Instant Genius - Why you’re not actually addicted to your phone

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Just about everywhere we look today, screens, and in particular social media, are being called addictive, and being blamed for causing mental health problems and damaging childhood development. But does the evidence support this? In today’s episode we catch up with Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University and author of Unlocked: The real science of screen time. Pete tells us why we need to redefine our relationship with technology and why social media, for all its ills, may not be as bad as we often make out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, the bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week, you'll hear from world-leading scientists and experts, talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Tom Howarth, trends editor at BBC Science Focus. Just about everywhere we look today, screens, and in particular social media, are being called addictive and being blamed for causing mental health problems and damaging

childhood development. But does the evidence actually support this? In today's episode, we catch up with Pete Etchels, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bathbigh University, an author of Unlocked, the real science of screen time. Pete tells us why we need to redefine our relationship with technology and why social media, for all its ills, may not be as bad, as we often make out. So one thing that people seem to be quite aware of and in some ways scared of at the moment is how much time they're spending out of their day

looking at screens. But despite the phrase screen time being in the title of your new book, you actually argue that defining it is much harder than we think. Could you maybe explain what the problem with the concept of screen time is? Everybody knows what screen time is, which is why it's so compelling, right? but at the same time, nobody knows what screen time is because it's such a broad, vague definition that it literally means anything. So we've become enthralled in a way by this idea because it's such a simple and compelling one. Screen time fundamentally is how much time have you spent on some sort

of screen-based technology in a given time frame? So it might be in the past 24 hours or in the past week or something like that. And it's really enticing because we can attach a really simple, straightforward number to it, right? It can be somewhere between zero and 24, if you're talking about it the last day in terms of hours. And that's compelling for the way that we talk about our screen use more broadly. But it's also compelling for scientists as well, because it's one number then, and it's one number that encapsulates quite a complicated facet of day-to-day human life, and it makes it a lot easier to do statistics on it. But I think we've become sort of misguided. I guess in a way that this is a meaningful thing to talk about or that we should pay attention to it.

Because really, when you start digging into it, screen time is just a meaningless concept. We're talking about what's the effect of screen time on us or what's the effect of screen time on our mental health. What you end up doing is getting a number for your screen time and some sort of number that's a measure of your mental health, say, and you do correlations. but we can never get past that. We're only ever stuck at correlations. And I think, you know, if we start talking about what our own screen time actually is, it becomes really complicated really quickly, right? So if I think about my morning of screen time, you know,

it's probably two hours in to doing work at the minute. And that entire two hours has been in front of my computer with my phone by my side. If I sat down and really thought about it right now, I could try and break that down into, say, five or ten minute chunks where, you know, in this five minutes, I was replying to this email. In this five minutes, I was, you know, rereading my book in preparation for us having this chat. And then what you maybe want to start doing is thinking, well, you know, and I'm not going to lie, obviously there was 10 minutes of scrolling around on Twitter to see what's happening in the world. So how does that impact my mental well-being versus the five,

10 minutes of email. And maybe get somewhere with that if I was really deeply reflective of that now. Problem is that if I do a study next week where somebody asked me, what was your screen time like last Friday or last Thursday or whenever, all of that nuance and context will be gone. And I'll just go, oh, I spent two hours on my computer. It just doesn't tell you anything meaningful at all. So we've become stuck in a way, I think, because screen time is just this big nebulous,

term, it then becomes anything that we want it to be. So I really think it's become this catch-all term that we use to encapsulate a lot of worries that we have about our online lives, our digital lives, but it doesn't really have any specific meaning to it. So then within screen time, you know, maybe cumulatively it's not that useful, but is there such a thing as healthy screen use and unhealthy screen use? Probably, yeah. It depends what you mean by all of those things. It depends what you mean by screen use. It depends what you mean by healthy and unhealthy behaviors. And I think this question really speaks nicely to one of the big problems that we have, which is the way that we talk about our screen-based lives. I don't think that we've managed to find a good language around contextualizing that use and describing the relationships that we have with digital technology yet. And that's understandable because These things develop so quickly and they become part of our lives so seemingly instantaneously. Of course, it's going to take time to understand and navigate those relationships.

