Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health | Dr Anders Hansen #657

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

A topic that I’m truly passionate about is the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives - changing the way we think, feel and connect with one another. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist, globally renowned speaker, and best-selling author Dr Anders Hansen. In this clip, he explains how our attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in today’s world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/381 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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five travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 and K2 drops. You can see all details at 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 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist and author, Dr. Anders Hansen. In this clip, he explains how our attention

has become one of the most valuable commodities in today's world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters. The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention. And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard.

And that's because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product. Every second that we spent on our screens is money for them. And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing this. that and as a consequence we spend more and more and more time on our screens and today for adults it's somewhere between four to five hours for teenagers it's five perhaps even six hours these things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast and what's the consequence of that well that is that we when we spend so much time on this we don't sleep as much we don't move as much and we don't

meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions. So in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online. I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch it with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear

that these things are having, for all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem. Yet, despite us talking about it, despite them hearing about it, a lot of people just aren't able to change what they do. Because it's so difficult. Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok, for instance.

Every time you turn TikTok on, you have a $10 billion dollar artificial intelligence, directed towards you to figure out what should I show Rangham so that he doesn't turn off because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies especially directed to children and teenagers without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty

because we constantly return to our phones. I do that as well. and I've just realized that it's not just about characters. These are very powerful stimuli, and the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the times. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time

because they will be too attractive. This modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful because anything good in life comes from presence. everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work. Me and you interacting now with no phones here, just me and you sitting across the table, me chatting to my wife about something important,

me chatting to my children, me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh. All those things require attention and presence if you're going to get the true value of them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, where we cannot maintain our attention. So I guess what I'm trying to get to, Anders,

is how do we change things? What do we do if we look at the addiction with smartphones? If I look at what's happening with children now, you can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity. You think, well, actually, where does this go in five years and ten years? Where do we end up in 20 years? You know, there's a book called Re-Claiming Conversation, which is brilliant.

I read it. I love it. And this whole idea that we're losing the art of conversation, this is one of the things that makes us human. And many kids and teenagers, apparently, according to Sherry and her research, prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I've never forgot that since I read it, where you can edit a text message, you can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, Now, me and you, we have the risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled, right? Maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through.

That's the risk that we are running by having this real-time conversation. But it's also something that is part of humanity, it's part of who we are. We're not wide for these perfectly edited communications, are we? Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's born. boring, but historically, loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food.

That's why we have so strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We read one another, we're very good at that, and we try to create bonds, social bonds, and we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now, those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years, what we met physically. And now all of a sudden, we meet like this. And we can replace some of that with a screen,

but we can't replace all of it. It's not just what your face expression on the screen. You know, it's so many more signals that we are constantly registering. And if we all felt that during COVID when we spent so much time on our screens, that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. But most of us felt very lonely. isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredible,

strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this, the brain thinks that we're lonely. And if we're lonely, well, then we will die. That's mortal danger. And then we feel crappy, of course. we have to intentionally create some rules for ourselves because if we don't, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus. Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made when you have students doing tests for focus and for memory

and half of them bring their phone into the testing room. The other have leave their phone outside. And the ones that bring the phones with them don't pick it up. They just have it in the pocket. And it turns out that the one so have left the phone outside perform better. Even if you don't pick it up. So it's just by being in the same room, it distracts you. And the reason is probably that it's providing you with so much stimulation that you must constantly think,

I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. And then you get distracted. And that doesn't matter if you're doing something very ordinary. But if you have to be focused at your work or in school, you're studying for exam, leave the phone outside. There's also been experience made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between. And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject.

And on half of these tables there is a notebook, paper and pen. And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. and they don't pick up the phone but it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table they find the discussion less interesting they even find the person

they're talking to less reliable and that's probably because I have to think I'm not going to pick up my phone I'm not going to pick up my phone I'm not going to pick up my phone so it's steal some of your mental bandwidth just by being around

and we feel guilty for this we feel you know I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time but we shouldn't because these are incredibly powerful stimuli. And again, someone is making money from that. Yeah. You also write in the attention fix about low-tech parents, and you reference, I think, Steve Jobs,

and how, you know, we've heard this before, but I think it's worth reiterating that a lot of the creators of these products did not allow their children on them. Exactly. There was a journalist that came home to Steve Jobs, and he thought that there would be iPads everywhere and all the screens in every room and there weren't.

