Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Why Your Brain Wants You To Be Anxious, Lazy & Fat (And What You Can Do About It) with Dr Anders Hansen #381

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

I think it’s fair to say that human beings have got it pretty good. Compared to most of our evolutionary history we have never been richer, safer, or lived longer lives. Yet, despite that, more of us are struggling with our health than ever before. What’s going on? This is the question that my guest today has spent years trying to answer.   Dr Anders Hansen is a Swedish psychiatrist, a globally renowned speaker with his own TV series exploring the human brain and he is also the author of multiple bestselling books, including his latest two The Happiness Cure and The Attention Fix.   He believes we can start to understand the struggles of modern life by looking to the brain, where our emotions are created. The brain did not evolve for intelligence, creativity or even happiness. Its sole purpose is to help us survive and reproduce – to make it to tomorrow, alive. We have inherited the evolutionary defence mechanisms that kept our ancestors hyper alert, fearful, and able to evade danger.   The trouble is that modern life has evolved at a pace our genes and brains have been unable to match. So today, these incredible survival skills that once helped us, now show up as unwanted feelings like chronic anxiety, distractibility, an urge to overeat, under exercise and even gamble. We often see these as mental health failings – something broken that needs to be fixed, says Anders. But when you look at them through the lens of evolutionary psychology, these behaviours all start to make perfect sense.   We no longer live on the Savanna: we live in a world of abundance and super-stimulation – and, if we want to thrive, we need to work against our brains’ natural instincts.   Easier said than done? Perhaps, but this conversation contains some excellent practical advice to get you started.   Anders is someone who really wants all of us to learn how exactly our brains are wired -  so we can more easily understand ourselves and our daily behaviours. He is passionate, knowledgeable and a brilliant communicator. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him, I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/381 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I told the patient once that a panic attack is often a sign that your brain is functioning normally and you are not damaged, but you suffer and we can fix that. And that's fine, but you should not look at yourself as someone who is broken. And when he realized that, those attacks came less often. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. So I hope you had a good summer. I hope you managed to find some time to switch off and relax. We are back with a brand new season of my podcast, and I have some absolutely fantastic guests lined up for you this year.

Now, before we get into today's episode, just a quick reminder to sign up for my free weekly email, which is called Friday Five. The first one after the summer break is coming out this Friday. Over 200,000 people currently receive it. And each week I share five simple and uplifting ideas to improve your health and happiness and get you ready for the weekend. So if that sounds up your street, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. Now, I think it's fair to say that human beings have got it pretty good these days. Compared to most of our evolutionary history, we have never been richer, safer, or lived longer lives. Yet despite that, more of us are struggling with our health than ever before.

So what exactly is going on? Well, this is the question that my guest today has spent years trying to answer Dr. Anders Hansen is a Swedish psychiatrist A globally renowned speaker with his own TV series Exploring the Human Brain And he's also the author of multiple best-selling books Including his latest two, The Happiness Cure and The Attention Fix. Now, Anders believes that we can best start to understand the struggles of modern life

by looking to the brain where our emotions are created. The brain did not evolve for intelligence, creativity, or even happiness. Its sole purpose is to help us survive and reproduce, basically to make it until tomorrow alive. And so we have inherited the evolutionary defense mechanisms that kept our ancestors hyper alert, fearful, and able to evade danger. The trouble is that modern life has evolved at a pace that our genes and brains have been unable to match. So today, these incredible survival skills that once helped us

now show up as unwanted feelings like chronic anxiety, panic attacks, distractibility, an urge to overeat, underexercise, and even gamble. We often see these as mental health failings, something broken that needs to be fixed. But when we start to look through the lens of evolutionary psychology, these behaviors all start to make sense. We no longer live on the savannah, we live in a world of abundance and super stimulation. And if we want to thrive, world of abundance and super stimulation. And if we want to thrive, we need to work against our brain's natural instincts. Easier said than done, perhaps, but this conversation contains some excellent practical advice to get you started. Anders is someone who really wants

all of us to learn how exactly our brains are wired so we can more easily understand ourselves and our daily behaviours. He's passionate, knowledgeable and a quite brilliant communicator. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him. I hope you enjoyed listening. As I think about your work, a central philosophy, I would say, seems to be this idea that we've got it pretty good as humans these days, yet at the same time, many of us are struggling. From your perspective, what's going on? Well, this is something that I have thought of my entire life. We have never had it so good as we have today. We've never been so rich. We never lived so long. We've never been so healthy, but still so many seem to be struggling with their mental health.

And in Sweden, one in eight adults are on antidepressant medication. And I have realized as a psychiatrist that if you really want to understand this, you have to start from the brain because that's where your emotions are created. And I think the most important thing I never learned in med school was that the brain did not evolve for intelligence. It did not evolve for creativity. It did not evolve to make us happy, but it evolved to help us survive and reproduce. The primary goal of the brain is not to make a symphony. It's to take you to tomorrow alive.

And half of all humans have died before they became teenagers during almost our entire history. And they did not die from cancer or cardiovascular disease, which is what kills us today. But they died from bleedings, infections, murder, dehydration, accidents. And we are the descendants of the ones who did not die from these causes. And that means that we have in us defense mechanisms that protects us against bleedings, infections, murder, accidents, and so on. And one of those defense mechanisms is that we see the world as more dangerous than it actually is. And to see the world as more dangerous than it is, that's this anxiety. So from this perspective, you realize that it's not strange that there are people who have anxiety.

What is strange is that there are people who don't have anxiety and maybe they should be diagnosed. And I tell my patients that anxiety doesn't show that you're damaged goods. You're not broken. You have a brain that is trying to protect your life. And a strong pair of arms can lift heavy things. Strong legs can run fast. But a strong brain is not a brain that goes through periods of stress unaffected.

It's a brain that wants you to survive at all costs, even if it means seeing the world as dangerous and by definition then feeling bad. So I think we have to be aware that we never evolved for happiness. However, there are things in our modern society that makes the world we live in almost depresseogenic. It's almost difficult to think of a world that creates so much depressions and anxiety as today's world. And that's exactly why we need to learn more about the brain and look under the hood and see how we really function

in order to sort of work around the Achilles heels that are in our brains. That's a really nice quote that you start one of the chapters with in the attention fix. I don't have it to hand now, but it was something like, it's a surprise that more of us are not mentally ill, given how alien our current environments are.

Exactly. And I think what you've just said really speaks to that. Exactly. And the world that we think is so natural with cars and computers and refrigerators and tinders, whatever, that's actually a very, very strange world for humans. Almost all previous generations have lived as hunter-gatherers or as farmers. So you may be a doctor or a cab driver or a nurse or a teacher, but biologically speaking, we are all hunters and gatherers.

That is what we have adapted for. And those instincts that helped us survive in a world of scarcity and a dangerous world, those instincts don't help us become happy in a world of overabundance. Yeah, I think that's a really nice rephrasing for your patients with anxiety that, actually, there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain is doing what it's meant to do. See, there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain is doing what it's meant to do. Exactly.

So anxiety is both natural and hell at the same time. I don't want to downplay how horrible anxiety can be because it devastates lives. It costs lives. But it's important to understand that you are not broken. You are not damaged goods. And this is something that can be fixed by therapy, by exercise, and if it's really bad, by medication.