What happens is that we end up talking about things using sort of day-to-day terms and the one that I'm going to say here is addiction. We talk about things like, oh, you know, I played that game the other day and it was so addictive. It was great. Or I watched that TV show. It was so addictive. And what we mean there is that we really liked it or that. we played or used it a lot. Maybe in some cases we say it with a bit of a negative connotation that what we mean is that we binge watch a TV show and we watched it loads and maybe too

much and we didn't feel so great afterwards. And that's how we use the word addiction in day-to-day terms. Obviously addiction has a different meaning, a very strict clinical definition to describe things like drug addictions or gambling addictions, things like that. And the two very often get conflated. What I mean by that is that we start to think of this sort of day-to-day language use in more formalized terms and vice versa. So we get stuck in this frame of thinking that means that when we think about how we use social media or how we play games, things like that, we think about it almost exclusively in terms of excessive use or repetitive use. How much is too much? Is screen time good or bad for us? As though it could ever be those things.

And I think that this is a real problem that we've got in the wider conversations about screens at the minute, but it's also a problem in the research literature as well, that we've got stuck in that frame of mind. And the problem that it leaves you with is you're left with a very limited set of solutions here that we know don't really work, things around abstinence or stopping use. And it just doesn't really encapsulate how we use screen-based technologies, how we play video games. So even if you take a specific aspect of that like social media, it doesn't really encapsulate the use of that either because that's such a multifaceted thing as well. So to go back to your question, is there such a thing as healthy and unhealthy screen use?

Yes, maybe. But I wonder whether I don't mean this in a disparaging way. I wonder whether we're asking the wrong sorts of questions when we ask those sorts things or rather we're framing the questions in the wrong sort of way. So it's not just about trying to look at, you know, this thing is good, that thing is bad, you know, where are the dichotomies? But thinking about why we use technologies in the way that we do, in what sorts of situations do we have bad experiences versus good experiences?

Have we got any control over that situation? And therefore, can we do anything about it? And, you know, for ourselves, minimize the bad things and maximize the good. So we might not be addicted to social media, as you said. but could you sort of steal man the case for having a social media detox? And is this something that you've ever personally tried yourself? I've never tried it myself. I've considered it before. They occupy this weird space, right? Because they sound quite compelling. Yeah, obviously at face value, if you're having a bad time on social media, not using social media is going to stop that bad time.

But again, we talk about those sorts of things within this language of addiction that's maybe not the right way of characterizing the relationships that we have with social media. Social media isn't this monolithic thing. It's hugely complex. What is social media? It's, well, for some people it's WhatsApp, some people it's Twitter, Instagram, it's TikTok, it's some of those things. It's a combination of those things. Even if you take a particular social media platform, the way that people use that is very different. Some people use it very passively. They just consume content without really engaging with anybody. Some people use it in a much more active way. Some people use it in a global sense and that they're more interested in looking at

what celebrities are doing, people they don't know, or engaging with them. Some people are much more interested in it in a local way that they use social media just to form local, very tight-knit communities. And there's an emerging line of research that is starting to tease that apart a little bit and looking at what the relative positive and negative impacts of particular types of social media use are. But there's not that much at the minute because we're still stuck on these big questions of, is social media bad or is it good or not? And because we're stuck on those sorts of questions, we're again, we're just left with these unhelpful solutions, I'd say, in terms of things like digital detoxes, colleagues of mine at the University of Bath, people like David Ellis

have said their solutions looking for a problem, really, in that because detoxes use this language of addiction, that you're doing something too much and that's bad for you, therefore you need to stop doing it. And because that's not what social media does, that's not how we use it, those things aren't going to work because they're targeting things in the wrong sort of way. So if you look at the research literature on digital detoxes, it's a complete mess. And the reason that it's a complete mess is because we're thinking about this whole thing in the wrong sort of way anyway. But also when you try and kind of drill down into it, you see, you know, sometimes it's, you know, if you do a detox, it's good for well-being.

