Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #228 Johann Hari on How To Reclaim Your Attention

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

CAUTION: Contains swearing and themes of an adult nature.   Why have we lost our ability to focus? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back? Today’s guest and author of the brilliant new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, went on a three-year journey to uncover the reasons why our teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers on average manage only three minutes. Johann Hari interviewed more than 200 leading experts in the world on attention, and learned that everything we think about this subject is wrong.  We think our inability to focus is a personal failing – a flaw in each one of us. It is not. Johann argues that this has been done to all of us by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. He discovered there are twelve causes of our modern-day attention crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In this conversation, Johann explains some of those key causes and importantly he shares the steps that we need to take, both individually but also collectively as a society, to get our attention back.   This is such an important topic. Our ability to focus and pay attention plays a crucial role in every aspect of our life: reaching our goals, maintaining close relationships, thinking deeply, as well as our ability to be kind, compassionate and empathetic. Our ability to pay attention is at the very heart of living a happy and meaningful life.   This is a thoroughly engaging conversation and Johann has a unique gift for storytelling. I think you will really enjoy listening. Thanks to our sponsors:   https://www.leafyard.com/livemore   https://www.blublox.com/livemore   http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version and US & Canada version   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/227   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. 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.

It's not that your attention collapsed. Your attention has been stolen from you by very big forces and to get our attention back we have to understand what's happening. We have to protect our minds and our children's minds and we have to do that by taking on the forces that are destroying our attention and focus. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. So here we are, second episode of the year. How is 2022 going for you so far? Are you back in the swing of things yet? I have to say quickly that I have been blown away to the amazing feedback to last week's podcast episodes with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Thank you to all of you who took a bit of time to listen to

the episodes and then also took time to share the episode with your family, with your friends, and also on social media. I really, really appreciate it. So from Andrew Huberman to a previous favourite on this podcast, Mr. Johan Hari. Now, long-time listeners of this show will know that Johan first appeared on my podcast all the way back on episode 95, where he shared what he had learned about the true causes of depression whilst researching his brilliant book Lost Connections. Now the occasion for his second appearance on my show is the publication of his brand new book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention. Johan has been on a three-year journey to uncover the reasons why our teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers on average manage only three

minutes. He interviewed some of the leading experts around the world on attention and learns that a lot of how we think about this problem is plain wrong. So what if I was to ask you about your own focus? Do you struggle? Is it getting worse than it used to be? Do you think that you know the cause? Well, whatever your answer, I would recommend that you stay tuned because I think you're going to learn a lot about some possible causes that you may not have thought about yet. Many of us think that our inability to focus is a personal failing, a flaw in every single one of us, but it isn't. Johan argues that this has actually been done to us by powerful external forces. As the title of his book says, our focus has been stolen. Johan has discovered that there are 12 main causes of our modern day

attention crisis. And in our conversation, Johan explains some of those key causes. And importantly, he shares the simple steps that we need to think about taking, both individually, but also collectively as a society to get our attention back. Now, before we get into the conversation, I want to share with you why I think this is such an important topic. This is not just about being able to focus better so that you can be more productive at work. Sure, better attention will help with that, but this actually goes much, much deeper. Our ability to focus and pay attention plays a crucial role in our ability to reach our goals in life, in our ability to maintain deep, nourishing relationships with others,

but also with our ability to have a good and meaningful relationship with ourselves. It also plays a role in our ability to think deeply, to be kind, compassionate and empathetic. In short, our ability to pay attention is at the heart of living a happy and meaningful life. It's always a pleasure to sit down face to face with Johan. Not only is he a passionate and engaging character, he also has a quite unique gift for storytelling. I am quite certain that you are going to enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Mr. Johan Hari. you won't know this, but the advanced copy came to me a few months ago and, you know, I started reading it. Within five or 10 minutes, I thought, I'm going to love this. I'm already loving it. I just know this is right up my streets. And then my son took it. Like for two months, I'd go into

his room in the evening. He's reading Stolen Focus in bed, right? And he is 11 years old. So you didn't write it, I don't think, for kids, but that has certainly been some of his bedtime reading. Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. That's so exciting. And this morning over breakfast, because I always love to chat to the kids over breakfast, and I said, Daddy, who's coming to the house today?

I said, oh, Johan's coming, Johan Hari. And they were like, okay, great, great. Is it Zoom or is it in person? I said, Daddy, he's coming. He's coming, Johan Hari. And I'm like, okay, great, great. Is it Zoom or is it in person? I said, no, no, he's coming. He's coming to the studio. I said, son, before you go, what's one thing you remember from Johan's book? And we literally had a minute

before he had to leave for school. I guess I just remember, is it something like 90 or 92% of car accidents are because of distracted attention or because of phones. That's a key thing that he remembers. That's so interesting. And it's fascinating talking to people who read the book, because one of the things I learned in the process of writing the book is I believe there is now convincing evidence that we have a global attention crisis. This is a serious problem, which is significantly worse

than it was for previous generations. So there's lots of ways we know this, but there's 12 factors that have been proven to affect people's focus and attention. And there's good evidence that lots of those factors are getting worse and worse. I'm sure we're going to talk about lots of them. And it's been interesting talking to people who read the book, because different people are really picking up on different aspects of that. Precis precisely because this is a complex problem with complex causes and that require complex solutions it's been fascinating to see different people kind of responding to different aspects of it in different ways but I think most people can feel the truth of of what's happening to us you know there, there's, for example, one small study found that the average college student now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds. In fact, the median amount of time

they focus is 19 seconds. And the average office worker now focuses for three minutes. So it's like we're living in a culture that is pouring itching powder over us all the time. We can feel this dissolution happen. With each year that passes, things that require deep focus, like reading a book, become more and more like running up and down an escalator. And I wanted to figure out, well, why is this happening to us? Particularly, why is this happening to our kids? It was actually something that happened with a young person I love that really spurred, which we can talk about if you want, that really spurred me to start actually researching this. Why is this happening to us? And most importantly, how do we get our minds back? How do we restore our attention and focus?

What is happening to our kids, I think, concerns many parents, because we sort of feel it happening to ourselves, that we can't focus as much as we used to. You know, that's a beautiful analogy. Reading a book can sometimes feel like running up a down escalator. I think that's a beautiful way to put it. I think who doesn't know that feeling when they're sat there trying to do something and they're just getting diverted to other things and they're not able to do what they want. So why don't you tell us about, you know, one of these young folk in your life,

you beautifully write about it in the book, but I think that's a great starting point. You know, it's funny, Ron, because for years I've been thinking of writing about this and I put it off for lots of reasons. I think one of them is I kind of, partly I was a bit scared of the subject, but also I would reassure myself by saying, yeah, but every generation of human beings thinks this is happening.

Every generation, they get older, their brains deteriorate a bit and they mistake the deterioration of their brain for the deterioration of the world. You can read letters between monks almost a thousand years ago where they say to each other, oh, my attention ain't what it used to be. That's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of what they what they said but there was a moment when i thought i need to figure out if this is just the normal anxiety or if some deeper problem is going on here and it started for me so i've got a godson when he was nine years old he i never quite understood why but he developed a freakishly intense obsession

with elvis for about two weeks in the way that nine-year-olds do right and it was so cute because old. I never quite understood why, but he developed a freakishly intense obsession with Elvis for about two weeks in the way that nine-year-olds do, right? And it was so cute because he didn't know this had become like a cheesy cliche. So he was singing like Viva Las Vegas with all the kind of heart-catching sincerity of a little boy who thinks he's being cool. And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis again and again and again. And I kind of tried to skip over the final act where it all goes wrong for Elvis. But one night when I was tucking him in, he looked at me very intensely and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I was like, yeah, yeah. And the way

that you just tell children, you know, they're going to forget it a week later. And he said, no, do you really promise that one day you will take me to Graceland. And I said, absolutely, I promise. And I didn't think of it again until everything had gone wrong. So 10 years later, Adam, he dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he was just, he seemed to spend all his waking hours alternating between WhatsApp, YouTube and porn. He was constantly flicking between devices. It was very hard to get him to stay with the subject along. He was a very decent, kind and intelligent person, but it's like his mind was whirring at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still or serious could stay with him. And one day we were sitting on our sofas and I was

thinking, and I was watching him like this, and I was looking at my own phone much more than I wanted to. And I looked at him and I thought, God, in the decade in which he's become a man, it feels like this fracturing has happened to so many of us. And I looked at him and I suddenly remembered this moment 10 years before. And I said to him, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what do you mean? And I'm like, he didn't even remember this Elvis obsession. I was like, no, we're going to go to Graceland. he was like what do you mean and I'm like he didn't even remember this Elvis obsession I was like no we're gonna go to Graceland we'll go all over the south we've got to break this numbing routine but you've got to promise one thing which is if I take you you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day you won't be checking it all the time and I could see it sort of excited something in me said yes I'll do it so we two weeks later we

flew we went to New Orleans first and when we got to graceland so when you arrive at the gates of graceland this is even before covid um there isn't a guide to show you around anymore what happens is they hand you an ipad and you put in earbuds and the ipad shows you around so it says you know go left in this room this happened go right and in every room you into, there's a digital representation of that room on the iPad. So we're walking around Graceland and I'm noticing that what's happened is everyone is walking around just staring at their iPad, right? They're all just looking down at the screen. And I'm trying to make eye contact with them to go like, oh, isn't this funny? You know, we're the people who traveled 3000 miles and looked around us, right? And one guy, finally, I made eye contact with someone. And then I realized he'd only looked away from the iPad

to take out his phone and take a selfie. And I was like, oof. So we're walking around and I'm getting more and more like, there's something tension building in me. And we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's a fake jungle with like sagging, slightly sagging fake plants that have seen better days.

And we're in there and there's a couple canadian couple who were next to us and the guy turned to his wife and he said honey look this is amazing if you swipe left you can see the jungle room to the left and if you swipe right you can see the jungle room to the right and i sort of looked at him and i literally i laughed right because i thought he was joking and then his wife starts swiping back oh yeah and i said to him but sir there's there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do it's called turning your head because we're actually in the jungle room right you don't have to look at a digital representation of it we're actually there and they like sort of understandably thought i was a lunatic and sort of backed away

and just left the room and i turned to my godson to laugh about it. And he was just standing in a corner going through Snapchat. Because from the minute we landed, he just had not been able to keep his promise. He was constantly on his phone. And I just got really angry. And I just said, you know, you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing you will miss out, right? You're not present at the events of your life. And he sort of stomped off. So I spent the afternoon wandering around Graceland on my own. And that night I went to the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying and I found him by the swimming pool, which is shaped like a guitar. And he was sitting where they play Elvis songs in a loop. And he was looking at his phone and he just said,

I know something is really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to figure out what's happening here. So for the next three years, I ended up traveling all over the world, interviewing more than 200 of the leading experts in the world about what causes focus and attention to grow and what causes them to deteriorate. in the world about what causes focus and attention to grow and what causes them to deteriorate. And just, it was partly meeting just experts everywhere from Miami to Moscow to Montreal, and also just going to places that have been very affected by tension in different ways, from a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way,

to an office in New Zealand, where they'd found an amazing way to restore people's attention. So it was really fascinating to start to look at this from all sorts of angles and directions and to realise it's not that your attention collapsed. Your attention has been stolen from you by very big forces. And to get our attention back, we have to understand what's happening and we have to respond in a variety of ways that are different to what we're doing now there's so many things about the story with your godson you just mentions one of the things you said was something's happened in the past decade And that really struck me because, you know, you saw a kid with wonder and awe about Elvis and this kind of fantasy, this dream, hey, one day we're going to go to Graceland. And then in the 10 years that followed, something happened.

Of course, kids grow up, kids, you know, they get new interests. But it's not that, is it? There's something more toxic and insidious that has happened there. The other thing that really struck me about that story was when you said you were there at Graceland and he couldn't keep the promise that you'd made to you. I bet he wanted to. I bet he wanted to with all this heart keep that promise. But he couldn't, could he? I think you're totally right.

That's a really good way of putting it. Because he definitely was sincere. He wasn't lying. Yeah. And he was quite crestfallen that he couldn't keep this promise. And it was fascinating because, of course, it's tempting. We've got two quite simplistic stories about attention when we see this sort of problem, right? One is just to see it as purely a personal

failing, which is how I thought about it in relation to myself. When I couldn't focus, I'd go into a sort of recriminatory dialogue with myself. I'd be like, you're lazy, you're weak, you're not good enough. And we sort of do that with when we see kids that can't focus. We sort of go, what's wrong with this child? Why are they being like this? So that's one story to see it as personal failing. And the other story, which is also overly simplistic, although it contains some truth, unlike the other one, is to see it just as a result of the rise of smartphones, right? It's like, oh, I would say to myself, oh, my phone came along and hijacked me, right? It just took me over. And actually what I learned is something more specific than that is happening and something more complex than that. So when it

comes to tech, what's been done to us is more interesting than just the technology arrived. It's something specific about the technology that I'm sure we'll talk about that's doing this to us or that's primarily responsible for doing this to us and then i learned which was the thing that was much more surprising even than that that actually tech isn't the biggest cause of these problems i don't think in fact there's 12 factors tech is a big one this specific element of tech is a big one but actually it's only one aspect and probably not the most significant so it was really fascinating to realize there's a much more complex picture going on here than just a personal failing or a single new invention. Yeah. And I think your book does just a wonderful job at exploring an issue that is arguably

one of the most important issues that we face. I really think it is, right? And I'll tell you why I think it is and why I think your book is probably going to be one of the most important books in 2022. Because an inability to focus, like to me, it goes beyond, oh, I can't concentrate on this work project I'm trying to do, right? Yes, that can be frustrating, or someone wants to read a book in their leisure time. So they sit there for an hour and they keep rereading the same page, flicking to Twitter, flicking to email, whatever, right? Most people have been in that position at one time or other. Not everyone, of course, but many of us. But it goes beyond that for me, right? Our ability to focus and put our attention where we want it to be, I think it's literally what underpins

our experience of being human, our relationships, our passions, our hobbies, our interactions with others, our ability to know who we are. We need focus to be able to do that. Yet focus is something that very few of us have in the way that we would ideally want. I think that's so important. The more I looked at this, the more I realized this is the foundational issue. If we don't deal with this, we can't deal with anything else. I think there's sort of two levels to that. One is there's just a purely personal level, right? If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals in life. If anyone thinks about a time you've achieved a goal, right? Whether it

was being a good parent, setting up a business, writing a book, whatever it might be, that goal required a lot of sustained focus, right? If your focus breaks down, and I think there's good evidence our focus is breaking down, you're less able to achieve your goals for yourself, right? Which obviously is a very painful thing for a person to experience. Also, you're less able to achieve your goals for yourself, right? Which obviously is a very painful thing for a person to experience. Also, you're less able to form connections with other people. Sustained connections require lots of attention. To have a good relationship, you have to be able to pay attention, whether it's a friendship, a romantic relationship, whatever it is. You have to be able to pay attention to the other person. There's another layer to that, which I think is as important, which is a collective layer, which is what happens to a

society where most of its members are losing the ability to focus and pay attention. That becomes a society where collective problem solving, where collective achievement of goals begins to break down. I don't think it's a coincidence. There are clearly lots of reasons. I don't want to be simplistic about it, but I don't think it's a coincidence. There are clearly lots of reasons. I don't want to be simplistic about it, but I don't think it's a coincidence that this attention crisis is happening at the same time as one of the biggest crises in democracy, certainly the biggest crises in democracy in our lifetimes, right? A society of people who can't focus will be drawn to simplistic solutions, angry solutions, won't be able to follow through on things. And I think we're seeing that. So there's both those levels.

