Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #276 BITESIZE | Transform Your Life with a Digital Detox | Adam Alter

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 132 of the podcast with author and expert on the compulsive nature of technology, Adam Alter. Now in this clip, Adam explains why technology can have such a pervasive impact in all areas of our life, our health, our happiness, and the quality of our relationships. There are so many positive uses of technology, but I think we all need to be mindful in how we use it.

Starting point is 00:01:46 And Adam gives some great tips to help us restore balance and live a rich, meaningful and contented life. I've been running this experiment for years now and I keep collecting additional data. And it's a really, really simple experiment. It's about as simple as experiments get where you ask people to make a choice and you record the choice they make. And I've been running this with kids as young as 13 and adults as old as in their 90s. And the simple question is you have to make a choice. One of these things is about to happen. Either your phone's going to drop out from your pocket, hit the ground and shatter into a million pieces, and you're not going to have your phone anymore, or a small bone in your

Starting point is 00:02:28 hand is going to be broken. Which one would you choose? And obviously, neither of those is pleasant. No one wants to make the choice. But there's a certain age, and it's about late 20s, early 30s. It's been shifting a little bit, but it's about 30, let's say, above which, if you ask that question, it's read almost as an insult what a ridiculous question obviously broken phone is just better than a broken bone but if you ask that question of teens and tweens and adolescents and people in their early 20s it becomes a bit of a negotiation it's a difficult question so instead of being an insult it's like oh that's really interesting let's think about this and you get you a bit of bargaining. So you get questions like, when I've broken my hand, can I still swap my phone?

Starting point is 00:03:09 How much will they both cost to fix? Which I think is a legitimate question to ask. It's a wise question to ask. But the point is, about 40, 45% of young people will ultimately decide, you know what? I'd rather have a broken bone in my hand. I can handle that. They don't want to be without their phone so much that they'd rather have a broken bone in their hands. I'm so interested in this topic because I don't think it's just a trivial distraction

Starting point is 00:03:32 or we're spending a bit more time. I think it's having real consequences for some of us with our physical and mental health. Yeah, I agree. So I think it's had a huge effect on the way humans live their lives. And it has to have had some effect on our well-being as well. I think we really have to audit our screen behavior the way an auditor might audit the books for a company and say, let's look at each of these components. Where am I deriving the most well-being? What forms of screen use are bringing me huge benefits? And what forms of screen use are bringing me huge benefits and what forms of screen use are robbing me of psychological well-being. And for most people, if we talk about measures like happiness or engagement or concentration or focus, people find that social media, a huge amount of

Starting point is 00:04:19 social media use is bad. A huge amount of game playing tends to be bad. They report not feeling happy. Doom scrolling or reading too much of the news is not good for people. But people get a lot of enrichment from spending social time in front of screens with people who they can't otherwise see. Learning a language, educational experiences are incredibly enriching. Reading books on a screen, they really all have to be separated because they provide such different benefits and also rob us of very different components of our psychological well-being. What is it about technology or certain kinds of technology that makes them so addictive? There is no natural endpoint to a lot of these experiences by design. So the companies that create them have done their very best to remove the natural points at which we might say, all right, I'm going to move on and do something different.

Starting point is 00:05:07 We call these stopping cues. And a lot of the experiences we've had, especially in the 20th century, but even in the early 21st century, there was a natural stopping cue built into them. So if you watched a TV show, you'd watch an episode and it would be six days and 23 hours till the next one arrived. That was a stopping cue. You'd see the credits roll and you'd know, I'm not going to sit here for the next six plus days. I'm going to go do the next thing in my life. You read a book, you get to the end of a chapter.

Starting point is 00:05:33 Eventually you get to the end of the book. Newspaper, end of the article, end of the newspaper. There were gentle hints that it might be time to move on. And I think humans take those cues pretty seriously and implicitly the tech companies that make the products we use today though have done a lot to to systematically remove those stopping cues so everything is bottomless you don't have to do much to get more and more and more content there's no natural stopping cue or end that it's time to move on it's true of of you know just the amount of information that's out there there's no natural

Starting point is 00:06:04 stopping point. When you play video games, most of them, you end the game and the next round just automatically begins. There's no grand game over screen. Insert your coins here. So I think the endlessness of a lot of experiences has sort of short-circuited our ability to say, well, maybe this is time for me to move on. And that's been a big part of what keeps people glued to an experience. for me to move on. And that's been a big part of what keeps people glued to an experience. I think one of the biggest problems for tech, I think it's detrimental for relationships massively. Husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, father, child, mother, child. I just see

Starting point is 00:06:37 relationships, including with myself, not being as fulfilled as they once were because of screens. with myself not being as fulfilled as they once were because of screens. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it's interesting you say relationship yourself. The relationships are so diverse. It's relationships within a generation. So a husband and wife, it's relationships upward. Kids with their parents, parents with their kids.