Sometimes it's actually bad for well-being because social media can be good in some ways. So I don't think that's to say that you shouldn't do them. or that you won't get anything out of them, I just think thinking about why you want to engage in that sort of behavior is the most helpful thing that you can do to begin with. So thinking in a reflective way, what do you use social media for? Why are you using it?

Is it working for you? Is it reaching some of those goals? And if the answer to that is yes, then fine. If the answer is no, what can you tweak about your social media use to downplay those negative aspects and promote the positives. In some cases, I think for people that might be,

do you know what? I need a break from social media. And that's absolutely fine. You know, do it. If that's what's going to work for you, do that thing, great, and more power to you. But absolutely, we can have those conversations without panicking ourselves about

whether this thing is addictive or not in the first place. So could you speak to what are some of the positive things of social media? You mentioned that it's obviously being useful in your science communication career. But yeah, what are you thinking? of the positive things that we get out of it? We are fundamentally social animals, right? And social media, the clues in the title. It's a social connecting experience.

I appreciate that this is a very big oversimplification of what social media is. But fundamentally, at its core, it's about talking to people and connecting with people. And there's a huge power in that, right? You know, this ability to get your voice heard is something that's unprecedented, even in modern day history. Just to give a really silly little example, but one of the things that I find myself using Twitter for more than anything nowadays is that I still get food deliveries every week. I very rarely go to the supermarket to do my weekly big shop. And one of the issues with that is that somebody else is picking your food for you and sometimes you get some stuff that's not great. And, you know, a bit a couple of times where the driver's gone and I've been sifting through stuff and I've found it like a crate of broken eggs.

What they did it is like going on to Twitter and like privately messaging the supermarket. say, hey, can you sort this out? And they've sorted it out, like, straight away. I'm like, wow, that's like super convenient, right? That's really, you know, I don't have to traips all the way to a supermarket to get this sorted out and try and figure out where my digital receipt is and all those sorts of things. It's just done and sorted. I know that's like a really silly little example, but I think very often we forget about those convenience factors that things like social media have for us. Again, you know, social media, it's almost a nonsensical term because it covers so many different things. But we've all got experiences of using social media over the pandemic to keep in touch

with the people that we love and care about, right? That we physically couldn't see people. So we use things like WhatsApp and FaceTime to chat to people, to play games for people, to connect fundamentally. And yeah, obviously connection is not always a positive thing. And there are very deep, difficult, very emotive discussions and debates that we need to have about how we manage and curate those experiences. But there are positives there, and I think we need to remind ourselves of those from time to time. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC.

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So when I have these conversations quite often, it might seem like I'm coming across as an apologist for big tech that what we've been talking about here and what I've been saying is this idea that if you rethink the way and reframe the way you think about your relationship with technology, what it does is empower you a bit more. So one of the things about this addiction framework is that It really disempowers people.

If you're addicted to your smartphone, because smartphones are addicted by design, that's something that's happened to you. And it's very difficult for you individually, therefore, to do something about it. I think that's not the case at all. I think we do have control and power over that situation. It's effortful and it's difficult, and it's not something that you just do once and then it's fixed. But we do have the power there. And I think that's really important, somewhat paradoxically, for, holding the tech industry to account. Because I think the problem that we've got at the minute is that because we're sort of asking the wrong questions or we're framing them in the wrong way, things like, you know, is social media bad for our mental health as an example? Or, you know, is this thing addictive by a design? One of the big ones is, you know, social media gives you a dopamine hit, therefore it's addictive, which is completely nonsense on a number of levels and a complete misunderstanding of the neuroscience of dopamine.

