriously. Being in a state where your inner critic is not present, which is so freeing. There's really a sense of freedom and release in our most fun memories. And it doesn't mean you be the class clown. It just means that you have to be willing to laugh or to find or to go along with things and find the joy that exists in life. And then the last thing is flow, which is the state we get into when we are totally engrossed and actively engaged in what we're doing. So the quintessential example is somewhat like a rock climber, scaling a rock face. You obviously have to be fully engaged in present in order to do that successfully. Same thing with a musician playing a piece of music or an athlete playing a game or being

in a good conversation. All of us slip into flow at various points. It's very different from the passive, I lost track of time because I'm watching Netflix for seven hours feeling that's not flow. That's what Chixemi Hai, the psychologist who coined that term, would have called junk flow. So it's being active. Anyway, so I think of true fun as being this confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. And so how do you do that? Some concrete examples for or ideas for the adult listeners in your audience. One is to figure out the people and the activities and the settings that are the most likely to generate this feeling of fun for you personally. You can't guarantee fun is going to happen because it's kind of like if you focus too much on it, it'll run away.

We've all tried to force fun upon a child or a loved one and then they're not having fun and you find yourself being like, this is supposed to be fun. And then it's just horrible. But we each do have a collection of people in settings. activities that are more likely to generate it. I think of these as fun magnets. And so one thing you can do is just make a list for yourself of what are your personal fun magnets. You know, it's a fun activity to do with your spouse or your kid is like make a list of your respective fun magnets and see where they do or don't overlap. For me, a big fun magnet is playing music with other people. My husband's been having fun recently, playing disc golf. Those things, we do not share those fun magnets. It is much

better if we do those things separately. But one of our shared fun magnets is having people over in hosting events. So my point being, if you can kind of figure out your personal fun magnets, it gives you a way to actually incorporate more opportunities for fun into your life. You can actually say, oh, wow, I know that every time I have a conversation with you, like, I have fun. Therefore, I'm going to prioritize scheduling a date on the calendar where we're going to get together and when I'm going to make it happen. It's very easy for fun to fall to the bottom of our to-do lists. And by identifying your fun magnets, you can actually make a point of carving out time for them on your schedule. And then I would say the other thing is much of fun is spontaneous.

It happens in a way, moments where you couldn't predict it. It's not always something that happens on vacations. You don't have to go to an exotic location to have fun. You can have it in any kind of shared moment of playful, connected flow. And so the best way to do that is just make a concerted effort to add more playfulness, connection, and flow to your everyday life. You know, how can you like do something to delight yourself or to delight someone else, add a little bit of playfulness? How can you reduce distractions, which often is coming through your phone, so you can be more in flow? And then how can you find more opportunities to connect with either your environment or your experience or the people around you? And the more you do that, like worst case scenario,

you just have more playfulness, connection and flow in your life. They're all great for us, both emotionally and physiologically. But in the best case scenario, you have more moments of fun. You and Jonathan were being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and in honor of the launch of, you know, announcing the Amazing Generation book, the graphical novel. And one of the things that you talked about that I think a lot of people who are listening today may not know about unless you have kids that are in this, like, unique window, there's like all of a sudden kids that are really into like watching friends and wearing like friends t-shirts and older shows.

Like talk about that phenomenon. What are they feeling that they're getting a glimpse of? And how does that relate to this idea of fun and smartphones? It sounds like your audience is very gen X, as am I. And so, yeah, we're really cool now. That's a fun fact for you, because one thing I've noticed, and this is not just me, this is a thing, is that there really is this nostalgia among younger people for a time they never knew, which is very poignant and sad in many ways. But you do. You see teenagers from wide variety of backgrounds wearing friends' t-shirts and getting into the record.

like the records, for example, people are going back to records, or film cameras, this desire to go back to a more analog way of life. And I think what that's about is that they actually long for the ability to have the experiences we took for granted, where you just hung out with your friends. Honestly, we were having fun. You were having fun. When your guard was down because you weren't worried that someone was going to take a picture

of you and post it on Instagram for other people to comment on. And you were actually together in person. And there was an ability to actually get together at the, you know, coffee shop or the bowling alley or wherever people had them, mall where people hung out. And you weren't constantly dividing your attention between lots of things. There just was, like, much more of an ability to hang out and have fun as a teenager. And I think that today's teenagers, when they see clips from movies or shows of that era, something inside of them registers, like, I want that, you know.

They wish they had that. So on the one hand, that's really depressing. But I'd also say one of the goals of The Amazing Generation, our new book, which it's, does have a graphic novel in it, but it also has a text component and also has lots of interactive elements. It's meant to appeal to a pretty wide range of age range of kids, both kids who already have smartphones and social media and ideally those who don't. But one of the goals there is to help them recognize that they have the ability to create that life for themselves. If they work together and they choose to prioritize real life over screens, it's actually not

impossible to have some of the experiences that our generation takes for granted and that they wish that they had. Let's go back to the problem a little bit more. if that's okay with you for a second. You know, a lot of my audience, as we age and you're learning more about the different influences of a sedentary lifestyle, hyper-processed and palatable foods, we understand that a lot of these behaviors combined over years can lead to all sorts of things like cognitive decline, you know, potentially increase your risk of Alzheimer's disease. And, you know, anything that affects our brain is very, very scary.