100%. And I'm sort of picking at your book because I underline this. And I think the most important line in this book is on page 12. People who can't focus will be drawn to simplistic, People who can't focus will be drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions and less likely to see clearly when they fail. I sat and reflected on that because at the moment we're recording this in December 2021. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the world. There's all kinds of different opinions on how we should be best dealing with COVID, let's say. And we don't necessarily need to go down that rabbit hole, but what you see is a lack of nuance, a lack of respect for other opinions, an inability to see the other side. I think there's many reasons for that. I think fear, which hijacks our rational brain, I think there are often good reasons in life to be afraid so

we can take a verse of action. But how many people at the moment are falling out with friends, family members, like proper fractures in their life. At some point, this will be over. Be careful how many of your family members you leave on the curbside just because they have a different opinion to you. And why I'm so passionate about this, particularly through the lens of your book is, I think you've nailed it with that line. I think, as I said already, Johan, it's about when we cannot pay attention and focus, I don't think we can be kind, empathetic, compassionate individuals. You're totally right. Well, kindness and empathy are forms of attention.

And if you're an adult individual whose ability to do that is broken down, you will be less kind. I think what you just said, Rangan, there many things that um that i learned a lot about for the book so one is just the evidence that stress destroys your ability to focus and pay attention i'm sure we'll talk about that but another one is um you think about collective problems and collective solutions and you know why people are being so angry i think it's worth thinking about because one of the factors that make this making us so anger itself damages your attention, we can talk about that. But one of the reasons that is making us so angry is also the factor, one of the factors that's destroying our attention. And one of the ways I understood this, I spent a lot of time

talking to people in Silicon Valley who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live, in which our kids now spend so much of their time, the key aspects of social media apps and other aspects of the internet. And I remember certain moments with them, it was fascinating to realize, oh, even though they designed these things, they're not immune to these problems themselves. There's a wonderful man named Dr. James Williams, who was a Google engineer, who as subsequently was so horrified by what they were doing, has quit and become, I think probably the most important philosopher of attention in the world at the moment. And when I went to go and see James in Moscow,

he told me about this moment that was really important for him. He spoke at a tech conference and he's speaking to exactly the people who are designing our world, right? And he said to them, designing our world, right? And he said to them, is there anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're designing? And nobody put up their hand. It's another moment with Tristan Harrison, amazing, also a Google engineer who's become a dissident, who said to me, he had this moment when he was working on Gmail, very early in Gmail, and they wanted to increase the number of users, but they particularly want to increase the number of times a day a user opened the app. I can talk about why if you want. And one of them sitting in the Googleplex, one of his colleagues had an idea. He said, why don't we make it so that whenever you receive an email, your phone vibrates a little bit. And

everyone said, that's a good idea. And a week later, Tristan was walking around San Francisco and he just starts hearing these vibrations vibrations like the chirping of birds all around him and he suddenly realizes shit we did that and that was happening all over the world as a result of one colleague's decision in fact he calculated about a year later that they were responsible that one decision was responsible for 11 billion interruptions every day to people's day but the thing to understand about that, the reason this relates to what you're saying about anger, is obviously there's a huge debate about the design of these apps. But there was a moment it really fell into place for me,

an understanding of this. Tristan and I were walking around San Francisco, actually, and he said to me, if you open Facebook now, Facebook will tell you loads of things, right? It will tell you whose birthday it is. It will tell you what you said on that day 10 years before. It'll show you photos that your friends have tagged you in. There's one thing Facebook doesn't have. Facebook has no button that says, I'd like to meet up with my friends. Is anyone nearby and wants to meet up? Right? Now, the minute I say that, lots of people listening will be thinking, oh, that'd be a really handy button. I'd like to have that. So that would be very popular with its users. It's very technologically easy to design. Why does Facebook not offer it to you? If you

follow the trail from that question, I think you begin to understand some of the reasons why we can't pay attention and we're so angry. So when you open Facebook, Facebook starts to make money in two ways. First way is very obvious. You see ads in your feed. Okay, we all get, we know how that works. Second way is much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by Facebook to figure out details about who you are. So let's say if you clicked that you like, I don't know, Kylie Minogue and Donald Trump, and you said to your mom in a private message that you've just bought some nappies. Okay. Facebook knows this is probably a gay man. No disrespect to the straight fans of Kylie. I'm sure there are some. This is probably

a right wing person. And this is probably a person with a baby because they're talking about having nappies, right? So they're getting, imagine they've got tens of thousands of data points like you. Now, the reason they do that is because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product in Facebook. They sell that information about you to advertisers so the advertisers can target you better. Because if I'm an advertiser selling nappies, you don't want to target to me. I don't have a baby. You don't want to target to you.

You don't have a baby anymore. You want to target people who've got babies, right? So these are the two revenue streams for Facebook. That's all they're interested in. These are the two ways they make money. Now, imagine if they introduced that button that says, oh, I've got who's nearby and wants to meet up. If you push that button and it goes, oh, Bob's around the corner. I'll go for a pint with Bob. You'll shut Facebook and Bob will shut Facebook, right? That's a disaster for Facebook. They suddenly lose both their revenue streams. So their entire business model, all of

that extraordinary staggering engineering power, all the design of their algorithms is built around one thing. How do I keep you and your kids scrolling? That's their sole financial goal. Now that obviously leads to inherently hacking our attention. And that's not the view of the dissidents. That's what the people at the heart of Facebook say. Sean Parker, the first really big investor in Facebook, crucial figure in the history of the company, said, from the beginning, we designed it to invade your attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our kids, right? That's what he said. But that comes, the reason this relates, so we can talk

about how that affects our attention. It means that the whole of Facebook and all the other social media companies that have the same business model is designed to figure out how to invade your attention. And we can talk about the various techniques they use. But that also has another effect on exactly what you're talking about, about anger. And one of the reasons why we're becoming so angry and so polarized. So Facebook's algorithms, like I say, only care about one thing. How do I keep you scrolling? They don't care if you feel good. They don't care if you feel bad, not their interest. It's how do I keep you scrolling? So the algorithms are constantly figuring out, okay, what keeps people looking? What keeps people looking? And they bumped into,

this was not the intention of anyone at Facebook, but they bumped into a quirk in human psychology, which is that we will stare at things that make us angry and upset longer than we will stare at things that make us feel good. Anyone who's ever been on the motorway and passed a car crash knows this effect. You stare longer at a car crash than you do at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road, right? This is called negativity bias. There's loads of psychological research for it. 10-day-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a happy face. It's probably for a good reason in our evolution in that you want to be vigilant to anger and danger, right? But this has an effect online that is catastrophic. It means that when the algorithms are trying to figure out how do

I keep wrong and scrolling, what they bump into is if we show him things that make him feel good, he'll probably relax and is more likely to put down the app. If we show him things that make him feel angry and upset, he's more likely to keep scrolling. Now that has an effect at two levels. There's a personal level and a bigger political level. A personal level, imagine two teenagers who go to the same party, right? And get the same bus home. So one teenager on the bus home types, that was a really nice party. I had a great time and everyone looked good. And the other teenager puts the status update that party was shit kerry looked like an absolute slag i've been reading my niece's facebook so i

know i've got a bit up on how they're talking uh kerry looked like an absolute slag her boyfriend's a twat uh you know you can imagine like a stream banger facebook will figure out because it looks for angry versus happy words calculates it will put the happy status update into a few people's facebook feed but it will put that angry facebook update into loads more people's feeds because they know the happy one most people will go oh that's nice but the angry one people go how dare you call carry a slag what are you talking about how you can see how it makes people more engaged it makes them scroll scroll longer. If it's enraging, it's engaging. Now that's disastrous enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus

in Withenshaw, right? But that is catastrophic at a political level where we're being fed things that are designed to make us angry. It privileges anger. It's one of the reasons, not the only one to be sure, why we're seeing such extreme polarisation, why, you know, I don't need to mention Trump and Brexit and Bolsonaro, all these factors that are going on. And anger itself harms your attention. It's harder to pay attention when you're angry. I mean, where to start unpacking that?

That's just so much, right? But a lot of people, I would say, I think most people, if you ask them, is your phone hijacking your attention, taking you away from some of the things that you would probably rather be doing in your life? I think a lot of people would say, yeah, I can sort of see that, right? I can see that, but I can't resist. But some people would probably say, you know, look, it's neutral, right? I just go on to catch up with my friends, right? There's, you know, what are you talking about? Like, I'm just popping on to see a few photos. I like the influencers I follow. I like the content I'm getting from them. them. I find it hard to draw any other conclusion that for most of us, I think we're probably kidding ourselves that this is neutral. I think we like to think it is, but I honestly don't think

it is. I'm sure for some people, I reckon they can. I think for most of us, we don't realize how much our thoughts and emotions are being influenced. Well, there's a bit in the book, it was so powerful. I think he was talking about Tristan Harris in the early days at Google. I think it was Tristan, he was saying that, man, I'm realizing that at Google here, we are literally influencing the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of one or two billion people. It's probably more now. What they decide to show you literally is influencing how we view the world. So is it neutral? Can it be neutral for anyone? Or is your research saying,

we are not aware of just how insidious this problem is. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one convenient daily

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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. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Under the current design, it can't be neutral. So you think you go on to just see the images of, you know, your friends or whatever. But think about the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Of the 20 most shared stories on Facebook during that election, 19 of them were lies. They were not true.

For example, the claim that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Completely untrue story. In fact, the Pope pretty candidly warned against Donald Trump, right? So, of course you you don't go on most people do not go on primarily to get news from facebook but you're scrolling down and you're receiving information that is designed to anger you to shock you to be surprising but the most important thing i learned and this is really interesting if you think about because i didn't want to write a book about saying okay okay, here, everyone, here's all these problems with retention, we're screwed, right? Because the truth is, we're not. And one of the

things that I really left the book with a feeling of optimism, because these problems can be solved, but there have to be two levels of the solution. And in terms of, can it be good? There is a world where it can be good, and we could get to that world. So you've got to have two levels of solutions, right? One is purely personal. There are all sorts of things we can do to defend our own attention and focus. And I'm sure we're going to talk about a lot of them and I do lots of them and it's improved my attention. But we also have to be honest with people that will take you so far and then you will hit a wall because at the moment it's like we're living in an environment that is pouring itching powder over us all the time. And the people pouring the

itching powder on us are going, do you know what, mate? You might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much, right? And it's like, all right, it's good to meditate. I'm in favor of it, but we've got to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. And at first I was pessimistic because I thought, okay, these forms of disruption to our attention are just inherent to social media. Social media ain't going away. We're in real trouble. But actually, when I spoke to the people at the heart of this machinery, they explained to me that that is wrong, right?

And there's a historical analogy that I think helps us to understand it. In the 19th, which was explained to me by Jaron Lanier, a brilliant Silicon Valley designer. Yeah, he was in Social Dilemma as well, wasn't he? Love Jaron. Great guy. Great guy. I went to his house to interview him um so jaron pointed out this historical analogy that i then looked into a lot which is in the 1970s lots of people painted their houses with lead paint right and actually most people had cars that took leaded petrol and then it was discovered that in breathing

in lead is devastating for children's ability to focus and pay attention. It radically lowers their IQ. It's awful. So what do we do? We did not ban paint and petrol, right? You've got a house that's been painted, so have I. You know, you drive a car that has petrol in it. What we did is we banned the lead in the petrol. And there's an analogy with how we can think about the factors that are destroying our attention, our individual attention and our collective attention in social media. Now,

there's a degree to which the invention of the smartphone would have increased distraction and disruption to some degree. But what we ended up with were models that were maximally designed to hack and invade your attention, right? Now, there are different models that we could choose that we can make these companies adopt. I spent a lot of time talking about this with many people, but one of them was Asa Raskin, who designed a key aspect of how the internet works. His dad, Jeff Raskin, was the guy who designed the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. And Asa said to me, it's a very simple solution here. You ban the current business model, right? So you take the current business model, which is all these social media sites, their model is survey you, surveil you, build up a profile of you and sell your attention to the highest bidder, right? That's their business model. He says, just ban it. We

don't allow leaded paint. There's all sorts of things as a society. We just say, this is too harmful. We don't allow it. And I'm saying to Aiza and lots of the other people, okay, but what happens when I open Facebook the day after a ban? it just say gone fishing right and they're like no what happens then is they would have to go to a different business model and there are all sorts of different business models they can adopt uh to give you two obvious ones that everyone listening has some experience with one is a subscription model right could be that we pay 50p a month to be on facebook right or it could be a model, very close to where we are now, there is a sewer. Everyone watching and listening,

you're close to a sewer. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street and we had outbreaks of cholera. So we built sewers, we paid together to build sewers and we own the sewers together because we don't want to go back to that world, right? Now, it may be that just like we own the sewage pipes together, we decide we want to own the information pipes together because we don't want to go back to that world, right? Now, it may be that just like we own the sewage pipes together, we decide we want to own the information pipes together, because we're getting the attentional and political equivalence of cholera. There's all sorts of different models, whether it's subscription, public ownership, independent of the government, there's a whole range of ways we could do this. But the most important thing to understand is, once we do that, the incentives when it comes to your attention can completely change.

