Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How Addictive Technology Keeps You Hooked with Professor Adam Alter #132

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Do you find it hard to resist the ping of a new email, the urge to scroll on social media, or watch the next episode when streaming? Do you wish you could stop checking, clicking, liking and sharing? Then put down your phone and listen to this episode. My guest today is Adam Alter, an associate professor of marketing and psychology, bestselling author of ‘Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and The Business of Keeping Us Hooked’ and an expert on the compulsive nature of technology. Adam explains how tech companies make it their business to know exactly how to keep us engaged for hours on end. He shares some of the hooks embedded in products to ‘catch’ us, such as variable reinforcement (those likes and shares on social media), goals and rewards, and a lack of stopping cues (there’s always another video cued up, another game level to play…). And how do they know all these techniques work? Big data. They simply look at what makes us click. Tech giants prey on our capacity for ‘behavioural addiction’, which like other addictions can undermine our mental health and relationships. Playing with a phone is not just trivial distraction it can have real consequences, especially for our children – something that as a parent really concerns me. Adam suggests we should be teaching our kids ‘digital hygiene’ in schools and I couldn’t agree more. Of course, there are many positive uses of tech, like education, admin, communicating with loved ones we can’t see in person. But when screen time starts to harm our wellbeing, Adam says we need to look at what psychological needs it’s meeting. What’s lacking in our lives that leads us to numb the discomfort by picking up that phone or tablet? But it’s not all doom and gloom. Adam says, it is possible to live a rich, meaningful, healthy life in our tech-driven age. And we discuss some of the solutions we’re both using to wean ourselves and our families off screens. We agree it’s about intention, using tech where we need and enjoy it, but making a conscious decision to do without it at other times. Starting with an hour or two a day when you put your phone out of sight is a great example. If, like me, you’ve recently watched The Social Dilemma, Netflix’s fascinating (and scary) take on persuasive technologies and surveillance capitalism, I think you’ll really appreciate Adam’s insights – and his reassurance that tech addiction is not a human failing.  Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/132 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.

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 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. 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 phones without moving their feet. So these devices are not inside our brains, but functionally they are basically implants. They're a part of us. They're an extension of who we are. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. So, how is your relationship with technology at the moment? Are you spending more time on your phone than you ideally want to? Do you wish you could stop checking, clicking, liking and sharing? Well, maybe it's time to put your phone down and listen to this episode. Unless, of course, you're listening to it on your phone, in which case keep listening, but maybe try to listen

without scrolling at the same time. My guest today is Adam Alter, an Associate Professor of Marketing and Psychology, and the best-selling author of the fantastic book, Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive Technology, and The Business of Keeping Us Hooked. He's someone who is an expert on the compulsive nature of technology, and in today's conversation, he explains how tech companies make it their business to know exactly how to keep us engaged for hours on end. He shares some of the hooks that are embedded within the technology to catch us, such as likes and shares on social media, and how a lack of stopping cues keeps us scrolling for longer. And how do they know that all these techniques work? keeps us scrolling for longer. And how do they know that all these techniques work?

Well, they work with data, real world human data. They simply look at what makes us click and repeat it over and over again. You see, tech giants prey on our capacity for behavioral addiction, which like other addictions can undermine our mental health and relationships. like other addictions, can undermine our mental health and relationships. Playing with a phone is not just a trivial distraction, it can have real consequences, especially for our children. And as a parent, that is something that really, really concerns me. Adam suggests that we should be teaching our kids digital hygiene in schools, and I couldn't agree more. Of course, there are many positive uses of technology like education, admin, communicating with loved ones that we can't see in person. But when screen time starts to harm our well-being, well, Adam says that we need to look at what psychological needs it's meeting. What's lacking in our lives that leads us to numb the discomfort

by picking up that phone or tablet. But it's not all doom and gloom. Adam says it is possible to live a rich, meaningful, and healthy life in our tech-driven age. And we discuss some of the solutions that we are both using to wean ourselves and our families off the screens. This is an issue that affects pretty much all of us these days. And I think you'll find Adam's insights really valuable, especially his reassuring words that tech addiction is not a human failing.

Now, on to my conversation with the hugely insightful Adam Alter. I think my first experience with tech was video games in the 80s, then into the early 90s. And I always found them very difficult to resist. I thought the best ones, the way they were made, and I always found them very difficult to resist. I thought the best ones, the way they were made, they were made so that you couldn't really stop playing them. And then when I became a researcher, when I did my PhD in psychology, I think a lot of psychologists end up spending a lot of time researching the topics that are most prominent for them,

that play a big role in their own lives. And so I noticed when I first got my smartphone, when I first got an iPhone in 2009, it changed my life in some profound ways. It changed how I spent my time. I felt that I'd been robbed of, I always thought of myself as someone who had pretty good self-control. I made a lot of good long-term decisions and avoided short-term temptations. But the one area where I felt even very early on, as soon as I got the phone, I was struggling, was how to spend my time. And I noticed that a lot of the time I was doing something that was was mindless and a little bit mind numbing in the short term and I knew I should have been

doing other things there were better things for me to be doing I often I the area where this happened most often was I was flying a lot I was traveling a lot and I'd get on the plane and I'd have my phone with me. And instead of doing all the things that were, you know, on deck, I was trying to be productive. I was trying to have a nap. I was trying to eat some food, all those things. They just went by the wayside. And I'd often sit there playing some mindless game on my phone. And that began in about 2000 and probably 12, 13, 14 14 and i really started thinking about this issue um probably 2013 and then and wrote the book proposal in 2014 and that's when i began writing writing

about it yeah i mean i'm interested if you were releasing the book now um what would you add? Quite a lot. I think you read the subtitle, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. That was an aspirational subtitle because I wanted to talk about the business of keeping us hooked and I really struggled. There wasn't a lot of information about the business side of this. It was all behind the curtain at these large companies

and a lot of them didn't want to talk for obvious reasons to a writer who was writing about the dark side of the products they were creating. So I think we have access to a huge amount of information now that we didn't have when I began writing in 2014. Five, six years ago, it's a long time. So I would have bolstered the business part of this. So that's the biggest change I would have made. You know, the book's core is really just an attempt to understand what it is exactly about these experiences psychologically that makes them so hard for us to resist. And I think I wouldn't change much about that. That's the core six chapters in the middle of the book. I think that's pretty complete and not much has changed on that front. But where things have really changed is the business side and our understanding of how sophisticated these companies are.