It's understandable where those worries come from because experientially we all feel as though we've had not good experiences with our devices and stuff. And therefore, there's a need there to hold the industry to account. But because we're framing them in these quite sensationalistic ways that aren't supported by research evidence, it's really easy for tech companies to just ignore all of that. Just say, well, that's all noise. It's not grounded in evidence. That's not actually what's going on.

You have those big panics and we're just going to carry on because that's not actually the reality of the situation. And that's a really bad situation to be in because there is stuff that's go wrong with the way social media platforms operate and the things that they do. And we absolutely need to hold them to account. So I think what we need to do then is sort of be better at understanding what the actual science says about screens, being able to ask better questions that are much less easy for the tech industry to ignore. In a roundabout way, to go back to your original question, it's not so much about whether I think one particular platform is doing better than another, the big thing for me is that fundamentally what we're talking about, when we talk about all these technologies, is that they are technologies of pleasure, of entertainment, of convenience, of making our lives a little bit easier. And if that is truly what they're about, if that's why they've been designed, and the naive optimist in me thinks that fundamentally, originally, that's what they were there for, 100% user well-being should be at the core of design

decisions. That should be the first thing that everybody thinks about in terms of designing new experiences, new platforms. Is this going to give people a net benefit or not? And I think the industry, again, as an amorphous blob, does think about these questions, but I don't think that they're at the forefront of everybody's minds. And I think we need to do more to make sure that they are. Do you think that originally they were at the forefront and they've maybe strayed away from it as they've got massive? Yeah, definitely. I think we talk about the tech industry as though it's this singular entity and obviously it's not. And even within a particular company, there's a huge level of complexity in terms of the different parts and how they operate with each other and how things are designed.

You will have teams of developers who will be almost kind of completely siloed from other teams just to work on a particular aspect. So it's very difficult to see where the overall oversight happens with these sorts of decision making processes. I think it's very important to, you know, as you're doing, reframe the conversation around how we use tech and social media. But for a lot of people right now, they are worried about the way that they're using screens. So what advice would you give to those people who are worried about their tech use right now? It's a great question. And I think it's obviously it's one that we all worry about. I think absolutely fundamentally is try not to panic because things can always be fixed.

So again, it's trying not to get stuck in the. this way of thinking that the only way out of not being happy with your own tech use is to kind of get rid of it all. That's not the only solution. So this really requires effort. And I appreciate this is always difficult because we're all busy enough as it is. But thinking about what you use your tech for, and I'm using that in very vague terms of the same way that we talk about screen time, because it entirely depends on what specifically you're talking about, what specifically you're worried about. So it's hard to give generalized advice. But thinking about your tech use in terms of habits rather than the sort of addictions and excessive use, I think,

is a really useful thing. So we are habitual beings in a way. It's very easy for us to develop habits. Habits in and of themselves are neutral, and either good or bad in and of themselves. It's other things that happen, other situational factors, contextual factors, that then create good or bad habits. So one of the examples that I use in the book is phone checking behaviors. So phone checking is a habit is neutral. It's neither harmful nor beneficial for us. It's just a thing, right? Checking your phone when you're driving down the road just to see what people are putting on Instagram or wherever. Really bad habit to get into for very obvious physical harm reasons. Checking your phone at night when you feel it a bit lonely and you want to connect with friends,

you want to send a message on WhatsApp and just strike up a conversation. with somebody, that's a really nice habit to get into and you'd see a positive impact on well-being in that sense. Again, this is early days for this sort of research because researchers are really starting to think or rethink these sorts of relationships in a research-based way. But there's this thread that's come out over the past few years that argues for this sort of technology habit approach that argues that what's going on maybe is that it's not just sheer frequency in and of itself of screen use that's a problem. But the more you engage in a particular screen habit in a non-reflective, almost I guess mindless way, then the more you're opening yourself up to