The incentive at the moment for all the social media companies has to be, doesn't matter whether they're run by nice people or horrible people, the incentive has to be how do I invade your attention? How do I keep and take as much of it as possible and sell it? Once you're no longer the product, you're the customer whether you're the subscriber or the owner collectively the incentives completely change suddenly instead of it being designed to hack your attention it has to figure out well what does rongan want oh rongan wants to be able to meet up with his friends let's introduce a button telling him where his friends are rongan

wants to be able to focus okay let's redesign this in all sorts of ways which we could envision now and that these people i'm talking about talk about so it's designed not to be a vacuum sucking out your attention but a trampoline pushing your attention back into the world right yeah but to get there you have to change the business model there is no way inside there is currently a fundamental clash between their business model and our desire to pay attention. Our distraction is their fuel, right? We need to break that connection. And I can talk about how we could do it practically as well, how we can all achieve that. So it's important to talk about the individual things we can do, but we've got to talk about these bigger

factors. It's what's called the attention economy, right? That human attention is the product now. Yeah. Was it not the was it reed hastings ceo of netflix who said we're competing with sleep or sleepers are really competitors something like that yeah which maybe was said in jest but actually is there's there's some real alarming truth isn't there and And I think, as I hear you talk, it's so clear that money is what realistically is what makes a lot of the world go round.

So if the way that these companies are making money is based on having more and more of your attention, it's always going to be like that. There's no way that will change unless they can make money in a different way. Because if they can make money a different way, it's like, oh, we don't need to ruin people's relationships, hijack their attention, get rid of their focus, steal their time away from their children, their hobbies. Oh, because that's not going to make us money. And that really is going to be that sort of societal change. Part of the problem, I think, I think about this a lot. I'm a creator. I use these platforms. The way I use them, I'd like to think I'm intentional about,

but we're used to free, right? People are used to free. In this age of the internet, right, we are used to free. We want all our information. We want free news, free articles, free podcasts, free YouTube videos. And I think many of us don't realize, maybe there's a slow realisation now that actually if you ain't paying, you know, as they say in the social media, you're the product. Would you agree with that?

Yes, I think you put it really well. But it's important to explain to people it's not free, it's coming at an enormous cost. And one of the people who helped me to understand this actually, both his research and meeting him, is an amazing guy named Professor Earl Miller who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the

world i went to interview him at mit the massachusetts institute of technology and he said to me look there's one thing you need to understand about the human brain more than anything else you can only consciously think about one thing at a time that's it right this is a fundamental fact about the human brain the human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any timeframe we're going to see. You can only think about one thing at once. But we have fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time, bit like my godson. But what happens when Professor Miller's colleagues get people into labs and test this? They look at, well, what happens when people think they're doing lots of things at once and what they discover is

in fact you're not doing lots of things at once you're juggling between them your consciousness papers over it gives a seamless impression of consciousness but actually you're juggling very rapidly between them so let's say for example i've left it in your kitchen but i've got my phone over there right let's imagine when you were talking i just just glanced at my text, right? My text. I take out my phone and glanced at my text. It feels like, oh, I can still listen to Ron. It's one second to glance at my text. But what happens is I'm focused on you. I glance at my text and my brain refocuses. Oh, my friend Rob's texted me. Oh, his mom's got out of hospital. Right. And then I have to refocus on you, right? And it turns out this refocusing takes a significant amount of your mental bandwidth.

And that's just one switch, right? And it comes with a whole series of costs that have been shown in labs. So one is it just takes a certain amount of your brain power to do switching. Imagine I switch the text and I'm like, oh, what was on Facebook? And what's on the TV in the corner over there? And you can see how that begins to jam up my mental bandwidth. Another way is when you're switching a lot, you start to make mistakes and then you have to go back and correct your mistakes. That takes a certain amount of your time. Another effect that

you get when you switch tasks a lot is an effect on your memory. To convert your experiences into memories takes a certain amount of mental power. And if that power is instead being deployed on constantly switching between things, actually you just remember less of what you experience. The fourth effect is that you become much less creative because creativity requires the space to let your mind wander. When you let your mind wander,

you think back over things without even feeling effortful. You think back over the experiences you've had. You connect different things together. That's how new ideas pop together. That's where creativity comes from. If your mind is jammed up with switching, you become significantly less creative. But it was striking to me when I first heard him say that, I thought, that sounds persuasive,

but this must be a fairly small effect, right? Then I looked at some of the research on this. It's quite striking. I'll just give you two quick examples. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, commissioned someone to do a small study where they split a group of their workers into two. And the first group was told, just do your task and we won't interrupt you. And the second group was told, do your task, and they were interrupted by texts and emails, heavily interrupted. And at the end of this,

they tested the IQ of both groups. The group who'd only done one thing at a time tested, on average, 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been distracted. To give you a sense of how big 10 IQ points is, if you and me sat here now and got stoned together, our IQs would drop by five points. So being chronically distracted is twice as bad in the short term for your iq as getting stoned you'd be better off sitting at your desk um doing one thing at a time and smoking a spliff than sitting at your desk trying to do lots and lots of things and being constantly interrupted

and not smoking a split it's another study uh not that either is good uh for your attention and concentration obviously um there was another study at carnegie mellon university they got 138 students and they split them into two groups they gave them all the same exam first group was told uh just do the exam in normal exam conditions and the second group was told um you could have your phone on and you can send and receive texts now you'd think the second group would do better because they could have cheated right they could have texted someone and asked for the answers. In fact, the second group did on average 20% worse because being interrupted, being disrupted ruins your ability to pay attention and really damages your ability to think clearly. And we are all losing that 20%.

This is why Professor Miller said to me, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment. And if you look at it, one of the things that miller said to me we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment and if you look at it one thing that's restricted me the one of the implications of that let's say you look at your screen time at the end of the day on your iphone and it says you spent three hours that day on the phone if those three hours were spread throughout the day in fact you were losing way more than three hours in stolen focus because there's a guy called michael posner did a study that found if you're interrupted it takes on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had prior to your interruption but most of us are almost never getting those 23 clear minutes

yeah we just we're operating so many of us as a kind of low-grade version of who we could be. Exactly. That's a brilliant way of putting it. That's exactly right. You know, we're downgrading who we are and we're so used to it that we think it's normal, right? But it's not normal. I think it's a great time for you to tell me about the eight-foot chair on the beach in Provincetown. Because when I read that yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in bed, just reading it. And I just stopped and I just made me smile. It made me think. I sent you a text. I said, I'm just thinking about that eight foot chair on the beach. So tell me about that because I think it plays in beautifully to this. about that because i think it plays in beautifully to this so yeah when i came back from memphis i was so appalled at myself because i realized how much of my anger at my godson was anger at

myself right i could feel so many things that were so important to me like reading books is such a crucial part of who i am and how i engage with the world i could feel those things becoming harder and i just thought, okay, I have to just break this. I was still in that psychology of thinking about this as primarily a personal failing. So I decided to do something really drastic. It was not long after I came back from Memphis, just a few weeks, I suddenly like, right, I'm going to do this. So I announced to all my friends triumphantly that I was going to go away for three months with no internet connected phone and no laptop that could get online. I was like, I've had it. I'm through. I can't, I'm just tired of being wired in this way. What did they say? It was a mixture of

some people were envious. Some people were quite panicked for me. They kept saying things like, but what if they're saying, I'm not going to take a smartphone. smartphone i'll be like but what if there's an emergency and people need to contact you and i was like i'm not the president of the united states what's gonna happen what's gonna invade ukraine and i have to give orders do i like it's i'm not that important right what's what's gonna happen i had a it's funny to to buy and i bought the only phone you can buy in the us that can't get onto the internet ironically i had to buy had to buy it online. And it's a giant, it's called the Jitterbug, and it's so it can still picture it. And it's a giant, it's got huge buttons and it's designed for old people. And it's got an emergency button on it for if you fall over, it'll call the nearest hospital immediately. So I thought, oh, great,

if I, you know, there you go, emergency, if I fall over, I've got that option. So I rented a little part of a beach house in a place called Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. And I left my phone and my smartphone and my laptop with my friend in Boston. And I got the boat over. And this is an extreme, this was a very extreme form of a technique, a personal technique people can use called pre-commitment. So pre-commitment is a technique. All of us have goals for the future we want to achieve that we know we might crack on. So for me, a very simple one would be, I don't want to eat Pringles all the time because they make me fat, right? So what I used to do is buy Pringles and go, I'll put them in the cupboard

and I just won't eat them, right? Which of course, everyone is over what Pringles knows is physically impossible. Actually, my nephew told me recently that I look weirdly like the Pringles man, which is actually true. But, but so the form of pre-commitment is very simple. When you're in the supermarket, don't buy the Pringles, right? So you're planning ahead, thinking about your own fallibility and you go, okay, I'm going to pre-commit. I'm just not going to have Pringles in my house, right? To make me look slightly less like the Pringles man um this was an extreme form of pre-commitment right and there's all sorts of forms of pre-commitment we can talk about people can integrate into their everyday lives that can help them but um so i remember taking the ferry

from from boston to provincetown and feeling this incredible kind of lightness. And I found myself thinking about the first time I ever saw a mobile phone. I could picture exactly where it was. It was 1994 because I know how old I was. And I was on the top deck of the 340 bus in Wheelstone in North London, coming home from school. And someone had a mobile phone and he was talking on it. And everyone turned and looked at him.

And he was talking really loudly. And someone said to him, we broke the first rule of public transport in Britain, where someone addressed a stranger and just said, mate, you're a wanker, right? And that's how we felt when mobile phones first arrived. And I remember the very first email I ever sent as well. I'm feeling this weird anti-climax it was in 1999 i'm thinking god if

you told me then that when i was you know 40 i would some mutant form of these two things would be so powerful over us that i would be fleeing on a boat i would have thought you were completely deranged right it was a very strange thing so I arrived in Provincetown and I was there for three months and it was really transformative for me in all sorts of ways, that experience. Yeah. I mean, part of it was just as simple as when I arrived, I mean, a lot of the things that happened there

only made sense to me because I interviewed all these experts afterwards. But if you think about it in relation to what Earl Miller told me at MIT about how disruption and distraction destroy your ability to focus and pay attention, there's something about for the first time in more than a decade, I was just doing one thing at a time. Yeah. Right? Just the incredible mental relief of doing one thing. Even just saying as simple as I got the news once a day because I went to the little shop there called Essentials and I bought the New York Times and I read it. And then I didn't know what happened in the news until the next day. Right. And that summer there were a lot of big news events.

And I thought, God, normally I'm absorbing this drip feed that causes panic to me. And so there were all sorts of initial forms of relief and lots of other things that we can talk about you you know this this your your experience in provincetown as i read it i imagine a lot of people will read it and go oh if only if only i If only. I think people, we know what constantly being connected is doing to us. Everyone does went there to learn how to focus, but you ended up increasing your ability to think. It was a really odd thing because I had all sorts of ups and downs in Provincetown, but there was a moment, this really changed, especially when I learned more about it later, this phenomenon, it changed how I more about it later this phenomenon it changed how i think about what attention actually is um so i there's there's a kind of metaphor that has

dominated how people think about attention in the western world for more than 100 years now is created by a man named william james the kind of father of modern american psychology and he said attention is like a spotlight right so the kind of definition of attention that he gave is attention is your ability to selectively attend to things in your environment so you think about where we're sitting now the podcast studio where we're sitting right i'm looking at you you're looking at me we're paying attention to each other's words but if we could zone out a bit i could be thinking about the cameras over there i could look at them how do they work i could think about your colleague who's sitting in the corner very nice he's looking at the laptop and figuring out how to do it. There's plants

behind you. There's all sorts of things I could be thinking about in my immediate environment, but I'm selectively attending to you. My spotlight is on you and your questions and answering them as best I can, right? So that is an absolutely crucial form of attention. And that form of attention is being disrupted in ways we've been talking about and many other ways that we haven't got to yet and that's what i thought i thought that's all attention was right so i thought so when i went to provincetown a big part of why i went was i wanted to read lots more books right i had this big pile of books and i did in fact read lots of books i read war and peace i read all these things i've been putting off for ages um but about a month into it maybe a little bit more maybe five weeks i started um i started taking these long walks up to then when i went for walks i'd brought with me an ipod which

is funny because i remember when ipods came out they seemed so futuristic and people would like look at it like i had something from noah's ark or something because obviously because it wasn't internet connected but i'd loaded i'd loaded loads of audiobooks onto it every time i put it on i had to put on my headphones as well my noise cancelling headphones and the headphones would always say searching for johan's iphone searching for johan's iphone and then in a sort of sad sad voice it would go iphone cannot be found and i was like god that is how it feels right but um I think about even said connection cannot be made which is even more sinister sounding sentence but um and then one day I just thought you know what I'm not going to take my the 10th audiobook of the month I'm not leave

it I'm gonna leave my audiobook I'm just going for a walk and Ponson is these incredible beaches and I just walked I ended up walking for like five hours and I suddenly and I started taking these longer and longer walks every day where I was not deploying my spotlight at all right I was just letting my mind wander completely freely and I suddenly felt much more creative and open all sorts of things were combining in my mind in interesting ways but I would come home and think wait this isn't what you came here to do you came here to deploy your right? But when I left Provincetown, I interviewed the leading experts in the world about mind wandering. And I learned, it was so fascinating to look into this, that mind wandering is a form of attention. It's just a different kind of attention. There's an amazing guy called Professor Marcus Reichel, who's a professor of neuroscience

at the University at the university of washington in st louis missouri where i went to interview him and he that's funny when he was a little boy in aberdeen in washington his teacher mr smith called him in called his parents in and said your son's got a real problem he keeps daydreaming his mind is just wandering in class which we're taught from a very young age is the worst thing you can do right that's a terrible thing for a teacher to call a parent in and say that and but marcus many years later made this incredible breakthrough about how wrong mr smith was about how the pet scans were basically invented out of a new form of scanning the brain were basically invented next to professor reichel's office and he using these brain scans discovered that actually when your

mind is wandering when you appear to not be focusing on anything until his research it was thought that if your mind's not doing anything if your mind appears to not be doing anything it's just wandering then your mind is just sort of inactive it's a bit like my arm muscles right i'm not using my arm muscles right now so they're sort of inert they're waiting for me to activate them as you can see i don't activate them very often but um so it's thought that when your brain is you know you're just mind wandering your brain is inert right it's not doing much in fact what he discovered looking at these PET scans of people who are mind wandering is your brain is just as active when it's mind wandering it's just it's just active in a different way so then lots of this opened a whole

field of science looking at what happens during brain wandering. I interviewed many of the leading experts on this. What they found is when your brain is wandering, in fact, it's doing lots of crucial things. Most important is it's making sense of what you've experienced, right? It's going back over what you've experienced. It's filtering it. It's thinking, what did that mean? When you've got space to mind wander, you think about what the experiences you've had mean. You begin to anticipate the future.