And a lot of times our focus and attention is on things that are sort of known as formal diseases when it comes to impacting our brain. But the thing that a lot of people I don't think realize, I didn't maybe realize it until I started looking into a lot of the stuff that you and Jonathan talk about is that there's an impact on our brain right now with smartphones. So what do we know about memory, for example, when it comes to smartphone use and the abuse of it in particular? Yeah, this really interested me when I was reading how to break up with your phone because I think a lot of us have, again, intuitively felt that there's something different about our brains when we spend a lot of time on screens. And those of us who are old enough to remember a time before we had smartphones, probably remember having better attention spans than we do now and better ability to remember stuff, just feeling more with it. And of course, some of that decline could be due to aging, but I believe it's very strongly related to our use of smartphones. So in terms of memories in particular, It kind of should go without saying that if you're not present for something in the first place, you're not going to have a memory of it afterwards. It's just because you don't have anything to remember. So when we have our smartphones in front of us at all times,

and they serve as what John likes to call experience blockers, like you're actually not having other experiences because you can't. You can't be in two places at one time. You also can't be physically present in two places at one time. You also can't be emotionally present. You know, adults like to think that we can multitask. But in reality, the human brain, or I would argue all brains, can only do one thing fully at once.

And when you try to multitask, you're actually rapidly switching your attention between tasks. It's called task switching. And it's similar to the idea of driving a car 65 miles an hour down a highway. If you were to then need to make a 90-degree right-hand turn, you will have to slow the car down in order to make that turn, speed back up again, and then slow it down again if you need to make another turn. It's the same thing when we start to switch our attention between tasks.

It actually slows us down in the long run. So you're not going to develop memories if you don't have the experiences to begin with, But then one thing I found to be really interesting, and I appreciate the ability to be a little dorky with you here, is actually what does it take in our brains to form a long-term memory, right? Because you have to be, you have to have the short-term memory to begin with, but then you need to put it into long-term storage. And it turns out that that actually requires the creation of new proteins in our brains. And that process of encoding a long-term memory from a short-term memory can get derailed by distraction, which is kind of nuts. And so when I was writing How to Break Over Your Phone, I was like, is it possible then that the constant distraction from our smartphones isn't just preventing us from having experiences to remember to begin with, but actually could be interfering physiologically with the process of creating long-term memories in our brain? And I thought, oh, well, that's interesting, but how am I going to prove that?

And then I had the weirdest coincidence maybe of my life, and I sat down on a train, and I was not on my phone, and there was an old guy sitting like catty corner to me. And I was like, gosh, that guy is so familiar. I managed to figure out that he was Eric Candell, who was the scientist, who won a Nobel Prize for in part discovering that long-term memories require the creation to do proteins and it's interrupted by distraction. And I went up to this man, this stranger, and I knelt next to him on the Amtrak. I said, excuse me, sir, I was just giving a talk about, that involved your work because I had been. And I ran that theory by him. I said, is this possible

that smartphones are destroying our ability to create long-term memory? And Eric Candel said, that makes sense. Yeah, so thanks for asking me about memory. And, you know, honestly, if you make a conscious point to reduce distractions, you will find that your memory is better because you will be able to encode things better in your brain. Yeah, so on a practical level, this is even, I think, I don't know if you wrote about it or Jonathan wrote about it, but just even the idea that popping an elevator,

we're killing some time, we're just quickly looking at our phone, but for no specific reason, right? You have a great protocol for that, that we'll talk about in a little bit, that these little moments of interruption, which seems so benign, seems so just no big deal, doing them regularly, besides the fact that we're just not going to remember as much of what experience we went through. There's also this phenomenon where we just feel like, why does it feel like life is going so quickly all the time? And we just

feel like, you know, it's just like everything is on hyper speed. And it could be relating to this idea that you just shared, which is if we're constantly interrupting with our phones, we just don't have the ability to actually remember what's going on, at least in great detail and the feeling that goes along with it. Yeah, it's much harder to experience life through a screen. And if you're constantly fragmenting your attention is going to have an impact on your attention span. So to the first point, like, I think it's interesting. All of us are doing lots of Zoom calls these days in virtual interviews. It's much less likely that I would recognize you on the street if we ran into each other on the street having had this virtual call with you compared to actually sitting down and having