Yeah, I certainly as a reader of the book, I think those core chapters are brilliant. They're mesmerizing. I spent a lot of time again this morning sitting with them. And, you know, you spend a lot of time making the case for the why. Why are these things so bad? So what's going on? And I really want to delve into that. But before we do, you got into this with a personal experience. You realize that you're spending a lot of time, that you could be doing other things. And I've been very concerned about tech over the past year. So I've been a medical doctor for almost 20 years. And I've always been interested in how our lifestyles

impact the way that we feel, impact our symptoms, and how we're not really taught about that as doctors. So I'm always looking for what's the root cause? Is there anything I can tweak for this patient to help improve the quality of their life? And I had this case that I wrote about in my first book about a 16-year-old boy who essentially rocked up in my surgery on a Monday and had been admitted to the ER on the Saturday having self-harmed. And I won't sort of go into the whole story, but essentially I knew this family well. I knew I'd been seeing them for a number of years. I never detected that there was any underlying emotional problems. It was a real surprise to me. And when I delved into it and

I didn't put him on medication initially, well, I didn't actually end up needing to, I didn't put him on medication initially. Well, I didn't actually end up needing to. I started really probing into his life with him. And I felt without any research, without any sort of, you know, without the, you know, the luxury of having your book out, because this is probably 2013-ish, I'm going to guess, 2014-ish. I felt the use of social media and tech is probably contributing to his mental health. So I helped him go through a stepwise reduction, starting off for an hour before bed. Eventually, we worked up to two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening before bed. And I'm not kidding you. I made a couple of other changes with his diet and a few other things. But six months later, he's like a different kid. I get a letter from his mum saying,

Dr. Chachi, I want to thank you. You completely changed his life. He's engaging with his communities, with his friends, he's joining clubs. And I really felt, wow, we're not learning about this in my profession. Many people are saying this is not a problem. It's just a brand new, new technology. We're always scared of new technologies so i wanted to share that with you because i think that that helps i think prefix for you why i'm so interested in this topic because i don't think it's just a trivial distraction 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. You're preaching to the choir. I think that's right.

I am not a clinician, so I don't see people in a clinical role, but I've heard from so many people who've had similar experiences. I've visited people at various treatment facilities where they're dealing with these issues. And I also have some very good friends who are psychologists themselves, clinical psychologists, and they all describe this kind of shift over the last decade or so where one of the things they've described is you can't even tell when people are talking to you,

especially when young people are talking to you about their experiences, whether these things happened over the screen or whether they happened in real life face-to-face. So they'll say things like, I spoke to this person and then this happened. And it's not even clear whether that's happening through mediated by a screen or whether it's happening in real life and they're standing in front of these people face to face. 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. And I've heard so many cases, just like the one you've described, where we just don't know enough about exactly what screens are doing to people,

especially as individuals. When one person presents with some sort of issue, the extent to which a screen has been responsible for that, sometimes it's very clear that it's something like bullying or aggression online. But a lot of the time, it's just this general sense that spending that much time and having so much of our social relationships, so much of our social lives mediated through a screen seems like it's harming people in all sorts of ways that are hard to detect. And that other point you made, I think is really interesting. This idea that we're just not being educated enough about this. And I've heard that from doctors. I've heard it from clinical psychologists. I think there should really be a new component added to the curriculum at schools, whether it's in high school or primary school

or wherever it is, teaching kids digital hygiene. This is a thing. You teach manners. You teach math. You teach maths and you teach reading and languages and things. I think this is the sort of thing that really needs to be taught universally now so that kids get some basic education in how to manage screens. Because it's an issue that's going to affect all of them at some point.

Yeah. And I definitely want to dive into this area as a father of two young kids. And I know, I think, how many have you got? Is it two as well? I have two. Yeah. You have two kids. Three and four. Yeah, mine are seven and ten. So I'm bordering on starting to lose control over what my son does. So we'll delve into that. I want to get to solutions and practical things. But let's sort of take the big picture. You know know what is it about technology or certain kinds of technology that makes them so addictive yeah i that's that's a huge part of my research and a thing that i've

really been focusing on a lot in the last few years um there are a number of sort of hooks that uh that tech companies will use they'll embed these hooks in their products and if you embed enough of the hooks in the products there's a pretty good chance you're going to catch the fish. We are the fish. And so the first one, I think, is just an old idea from behavioral psychology, which is variable reinforcement. And so you give people rewards that are unpredictable in the same way as you might if they were playing a lottery or if they were sitting at a slot machine in a casino. And not just humans, but pretty much all animals, any higher order animals, find this absolutely irresistible. It's very hard for them to say no. And so they'll come back to that experience over and over again. And

I think that's embedded in much of what we do online. Every time you share a piece of yourself online, you're waiting for feedback. And it's not clear whether you're going to get silence, which is negative, or criticism, which is negative, or positive feedback. You're going to get people saying, that's fantastic. I see you've taken a photo of your lunch on Instagram. That looks delicious. It can be really sort of simple things, little doses of positive feedback throughout the day. Or it could be a jackpot. Someone shares some post you've made, and suddenly it goes live to 1,000 or 10,000 or a million people. So chasing that kind of jackpot, Someone shares some post you've made and suddenly it goes live to a thousand or ten thousand or a million people. So chasing that kind of jackpot, I think, is a really big part

of what we do online. There's a big social component to this as well. Some of it is social obligation. So people often say they feel a strong sense that they have to respond to friends. They have to respond by liking, by commenting by by retweeting regramming all that sort of that sort of stuff um and so there's the social obligation is a big part of this as well um so that brings people back the goals that are wrapped up in these these experiences are really big as well if you think about something like a fitness device that gives you a little chirp when you've walked 10,000 steps, that's going to spur you to keep doing this behavior over and over again.

The goal of reaching 1,000 followers, 10,000 followers, and so on, 1,000 comments, 1,000 likes, those goals are embedded in almost everything we do online. Video games are the same. The games on smartphones, they have lots of goals embedded in them. They're obviously games by definition, game the games on smartphones they have lots of goals embedded in them they're obviously games by definition so they are laden with goals um there are just a lot of these little hooks that are that are built in i think one of the biggest things so a lot of these things get us into the product and then one of the things that keeps us there is there is no natural end point 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 all right, I'm going to move on and do something different. And that's, I think that's a really big part of this. So 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 then 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. Eventually, you get to the end of the book, newspaper, end of the article, end of the newspaper. There are 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 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. more and more and more content. There's no natural stopping, queue, or end that it's time to move on. It's true of just the amount of information that's out there.

There's no natural 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. Yeah, I mean, there's so many rabbit holes we could jump down there. It strikes me that it's just been this sort of insidious increase of tech and A, the proportion of our lives in which we spend on screens, but how almost everything we do now is mediated and facilitated through screens. And I kind of feel that we overestimate our ability as humans, our motivation, our self-control. I think we kind of feel, no, no, come on, we're humans. We're smarter than technology. If we wanted to start, we'd start, but it's not that simple, is it? They're pretty clever in terms of finding our weak spot and basically drilling down into it. Well, they're clever in two ways. They're clever because they

understand the psychology of these clever because they understand the psychology of these experiences and they understand all the things that I just mentioned and many more. And so part of it is just an architecture. It's designing experiences so that you encourage people to keep using them. But the other part is not even about being smart. It's just about having access to incredible amounts of data that are unprecedented. And so if I want to know, I'm creating a video game. I want to know this mission that you're going on. It could be in a forest. It could be by the seaside. It could be in a desert. I could imagine 25 different landscapes, and I don't know which one's going to be the most compelling one. I don't have to think about that very hard. All I need to do is to send

all of those versions out there so that some people get one version, some get another, create them all, test them, do an experiment, a massive experiment with sometimes, depending on the platform, it could be millions or billions of users even. And then I get the data and I can decide, oh, it looks like rainforests are the key. Make your mission in a rainforest. People find that really beautiful and compelling and they stay there much longer than if you make it in a desert. in a rainforest, people find that really beautiful and compelling, and they stay there much longer than if you make it in a desert. So you don't need theory, you just need data. That's, I think, one of the big things that distinguishes this period from any other that came before it, which is instead of being really smart about designing experiences, you just need access to huge amounts of feedback and data. And from that, you can design the perfect experience. Because if you iterate that, you do that over and over and over again you're evolving this experience so you keep making small tweaks and you you have