It begins to think, oh, what will happen next, right? It begins to make connections between the different things you've learned. And mind wandering is an absolutely crucial form of thought. And we are living in a huge crisis of mind wandering because at the moment, we're in this awful world, awful combination, where we are neither spotlight focused a lot of the time, nor are we mind wandering.

We're jammed up with switching, which is the worst combination of all, right? And I remember just to say one thing about Marcus, Professor Reichel. When I interviewed him, he was 81, and he'd always played in a symphony for more than 50 years. He plays the oboe. And he'd just given up playing in the symphony for more than 50 years. He plays the oboe and he'd just given up playing in this symphony. I was thinking about this and I sort of realized in a way thinking is like a symphony, right? You've got your woodwinds, your oboes, all these different parts of the orchestra. And to play Marcus's favorite piece, Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, you need all the

different parts of the orchestra, right? But what we have at the moment is it's like we've stripped out lots of parts of the orchestra. That thinking is like, to think fully is like playing a symphony. You need many different forms of thought. But to extend the analogy probably a bit too far, at the moment, it's like we've got this symphony and one of those heavy metal bands like Slipknot have charged the stage and are screaming and biting the heads of bats and spitting at us. We're so jammed up, we can't activate the different parts of our thought. That probably is going too far, that analogy.

No disrespect to Slipknot fans. I quite like them. I just think what you experience in Provincetown, it gives us a little window into what might be possible if we start addressing many of the things in the book, you know, making societal changes to algorithms, you know, we'll get hopefully to pollution, stress, foods, you know, reading, children, all the kind of stuff you beautifully write about. That kind of life, whilst on the surface appears to be unattainable, it's like if we value the human experience and the fabric of our day-to-day lives, it's like, well, why can't we aspire to that? And just to share, you know,

I've not done a three-month sort of leave everything, go off the internet, go to Provincetown. But what I started doing a couple of summers ago, I remember this, I remember so well, I decided, right, this August, kids are off school. I want to be present with them. I want to spend time with them. I want to spend time with them. I don't want to get sucked in to the vortex of social media and see what's going on. And so I decided, right, this August, I'm going off. I think at the time I thought I'll go off for maybe two, two and a half weeks. I don't know how long for. And I posted about it on the channels. And then I deleted the apps from my phone. I think at the time, I don't know what

was on it, but Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever I was on my phone at that time, I deleted them. And, you know, I'm interested to see how this sort of compares with your experience. But I remember like the first few days, I could still have the smartphone. So I didn't go all out like you, didn't not have the smartphone, but I had removed the apps. There was no email on my phone, nothing like that. And you just keep picking it up and almost reflexively, oh, there's no app there. Okay, put it away. I think it took maybe five days until that had stopped, that reflex, pulling it out, looking at it, even though I couldn't go and get onto the app, you know. And then it was just this gorgeous calm and relaxation and an enhanced ability to focus and be present. No sort of distraction when you want to be with your wife or your kids.

I think I did about 18 or 20 days then. Last summer, the one's just gone. I think it was off for a month. And it was incredible. Now, I also will acknowledge, because sometimes you do this, people go, well, that's not a solution, right? And you obviously in the book talk about, we can't just put it all on personal responsibility. But there is an analogy here, isn't there, with technology, our attention, our lives, and food, I think. And you actually talk about that as well. I think it's a really nice analogy whereby when you go off these platforms and you drastically reduce your consumption of tech for a few weeks, you start to feel different. You start to see how you could live an alternate reality. What does that feel like? And then because I feel what that's helped me do,

and it's very, very hard not to slip into old habits, right? But it allows me to be much more intentional now. And I feel that that is a process I'm getting better at all the time. And it's a bit like food, isn't it? Food, we put it all onto personal responsibility. The big food corporations love to do that. It's just a toxic food environment. It is very, very hard for people to make healthy choices, particularly people without much money, people living in difficult conditions and deprived communities. Very, very difficult.

Easy to say, take responsibility for your life, for what you put in your mouth. You know, from the seven years I worked in Oldham, that is just not based in reality. You know, people have got very different pressures. But I'm passionate that we can teach people personal techniques that are going to help them. You know, it's not perfect, but of course, would it be better if we weren't tempted every time we walked out our front door at a station, we weren't tempted every time we walked out our front door at a station, in a supermarket,

at an airport, at our workplace, at Christmas with all the cookies and the biscuits, whatever it is. Of course, it would be much easier if society makes it easier for us. But I kind of feel there's a personal responsibility component as well. So when people say to me, yeah, well, that's not fixing the problem. It's like, no, I accept that. You know, me going off for three or four weeks in the summer doesn't fix the problem. But just as someone, if someone has gone, if someone has ever done this, I'd really encourage them to do it, right? If you have never in your life spent four weeks just eating fresh whole foods that are cooked from scratch, right? If you've never done that, I'm not saying everyone has the ability to do that, but if at some point you can go,

let me just try that. Just see how you feel. Just see how you sleep. Just experience what feeding your body with the right nutrients does for you. Sure, at the end of that, it might be hard to maintain it, but at least you know in the back of your minds, oh, that is possible. I am currently living a low-grade version of myself. Bit by bit, hopefully I can get to that point. Do you know what I'm saying? Is there anything in that you would resonate with?

Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you

back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. And I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been

shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes,

but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to

drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. There's so many things what you're saying there's loads of evidence that the way we eat and the way i eat is damaging our ability to focus and pay attention and that's one of the things that changed in provincetown that i didn't even think about at the time and later realized was having a big effect on my attention but just to go back to think what you there's so many important things in what you said i was really struck by i had the similar thing to you, which is when I stopped, I had these, after the initial relief, I had these enormous cravings. I remember one day walking down the beach and seeing the thing that had been annoying me ever since I was in Memphis, long before that, you know, people were just using Provincetown as like a backdrop for their selfies. They weren't looking at their kids. They weren't looking at the beach or look at anything they were just trying to take selfies all the time um but instead of thinking oh how terrible i what does ramsay go

give me that phone me me you know we we've all become accustomed to all throughout the day receiving the thin insistent signals of the internet hearts likes especially people in the public eye in the way that you and i are you know hearts and likes and when you're withdrawn when those are gone it's like the world has fallen silent for a while right and it feels rather eerie it's like it's hard to be with ordinary life if you become accustomed to these signals all the time it's one of the reasons why my godson couldn't just couldn't cope without those signals right for one of many reasons but then once i kind of got through that withdrawal i was a man because i had honestly thought maybe my brain is just a bit broken and i was amazed by how rapidly my full mental capacities came back i could read like

i did when i was in my early 20s but all basically all day if I wanted to and retain so much more of what I was learning. So you're absolutely right. When you talk about there's two layers to this, there's the personal and there's the collective, right? And people often try and play them off against each other. And I'm just like, obviously we need to do both. And obviously some people have a greater margin to make personal changes than others and i'm conscious of course so when i talk about bromance town i try to be very careful about this because to a lot of people hearing me say that will feel a bit like as if i've walked up to a homeless if they think that's the advice i'm giving them is to do that they'll feel a bit like i've walked up to a homeless person in the street and said, mate, do you

know what would make you feel much better would be if you went into the Ritz over there and you had a really nice steak. Don't you think that would make you feel better? And the homeless person will entirely understand and go, well, screw you. I'd love to do that. I can't do that. And at the moment we live in a gap between what many of us want to do and what many of us feel we can do. And together we can close that gap. So some of that is about empowering people in their everyday life to know more about these factors that are invading our attention, of which tech is only one of the 12, and empower them to fight back at a personal level. And there's all sorts of techniques. I'm going to give you a very simple

example. I have in my office and in my flat, what's called a K-safe. It's very simple. It's a little plastic safe. You take the lid off. You put your phone in it. You put the lid on. You turn a dial at the top and it'll lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week. Every day I lock my phone away for four hours a day.

Every day. So I can get clear headsets. Every day without fail. Not at the moment because I'm doing book promotion, but in normal. Can you hack it if you need to? I mean i mean if there was a fire i could smash it i could just throw it on the floor no but there's no easy way to put a code in and go no no there's no way you can get it out i mean you could smash it and buy a new case if it wouldn't be that difficult to smash it how do you spell that just k hyphen safe right uh so there's uh i'm going to

send you one to thank you for doing this interview uh so there's so there's all sorts of personal technique techniques like that, right? Everyone should buy a K-safe. Can I give one to my wife? I will definitely. Exactly. You can hand it to her without judgment. She might edit that out, actually. So there's definitely all sorts of personal techniques like that.

But a lot of people, again, will hear that and go, right, but I can't do that. So I want to talk about a collective solution that would help make it possible for many people to do that. It's a collective solution we can all fight for together. In France in 2018, they had a big problem with what they called Le Burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government, under pressure from trade unions, got a guy called Bruno Mettling, I apologise for my appalling accent to all French people, who's the head of Orange, their biggest telecom company, one of the biggest. And they basically said, figure out what's going on, right? So he does this commission, he looks at all sorts of things. And he discovered 35% of French workers felt they could never unplug because their boss could text them at any time of the day or night

and they would get in trouble if they didn't respond, right? So I remember when we were kids, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors and even doctors went on call all the time right now almost half the economy is on call right which means you can never just totally switch off and spend time with your kids you could never just be in the bath and completely relax you can you want to read a book but you're being pulled away by this fear, right? So the Metling recommended and the French government introduced into law, very simple reform. Everyone in France has a legal right to disconnect. Just means two things. One is you have a right to written and defined work hours, and you have a right to never have to check your phone or take

work calls outside those legally defined work hours. So I went to Paris to look into this. Big companies get fined. When I was there just before, Rent-A-Kill got fined €70,000 because they told off a worker for not checking his email an hour after he finished work. €70,000 straight away, fined, right? So you can see how that's a collective reform that won't just be handed down. We have to fight for it together. But if we get that, that's a social change that makes it possible for people to begin to make these individual changes. Because at the moment, there's no point giving someone in that position a self-help talk if they literally can't do it, right? Now, there will be some things almost everyone can do, but that's a really big thing, not being able to never check your phone. We've got to free people

up to do the things they need to do. We've got to have um in the same way that obviously women had to have and still have to have a feminist movement to demand their right to their bodies and their lives i think we need to have a movement to protect our attention collectively right to take on the forces that are stealing our attention and reclaim it from them. And that goes way beyond tech, right? Bosses, that's not a tech thing, right? And most of the smartphone has enabled it. But that's about our bosses interfering in our lives and effectively getting us all to work overtime all the time. Yeah. I love those kind of systemic solutions. I give lots of talks to companies on wellness and how to change the culture at work. And

quite a few times I talk to senior management and say, listen, guys, if you want to send an email at 10pm to people who work underneath you, or who reports you is probably a better way of saying it. Maybe that works for you, make sure you tell them clearly that they're not expected to look at it, that you don't expect a response. And there's even these programs now, you talk about collective action we can do. There are programs that I think some companies now bring in where, because some people like to work at different times, right? We've got the freedom now with the internet. One of the great things about it, which again, can go the other way and interfere with other aspects of our life is that,

well, people do have a bit of autonomy as to when they do certain things. So someone may want to finish off their work emails one evening, and they can press send, but it doesn't go out. It doesn't get delivered to the colleague's inbox till, you inbox till 8.30 the following morning. So they're not even going to see it, even if they are looking. So I think those things are pretty good. I find that idea of a case safe interesting because on one level, it's kind of like we want our smartphones. And again, there's so many benefits of them but one there's so much that we're not going to downgrade and get a dumb phone or be more intentional with our use which i know is very very

difficult we're physically going to buy something to put it in a bank but we can't do you know what i mean it's kind of something i think it says something about where we've got to as a society it reminds me a lot of what tristan harris said when he testified before the senate he said look you can try having self-control but every time you open these apps there are 10 000 engineers at the other side of the screen trying to break your self-control so we have to have both those mechanisms or think about essentially you were talking about talking to bosses so there's there's lots of factors in the way we currently work and actually this begins with our kids at school the way our schools work is destroying children's attention we can talk

about that but two hours on that alone this makes me so angry on it yeah the last as you know the last quarter of the book is about yeah how we're destroying our kids attention and actually tech really isn't the biggest part of that but the in terms of bosses, it's really interesting because I was thinking as you were saying that about an amazing man I got to know named Andrew Barnes, who did a really interesting experiment with his company. Andrew is British originally. And he worked in the city of London, the financial sector, in 1987, just after they deregulated also the big banks. So you remember like from when we were kids, people shouting each other across the stock exchange floor going, sell, sell, sell, right? With big hair sprayed hair. He was that guy, right? One of them. And in that world, as they would have put it, this is not the way I would put it. You were a wuss if you came to work later

than 7.30 in the morning and you were a pussy if you left before 7.30pm, right? And so for half the year, Andrew would leave for work in the dark and get home in the dark. And he said to me, he missed the feeling of the sun on his face. He never saw his children. He had to build a relationship with his children many years later. It was exhausting. It hugely depleted him. And he made this really bold decision to just leave, right? But a lot of people stayed. But even after he left, he went to Australia and then New Zealand and built a very successful series of companies. But he always remembered that feeling of just exhaustion and depletion. And one day in 2017, he was on a plane and he was reading a business magazine. And he

just happened to read this report about a study that showed the average worker sits at their desk for eight hours a day, but is only actually focused on their work for three hours a day. And he was really struck by this, right? He thought, God, that's bad for everyone, right? It's bad for the individual because their life is passing them by. It's bad for the employer. You know, they're not getting good value. And he had an idea. He thought about the exhaustion he'd experienced. Andrew had an idea. He said, well, if this is true of my workers, he ran a company called Perpetual Guardian who manage

wills and trusts, employs 240 people. Andrew asked himself, well, if that's true that my workers are exhausted and therefore can't focus, if I moved to a four-day week, but we had exactly the same pay, so we went from five days a week to four days a week, if that increased the amount they paid attention, just 45 minutes a day, then it would have paid for itself, the experiment, right? We'd be producing as much in four days as five. So he organized a phone call with this whole company and he announces, good news, everyone, we're going to move from five days a week to four days a week. You don't have to, I'm going to pay you exactly the same. We're going to try it for three months and see what happens. His head of HR literally fell over, right? And people were like, is this some kind of