coffee together, for example. There's a real difference between scrolling through, quote-unquote, experiences, I guess, on an Instagram feed and actually having an experience. Like, there is a difference in the perception, the feeling of connection we have, obviously, but also in the perception of time. And I can speak from personal experience, and also I've spoken to scientists about this, that one way to make time feel like it is slowing down is actually to take a break from screens. Because when we scroll, we get kind of sucked in that doom scroll spiral, we kind of lose track of time, which is very conscious on the part of the app makers. They want us to lose track of time because that's how they make more money. It's exactly the same thing that casinos do where they

don't put clocks in casinos and they don't have windows and they give you food and drink so that you don't have any sense of time passing and you don't have natural cues from your body encouraging to get up from the chair. You just stay there and you play the slot machine. And the same thing, our social media feeds are designed to be endless so that you don't notice how much time passed and you just scroll. But that is going to make time feel like it's a lot of the same thing. it's moving really quickly, and it's also not going to give you any experiences to remember because you're just scrolling. If you experiment with the practice of taking what's known as a digital Sabbath, like a 24-hour break from your screens, which I know might sound terrifying, but I encourage people to try it, you will be amazed by how much time there seems to be in a day when you're not scrolling.

And you may have had that experience yourself on vacation, where you take a break from your work computer and you're actually out living in the world, and suddenly time seems to stretch out, and you end up with all these memories. The other point I was making is that if you fragment your attention constantly, you will actually change your brain in ways that make it harder to pay attention. And again, there's kind of an evolutionary background to this. If you think about it, paying attention being deeply focused is a very vulnerable state to be in. Because if you are totally focused on one thing and you're tuning out all other distractions, which is essentially what paying attention means, you will not notice one of those distractions that actually could be a threat. And as a personal example, I had an experience a couple of years ago where I was walking down the street,

in California, actually, and I was talking to my husband on the phone. I wasn't looking at it, but I was talking to him, and I was very engrossed in the conversation. I did not notice a car pull up next to me, and a young man got out with a gun and mugged me for my phone. You know, and I'm sure he targeted me because I was totally focused on the phone. I was not paying attention to the external world, and I was just an easy target. So my point being, there is actually a risk to be able to focus. Our brains, therefore, naturally are distractible. That's our natural state, is to be scanning our environment.

Our phones make that worse because they are designed to get us to pay attention to small snippets of things on multiple apps only for seconds at a time and to encourage us to be constantly dividing our attention between what's on the screen and the real world. And over time, that actually can cause changes in our brains because our brains don't just change when we're kids and teenagers. They're constantly changing. That's how you learn something. Your brain is plastic, as the scientists say. Over time, you will undo a lot of the hard work you've done through your life to be able to concentrate and your brain will start to start to. to go back to this natural state of distractibility. And anyone out there who's like, I used to love to read, and now I can't read more than a paragraph.

Anyone who has had that experience, that's what's happened to you. So the good news, truly is good news, though, is that it's possibly get your attention span back, and I've heard from so many people about how delighted they've been by the fact that once they make a conscious decision,

for example, to get their phones out of their bedrooms at night, put a book on the bedside table, and build back up to reading, that that ability does come back quickly. I'm not sure, honestly, that that's the case for younger people who never had the opportunity that people of my generation did to build up the sustained attention. And that's the reason to be concerned about what's happening at kids. But for any listeners who are, you know, 40 plus years old, we probably still do have

that ability buried inside of us. And the people that I've worked with find that it actually does come back really quickly. So that's a note of inspiration on an otherwise somewhat depressing monologue. You know, you mentioned the Sabbath. And on a practical level, can you share either how you've implemented? this year life or some of the best practice from other people. A lot of people crave the idea of like, wow, like, I would love to do that. And then there's but X, Y, and Z and their own version of their contextual life.

What are some of the practical things, best practices that you've seen out there, gear up, prep, whatever needs to happen to allow people to be more successful in attempting to incorporate this digital Sabbath in their own life, especially if they have families. So the digital Sabbath is just one example of setting better boundaries with screens. and protecting time for yourself. So you really can think about it as giving yourself a gift. So my first suggestion would be to flip it in your mind so that it comes not from a place of restriction.

I can't use screens for this particular period of time. And more from I'm giving myself and my brain and my family and my relationships a gift of being able to be present and undistracted. And that can be very helpful in terms of creating the motivation to try and to do this. And then I would say that the ultimate goal of this exercise is to get in the habit of creating boundaries with technology.