this little arms race this series of ab tests so this time i'm again going back to the video game i've decided that rainforests are the best now the next question is is it better to have a quest where you're rescuing a person or whether you're trying to find an artifact. Turns out rescuing a person is better. So then it's rainforest rescuing a person. What if the person's male or female? Turns out it's better if it's female, say. If you do that enough times, the version that you and I experience when we end up playing that game has been through this kind of trial over multiple rounds. The version that greets us is this weaponized version that has been evolved to be

as difficult as possible for us to resist based not at all on insight but based entirely on on access to reams of data that's what's i think one of the biggest things yeah yeah it's fascinating and you know i think about gambling as you were talking there and so gambling you know as anyone who's gambled before that sort sort of variable reward is huge. Sometimes you're going to pull the slot and it's what you want to see. Other times it's not that. That's the hook that keeps, or one of the hooks that keeps you going back. But what's interesting is that you talk about the tech companies and we're in many ways being treated as the gambler because we're getting the variable reward.'s pulling us back but they're not

gambling at all they're testing and they're giving you what they know with i was going to say 99 but probably with 100 certainty we know that this is going to work the house always wins yeah pretty much that's a it's a really analogy. I think that's exactly what's going on. Now, I have a PhD in experimental psychology. So a lot of my research was painstaking. I would have a single person come into a lab, I'd administer a little experiment. It was mostly social psychology, which basically means I'm interested in how people interact with each other, the imagined interactions they have, the real ones, the interactions through screens and so on. imagined interactions they have, the real ones, the interactions through screens and so on. And I'd have to spend an hour with this one person, putting he or she, him or her through a series of experiences. That was one, a sample of one. And if I wanted to make it an experiment

with 100 people, that was probably 100 hours. 1,000 people was just never going to happen. But here you've got these companies instantly getting data from just hundreds of thousands, millions, sometimes more than that. And so when you can do that instantly, you really are, as you say, you're not gambling when you're the company that's administering these tests, because you do have such power to detect even quite small effects. And they compound as you do these rounds across time and so you know there's no perfect formula for creating an experience that people can't resist but i think we've got really good at it now we yeah these companies have got really good at it now and as a result the best ones that

we experience have have been designed so that there's no there's no gambling these companies know what they're doing yeah that that sort of i as you were talking that i i thought back to some of my friends who support manchester city in turn in sort of, as you were talking that, I thought back to some of my friends who support Manchester City in sort of English football. And I remember way back, I don't know, five, 10 years ago when they got bought out with a load of money and suddenly they were winning every week. One of my friends said, you know, it's getting really boring now, actually. They actually preferred it when it was, oh, you know, we we never quite we were never quite as good as united we're gonna go and it was almost the fun was the fact that sometimes they'd win but more often than not they'd lose and it was that variable reward

and they got bored of winning all the time and yeah isn't it it's so interesting it's kind of baked into us as humans right yeah as a big liverpool fan that was chelsea obviously in the first part of the 2000s and then man city now um yeah i think that's really an interesting idea i have a friend um one of the people i interviewed for the book who was telling me that he he has a friend um he wouldn't tell me who this person was but he said this is one of the top billing male actors in the united states and in the world and they used to go out together. They'd been friends for a while. He would describe how this friend would go out and just be bored by going out

because every night unfolded exactly the way he wanted it to. It was like he could predict exactly how the night would go. People would come up and talk to him. It didn't feel like there was any kind of question mark about how the night would be. And it would be if he wanted it to be a night where he just collect 10 people around and they'd have a fun night and they'd have a drink and a chat, he'd be able to do that. And the absence of uncertainty for him was, even though he basically won every time he got what he was looking for,

it was totally counterproductive. It made him feel a bit empty inside. And there's something to that. If you win often enough for for that particular currency whatever it is whether it's winning money or winning the kind of experience that you want to have it it uh kind of loses its luster and you stop coming back for more and so that variable reward is such an important part of these experiences if we got exactly what we wanted every time we posted something online, it would lose its appeal for us. Yeah. Now, when we talk about addiction, I think it's worth sort of spending a bit of time trying to figure out what is addiction, because conventionally, we would talk about it in terms of drugs, alcohol, gambling. And you've written a whole chapter on behavioral addiction. So I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit for us so we can understand what addiction is and how technology

fits into that. Yeah, it's a controversial idea. So behavioral addiction is basically the same as substance addiction, except it involves no substance. It involves an experience or a behavior. But it has a lot of the same hallmarks. So you experience it in a similar way, which is to say that in the short term, it's something that you really want to do over and over and over again. But in the long run, you know it's bad for you and it does ultimately harm you in some sense. So taking drugs, drinking too much, those experiences, we understand quite a lot about them physiologically.

We understand how they harm us. For behavioral experiences, there are really four types of harm that we focus on. Social harm, it's pretty clear, for example, if you spend all your time in front of a screen, how your social relationships will be degraded. It was one of my first experiences was being with my wife or with friends and being with my phone and realizing that that was clearly harming the nature of the relationships we were developing. Social, financial. So often this is very costly for people. They end up gambling online. If that's a possibility in your region, in different regions of the world, it is and some it isn't. Spending a huge amount of money shopping online is a big one as well. So it's the social, financial, the psychological. So there are a lot of psychological consequences to spending a huge amount of time online.

We are exposed to much more bullying. There's a lot of loneliness. We feel disconnected, a lot of us. There's a rise in depression, a rise in suicides even in certain age groups, which is really concerning. And then the fourth is the physical consequence. So being sedentary, not moving around as much, exercising less, being in a car and turning to your phone and that being very dangerous when you're driving, that can have physical consequences. People who develop repetitive stress injuries from using their phones for hours at a time, carpal tunnel, things like that. I mean, it's amazing the constellation of negative consequences across

a whole range of different modalities. And so that's the definition for me. It's this thing that you do in the short run that you want to keep doing that is ultimately bad for you. Some people say that addiction is such a loaded term that applying it to these experiences doesn't make sense. I'm happy to jettison the term addiction. And I think if we just describe the phenomenon of what's going on without using the label, I think it's still worrying enough that it's something we can all discuss. And so, you know, some audiences will push back pretty hard on the term addiction because they'll say, you know, addiction has a very specific medical use.

