The Dr. Hyman Show - Scrolling Ourselves Sick: The Hidden Cost of Constant Connection

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Social media platforms are designed to hijack our brain’s reward system, keeping us hooked through endless dopamine hits. This constant stimulation fragments our attention, reshapes our behavior, and can lead to burnout, anxiety, and even addiction—especially in developing brains. The more we scroll, the more we crave quick hits of novelty, making it harder to tolerate boredom or engage in deeper, more meaningful tasks. And while adults may struggle, kids are even more vulnerable, facing emotional dysregulation and long-term brain changes. The good news? Awareness is the first step toward reclaiming agency and creating healthier boundaries in a world built for distraction. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, bestselling author, and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His research focuses on the moral foundations of culture and politics, exploring why good people are divided by religion, ideology, and values. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), and has given four widely viewed TED talks. Haidt is also a co-founder of Heterodox Academy, the Constructive Dialogue Institute, and Ethical Systems—organizations that promote viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and ethical leadership. Since 2018, he has turned his attention to the mental health crisis among teens and the role of social media in political polarization. His latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, was published in 2024. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. In addition to researching cutting-edge technology, he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture. Newport is the author of six books, including Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. His work has been featured in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, and he has been writing essays for his personal website (CalNewport.com) for over a decade. He has never had a social media account. Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a writer, designer, and media researcher whose work has been featured in major outlets such as The Atlantic, WIRED, NPR, the BBC, CNN, and many others. His research has been cited in the adoption of key interventions to reduce toxicity and polarization within leading tech platforms. He previously led humanitarian projects in Southeast Asia focused on civil war reconstruction efforts, work for which he was honored with an award from the 14th Dalai Lama. He lives in New York with his cat Waffles. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: How to Protect Your Child’s Mental Health from the Dangers of Social Media How Social Media May Be Ruining Your Life How Social Media And AI Impacts Our Mental Health: Reclaiming Our Minds And Hearts And Healing A Divided World

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman show. So the more you social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets. To be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. These intense addictive forms of distraction have a long-term effect on your cognitive health. Magnesium doesn't get the spotlight like vitamin D or omega-3s, but it should. It helps regulate mood, hormones, energy, sleep, and even blood sugar. And yet, most of us are either deficient or barely scraping by thanks to stress, caffeine, processed food, and even depleted soil. That's where magnesium breakthrough from bioptimizers comes in. Unlike typical supplements that

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For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated, doctor-trusted supplements and health products at DrHyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast, ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. So we have a major, and it's not just America,

it's all the English-speaking countries for sure. It seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world, we're seeing suddenly, in the early 2010s, teens are getting more depressed and anxious. And so this was a side project for me. But as I began to dig into it and to realize that it's international, to realize that more

and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation, but we're beginning to get experiments. Experiments where you randomly assign one group of college students to reduce their social media for a month, another group doesn't, you see what happens. So once you have correlational studies and experimental studies, and you have massive eyewitness testimony from Gen Z, go find me. I cannot find, find me an essay online, find me an essay anywhere by a member of Gen Z

who defends the phones, who says, oh, no, it's been great for us. Oh, no, the phone-based life has been great. Don't take it away from us. You can't find that. But you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me, it destroyed my generation, destroyed my childhood. And we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers.

The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, I don't know about all. But 90% in surveys say this is a problem, 80%, 90%. Same thing for school principals. So we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate

of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause. Yeah. Well, I think there was an attempt to rebut this by Candace Rogers in Nature and you on X basically replied to that kind of rebutting a lot of what she said, which was that there was no cause of evidence. And you talked about a lot of the data that you cite, which is, you know, both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just

some correlation. Yeah, that's right. So there are a few pieces to the argument. The first, as they said, there is experimental evidence. And a meta-analysis came out six or eight months ago showing, yeah, some experiments show a big effect or an effect. Some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air. But my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, we're reanalyzing all

the experiments. And actually, when you remove the short term experiments, this is the key. Some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day, or two days. And if you're addicted to something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? Well, you know, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or two, it's going to be pretty bad. You have to wait, it takes, you know, two, you know, an Olympia says three or four weeks, but you know, I think we're seeing effects by, you know, by a week or two, you're getting over the

roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one day studies, and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly, they find that there are benefits, there are mental health benefits to getting off social media. So, Rogers said that I have only correlational evidence which is false. I keep saying, no look, here's the experimental evidence. And the other thing that I think is very powerful is that this happened around the world at the same time. And you know, most people say, oh, Hyatt is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're gonna be looking into phones

and banning phones for little kids. When what we should be looking at is X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z is usually inequality and climate change and racism and Donald Trump and things like that. It's usually something about America. Probably all of it adds to the soup for sure. Well, fine, but what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during

Obama's first term with the financial crisis, things were fine for teenagers? Mental health was normal. It didn't change in his first term. Then all of a sudden in his second term, what? Suddenly like racism and school shootings, that's the other thing that people say. 2012 was the Newtown massacre. So that does fit the timing because after that kids had lockdown drills. Fine, if it was just the US, if 2012 was the turning point in the US, but not anywhere else,

then I'd say, yeah, you know what? You could be right about that. But the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in the US, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, that's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015. And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and

Twitter and Instagram that then drove. Not well, we have to be more specific because Facebook comes out in 2004 and it earth 2003. That's when they put the like and the share buttons, right? That's right. So we have to let's just trace it out. And actually, this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the internet comes out, the public gets access to it in the mid 1990s. You know, I remember the first time I saw a web browser was Alta Vista. And I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe. Like, you mean I can just like, ask for something and it comes to me

instantly. I don't have to get my car and go to the library. Like anything like admissions, you know, it was totally crazy. It was magical. And in the 90s, the teenagers who were Gen Z, I mean, who were millennials, they took to the internet, they were on AOL and AIM and and their mental health was fine. The early internet was decentralized. It was fun. It was exploratory. It was amazing. And so we all think, well, this is good. And our kids are spending time on it. And that's good, we think. And then you get into the 2000s. Now, remember, everything's dial up.

