The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - What Screen Time Is Really Doing to Your Body with Manoush Zomorodi

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

We hear a lot about how screens affect our mental health, but time spent on computers and smartphones is having just as much of an impact on our physical health — from brain fog and weakened core muscles to changes in our posture, our sleep, and even the shape of our eyes. As part of our series on spring cleaning your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie sits down with journalist and podcast host Manoush Zomorodi, author of Body Electric, to explore how modern tech habits are affecting us physically, and what steps we can take to protect our health in a world where screens aren’t going away anytime soon. Experts Mentioned: Manoush Zomorodi, journalist, author, and host of NPR's TED Radio Hour Dr. Keith Diaz, exercise physiologist and Florence Irving Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center Dr. Maria Liu, Professor of Clinical Optometry at UC Berkeley and founder of the Myopia Control Clinic Dr. Rick Neitzel, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan  Dr. Peter Strick, Thomas Detre Professor and Chair of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Dr. Sahib Khalsa, psychiatrist and neuroscientist at UCLA  Resources Mentioned: Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being, by Manoush Zomorodi (2026) Body Electric, a six-part podcast series by Manoush Zomorodi (National Public Radio, 2023) "Breaking Up Prolonged Sitting to Improve Cardiometabolic Risk: Dose-Response Analysis of a Randomized Crossover Trial," by Keith M. Diaz et al. (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2023) "The Mind-Body Problem: Circuits That Link the Cerebral Cortex to the Adrenal Medulla," by Richard P. Dum, David J. Levinthal, and Peter L. Strick (PNAS, 2019) Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, by Manoush Zomorodi (2017) Related Episodes: "How I Stopped Fearing Boredom" "How Our Screen Habits Impact Our Stress Levels" "Smell, Taste and Touch: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses" “Sight and Sound: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. If you follow the research on the science of happiness, you've probably heard a lot about the connection between screen time and well-being. It's a problem that I think about a lot and a topic that we talk about on the show a lot. But lately, I've found myself wondering, what if we're missing the bigger picture? We hear, you know, the mental health epidemic, growing rates of depression and anxiety has to do with the content that we get, right? This is journalist Manusse Zamerooti. Some of you may also know Manusse, as the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. This idea that we are taking in outrage, headlines, violence, also comparing ourselves to other people, that it is purely sort of a psychological thing, that it's something going on in our heads. Manush says that given all the focus on how technology affects our minds,

it's easy to overlook another important part of the story. What we're not taking into account is what we actually do with our bodies when we are spending all that time taking in that content. We are sitting and looking at a screen for long stretches of time. And we now know that the average American adult spends 12 and a half hours consuming media a day. And, I mean, that's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours.

That's incredible. Yeah. Right? And I feel like for me, like there was one day where I got into a cat, and there was a screen in front of me on the back of the seat. I got out and I went into an elevator and there was a screen in the elevator. I got out of the elevator and checked my phone and then check into the building on another screen. And it just made me think like my entire life is now mediated by screens.

I don't feel well. My eyes hurt. I have a headache. I'm on my butt. A lot of the day. I do have a backache. Is that coincidence? I'm not really sure if that's coincidence.

And then after sitting all day, I go home and all I really want to do is go lie on the couch and look at my screen again. Maybe two screens, actually, because maybe I'll watch a show while I'm looking at my screen. And we've all heard like sitting is the new smoking and all of those things. But this sort of deep exhaustion that I think many of us are feeling felt very like in my bones. You know, yes, I get exercise. but that didn't seem to be making that much of a difference. And so that made me want to understand how are my tech habits affecting my physical health?

And of course, that has a lot to do with your brain health as well. But I don't think we think about it as a full system often enough. These tools are very powerful, and they really are having a huge effect. So in today's episode, another in our series on spring cleaning your well-being, Manoche will share some of my favorite takeaways from her new book, Body Electric, the hidden health costs of the digital age and new science to reclaim your well-being. I am not anti-tech, by the way. I don't know if that's come across.