Starting point is 00:07:07 One of the big shifts in the last few years is that kids have been now exposed sufficiently to phones, that they're starting to demand things from their parents, parents with their kids. One of the big shifts in the last few years is that kids have been now exposed sufficiently to phones that they're starting to demand things from their parents. When I first started talking about this, parents were tearing their hair out saying, I don't know what to do. I can't get my child to use the phone less or to go to the dinner table and actually sit there and have dinner and communicate with me. But just as much now, it comes from the younger generations. They're talking about how their parents aren't using the phone in the right way. And so they can't access their parents. And occasionally I will, whether it's because I'm following Liverpool on the screen from afar or whether it's because I think that work is absolutely urgent in the moment, my kids will see me with the screen and I will look at them. And I'll look at them looking at me with the screen and I feel incredibly guilty. I'm guilty of this as well. I'm teaching them that as important as they are to me,

Starting point is 00:07:49 there is this other device that's grabbed a huge chunk of my attention in the moment. And so it's definitely harming my relationships, even if in small ways with my kids. It is hard. These things, as you've titled the book, they're irresistible. It's not a human failing. It's actually, that's how they're engineered. And I just want to make super clear that I am a perfectly imperfect human. I think I was called out by my daughter when she was four, actually. And it was one of those moments where I thought, when she said, Daddy, you're not really here, are you? And it was like an arrow to my heart. And I was like yeah she's she's right I'm not I'm

Starting point is 00:08:25 sort of in the room I'm physically in the same space but mentally I'm a million miles away how have you sort of navigated those things in your own life we have a little box actually there's a company called intentionally unplugged they sell a little box it's a very cute little thing and you buy it and then you put it in an area of your home that's a sensitive area. You'd like to not have devices present. And so for us, that's our kitchen. So when we're in that area, we try to put the phone in the box and to leave it there. A really big part of it is making decisions that mean that you don't have to exercise willpower, that you just have a kind of structure in place. I think all the best interventions really

Starting point is 00:09:05 do a great job of recognizing human fallibility and the fact that, you know, asking yourself to exercise self-control time and time and time again during a day when we're all too busy anyway and overrun and exhausted, this is never going to work. And so that's what my wife and I have done primarily is to try to institute a set of basic rules that we try to follow as often as possible. And I think that's made quite a difference for us. I think I've heard you talk about this before when I was researching your work, Adam. I think you mentioned that proximity to the phone often will determine how often you use it. how often you use it. Yeah, it's this old psychological concept known as propinquity,

Starting point is 00:09:50 which basically says that the things that are closest to you in physical space will have an outsized effect on your psychological experience of the world. So if your phone is near you, it will have a bigger effect on your experience of the world. It's a very obvious idea, but it's pretty profound and it has profound implications. So, you know, a lot of people, you say to them, would you allow all the things that are on that phone to be implanted in your brain so you don't have a device? And people are very squeamish about that. And they say, no, that sounds horrible. I don't want that. I definitely don't want an implanted form of technology. But functionally speaking, if you ask adults, 75 to 80% of them will tell you that 24 hours of the day they can reach their

Starting point is 00:10:22 phones without moving their feet. So these devices are not inside our brains, but functionally they are basically implants. They are part of us. They're an extension of who we are. And so one way to gauge whether you're succeeding in your fight against using tech more than you'd like is to say, how many minutes of the day or hours of the day do I spend where I can't reach my phone without moving my feet? And if the answer is zero, that's a problem. So one thing to do is to start to build these periods in. The easiest one, and you've talked about this, I know, is to say, whether it's 90 minutes or 60 minutes before bedtime, my phone will not be in the room with me. And when I'm in the bedroom, my phone will never be there with me, which then immediately carves out hopefully eight hours, seven and a