Again, not to totally get rid of technology. There's a time and a place for it, but just to make sure that it's not encroaching on every single minute of your life. So what we're talking about is a digital Sabbath, which is like a full 24-hour break from your phone and other screens. You can kind of customize it

to see what fits for you and your family. I can talk about that in a second, but you can also start by very simply just baby steps of taking breaks from your phone. Leave it behind for an hour while you're at work and go for a walk, you know. on a weekend morning decide that your phone is charging in the other room, because we started to talk about getting that out of your bedroom, so it's charging somewhere else. We'll give yourself the gift of

what I think of as like an analog morning where you don't go for the phone first thing, and instead you take some time to walk your dog or have a cup of coffee, or maybe you read your print newspaper that you now have subscribed to or chat with your family, whatever it may be. But I personally do think it's really nice to have this ritual of taking a longer break, even if it's once a month. My family, we typically do this on Fridays because that's just the easiest time. It also is the traditional day for the Sabbath or the, you know, yeah, for the Sabbath. But I think what gets in many people's ways is this sense of anxiety of what they'll miss. So kids aren't the only ones who are suffering from FOMO, the fear of missing out.

In the adult case, you're worried that you're going to miss an important work email, or you're going to miss a call from a family member in an emergency, things like that. And so I think one of the most effective things to do is to actually run through some of your anxieties ahead of time, maybe even list them out, and then try to figure out some ways to deal with those anxieties ahead of time. You know, what if there is an emergency from a family member? One idea is to get a landline telephone, landline in quotes, because there are phones now that use your internet connection to place calls. They're way cheaper than smartphones. They do not require an expensive service plan. In many cases, once you buy the phone, you actually can use it for free because it's just.

placing calls over the internet. And my family uses that so that we can actually put our phones away, my husband and I, for the weekend or for the day, whatever it is, and just have calls forwarded to that landline. So, like, problem averted. If there's a crisis with my parents, we'd find out about it. You also can do things like, you know, actually keeping a notebook nearby, so you can write down all the things your brain is going to come at you with

because it's going to come at you. You're going to be like, oh, I need to buy this. I need to check this. I need to know this. I need to schedule this. I just be like, calm down, brain, capturing on a piece of paper, it's okay. And then my third suggestion would just be to make sure that you have some things planned for yourself, some nourishing, fun, energizing, whatever it may be, some things that you want to do for yourself

so that you can have alternatives. Because again, restriction is not the way to go with this. Willpower and restriction is not going to lead to success. You need to do this because it's a gift to yourself because you want to do it and give yourself alternatives because the more fulfilling your real life feels, the less you're going to want to be on your phone. You know, as I was saying, we're turning to our phones because we feel lonely and we feel disconnected and we feel bored and we feel understimulated and we're trying to find we're trying to feel alive. Like that's what we're after. That doesn't happen on a screen.

So the more you can get that in real life, the less you're going to be drawn to your phone and other screens. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that people are looking for, of all generations, but especially young people, they're looking for, you know, what are regular rituals, events, things that they can have on a regular basis in their life that sort of encourage this container for everyone involved. I read a story about a nightclub in LA that was a little pop-up sort of, you know, gathering. I don't know if it was like, you know, what time of night or anything like that that was there. But everybody who went into that sort of bar environment, they had all check their phones at the door. And they were trying to recreate almost this sort of old school bar nightclub dance club situation where everybody was just there and you have to talk to each other. And you have to connect and nobody's carrying their phones and people were willing to pay a premium for an experience

like that. I'm part of a men's group that meets every Thursday morning and we call it man morning. And the guys look forward to it so much. It's a group of entrepreneurs and friends that have made over the years. And we have a few key rules. One of the first rules is phones are off right now. If somebody's expecting an urgent situation or what it might be, they might, you know, hang back a little bit, check very quickly and then get back into the group. But phones are off during that period of time. And it's an opportunity for us to check in and talk about and walk, which is very easy to do in LA with the great weather year round. Talk about like what's one aspect in life that you're celebrating. What's one aspect in life that you're navigating. And the

bonding and the connection and the amount of joy that that weekly gathering brings to everybody that's part of that, it's magnified by the fact that everybody's present and not being interrupted by anything else. And also I like to think that, you know, being outdoors and getting sunlight and walking a little bit also helps that as well too. So you see people craving and wanting to create these rituals. And in a way, I was thinking about this other day, but we're trying to borrow from a different time in life where whether it was faith-based communities

or other types of communities where life sometimes is very hard for one individual to always set up this situation on their own. If you're somebody that cares about this topic of wanting to use phones more mindfully. If you're constantly setting things up from scratch on your own and trying to recruit people to things, that's great. But it's so much easier if there's a little bit of a container

that everybody can say, hey, this is a regular thing that we participate in, which is why so many families themselves have adopted the idea of, hey, whether it's a digital Sabbath or a Sabbath from just, you know, we're going to use this opportunity to, like, concentrate on our family,

and connect with each other. We're going to incorporate this as a regular ritual into our lives. So I don't know if I had a question with that, but I was more sharing. But let's turn it into a question and bring it back to the book, Amazing Generation. When you guys are out there talking to young kids, are there any other examples that you've seen of young kids trying to make this more of a thing for kids who are curious to also get a chance to be an environment and participate in. in this idea of not letting the phone dictate how people hang.