I love this stuff. But too much of a good thing, right? Like, that is the problem. My biology was not built to be doing this nonstop as much as the tech is happy to comply. Get ready to hear more about how you can enjoy your tech without all the crappy side effects. right after these messages from the Happiness Lab sponsors. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. These days, we think a lot about how screens affect mental health. But podcaster and tech journalists, Manus Zamoroti,

argues that we may be missing an even bigger piece of the puzzle, how screens affect our physical health. It's estimated 500 million people around the globe are going to have a chronic illness by the end of this decade. It's going to cost governments $27 billion a year. We know we have higher rates of obesity. The rates of diabetes and young people have doubled over the past 20 years. We hear about colon cancer on the rise and young people under 50 as well.

We also hear about people just feeling like they can't concentrate anymore, that they are so tired. And in this weird sort of like, sure, we can call it burnout, but I think it's just a sense of all we want to do is crawl under our desks and go asleep a lot of the time. And so I want to be like, why don't we feel so crappy? Like, what is going on? And honestly, you know, for many of us, like the pandemic, that was the moment for me. And I think it was because everything went to a screen. It wasn't just work on the screen. It wasn't just our social lives. It was just everything. And all I knew was that I was very lucky. I was in a safe place. I had plenty of food. I was with my family. And yet I felt like that. total crap at the end of the day. And I just could not understand what was going on in my body. And then we saw it too, rising rates of anxiety, sleeplessness. You know, sure, a lot of that had to do with the headlines. But a lot of it was people who felt like, how is this possible that I feel so bad when all I'm doing is sitting in front of a screen. And so talk a little bit about why our bodies are such a bad fit with this environment you've talked about where we're sitting all day watching screens. Like in our office, we come home, we plop on the couch. What's so different about what we

were built for. Well, it was interesting to go back into like the literature. So the book is named after the Walt Whitman poem, Body Electric, where he speaks of the body electric and this idea that there's this vivaciousness and pleasure in the human body when it is functioning as it should. And then he and lots of other writers at the time start to observe the clerk, you know, the guy, the scribe, sitting at the desk and this idea that he walks home and he is of chalky face and slight stature. And so we saw very early on as labor went from being a very physical thing to be more of a mental thing, that it started to affect people's vitality, that it started to affect their basic physical health. That's what I wanted to understand. I was like, first of all, why is sitting so bad?

Because I figured like, oh, well, maybe it's because you're not burning calories. You know, I wasn't really sure. And what I ended up learning from a physiologist that I reached out to, Keith Diaz, was that when we sit, we actually, this is an image that's going to stay with you, Lori, sorry, in advance. When we sit, we basically kink our bodies at our knees and at our waist like a garden hose, right? So imagine a garden hose. You know that kink that there is and then things get backed up there. So that's what's happening in our bodies. Blood and fluid are getting backed up. And we need that constant stimulation of our leg muscles for numerous reasons. One is that without that, we don't flush out the fats and sugars that can build up in those leg muscles. And so that's

where you start to see rising rates of diabetes. You start to see higher blood pressure. And then I started to find out about another relatively new topic, which is something called interoception. This is what one of the neuroscientists I spoke to. He's also a psychiatrist, Sahib Khalsa, who's now at UCLA, he described it to me as like your inner selfie, essentially. Like your body is sending you signals all day long. Some of them you don't even recognize, right? Like, it might tell you to take off your jacket because you're sweating or you're hungry. Go get a snack.