And you cannot get rid of all of your anxiety, but even if you just lower it a bit, you will feel a lot better. But I think the perspective on looking at it as an evolutionary defense mechanism that helps you to survive, that makes you less afraid of the anxiety itself. Because there's something which is basically fear of fear. You're afraid of your anxiety and you're afraid that you will get anxious in the future. And that might cause as much harm as the anxiety in itself, so to speak. You see patients with panic attacks, they start avoiding things to avoid

those possible attacks. And I told the patient once that a panic attack is often a sign that your brain is functioning normally. Because if we assume that we are living on the savannah, which 99.9% of all humans did, and there's a rustle in the wind, then you could think that, okay, that's probably nothing. And then you don't do anything. Or you could think, there's a rustle in the wind, then you could think that, okay, that's probably nothing. And then you don't do anything. Or you could think, that's a lion. And then you run away as fast as you can. So if it's just the wind and you run away,

what do you lose then? Well, you lose 200 calories. That's what your body uses when you run away. If it's a lion, what do you lose then? Well, then you lose 200,000 calories. That's what the lion will get when he eats you. You lose your life. So from a pure calorie perspective, we should not be surprised that the brain is calibrated in a way that it accepts 1,000 false alarms to not miss the one time your life depended on it.

miss the one time your life depended on it. So this really gives an understanding that most panic attacks are false alarms that shows that you are functioning normally. And when I say that to patients, I've had many of them who say, okay, so it's okay to have a panic attack. And when he realized that, in this case it was he, those attacks came less often. I mean, it's really powerful, Anders. It's really powerful, that sort of reframe exactly because so many patients think they're broken they think there's something wrong why is my brain doing this my partner's brain doesn't do this there's something wrong with me yeah and so i think you just been able to validate their experience to say wait a minute your brain's doing what it's supposed to do. And you are not damaged. Yeah. But you suffer and we can fix that. And that's fine. But you should not look at yourself as someone who is broken. That's very important. How you contextualize

an experience of anxiety or depression is very, very important of how you will experience it. And also, if you learn the biology of the brain, you realize that feelings are short-term. They will pass. Because the goal of feelings is not that we should have a rich inner life. It's to push us against behaviors that helped us survive in our past. And if feelings were not short-term, we need to change behaviors all the time. So a feeling is there, in your view, to help us change our behavior.

Exactly. That's the only reason. That's the only reason. So in every moment of our lives, the brain takes information from the body and from the surroundings, and it creates a summary of all that. And that summary is a feeling and it's supposed to tilt you to behave in certain ways. If your energy levels is low, well, that feeling might be hunger

to take care of your nutritional need. If you're bored, then that feeling tells you to do something. You have to be active in order to survive. If your feeling is lonely, it's telling you to take care of your social needs. So feelings are there to help us do the things that help to survive. If your feeling is lonely, it's telling you to take care of your social needs. So feelings are there to help us do the things that help to survive, not the things that help us survive today, but the things that help humans survive in our past. And I would like to see,

I almost see feelings as whispers from previous generations of humans who have, against all odds, survived. So you should not ask, really, what's the function of a panic attack today, because obviously there isn't. You should ask, were there situations in the past where a panic attack might be very useful? And there probably was a lot of those instances in the past yeah there's a beautiful poeticism sort of philosophy behind what you said about ancestral whispers but there's also kind of a change to our physiology we're seeing lots of research aren't we about transgenerational trauma being passed on.

We see in certain families, if we see this in Northern Ireland, Iraq, all kinds of countries where there's been significant trauma in the recent history, we see that the kids or the grandkids, even though they didn't experience it, they didn't directly experience the trauma, they have imprints of that trauma within them. Their stress response is set differently. So, that idea of whispers from the past, I think it works poetically and physiologically. It does. And you could see this as a smoke detector principle. If you have a smoke detector

in your kitchen, it's okay if that smoke detector sometimes alarms when you toast bread, when you burn bread, because it has to alarm when there is a fire. So you accept false alarms. And that's the way you should see anxiety. Most of it is false alarms. If you grow up in a world where there's a lot of danger, where no one is really taking care of you, if you have traumas, severe traumas in your families, then the brain thinks that I'm going to live in a very, very dangerous world. And the sensitivity of the smoke detector rises even more, not because you are broken, but because your brain is trying to help you to survive. Well, let's dig deep into that analogy because I like it. I think we've all had that experience of the smoke alarm going off and us getting

frustrated, annoyed, irritated. Just if we were to extend that analogy. So the smoke alarm going off is our anxiety, right? So we can either look at the smoke alarm and go, that's irritating, how annoying, I wish I never put it here. So ignore it, see it as a negative, or we could reframe it and go, okay, this is great. Look, slightly frustrating, but it's a good job that it's working. I'll be a bit more careful with checking the toast, maybe putting the setting down on my toaster, whatever it might be. You're looking at it as a positive thing. Thank God it's working so that if ever in the middle of the night it goes off, I know it's going to save our lives. Is that almost how you want your patients to approach

anxiety? Thank God it's working. It's a good thing. Yeah, I think so. And when I hear patients saying things like, okay, so now I get it, the panic attack is just a false alarm that shows I'm functioning normally. I think of a scene in a movie called Wizard of Oz from the late 30s, I think. And in this scene, the protagonist, Dorothy, is afraid of a really powerful wizard. And in the end of this movie, the curtain where the wizard is behind is withdrawn by Dorothy's dogs. And she sees that it's just a phony. It's just a phony who's pulling levers and pushing buttons. And the same thing goes for anxiety. When you realize what it is, you see that it's just when you realize what kind of buttons and see that it's just when you realize what kind of buttons and levers that are being pulled in your brain, it becomes less frightening. And

if you go in therapy, a big part of any therapy is to sort of see yourself at a distance. And that's very, very difficult to do that. It's very difficult to take a helicopter perspective on yourself. But you could use the brain for doing that. You could say, it's just my brain who wants me to be afraid and so on. So I think this perspective can be therapeutic. But having said all of this, we must remember that anxiety is incredibly powerful.

Yeah. If we could just think, you know, trick anxiety away by thinking, think positive things or be happy or choose happiness or anything, then, you know, anxiety would not exist at all. It is extremely powerful because it's going to motivate us to take care of danger. So these are very, very, very powerful things and they will not just get easily tricked. So if you suffer from this, you should definitely seek help. There's no point at all in suffering in vain. So I think first step is you're trying to explain to us and your patients that, look,

this is a normal phenomena, okay? Doesn't mean it's easy to deal with. Yes, it can be frustrating. Yes, it can have a massively negative impact on your life currently, but it's your brain doing what it's supposed to do, right? So patients are obviously going to feel better when they hear that, oh, I'm not broken. Okay, there's nothing actually properly wrong with me. Now, the next step is, well, what can I do about it? Now, you said one of the goals of therapy is to try and get that helicopter view. And in the happiness cure, you've got a nice little section on anxiety. There's a nice little box out, two brain tricks to combat anxiety. You talk about breathing and writing things down. I wonder if you could explain how they might help here.

Right. Well, first of all, there's a part of your nervous system called the autonomic nervous system, and that is something that you can't control. And it takes care of the organs in your body, how they work, and so on. And there's two parts of this autonomic system. One is called the sympathetic system, and then the parasympathetic system. And these two work at the same time. And the parasympathetic system is digestion of food, being calm, at ease. The sympathetic system is stress. That's fight or flight.

And it's a balance between this system. You go from digestion to fight or flight, back to digestion and so on and so forth. And it turns out that your breathing actually affects these systems. When you inhale, you amp up the sympathetic system. So inhaling is fight or flight. Exhaling is digestion, calm. And you could use this by breathing in for four seconds and breathing out for six seconds. It's longer than when feels normal. And by doing so, you pushes the activity

in your autonomic nervous system away from fight and flight. And that is very effective. Breathe in four seconds, breathe out six seconds. Repeat that a couple of times and that's very, very efficient. And. Repeat that a couple of times and you will, that's very, very efficient. And another thing that you could do is to put words on what you're experiencing and try to be a bit nuanced, not just saying I feel bad, but try to describe it in a more

objective way. In a journal? In a journal or say it out loud or just think it, but try to explain it and see it from the distance because that activates certain parts in your prefrontal cortex that calms your amygdala. And amygdala is a part of the brain that is very active in detecting threats and has been connecting to anxiety. I mean, it's really interesting, isn't it? I think many people don't realize the power of slow intentional breathing. When your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, you are literally changing your biology. You're changing the signals to your brain, right? We understand it. We've been conditioned by taking a pill that's going to have a big effect. But actually, I think some of us

don't realize just how powerful finding a breathing practice that works for you. I mean, my experience has been that, you know, I've been teaching my patients for years, something called the three, four, five breath, where you breathe in for three, you hold for four and you breathe out for five, right? Again, it's similar principle, but I always say to patients, listen, that's one breath. And this is talking about the four, I always say to patients, listen, that's one breath. And this is talking about the four, six breath. Andrew Wilde talks about the four, seven, eight breath. There's box breathing, right? Find a breathing practice that works for you, that you resonate with. And could you perhaps share some patient stories where they had bad anxiety and actually breathing was massively useful.