So there's no video, slow connection speeds. It's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on. Now you get into the 2000s. Now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world and speeds are speeding up and you get social media. Now we're beginning to get a more centralized internet. People can't, many young people won't know that

the internet was not dominated by three or four companies for the first decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now, you know, three or four companies basically control our kids' consciousness. You know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a few others account for, I think the majority of what they're doing with their day.

For a lot of people. It's basically TikTok, Google, Meta, and X. That's right, that's right. And especially the short videos, that's right. X is not so important for adolescents. It's there and it's important for democracy, but X does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues.

It's the short videos and video content especially. Anyway, so 2003 you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first and it's not particularly toxic. In the late 2000s you begin to get the iPhone in 2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss army knife. It's not harmful. There are apps, but there's no app store, no push notifications. So all the way up to 2008, 2009, the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting, it's getting more engaging, but it's not like what we know now.

And teen mental health is fine up until 2011. There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 2009, you get the like and the retweet buttons, and now Facebook and Twitter are able to algorithmize everything. You get share buttons as well, so retweet, share. Now social media becomes much more about the newsfeed. Before then, they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people, you see their page, they see yours.

Connecting people is generally a good thing. they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people, you see their page, they see yours. Connecting people is generally a good thing. But now it's about the newsfeed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on. Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric. If you can keep people on longer,

you get paid for it. You get a bonus. You get a bonus, yeah. And so, you know, very smart people, they did it. They found ways to keep young people, especially on longer. And that was the newsfeed and the algorithms, much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So in the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone.

They're mostly have flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer. They don't have high speed internet. It's not dial up at that point, but it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram, it doesn't exist on January 1st, 2010. There's no front facing camera on January 1st, 2010. In 2010, you get the front-facing camera and Instagram. Takes a couple years before everyone has it. In 2012, Facebook buys Instagram. It doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls' social life, teen girls' social life moves onto Instagram.

It wasn't on it. It wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front-facing camera and an Instagram account and high-speed internet with an unlimited data plan. In 2010, you could not spend 10 hours a day on your flip phone. I mean, that would just be hell. But in 2015, you can spend 10 hours a day on your smartphone. And now that's about the average. Eight to 10 hours a day is what teens now spend on

on their phones. That includes video games, but it's mostly phone and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids use flip phones to connect and see each other in person. In 2015, that's largely what's not gone, but it reduces greatly.

And life is now, you sit on your bed scrolling and then your mom calls you down for dinner. That's now, that's a lot of teen life now. Yeah, it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's, you know, it's happening almost invisibly in a way that's sort of at a subtext in our culture. And the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who

are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the data basically showed that it was JAMA pediatrics from 2005 to 2017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by 52%. Those 12 to 17 who experienced a major depression in that same period went from 8.7% to 15.7% from 2005 to 2019. And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in Lancet Papers and others and to be really correlated or even potentially causal with this. And so the costs of this are staggering. I mean, just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of the total cost of care to society. Not actually hospitalization and necessary medication,

but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years, it's a single biggest driver of cost to society. And it's just beginning, it feels like we're just at the beginning of this. And what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last,

I mean, 10 years, right? 10, 15 years, it's very quick. And your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue, but you also talk about what needs to be done to kind of solve it. And some of the things you talk about are seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers until they're 16, no smartphones, you know, making sure kids get out

and play. I mean, all this stuff that we did when we were kids. I mean, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, you know, I was like seven years old and had my bicycle and left after school and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood. I mean, and, and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these these solutions. But I can't imagine how you how you imagine they're going to get implemented because of the resistance and the change in behavior. Yeah, no, not. No, it's actually amazingly easy.

I'm shocked at how easy this is. I've been involved in a lot of efforts at social change. I ran a gun control group in college, a handgun control group in college, and that was completely hopeless and we had made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're gonna be successful,

where we're being successful, is that we don't have to persuade people. They already know. Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it. The child psychologist, everyone sees it. So, I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book is give a clear diagnosis.

Here is exactly what happened, when it happened, and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms. Here are the developmental pathways that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works. Here's the way the brain changes during puberty. So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history,

how the internet was amazing in the 90s, but the internet we have now is nothing like the internet we had in the 90s. And then people, the key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyze this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10-year-olds now have phones, have their own smartphone? And the answer is because your 10-year-old comes home in fifth grade and says, mom, everyone

else has a phone. I need an iPhone. And you say, well, no, but I gave you a phone watch or I gave you a flip phone. You can call me if you need. No, no, no. Everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me. And then so you then you give in and you give your kid an iPhone. Well, once 90 percent of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have one or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem. And this is the key to why it's so painful for kids because social media is socially addictive. Now it is biologically addictive to some heavy users, you know, dopamine circuits get rewired. So for some, we can say it's

biologically addictive. But for the great majority of teens, they're on it, not because their brain says they must be on it to feel normal, but because everyone else is on it. They can't quit. I talked to my students at NYU. They waste huge amounts of time. They don't want to waste all this time. I say, why don't you just delete it? I can't because everyone else is on it. I have to know what's going on. So these things are socially addictive. And so what I did in the book is I said, once we understand the nature of collective action problems, where if everyone is on it and you step off alone, you bear a cost and

you don't make anything better for anyone else. But what if 10% of people get off? Well now they have each other. Now they're not alone, they have each other. And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in fifth grade. And now some parents will say, no, you're not, you know, there's a pledge called the wait until eighth pledge, which is actually wait until after eighth, wait until ninth really, because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development, the worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information.