the risk of having a problematic episode, something bad happening. But it's not just the case that if you come across something bad or something bad happens, that you're therefore inevitably going to come to harm as a result of that. Again, there's research that shows that that's not necessarily true either, and that's particularly not true for kids. It's all about other things that are happening, the scaffolding that you've got around the situation. So support networks are really important. Thinking about your technology use, thinking about what your goals are and how that tech use aligns with it or not is a really good thing to do. So this is something that I've been trying to do recently. And the weird thing that I've found is that I've just naturally stopped

doing some of the things that wasn't working for me so much. So being aware of when and how and why you're using your phone and checking for messages is a good example, because we all do that in situations that we probably really shouldn't do. And then we often find it very hard to stop doing that. But just being very aware in that moment, when somebody calls you out for being on your phone, when you shouldn't be, thinking about, okay, what was I doing? Why was I doing it? Did I need to do that? Was I getting anything out of it? And sometimes the answer to that is, yeah, actually, it wasn't great. And I maybe should have communicated better with the people around me. that I just needed to do this thing on my phone

and then I'll give you some more attention. There you go, you've got an idea of something that you can do for the next time that happens. And then in other cases, you go, actually, no, I was just doing something completely mindless then, completely meaningless. I didn't need to be on my phone. Again, being aware of that

and thinking for next time, can I catch myself a bit earlier in that process to stop that? And if you can do that repeatedly, you'll find yourself weeding out those bad habits. it takes time and it takes effort and you'll get things wrong, right? You're not going to get this perfect every single time. That's okay. We all make mistakes, but what we're trying to do here is improve the relationship that we've got.

And I should say there's a really weird thing here, right, which is that there are some commentators out there, some scientists who take a very different view to me who are very much, phones are bad, social media is really bad, we need to do something about this. There's a real urgency and real panic there. I felt it really interesting that actually when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, we're all kind of saying the same thing in terms of advice. So one of the things that I've done is my university uses Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and we moved over to that recently. So I downloaded Outlook and Teams onto my phone, and obviously it defaults to notifications on.

And I found myself getting really down in the evening because I get message pings and find myself like checking my work emails at times when I really didn't want to, And there've been a couple of cases where, you know, I've got difficult emails to deal with, and I've checked it at like 10 o'clock at night, and it's really impacted my sleep. And the way I've fixed that is I've turned the notifications off on my phone because I've sort of made the conscious decision. Actually, I don't need it. I'd still like to have the app on my phone because there are times where it's really convenient to check my work emails during the work day on my phone. But there's no scenario where I need those notifications. I don't need to

know when a message has come across right then and there. And actually, what I've done increasingly is across all of my social media accounts is I've just, by and large, I've switched off notifications because I want to go and see what's going on on those platforms when I've got the time and the space to do that. And with notifications, I think it's often the other way around. It's there telling you, you should go and look at this thing now, not because they're addictive or anything like that or they're attention grabbing. It's just a convenient thing to put as part of the design in these things. So one of the, what seems like it's become the nexus point of this debate is around children and their use of phones and social media. What do you think about the calls to ban smartphones

for all under 16s? It's a really difficult topic. It's really emotive. It's really contentious. And I totally understand that there's a lot of anxieties around this. I have them myself, so my daughters at primary school. She's of an age where nobody's really thinking about smartphones at the minute, but I know that this is going to be a conversation that we're going to have over the next few years. And honestly, I'm nervous about it. I don't personally see that there's a need for her to have a smartphone in primary school. I would like at some point when, you know, she's got a little bit more autonomy and a little bit more independence, a way to keep in touch with her because that's just good for safety. That doesn't need to be a smartphone. It can be a flip phone, an old school flip phone.

if needs to be. But I know eventually some of her friends in class will get a smartphone and it would generate those sorts of discussions. I worry about this being contextualized as a ban on smartphones because I'm in quite a privileged position with my child and that everything's going okay, education-wise, health, medical-wise, all of that's fine. There are some people who are in other situations and they're very difficult and it's really important that they have a mechanism by which they can stay in touch with people outside the school. People in caring situations, kids in caring situations, I think is a really good example of that. And I think we very often forget those groups in these sorts of conversations in that I think a blanket ban is bad because it further marginalises

kids who are already having difficulties. The other aspect to this is that what banning effectively does is to say, you know, you can have this thing just at a later point. And that's absolutely fine, providing that we build digital literacy skills before that point. So I think just saying no phones and leaving it at that is a really dangerous situation to get into because eventually kids will get a phone. And we don't want that to happen in a situation where they don't really know what they're doing with it.