trick? What's going on here? So I interviewed everyone who worked in one of them. He needed your phone. If you fall over, you can press the button, right? The jitterbug, exactly. If only he'd had the jitterbug, how much safer he would have been. So I interviewed everyone who worked in their office in Rotorua, which is a little town in New Zealand, which weirdly stinks of farts because they've got a lot of sulfur. But very nice town, other than the absolutely abhorrent smell. And it was fascinating talking to the people there

about how it changed their lives. In some ways, what they said was just very obvious. So Amber, who worked there, she took her daughter out of daycare one day, just spent an extra day every week with her daughter. Eleanor, who worked there, she just slept much more. Another one of them just did a lot of decompressing, doing DIY. So this experiment was studied very carefully by dr helen delaney at the university of auckland business school and what they found was um productivity attention at work went up by 30 they achieved more in four days than they had in five right because stress

went down social media use went down one of the things people spent more of their time doing was sleeping more i'm sure we'll talk about that. Absolutely essential for attention. And so they've now moved to, this is now permanent. They now permanently work four days a week. And in a way, I remember when I first learned about that and I interviewed Andrew and all these people, thinking, that feels almost too good to be true. And I went to Stanford to interview Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer who's a expert on organizational behavior and he said to me look if you want to understand why that if you want to understand

why that worked it's kind of obvious ask any sports fan do you want your team to go onto the pitch absolutely exhausted no you want your team to go onto the pitch really well rested really up for the game why would it be different for everything else right and it was and of course there's been now been lots of experiments in a four-day week and they pretty consistently find the same thing microsoft in japan went to a four-day week their productivity went up by 40 percent toyota in gothenburg in sweden went from their engineers having an eight day eight hour day to a six hour day and they produced 125% more than they had before. Do we know the impact on their happiness and their well-being? Because we often,

it speaks to what we're saying about tech, we often have to justify these things, don't we, through the lens of the capitalist culture, it's going to make more money, it's going to make you more productive, right? And of course, for a business, if we're going to pay people the same, they have to know that it's not costing them. But if we just extend that, I don't know if you looked at the research, well, yes, they're more productive. They've got an extra day off now. I think you're absolutely right that as it happens, this made them more productive. But even if it didn't make them more productive, I would be in favour of it, right? Because actually, life is not all about work, right? And if they were less productive and the evidence shows quite clearly they weren't but

even if they were life is not to be atrophied on cons work is an important part of life and a hugely valuable part of life but it is not everything and especially since we're now all on call all the time this is hugely imbalanced the way we live. And I find this very challenging. You know, I work very obsessively. What do you do when writing a book? Because you write incredibly detailed, in-depth books, right? What's your process when you are at your best as a creator, as a writer, when you're just sort of, I've got it, I'm nailing it. I just want to keep typing. What does that kind of day look like for you? So it's interesting. This relates to another thing that I learned a lot about.

I kind of understood this part of my behavior much better after I'd interviewed the leading expert in the world on this. So for me, when work is so much about getting into a flow state, and everyone listening will have experienced a flow state at some point in your life so a flow state is when you're doing something that is meaningful to you and you just get really into it and in that moment time seems to fall away your ego seems to fall away and attention comes effortlessly right you're just in it and um i interviewed the leading expert on flow states the man who first coined the phrase a professor mahali cheeks at mihi in claremont in california who sadly died

recently yeah wow you got to interview i've written about him loads like you it's just you got to meet the guy such a great man and it was i think i think it was the last interview he ever did as well so totally amazing it was very unwell when i interviewed him but he was such an extraordinary person and and the thing that's really important about flow is flow is a form of deep attention that all humans can give it's the deepest form of attention we can provide um but it's a form of attention that doesn't feel like a huge amount of effort right when when you're in flow it's not like memorizing facts for an exam where you're like okay what's this what's that you can force yourself to do that for a while flow comes easily and i was so really interested in looking at his research obviously he researched this for over 50

years figure out well how can we get into flow states how can we maximize our chances of getting into flow states and from what i read of his research and from what he told me there were three to me really key elements that are so important for the environment in which we now live. The first, and he was very clear on this, is you've got to choose one goal, right? You've got to do one thing at a time. I want to climb this rock face. I want to paint this canvas. I want to take my child to the beach, whatever it is. If you are doing more than one thing, you will not get into flow. The evidence is very clear. Disruption destroys flow, right? The second element is you have to choose something

that is meaningful to you, right? You can't flow into a goal that you don't care about. So for me, I'm not going to get into flow playing football or painting a canvas or trying to play the cello because I'm rubbish at all of those things and I don't really care about them, right? I mean, I wish everyone who does them well, but it's not for me, right? The third element, and this was very helpful to me as well, was it massively helps if you choose something that is at the edge of your abilities. So let's say you're a rock climber. You don't want a medium talent rock climber. You don't want to just clamber over a garden wall. That's not going to get you into flow. Also, you probably don't want to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro tomorrow because that's

going to freak you out so much. You're not going to get you into flow. Also, you probably don't want to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro tomorrow because that's going to freak you out so much you're not going to get into flow. What you want is to choose a rock face that is slightly higher and harder than the last one you did. When you're at the edge of your abilities, that's when flow is most likely to come. So you put in place these three factors, and it's like drilling into yourself to get that gusher of attention. into yourself to get that gusher of attention. So for me, when I'm writing, a lot of it is about, okay, how can I, it's keying into the meaning of what I'm writing about.

Why did I always have a, for each of the books I've ever written, I have a list on the back of my office door and it just says, why does this matter? Right. And if I feel my attention faltering, I go back to the list and I'm like, why does this matter? Okay. So attention matters because if we can't pay attention, we, well, I literally just had my godson's name was the first thing on the list because I could just picture him. I could see his attention was screwed. That matters. And there's lots of kids like him. Secondly, it was, if you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. Thirdly, it was everything you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. Thirdly, it was everything you've ever achieved in your life was because you paid attention to something. If you lose that, you will lose your achievements. Pay attention. That was just kind of advice to myself. There were other things on the list. I'm trying to remember what they were

now. So for me, it's about keying into the meaning, doing something that's a bit harder than what I've done before. It's a different kind kind of but it's kind of related to the books i've done before book i'm writing now about this series of crimes in las vegas that i've been researching for 10 years it's at the edge of my abilities right that's a that's it's not my comfortable bailiwick of what i've been doing um and and and again it's about just doing that one thing and not trying to do anything else so for me it are some people say about writing oh look different people have different things that work for them but some people are like oh you you have to have a routine where you sit at your desk even if you're not

writing just to make your i don't do any of that i just i key into the flow i key into the meaning and then it comes and sometimes it doesn't come yeah it's fascinating to hear that you don't necessarily follow all the standard advice because i don't think i follow any of it actually yeah and it's i think for me i'm very passionate about that because it it goes beyond the tension and flow and focus it it goes even to health for me it's it's like listen to other people absorb what they have to say, but then figure out what's going to work for you. Like, just because this lifestyle, this diet works for your mate down the corridor, doesn't mean it's going to work for you. And yeah, you're really connecting to your why

when you get stuck. Do you have to minimise distractions? Do you have any techniques that get the phone away? I've got the K-safe. That's my writing time. When I'm writing it, I would put it away for longer. Often I'll actually just leave my phone. I've got an office, so I leave my phone at home and just go to the office. I've got Freedom installed, the app Freedom.

So people who don't know, Freedom is an app that will cut you off from particular websites or the entire internet. So let's say you've got a problem with checking twitter you can just say don't let me onto twitter for the next day so i have on my my phone and my laptop just a renewing um it renews every 24 hours it's on a schedule so i can never look at twitter or instagram or facebook on my on my phone on my laptop and once a month i get my assistant to turn it off and i look at the messages from it so i my assistant does my updates i tell my laptop. And once a month I get my assistant to turn it off and I look at the messages from it. So I, my assistant does my updates. I tell her what to do,

but I never look at the feedback, the responses, any of that, that just, it just throws your head off. If it's nasty or even more, like we were talking about earlier before we started recording, it throws you off even more if it's praise and if it's nice, actually, you want to just be keyed into why does this matter okay um i believe this subject is important i interviewed the leading people in the whole world about it they told me really important things i think i've learned how together we can deal with a lot of the things they've told me when i key into that meaning i don't feel anxious i don't feel distracted when i get into the zone of like the book is about to come out it will have come out by the time this broadcast happens

if i get into the zone of what will people say about it how will it be received how many will it sell then you just get into the zone of anxiety and and actually attention problems right and anxiety causes attention problems and it's a circle um so just the more you can be plugged into the meaning i had had a recent conversation in Moscow with a guy called Dmitry Leontiev, who is one of the leading psychologists in Russia. His grandfather was probably one of the three or four most important Russian psychologists ever. And he said to me, I thought it was so interesting. He said to me, And he said to me, I thought it was so interesting, he said to me, you know, when Russians, when we hear British people and Americans talk about, their philosophers talk about, the

meaning of life is the pursuit of happiness. It's even obviously in the American constitution, the pursuit of happiness. You think philosophy is all about happiness. To us that sounds like a child's philosophy, he said. We think life is about the pursuit of meaning. And when you are pursuing meaning, you can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness right as russian is the whole of russian history shows you right um but meaning is and he applied that to attention and he's absolutely right when something is meaningful to you attention will come much more freely than when

attention when something is not meaningful and this is one of the ways in which what we're doing in our school system is such a disaster because what we've done is we've restructured the school system even more than it was before around meaningless and arbitrary tests right i remember at school when you had to learn for tests and you'd say why are we learning this and they'd say things like because you have to or because there'll be a test on it and i'd be like when i was a kid i could read at home all day in school i couldn't read i would have been say things like, because you have to, or because there'll be a test on it. And I'd be like, when I was a kid, I could read at home all day. In school, I couldn't read. I would have been diagnosed with ADHD today because it was just meaningless to me. I hated it. I refused to learn something where I'm not told what the meaning of this is, right? But we've restructured

the entire school system. So in 2002, George W. Bush passed a thing called the No Child Left Behind Act, which massively restructured American schools around rote learning and testing. And in the four years that followed, ADHD diagnoses went up by 23%. Children can't pay attention to things that are meaningless to them. We've created an arbitrary school system that is extraordinarily boring to them. It's one of many changes in childhood that have damaged children's attention. It's only one, and it's only one of the harms in education. But does that ring true to you, Rowan? So, so much. I mean, I struggle with the school system. Now, before I give my opinion, I want to just acknowledge that teachers are heroes.

They were the first people to warn about this. They were the people who pushed back first against this arbitrary testing. They were the heroes of fighting against this, and they're still fighting against it through their unions. I think a lot of teachers are doing their very best in a system, a lot of the time, that is working against them. And of course, there are exceptions. There are probably lots of schools who are bucking the trends, but we're not speaking about sleep yet, right? And I think this plays into this. So what I have seen in education through my kids, but also through my friends' kids. And I really feel that it does

start in some primary schools, but in secondary schools as well. I'll tell you one thing I'm seeing at the moment is there's just too much pressure on kids, right? So there's a couple of things that really bother me about schools um one is a fear-based approach to you know behavior learning like if you don't do this we will punish you right i was even thinking I was talking to my wife the other day about detentions. It's like, I mean, I grew up in a system where there were detentions. And, you know, the secondary school where my son goes, for example, there are detentions. And he's a bit freaked out sometimes about, oh, I don't want to do something that's going to get me in trouble, that get me in a detention. I'm thinking, how is that helpful for kids, right? How is it helpful? And I'm going to invite a teacher, I'm going to try and find a teacher to talk to on the show soon, because I want to hear

another perspective on this, where what do people feel that detentions do? Because I think it's like, well, if you don't do things the way we've said you're going to do them, we are going to punish you. It's like, well, does that really work? You know, does fear and potentially making you feel bad in front of your colleagues, which can potentially lead to shame and all kinds of other things, how helpful really is that? That's one thing that bothers me. We know that anxiety and stress ruin your ability to focus and pay attention, right? Yeah. We know that for adults and kids. If you're worried about it, how are you going to be focusing properly? How are you going to really be creative? How are you going to get into flow, right? If part of your brain is worried about doing something wrong

because then I'm going to get in trouble. So I think there's still a hangover from older ways of educating. And I'm looking at this through the lens of someone who's, you know, I've got 20 years experience as a medical doctor. I'm hugely passionate about health and wellbeing. Like you write a lot about this kind of stuff. And the other thing that I've seen creep in over the past couple of years is tech. And, you know, of course, there are benefits with technology. And, you know, you beautifully explain in the book how we can be using technologies to help us, you know, enhance our humanness. But here's the problem I see, right? If kids are being,

if kids are coming back stressed out, they've got a ton of homework because it's important to do lots of homework and hit these targets when you're 11 or 12 for some reason. And then your homework is either on a screen or to look at it or to do it, you have to go onto your Google Classroom on a screen. Well, I know full well what looking at a screen in the evening does to your melatonin levels. This is a hormone in your body. It shifts it. It delays the onset. So if kids are looking at screens in the evening, doing their homework, they are not going to sleep well. So they are going to be knackered the next day. They're going to not be able to pay attention

they're more likely to get a detention they're more likely to make poor food choices they're going to be best they're going to be less able to emotionally regulate so you know i'm going a bit for rant here i don't mean to but you're 100% so passionate about this that i honestly don't feel sometimes that someone stepped outside it and looking at the big picture going, wait a minute. So when I see a patient, Johan, the way I approach it is, okay, there's all kinds of things that are going on. And I try and think clearly and go, okay, wrong. There's infinite things that you could do with this patient. But what are the key upstream things that if you turn that lever, you're going to eliminate

by default some of the downstream ones. And I would say for a school, get the homework off the screens. We're now in the winter in the UK, it gets dark at 4.30. On an evolutionary level, as it gets dark, we don't want to be looking at screens. But every kid who has homework on screens, right? And let's not even come into phones and potentially gaming in the evening, what that's doing, right? I'm not advocating we go back to times where screens don't exist. But I think these kids are young, right? We all want, all parents, all teachers want the best for their kids.