We've got to keep this out of kids' lives, at least until high school. So the wait until eighth pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem. Parents sign up when their kid is in elementary school. They say, I'm not gonna get my kid a phone until ninth grade, a smartphone. You can give them a phone watch, give them a flip phone. And then once 10 people, I think it's,

or 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful. And I, you know, I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March and April. Now it's clear we are being successful. And the reason is because, is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones. I mean, it's impossible to teach when, I mean, imagine when you and I were kids, if they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set, you can bring in your V set, you can bring in your VCR, you can bring in your paint to your paint by numbers kit,

you can bring the car you bring in anything, everything, have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you go ahead, like insanity. Yeah. So so phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts is are going phone free New York City is going to announce in a couple of weeks the state of Virginia. I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say oh you can't use your phone in class which is nonsense because then you have to use it between classes so that's terrible. But some

states are going truly phone free from bell to bell. You turn on your phone in the morning. This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on the schools, we already are successful. Every day I'm getting notes from parents saying, thank you. Your book gave me the courage to let my seven year old ride his bicycle to his friend's house or ride it up and down our street. And now other kids are riding their bicycles. So it's a collective action problem and parents are ready for change, not all, but a lot are ready for change. And once they start and their kids are out having fun together, more parents are going to say, oh, it's kind of creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling. Why don't you go out and play? And I think that's going to happen over the next year or two. That's incredible, John. I mean,

I think it's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness that there's a problem, and you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. And the interesting thing is what's going to happen between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed.

Because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home. So do think that no but it's not kind of does it kind of does because the the issue with the smartphone is that you have it with you always. And so because anything you can do on a smartphone you can do on a computer. If you have a laptop at home and you know most nowadays middle school kids they need need a computer, access to a computer. So if you have, ideally, if parents have like one desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen or someplace, I think that's great. That's very safe. The kid's not going to get into porn. They're not going to get seduced by sextortionist rings. So having access to a computer is great, but that's just going to be for for an hour to a day at most. When you have the phone, you can get 16 hours a day.

And that's what some of the kids are getting, 16 hours a day. How is that possible? Because when they're on the bus, they're doing this. When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me, now that iPhones are waterproof, kids are taking them into the shower. So you can keep scrolling or doing things

while you're taking a shower. OK? So can't we just delay that till high school? Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that? Yeah. It's quite striking. I think you talk a lot about kids,

but I would also point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids. And I'm wondering- Let's talk about that. Wait, just tell me what you've seen because what Zach Rauch and I do is we have all these graphs of all the data sets

we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age. And what we generally find is that when you track levels of at least I've only done depression, anxiety, I haven't done everything. When you look at depression anxiety, for people over 40 or 50, there's no change. They are of course, we're all we all feel frazzled, we feel there's too much stuff coming in, we're all hooked on our phones. But levels of depression anxiety are not really rising for older people. For Gen Z, it's a hockey stick. Gen Z is born 1996 and later, hockey stick, huge. For the millennials, it's in between. And I need to try to break it up by early millennial

versus late millennial. It might just be that those born in, millennial generation is usually 1981 through 1995. And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early 90s, they had this stuff when they were late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see for depression anxiety,

it's really a Gen Z and a little bit millennial thing. It's not a Gen X and older thing. But you tell me, do you know specific? I mean, the WHO basically says between 2005 and 2015, there was about an 18% increase in depression. In kids, it was more. In youth, it was 52% between 2005 and 2017. So it's certainly more in kids, I agree.

And it's much more in girls. Wait, so who you can say, if you look at a nation, you'll see an increase. But you must always break this stuff up by gender, always. Because sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls. Sometimes it's just bigger in girls. So if you take, so the increase for younger females is gigantic.

The increase for other groups is not nearly so large. Yeah. And how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society and as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the internet that's affecting them. And hopefully your efforts will actually lead to sort of a reduction in this because of the prohibitions in school.

But where do you see this going? I mean, it just seems like we're heading kind of a slow motion disaster. We were heading in a slow motion disaster. And by 2019, when I was really beginning to get into this and Jean Twenge was writing about this, we were beginning to point out like, wait, we just did this gigantic uncontrolled experiment. And now the results are in, look,

things are going really, really badly, 2019. And then COVID hits and everybody, you know, in 2019, I was saying what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens, a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. And COVID comes, what do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing because we thought you could get COVID outdoors and you can't touch people, you know, you, we got it

all wrong with kids, we really made COVID so much worse for kids than it than it had to be. But that confused us all. And of course, the kids were on screens all day long. They had to be on Zoom, and it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do. And so now that COVID has receded, now we can see the wreckage. We see the gigantic rates.

And while some numbers have come down a little bit from the peak in COVID, but in a sense, they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if COVID never happened. So So now it's become becoming obvious. So I don't think it's gonna be a slow-motion disaster from here on in I think we're at a cultural turning point and we're now seeing this is not light playful stuff that lets kids be creative This is not that that's what Facebook and others have sold us on Sure, they can do that. That is part of the experience That is true

But you know a lot of it is talking with strange men. That is true. But, you know, a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to six-store you or trying, you know, people trying to sell you things. Like it's complete insanity that we let, you know, we're, as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online. Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both and we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light playful thing. This is not the early internet that I remember from my 20s. This is, we need to think of this much more like alcohol or tobacco or automobiles or gambling or strip clubs or whatever. There are all sorts of things that we let adults do, but we don't let

children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on, the reason why we block children from doing things is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm, or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids, or it's sex and violence, or addiction, we tend to say, no, 12 year olds can't do this.