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm nodding emphatically about everything you said and wishing I was a male entrepreneur who lived in Los Angeles and joined the men's group because... My wife has a female version, by the way, so that gets together a little less frequently, but you can join that anytime. Okay, so I just have a move to Los Angeles. Put it on the list.

Because it's so hard as adults, and I'll answer the question about kids in a second, but it's so hard, especially if you don't, I don't have a religious background. I don't have a faith-based community. And I'm a freelancer, you know, and my husband works at a very small place as well. It's really hard, and I completely hear what you're saying, and I want to emphasize that rituals are important.

You know, we've lost a lot by having the disintegration. I mean, say what you will, about religion, but like from faith-based communities, but also the stuff that Robert Putnam writes about in Bowling Alone, how there used to be many, many, many, many, many more social clubs and social activities for adults in America. There's a great documentary called Join or Die that is about Robert Putnam's work

that I recommend people check out if they want to get more into this. And it is indeed so hard to always be the person organizing it and I was feeling that because that's me and my husband were always the ones organizing stuff. And one of my favorite rituals that I've had in my adult life is actually having a weekly music class for exactly the reason you're saying

is that something where you can show up, you don't have to organize it, you are around like-minded people, you get to let go of the rest of your life in the world. I know that you're saying you guys engage in the meaningful conversation about things that you're celebrating or struggling or working on. But you know what I mean? It's just a, it's an enclosed space and it's something that doesn't have to be planned. So I think adults are really

missing that. There are examples of this for young people, especially when it comes to phones. And one of my favorite examples of that is there's a young man named Sean Killingsworth, who's actually featured in the amazing generation. We've profiled a number of what we call young rebels who are young people, both in Gen Alpha, which is like the youngest generation, and Gen Z, who are actually trying to live their lives without being dominated by screens. And Sean is one of these young rebels. And he created a movement called Reconnect, which is a network of college clubs around the country

where students get together for an hour or two regularly, I think normally over the weekends, but, you know, college, whatever, whenever they do it. And they do things together without their phones. So that's the whole thing. They put their phones down. You know, sometimes they have something more formal, like they go hiking somewhere, they play a particular game,

but a lot of times, Sean said they just kind of hang out. And he said that that is a very unusual experience for people of his generation. He's 22 or 23 right now, because they haven't had that. Their adolescence was all spent on phones. And also, hugely depressingly, they have grown up in a world in which their peers are always on phones. So even if they're trying to be present,

often their peers are on screens. And so they just feel lonely. And so he's created this really, it's a simple idea, but such a powerful one, of helping students to create regular opportunities to get together without the distraction of smartphones. So for anyone who's got a college-age student in their life, really recommend checking out reconnect. And then I also think on the personal level, whether you're a parent of a younger kid or you want to do this for yourself, we can build more rituals into our own lives. So, for example, this digital Sabbath idea, there's a book called 246

by Tiffany Schlaen, which is about, she's a woman who founded the Webby Awards. Like she's very and she's a filmmaker, she's not a Luddite. Does she and her family for more than a decade have had weekly tech sabbaths? And part of their ritual is that on Friday night, they invite other people over to their home to share dinner together, which often happens in a religious context, but in this case,

they do it just to bring people together. She makes it simple. She says they always cook the same thing. They always have chicken and a particular bread, and then they ask guests to bring some side dishes and extra stuff to make the meal easy, so you're not hosting. And then they just have to have a particular bread. have a regular ritual of whoever can come over for those Friday night affairs comes over.

And it's something she did with her own kids through their childhoods until their teens. And it's just as a lovely example of how maybe you put work into setting it up the first couple times. But once it becomes a ritual, it becomes a beautiful part of your family life. And it becomes less work, but it gives you such meaning and so many memories. So I really encourage people to explore the idea, both of rituals you might already have and not even recognize that you have. and kind of honor them. And then also to think what other rituals

might I want to experiment with on my own as a family, you know, with my friends? On the side of practical things that we can all be doing, you have another framework that you shared for many years now, WWW, and it's an opportunity for us to have a reminder to actually see in this present moment,

are we actually needing technology or are we sort of in this loop where we are reactive to, you know, abusing technology? Can you break that framework down? Sure, yeah. I mean, how to break with your phone is kind of a mindfulness guide and disguise, and a lot of those messages are in the amazing generation as well, to kind of use technology as an opportunity to prompt ourselves to be more mindful of what we're doing in the moment

to make sure it's how we want to live our lives. Same thing I was talking about earlier in our conversation. So I realized that one of the main issues with our smartphones is that as everyone who's listening is probably experienced, we often end up with our phone on our hand and 45 minutes have passed and we've no idea of what just happened. And then, you know, I'd like that you keep talking about junk food because it's very, very similar to what happens with junk food.

You take one bite, one potato chip, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, the bags empty, what happened and I hate myself. That's like a bad combination. So I think that screen time, certain types of screen time are, it's very analogous to binging on junk food and it's designed to be bingeable. So how do we break that cycle in the context of screens?