And I'm okay with that. I'm okay to not use it. But I do think it's apt. I think it makes sense in this case for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I think most people, I'm pretty sure most people listening or watching this conversation right now would know, like you put in the subtitle, addictive technology. Okay, there is an addictive, I think it's safe to say there are addictive-like qualities to our use of certain kinds of technology. I don't think, to me, I don't think

that's controversial. It reminds me a bit of food addiction. Food addiction is also very controversial. And I've just finished writing my next book, which is on responsible, scientifically sound, sustainable weight loss. And I do cover it and I sort of say, look, it is controversial. Let's let the academics fight about whether we can call it addiction or not. But what we can say for certain is that certain foods tend to have addictive qualities to them. And I guess we've got to be careful with language because I guess if we call tech addictive, people start fighting over whether we can use that terminology or not. We're sort of distracting from the actual problem that does need addressing. Right. That's one reason why I don't like having

that definition debate, arguing over whether it's actually addictive, because I don't think it matters. I think essentially, this is such a serious issue. As you say, the experiences themselves are capable of provoking addiction, whether it's in just a small percentage of the population, if you want to be really strict about the definition, or if, as I do, you think it applies to a much larger proportion of the population. It doesn't really matter because, again, this is one of the interesting things that's evolved as well over the last, I'd say, three or four years for me. When I first started speaking about this issue, I felt that I had to do a lot of convincing. I'd get up in front of an audience and I'd ask a lot of questions and say, is this something

we need to worry about? Why is this a topic? Even trying to sell the rights to the book. Now, there was just a little bit of pushback suggesting that this was a storm in a teacup. Maybe this is not really a big issue. We're getting a lot of benefits from technology. That's not the case now. In fact, if you try to sell a book on this topic now, you have to be very clear about what you're doing that's completely new and fresh,

because it's been so picked over as an issue. And so I don't think this is an issue you really have to convince people of. They're all pretty much on board now. And so that's why I agree with you. Having definition debates and arguing about the terms used seems pretty silly and it moves you away from the real issues that are worth discussing. How much are we using our devices and is that number increasing? It seems to be, yeah, we are. We're using our devices. When I first started looking into this, I got some data from a guy who had created one of the first tracking apps. This was before that was native in Apple phones. And he told me most people underestimate by half. So if you have to guess how much time you're spending on your phone, it's probably half of

what you're actually using. So I said to him, well, I think I'm on about 90 minutes a day. And he said to me, if that's true, if you're on 90 minutes a day, that's remarkable. And that's way lower than most adults. And so he gave me access to the beta version of the tracker and I used it and I was on three hours. So he was exactly spot on. And now three hours is way less than I'm using my phone now. I'm usually around four to five hours a day. And it hasn't helped that we're enduring a pandemic here because I'm using it much more than I usually would. hours a day. And it hasn't helped that we're enduring a pandemic here because I'm using it much more than I usually would. But yes, the population on average, about five years ago, was about three hours a day. Three years ago, it was about four hours a day. It seems to be pushing above that towards five or even more hours a day in 2020. And it's more extreme among younger

people. So teens, often six, seven, eight hours a day. I actually teach a high school class in the summer at NYU. And one of the things I've been getting the students to do for years, for about six years now, is to track their use of their screens across that six-week period. And it's just astounding to me. I'm not even sure I'm awake as many hours as some of these kids who are on their phones during the day. It hits something like 14 or 16 or 18 hours and it's just, it's not even unusual. You know, that's not just an outlier or a single case. So it's a lot. It is a lot. And you know, I don't want to be too doomsday about this because tech has so many amazing benefits as well, which we must make sure we cover during this conversation. But I think some people, you mentioned some younger

people are spending a huge amount of time. And I gave a talk, this is probably two years, if not three years ago, I gave a talk for one of the global tech firms in London. I won't say which one it was, but it was just after I spoke about a no tech 90 in one of my books about this idea of 90 minutes before bed, which I've changed to now 60 minutes in subsequent books, because actually 90 minutes is just seems like ridiculous. It's like running a marathon for people. 90 minutes before bed, no way. But I remember thinking, I'm in the lion's den here talking about this to this big tech firm. And it's really interesting is that the feedback was really good, actually. But this young lad came up to me afterwards in private. And he said, Dr. Chastity, look look I really enjoyed your talk and I'm going to

guess he was mid to late 20s and he said to me look I'm a big fan of what you're talking about I like it all but but if I switch my phone off for 90 minutes before bed what am I going to do and there was this is you know some people may laugh when they hear that. There's no laughing matter. He genuinely had no idea and concepts of what he would do. And that really concerns me. You know, that concerns me about the younger generation. They're growing up in a world where tech is endemic. I grew up in a time, you know, I remember mobile phones coming out when I was at university. And I remember walking down Princess Street in Edinburgh seeing mobile phone adverts. And I thought, oh, you know, I don't think I need one of them. I'm sort of, you know, a few years, it wasn't until a few years after that one, I actually got my first one. So it probably wasn't until 22, 23 until I actually had one. So those sort of stories, I think, are actually, they're not trivial.

They're really worrying, I think. Yeah, I think, are actually, they're not trivial. They're really worrying, I think. Yeah, I think so too. 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. 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.

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product. 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 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. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. 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 hand is going to be 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 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 get a of bargaining. So you get questions like, when I've broken my hand, can I still swap my phone? 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. And so you see that there are two ways to interpret this. One way is to say we've broken a generation. A lot of older adults do say that.

They say there's something wrong with younger people. And that's an absurd thing to say, I think. It's too simplistic. I think the better way to look at it is to say, what is it exactly that young people get from these phones? What are the psychological needs that are being met by them that are so important to them and central to their well-being that they would rather expose themselves to physical harm than lose out on the phone? And I think that the person who came up to you and said, what am I going to do for 90 minutes? It's their everything in some sense. It's access to a social world. It's access to entertainment. It's the screen that they watch shows on, play games on, access emails, schoolwork, university work, and so on. All of that is in this one device. It's incredible convergence.

You pour so much of your social and psychological well-being into just a tiny little square. And so that's where all your focus is. And so it is a genuine conversation. What is worse, having this bone in my hand broken or losing out on all of those psychological benefits? And I can understand why a lot of them end up saying, I can't be without my phone. It's going to be too hard. We need to. Yeah, I love the way you unpack that. too hard. We need to. Yeah, I love the way you unpack that. We need to come at this problem with understanding, with compassion, really trying to understand why that is. Because yeah,

to me, it may seem ridiculous. Why? Of course, I'll take a broken phone any day of the week and a broken hand. But there's no point judging those youngsters for feeling like that's the way they feel. So what is going on in society? And it seems to me, this is more, I guess, a philosophical point, but it feels to me as though we've created the perfect storm in society whereby we're busy than ever. We're more stressed out than ever. We're more underslept than ever.

We're more physically inactive than ever. We're bored, we're lonely, we're away from our communities. And then to try and numb that discomfort, we've never had it easier. We can literally pull it out the pocket and all the numbing that we want is right there in front of us with very little friction. And so is it the technology that's the problem? Or is it the fact that society on many levels is broken, hence technology is the fix that we're choosing? You need both. You need to have a society that's in some ways not meeting certain very important core psychological needs for people. And then you need a way to paper over those needs or address those needs. And that's what the phone is doing.