Looking at screens in the evening, giving the homework on screens, it is absolutely not going to help them. And as a culture, if you talk about that with your kids, if you say, no, you know what, we don't need to give it in this way. We're going to give the homework in the old fashioned way. I think by default, without doing anything else, you improve sleep quality, you improve attention, you improve focus, and you probably reduce detentions as well. You're totally right. But I would go even further. I would say in terms of looking at the big picture, let's look at the country in the world that has the most literate children and the lowest levels of diagnosed attention problems anywhere in the world. It's Finland. How does their school system work? Children in Finland don't go to school at all

until they're seven. They just play. Between seven and 17, they go to school between 9am and 2.30pm. They have no homework and they have no testing until they're 17. What does that do? It produces incredibly happy, literate children, right? What we've done is we've created an education system which is drained of meaning, which drains the children of energy by exhausting them in all the ways you're talking about, and that deadens them in a very basic way. And it was fascinating for me to go to the places that have tried to reverse this and seeing what it does to children's attention and focus. So one of the, what we've seen, you and I, I think

we're the same age, aren't we? I'm 42. I'm a smidgen older. I'm in my early 40s. Okay, well they're the same age. So when I was seven and you were nine, for every child that was diagnosed with attention problems then, there is now a hundred children diagnosed with attention problems, right? In Britain. In the US, it's an even bigger increase, right? And some of what's happening there is there are real genetic contributions to attention problems for some people that would have been unnoticed in the past that are now getting picked up on. That is a real factor that does contribute to some children struggling to focus. But I think the evidence is clear that something much bigger is happening, which is there have been a series of transformations in childhood that are genuinely

producing children who are less able to focus and pay attention. There's been a transformation in children's diets. The way we eat ruins our ability to focus and pay attention. Children on average sleep 80 minutes less than they did a century ago. There's all sorts of factors there I'm sure we'll talk about. But for me, the single biggest factor after speaking to so many experts, I mean, it was fascinating. Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed in Portland and Oregon, who's one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, said that we now live in what he called an attentional pathogenic culture, in which it is very hard to form attention and maintain really strong evidence that children develop attention and an ability to learn through playing freely with each other. And there has been a collapse in free play. So in the US, we're slightly better than this, but in the US, only 10% of children ever play freely without adults outside their home, ever.

And I really tell this story in the book through an incredible woman who's working on this. Her name's Lenore Skenazi. So Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago. And in the 60s, when she was growing up, when she was five, she'd walk out of her house on her own and she'd walk to school, which was 15 minutes away. She'd generally meet up with the other neighborhood kids, all of whom also walked to school on their own. They'd sort of hang out, they'd get to school. She'd be at school until whatever it was, three, and then she would leave on her own with her friends, with no adults, and they would walk together, they would play together for a couple of hours, they'd go to the local park, they'd run around, and then they'd make their way home when they were hungry. Today, if you saw a five-year-old walking to school on their own, you might well

ring the police, right? There's been a profound transformation of childhood to the point where when Lenore had her own kids in the 90s, she was living in Queens in New York by then, she was expected to deliver her child to school, watch him while he walked through the door and be waiting there when he came out. Childhood has now been profoundly confined. It's been psychologically confined at school where play has been massively reduced, free play, and they are physically confined in their homes. And this has all sorts of disastrous effects on their attention and focus. Exercise massively boosts your attention and focus.

When children are prevented from exercising, their attention deteriorates. The skills that children learn in play are essential for attention and focus. When you play freely as a child, you experience less anxiety. If we want to restore attention, one of the many reforms we're going to have to make is we have to restore childhood, right? For almost all of human history, children roamed freely.

They learned by playing with each other and watching adults. And we have massively constricted that and it's interesting lenore the woman i was talking about who so she runs an amazing group called let grow dot org which i recommend everyone look into um which is about helping because apparently just lets their child go out and play now if you're the only parent who does it it just seems really odd and the child doesn't enjoy it it's, we've got to persuade groups and schools to do it together. And she does, so I can tell you about the places I went to where they'd done this.

But one of the ways she starts that conversation is she says to people, parents, tell me about something you did as a child that you loved that you don't allow your own children to do. And people light up when you ask them this. I used to ride my bike into the forest i used to you know a whole i built a fort with my friend things and they and this is what so that's that your happiest memory from childhood do you let your children do that no yeah um and and this is not guilty as charged that's interesting and what how would you account

for that and i would like to think I'm an enlightened parent, but as you say that, I'm thinking, yeah. I used to ride my bike off by myself, go off into the woods. I once sort of fell and I think fell into the stream and had to climb out and then... I've got a big smile as I think back to that. I remember like once, I think it was about seven or eight, I got in such trouble.

I just disappeared on my bike for hours, came back late. Man, I got in trouble. But I guess there was a certain freedom with that. And I think, well, I probably don't do that with my own kids. Well, I don't. I say probably, I don't. But this is so important because attention, partly attention comes from a feeling of competence, right? And children build a sense of competence by facing an escalating series of challenges throughout their childhood. And what we've done is we've removed a huge amount of these challenges.

It's one of the reasons they're so obsessed with video games. It's one of the only places where they get to feel they're roaming around and to feel they're experiencing a sense of challenges. Or even, particularly with boys, it's one of the few places they get a sense that they're good at something. We have a school system that makes children feel stressed and incompetent. Like, particularly boys, it's one of the few places they get a sense that they're good at something we have a school system that makes children feel stressed and incompetent like they're particularly

boys it's also true of girls to some degree but so lenore's program it was it was deeply moving to see it so what they do is they go to schools and they explain this problem and almost everyone agrees when you explain this to them right it's not it's not like explaining quantum physics to them people get it right and they can see something's wrong and they can see children are less able to pay attention and more anxious so what she did this is pre-covid it was obviously disrupted by covid is um they persuade people they get parents so they start in a very simple way i went to two schools that had done this um and actually it was very moving there's a school called roanoke elementary school which is in long island and they had this chilling moment where they did this thing called world play day where uh kids are allowed to just play freely for the day and so they just throw a

load of toys into the middle of the room and just set the kids free and one of the teachers there donna verbeck described how several years before they did this, right? They just put out their toys and in the past she'd been a teacher for 30 years. Kids would just throw themselves into the toys and it would all just start spontaneously. But she noticed that as the years passed, kids were just more and more puzzled

when you set them free. So they had this global play day where you can just do whatever you want, just play. And the kids would say, but what are we meant to do? And she'd go, whatever you want, just play. And the kids would say, but what are we meant to do? And she'd go, whatever you want, just play. And some of the kids would dive in straight away, but a lot of them just stood there really puzzled. Several of them were so puzzled,

they just went into a corner and went to sleep because they didn't know what to do. And that's when she learned about Let Grow. So the Let Grow program starts really simply. It takes kids, in the case I went to this school, they were working with nine-year-olds, the class spent time with and they just say to them um your homework is to just do something on your own that you don't normally do and report back to the class about it just tell us about it right so i spoke to these kids who did different things and at first a lot

of the parents were like no one of the kids just wanted to do the washing. And no, no, he'll break it, he'll ruin it. No, right? So they had to do a lot of work persuading the parents just to let their children do anything. But it was these kids, it was so interesting seeing their faces. One of them had done a lemonade stand on their street. One of them was obsessed with turtles and she thought that the trash near the river was killing the turtles.

So she went and she cleared some of the trash to save the turtles. And one of the little, a little boy, I can picture him so clearly, it was a little pale redheaded boy, said, oh, there was, said it very quietly to me, said, there's a rope in my garden hanging from a tree and I'd never climbed it and I climbed the rope. And I remember Lenore was with me and she said, in what previous

generation would there have been a rope in the garden that's obviously there to be climbed and you'd have a healthy nine-year-old boy and he wouldn't even think to climb it but you could see the kids that that lighting up when they talked about this was one boy I'll call him LB that's not his real name who it was so moving he He had decided, so he was always being treated as a kid who was not competent. He wasn't good at academic stuff. It was constantly a fight with his mum to get him to read. And he decided he wanted to build a raft, initially just a small model raft. So he gets a load of glue stick, a glue gun, a load of toothpicks and things, and he builds this raft. And he gets into an early form of flow, right a glue gun, a load of toothpicks and things. And he builds this raft

and he gets into an early form of flow, right? His mum, he said he was really not good at focusing, told me, I should sit there for hours and hours doing this, right? When he was set free from arbitrary, meaningless homework to just find something you find interesting. So he sits there for hours and they took it out to the sea near Long Island, on Long Island, and pushed it out. And then he said he wanted to build a bigger and bigger thing. So he gets more and more into it. He starts reading a load to learn how do you build bigger things? He goes and asks the neighbors, can I have the bamboo in your yard?

He ended up building an amphibious wagon, really big amphibious wagon, pushes it out into the sea and it sank. And I said, how did he feel? And he said, I was sad, but I was determined to to make it work and he was explaining it in all this detail and i remember donna saying to me setting that child free to do that has taught him so much more than us didactically standing over him lecturing him and you saw this it was so interesting because the the i went to another school in long island that also did the program. It's this moment that really threw me and then inspired me. But there was a boy, the level of fear these children had was insane.

So this part of Long Island, Roanoke is in quite a poor part of Long Island, but we went to this quite fancy part of Long Island where they do it with what we would call a secondary school. And there was this boy who was 14. It was a big strapping 40 taller than me strong strapping 14 year old boy and he said that until they did this program six months before he was too his parents wouldn't let him leave the house on his own right he said because of all these kidnappings there's never been any kidnappings in long island of 14 year old boys and then his parents let him go jogging around the corner.

And eventually he developed a bit more. And when he was, they got a bit confidence, he went into the woods and he built a fort. And Lenore said to me, think about like human history for thousands of years, children are free. They build forts,

they do things. And then the moment this boy is set free, what does he do? He goes into the woods with his friends and he builds a fort. Children want to build and create, and we are crushing their attention by putting them in arbitrary meaningless situations they don't want that don't mean anything to them we're physically confining them we're mentally confining them we've got to restore childhood you can't form attention if you don't have a healthy normal childhood it reminds me of a conversation i had with my son in the car this

morning he's got his um music assessment at school today they all do it then music that's assessment now in like year seven so 11 year olds are getting assessed and i said to him clearly because i know sometimes how he feels about assessments. I said, listen, go and let your light shine bright. Perform the way you want to perform, right? Sing the song you want to sing. And it doesn't matter what assessment you get. I said, all these artists, because he wants to be a musician at the moment, right? So all these artists you hear, I tell you, 99% of them were breaking rules. They weren't conforming to this is how you do this. This is how you play this, right? Of course, there's a place for that. But I'm trying to, again, go if you feel that you've performed to the best of your ability, and you enjoyed it,

that's all that matters. That's all that matters. That's music. That's creativity. Do not worry. You assess yourself. If you gave 100%, you're happy with it. Doesn't matter whether you get an A or a D. Now look, he is very good. So I suspect he will get a good grade anyway. But I don't want him to be focused on that. I want him to be focused on that innate creativity that he has. And that message will empower his attention, right? Because it's about connecting with flow, connecting with meaning. But that message,

which almost all sane parents in Britain would totally endorse, you're spitting in a wind that's going the other way. And we should stop tolerating the fact that we have imposed on our kids forms of childhood that were not good for us and are not good for them. And actually it's moved, even when we were kids, it was pretty ritualized and drained of meaning, but it's become more so as the years have passed, right? Because of this completely false conception of productivity that we have. Which plays into stress. Exactly. Exactly. And you see these kids, you see many

kids now. I see them, you know, I've been seeing for years as a doctor, you know, 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, school is stressing them out, right? We have to address that. Culturally, we have to address that. And particularly for adults, there's healthy pressure and then there's stress. You and I experience healthy pressure around our work. It's great. I feel a little bit of pressure in this interview to do a good job. You're doing a great job, by the way. Oh, thank you for that. There's a difference between that and stress, right? Which is where you feel overwhelmed by the pressure you experience. And it was really interesting i spent a lot of time talking to experts about

stress and what we can do about do about this and it was one of the people who most taught me about this was an amazing woman called dr nadine burke harris who's now the surgeon general of california the most important medical officer in the state book on childhood trauma yeah the deepest well yeah nadine is a completely amazing person um and i spent a lot of time discussing stress with nadine and she made a kind of breakthrough on understanding this in relation to children now the thing she was looking at was very extreme but it helps us to understand milder forms of stress so nadine grew up in palo alto and um every day when she left school she felt this anxiety because the way she would

put it she didn't know whether she was coming home to nice mom or scary mom because her mother was an amazing woman in many ways but had paranoid schizophrenia and so you can imagine it was a very challenging childhood and Nadine coped by being like a absolute grade A student she went to Harvard and then when she left Harvard she went to work in in bayview which a very poor part of the san francisco bay area the poorest part because she wanted to give back and um i mean it's a really frightening area you know the very first day she's there a 17 year old got shot right next to her um so there's a lot of stress and anxiety in bayview through no fault of the people who live there um and nadine starts working with kids so she's working in a clinic with kids and she notices that their diagnosis of adhd are just off the scale like so much worse than in

wealthy areas she's like well what's going on here this is we need to figure this out and so nadine's looking into it more and more and she decided to do a study where she looked at um all the kids who worked there and assessed the level of trauma they'd experienced. They did very detailed interviewing and analysis of their backgrounds. And what she found is kids who were experiencing four severe forms of stress were 32.6 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than kids who were experiencing no forms of stress right no severe forms of stress 32.6 times i mean that's a staggering figure subsequent studies have found sort of a similar effect as a large effect that that stress causes attention problems now

that's true for the kids in bayview but that's true for all of us and one person who really she helped me to understand it was another person who did as well uh particularly made a breakthrough with me i remember nadine saying to me i was asking her why is stress so bad for our attention and she said look imagine you were attacked by a bear imagine tomorrow you know a bear savages you're not very likely in greater manchester but maybe they escaped from the zoo right um in the aftermath of that something will happen to your attention it will flip so it will flip from your normal attention where hopefully you can focus on the things in front of you to a state called vigilance where you are scanning the horizon for other bears right you're just

it's an involuntary physical response you're scanning for dangers okay now imagine you're attacked by a bear again you're going to a state called hypervigilance, where you are just constantly on the lookout for risk and danger. Now, many people live in that state of hypervigilance. Think about something as simple as if you're a single mother, and you know that one thing goes wrong, and you're in real financial trouble. Your child loses their shoe. What are you going to do? The washing machine breaks. What are you going to do? You go into a state of vigilance. It's not that you're not paying attention, it's that you're paying attention to scanning for risks, right? And there was a child psychiatrist in Adelaide in Australia, Dr. John Girardini, who said to me,