I've had one guy who said it was incredibly important for him. And he actually learned it from you in your books. Yeah. And he tried a lot of things. And for him, it was very important, he said. But there's one patient case that I never will forget. And that's a guy in his 20s who came up to me at an airport. And he said that he read a book I wrote about physical activity in the brain and how

physical activity reduces anxiety. And he decided to try running. And he had a very, very, very bad upbringing. He was a child soldier. So he had severe post-traumatic distress. And he had tried everything and nothing had worked. And he had started drinking, so he had developed a severe alcohol problem as well. And then he started to run. And from running, his anxiety was reduced. And then he could cut down his alcohol intake. And he did not know whether it was the running or the reduced alcohol that in the end was the most important. But he said, if I had not started to run, I could never have cut down my alcohol.

And he said that he wished that I had written this book 10 years before. So exercise is incredibly important for mood regulation. And that goes back to the things that we talked earlier, that the brain doesn't create feelings based on sensory input. It creates feeling based on sensory input and the input from your body. So your body's state is incredibly important for when the brain creates your emotional states. And if you exercise, well, then the whole of the body becomes in better shape and then the brain gets better signals And that increases the chances that it will create positive feelings instead of negative. I definitely want to get to exercise and what exactly it does for the brain. Before we do that, though, we've mentioned a couple of times about all these signals that the brain is constantly taking in. And the,

I think you said earlier that the end result of that is a feeling. So all the inputs that it takes in, it creates a feeling in order for us to engage in a certain behavior that's going to help us, that's going to help us. And not necessarily help us now, but help us in the world that we evolved for, because we are still adapted to life as hunters and gatherers. That's going to help us. And not necessarily help us now, but help us in the world that we evolved for, because we are still adapted to life as hunters and gatherers. That's a problem. The brain wants us to constantly eat, because we're preparing ourselves for a famine that never comes.

In our world, we can eat as much as we want. It's never going to be, the grocery store will never be empty. But for almost all prior generations of humans, that was not the case. If they did not eat everything at once, they could die from starvation. And again, we can use that to help people feel better, right? For hundreds of thousands of years, if there was a lot of food around, we were wired to eat it and store it as fat, right? That's why we've got these mechanisms there. It's there to protect us. So if we don't get food for four or five days, no problem. We've got our fat stores that we can start utilizing as fuel. And I think people feel very bad when they can't resist sugar or crisps or super sweet chocolate or sweets or whatever it might be without an

understanding that you know for most of your evolutionary history for most of your evolutionary past that would have helped you yeah you're wired to do that and actually it's not a moral failing if we brought your great-grandparents into this food environment, you know what? 60, 70% of them would also be overweight. Absolutely. It's not as if they suddenly had an amazing willpower. They just weren't exposed to this abundance. Exactly.

That's such a good point that when you go into the candy section at the store, the stuff that you are confronted with, there's nothing like that in nature. There is nothing that contains as much calories as what you find in the candy section. Candy section is basically super, super, super fruits. And when you taste it, your brain thinks that you have run upon the best tree on the savannah and it's telling you, eat everything at once. This is jackpot. And so this craving for calories that comes from eons of time in a world where we lived without any calories, that worked great then, but that craving does not work at the candy section. So it's not just our character. It's that we had to resist these incredibly strong temptations.

And we are constantly, have to do that constantly. Our smartphones, that's a super stimuli. Candy is a super stimuli and so on and so forth. So today's society is so much about resisting things that would have been incredibly good for all previous generations, right? And I think that the big mistake we make is that by thinking that if we just follow our instincts, we will be happy. But it's not the case.

And if we follow our instincts, we would survive in a world where we aren't anymore. We will not be happy in the world that we live in. They will not be happy in the world that we live in. I mean, that argument extends to pretty much every single chronic disease we have today. Pretty much all of them, you can make this evolutionary argument. You can make the case that there is a mismatch between our evolutionary biology, our genes, and the environment in which we're living. And that disharmony that comes from that mismatch is at the root of mental health problems, autoimmune problems,

allergies, right? I had a lady called Teresa McPhail in here a few weeks ago, and she's written a great book all about allergies and why allergies are on the rise. And she shared with me that 30 to 40% of the adult population around the world are currently allergic to something. By 2030, they estimate that's going to be 50%. So if you take a step back and go, wait a minute, we're basically saying that within a few years, half of humanity are unable on one level to live in harmony with the environments around it. It's pretty profound. And I think it all comes back to this evolutionary mismatch. Yeah. And just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Kenya and I lived with a group of hunters and

gatherers for a couple of days. And I had read everything about this and I have written about it, but I had never seen it in real life. So this was just extraordinary to be there. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your

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They constantly moved, did not stay in the same place more than six months, then they moved their herd around and so on. And they were just fantastic people. They all looked like models of health. I mean, they looked fantastic and they seemed to be feeling great, all of them. And I said to one of them, how many of you have sleeping problems? And he said, well, we did not sleep last night because there was a lion here that tried to grab the cows.

And I was like, okay, but if there's a lion in my house, no one would sleep. That's reasonable. That's reasonable. That's reasonable. But apart from that, and he did not even get the question. He was like, well, if there are no predators around, why shouldn't you sleep? And then I asked him, how many of your children have allergies? None.

many of your children have allergies? None. And then I said, in my country where I come from, one in eight adults are being prescribed medication because they are sad. And then he said, well, you have everything. And I said, yeah, that's probably why. So I'm not trying to romanticize that life because that life is hell in many ways. The child mortality is very, that life because that life is hell in many ways. The child mortality is very, very high and the women are not treated in any way that is, I mean, that's totally unacceptable by any of our standards. So I'm not saying that we should go back to life on the savannah. That's not possible. But there are definitely some important lessons that we could learn from that. And not just from our mental health. Cardiovascular disease is basically non-existent in these groups. Diabetes type 2, one hasn't even been able to put a number on it because one can't find any cases. And remember, they don't have any healthcare facilities. They don't have anyone to take care of their blood sugar. They don't have

any medicine against hypertension. They don't have any therapists. They don't have anyone to take care of their blood sugar. They don't have any medicine against hypertension. They don't have any therapists. They don't have any, and so on. They don't have any antidepressant medication. And they seem very healthy anyway. I wonder what they would think of the idea of therapy. I think they would find it bizarre that you would need a professional to go to for that because they would get it from their community.

They lived very closely to one another and they lived also across generations. That's fascinating. It is. Did you observe what they ate while she was there? Yeah, a lot of it was based on milk and meat, actually. That's what I've read. I've never had the privilege of spending time with them, but we read that, that that's what they eat, like meat and milk.

And I don't know whether that is good for them or not. And you should definitely not romanticize this too much, but it's so vital. When I went there, I thought, you know, they might be happy and so on, but they don't know any better. I had that thought in the back of my mind. I felt bad for them in some way. And when I left, I thought, I'm wondering who, I mean, it's not they don't have the problems, it's we who have

the problems. I really felt that sincerely. So once again, we should not go back to that, but there are definitely some important lessons to be learned from it. It's really powerful what you just said, because we hear about these tribes, you know, whether it's the Hadza, the Maasai, or, you know, any kind of hunter-gatherer tribe who's still living like they used to. And it is easy to romanticize it and not see the negatives, but I don't think we need to. Like, it doesn't need to be black or white. It doesn't need to be, you get to choose. You're either going back to, you know, the savannah, living like hunter-gatherers,

to the savanna living like hunter-gatherers, or you can live in a Western urban city. Those are not the only two choices available. Exactly. We can look at these things and go, well, what is it we can learn? What is it we might be able to take and go, no, many of us like modern comforts, right? And unfortunately, we know when a lot of these tribes, when a lot of

these native populations end up moving or urbanizing or being given access to ultra-processed foods, they get just as sick as the rest of us. Absolutely. So there's nothing genetic about it. Exactly. It's an environmental issue. it is fascinating you know we have to acknowledge if they are not having heart attacks and type 2 diabetes yet they're eating meat milk and from what i understand blood as well right i know you didn't say that but that's what i've read about yeah they did it's kind of like well hold on a minute there's something in the way that we are scientifically trying to talk about heart disease that there might be something that we're missing. We may be being too reductionist. And remember, they don't have any medicines at all. They don't

have anyone who's taking care of this. They don't have any primary care physician. And let's take, for instance, exercise. These groups, they don't exercise. They move in their daily lives and they take about 18,000 steps per day. And I asked them, do you ever go for a run? And they were like, what? You know, why would we do that? But just for fun, they were like, no, of course not. When we don't have to work, we are still, we hang out with our children and with our elders and our friends. It's just that they have to run to hunt sometimes. Exactly. So they can't make a decision about it. They continuously move because they have to survive.