So I think it is the perfect storm, as you say, because both parts of the equation have been met here. You need those two ingredients simultaneously. You'll know much more about addiction than either because of your background, but about at least addiction to substances. My understanding is that a lot of people will go into surgery. neither because of your background, but about at least addiction to substances, that my understanding is that, you know, a lot of people will go into surgery, they'll have surgery, they'll be treated with incredibly strong opioids, and then they'll leave hospital

and they won't have an addiction to them. For a lot of people, that's true. I'm sure some develop an addiction. But the fact that they can be exposed to the substance, to that high that you would get, and then not develop an addiction, I'm sure there are a lot of psychological needs that are being met when they leave the hospital they leave the context behind they go back to jobs they are taken care of by people and so it's not just exposing people to the thrill of this experience you've also got to strip them of the psychological needs that are being met by that device for it to become the hook i mean the same way that might be

true for a drug yeah in your your chapter on i don't the whole chapter is on addiction but that you really dive deep into this and you you've spoken to lots of different experts with lots of different definitions and it really i think i think it's mandatory reading for anyone i guess adam i don't know i'm just sort of thinking. When we mentioned how much time people are spending on screens, do we need to be a bit more specific with that? Because so much of what we do now is on screen. So let's say you're ordering your shopping on a screen. Let's say you are arranging your children's piano lessons on a screen. Should that come under the same metric or is there a way that we can split up what people are actually doing on their screens?

I think it's very important to split it up. Screen time is not monolithic. There isn't only one thing known as screen time. There's a big difference, as you say, between all these different experiences. There's reading a book on a screen. There's surfing mindlessly through social media. There's sending an email. There's playing a game. There's learning a language. There's communicating with people you love and have not been able to spend time with because they live far away, which is a big issue in my case. I'm in the US. A lot of my family's in Australia. And so in some sense, a lot of screen

time is incredibly beneficial and very important for our well-being. When I arrived in the US, it was about 16 years ago, you couldn't really communicate in the same way with video. So I'd phone my family and we'd talk on the phone and that was great. And then a few years later, Skype really developed. There are other tools that are developed. You know, broadband was more capable of sending the signal across in real time. And so I was able to speak to them face to face. And I felt that there was this need that had been met that hadn't been met earlier on because I could see them and see them moving in front of me as I was talking to them. So there are huge benefits to having screens, especially during a pandemic. to having screens, especially during a pandemic.

I think we really have to audit our screen behaviour 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 wellbeing? What forms of screen use are bringing me huge benefits? And what forms of screen use are robbing me of psychological wellbeing? 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 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, especially in these times, 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, especially during a pandemic. 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. and also rob us of very different components of our psychological well-being.

Yeah, as I have reflected a lot on my own behaviour around technology, I go through lots of ups and downs in terms of what I feel the solution is. I'm currently waiting on the delivery of a dumb phone, something I'd been thinking about for a while. And I thought, okay, forget it. I've actually supported this Kickstarter campaign. I think they come out in December in the UK. And why am I doing it? I'm not convinced it's the solution, but it's going to be an experiment for me. What does it feel like when my phone is literally a phone or I can do SMS text messages on them? What happens? And I guess the point of bringing this

up is it's sort of really piggybacking on what you just said. It feels like it's about intention. So many of us have bought, let's say the latest iPhone or the latest Android phone, and it comes preloaded with all kinds of goodies that we may or may not want, but because they're there and because they've been engineered to keep us hooked, they're addictive. Let's be technically correct, they have addictive-like properties and they potentially keep us on our screens for longer than we might otherwise want to be. So if we thought about, well, what do I love doing on technology? Oh, you know what? I love

WhatsAppping with my mates. Okay, right. So let me download WhatsApp. You know, I love, I don't know, listening to audio books and podcasts. Let me download Audible and the podcast app. Then suddenly you've got an intentional phone there that's doing the things that you feel are bringing value to you. And I sort of feel we've never really taken that approach with tech. It's almost been like being in the candy shop where everything's available. And then we kind of figure out, we're almost trying to push the boulder uphill. Do you know what I mean? It feels as though we need to look at it differently and look,

let's see what happens when I get this dumb phone and let's see how I get on with it. Because I am thinking what I'm going to miss out on, but I tell you what, one thing I'm really focused on is what I'm going to gain. And I don't think we have that pros and cons conversation. 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 relationships, including 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. 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 you know 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 right 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 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. incredibly guilty. I'm guilty of this as well. I'm teaching them that as important as they are to me, 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.

You know, what you're doing, obviously, with a degree of intentionality, being so careful about this, starting to experiment with a dumb phone and thinking about which apps to download. The problem is you are one in 10,000 people in my experience. Almost no one actually does this. If we could all do it en masse, that would be great, but it's just asking a huge amount of people. So I think it's always important to focus on the end user, the consumer of the phones. But one of the reasons I always think it's more important to focus on the end user, the consumer of the phones. But one of the reasons I always think it's more important to focus on the top end of the chain, of the distribution chain, the tech companies themselves, government legislation, is because that's where real change is going to be made. To expect the population at large to be as careful and thoughtful as you are being. I've always found that difficult.

You can talk to one person and kind of coach them through, but the real change is to be made, I think, up the chain, going back through the distribution chain to the companies that produce these products. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think it's not dissimilar to when we talk about lifestyle and health, really. It's sort of, you know,

everyone talks about personal responsibility and of course there is a degree of personal responsibility but frankly some people are their lives are set up in such a way if we if we look at deprived areas and low socioeconomic status areas where actually it's very challenging to make those what we call healthy and diverse commerce choices you know for some people it's not really a choice and it's but i've always said it's both you can't it's not all about because people will get really um you know really territorial saying you know it's some say it's all personal responsibility people should actually know what they're doing and take responsibility for their lives other people say that's all a load of rubbish. It's all about societal change

and government passing legislation. And I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I think you can sort of support both. Like when I've worked in poor deprived areas, I've tried to empower as much as I can, because I can't wave a magic wand there and change the system. So it's what tools can I give them to help them, even if the environment is set up or is working against them. But then also we should be advocating for change. So I guess on that topic then, what responsibility do you think tech companies should have to actually make changes that actually enhance the lives of their users? Because it feels at the moment as though there's a real problem whereby they want you on their devices longer, because that means more engagement, more money.

So actually, is even asking them to police this the right thing to do? Does it need to go even higher and actually be mandated by government? Yes, it probably does. You can't expect tech companies to do the right thing any more than you can expect any other for-profit organization to do the right thing when you're asking them to sacrifice profit. I think there are two forms of change. And just before I talk about those forms of change,

I think one really important thing to do, and I think we're doing this in this conversation, is to remove the moral component from this, where people are either saying it's all about personal responsibility and the end user. There's a kind of moral burden that this, where people are either saying it's all about personal responsibility and the end user, you know, there's a kind of moral burden that's laid on people using screens, or it's laid on the tech companies. But I think the most productive and fruitful conversations about how to solve the issue, remove the moral element

and talk about what will actually solve the problem. So thinking about that, there are two approaches, broadly speaking. One is the bottom-up approach, and the other is the top-down approach. The bottom-up approach is grassroots. It's a little bit like Barack Obama's election campaign in 2008, where you focus on individuals, and you work with individuals. They all start to get energized. They speak to other people.