Even 16 year olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Even 16 year olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Social media hits all five. Do you often feel tired, tense or foggy? Magnesium might be the missing link. Most people are low and standard supplements don't cut it. Magnesium breakthrough gives you all seven essential forms

in one powerful formula. Better sleep, less muscle tension, mental clarity, all with no laxative side effects. Try Magnesium Breakthrough by bioptimizers at bioptimizers.com slash Hyman for 15% off. The positive social media articles, what they're essentially finding is in isolation, there are certain things that happen on social media articles, what they're essentially finding is in isolation, there are certain things that happen on social media that make you happier than if you weren't

doing them. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say do nothing or send a note to a close friend or family member on social media, you'll be a little bit happier having sent a note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. Now it turns out that actually talking to a non-close friend or broadcasting information to a large audience or reading information that was broadcast to a large audience, none of this even in isolation makes you happier. But there's a few things in isolation.

So not your Facebook friends, but your actual friends and family. Yeah, on the same token though, the sort of best research we have that looks at the correlation between social media use in your life and indicators like perceived loneliness or social isolation, say that the more you use it, the less happy you are.

Even when you do all of the standard controls that you would do for all the different demographic and economic variables you think might be relevant. And so what's going on, right? This seems like they're countervailing. And what's probably happening, what the researchers think is happening, is that you get a little boost to do sort of virtual interaction with people. But real-world interaction is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful and vital to being happy.

And the more you use social media, the less of the real world interaction you actually do with friends. Because you have the sense of, I'm connected to people, I'm talking to people all the time, I just sent these six messages in the last five minutes and I talked to my high school roommate and here's my middle college roommate. But the benefits you get from that is so small

compared to what you're losing by doing less real conversation and analog interaction, you end up net negative. So the more you social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets. Yeah, so face to face instead of Facebook.

Yeah, face to face instead of Facebook. I mean, our brain, the degree to which our brain has evolved to essentially be a social processing engine is incredible, right? If you look at the research on how much of our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues, it's completely impoverished when you take away

this rich stream of input that you and I are seeing right now being in person and seeing facial expressions and movements and voice tonalities, and you replace it with a one bit indicator, like. Yeah. Like. A one and a zero, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't do it for our brain, right? It's leaving it anxious and without much to do,

and so that's sort of the first myth, that somehow you're gonna be happier in your social life if you're using social media. The inverse seems to be true. If you don't use it, now you're gonna have to do real social interactions to feed that urge, or you're gonna be that urge. People have forgotten. I was amazed with these kids and millennials. They don't want to call each other on the phone. They are socially awkward and not able to actually have real connections and

authentic relationships, but they're, you know, on social media doing that and it's it's they've lost the skill of actually human connection interaction. Yeah and it's a vital skill. I mean not just for sort of navigating the world, but just for mental health and happiness. So yeah, it's a vital skill. I mean, not just for sort of navigating the world, but just for mental health and happiness. So yeah, it is a big issue. So, you know, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that, you know, I learned how to do all of that.

I grew up before there were cell phones and social media. And so the big risk for someone my age might be that I get away from that too much. But if you're younger and it's all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem. Yeah. Now, the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier, but you quote research that it actually all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem. Yeah. Now, the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier,

but you quote research that it actually makes you anxious and depressed and impairs your cognitive function. So, not only is it not helpful, but it may be harmful. So, can you talk about the harm part? Yeah. Well, so the first indication I had that there's something screw going on with this constant connectivity

was probably four or five years ago. And so I was doing an event on a college campus, it was an elite college, and I was talking to the head of the mental health services on the college, and we had talked about some of these issues, and she said, you know, Cal, something I have noticed in my time here is that the issues we're dealing with with the students

have changed dramatically. That what we used to deal with were sort of the standard mix of mental health issues you might expect in 18, 19, 20-year-olds. There were sort of eating disorders and homesicknesses and some OCD and schizophrenia and some depression, sort of a mix, a variety. And she said it was like a switch flipped.

And it's all anxiety and anxiety related disorders. And not just that that's overtaken everything else, but the number of students coming in with these issues is well beyond what they ever saw before. And I said, okay, well what changed? And without a hesitation, she said smartphones. It was that first class that came in that had had smartphones throughout their teenage years.

They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get a few years later, you get Jean Tween, had smartphones throughout their teenage years. They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get a few years later, you get Jean Twinge, she's one of the, or Twinge, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think, very important book last year called iGen.

And she's one of the top generational demographers, the world expert on understanding trends and how they differ between generations. And her whole book is basically making this argument that that's not a mirage. That this entire generation, this entire iGen, the first generation to have smartphones starting from their teenage years

is having off the charts, mental health and anxiety related issues. And it's not, there was some pushback that, okay, well maybe this was, reporting has changed or more aware and acute to sort of mental health issues now. That's not the issue because we have hospitalizations for suicide attempts among the same group. Has gone up right along with the mental health issue.

So this is actually real issues that are happening. And she looked at every cause she could. She did not want the answer to be something so simple as it's smartphones and social media. It's really been the only thing that fits the, the only thing she's found that actually fits the timing and the characteristics of the data. So I think there's actually for young people,

a mental health crisis caused by these phones. Yeah, no, I see that. I do see that in patients. I see it in my family members. And you know, the other part of it, in addition to the anxiety and social isolation, which, you know, and some of it are a little surprising the anxiety and social isolation, which in some way they're a little surprising,

you think it makes you more connected, is the effect on your cognitive function. And you talk about the intensity of your focus and attention being related to the quality of your life, your productivity, your success in life, that you actually say you don't even work after five o'clock and you've written six books and what are you, 25 years old?