And I thought a lot about, we know that exercise is so incredibly important for our mental well-being and it also protects against diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And it's just incredibly important. Everyone knows that. So then why isn't it natural for us to go for a run? Then why do we want to be in the couch? Well, the answer is that during almost our entire history, we died from starvation. And that's why we want to eat every calorie that we find. However, how much energy you have in your body is not just dependent on how much food you eat. It's also dependent on how much energy you use.

And it costs energy to move. That's why we want to stay in the couch. The brain is telling us, don't waste your valuable energy. Don't go running because, you know, there could be famine soon and you need that energy. And then you might argue that I have extra kilos around my waist why do i still want to be in the couch that's actually very strange and the answer is that we have never been overweight or obese in human history overweight and obesity has been basically non-existent problems during our entire history but threatening starvation has been a huge problem. And there's a lot of defense mechanisms

against starvation in our body. And one of them is that when we lose weight, our hunger increases. When we lose weight, the basic metabolism, the amount of energy that we use when we are at rest goes down. And when we lose weight, the amount of energy that is extracted

from the bowels actually increases. And all of these mechanisms are defenses against starvation. But they kick in in us, even though we are overweight. And that's why it's so difficult for us to lose weight. So, and for some people, it's more difficult than for others but this is incredibly powerful stuff and you cannot just say that it's bad character or pull yourselves together it's not that simple yeah i think this is such an important message and it all makes sense through an evolutionary lens most things i find that we're struggling with these days completely make sense when you look at our past and our history and what have we evolved to do. And of course, the idea that the Maasai would say to you, why on earth would we just go for a run?

Of course, it makes sense, doesn't it? If you have to conserve energy, why would you go and just blow and burn off a load of energy? You might as well throw your food into the ocean. Yeah, exactly. So, of course, that person who's listening right now, who struggles to motivate themselves to exercise and would rather open a bag of crisps and sit watching Netflix, it's kind of who we are, right?

We've always wanted to make things easy for us. We've always looked for convenience. Right. And that is the most convenient thing to do. again just as you said at the start maybe we should be studying people who don't have anxiety in the modern world and going what's wrong with you maybe also it's like well why is it that some of us do want to go for runs yeah we manage to even though we we're living in an era and an environment of plenty. Right, right.

But when I'm lying in the couch, and God knows I do that often, and I'm trying to make up excuses to go for a run, I think that, you know, my brain is doing the exactly right thing right now. It's trying to protect me against starvation because it wants to keep me still. And sometimes I think that I'm not going to let any brain or any evolution decide what I'm doing.

And then I go for a run. And it doesn't work all the time, but sometimes it actually works. So it is difficult. We are lazy by nature. And how could we get over that? What I think so many of our behaviors are determined by habits. So we should try to make it a habit of exercising. That could be walking to work instead of taking your car. That could be riding your bike to work instead of taking the car or bus. That could be walking in stairs instead

of taking the elevator. Find the small stuff that you could make a habit of so that you don't negotiate with yourself too much because the lazy part of yourself is an incredibly powerful negotiator yeah i know that from personal experience so make a habit out of it and don't blame yourselves if you can't do it all the times it's not bad characters we are fighting an incredibly powerful forces in modern society. And those forces are pushing us towards something that doesn't make most of us feel good. The more we learn about this Achilles heels of our brains,

the more we could work around these Achilles heels. The more we learn of our biology, the freer we become from our biology. more we learn of our biology, the freer we become from our biology. This is why I think this whole idea that I'm sort of bang on about pretty much in every podcast that different things work for different people. I think it's because of that, right? You've found a strategy to work for you. I'm not going to let my brain tell me what to do, right? You know, you make TV shows on the brain, right? You're on your fourth season now on this big Swedish show about the brain, right? So you study the brain. So you've found something in your head that works

to help you in this alien modern environment. But it's kind of incumbent upon all of us to find our tricks that work for us. Like if we go from the starting point that this is an alien environment, we're not broken, right? We're not lazy. Well, we are lazy, but laziness has helped us for many, many years. If we start there, then I think it comes down to, okay, so what strategies can I adopt to help me navigate this alien environment? For example, if we talk about food choices and diet, right? Some people will swear by low carb. Some people swear by low fat. Some people swear by plant-based. Some people will swear by carnivore. There's many ways we can look at that. But if we take a big picture view,

there's something I've been thinking about and writing about recently is they are all mechanisms in some way to help us limit what we eat. in some way to help us limit what we eat. So in a world where we have, for many of us, of course, not everyone, but many of us, you in Stockholm, me here in the Northwest of England, there's food everywhere. I can afford to buy food every day. I can overeat every single day of the year if I wanted to. I need to find some rules that work for me that stop me from doing that. So in my experience, don't use that willpower at home. Save it for when you're outside.

Yeah, good point. So I found it very helpful for many of my patients and myself, so I don't bring food into the house that I don't want to eat. Because if the food is there, it's going to get eaten at some point. Exactly. So that works for me. I appreciate it may not work for everyone. Because if the food is there, it's going to get eaten at some point. Yeah, exactly. So that works for me. I appreciate it may not work for everyone. And so coming back to movement,

I think we can all have certain rules. So I have a rule, which is I will try my best not to take a lift or elevator if there are stairs there, right? And having kids, I'm always keen to model that behavior. So the local supermarket, if we're ever driving back from school and we park there, we never take the lift down. I'm always taking the stairs. And sometimes I'm tempted. I think, no, I want to model to my kids that we always take the stairs, right? Simple rule that works for me and my family. And again, I'm not saying it's going to work for everyone, but I kind of feel we all need to find our own personal rules. What do you make of that? No, I agree completely saying it's going to work for everyone, but I kind of feel we all need to find our own personal rules. What do you make of that?

No, I agree completely. And I can't have candy around. I just can't. I will eat it. It's so incredibly powerful. And I use the same logic to digital devices. I don't have them around. The mobile phone is incredibly powerful stimuli.

It's like candy. And therefore, I can't have it around all the time. So I don't have it in the bedroom. I don't have it when I work and so on. And I tried to be aware of this Achilles heels in my psychology, which are in reality defense mechanisms or survival mechanisms

that have become Achilles heels in our modern society. And everyone must find their own way of sort of working through this but it's incredibly fascinating to learn more about it because you understand yourself better yeah and if you understand yourself better well then you can work around what's what's difficult for you we'll come back to exercise a bit later because I really want to go deep with you on the impact that exercise has on the brain. Before we do that, I wonder if we could talk about focus and your latest book, The Attention Fix. Now, I know it's just come out in the UK,

but it was actually released in Sweden a few years ago. So it's really interesting as to what you've had to update potentially for the UK edition, given how the world has changed so much since, what, 2018, 2019, when you first published it? Yeah. So I'd love to hear about that. But first of all, it's called the attention fix. You're making the case that many of us are distracted.