And you develop enough interest in the community that people say, this thing should change. And that started to happen, I think, in the last four or five years with tech where individual consumers now are savvy enough well educated enough have been exposed to enough content like the social dilemma where they start to say hang on this is not good for me I don't like what these tech companies are doing and they start to demand change the reason that's important when it grows when there's a swell is um it forces the tech companies to make changes for the long-term survival of their brands for their for their own existential well-being so if i'm a tech company and i hear from a billion users that they don't want to use my product anymore at the very least i have to be seen to be doing the right thing by consumers whereas if

consumers don't respond at all they don't say anything that i can just keep exploiting them so that's the bottom-up approach the top-down approach that you've mentioned is to go to the few, probably 10 people in the world who have this colossal effect on our well-being, the CEOs of the very biggest tech companies, to try to appeal to their better angels, I think, is just folly. I don't think that's really going to happen. And that's why you really do have to go to legislation. And what's been interesting in the last decade or so is looking at how different governments around the world have started to try legislation and to experiment with it and I think in some countries they're doing a reasonably good job I think western Europe northern Europe is doing doing some good stuff parts of East Asia

I think they're trying some other ideas they're quite different in their flavor but but they're all starting to think about how we can police not just the tech companies, but also the workplaces that voice, say, email on us. A lot of it focuses on email, actually. But it's designed to not, most of it's not designed to punish the consumer, and it's designed to say, what can we do about changing the way tech companies practice? What can we do about changing the way tech companies practice? In the same way that we said in the 80s and 90s, there are these huge industrial conglomerations that are polluting the waters and the skies. And what can we do to prevent them from doing that? Well, we can levy fines. And so there's basically a price for that.

And some of them are thinking about the same idea. You know, if you rob on average a billion or two billion people of 10 minutes a day, well, there's a way of converting that to economic terms. How much does that matter? And we'll fine you for that. If that's what it's going to take, then maybe we should move in that direction. Yeah, super interesting. And I love how you really emphasise removing the moral components. I think that's important when we're trying to solve any problem. A, that gets people guarded and it gets people's backs up. But B, you know, it is hard. These things, as you've titled the book, they're irresistible. You know, 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. The fact that I'm trying to purchase a dumb phone and experiment with it does not mean I've got this stuff down. It's actually because, and I think I'm pretty intentional about my usage. I'm certainly, one thing I'm pretty militant on with myself is usage of tech around my kids. I've always, well, 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 right. I'm not. I'm sort of in the room. I'm physically in the same space, but mentally I'm a million miles away and that really prompted me to go right okay enough's enough around the kids don't be staring at your phone because otherwise you're modeling

that behavior for them and then when they're teenagers don't be surprised when they're doing the same thing um how have you sort of navigated those things in your own life we have a little box actually um there's a company called um intentionally 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 the kitchen and the dining room it's sort of a big open area we have the little box there and so when we're in that area we try to put the kitchen and the dining room, it's sort of a big open area. We have the little box there. And so when we're in that area, we try to put the phone in the box and to leave it there. And so these little ways of short-circuiting your tendency to just pick up the device I think are really useful.

It's something that my wife and I do, and we try to instill in the kids. They're still quite young, so they're not exerting their will in the way they might when they're older. when they're older. But 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. Structure does what you need it to do. And so instead of having to say every time, am I going to use my phone? No. You have some habit that's in place. You have a structure. You say, all right, my structure is that when I get to this part of the house, the phone goes in the box. Or when I come up from the basement, so I'm in the basement now working. When I come upstairs, I'll leave the phone in the basement so I'm not tempted to use it.

I think all the best interventions really do a great job of recognizing human fallibility. And the fact that, you know, asking yourself to exercise well-being, 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. Yeah. I talk about habit change a lot in terms of, you know, creating health habits that we might want to, but we've tried for years and failed. And one of the rules is to make it easy. You know, if it's easy to do, you'll do it. And it's almost the flip side.

And 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. Yeah, it's this old psychological concept known as propinquity, 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. 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 am 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 it, 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.

A lot of people you say to them would you 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 percent of them will tell you that 24 hours of the day they can reach their phones without moving their feet so these devices are not inside our brains but functionally they are basically implants they're a part of us they're an extension 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 half eight hours of the day where you are without your phone 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.

Make it as hard to reach as possible. So setting up these structures, exactly as you say, instead of making it easy to do the right thing, make it incredibly hard to do the wrong thing. And you'll stop doing it. It really does. I spoke to James Clear recently. That episode has not come out yet. I don't know if you know James. He wrote the book Atomic Habits.

And he talks about when he's working and he talks about if literally the phone is just in another room, you know, probably takes him 20 seconds to get there. He can have a whole productive morning of work and he doesn't even look at it. And even though it's just a small amount, and I think about two or three weekends ago, I'd been out on Saturday afternoon, my phone was in the car in one of the sort of, I don't know, you know, just inside the

front, the door as you open it. And I had left it there by accident. And, you know, after about an hour of being at home, I was like, you know, where's my phone? I'm looking around, sort of went upstairs, trying to retrace my steps. I couldn't find it anywhere. And then I thought, you know what? I know I bought it into the car. I couldn't be bothered going to the car to check. So I thought, I'm sure it's fine. I'm pretty sure I know that I've not left it anywhere. I got to tell you, I didn't get it then till the Sunday evening. I felt like I'd been on holiday. I've experienced this before 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's functionally it's it's just an extension of our brains that's how it feels and i feel i feel that they are so addicted that sometimes if they're there you can't resist because that's the whole point of them so actually you need to put a physical obstruction in the way you do yeah and it's it's interesting hearing people i 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'thanies, 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. And it was the best two hours of the last three months of my life. And realizing, oh, there's a correlation there between the presence of the phone and

feeling not great a lot of the time. But Adam, we can know that, right? We can know that, or we can experience it, yet we still can't change it right you've written a book on it right you've written a book on it what what's like what what are your habits like because it's all it's all very well knowing this stuff rationally and cognitively but we're we're all imperfect humans right can you implement as much as you would like to in your own life yeah and i think you and i probably have the same philosophy about this. You apply it to other domains, but it's the same idea that you've got to make these interventions as simple as possible.

We're asking far too much of ourselves if after a day we're like, oh, that was exhausting, I can't believe I had to do that. So it's got to be something that's really small that has outsized consequences. The easiest one by far is to just pick a time in the day, whether it's half an hour or an hour, that you will sort of sanctify and say, this is going to be screen free.

And it doesn't matter what happens. And for most people, the easiest one, because it's consistent, is dinner. It doesn't have to be at the same time or the same place or with the same people, but you could make this blanket rule, during dinner time, I will not have my phone on my person or

reachable. So it's going to be in the box in my kitchen, or it's going to be somewhere else, it's going to be in a different room. You can even have a little drawer in your bedroom or wherever in the entrance hall, wherever you want to put it. Have that be the drawer where you put your phone at dinner time. And do that every day. Try that for a week. And if you don't like it, bring the phone back to dinner. But it never happens. No one who's gone through this after a week says, you know, I really missed my phone at dinner time. Now there's a withdrawal period for the first day or two. You get FOMO. You have that fear of missing out on things. And a lot of people describe the discomfort, but it ebbs and then it's just absent for the remaining, say, three or four days. And then

you never want to go back. Now that's instructional and instructive for people. It basically says to them, if I could carve out that half an hour or hour-long period, what about if I could try to do that at other times? So one of the things I do is I don't want to be completely without my phone because I take tons of photos of my kids. So when I'm with them on the weekends, I like to have it somewhere nearby, which is difficult. But one thing I'll do is I'll turn the phone into a dumb phone by putting it on airplane mode. And once that's happened, I'm not getting texts, I'm not getting emails, I'll make a strong rule that I won't switch back. And that has a huge effect. So I'll be able to use the phone as a camera. It'll be there as a camera, but it'll effectively just be a camera.