And what happens when we don't listen to those signals, right? You get cranky because you forgot to eat or all. of these things. And so my theory was being on screens all day, I would get up and I'd be like, oh my God, I haven't gone to the bathroom in five hours. What is wrong with me? Why is my foot asleep? And I didn't even notice the sense of being almost disconnected from our physical selves. Because there's so much going on on our screens. Like my senses are completely overwhelmed and taken by everything that's coming in off the screen. No wonder I can't pay attention to the fact that like, oh my God, my back is killing me or my arm should not be in that position

for that long. So this sort of disconnect between what our bodies need in order to function is completely mismatch with technology, which it can go all day long, plug it back in, upgrade the operating system, it's ready to go. And as much as I wish sometimes that I was as efficient as my technology, I'm not. I'm just a human. And I'm just a human. And I I need breaks and breaks need to be part of the strategy, not a reward. And so this problem that you've talked about with interception makes it hard for us to realize what we need to do when we need this moment of rest. What's the kind of fatigue we're experiencing now and how do we get it wrong when we try to

solve for it? So I don't know about you, but for a long time, I just thought, well, I just got to get it done. Like, I just, I mean, I'll just keep working and, you know, I'll put in four hours and get that report finished. And that, I think, leads us to that sense of like, I'm working really hard, but why do I feel like I'm actually not getting anything done? Or that sense, like, I nailed it yesterday, and then you come back and you read something that you did and you're like, this is a piece of crap, actually. This is really bad. So this idea that productivity comes with grinding through and just keeping at it and working hard really speaks to me personally as a type A good girl who,

wants to get the job done so she can move on to the next thing on the list. It was a really hard personal, I'm still learning this lesson, Lori, that actually my best work and my happiness, to be honest, and my sense of enjoying life on a daily basis means that I need to build in breaks. And this idea of really sensory resets, and I just, you know, had to learn the hard way that often what I need is a boring walk. It's just that simple. And I always feel better and I always come up with my best ideas and my back stops hurting and I do my best work until the next time that it's time to take a break. And that is painful for me and it's a lesson I teach myself every single day. I just have to trust the process. I know this works. I know from a scientific perspective it works. I know

from a personal perspective it works. It seems silly when you say it out loud. You know, well, you got to take breaks. Like, well, yeah, duh. But that's not the world we've built around us. And so I think of it as almost having to make sure we get into that negative space that we have crowded out. The screens around us are obviously not going anywhere anytime soon, which is why Manuche wants to understand how we can live with them in a way that doesn't make us feel absolutely terrible.

Of course, sensory resets can. help. But in a culture that rewards constant productivity, taking breaks can seem counterintuitive. So how do we actually build in movement when we're expected to sit in front of a laptop all day? This was the question Mnuch was wrestling with when she came across the research of Dr. Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center. Keith is obsessed with trying to understand what is the least amount of movement that the body needs in order to function. well in order to clear out the glucose and the fats and keep your body and your mind sort of functioning properly. But he's also like a realist. He knows that a lot of us for our jobs,

we have to spend a lot of time seated and looking at his screen. So he made it his mission to try and figure out what was the minimum amount of movement we could do that our lives wouldn't kill us at the end of the day, wouldn't lead to diabetes and blood pressure and cardiovascular issues, all those things. And what he found in his lab was really interesting. It was five minutes of very gentle movement every half hour of sitting largely offset the harms of those long stretches of sedentary time. That's kind of a surprising result because it's actually not that much time, but it's also surprising in a different way, which is it's probably more frequent than I think a lot of us think. I always had the sense of like, oh, I need to take the super long walk one time in the day and then I'll spend 10 hours doing podcasting on my chair and that will be okay. Well, let's talk about that. So essentially what he said is if you work out or you take that one long walk, that's basically like 4% of your day. And that means that there are still very long periods where you are not moving. You are sedentary. You are looking at a screen. If you then go on to sit for the rest of the day, it doesn't matter. They have found in study after study after study that even if you work out in the morning or you do a workout late at night, if you do

don't break up those long periods of sedentary screen time, then you are putting yourself at risk for serious health harms. And then I was like, oh, but what about standing desks, Keith? And he's like, yeah, sorry. Actually, studies are now showing that, like, if you stand for two hours a day, if that's a way to get yourself moving, great. But standing alone can actually be shown to have problems in terms of cardiovascular health and very caracons. post veins. So it's actually might be worse. I was like, oh, great. I know. It's so annoying. Okay, but here's the good news. When he was talking about gentle movement, I'm talking gentle movement. So I went to his lab and joined the study just to see what it was like. So I had one day where it was