And they don't know how to navigate that sort of world. They don't have a support network around them for if something goes wrong. know who to talk to, it just sort of happens to them. If that happens at 16 or 18 or 25 or 5, it doesn't matter. You're still going to have problems. It's interesting that you talk about not dropping smartphones and social media on kids one day, you know, helping them build up those skills because it feels like that's what has happened to the rest of us, right? One year, you know, we didn't have smartphones and social media and you had a flip phone and a couple of years later, everyone had Facebook and Twitter on their phones. So do you worry about the generations, you know,

older actually, sometimes a bit more than the younger generations? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really great point. And you're absolutely right that these things, you know, you can't build digital literacy skills in a thing that you don't know exists. Yeah. So we didn't have, you know, the smartphones appear and we just adopt them. And that's how it sort of become this Wild West thing. And I do worry about, I include myself in this, our older generations, we've been the ones that have gone through this massive technological upheaval. So it's understandable then that we're more likely to struggle than others. The positive view there is that as these technologies develop and mature and become more embedded

and we figure out how to navigate them and we figure out how to talk about them and educate ourselves and younger generations about it, that those successive younger generations will be much better equipped to navigate. them. So maybe the worries that we've got now won't be borne out in the next few years, a few decades. But yeah, this goes back to that original point, right, that I can remember when I got my first iPhone. And I really remember looking at it going, this is awesome. Okay, what do I do next? I just try to figure out why I've got this thing and how it's going to fit into my life and stuff. And then, you know, like you say, you start adding apps once they become available.

because we often hear this that, you know, things like mental health issues started skyrocketing with the advent of the smartphone around about 2007-2008. But, you know, I remember the original iPhone and you couldn't do that much with it, right? It was very much a glorified flip phone. And it was only gradually over successive years that you started getting these new applications, new social media platforms and things. And, you know, uptake wasn't straight away and people use them in different ways. And they looked very different to how they look nowadays. And there's a lot of kind of complexity and nuance in that that we don't think about when we just see a graph with mental health issues going up and align straight down through 2008 because smartphones. I think it's a very sort of oversimplified way of looking at these things.

But it is true that we just figured out how to do this. And for a lot of us, we maybe didn't figure it out particularly well. And it's caused a lot of problems for a lot of people in the same way that a lot of people have found amazing benefits. and it's really changed their lives for the better. I think the trick is that that's a lesson that we need to learn. So there's always going to be new technology that's developed. And there will be something that we can't even imagine in our wildest dreams that might become an embedded norm in society in 10 years' time.

And yet we can't know specifically what that technology is. But we can think about how do we implement these things? How do we build resiliency in people? how do we make them feel more able to talk in a sensible way about technology use, in a comfortable and open way, so that they can develop support networks? I've said that a lot through this. Support networks are so important for everything, not just our online lives, but particularly in our online lives,

having people that you feel able and comfortable to talk to and talk things through with is such an important aspect of this. And we find that very difficult sometimes, again, because I think the language that we use around technology use is not where it needs to be yet. But we need to get there with it. So that was Pete Etchels, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bathbar University. To discover more about the topics we've discussed today, check out his book, Unlocked, The Real Science of Screen Time, which is available to purchase from the 21st of March.

Thanks again for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale right now in supermarkets and newsagents up and down the country. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe via your preferred app and write as a review. You can, of course, also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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