You know, how old are you, 25 years old? I would. You know, how old are you? 36. Okay, well that's pretty good. It took me a lot, I was like 50 to write six books. But I think that, you know, that's a very interesting point because what happens to your ability to focus, pay attention, engage with your life, be present

and alert to what's actually happening when you use social media. Yeah, that's actually my entryway into this issue. So I wrote this book back in 2016 called Deep Work. And the premise of the book is that the ability to focus intensely without distraction, that's what I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology and that this created a mismatch. I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology and that this created a mismatch.

And so that you would have this big advantage if you're one of the few to really care and cultivate your ability to concentrate. And one of the things I discovered in researching this book is that, yes, these tools are having a permanent effect on people's ability to concentrate. It's not a matter of whether the tool is in front of you right now in the moment in which you're trying to concentrate. If you're just used to in general pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up another tab

as soon as you get a little bit bored, give yourself a little bit of a hit of stimuli, it permanently changes your brain, or at least for a long term, such that if I then take you away from all those stimuli and then put you in a Faraday cage, which you could have no distractions when you're on the plane and the wifi's not working,

you're gonna have a hard time focusing. And people think, oh, it's different. Yeah, at home, I do this, I get bored, I look at the phone a lot, but at work, I really concentrate, it has an effect. It's like an athlete saying, I only smoke on the weekends, not when I'm training. The smoking's still gonna affect you

when you're on the playing field, you're hurting your physical health. And so these intense addictive forms of distraction have a long-term effect on your cognitive health. And this has professional impacts. If you work in a knowledge sector job, it's gonna make you worse at what you do. Yeah, that was interesting.

I was sitting at a lecture the other night with a friend of mine, and she was on her phone, and she was tweeting, and she was picturing, and she was doing all kinds of stuff, Instagramming, and I said, give me your phone. And I grabbed the phone from her, I said, open your phone. And so I opened the Screen Time app. And it shows not only the amount of screen time, which was a lot for her,

but it showed the number of times you pick up your phone. And it was like a thousand times in a day. And she's, what's yours? And I opened mine, it was like 60 or 70 times, which is still a lot. But I was like, wow, that's a lot. And I think, you know, people don't realize that it affects your ability to be engaged

in any particular work for a long period of time. And that's concerning because the things that matter to us, the quality of work we do determines our success in life in terms of actually sort of be able to be engaged with what's happening around us. And that's a big deficit. Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy. If we were professional athletes, and we're eating junk food, or we were smoking,

people would say, that's crazy. You make a living off of the physical health of your body. But it's the same thing if you're in elite level knowledge work. I mean, it's literally your brain and its ability to concentrate, its ability to concentrate, its ability to take in and process information and produce new information that has new value.

That's at the core of probably a lot of your audience's living, right? That's how they make a living. And to be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. And yet somehow we're not seeing it that way. So you're a scientist. What is the data that validates what you're saying?

Because I can imagine people listening, oh yeah, that's just kind of sure, maybe, I don't believe that, I'm fine. What is the actual hard data that supports this thesis that being on your phones all the time or being distracted by social media is actually impairing your ability to focus? Well, one of the more-

And do deep work. That's right. Well, I think one of the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is, we call it sometimes economist, a productivity paradox, which is if you study non-industrial productivity, so the economic metric of productivity, so the amount of actual output produced per hour spent working, it should have continued to increase over the past 10 years as we've had this revolution in not just our technology,

but in connectivity and information. People are connected in places they never were before. They have essentially all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. They can move files and information from a device that fits in their hand with a supercomputer-like power. Like this is amazing. And yet during this entire period,

productivity's been stagnant. It's not going up. It should have been going up, but it's not. And there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that yes, these technology is giving us more options and power, and yet at the same time, it's working against the way that our wetware works.

To actually fragment our intention in the way it does makes our brain actually worse at concentrating and producing value. And so the downturn from that, combined with what should have been enhancing our productivity, which is the tools, is just flattening out. And so I think this has a real issue,

and I can only imagine that we're gonna see if this is true. Non-industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected than anyone before starts to come into the workforce. So we have that piece of evidence. Then we have a lot of more close study, those individual type studies actually trying to understand work. The late work by the late Cliff Nass of Stanford University, he did a lot of work actually

in the lab, the psychology lab, with individuals working on what he called multitasking. It's basically the same idea. There is no such thing, right? There is no such thing. And he actually helped spread that idea. But he was the one who actually had some pretty good research on chronic multitaskers. Think they're really good at concentrating, but they're much worse than people who don't. Another thread of research I'd like to point people towards is to work on attention residue

that's done by a professor named Sophie Leroy. And what she's finding is that when we think that we're not multitasking, what we're doing when we've rejected multitasking now, we know we're not supposed to do it. So we try to do one thing at a time. We only have one window open. But every five or 10 minutes, we do a quick check, right? So we don't have multiple windows open. But every five or 10 minutes, we do a quick check. So we don't have multiple windows open. We're not doing the late 90s style of multitasking around the phone and doing email variety. We're doing one thing, but every five or 10 minutes, it's the phone or the tab. And what she's finding is that context switch, and then back again, even if it's very brief,

leaves what's called a tension residue, which you can measure in the lab, reduces your cognitive capacity, and takes a while to actually clear out. And you can measure this easily in the lab because you actually have people doing cognitively demanding puzzles. Yeah. And so they can see you start making more mistakes and it takes 10, 20 minutes to actually get back up. To reset. And then in that 20 minutes you do another one. You do another. And so what most knowledge workers are doing is they read Cliff Nass's work and they say, I don't multitask, I'm so advanced, I just single single task but because they're quick checking every five to ten minutes They put themselves in a state of persistently reduced cognitive capacity. It's like a reverse

Neutropic or something a drug that makes you worse at what? Wow. Yeah, I know when I write my books I literally have to turn off my phone. I turn off email I often turn off Wi-Fi unless I'm not researching some article. And I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read or I just print it out in paper and do it. Because it's so powerful and I get so much done. And yet, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, I feel like I'm never really productive.

