Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #190 BITESIZE | Transform Your Life with a Digital Detox | Cal Newport

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Digital technology is slowly eroding downtime from our lives. The constant flow of digital noise is affecting our ability to be alone with our thoughts, to focus, and to cultivate authentic relationships. Is it time for a digital detox?   Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.   Today’s clip is from episode 50 of the podcast with Professor of computer science and author of the book ‘Digital Minimalism’, Cal Newport.   In this clip, Cal explains how our digital interactions are pulling us away from real-world connections and activities, and the effect this is having on our attention, our health and our relationships. He gives some brilliant tips on how to declutter your digital world and pursue more meaningful connections. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore   Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/50   Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 50 of the podcast with professor of computer science and author of the book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport. In this clip, Cal explains how our digital interactions are pulling us away from real world connections and activities and the effects this is having on our attention, our health and our relationships. He gives some brilliant tips on how to declutter

your digital world and pursue more meaningful connections. I'm just getting that sense more and more that people are aware now that actually digital media, for all its perceived benefits, there have been some unintended consequences. I'm meeting more and more people now who are choosing to go offline for a significant part of their recreational time, their personal time, their downtime. I've been writing about these issues for many, many years. It was really right around that 2016 that I really began to notice this shift where people were going from telling self-deprecating jokes about how much they look at their phone to actually starting to get concerned

about the impact of those phones and their ability to thrive as human beings. It became clear the next frontier to tackle when it comes to the intersection of technology and culture was going to be what's happening in our personal lives and in our quest to live meaningful and satisfied existences. How are new digital and online tools played in this particular arena? We're sort of filling every bit of downtime with noise,

and so therefore solitude and the ability to just self-reflect and daydream. These things are sort of being removed from society slowly and insidiously. And you think this is having a negative impact, don't you? Never before in the history of the human species have we really had the capability of banishing every moment of solitude from our day. I mean, this required technological miracles that basically be possible. We had to cover the entire world with high-speed, ubiquitous, wireless internet access, design these sort of semi-magical devices

that could fit in your pocket and connect to this and at any moment give you any number of distractions or connections or thoughts from other minds. I mean, it took really technological miracles to even try this experiment of can we banish every moment of solitude from our lives. If you strip away from people any time where they're free from input from other minds, if you strip that out of your life, it's not good. You're not able to process what's going on. You're not able to self-reflect and your brain begins to burn out.

And there's also the really big impact that digital interactions do not play the same role in our mind that actual real-world conversation does. So people who spend more time doing digital interactions spend less time doing real-world conversations because they feel like, oh, I'm already checking that box. I'm being social. Look, I'm on Facebook all day. But our brain doesn't agree that those are the same things. And so people are becoming increasingly lonely and increasingly anxious and depressed as they use social media more. It's because it's replacing the stuff that was keeping them from being lonely. So there's the big picture issue of autonomy and then a bunch of small scale acute wounds that this behavior is causing. What I'm sort of talking about, what you're talking about is trying to get back to what

existed in the world not that long ago. Yeah, we're not talking that far back in history. What we're doing today that feels so fundamental is so new. It's so arbitrary. And it can be hard because it's like a fish that doesn't know what water is because it's always been all around it. This notion that you're constantly checking a screen that's delivering sort of algorithmically selected news and intermittently reinforced social approval indicators. This is like so arbitrary that to a time traveler from 15 years ago, it might even look dystopian.

We just became used to it because it gradually slipped up on us. And actually, most people, as you mentioned earlier, it's not like they signed up for this. I mean if you bought an iPhone in 2007, you didn't buy it because you're like, I want to check this thing 85 times a day. I mean you put it up – the music player was beautiful, right? You signed up for Facebook in 2004 like a lot of my friends did. They're like, this is a novelty. Mainly I'm just kind of interested in what the relationship status is of various people at my school. You've got 20 minutes of time a week, right?

This idea that you would check it on Facebook all day long. No one signed up for that, right? This idea that you would check it on Facebook all day long, like no one signed up for that, right? I mean, this is stuff that emerged over time. And so now we're in this weird state where to an observer from 15 years ago, to Steve Jobs from 2007, is almost horrifying. And I think we're just starting to realize that like, oh, this isn't fundamental. This is actually a lot weirder than we thought. I mean, we're just too used to it, but this is weird what we're doing right now. It has allowed us to actually avoid having to invest the time and resources necessary to develop more high quality leisure activities. But it turns out we really need higher quality leisure activities. This is

an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle writing the Nicomedean Ethics, that we need activities done just for the activity's sakes if we want to be able to find joy and beauty in a life that's often full of, you know, hardships and things that we can't control. So we have this craving for quality and it creates a void if we don't have it in our life. But we have these constant distractions that can distract us just enough that we can tolerate not having this quality in our life. And I think this is causing real issues in people's resilience and happiness.

And then the second issue of all these sort of quick interactions is that we're unable to actually focus on a moment. So a social interaction, actually get all the benefit out of that social interaction or being outside with a beautiful sunset, actually fully extracting all the beauty that we've evolved to appreciate and enjoy. And so in multiple ways, it's impoverishing our daily experience of life. In some ways, this is really about purpose, isn't it? It's about what is the meaning and purpose in your life? What do you want to achieve?