Well, first you have to notice that you started, that you have a habit. If you don't know you have a habit, you can't change it. And so what I recommend people do is to start by getting a rubber band or a hair tie and putting it around your phone for a couple of days. And then when you reach for your phone on autopilot, which you will because it's an ingrained habit, you're going to notice there's something on your phone and you're going to be like, what the heck is that? Why is there a rubber band around my phone?

When that happens, that's when you can use it as a prompt to do this WWWW exercise that you mentioned. So that is short for what for, why now, what else? And I encourage people actually write those questions on a post-it note and take a picture of it and use it as your lock screen because you can actually remind yourself in the moment to do this. So what for is the first question? And that's quite simply ask yourself, what did I pick up my phone for? You know, what was my purpose?

Was I trying to buy something? Was I sending a particular email? Was I calling a person? Like, did I have a purpose? In many cases, you probably don't. But what was your purpose? Then ask yourself, why now? Why in this particular moment did you reach for your phone?

You know, sometimes it might be a true time-sensitive reason, like it's your friend's birthday and you wanted to call or text them. But a lot of times you're going to find out that there's actually an emotional reason behind this, that the why now is because you were feeling lonely or you're feeling anxious and you wanted to calm yourself down. Or you felt like you were bored with your task at hand and you wanted a distraction. So if you figure that out, you can then move out, so figure out what your brain is after, why now? Then you ask yourself, what else? What else can you do in that moment? You know, what else can you do, for example, to give yourself that reward that it was craving? If you felt lonely and you wanted a connection, maybe instead of scrolling on social media,

you could call a friend, use your phone for a real connection, call them, or go talk to a coworker or whatever. If you need a distraction, maybe go for a little walk outside. Like you're saying, nature's guaranteed to make you feel better if you go outside. Do that instead of doing a scrolling session. When you ask yourself what else, you might also discover that you want to do nothing for a little bit, which is, I think, a really wonderful thing to offer yourself regularly as the chance to just sit, just be, observe the world around you, give your brain a break from this fire hose of information and content that we are flooding ourselves with constantly. So personally, I make a point if I'm, I live in Philadelphia, like if I'm in an Uber or a lift ride,

of looking out the window and trying not to look at my phone. And I will say I've had two separate drivers ask me if I'm okay because it looks so weird to them. and I was like, I'm fine. I was just looking at a cloud. So be prepared, you might get a response. But it can be really calming to do that. And then the last possible response to what else is you might say, I don't want to do anything else.

I want to be on my phone right now, even if it is mindless scrolling. And that's totally fine. So the point of this what for, why now, what else exercise isn't to say the screen time is bad, is just to make sure that when you're on your phone, it's because you chose to use it, not because you've been manipulated by a company into picking it up. You know, my audience, as I mentioned to you, previously is probably about like 70, 75% women.

One of the things that I've heard from them and my sisters who helped me with this podcast as well, too, as you focus on getting healthy, you want health for everyone. And I think there's also a contextual conversation, which is a lot of women that are listening today. They also care about championing and advocating for the health of other women, especially young women. And I think one of the things, and not that the men that are listening don't feel that way, they feel that way too. But in particular, it's okay for people to feel like they want to champion and want to make the world a better place, especially for people that they might have, you know,

shared and related experiences with that are there. So I don't think that all of our audience fully knows about this, but can you talk about why social media in particular is, seems to be having more of a hijacking effect on the brain. of young women, if I understood that correctly, either in terms of the damage, the usage, boys and girls, all kids are impacted by this. But what would you want to say to the women who are listening in particular today who are like, who may not be aware about how young women are being impacted by this? And why it's so important to be a rebel who is part of this fight protecting everybody,

boys and girls, but especially if I got the information right in particular, and correct me if I'm wrong if I didn't, there seems to be something unique that might be going on even more so for young women that we all have to be even more so on the lookout for. Yeah, yeah, I would say social media is affecting both boys and girls, but yes, the research does suggest that girls are responding more negatively with bigger, you know, the effects on them are larger than on boys. With that said, I came across a startling and disturbing number of young men who said they had developed eating disorders or body dysmorphia as a result of the time they spent on social media, so I don't want to discount that.

But I do think that research is showing there is something different about young woman. And, you know, what comes to mind for me is that when I was growing up and I was a teenager in the 90s, I had plenty of issues with my own body and self-hatred issues and just comparing myself to pictures in magazines and on bus stops. I grew up in New York City, and I went to a school where there were a lot of very attractive, you know, like one of my classmates was actually chosen as like the model of the year for YM magazine out of the whole country. Like it was, you know, it was that type of environment and there were a lot of eating disorders, which was hard. But I think it's so much harder now, you know.