And that's uh that's another way of dealing with it so these changes are they don't ask a huge amount of you that to actually make the changes really easy you just move it to a different room or push a button on the phone and then if you can just stick with it for a week i'm telling you i've just i haven't met people who after a week go back yeah no i think it's super useful tips and what i love about the way you put them across is you're not trying to enforce on people how they should live their lives you're saying try it see how you feel if you don't if after a week you missed your phone at dinner bring you bring your phone back to dinner put it on the chair next to you that's

fine but but you know and i i really that's the approach i've always taken as a doctor with anything i recommend to my patients is why don't you try this see how you feel but give it seven days give it 10 days really see how you feel then once you're empowered okay then you can make a choice what you want to do but often we we often we don't even know what it feels like without it's a bit like it's not dissimilar to caffeine and sleep sometimes, right? You know, so many of us are so and I love my caffeine, right? So this is not an anti caffeine blast at all. This is just many people that drinking so much caffeine throughout the day into the afternoon into early evening,

and are struggling with their sleep. they don't know how good their sleep can be when they cut it back to just being in the morning or even go without for a week. And for me, it's always about, why don't we try it? Let's see how you feel. And then you're empowered at the end of that. It's like, you know, I've used this analogy in talks before, but I really want people to understand this, that, you know, if you were, you know, back in pre-pandemic times, people were out on a Friday night in a bar with their friends, having some drinks, you know that there's probably going to be a cost on a Saturday morning. Headache, poor night's sleep, a bit fuzzy. But you're making a

decision that actually the enjoyment I get on a Friday night is worth the downside on a Saturday morning. I feel with many things like our tech use, we're not even aware of the downside. So we do need these kind of periods of experimentation. And I don't know, I'm a fan of digital detoxes as a way of teaching us what life can be like, but I know not everyone is. So i mean what what do you think about digital detoxes i think i think they're great um i just to say my the book that i'm working on now is about getting unstuck about being stuck and how to fix that and a huge part of being stuck is not knowing what the alternatives are 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,

condition using condition as the kind of in experimental sense or the scientific sense. You know, you might have 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? What about if I drank 20? Probably not a good idea. But 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 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 and i totally agree with you i think 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 yeah no it is it's i mean there's there's so much in terms of experimentation people can do we mentioned physical distance but even distance on the home screen one of my buddies he i think he read it in was it near irs indractable? I think Nir was talking about this. And he's grouped, his home screen, I think has about three apps on, just the three things that he intentionally wants to use his phone for. Everything else is partitioned off,

like two or three swipes away. And he said, look, I just don't use them as much. So that's one option that, again, may work for people. And I think that's the way we need to have the conversation. It's not all good or all bad. It's like, well, what are the benefits? What do I like using it for? What are the downsides? And I actually started following you on Twitter yesterday. And I noticed, and the reason I noticed, I'll share just a second, but I noticed that you only follow about 320, 330 people. And why I was acutely aware of that is because I've been going through a process for about four weeks now,

where I've been cleaning up my Twitter. So four weeks ago, I think I followed 2,300 people. I'm down to 700. Man, it is time consuming to unfollow people. But I really got clear in my head the intention because there can be a lot of emotional baggage tied up with who you're following and who you're unfollowing. And I feel five years ago, I would have struggled with that.

I feel I'm in a much more secure place in who I am these days. You know what? It's not a personal insult to someone if I don't follow them. If they choose to take it like that, I'm not responsible for the way they feel. But I believe, and I've spoken to a few people who use Twitter as a great way of generating ideas and following thought leaders. But they only follow 200 or 300 people. So it's a very curated feed. James Clear was saying every time he goes on

Twitter, it's just full of wisdom. I thought, well, I like that. So maybe Twitter can be a network that I find enriching if I follow the right people. I've removed all news channels. I thought I'd removed them all. A few were in there, but I've actually got rid of them all. It's amazing. You go on, you don't see any breaking news. It's like, this is awesome. This is completely awesome. And you're proving, because you've got these best-selling books, right?

And same with Cal Newport, who wrote Digital Minimalism. Cal doesn't have a social media account at all. You guys are bucking this idea that, oh, to be an inverse commerce successful, to have a book out there that people are going to read, you must be on social media. You are both proving that that's simply not the case. Yeah, I think you can sell books and you can sell ideas and you can promote ideas without social media. You need other channels, though. And I think Cal's very thoughtful about that.

And I certainly try my best, especially as a marketing professor, to think of alternatives. Are there ways to get a message out that don't involve social media? And you can do it. You can certainly do it. And the other thing about transmitting messages is that there's a real lumpiness in terms of how much of an effect a particular channel will have. So you can say yes to a thousand interviews or a thousand discussions that are supposed to be public and they won't have any effect on selling books but if you hit the right few they will have a huge effect on selling books and so you

learn that over time that there's a very long tail not every communication you have that's designed to be public will actually go public and matter and have a big effect on things like sales. So there are there are ways to do it without without going on social media, but it takes a lot of thought. If you were going to teach children at school about digital hygiene, as we mentioned right at the start of this conversation, I guess one of the questions would be who would teach it? Because have we even come up with those rules yet? But if you were teaching it, what sorts of things would you put in place for kids?

I think one of the things to put on their radar is the idea that using social media for 6 to 12 hours a day is not inevitable. It's not the way humans operated for thousands of years before today. And it's not necessarily the way humans need to operate moving into the future, even though it will seem inevitable because that's the soup that they kind of grow in. That's just what they know. That's all they know. So I think that's one really important thing. And so to have little detox breaks in the school context is important.

There are some schools here in the U.S. that are very good about this already. They'll have like a little place where the kids will drop their phones when they come into the classroom. So there are no phones in the classroom. Other schools are a bit more lax about it. A lot of private schools will give kids devices. So that's one way of demonstrating how wealthy you are is to say every kid gets a tablet or every kid gets a phone or whatever. And that's, I think, counterproductive. And so I've worked with a lot of schools and with a lot of school districts to try to discourage that. So that's obviously just implicitly bad digital hygiene education,

is to give kids these devices and suggest they have a role to play in every context. So I think having that conversation is really important. I think one other thing that people don't do enough is to ask themselves, again, this audit process that I think can be encouraged in kids as well. Why are you doing what you're doing? Be mindful 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 WhatsAppping 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. I think it's important to teach that kind of digital mindfulness in kids more than anything so that they don't take it for granted and assume that it's inevitable. I think that's one of the biggest parts of it. So that by the time they're older, they're adults and they're sophisticated, they realize there's an alternative. Because that's my biggest concern is that kids who are born into the smartphone world, like my kids who are young now i want them to know that that's not

the only way the world can be yeah and that they can intervene yeah it's that empowerment just knowing and i think i think that's the key isn't it just to understand that it's not the only way that it may be a way that one chooses but it may not as well and it's interesting you know your kids are a little bit younger than mine and i And I'm wondering how you're going to navigate the next years because I'm currently in a situation and I'm not saying I'm doing the right thing here. I will acknowledge, we don't learn how to parent. We're all doing the best that we can based on what we know. But as things stand, my son at 10, I really struggle with the idea of him having a smartphone at this age. I really don't feel it's necessary or helpful

think a smartphone at this age, I really don't feel it's necessary or helpful personally. He seems totally okay with it because I've explained it. My wife and I have explained our view. He's not really causing a fuss about it. I don't know if this will come to bite us in a few years time or not. I guess you taking your professor hat off or even keeping it on. I mean, what is the right age, would you say, for children to start being given access to these devices? I want to say devices. I should be more clear. I should be a bit more clear because I think there's a big difference between getting a dumb phone where you can text and phone. And if you need to communicate that you're safe or actually, oh, you know, let's say you're in secondary school and you're getting a 30 minute bus ride away.