It's a tension residue. Yeah, I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And then that's a very interesting thing because what you're saying is that by using our phones and technology that we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function,

and there's no such thing as multitasking. Yeah, and even if you think you're single tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad. Quick checking, yeah. Well, that's sort of like multitasking. Now, you know, I feel like the thing that is fascinating about your work is that you also sort of talk about the positive benefits

of not being on your social media or devices. And I'd like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media, because they're not always the same, right? So what are the benefits of doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox. There are camps, people go to the weekend and they put their phone away. We in our Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phones and

during meetings we put them at the front of the table and no one can touch them. And we have much more productive, engaged meetings. Yeah, well, so the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit. It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to, whatever, put my phone away for a weekend, or Sundays,

I step away from the phone and I don't use my phone or something like this. But then you go back and start using it again normally. And so if you think about this, if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we were addicted to, it's not gonna work that well. If I said, I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm gonna do,

I've it all figured out, don't worry. I'm gonna go away and on Sunday I'm not gonna drink. But then get back to it again on Monday. Is that really solving the problem? This is my issue with just the detox notion or the digital Shabbat notion of you just take a little bit of time off. And so the lifestyle I often pitch is,

and this is the new book, is not digital detoxing but digital minimalism. Yeah, what is that? So it's a philosophy of technology use that says you should start with your values. What do I value? What's important to me in my life? Then for each of those you ask, okay, what's the best way I can use technology

to help these specific values? And then that's it in terms of your engagement with technology, you can ignore the rest, miss out on the rest. As opposed to this maximalist approach of if I can think of anything interesting about using this app, I'll download it. If I can think of anything that might be cool about this gadget, I'm going to buy it. Minimalism says, no, no, my life is about doing the things I really care

about, really value. Often there's some way that you can use technology very intentionally and very selectively that's going to even boost and enhance those things you care about, right? I mean, I'm a computer scientist, I love technology, but you only use it in that way and then you ignore the rest. And so instead of cluttering your life with every possible form of technology that begins to eat away at your attention and happiness, you have this very intentional use of a few things that do really well, and you're happy

missing out on everything else. So I mean, to get back to your original question, I've been studying these digital minimalist, and they're calm, they're happy. You can have a conversation with them for a long time and they won't once glance at a phone. They don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment.

They can just actually be there. They're much more productive in work. They produce things of great value. They're respected by their friends, they're involved in their community. I mean, you can go down the list by when they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining pole on their attention and get back to,

here's what I care about. This is what I want to do. I'll use technology selectively to help that. And that's it. It's, it's a much more present, mindful and satisfying type of life. But that's not so easy because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive. And the data scientists and behavioral experts, sort of attention experts who work for these social media companies design these programs to be addictive.

So can you talk about what you mean by that? Is it truly addictive? Is it just a metaphor? And what's actually happening biologically? How do they come up with the ways to make these things so sticky? Yeah, it was a depressing period when I dived into the reporting and research on how these companies

make their products addicting. It's a little bit dark, actually. So the best way. You pull back the veil. Yeah, so the best way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what they way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what they're trying to create is what they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions. So this is different than say a strong substance addiction. So

I mean if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user, they're not going to sneak out of the middle of the night to go to an internet cafe because they have to get a fix. On the other hand, They might. Yeah, they might. But if you're a heavy Facebook user and it's in your pocket and you can get at it any time during the day, you're gonna have a very hard time not using it a lot because that's what a moderate behavioral addiction

is gonna drive you to do. A lot of this absolutely is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological vulnerabilities. There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So I mean, I can give you a couple examples.

Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications on the mobile app, the designer said clearly this should be within the Facebook palette, which is gray and blue, right? So it's like sort of a very nice aesthetically pleasing thing. But the attention engineers came back and said, no, it needs to be alarm red because we get a much higher click rate if it's that color. It catches your attention.

It's very hard to avoid. The notion of this sort of endless scrolling, right? This was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerabilities sort of like a slot machine would that there might be something, one more scroll away there might be something really interesting. These companies have invested millions of dollars to solve really, really hard computer science problems, problems I know about as a computer scientist. Like programming issues.

Programming issues that they really didn't need to solve, like for example, auto-tagging people in pictures. This was a very hard problem in image recognition, but now if you post to Instagram, it can figure out, okay, this person, that's Dr. Hyman, let's send them a note and say, do you wanna tag this person? This is very complicated technology.

Why did they do it? Because if you say yes, I want to tag them, that sends to you what they call social approval indicators. And the richer the stream of intermittently arriving social approval indicators that's arriving in your sort of virtual app inbox, the more irresistibly it comes to tap on. So one of the things they optimized for

is this is why the like button took off. Right, it was originally there for a much more mundane reason, but every time someone clicks like, social approval indicator. Every time someone tags you in a photo, social approval indicator. So now you have inside this app, every time you click on it, indicators that other human beings are thinking about you.

Sometimes they're not there, sometimes they are, it's like a slot machine. But how does that affect the person hitting the like? It affects the person getting the like. Getting the like. They want the richest possible stream of social approval indicators coming at you from your network.

That makes it almost irresistible to click on that app to see what's going on. I mean, that's just pure psychological vulnerability. There's no reason for there to be like buttons on these things. Original design of social media was not so two-way. You would post things that people could read. They added that because you get social approval

and they get the tagging so you could get social approval indicators. And that plays on this deep seat of psychological vulnerability. Someone is thinking about me and I can get evidence of it if I touch this button right here. That's an incredibly powerful thing and it really shot up their profitability

and their average user minutes once the company started introducing these into their social media apps. I mean the whole experience is engineered to keep you obsessively clicking on this thing and looking at that screen. What about the brain response to this? Because there's a dopamine response which is the same hormone or I mean the same neurotransmitter that is stimulating your brain when you have cocaine or heroin or alcohol or nicotine, right? So how does that play a role in here?