Now, we struggle to focus. Paint us a picture. How bad is it? Well, I think it's very bad, unfortunately. I think that we have never changed our behavior so much as we have done during the last 10 years. And of course, I'm talking about digitalization and our smartphones. And I really wondered, why is this? And what effect does it have upon us? That's why I wrote the book. And in some cases, we did not know at 2018, 2019,

but a lot of these question marks have now been answered. So I updated the UK version. But if you want to understand your attention, you should start by looking at the brain. And there's a system in the brain called the dopamine system which is famous for it sounds like it's connected to feeling good and and the pleasure and so on but it's its role is more to focus our attention on things if i i'm hungry and see food dopamine levels rises in my brain because I should focus on the food and

eat it. Now there's been experiments made where you have rats hearing a tone and that tone is followed by juice. And you repeat this a couple of times so the animals associate the tone with the juice. And then you see that dopamine increases in the brains of the animals when they hear the tone. It's telling them, I should focus now. Something is coming now. That's important. Now, if you have the tone sometimes followed by juice, not every time and in random fashion, then dopamine rises even more. So the brain loves maybe. And that's very strange. Why should uncertain juice be better for the brain than certain juice? That's weird, right? And the answer is that most processes in nature are stochastic.

They are random. You do not know whether there will be fruit in the tree that you climb. You do not know whether the hunt will be successful and so on and so forth. So therefore, our brains over reward uncertain outcomes. And that's why we gamble. This is why we gamble. And gaming companies and casinos have exploited this mechanism in us. They make money from that. And social media have done that as well. Because if you post a picture on Facebook or Instagram and your friends click thumbs up, then you don't get to see those thumbs up

at the same time as they are clicked. Facebook keeps them and distributes them in a way to make us come back and see if there's maybe a new like. And that's just one of many, many, many different tricks that they have used to make us addicted, glued to our phones. And why is that? Well, that's because they're used to make us addicted, glued to our phones. And why is that? Well, that's because they're making money from us. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard. And that's because you are not the customer of

Facebook. You are the product. The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention. And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. Every second that we spent on our screens is money for them. And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that. And as a consequence,

we spend more and more and more time on our screens. And today for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours. Between for teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours. These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast. And what's the consequence of that?

Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much, we don't move as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep, and meeting in real life, are protecting us against depressions. So in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important,

it's what we don't do when we are online so long time. I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch up with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear that these things are having, for all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. And you outline a lot of that research in your book, which really gets people to stand up and take notice. Your byline on the front cover is how to focus in a world that wants to distract you. It reminds me a little bit of something Yoan Hari said to me when he came on

to talk about his book, Stolen Focus. He said, your focus has been stolen from you intentionally. Right. And he talked about him escaping, I think to some somewhere called Princeton for a few months. And he had no mobile phone with internet connection, he had no laptop that could get on the internet. And he said, incredibly, his focus and attention came back, which I hope gives us hope that actually, although many of us do feel distracted, that potentially by making some changes, we can get our focus back. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem. Yet, despite us talking about it,

despite them hearing about it, a lot of people just aren't able to change what they do. Because it's so difficult. It's as being in the candy section, having candy in front of you all the time. That's what it is. There was a biologist called Nico Tinbergen and he got the Nobel Prize

and he did experiments with seagulls. And seagulls have on their beak a red dot. And the young seagulls pick on their parents' red dot when they want food. And then the parent gives them food, basically. What he did was he put a pencil with a red dot inside the nest. And it was a bigger red dot,

brighter red dot. And then the young birds picked on the pen, even though they were hungry and even though their parents were there. And so, and of course, the pen did not deliver any food. And he called this pen a super stimuli, something that is so strong that it overrides the stimuli that nature has developed.

And candy is a super stimuli. It contains more calories than anything in nature. And therefore, when we eat it, you know, our brains explode and think, eat everything. This is survival. This is protection against the famine. And we know that we should not have candy all around and the same logic can be applied to smartphones they are super stimuli there is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as tiktok for instance every time you turn

tiktok on you have a 10 billion dollar artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out what should i showangham so that he doesn't turn off because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies, especially directed to children and teenagers without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty because we constantly return to our phones. I do that as well. And I've just realized that it's not just about characters. These are very powerful stimuli.

And the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things,. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time because they will be too attractive. When you were with the Maasai a few weeks ago, did they have smartphones? No.

One of them had an old phone, like the ones we used in the 90s, and that was used for connection with another tribe. That was one in the village, but they didn't. I wonder how things might change when a smartphone is introduced to them, because I imagine they wouldn't also be able to resist photos of themselves and their family. Absolutely. You know, but I just, I do wonder what will happen because it's inevitable at some point you would think that a smartphone

will make its way into the tribe. And then what happens? Yeah, I thought about that. You know, what a bad idea it would be to handle out the smartphones. Did you have yours with you? No, I didn't. I left mine when we were filming that. Why? Because I just wanted to have this experience without being distracted.

But I had a producer who was there to take photos and we were filming. So there's footage because this is part of the tv program but i did not have my smartphone with me you were about to say presence i think um you wanted to be present for that experience and for me that is the heart of why this modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful. Because anything good in life comes from presence. Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work, me and you interacting now with no phones there, just me and you sitting across the table, me chatting to my wife about something important, me chatting to my children, right? Me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh, right? All those things require attention and presence if you're going to get the true value

of them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, when we cannot maintain our attention. So I guess what I'm trying to get to, Anders, is how do we change things, right? What do we do if we look at the addiction with smartphones? If I look at what's happening with children now, you can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity. You think, well, actually, where does this go in five years, in 10 years? Where do we end up in 20 years? There's a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which is brilliant. I read it. I love it. And this whole idea, I think she published it back in 2015 now, Sherry Turkle, that we're losing the art of conversation. This is one of the things that makes us human.

And kids now, apparently, according to Sherry and her research, are preferring to communicate. I should say many kids, not all kids, many kids and teenagers prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I've never forgot that since I read it, where you can edit a text message. You can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, me and you, we have to risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled, right? Maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through. That's the risk that we are running by having this real-time conversation. But it's also something that, I don't know,

it's part of humanity. It's part of who we are. We're not wired for these perfectly edited communications, are we? Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's boring, but historically, loneliness was death.

To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food. That's why we have so strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We read one another, we're very good at that and we try to create bonds, social bonds and we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years

where we met physically. And now all of a sudden we meet like this. And we can replace some of that with a screen, but we can't replace all of it. It's not just your face expression on a screen. You know, it's so many more signals that we are constantly registering. And we all felt that during COVID when we spent so much time on our screens that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. We had to isolate during COVID.

But most of us felt very lonely and isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredible strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this, the brain thinks that we're lonely. And if we're lonely, well, then we will die. That's mortal danger. And then we feel crappy, of course.

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

and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years.

It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal. And as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal.

In 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 this 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. I'm incredibly cautious about my focus. Focus is something that is very, very vulnerable. If you've lectured, you probably noticed that you could have a couple of hundred individuals listening to, and then one comes late, and everyone is looking at the person who's coming late. What does it matter if one person is late? Well, that's because we are not necessarily, the brain didn't evolve to be focused. It evolved to constantly scan your surrounding for danger.

Is there something there, there, there, there, there? So we are incredibly easily distracted. And focus, which is so valuable in today's society, is something that is very, very, that's hard for us and when i do my most important work when i think the stuff that i really think is valuable that's when i am really in a deep focus mode and i want to protect that preserve that and then i have the phone outside that's not going to disturb me i'm not going to let any big american company steal my focus because they're making money from my eyeballs staring at the screen.

So you've taken preemptive action. You keep the phone in a different room when you're trying to do deep thinking. Yeah. James Clear, the author, talks about the same thing. He says even if his phone is in the next room, so maybe just three seconds to get up, walk there and get it, even just having it in the next room means he's, you know, significantly less likely to look at it.

Exactly. My wife, who produces this podcast, when she's listening to an episode that we've recorded, her phone is upstairs in the house. She's downstairs. She's kept it nowhere near her because it's too distracting. And it will take her double the amount of time and she won't do as good a job. She's realized that over time that actually, it's much better if that phone's nowhere near me,

that I can just stay focused on the task at hand. So I guess what you're talking about and tying in some themes from earlier on in our conversation, we have to intentionally create some rules for ourselves. Because if we don't, we'll end up eating too much. We'll end up spending too much time on the sofa, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus. Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made where you have students doing tests for focus and for memory, and half of them bring their phone into the testing room. The other half leave their phone outside. And the ones that bring the phones with them don't pick it up. They just have it in the pocket. And it turns out that the ones who have

left the phone outside perform better. Even if you don't pick it up. So it's just by being in the same room, it distracts you. And the reason is probably that it's providing you with so much stimulation that you must constantly think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. And then you get distracted. And that doesn't matter if you're doing something very ordinary.