you know, deep focus is a really good strategy when you're safe, right? Sitting down and reading a book is a great thing to do when you're safe. If you're stressed and in danger, deep focus is a very foolish strategy. If you're sitting in Bayview and you could get shot at any moment, sitting down and reading a book is... You're smarter to be scanning for who might shoot you, right? And I think what's happened is

of course that's a very extreme form of stress but a lot of us are living in a much greater state of vigilance than we need to be. It's as if the way we feel is a signal, right? So if you can focus deeply on something, I guess it's in many ways, at least at that moment in time, you feel relatively safe because you're able to switch that off and focus. And so maybe some people who are struggling to focus and have their attention where they want to, maybe it's not a failing of them. Maybe it's not that they

need to work on their attention. Maybe that is a completely appropriate response to the state of their lives. 100%. I'll give you an extreme example. Nadine was working with a boy who, she obviously didn't tell me his real name, but I'll call him Robert, who was brought in. So he had been diagnosed prior to working with Nadine with ADHD. And his attention wasn't getting any better. And he said he didn't like being given these stimulant drugs so nadine starts to interview robert and his mother in great detail she starts asking when did it begin these attention problems it turned out in robert's case it took a while for the story to come out and it was a horrendous story um one day robert's mother had come home and found her boyfriend sexually abusing him in

the shower and robert's mother had herself been sexually abused and groomed as a child and she felt she couldn't challenge this man so she did something she felt really ashamed of she sent him away to live with his dad but he would come home every weekend so of course he was seeing this person who'd sexually abused him every weekend and of course he goes into a state of vigilance right he's really scared for very good reasons he's that that fear is a necessary signal it was communicating something to us that that child was in real danger but of course that signal was misread of course i'm not saying all diagnoses of adhd are like this but in that instance that that child was profoundly

misread um and i think we're doing that a lot a lot of these signals i'll give you another example this sounds like a joke i assure you it's not. I went to interview a man called Nicholas Dodman, who is the pioneer of diagnosing dogs, cats, and walruses with ADHD. So one day, a beagle named Emma was brought to see Dr. Dodman. He's a British veterinarian, but he lives in Connecticut. And so Ona brings in Emma the beagleagle and says i've got a problem my dog just runs around all the time and just barks madly whenever i leave the dog so uh nicholas dodman assigned the the dog to a parenting class parenting sorry i said again uh

nicholas dodman sends the owner and the dog to training classes the training helps a little bit but the dog still barks all the time runs around a lot so he diagnosed the dog with adhd which he was the kind of pioneer of applying these categories which had formerly only been applied to humans to non-human animals uh so he prescribed ritalin for the dog the dog stopped running around all the time was much more kind more docile, and the owner was really happy. I remember interviewing Dr. Dobman, who's been a real pioneer of doing this with all sorts of animals. He gives Prozac to polar bears to stop them pacing about. There are parrots on Valium, thanks to him. There are walruses on antipsychotics. Half

of all American zoos now admit they drug their animals to make them more quiescent. It's a bit like one flew over the cuckoo's nest for actual cuckoos, right? Before I went to interview him, I thought he would say, oh, these animals have a genetic problem analogous to the humans we diagnosed with this, and that's why I'm diagnosing them. To be totally to him and i quite liked him as a person he said no of course not the polar bear is really unhappy and pacing around because it wants to live in the arctic where it would walk 20 miles a day and we put it in a tiny little cage that dog dogs are meant to have at least three hours a day off leash no american dog no british dog or virtually none

get that right he used this phrase that really stayed with me. He said, they've got frustrated biological objectives. And he gave me an example. There was a dog that would be diagnosed with ADHD in this mad world that was running around all the time. Its owners lived in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. And then they moved to a farm in upstate New York. The dog stopped exhibiting all these signs of attention problems. And I think that phrase, frustrated biological objectives, is really important. We are the first human society in the last hundred years ever to think you can make small children sit still for eight hours a day. That is an insane objective. What we do to our own bodies in terms of how we cram them in, the pollution

we expose them to, which causes all sorts of attention problems, the diets we feed them, we are denying our own biology unconsciously, unwittingly rather. And that in its sleep, humans need to sleep. I can talk about some of of that but we deny many key aspects of our own biology we treat ourselves like machines but we are not machines and we cannot live by the logic of machines it speaks to what you wrote about in lost connections right you are not a human being with broken parts you're a human being with unmet needs yeah right same thing i mean two things from earlier in the conversation kind of spring to mind for me. One is about technology. And you wrote in the book that you're a better person when you're not on Twitter, right?

You're a better person when you're reading books. And it just made me think, you know, it's a useful exercise, isn't it, for all of us to do. What kind of activities are we doing when we're the best version of ourselves, right? It's very rarely when we're rushing around, we don't have any time that we're leaving nasty comments on people's posts or whatever, right? So that's one element, I think. I think many of us probably don't realise, as we've already mentioned, what technology, what the over unintentional use of technology is doing to our brains, and who we are as people. But again, it also comes back to this idea at the start of the conversation that we're living in a perfect storm.

And I'm drawn back to Rat Park, which I think you wrote about Lost Connections, right? So you're gonna have to remind people what Rat Park is. But here's a question for you. If we weren't living in the conditions in which we now are, if we weren't living isolated lives where we have moved away from our families and our communities for work, when we had time to see our friends, when we were all sleeping seven to eight hours a night, right? When we didn't have jobs that chained us to desks so we can't move our bodies to sort of naturally relieve sort of anxiety and tension that might build up in the day, right? If the conditions in which we lived were different, would technology still have this effect?

Or would we be getting those needs met that we'd actually be able to use it in a different way? Do you know what I mean? It would have less of an effect. I think you're totally right the analogy i use about this is it's like these invasive technologies arrived a moment when our immune system was already down right so of course the virus comes along you know even some people with healthy immune systems will get it but the more your immune system is depleted the collectively as a society the more people will get it and i think we were even just think about sleep which we've mentioned lots of times so i spent a lot of time interviewing the leading

experts in the world on sleep and there was this moment that really chilled me so i interviewed a guy called dr charles sizler who's at harvard medical school where i interviewed him who has made a whole series of breakthroughs on sleep and he's shown that if you stay awake for 19 hours don't feel like very much you are your attention is as impaired as if you had got drunk and if you go a week with just six hours you get to six hours sleep a night you get to the same level but in britain 23 of people sleep five hours a night it's like a lot of us are living on the absolute brink of exhaustion there's one he discovered loads of really important things about sleep and attention that I write about.

But there's one thing that really haunted me. So he pioneered a technique, a very simple technique. You take two forms of technology and put them together. So there's a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at. And obviously we have PET scans that can scan what's happening in your brain. So he's looking at, well, what's wrong in looking at and what effect is that having in his brain? And what he discovered,

he looked at tired people, not that tired, just tired people. And what he found is you can appear to be awake. You can be looking around you. You can be speaking, but parts of your brain have literally gone to sleep. It's called local sleep because it's local to one part of the brain. So for many of us, we appear to be awake, but we are not fully awake our parts of our brain have gone to sleep and i found that such a chilling to realize how much that is happening around us you mentioned that your son talked about drowsy driving which is the fastest rising form of death or was before covid before COVID, you can see we are deeply exhausted. We are a bone-tired society. And when you are, as Professor Roxanne Prashad,

who's a professor of psychology at the University of Minneapolis and another expert on this said to me, when you're sleeping, you're repairing, right? All sorts of necessary physical processes are happening to repair your brain and process what you've been through in the day. And we are not giving ourselves time to do that. And it shatters attention and focus. And I think it goes, one of my key things with schools is, apart from the cultural traditions

that I feel we have to start letting go of and rewriting, I think all schools should be doing everything they can to prioritise their students' sleep. I think... Like, let's not make them wake up at six o'clock in the morning to get to... It's literally madness. It is insane. It's madness. And I feel, you know, to be clear, I think my son's school is excellent, right?

Sure, sure. They are doing a brilliant job, right? I'm just talking about some of the things that I witness across multiple schools that I find incredibly frustrating that what you said about sleep deprivation and driving i saw this right in i think it was 2015 or 2016 we were filming doctor in the house bbc one we went i think it was in guildford the driving center the stimulation center this never made the final cut for the show in the end but one of the guys was sleep deprived and we were in the driving simulator right which is so realistic you actually think that you're driving on the motorway and we watched him when

he was sort of well slept one night one evening i think i can't remember how many drinks he had but not that much just around the amount where you are legally drunk, right? So this is actually under the drink drive limit, right? Under, I think the drink drive limit is 80. It's 80, I can't remember the unit, 80 per 100 mils is the kind of drink drive limit in the UK. I think he only got to 50. So he was legally able to drive and his reaction time was shockingly bad. So, I mean, that's a separate note. Even one drink, even half a glass of wine will impair your ability to drive. But then we sleep deprived him. And it was worse. It was worse. And I saw that and it was like, oh my God, how many people are driving around all the time in this state of exhaustion An hour less. That's a staggering transformation in how we live,

which is really depleting. And interestingly, I commissioned for the book with the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry. We commissioned, as far as I can tell, the first ever opinion poll about attention. What's interesting is we asked people, we gave them 10 factors that we know harm attention. And we said, just select if you think

any of these affect your attention negatively and interestingly tech was the fourth thing that people named so it wasn't number one which is what most people think and the number one was sleep so people at some level know that this lack of sleep is really screwing them but again it comes back to okay so obviously one solution to that is teaching people to prioritize sleep teaching them sleep hygiene things that i'm sure people have heard on your podcast from you and your excellent books many times put your phone in another room no screens two hours before you go to sleep make your room slightly cold because your body needs to cool down there's all sorts of things like that. So very important advice and prioritize sleep insofar as you can. But I also think we then need those social changes,

like don't make kids have to wake up insanely early, give people a right to disconnect, stop us all being exposed to a machinery through social media that is designed to invade our attention by making them adopt a different business model. There are all sorts of solutions that we can pursue that will make it possible for people. Actually, it's really striking to me. One of the big changes that happened in that New Zealand office, Perpetual Guardian, when

they went to a four-day week, everyone slept more. What a lot of people did was come in. So actually a lot of people said, instead of doing a four day week, what we'll do is a five day week, but we'll do six hours a day. And what they did is they just stayed in bed more and slept more. So you can see how these changes free people up to do things that make them better. And that's one of the things you reported in the book about Provincetown, that you were sleeping well. You woke up and I think there's this one moment you described, I just didn't feel I needed a coffee.

Do you know, I had a really weird, it was really weird. I can remember this morning very clearly. I woke up, it was a month after I'd arrived there and I went into the little kitchen in this beach house and I was very consciously thinking, I feel, what do I feel? You know, there's so much you're trying to identify what you feel in your body. It's like, this is real. And I thought, oh, I've woken up and i'm not tired yeah and i cannot remember a moment in my adult life before that what i had woken up and not felt tired and so normally when

i wake up i like inhale caffeine you know like i hurl it into my face basically um and and i just thought i don't think i need any coffee And it was a really genuinely peculiar moment. And I actually slept insane. And again, I'm conscious that this will be enraging to a lot of people listening because I think I can't do that. And they're right. That's why we need this movement to free up more people to do it. like um you know it can sound like a kind of grating uh display of privilege which in some ways it is if you don't also present it as okay but this how do we all get to a point where we can achieve this um but i i slept nine hours a night most nights i was in province town it was

i was amazed by how much sleep my body actually craved that reminds me of something that happened in the first lockdown in the UK in March, April 2020. And of course, everyone experiences these things in different ways, depending on their job, depending on their income levels, depending on the space they have in their own home environment, whether they have a garden or not. So I totally understand that that but one thing my wife reported was that we look i'm a super early riser she is not she doesn't like mornings certainly not the way i do but i was stuck you wake up at four o'clock in the morning don't you half four yeah but again can i just you know that is something that i have uh evolved to do since I had kids. I say evolved. I have adapted my lifestyle to give me what I feel I need to be the best version of myself.

Even if my flat was on fire at 4.30 in the morning, I think I'd be like, I suppose this is how it ends then. Yeah, look, we're all different. And again, I'm so keen. No, I'm impressed by it. Well, again, I don't think we necessarily need to be impressed. Because by saying impressed, we're always- No, you're right.

I'm buying into that mad logic. We're feeding into that culture where it's, oh man, that's amazing. Well, I go to bed at 8.30, so I don't watch telly. I don't know any film that's just been on. Again, I don't miss it. I don't knowingly think, God, I wish I knew what everyone else was talking about. I don't know. I don't know who anyone is, celebrity-wise. I don't keep up to date with stuff. I love my work. I love my family. I love trying to look after my mum. I love my life, and I structure a life, and I'm able to now. I'm able to now, right? And I'm aware not

everyone's able to. And I know if I get up at half eight and I wake up at half four, I get my sleep in, I can do my morning routine that I really like, and I can probably get two hours of deep creative work done before other people are up in my house. So that's how I write.

People say, how do you write in a book a year and seeing your wife and your kids and doing a podcast? And look, I'm not saying we should aspire to do that, but I found a pretty good balance and I found a lifestyle that works for me, that allows me to do that. I'm not expecting anyone else to do that. I don't think everyone should do that. And so I don't think it matters if someone goes to bed at 11 and wakes up at seven, right? And again, I also know that a lot of young parents will hear that and hear about sleep and go, well,

listen, you know, my kid keeps getting up. And what I always try and say from the bottom of my heart is, it's okay, this won't last forever. One of the tragedies though, Rangan, of the way we live is that for a lot of people, it will last forever. I mean, their child won't cry forever, but Roxanne Prashad, the expert on sleep I interviewed at the University of Minneapolis, she was studying college students, her students, and she found that they slept as much on average as parents of a newborn baby. And when she talked to them about it, they knew they were exhausted, but they also had grown up in a culture where they thought that was normal.