Starting point is 00:11:03 half, eight hours of the day where you are without your phone or away from your phone. And then during dinner time, a lot of people will say, this is another time when I should be nowhere near my phone. I don't want to sit at the table with my phone in my pocket or on the table with me. It should be in the next room under lock and key. When I've had screen-free Sundays or certainly a long walk in the country with my wife and my kids, and we don't take our phones with us, I feel like I've been on holiday when I come back. Because I think it really is amazing. You said it's functionally, it's just an extension of our brains. That's how it feels. And I feel that they are so addictive that sometimes if they're there, you can't resist because that's

Starting point is 00:11:45 the whole point of them. So actually you need to put a physical obstruction in the way. You do. Yeah. And it's interesting hearing people, they have these epiphanies, you know, whether it's a Sunday without the phone or more often than not, it's losing the phone. Hearing people who say, I just didn't know for a couple of hours where my phone was. It was the best two hours of the last three months of my life and and realizing oh there's a correlation there between the presence of the phone and feeling not great so um this this idea of experimentalism of having a philosophy of saying i want to know what the conditions are like i'm currently living only one condition of my life in condition using condition as the kind of in experimental sense sense or the scientific sense. You know, you might have

Starting point is 00:12:25 all these different potential ways of living your life, and you're only living one of them. And the only way to know if there's a better alternative out there is to actually experiment, to try out these other ones. And so that might be, if you're someone who drinks 16 cups of coffee a day, what would it be like if I drank 10? What about if I drank five? If you try these out, suddenly you have this period where you're exploring and experimenting. You then have a sense of what the options are, just as we all know what it's like. Well, a lot of us know what it's like to go out and have too many drinks, wake up the next morning and feel bad. We know the full set of options and we know the consequences. In most cases with tech and with so many areas of our

Starting point is 00:13:01 lives, we just don't know what the counterfactual is. What is the life we're not living? So I think so much of this kind of process of getting unstuck and then moving forward and progressing in our lives is knowing what the alternatives are. I think a digital detox is an incredible way of exposing to yourself what it would be like to be without screens in a broader period where you wouldn't even need a detox. Have a detox every day whether it's dinner time or whether it's the hour after you wake up in the morning or you know an hour around lunch or whatever it is as much as you can why are you doing what you're doing be mindful

Starting point is 00:13:34 about it so if you're using your phone if you're picking it up you get home from school at the end of the day and you pick up your phone and you're texting or whatsapping or whatever it is that you're doing using twitter or snapchat or instagram or what tiktok what is it that you're texting or WhatsApping or whatever it is that you're doing using Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok, what is it that you're doing that for? Why are you doing it? What is it bringing to you? What is the psychological need that it's meeting? Are you lonely? Are you bored? Are you anxious? Are you depressed? And once you understand why you keep turning to your phone, I think you have a better understanding of how you might meet those needs in other ways. And I think one of the antidotes to tech in this world where we're just flooded with technology and with screens is to spend, I know this is difficult for people in

Starting point is 00:14:13 very dense urban environments, but to the extent that you can expose yourself to even small bursts of nature, whether it's running water, wind through the leaves in a forest or in a park, it's incredibly restorative to do that. And so try to do that. And one way to kind of ask yourself if you're living well or right in a way that I think is productive is to ask yourself how many minutes of the day can you tell what year it is by looking through your eyes? The scene around you tells you. So, you know, surrounded by screens and phones and lights and all the trappings of Zoom calls right now. I know it's 2020. It couldn't be any other era. But when I go for a run, I'm a big runner. I try to run almost every day. When I'm running,

Starting point is 00:14:55 there are parts of town where I live, where I run that are by the water, that are through forests. It could be 100 years ago. It could be 500 years ago. ago and with luck that's how they'll look at 500 years and there is nothing more restorative to me than that so try to spend some of the day looking at scenes whether it's into someone's eyes as you have a conversation that's also timeless or at scenes that are natural and um try to spend some of the day where you have no idea what year it is and i think that's that's one way of gauging whether you're living the right time. That's a lovely thought. It brought a smile to me as I was sort of reflecting on that.

Starting point is 00:15:33 I love the idea that, you know, go in an environment where you don't know what year it is. What a wonderful way of thinking about it. Really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #276 BITESIZE | Transform Your Life with a Digital Detox | Adam Alter

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