He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads. And we remember Steve Job is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us ever. And he himself was cautious about using it to mush. That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that,

if you are looking at a screen more than you are looking at someone's eyes, you're doing something wrong. So the CEO of the company that makes the most money from screens says, don't use our products too much. That says something on how incredibly addictive these things are and how naive we have been in implementing them so widely. And again, especially toward children. And as I said before, I think the main impact of digital lives on our well-being is not what we do online,

but what we don't do when we are online. We don't sleep as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet. But there is a big caveat to this, and that is overusage of social media seems to be dangerous for teenagers. For girls in the age 12 to 13, boys 14 to 15. That's probably because this is a time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? well, I think that part of your life, you really desperately want to belong to a group. And we have compared ourselves to a small group during all of human history.

You know, there were 50, 100 people who you met during your entire life. That was your tribe or your band. And you compared yourselves to perhaps 20 or 30 of them who were around your age. And now you compare yourself to the entire planet. And there's always someone who is smarter and better. looking and more successful and richer than you are and you feel that you are worthless. I am not good enough. And you get this signal from your screens five or six hours every day.

And you have your friends' photos. And for every photo on Instagram, there was a hundred photos that was discarded that you don't see. And if that wasn't enough, you have a whole, you have a whole army of Instagrammers and influencers who get paid to show their perfect life. And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough. And then it feels lonely and then you feel like you're being pushed out of the group. And that is registered in the brain as something that is extremely dangerous. And that's why you feel so bad about it.

You know, the problem is Anders, the way I see it is that we can know this with our rational brains. We know we're comparing, you know, the highlight reel of someone else's life to the mundane reality of our day-to-day life. We know that. We hear it. You've said it. I've said it. But I still don't think knowing it makes a jot of difference because you can know it. But you're subconscious when you're scrolling.

It's still picking on this idea that their life is better. Their life is better. They'll have his own. One morning, this is about, I don't know, a few months ago, I broke one of my rules. I was on Instagram very early. I don't know why, but, you know, we're all human. We're all seduced by these devices. And I saw something, I can't remember what it was, but I started to feel bad afterwards. And then I was making a hot drink in the kitchen. I thought, wow, wrong. Nothing has happened, right? Literally nothing has happened. You're still here in your house. your wife and kids are still sleeping,

the birds are singing in the garden, right? Nothing has happened, apart from the fact I went on Instagram for a few minutes. So nothing in the real world changed, yet my mental state changed from scrolling. And I was like, this is utter madness. Yeah, and if you take a step back, you let someone who you have never met, who you will never meet, make you feel inadequate. Yeah. Because they had a better looking toilet or more expensive vacation or a nicer car or what have you.

I mean, that's insane. Of course, it happens to me all the time as well. But the more you think about these things, when you read about it and you have to hear it many times, you have to hear it from many sort of different angles and present it in different ways, then you start to seeing it being played out in yourself. And that's why we have to create distance to it. I'm not going to let any big American company steal my focus because they're making money from my eyeballs staring at the screen.

So what's your approach to deal with smartphone addiction and a lack of focus? I mean, how do you, as a busy professional... I'm incredibly cautious about my focus. Focus is something that is very, very vulnerable. If you've lectured, you probably notice that you could have a couple of hundred individuals listening to, and then one comes late, and everyone is looking at the person who's coming late. What does it matter if one person is late? Well, that's because we are not, the brain didn't evolve to be focused. It evolved to constantly scan your surroundings for danger.

Is there something there, there, there, there. So we are incredibly easily distracted. And focus, which is so valuable in today's society, is something that is very, very, very. that's hard for us and when I do my most important work when I think the stuff that I really think is valuable that's when I am really in a deep focus mode and I want to protect that

preserve that and then I have the phone outside that's not going to disturb me so you've taken preemptive action you keep the phone in a different room when you're trying to do deep thinking James Clear the author talks about the same thing he says even if his phone is in the next room so maybe just three seconds to get up, walk there and get it,

even just having it in the next dream means he's, you know, significantly less likely to look at it. Exactly. It's like candy. And therefore, I can't have it around all the time. So I don't have it in the bedroom. I don't have it when I work and so on. And I tried to be aware of this Achilles heels in my psychology,

which are, in reality, defense mechanisms or survival mechanisms that have become Achilles Heels in our modern society. And everyone must find their own way of sort of working through this, but it's incredibly fascinating to learn more about it because you understand yourself better. And if you understand yourself better, well, then you can work around what's difficult for you. It's a constant uphill battle.

But, I mean, if we want to feel as good as possible, then we have to do this. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called a Friday 5 and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity.

Articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it, free of charge at doctorchatterjee.com forward slash Friday 5. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next Friday.