So actually, we've created such a dysfunctional culture around sleep that even think about something as completely mad as the fact that people who should know this most doctors as part of their medical training make themselves do a jack bauer that's what they call it isn't it stay awake for 24 hours when that surely knowing that profoundly endangers their patients you do not want to be tended to by someone who's been awake for 24 hours right so you think it's such a crazy logic and you mentioned covid because it's interesting obviously many things happen in covid this has been a horror show for many people but one of the interesting things about this that i thought reflected on a lot is so there's really interesting evidence that the the people's experience of life has been

speeding up i could talk about how but let's just take that for a moment as a given and and there's very good evidence that when things speed up people can pay attention less the faster things are going the less easy it is to get into any state of focus and covid for a lot of us clearly not everyone like focus. And COVID for a lot of us, clearly not everyone like healthcare workers, but for a lot of us, COVID was really the first moment that our lives had consciously slowed down in a really long time. And there's interesting research on this. So because it coexisted with so many other factors, it's hard to separate them out. So we were all obviously more stressed. We know stress damages attention. There's all sorts of things going on. But there's interesting

evidence that if all those other factors weren't in play... There's this guy called Professor Guy Claxton, who's a professor at the University of Winchester. Have you had him on? No, but I've literally got it written down here because I love that bit about deliberately slowing down. You should have. You'd love him. He's a wonderful person. UK based. Yeah, he's a professor of the learning sciences at the University of Winchester. A fantastic person.

Professor Claxton did a really interesting study where he looked at all sorts of practices that involve slowing down. Meditation, yoga, tai chi. And he found out why there's good evidence that they all boost your attention why is that it seems to be slowness boosts attention speed shatters attention slowness boosts attention and building a slow practice into your day will improve your attention and focus not just obviously improves it while you're doing the slow thing, but it sort of sets your thermostat, internal thermostat a bit differently. It's one of the reasons why that works.

He says it's not, you know, the orange robes and the chanting, although they're good for lots of people. It's the slowness that's the core of it. And that plays into why I get up early, right? That for me, I found, mate, that actually I have that slowness every morning. When I'm my best self, I've gone to bed on time. I've woken up then fresh, but that's my practice of making sure that

I've slowed down. I've given myself that time and I am a better human being in every single way on the mornings when I've done that. And when I don't, when I, you know, rush from first thing in the morning, you feel it later, right? So I think there's a lot to be said for that. I don't even feel we've even touched the sides on the stuff I want to talk about because it is such a deep dive. Just to start closing down this conversation, I'd love you to, if you wouldn't mind, mentioning Rat Park, because I don't think you mentioned it on the first time you came on my podcast. And I think Rat Park for me beautifully illustrates, yes, problems with depression and

anxiety and addiction, but I think it goes beyond that. I think it helps us realize why, as you said, we have these suppressed immune systems. We are susceptible at the moment to the food industry, to the tech industry, to the overworked culture, right? Because of the way we are living disconnected lives, right? And yes, I want change in the tech industry. I want change in the food industry. But I also feel if we can build on some of these connections and nourish our mind, body, and heart, that I kind of feel we're at least a bit more resilient to the pressures that we're facing yeah I think that's I think you've just put that really well you should also have Bruce Alexander who did the Rat Park experiment on your podcast he's one of the most amazing people I've ever met

um but so I came to Rat Park because um we had a lot of addiction in my family and still do and um i i thought i understood the addiction that i'd seen close to me so if you'd asked me when i started doing the research on addiction years ago um in fact i started doing it exactly 10 years ago if you if you'd asked me then what causes let's say heroin addiction because it's saying close to me i think I would have looked at you like you were thick and I would have said, well, heroin causes heroin addiction, right? Obviously, the clue's in the name, right? So we've been told this story for 100 years. It's become deeply part of our common sense. It was certainly part of mine.

which is that we think if we kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past your house, and like a villain in a horror film, we injected them all with heroin every day, three times a day for a month, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave, right? And at the end of the month, they'd have this tremendous physical hunger for heroin, right? For the hooks in the drug. That's why we call it being hooked, right? Now that story has some truth in it, but it turns out it's a very small part of what's going on with addiction. And the first thing that alerted me to the fact there was something wrong with this story we've been telling is when lots of doctors here in Britain explained to me, look,

if I get hit by a truck and I get taken to hospital and I break my hip, it's quite likely I'll be given diamorphine for the pain, right? Diamorphine is heroin. It's much better heroin than you'd ever score in the streets, right? Because it's medically pure heroin. Anyone listening who's got a nan who had a hip replacement, your nan was probably given quite a lot of diamorphine, right? Heroin. If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to these people in British hospitals who are being given potent amounts of heroin? Significant numbers of them should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. There's been studies of this. It never happens, right? I remember when I

learned that just thinking, well, that can't be true. How could you have a situation where you've got someone in a hospital bed who's been given quite a lot of potent heroin, they don't become addicted, and you've got someone shooting up in the alleyway outside who does become addicted? How can that be? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver to interview an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who really changed my life and has changed the life of many people. So Professor Alexander explained to me, this story we've been told that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. Your viewers can try them at home if they feel a bit sadistic. Don't actually try them at home,

but you could if you wanted to. You take a rat rat you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles one is just water the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine if you do that the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself within a couple of weeks so there you go it's our story the rat's exposed to the chemical hooks it wants more and more of them and it dies in the 70s professor alexander was working on the downtown east side of Vancouver, which is an area with a lot of people with addiction problems where I've spent a lot of time. I just thought, yeah, it doesn't seem to ring true to me.

So he decided to do a variant of this experiment. He built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of colored balls. Anything that makes life meaningful for rats is there in Rat Park. And they've got both of friends, they can have loads of sex, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls.

Anything that makes life meaningful for rats is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water. And of course they try both, they don't know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drugged water. They hardly ever use it. None of them use it compulsively. None of them overdose.

So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living, to no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living. There's lots of human examples, but what I took from this is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. Valuable though that is to many people, the opposite of addiction is connection. And I think you see this with so many of the things we've been talking about in relation to attention, right? We have a profoundly lonely society. We have a society where we've been taught to value the wrong things, to think life is about status and money.

We have a society where most people don't have control over their work and are humiliated and controlled at work. A society like that is going to have a bank of unhappiness and distress, which is roughly analogous to a depleted immune system. And so it means that when something that comes along that just gives momentary relief, I got a like on Facebook, I want a Big Mac, you know, a whole range, even saying that, maybe you want a Big Mac, a whole, a whole rain, even saying that, you want a Big Mac. A whole, you know, when things come along that give you a moment of relief in a landscape that is sort of dry and parched of the things we need, we will be much more drawn to them,

just like the rats in the isolated cage were much more drawn to the heroin than the rats who lived in Rat Park. We talked about Finland, right? We talked about how in Finland, they have the lowest levels of children diagnosed with attention problems in the world. And we talked about that in relation to schools, which is important. Their schools work differently to ours. But it's also just their society works differently. It's a much more equal society. It's a society with much more financial security for people at the bottom who

are not humiliated. Society where people have more control over their work. There's certainly problems in Finland. It's not paradise, but it's much more like Rat Park than we are, right? So the more we can make our society strong, the more we can have societies of people who are connected to other human beings, and there's all sorts of very practical ways we can do this that I've written about, the more we build up an immune system that can defend us against attacks on our attention. Of course, you've got to do both. You've got to strengthen the immune system and you've got to deal with the virus, to extend this analogy. You've got to do both, right? But at the moment, we're strengthening the virus and weakening the

immune system, right? And this is one of the things that's so important to me about this subject, because you could listen to everything we've said and think this is bad we've got to deal with it somewhere down the line we are in a race at the moment the factors that are making our attention worse are increasing think just about technology to pick one of the 12 that technology is becoming more and more invasive with each year that passes facebook has already patented technology that could read your emotions through your webcam and adjust accordingly their algorithms right and paul graham one of the leading um investors in silicon valley said the world will be in the absence of regulation the world will be more addictive in the next 40 years

than it was in the last 40 years right so that And that's just one of the causes. The food industry is making more processed, more invasive, more addictive food. We could talk about all of these 12. Most of them are increasing, right? We sleep less now than we did 10 years before, which is less than it was 10 years before, which is less than it was 10 years before. So the way I see it is we've got a race with two sides. We've got these invasive forces, The way I see it is we've got a race with two sides. We've got these invasive forces, and then on the other side, we've got to have a movement of people taking on the forces that are stealing our focus. And to do that, I think about two things. First thing, we've got to change our own psychology. We've got to stop asking only for tiny little tweaks. We are not medieval peasants living at the court of King Zuckerberg, begging for little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we can reclaim our minds. And I know that might sound a bit fancy or abstract or when I think about that, I think about something very direct in my own

family and almost certainly in your family and the family of everyone listening. So I think about my grandmothers, right? Who I loved, who I knew very well. My Scottish grandmother basically raised me. So my grandmothers were the age I am now, 42 in 1963. Both of them left school when they were 13, even though the boys in their family went on to school longer because no one gave a shit about girls learning anything um my one of them was a working class scottish woman and uh he was living in a scottish tenement and one of them was a what would have been called then a swiss peasant living on a wooden in a wooden hut on a mountain in switzerland um in that year neither of them were allowed to have bank accounts in their own name because they were married women. It was legal for them to be raped by their husbands. In practice, it was legal for their husbands to beat them up because the police never did anything about domestic violence. In the entire world, there was not one woman who ran a country, a police force or a company. Not one, right? That had been the case ever since countries, companies, and police forces were invented.

They'd never been a woman running them, right? Never, apart from occasionally a hereditary queen, right? My Swiss grandmother, she loved to draw and paint. And she was told, what are you doing this for? Shut up. You get married. Stop doing it, right? Now, I think about my grandmothers in that year, when they're the age I am now,

not so long ago. And then I think about my niece, who lives not very far from where we are now, who's 17. When she started to draw and she was really good at it, we were like, you should go to art school. Now, even the craziest sexist wouldn't suggest women shouldn't be allowed to have bank accounts or my swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote in 1963 right it's not that long ago it's not that long ago i knew my grandmother's extremely well it's two generations back right now how did we get and we've still got a long way to go of course on achieving equality and freedom for women but and i'm conscious that all the women listening it's very aggravating to hear a man mansplaining this but that how did we get from my

grandmother's lives to my niece's life, right? Which is an enormous improvement. Doesn't go far enough, but it's an enormous improvement. It didn't happen because the men in power just handed it down one day. They were like, oh, let's stop being like this, right? What happened is ordinary women and some sympathetic men banded together and said we're not taking this shit anymore you're not treating us like this anymore and they fought and they fought and they fought and they're still fighting right and it led to an extraordinary array of changes every piece of progress i would just urge people if their grandmothers are still alive sadly mine aren't to talk to their grandmothers about what life was like for them and compare it to the women you know now. But there are so many

positive changes that have happened that happen because ordinary people band together and demand it. There's nothing else that's going to save our attention. No messiah is coming for us. No political leader is going to do this on their own. We have to protect our minds and our children's minds. And we have to do that by taking on the forces that are destroying our attention and focus. And if we don't do that, we've really got a choice between a movement that defends it or ongoing, the way Tristan Harris put it to me, the alternative is the downgrading of human beings and our minds, right? We've upgraded technology and downgraded humans. Now we can allow that to continue, but we need to know that is a choice. If we don't,

there's no guarantee that if we fight, we'll win. But if we don't fight, we won't win, right? Elizabeth Warren, American politician said, you don't get what you don't fight for, right? And of course, I mean, peaceful fighting. We've got to fight against these forces because they're not going to give up, right? The question is whether we're going to match them. And if it seems like that's a really big thing, and it is a big thing, and people say to me sometimes, but big tech is so powerful. I say to them, big tech ain't a hundredth as powerful as men were in 1963. Men controlled literally everything, right? Every single institution of power in every country in the world. Women could easily have said then, we're never going to win.

Look at 2000 years of all these things, we're never going to win, right? But they didn't. They started where they stood and they fought. And we have to do that now. Partly that's fighting at a personal level, but it has to be a bigger movement as well. I started jokingly in the book, say we should call it attention rebellion. Not that we want to use the exact tactics of extinction rebellion, although some of them are helpful, but some of them are not. But we've got to have an attention rebellion in the sense that we've got to decide, do to decide do we value this do we want our children to be able to focus and pay attention if we do we can make a choice now because we know the causes right yeah i've spoken to the scientists i don't think many people will read those causes and disagree

with them they'll recognize them in their own lives we know the causes scientists have discovered them so now and this movement has already begun i end the book with a list of different people who are fighting on all sorts of different fronts already on these issues we've got to fight back and i absolutely believe if we fight back we can win because these are not popular forces right yeah it's not like everyone loves mark zuckerberg and everyone loves you know that's i mean i do love mcdonald's so that's not a good example. But you know what I'm saying, right? It's not like people can't see this is happening and don't identify it as a problem. They absolutely do.

As we do finish, yeah, man, I want to acknowledge you. Oh. I really, you know, I speak to a lot of authors on the podcast. This really is a special book right i love it it's gonna it's gonna go on that studio wall behind me hopefully you'll sign it for me that's like being on matt rushmore right not yet not yet but um i just think it's such a beautiful exploration into a problem that i think we all know is affecting us. It's affecting our relationships. It's affecting the people around us. And I think you've done a great job at putting a spotlight on this issue. So I want everyone's going to get it. Stolen Focus, Why You Can't

Pay Attention. I think it's brilliant. As I say, my 11-year-old son's been enjoying it as well. Oh, I'm so happy. as I say my 11 year old son's been enjoying it as well oh I'm so happy and there's just so much in the book we haven't even spoken about so if you're at a loose end in a few months and you fancy coming back on the show you have an open invitation anytime there's plenty more I'd love to talk with you uh good luck with everything thank you so much coming up to the studio and see you soon I know sounds like an ironic form of thank you but I really appreciate how closely you paid attention to the book and I'm really grateful for that and for all the work you do and I know it sounds like an ironic form of thank you, but I really appreciate how closely you paid attention to the book. And I'm really grateful for that and for all the work you do.

And I meant to say, and my publishers will tase me, they gave me this ridiculous thing that I meant to read out, which I refuse to do. Please read, say it. I meant to say, if you want any more information about the book,

where you can get the audio book, the ebook or the physical book, you go to www.stolenfocusbook.com where you can also find out what Hillary Clinton,hen fry and lots of other people have said about the book uh what else am i meant to say uh there's audios on there as well yeah oh yes i meant to also say that uh you can listen for free to audio of interviews with lots of the people we talked about like mahali cheek sent me hi you discovered follow

states like uh tristan har, like the sleep expert. So you can listen to loads of that stuff for free as well. I think you probably should be very happy. You said all the key points, but Stolen Focus is out now. It's brilliant. Ah, cheers, Rangan. Thanks so much.

Thanks, mate. Woo! Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week.

And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.