Right. I get that. But there's a difference between that and a smartphone where you have access to the internet and basically anything you want. So I don't know, I'm struggling a bit. Unpick that for me, if you wouldn't mind. Sure. I almost don't think... You can probably hear my kids screaming now, actually. I don't think there's an age that's too young for a dumb phone, really, the way we use them. We're not at risk of encouraging addiction to a dumb phone because it's just not the way the world works today. There's no kind of network of users of phones in the way they used to be, where everyone would get together and make these calls and they'd all chat for hours and hours at a time. It's just not the way phones are used anymore. So most people, when they give a dumb phone to a child, it's so that the child has a

way of communicating with them to say, I'm safe or I'm on my way somewhere and I need a ride or whatever it is. It's very, very kind of quaint, old traditional ways of using phones for communication. I don't think there's a single age. I don't think there's an answer or a one-size-fits-all answer for the age at which kids should get smartphones. I think part of it's going to be about the maturity of the child. Part of it will be about the child's personality. I think whenever it does happen, there needs to be a big conversation

about how to do the onboarding process. Like, you know, you go from not having a phone to having a phone. You're being flooded with all sorts of potential entertainment, bullying, anxiety, all these other things that can come, both positive and negative things. I think there's got to be a hand-holding process in the early part of that experience. You know, I find this a really difficult issue. I think what you're doing is terrific. And I think it's probably the ideal thing to do is to wait for a while. I think 10 is probably young, although most kids by 10, at least as I've experienced, 10 year olds have got phones.

I think it's good to wait a little bit longer than that. But I think the most important thing is when they get the phones, how you kind of discuss the process, do a lot of debriefing. And then a lot of people ask these questions about whether there should be monitoring of what's going on on the phone and how much monitoring there should be. And some parents have even asked me, should I kind of snoop, make sure that nothing untoward is happening? I want to protect my child. And I think that's dangerous because then if you breach the trust that's really important, I think, around phones, you want your child to be able to come to you with issues. I think snooping is really dangerous, but you can have

a very open conversation with 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds about what the risks are and what they should be looking out for and to tell you if any of these things come up to say that you're there to help um yeah it's it's tricky you know the age that the canonical age that a lot of uh a lot of the pediatric groups refer to is 13 um and it's it's i think it's plucked out of the air a little bit um i think 12 14 that were fine ages but a lot of them say 13 is the age at which you can expose kids to smartphones and a lot of the air a little bit. I think 12, 14, both fine ages, but a lot of them say 13 is the age at which you can expose kids to smartphones. And a lot of the maturation and development that's so important before that has taken place, social development, linguistic development. Certainly, there's plenty more to happen once they're over the age of 13. They often cite that as the age.

Yeah, it's interesting. And i guess one of the questions i'm asking a lot with considering secondary schools for my son at the moment and i talked to the schools about their attitude to tech and uh it's interesting they've all got different answers and a lot of them are trying to show off to you how much they care you know we've got ipads we've got this and we're gonna it's like hey i it's like, hey, I'm not impressed. I actually want the opposite. I kind of wanted to hear the opposite of that. But I get it. And I think what's interesting is that, you know, and this is why I think your book and your work is so important, Adam, is because we got to give people awareness first. I don't think any parent is trying to harm their child

by buying them a smartphone. And I think they're trying to do something really nice for them. Go, oh, you really want that? And you can do this? Okay, yeah. Right? I honestly believe that all parents are doing the best that they can. Adam, are you hopeful for the future of tech?

Do you think this is a problem that we can solve and come up with solutions for? I think we can solve it. I think I've been encouraged by, I'd say, the last three years of how this issue has moved. I think it's been less about the addictive component of it and more about concerns about things like privacy and hacking of elections and things like that.

But I think people are becoming much savvier consumers of tech. They're being more thoughtful. And I think that idea of digital hygiene being about mindfulness, I think the population in general has become much more mindful about its use of screens. And I think that's been a good thing. So I feel hopeful on that front. These tech companies are behemoths. I think they're going to be very difficult to handle legislatively. Certainly, the current government in the United States has not focused on the issue. The previous government, the Obama government, was more focused on it. I'm hopeful that future governments will pay more attention to it here and in the rest of the world. And I'm hopeful that we can solve it to some extent. Yeah, that's good to hear. Adam, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More.

When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. I certainly think if we can have a much healthier and mindful and intentional relationship with our tech, we can certainly get more out of our lives. Could you leave the viewers on YouTube, the listeners of the podcast, could you leave them with some of your top tips that they can think about implementing immediately to start improving the quality of their lives yeah so my first book was on uh forces in the world around us that shape how we think feel and behave and one of the things that struck me as i was doing the research for that that book was the incredible power of being in natural environments to make us healthier and happier and i think one of the antidotes to tech in this world where we're just flooded with technology and

with screens is is to spend i know this is difficult for people in 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. of 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 that it's the year 2020. 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, 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. 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 right timelessness that That's a lovely thought. It brought a smile to me as I was sort of reflecting on that. I love the idea that, you know, when you go in an environment where you don't know what year it is, what a wonderful way of thinking about it. But Adam, big fan of your work. Please, when your new book is out, if you want to come back on the show, you have an open invitation invitation please email me because obviously i won't be able to find out on social media that your book is out uh thank you so much i really do hope everyone or a lot of people who listen to this go and get your book irresistible i think it's brilliant i think it really helps shine a light on something that really does need light shining on it thank you so much stay well and i look forward to the next

time we get to have a conversation you too too. Thanks so much, Rangan. I appreciate it. That concludes today's conversation. What did you think? I honestly believe that our addiction to tech is a lot more toxic than many of us think. And I hope you found that conversation enlightening and empowering. As always, please do think about one thing that you can take from today's show and apply into your own life. Now, is this a conversation that someone in your life needs to hear? Do you know someone who could do with a bit of help in resetting their relationship with technology? Well, why not take a moment right now to choose a few people who you think would benefit and send them a link to this episode with a personal note.

This is such an impactful thing to do. It serves us as an act of kindness that has benefits not just for the other person, but for you as well. this episode, like every single one, is also available in high definition on YouTube if your network prefers videos as opposed to audio podcasts. Now, if you want some more practical tips on how to reset your own relationship with technology, I really would encourage you to check out my first two books, The Four Pillar Plan and The Stress Solution, where I list so many simple and accessible strategies that you can think about applying in your everyday life. And on the show notes page on my website, you will see links to Adam's fantastic book, Irresistible, and other fascinating articles about his work. A big thank you to my wife, Vedanta Chatterjee,

for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for Audio Engineering. Have a wonderful week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it

because when you feel better, you live more.