I was comparing myself to pictures and magazines. I wasn't comparing myself and it was a limited, you know, it was like once a month or like in a catalog or something. It wasn't having a device in my pocket for social comparison and body comparison. And it certainly was not what's happening now. To back up for a second, I think an important thing for adults to recognize about what's happening today on social media is that if you're on social media yourself, your feed is nothing like your daughters or your granddaughters or any young women's because the algorithms are designed to create completely personalized feeds for each person. My feed is all about screen time and kids and like events in Philadelphia. I don't scroll through it anyway, but it's pretty harmless. that's not the case for young people who start using these platforms. And there have been interesting expos days done by various news organizations that have

created bot accounts to pose as in some cases like 13-year-old girls. And they don't have much information. It'll basically be like, well, this will relate to your audience. Say it's a young user, quote-unquote, who's interested in healthy living, quote-unquote. There was an expose done by the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago where they programmed a bot to do that. And so that bot kind of paused on content shown by TikTok that had to do with healthy eating. But it took very little time before instead of showing articles about like, hey, maybe reduce your sugar consumption.

Instead of showing videos about anorexia, how to, you know, force yourself to vomit, how to go on extreme diets, showing skeletal images of people. It gets very, very dark very quickly. And so I really want to emphasize that like the content that kids are being shown on social media is, incredibly disturbing and having a huge impact on their mental health. And that's not even getting into the fact that that's from creators they don't know that's just being fed to them by the algorithm. You also have social comparison with the people they do know. So you've got a situation where all of your classmates are on social media and everyone is commenting on everyone's photos. And any teen girl will tell you, I mean, also anyone who saw the show adolescence,

that really disturbing show that aired last year that tell you that adults don't understand the codes in those comments, what all the emojis mean, you know, the subtle things about who you're including in the caption or who's in your Snapchat group. There is so much social comparison, social exclusion, social messaging that's going on in these apps that young women in particular often end up in a situation where, as many have said to me, it becomes a full-time job just to try to manage what's happening online, manage their social relationship, online. And going back to our discussion about Discover and Defend mode, that is quintessential defend mode. How can you possibly be present in your real life, care about schoolwork, care about

your hobbies, you know, be present in anything if you were constantly worried about what is happening online and how you're being perceived online. And you feel this pressure to keep posting online and be present there. So it's truly horrifying, actually. And I think that anyone who's got a young woman in their life needs to recognize that this is probably happening to some degree if they're on one of platforms and that honestly they also may be being approached by creepy strangers like the the amount of like sex torsion which is basically adults who are asking kids to send naked photos of themselves online and then demanding money in exchange for not sharing those with their friends and family it is horrifying it is a huge it's an entire category of crime so all that is to say yes there is a difference

for young woman even though it's certainly not unproblematic for young men and i think there are differences that adults of my generation and your listeners generation we can't fully understand because this is completely different from what we grew up with, but we need to take it seriously. It is very serious, and we need to take action, collective action as adults to help protect the young people in our lives. You know, in any area, including junk food, unhealthy habits, and this topic, there's that balancing act between, you know, nobody's coming to save us. We have to be an advocate for ourselves and our own family, first and foremost, right? Because nobody's going to know better than what's going on there. So that's that personal responsibility

in a powerful way that, hey, there's a lot that we can all do today for ourselves. And then also, if you have kids and or if you're an uncle or an aunt or, you know, your grandkids, whatever might be, there's a lot that we can do for ourselves and there's a lot that we can do for our family, right? And that's a lot of what we've been talking about in this conversation so far. Then on the sort of other side of the conversation is also where can we be using public advocacy to inspire change at all different levels. One of the most popular ones that have happened since Jonathan wrote his book is you have a lot more schools that have come out there and said, hey, listen, you got to check your phone in and we're going to create a phone-free environment

inside of a school. So we're not even going to give the kids the opportunity to be having their smartphones. And I don't know how many schools to date worldwide have done that, but it seems like more and more every single day I'm hearing about those. there's at least 40 states that have enacted, or maybe not active, but have some sort of phone-free school legislation in the works, not necessarily from bell to bell, which is the ideal to have a whole day phone-free, but 40 state, that's amazing.

I mean, yeah, John and I are Cozzi, like, how, it's just amazing to see the speed at which this has happened. What are other things like that in this battle, in this good versus evil opportunity of fight that we're highlighting on today's podcast? What are other things like that, that you would want to see at least people having a honest discussion about potentially implementing. So going back to what you were saying about this, coming down to us personally, there is a lot we can do

personally, both for ourselves and our kids. And I would suggest that if you want one thing to start doing and you have kids in your life, the amazing generation is meant so you could read it with your kids, and you could actually ask them to read it with you and ask them to help you with your phone habits, which is a little bit subversive, but I think very effective as a way to get the playing field to feel more level and get your kids buy in to have a conversation. So on the personal level, I think that can be really helpful. With that said, it's really not fair that this is all on parents and adults to deal with. It's really not fair.