What brings you happiness? What gives you your values? And therefore, how does technology support that? This is a message of hope, isn't it? You're saying that actually we can do things about this and it maybe is not as tricky as we think it might be. But I ran this experiment last January where I had 1,600 people

leave all of their optional technologies in their personal life for 30 days as part of doing it to clutter to transform into a minimalist lifestyle. By the time they got to the end of the 30 days and they had done the self-work to get comfortable with their mind and they had put in the effort necessary to cultivate some high-quality analog activities, by the time they got to the end of just 30 days, they had largely lost their taste for a lot of that low quality digital, mindless tapping and swiping. And so it seems like a very attractable problem. But the solution might actually be closer in the temporal sense that most people might actually guess. Okay, so people did this, and did they find it difficult to cut these things out of their life? People reported it was hard for somewhere between seven to 14 days, and then it got less difficult. One young woman, for example, said she was so used to checking stuff on her phone that after she took off all these

apps from her phone at the beginning of the declutter, what she found herself doing was compulsively checking the weather app because this was the last thing on her phone that actually had updated information. It actually had information you could check. And she said for the first week, she could tell you like hourly updates on the weather in a dozen major cities around the country because she just had this compulsive need. I need to see information. But the same young woman said by day 10, there was no problem. And then the important thing was it wasn't just that you were detoxing.

That's sort of the beginning of the declutters. You detox from the compulsive need to use these technologies. Where the real value starts to come in is that you're also supposed to use this as a period of reflection to figure out what's important to me and also to rediscover alternative analog activities. And it was really this latter thing, the alternative analog activities that made a really big difference. And this was a surprise for me. As people rediscovered the type of analog activities they used to love, they correspondingly found that their taste for low-quality digital distraction began to diminish.

This sounds like a really key point. So it's not just reducing the use of the technology, it's finding alternatives. I guess what you're saying, is this what you mean when you're talking about high quality leisure activities? Is this kind of in a nutshell what you're teaching these people to do? Yeah. So things that you do just for the sake of doing it, just for the enjoyment of doing it. And the more that it actually has a component of socializing or skill to it, it tends to be the more value that people get out of it. And so this was really the secret sauce to the clutter was you figure out, OK, here's what is really important to me. And then second, you match those to some analog activities, right? OK, this is really important to me, so I'm going to go do this. I'm going to join this community group.

I really enjoy – like fitness and health is important. I'm going to join the football – the pickup football team or whatever it is, right? the pickup football team or whatever it is. It's this value-driven, high-quality analog activity. This is what it seems like – and again, this was a surprise to me. It's like this is what all these billions of dollars were invested in trying to trick us out of indifferent getting. This whole attention – digital attention economy is largely based on let's push that out of people's lives and then we'll be the thing that fills the void. And so to the point now that after this experiment, I changed the way I talk about this to people.

I say, you know what? You could make this much easier if you actually spend some time before you do the declutter. Start with the analog, right? Because if you already have those in place, you're actually going to find the stepping away from the technology piece much easier. And so that's one of the lessons I learned and was surprised by that particular experiment. Don't underestimate how much positive return you're going to get just by simply saying, I'm in control. I'm making choices that are based on my values. That's going to carry you much, much farther than the little occasional inconveniences or missed value that that intentionality is going to incur. Yeah, Cal, that's so profound. I've written that down, actually.

Intentionality trumps convenience. I'm going to be pondering that, I think, for the next few hours. There's something really powerful in that. And just hearing that phrase has already had an impact on me. So thank you for that. Can you leave the listener with some top tips that they might think about applying in their own life? Well, if you're interested in digital minimalism, I mean, I'm convinced the most effective way to make this transformation is to do something like the 30-day digital declutter. But if you're looking to experiment with it a little bit before taking that plunge, there's a few small things you can do right away that are going to give you big results. any app in which someone makes money every time you click on it.

So transform your smartphone into a useful device that does not have those tempting distractions. So I'm not asking you to quit anything yet. You still have access to all of those new feeds and social media through your browser. I'm just getting rid of the ability to check those at any moment. So that could have a big effect. The second small tip that gives a big reward is start engineering more occasions in your daily life in which you do things without your phone. This can be scary at first, so maybe you want to start small, like I'm going to the corner store and back, but try to have more and more occasions of longer and longer times where you are just

without your phone. It's just you and your mind out there encountering the world that's going to give you huge benefits. And third, right away, start systematically cultivating those type of high quality analog activities we've been talking about again and again. Put those back in your life. Few things are more effective in reducing your taste for the unnecessary

or low quality digital distraction and then having these type of high qualityquality pursuits, right? High-quality leisure. So take any app off your phone. There are people make money when you click on it. Go places without your phone. Start adding back high-quality analog leisure. This will get you a long way towards minimalism while you're still pondering whether or not the declutter is right for you. And hopefully that'll give you a strong enough experience that you'll go all in and make the final transition to this type of lifestyle. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest? And if you enjoyed

this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe

and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.