like kind of a typical day where I sat at my laptop and I worked for eight hours straight. And I had a lunch break at my desk, which sadly used to be true. And I had some bathroom breaks. And that was pretty much the end of it. And I literally fell asleep twice during the day and crawled onto the subway and went home and went to bed early. And I was hooked up to like glucose monitors and oxygenation monitors and all of these things. And then another day, someone would tap me on the shoulder every half hour and I would go and walk on the treadmill. Two miles per hour, Lori. So like a stroll. Like not, I'm not talking about breathless here. I'm talking about like walking. Walking. Walk. Yes. Yeah. I could have just marched in place. And at first I was annoyed. I was like, well, this is very disruptive. But I did feel better. I stayed awake all day. I didn't need the sweater that I had packed to deal with the AC that was blasting. And actually, I didn't get as much work done. But the work I did, the quality was so much better. I didn't need to go back the next day and revise it. I didn't need to remind myself what I had achieved. It was just like on point. You know, know what I'm saying? Oh, and I should mention my blood sugar dropped by 40% compared to the other day. Wow. Wow. My blood pressure was down 5%. My fatigue levels and my moon levels and concentration levels. They fell off the charts on the day I sat all day. They stayed incredibly level throughout the day on the day that I took the breaks. So I had the data. I saw it and I felt it. So when that

happened, I was like, dude, I am bought in. This clearly works. But are people actually going to do it. And Keith was like, yeah, I know. That's the problem with these lab studies is like, we can figure out the best. But if no one can do it, then like, what does it even matter? Right? So I was like, well, let's find out. Maybe people can do this. But what happens when you try to take a break every 30 minutes in the real world, filled with real bosses and offices and deadlines? Is the kind of routine Manus is describing actually sustainable in real life? We'll tackle that question. when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break. Harry Styles, live in London, England at Wembley Stadium.

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Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. all the time disco occasionally available now. Podcaster and journalist Manus Samarodi argues that we need to spring clean our body's relationship with technology. Before the break, we were talking about Manusia's lab-based work with physiologist Keith Diaz, which found that we can counteract the physical effects of sitting in front of screens by taking a five-minute movement break every half hour. But does that intervention work for real people, working real jobs in the real world?

Fortunately, Manush's role as a radio host gave her access to a huge group of willing participants. So we put out the call to public radio listeners, and he did it properly this time, a proper clinical trial with 23,000 people enrolled. They had to shut it off after that. It was too many people. People were like, please help me. I need to feel better. We had three cohorts. So you could try to go for the gold standard, which was five minutes every half hour. You could go for five minutes every hour or you could even do five minutes every two hours. And we weren't able to obviously monitor everybody's glucose levels or their blood pressure, etc. And although we couldn't mimic the exact, you know, conditions as in the lab, we had surveys that went out constantly all through the day. But it was amazing. We had Uber drivers signed up, teachers. We had nurses, lawyers, you name it, across the board.

You know, because screens don't discriminate. So physically moving throughout the day made people on average between 21 to 28 percent less tired. Fatigue levels dropped. In terms of mood and happiness, again, that stability. In terms of productivity, it actually didn't get worse. It even went up a little bit. 4% on average went up. So, you know, maybe not huge, but the sense of all those interruptions.

It didn't take. I think that's what we're all worried about. We think like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to have like a whole less episode done at the end of the week because I'm taking these breaks. But that's not what you were seeing. No, exactly. The fear of you're like, well, if I'm interrupted all the time, how am I going to get any work done? And actually, that wasn't the case. People would say they'd come back from one of these breaks and they knew exactly what they needed to get done. They were focused. They were more efficient. And I think that's really interesting to me that you can spend less time on your screen and simply be more efficient. And they said things like just lifting my legs, I would start to feel my mood improve. They would say things like, you know, how did they get people to do it? And in their office, they'd be like, I'm in this weird clinical trial. You want to try it with me? And that sort of gave people permission to have a walking meeting or be standing on a Zoom call and shuffling side to side while they talk to each other. You know, it's for science, Lori, right? Or like one woman was like, it was our busiest time of the year.