Well, it's the same effect that the famous Xylar experiments with the pigeons pecking on the lever and if they intermittently got food, the way that messed with the dopamine system made them addictively tap in a way that if they knew they'd always get food, they wouldn't. And this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have.

It's not food nuggets, it's likes and tags. But they're not always there. But sometimes they're there. And that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s that can be- Be a skinner, right? Yeah, it's impossible.

It's impossible to ignore. And the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement. Don't give them the treat every time. Make them guess and then keep them coming back. Yeah. There's even rumors, I don't know if it's true, that Facebook for a while was actually purposely introducing randomized delays into giving some of this feedback back just to

make sure that it was a little bit more intermittent. I don't know if that's true, but I want to put it past, given what I've learned. So then there's good science about how they're doing this and the technology that they're using and it is addictive. Yes, it's meant to be. I think it's important to think about the harms of social media, not in terms of just one specific thing. These are very complex systems.

Humans are very complex. The human body, the human mind is very complex. So if we approach it as if there's just one silver bullet, we're not going to get anywhere, right? If it's just fixing advertising, I don't think that's actually gonna solve the problem necessarily. So I think it's more important to think about it

like you would maybe like a human body and an illness, right? You're not gonna solve your athlete's foot with the same thing that will solve your broken arm, right? So I think there's this, I think some good analogies from the world of medicine in terms of thinking about how social media influences us and how we can intervene and make it better.

So we'll just talk about the problem for a second, which I think is important to just be clear about. One of the primary problems in social media in terms of mental health and anxiety is that it is our, it's becoming our primary source of news and information for a lot of people. It's becoming, you know, even if you still go to the New York Times or you go to Fox News or wherever you get your news from, social media actually is a certain type of filter on the news. And more than half of American adults get news from social media today. And social media posts tend to be negatively valence when it comes to news.

We actually tend to respond more immediately to news that is negatively emotionally valence. So stuff that is outrageous, missing context, anger inducing, disgusting, we actually tend to we tend to respond to that most, most quickly and immediately. And then it's a really good signal for algorithms to track, right. And if you just if you build a basic engagement algorithm that's trying to track what people are interested in, you know, this actually goes back to traditional news. If it

bleeds, it leads. Algorithms have figured that out, right? If it makes you, if it gets you stuck on the item, you are going to keep responding to it. That's right, is that why I get so many Gorilla videos? Maybe, perhaps. I love it, actually. Totally, Charlie.

And I wanna calibrate that, we've been with these tools for a little bit now, long enough And I wanna calibrate that like, we've been with these tools for a little bit now, long enough, I think in some ways to start to see new versions of slightly more kind of healthy algorithmic curation that have begun to be, that have tried to keep you happy and not keep you depressed and sad and doom scrolling. But we have all worked for it, doom scrolling, right?

Like it's like, everyone knows what that is, everyone has done it at this point in time. It's a strange new pathology that has no clinical reflection yet, but it's something that we absolutely feel. And I think that when we are exposed to too many of these negative stories, too many of these negatively valenced posts,

it does create a sense of learned helplessness, right? Which is when we feel a stressful situation consistently and repeatedly, we basically start to believe that we can't control the situation, and we can't actually respond situation and we can't actually respond and we can't do anything to solve the world's problems. And that's really problematic, right? Like that's a problem in itself.

We need to feel like we can actually tackle the problems that we're facing. And if social media has given us this huge new body of available problems and issues, if we are feeling helpless to solve those issues, then that's a recipe for extreme depression. Right, it's a recipe for disaster in terms of our mental health.

And that's really important. Let me think about what's the genies out of the bottle, right? And our identities, our beliefs, our, you know, it's like, I can't think of any better analogy than the matrix. I feel like we're all plugged into the matrix and we like, need to fricking unplug

so we can actually have a sense of what's true and real. And we don't even know where to go to find out what the truth is anymore. It's a little bit disorienting for me. It's disorienting for me, and I feel like I'm fairly well educated, fairly well read. Yeah.

You know, I pay attention, I travel all over the world, I meet all sorts of people, I listen to different perspectives, and it's like, you know, what actually is true? And what is actually a person to do as they're trying to navigate their life and figure out, you know, how to make sense of the world. And in a way, social media has helped us

make nonsense of the world. And how do we start with sense-making again? How do we deal with these digital technologies that we have now? Is there a way to sort of put the genie back in the bottle? And I want to eventually get to artificial intelligence where the genie is not quite fully out of the bottle yet. And what do we got to do?