But if you have to be focused at your work or in school, you're studying for exam, leave the phone outside. There's also been experience made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between. And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject. And on half of these tables, there is a notebook, paper and pen. And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. And they don't pick up the phone. But it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table,

they find the discussion less interesting. They even find the person they're talking to less reliable. And that's probably because they have to think, I'm not going to pick up my phone, I'm not going to pick up my phone, I'm not going to pick up my phone. So it steals some of your mental bandwidth just by being around. And that's why we have to create distance to it. And we feel guilty for this.

We feel, you know, I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time. But we shouldn't because these are incredibly powerful stimuli. And again, someone is making money from that. Yeah. You also write in the Attention Fix about low-tech parents. And you reference, I think, Steve Jobs and how, you know, we've heard this before, but I think it's worth reiterating that a lot of the creators of these products

did not allow their children on them. Exactly. There was a journalist that came home to Steve Jobs, and he thought that there would be iPads everywhere and all the screens in every room, and there weren't. He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads. And remember, Steve Jobs is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us ever.

And he himself was cautious about using it too much. That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that if you are looking at the screen more than you are looking at someone's eyes, you're doing something wrong. So the CEO of the company that makes the most money from screens says, don't use our products too much. That says something on how incredibly addictive these things are and how naive we have been in implementing them so widely. And again, especially toward children, there came out data from the Center for Disease Control in the US recently, and it showed that 30% of all teenage girls have seriously considered suicide. I mean,

that's just incredibly sad to read. And that's up by 60% during the last decade. 30%. One in three have seriously considered suicide. And as I said, it has increased by 60% during the last decade. And during that decade, we have become richer. The economy has grown. We have an economic crisis now, but still we are richer now than we were 10 years ago. And you could ask the most hardcore capitalist you could find why should we have economic progress and he will tell you that well it's because so that we could have it better

and then if you naively ask then why should we have it better then he will say so that we could feel better of course but we obviously don't do that and then that is the core message we follow these instincts, and they were so good at helping us survive in a world where half of all humans died before the big teenagers. But these instincts do not make us happy in a world of overabundance.

You know, when there's those statistics around females, teenage females in America, 30%. I've not heard that. That was reported in The Guardian today. And even the American Surgeon General has actually warned about social media. He's saying that we can't say it's safe. So there's more and more evidence showing that it seems to be dangerous to use social media too much. And as I said before, I think the main impact of digital life on our well-being is not what we do online, but what we don't do when we are online. We don't sleep as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet.

But there is a big caveat to this, and that is overusage of social media seems to be dangerous for teenagers. For girls in the age 12 to 13, boys 14 to 15. That's probably because this is a time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think that part of your life, you really desperately want to belong to a group. And we have compared ourselves to a small group during all of human history. You know, there were 50, 100 people who you met during your entire life. That was your tribe or your band. And you compared yourselves to perhaps 20 or 30 of them

who were around your age. And now you compare yourself to the entire planet. And there's always someone who is smarter and better looking and more successful and richer than you are. And you feel that you are worthless. I'm not good enough. And you get this signal from your screens five or six hours every day. And you have your friends' photos. And for every photo on Instagram, there was a hundred photos that was discarded that you don't see. And if that wasn't enough, you have a whole army of Instagrammers and influencers who get paid to show their perfect life. And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough. And then you feel lonely.

And then you feel like you're being pushed out of the group. And that is registered in the brain as something that is extremely dangerous. And that's why you feel so bad about it. You know, the problem is, Anders, the way I see it is that we can know this with our rational brains. We know we're comparing, you know, the highlight reel of someone else's life to the mundane reality of our day-to-day life. We know that, we hear it. You've said it, I've said it. I spoke to Will Storr a few months ago about status and how we're wired as humans to crave status. And you write a little bit about that in the

attention fix as well. But I still don't think knowing it makes a jot of difference because you can know it, but your subconscious when you're scrolling is still thinking of this idea that their life is better, their life is better, their life is better. One morning, this is about, I don't know, a few months ago, I broke one of my rules. I was on Instagram very early. I don't know why, but you know, we're all human. We're all seduced by these devices. And I saw something. I can't remember what it was, but I started to feel bad afterwards. And then I was making a hot drink in the kitchen. I thought, wow, wrong. Nothing has happened.

Literally nothing has happened. You're still here in your house. Your wife and kids are still sleeping the birds are singing in the garden right nothing has happened apart from the fact I went on Instagram for a few minutes so nothing in the real world changed yeah yet my mental state changed from scrolling and I was like this is utter madness yeah and if you take step back, you let someone who you have never met, who you will never meet, make you feel inadequate. Yeah. Because they had a better looking toilet or more expensive vacation or a nicer car or what have you. I mean, that's insane. Of course, it happens to me all the time as well.

But the more you think about these things, when you read about it and you have to hear it many times, you have to hear it from many sort of different angles and present it in different ways. Then you start to seeing it being played out in yourself. And then you will make changes. You will protect your attention. in yourselves. And then you will make changes. You will protect your attention. You will protect your, so that you don't feel inadequate by these posts and so on. And this is very, very difficult. It's a constant uphill battle. But I mean, if we want to feel as good as possible, then we have to do this. You mentioned the phrase low-tech parents in the book and the approach I've tried to take, because I'm really worried about this stuff, particularly having two children now. My son's

a teenager now, right? Daughter's 10. So they're coming into this kind of, I've managed to protect them from the external world and the influences for many years. But I'm realizing now, particularly with my son, that that's getting harder. He's getting into that age group where his peers are heavily influencing him. So I did something that I thought five years ago I never would have done, which is I did get him a smartphone relatively recently. Having said that, he's not on any social media apps. Knowing what I know about the impact of these things to a teenage brain, I just can't do it. Why did I succumb on a smartphone?

As a parent, you're always trying to ask yourself which battle is worth having here, right? Because there is constant influence from the world around you. It's like, which one am I prepared to, you know, which one is important here? And when he went to secondary school, I thought, you know what? He's literally going to be the only kid without a phone now. He gets a bus to school. Okay. You could say I could have held firm, but on balance,

we had a long chat and his use has been really, really good. He doesn't use it much at home. He's not allowed social media. He doesn't even ask. But I'm worried over the future. You know, we do other things at home, right? So I'm very, very low tech. Again, using that theme, and I'm interested as your perspective as a psychiatrist, but also as someone who's an expert on the brain,

you've written multiple bestselling books in Sweden on these topics. My approach is I want my house as low tech as possible. So I don't have a smart television, right? I don't want one. I don't want it to be easy to engage with this stuff, right? I switch off Wi-Fi at about 8 p.m. every night, right? And I don't put it on again until 8am. Now, to many people, that is an extreme thing to do. But actually, let's just look at it rationally. 15 years ago, no one's putting on Wi-Fi, right? No one had Wi-Fi. No one had this constant access. I put these things in place to make it harder to do the things that these companies want us to do, and the things that I will fall prey to like everyone else. Again, I share that not to make anyone feel bad. I share that not to say that anyone else should do that. It's just what I

have found helpful in my life, right? And it's my way of trying to protect my children from all of these inputs what's your perspective on that no i agree but it's it's a huge responsibility to put on parents because these are things are so powerful when we did this tv program one of our experts was max tagmark and he's a physicist at mit, world-renowned physicist. He was one of the guys who warned about the dangers of AI recently. He's incredibly bright,

and he said when he wrote his latest book, he had to take his computer and sit outside in the forest, basically, without any Wi-Fi, because he cannot stop looking at it. And if you have an incredibly smart MIT professor saying, I can't stop looking at it. And if you have an incredibly smart MIT professor saying, I can't stop looking at it, how should you expect an 11-year-old to do that? It's not going to happen. So I think we're putting a lot of, it's great that you're doing this for your kids,

but you're putting a lot of, we'll be putting a lot of responsibility on parents to do this, and we need regulation about this stuff. We will look back at this period in our history and say that it was incredible that we did not have any regulation. Yeah, I completely agree. And I just want to reiterate that I'm only sharing that in case it's helpful. Just to be completely honest, this is my effort. I think all parents are trying to do the best that they can.