There's very, very little regulation of any of these products by the government. And of course, there's a balance to be struck in how much regulation is a good thing. But I would say that people should be aware that there are a number of fights going on right now to try to get better legislation, better regulations in place to protect kids' safety online and to make the internet a better and safer place for all of us. The main bill that protects kids online is the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which was passed in 1998. So it's really old. And there is an updated version of this bill that almost was voted on last year by the house, but it was not. And now there's variations on it being circulated. It's called the, well, the name may change,

but the Kids Online Safety Act, COSA, and for all your listeners who do want to become involved in a political sense, these are really good bills that have bipartisan support. Like the version that didn't end up getting voted on by the House, it was passed by the Senate, 91 to 3. What these days possibly has that kind of support? And I think it's actually a really beautiful example

about people wanting to come together to do something good for the world, and in this case it's to protect kids. So I think that if you hear just, discussions about legislation, look into it and, you know, look at anxious generation.com, for example, to kind of get guidance on which ones are the good bills and support them. You know, if you find one of these, like actually call your representative and tell them that you want them, they're your senator, to support it because that they need to hear it. And I'll also say to be aware that

big tech is lobbying like crazy to try not to have regulations. It's really gross, honestly. And so I think that there's a lot of room for political activism. You can also support the young people in your life who are trying to change things. You know, like Sean's group, the Reconnect Movement, there's another young woman named Gabriella Nguyen who has something called abstinence.org where she's encouraging young people

to get off social media entirely. You could also support school boards that are considering going phone-free because a lot of times the pushback is from parents who are worried about violence habit, like school shootings, honestly, and they want their kids to have phones in that kick. but safety experts say that that's not actually making school safer.

In fact, the biggest risk to students in many cases, safety-wise in the school day, is fights with other students that often are instigated because kids are recording them to post online. And a lot of schools that have gone phone-free have actually found that their disciplinary issues have been greatly reduced because now there's no reason to get in a fight because it's not going to be on TikTok. So think about that and how upsetting that is. But anyway, there's a lot of stuff you can do to support new rules. rules or regulations or honestly societal norms that don't have anything to do with regulations by banning together with other parents and other grandparents and saying we want something

different for our kids and for ourselves. There's a lot that we can do. And I can honestly say that I feel more optimistic about this than I have at any point during the past 10 years. There's a lot more threats right now when it comes to even more addictive and disturbing algorithms, not to mention AI and relationships that they're coming on the scene. But with that said, there are is a conversation now. There is a movement, you know, around the world, things are happening. And the schools that have gone phone free are reporting amazing results. So I'm actually more hopeful for my daughter's generation than I think I ever have been. It's great to see young people, especially using a lot of these tools that are out there that

can lead to so many beautiful things. Like, I can't tell you how many friends were able to start, you know, incredible businesses through the power of social media and YouTube and other And I know you agree with this is that there's a great potential to use these things as tools to spread ideas, messages, bring people together. But it's only when we really understand what their limitations are and what the tradeoffs are when we use them unchecked, which is what your work is about, which is what Jonathan's work is about. And I can be more excited. You know, I don't have a young one myself in this age bracket to read this to, but as soon as I do, and even I was reading this and I was like, I need to read this book with my wife

because we both find ourselves in these moments where we've gotten a little bit out of sync in terms of what our ideal is. So even when I was reading the amazing generation myself in preparation of interviewing you, I was like, you know what? This is such an easy read. It's one of those things where tonight, let me just, me and my wife can read it together

and just as a reminder for us, you know, it's written in a way that is so easily translatable to, you know, these young adults, tweens, I guess you would call them. But it applies to really any age group that's out there. And sometimes, you know, you can give an adult a book and they'll see it and it's long and amazing. And they might think, oh, I'm not going to read it. But this is super digestible, super easy. So whether you have kids, grandkids, whether your auntie, uncle, whatever it is,

or whether you want to just pick it up yourself. We have the link in the show notes, and congratulations to you guys for furthering along this movement. It's an important battle, and it's right up there with all of the things that we talk about with our audience,

you know, junk light, being the newest best dose, junk food and high fructose corn syrup and all the things that are out there that we want to put restrictions on for our own family. Otherwise, we'll end up with all sorts of, you know,

chronic diseases, loss of purpose, loss of health, loss of happiness. So I appreciate you being a huge advocate for so many years in this category, and I thank you for coming on the show to educate our audience. Oh, thank you so much for having me.

This truly has been a delight, and I'm so touched to hear that you've enjoyed the amazing generation for yourself. That's my dream, and it just makes me even more excited for this book to get out in the world and into people's hands. So thank you so much.

I believe by the time this podcast will be out, the book is out there, or it's coming out very soon, and link is in the show notes, So please check it out. The Amazing Generation, your guide to fun and freedom in a screen-filled world. Who doesn't want that? Catherine Price, thank you so much for being on the Drew Prod Show.

Thank you so much. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you

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