It's a scary genie. It's like a, it's a little pinky out of the bottle right now. Yeah, so I think focusing on the issue of sense making is really important. So in studying this book, I kept on, so this book is actually a history book. You want to get through the first half of it. It's, I go straight back to every previous media disruption

in history that I go back as far as the printing press, trying to understand what, you know, basically what happens when you increase people's ability to see knowledge, share knowledge, and be emotionally excited by knowledge. And every single major media technology has had a tremendous influence on our species. And so, yeah, starting about halfway through the book, it goes back to Martin Luther and the printing press

and like what happened when we were introduced to the printing press. And it turns out the printing press was arguably the most violent invention introduced to continental Europe in up until that point in history, right? It caused huge schisms within the existing power hierarchies. It totally upset society and it caused about 100 years of civil wars. The printing press. The printing press. Literally printing press. Those books, right? And like you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't at the end of that point have

said, no, we don't want that printing press. We don't want all these books. We want people to go back the old ways. But there was this deep, deep dark period in which people were deeply confused. You know, in that era, a tolerance, like tolerance, the idea of tolerance was actually a sin. Like it was actually a sin. So if someone was of a different political persuasion or religious persuasion, it was kind of your job to go up to them and like confront them about it

and or be violent with them about it, right? So you think about how disruptive that was to go from one way of being to another way of being in the world. We don't tend to think about information technology as being such a disruptive or violent thing, but it absolutely can be. The reason is because it confuses us. It confuses us. It gives us access to huge new models of moral reasoning about the world. And it also exposes us to a tremendous number of possible outrages. And many of those outrages are real,

many of those outrages are not real. And to figure out the differences between what is worthy of our attention is really part of the problem that we're facing right now. So when we talk and just kind of like lean towards some optimism towards solutions here coming back to the beginning of our conversation, I can't emphasize enough how problematic misinformation is. And we have, as Americans, I think we have a healthy skepticism of authorities.

You know, we have this kind of anti-authoritarian disposition where it's like, don't trust the government, don't trust the experts. Like we can figure it out on our own. That's like a very American disposition, right? But there is a real difference between authoritarian speech, right? And mediated speech, right? And mediated speech, right? Which is like speech and information that comes from

media entities that are built to help try to parse truth from falsehoods. And they don't always get it right. They're not always gonna give you the exact right result, the exact right truthful item, but it's gonna be oftentimes much better than your average person trying to figure it out by doing their own research online.

And so that's, you know, we do need to find these proxies, these middle layers of proxies. And you can, you know, it's, we're actually lucky insofar as good information has a fingerprint. And what I mean by that, by good information, I'm not just saying like good information, I'm saying that like good information, like accurate information has a fingerprint. It tends to be well-cited. It tends to come, it tends to go through a few of these layers of refutation and peer review

and people that are trying to figure out whether or not it's accurate, right? And we can look at that in how the information travels, right? If it's one person's idea that just comes to you directly, it's less likely to be true than one person's idea that has gone through three or four cycles, other people calling bullshit on that idea, trying to actually figure out if it's true or not, and call it because we were much better at identifying the, the failures of other people's logic and the failures of other people's assertions than we are our own.

So, and that's really the point of free speech in the first place is so that we can share and we can criticize each other openly and improve the available knowledge for everyone. Yeah, I mean, it's increasingly disturbing to hear censorship happening and free range of opinion not being heard and debate being shunned. And I think, wow, like, what kind of society we're in, we're burning books, you

know, or I just watched the Ken Burns documentary US and the Holocaust. And it was just, you know, I thought, you know, gee, you know, we had this sort of, this sort of relatively new rise of division in society, but it always existed. And it's always sort of been a threat in America, right, the north and the South, the slave owners and the not, the sort of isolationists and the globalists in America. And I think it's, you know, we're sort of, I think, always prone to this, but you know, how do we find the, you know, as sort of Abraham Lincoln talked about, how do we find the search for our better angels, you know, how do we,

how do we get to our better angels who are going to inspire us instead of take us down the path of the worst aspects of humanity, you know, there's been war and violence and rape and destruction for millennia. But, you know, I feel like human consciousness, it seems like it's slowly getting better. But it's in again, these these forces that are played now in technology are seemingly taking us really out of any age of enlightenment that we were in for any period of time. How do we find our way back from that? Yeah. So I think that's really it's really important to recognize that.

And this is why I kind of come back to the misinformation point a lot is because the feeling right now is one of deeply, there's threats everywhere, right? It feels that we feel deeply threatened by the world, by our political enemies, our ideological enemies, our enemies to the identities and the people that we hold dear. That is something that social media does very well is serve us threats more than it would, more than traditional media would. It's like social media would focus on a single threat at a time, and now social media has exposed us to basically infinite threats, always. It's like if you're worried about something, you can find an anecdote that represents that deepest fear.

And social media is very, very good at serving us up those algorithms that prioritize certain content over other content and our own biases play together to actually make us see these threats more apparently than otherwise. And something strange happens when we are exposed to a lot of threats, right? We actually seek, there's this, there's this,

basically this kind of tribal switch that happens in our brains, in which we start to affiliate ourselves more strongly with, with in-group and out-group behavior. So we look for, we look for safety and identities that, uh, that feel, uh, that feel like they are more like us. Right. And we look to denigrate the out groups that are threatening. Right. And if you, you know, if you want, if you're curious about why there's so many hashtag identity, this hashtag, identity, that on social media, that is actually one of the reasons why is because everyone feels a little bit threatened on social media and they feel like I need to declare my

allegiance. I need to protect the things that hold that I hold dear in this space. I think it really does come down to this fundamental idea of threat that if we're exposed to too many threats, then it actually causes us, it causes these basic tribal emotions to increase dramatically. And there's some decent research showing that this J Van Bevel at NYU has a great book called The Power of Us, which I'd recommend on this topic as well, which shows how much identity shapes our behavior, particularly online. It really does influence our, how we see others.

It's like a lens that we suddenly are putting over our eyes and like, I see you and you are not, you know, you're not, you're not this, you're not just a human. You are that you are now a Republican, you're now a Democrat, you are now, and you will be, these identities become far more instantaneously salient to us because we're looking at everything through the lens of social media. And these, and unfortunately it doesn't just stay on social media. That's, I think, one of the biggest problems here. It's like these narratives stick with us. They follow us to our dinner tables, to our congregations.

They follow us everywhere we go. And if the threat is pernicious enough, then if it's scary enough, then it will keep running a little process in the back of your head, and it will kind of infect most of your interactions. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy

it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.

Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views

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