This is just my approach based on what I know, based on what I feel I can do. But I agree there has to be some sort of regulation. You mentioned teenagers, right? And one thing that's top of mind for me at the moment is what I've seen happen in schools since COVID, which is a lot of screens and now homework being given on screens in the evening.

Right. So perhaps you could just summarize at the top, what are these screens doing? You mentioned the relationship with depression and mental health, but what exactly are they doing to our brains? Well, no one really knows that, so it's almost prematurely to ask. But if we take reading comprehension, for instance, if you read a text in a physical book and then you read the exact same text on a PDF, then you learn more from the physical book. You learn more details and especially you learn, you understand the whole context better if it's a physical book. No one knows why that is the case.

A theory is that memory gets, when you read a physical book, it gets physical locations that you could hang up, like hooks that you could put memory on. You remember where something was on the page. It was on that, it was on top of that page, it was the end of the book and so on. So you get small physical references and they are used to store information. That mechanism is speculation, but we know for sure that you learn more if it's a physical book than a screen, especially if it's a difficult text. Now, the interesting part here is that those comparisons between screen and books have been made for more than 10 years now.

And the difference is actually increasing. The book gets better and better and better than the screen every year that pauses. So that means that we don't get used to these digital distractions. We get even more and more and more distracted by them for every year that pauses. And a recent study showed that reading on a screen for a 12-year-old, that's the same reading comprehension as a 10-year-old reading in a physical book. That's staggering. That's two years of difference. A 13-year-old reading on a screen, his reading comprehension is as good as an 11-year-old reading in a physical book. So for that reason, I think it's very strange that many

schools have thrown the physical books out of the classroom. That's insane. Yeah, but this data is not getting too many teachers. No. Because I like genuinely, like I said before, all parents are doing the best that they can. I honestly believe all teachers are as well. Like I honestly believe that teachers are there to try and help kids learn. And some of the time it's going to be like, no, it's pretty easy. We can give it on screens. We can keep track on it. It's on a Google doc. There's so many benefits. But again, with all these things, we tend to like looking at the benefits and not the cons, right? We love the pros. We don't look at the cons. What is the cost of that? And I think, you know, in terms of legislation, I really think schools should be strongly thinking about rules where there's no work given on screens after

school. I honestly believe from everything I've seen that the disadvantages far outweigh any advantages because we know they're going to affect your sleep quality. You're not going to switch off as much. And the other problem, Anders, is that many people now, many kids, their downtime, their relaxation time is on screens. So the schools can make it very, very hard for parents if they're now giving homework on screens then there's battles going on at home because you know the kid wants to then go on the xbox or you know chill out gaming or whatever it might be so the whole evening then is spent on a screen yeah i completely agree you're a psychiatrist You've been seeing patients for two decades now.

What is the impact? You've mentioned focus, right? You mentioned our reading age and how it's better when we're not looking at screens. But let's say for five years in a row, teenagers, let's say kids between 13 and 16, were given two hours of homework each night on a screen. Talk me through in your head some of the hypothetical downsides. Well, I think it's, first of all, they would not learn as much,

because we learn less on a screen than in a physical book. Okay, so they learn less. Yeah, and then, of course, as you say, if you are on the screen, you will start clicking on Facebook and all other social media. You won't be able to resist. No, you won't be able to resist. And in Sweden, the number of teenagers seeking help for sleeping problems have increased by more than 1,000% since the year 2000.

By a factor of 10. That's just staggering. And we do not know why this is the case, but I think it's fair to say that screens are at least part of the problem because one in three teenagers sleep with their phone in their bed, according to one study. Not on the table, in the bed. And just imagine having all your friends,

having a casino, having the world's collected information and entertainment in your bed. You're not going to sleep from that, of course. So the first advice that I give to people who seek help for sleeping problems, especially young people, is that throw the phone out of the bedroom by an old school alarm clock. Yes. And exercise, because exercise also improves sleep it makes you sleep fall asleep fast faster and gives you more deep sleep and before those things have been tried i think that one in most cases there can be exceptions but in most cases you

shouldn't even consider sleeping pills i think it was yesterday i think it was in the Attention Fix, that you quoted a study. I think it was kids aged 9 to 12 in Sweden. And the kids who had their smartphone next to their bed versus the kids who had it out of their room slept on average 21 minutes less. 21 minutes. That is a lot. And that's an average, right? That's an average. Yes. And that means that some children or teenagers don't have any problems if they have the phone in the bedroom. They don't sleep more or less because of it, but some do. And some sleep an hour less. And it's a shame during the last 10 years has been a gold mine of sleep research. And we know how incredibly important sleep is for the brain and for our well-being and for memory and for creativity and so on.

And the same time that all this knowledge has been collected, we are getting less and less and less sleep, unfortunately. Let's talk about exercise, because in both of your books, you talk passionately about the benefits of exercise. Your TED Talk's all about this, which is fabulous. I'd encourage everyone to watch it. It gives a really good overview of why exercise is so important for our brains. And you say in your book that exercise is a way of hacking evolution, right? So I think this is a continuous theme throughout this conversation is what are we wired to do? What are we built to do? And you make the case that exercise is important for not only how we feel, concentration, memory, stress tolerance, right? So perhaps talk

us through that. And I also like your research that you shared on the Stroop test, which I hadn't heard of before, actually. So I wonder if you could talk us through that. And I also like your research that you shared on the Stroop test, which I hadn't heard of before, actually. So I wonder if you could talk us through that as well. Yeah. So exercises has been shown to be incredibly important for cognition. Basically, all of our cognitive function, memory, ability to focus, creativity, even intelligence, it seems, is positively affected by exercise. And it also protects us against depressions and anxiety. And the brain actually seems to be the organ in the body that benefits the most from exercise. And one of the best studies on this was done where you scan the size of the hippocampus. And hippocampus is a memory center of the brain. It has many important functions,

but one of them is memory. And hippocampus decreases in size for every year that passes. It peaks in size when you're between 25 to 30, and thereafter starts to shrink by about 1% per year. Now, this has been thought to be inevitable. You just can't change that.

But then researchers in San Diego started believing that maybe this can be changed by exercise, because they had seen that if you put a wheel into the cage of laboratory rats, the rats run the wheel or the mice run the wheel, and then their one group walking three times a week, 45 minutes every time, fast walking for one year. And the other group did stretching exercises three times a week, 45 minutes every time. And then the size of the hippocampus was measured before this year and after. And it turned out that the stretching group, their hippocampus had shrunk by an average of 1.4%. It was 1.4% smaller after a year. But the walking group, their hippocampus had grown by an average of 2%. So instead of one year older, it had gotten two years younger in terms of size. Their hippocampus was bigger.

it had gotten two years younger in terms of size. The hippocampus was bigger. And they also had improved their memory, especially spatial memories, to find your way around a three-dimensional space. So exercise is actually a way to preserve the function of the brain. And it's a way to boost your creativity. We know that the creativity tests,

your results on them increase if the hour after walking, and quite substantially, especially the ability to brainstorm, that increases by somewhere around 50% the hour after brainstorm. So you get a temporary bump. The hour after walking. Yes.

So it just lasts for one hour. So if you have a difficult problem, go for a fast walk and then think of the problem the hour after you have walked. Then it increases the chances that you will find a solution. functions when we go running. We need our cognitive functions in a meeting room, in front of a computer or in the classroom, but not when we run. And then I realized that during almost all our history, it was when we moved that we needed our cognitive functions the most. During the hunt, during gathering of plants and so on, that's when we needed the focus that's when we got new sensor input that we had to remember to create memories of that that was when we had to

be at our peak in terms of creativity and so on so mother nature has built us in a way that exercise improves our cognition because it was when we moved that we needed our cognitive functions the most. And therefore, exercise becomes, from our perspective, a way to hack evolution, to exploit the mechanism in our brains in order to function better in our modern world. So I always say that to patients and through my books, that exercise has nothing to do with being good at a sport. It has nothing to do with being one of the marathon runners. Exercise is something that the brain evolved for and that is extremely important for us as a species. And you should not mix it up by being good at, by being an athlete. Make a habit out of exercise, walk to work,

ride your bike to work instead of taking the car, walk in stairs, have children playing during lunch break instead of staring at the screen and so on and so forth. Try to build exercise into your life so that you make a habit out of it. I think there was a cycle test you referenced and how it can predict depression in a few years, right? Exactly. That test was done in the UK. And if you were to cycle for six minutes as fast as you can on a cycle and then squeeze a handle as hard as you can, do you think that could say anything of your risk of being depressed from now until 2029? No, you wouldn't think so, would you?

No, you wouldn't. I wouldn't at least. I would think that if I become depressed, that would be if someone would get sick in my family or if I lose my job or something. But it turns out that this was studied on more than 100,000 individuals. They did this cycling test.

They squeezed this handle as hard as they could, and they were followed for six years. And it turns out that the ones who were in good shape, they had lower prevalence. There were fewer of them who were depressed after six years. And then one thought, the researchers thought that maybe this is because they are more healthy in general. Maybe they eat better. Maybe they sleep more. Maybe they don't smoke as much. So they excluded all of these factors in the data. And it turned out that exercise was still protective. And then they thought, well, depression is not just black and white. It's sort of on a spectrum. You could have a mild depression, you could have a severe depression,

but no matter where they put this cutoff of what is a depression and what isn't, exercise protected against it. So it's incredibly important that we move. We will not get immune to depressions, but we lower the risk of it. And I say to my patients who have had several depressions and who really, really want to avoid a new one, most of them want to continue having antidepressant medication because they want to be protected against a new depression. And to them, I say that the most important thing, probably even more important than continuing with medication, is that they exercise to avoid a new depression.

Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And you've outlined so much research on exercise. I'd like to think anyone reading your books is going to be convinced, if they're not already, that exercise, daily exercise, daily movement, whatever you want to call it, is an absolute must. It's not really an optional extra. It's who we are. And I think that's one of the things I've been thinking a lot about, Anders, over the last few months. You know, I'm 45 now, and I would say the big thing I'm changing in my life at the moment, and have been for a few months, is I'm increasing the amount of movement in my life significantly. I've just more and more, I'm convinced that,

you know, I'm not promoting this, but you can get away with not eating well for a few days. You can't get away with not moving. Yeah. You just can't. No, you can't. I feel exactly the same.

And it's so difficult. I have periods where I don't exercise so much because I work too much or if i have an infection or whatever and and then i feel that something is wrong with me i don't know what it is and and then i go for a run and i realize that was it and it doesn't matter how many times i talk about this and write about this this is difficult stuff difficult to do this is difficult to do because we are lazy by nature uh but the good part of this is that on average people take about five maybe maybe 5 500 steps a day now which that's one way to look upon that is saying that that's terrible that's too little another way to see it is that it's a

huge untapped resource it's something that we could just dig into it's a huge untapped resource. It's something that we could just dig into. It's a treasure chest for our cognitive abilities and for our feelings. And the ones who are to benefit the most are the ones who don't exercise at all. So it's when someone who don't do anything start walking to school or taking the bike to school, that's where the really big effects come in. It's not when you have the marathon club running a bit more that doesn't make any difference in terms of brain perspective yeah it's interesting so the ones who don't do anything you have this big untapped resource that will make you function better but even more importantly feel better you also mentioned some some great research in the

book there's something called the street test which is about resisting impulses and how just 20 minutes of exercise, or I think it was brisk walking in adults, makes us better able to resist distraction and impulses, which is really incredible given what we're talking about. There was also a study you quoted about children. I think it was done in Swedish schools where just six minutes of movement, I think before a class, improved concentration and made the kids better at avoiding distraction. So really, we've often heard about exercise

through the lens of physical health. And of course, there are benefits there. But as you say, it all comes down to the brain, right? The brain is where it's at. Get the brain functioning properly. And actually, most other things start to come online. And the case really is that exercise is critical for the function of our brains. Yeah, the brain seems to be the organ that benefits most from exercise, which is very strange. And my favorite study is one where they have a computer game called League of Legends. And that's

a huge computer game. It's played by more than 100 million players every month. And in this game, you walk around and you're trying to pick targets. Now, since this game is so big, there are competitions in this and there's a lot of money in this. And in one study, one took a group of experienced League of Legends players. They played on average, I think it was 14 hours a week, somewhere around 14 hours a week. So they were very, very, very experienced, and they were very good at this. And they had one group of them exercising intensely for 15 minutes.

And the other group was resting. And after this exercise versus resting, they played the game. And it turns out that the exercise group picked 11% more targets. They were 11% better on this game. And everyone who is good at something knows that an additional 11%, that's the difference between being good and being the best. So if you want to be a better gamer,

exercise. You will function better. And this is important because so much of your cognitive functions are needed when you play these games. It really shows that you are functioning better after exercise. Given everything we've spoken about so far, given everything you've written about, are you optimistic for the future? I was lucky enough to know Hans Rosling, the statistician from Karolinska,

who passed away several years ago. And I asked him that question, and he said, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist. I'm a possibilist. It's up to us. It's not going to go in either direction by itself. It's up to us. We can change things for the better.

And my aim with these books has been to present knowledge in a way that everyone can relate to and that they have to decide for themselves, but they can make that decision on a level where they are more informed. And I have an experience that was so fundamental to me 23 years ago. I was at the Karolinska and I was in an autopsy room and I held a human brain in my hand. And I realized that everything that this 84-year-old man

had happened, all of his life, all of his memories, all of his emotions, all of it has been played out in an organ that he never saw, an organ that I was now holding in my hands. I was in a way closer to his inner than he ever was himself. And then at the same time, I realized that I have a brain and in my brains, all my memories and all of my emotions has been played out.

And there was something so mesmerizing about realizing that your whole consciousness, your whole being is created in an organ that weighs like a packet of milk and looks like squashed sausages. But it was not this philosophical point that I take away from this day in the autopsy room that what I really remind myself of today, every day, and what I remind my patients of, is that the brain is an organ. And like the other organs in the autopsy room, the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, it has not evolved the way it did by chance. It doesn't show the world as it is. It shows the world as we had to see the world to survive, which was often filled with danger. The brain doesn't show ourselves as we had to see the world to survive, which was often filled with danger. The brain doesn't show ourselves as we are. It shows ourselves as we had to see ourselves to survive.

So the brain is not a passive middle step that you could skip if you want to understand yourself. If you want to understand yourself, even if you want to understand human nature, you should start with the brain. And this is an incredible time to live in because we have for the first time been able to look inside and see what's happening in our brain when we do certain things.

And that means that we are studying the machinery of the soul. For the first time in our species history, we can do that. And we see that certain things that we knew before, but some of the discoveries are actually pretty new and interesting. And one of these discoveries is how extremely important exercise is for the brain. And of course, I could have summarized my books by saying, you know, sleep more and be cautious about your screens and exercise more, and that would be it. But then no one would have cared cared it's when you really understand what this is doing to you what this is doing to your to the organ that creates your experience of existence then you will make changes yeah well i think the books

are beautifully written you do such a good job at communicating science to people i can see why you've been so successful with all your TV shows in Sweden and across the world. In the spirit of being a possibilist, for people listening who feel inspired and want to live happier lives, want to be less distracted and more focused what are some of your top tips i have just one tip and that is learn more about the brain when you do that um you will make changes you will protect your sleep the more i read about sleep research the more vigilant i become in my sleep the more i've learned on how fragile my attention is, the more I've started to protecting my attention. The more I've learned about how incredibly important it is to move, but at the same time, I am lazy.

And that is not the default. That's a function. That's not the flaw, so to speak, in biological terms. I have made a habit out of it, and I take it more seriously than I did before. But this is very, very hard stuff. This is a constant uphill battle. Because as I said in the beginning, we never evolved to be happy. We never evolved to be healthy. We evolved to survive in a world

where half of us died before they became teenagers. And we are still, strange as it may sound, hunters and gatherers deep down. Anders, love your work. love what you're doing. That's coming on the show. Thank you, Mark. Pleasure. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.

And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say in a world of endless

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