And I was pulling like 15 hour days. It was like the final sales push. She had her best sales quarter ever. Like the proof was in the pudding. And then, of course, a lot of young people who said, I don't have a choice. Like, there are some professors at college who make sure we get breaks during our three-hour lectures, but there are others who don't. And they said, I see the difference in how I learn during the ones where I get to take breaks, codify the knowledge that I have taken in. And actually, you know, we stuff our brains full of information.

But these breaks also help people think, like, what did we talk about in the world? that meeting. What are the next steps I want to take? How do I make the most of the information that I took in? And that is a full-body experience, right? I think this is so critical because I think this is just another domain where our minds lie to us. I'm picturing myself trying to do the experiment that you were talking about and having a person come tap you on your shoulder and be like, all right, it's time to go now. If I sit a little alarm on my phone of like five minutes, take a break, my sense is like, I'll be in flow doing some work for something and I'll be annoyed. I'll be like, No, I want to keep working.

And my brain just cannot compute. They're like, no, no, take a break, walk around. You'll get back to it faster and do it better than if you didn't take the break. And so how do we convince ourselves, like our slave driving minds that we'll need these little breaks? Yeah. So that was really interesting. What people found was they started, the number one way they started was using a timer, right, to remind themselves because they wouldn't remember to take the break. You'd forget.

You'd just forget. Yeah. Exactly. But what ended up happening is their bodies started reminding them. After a certain amount of time, they started to build that sense of interoception. I just was talking to some researchers who are studying how circadian rhythms can affect motivation. So your body literally will create a clock in you to be like, you whohoo, time to get up and move. You can't concentrate anymore. I love that. That like even if our monkey brain is like, I don't want to get up and move. your body will be like, I'm compelling you right now because I need this and we can start to hear it. But also, I think there's something to be said like, if you're in flow, fine, so skip a break. This is like skipping one break's not going to make that big a difference. And the people who actually succeeded and saw benefits did four breaks a day, five breaks a day. It wasn't like

16 breaks a day. And I think to me, like we can look at clinical data. We can talk about gold standards and science. But honestly, the best movement is the one you take, right? So like, if you take one break in the middle of the day, amazing. Start there. If you take eight and that works for you, awesome. We are setting the bar pretty low here and it has outsized effects. That's what, for one, something that is free, that's easy to do that doesn't take that long actually has a huge impact and is good for you and makes you feel good? That seems unbelievably surprising to me and exciting. And so as we take this exciting news and engineer more movement back into our days, we also have to address the specific sensory organs and the parts of our bodies that are under digital assault.

Were you kind of surprised when you started to learn the work about how much digital life is reshaping all our sensory organs? Yes. I think I subconsciously and many of us subconsciously, knew that something was happening, but we always think like, oh, well, it's just me. I'm the weirdo. And it's not. I mean, we now know that, for example, one out of three children are near-sighted, meaning they can see close but can't see far. And you think, like, huh, we must be genetically passing that on to our kids. No, that's not why. It's because of our technological habits. So I reached out to people who are studying things like this, like Dr. Maria Liu at Berkeley, who literally has been studying what happens to the shape of our eyeball when we spend lots of time

looking at a screen, doing near work. And the eyeball, your body wants to help you. That's what I have learned as we go along. If you're like, I need to look at things that are really close to me all day, your eyeballs will be like, I got you. And they'll form a shape. that helps you do that all day long. Trouble is when you're back in class or you go to drive a car or you go to the movie theater, you will not be able to see very far because your eyes are like, well, we don't do that anymore. So that is fascinating to me. And you hear like the 2020-2020 rule like for every 20 minutes of sitting 20 feet into the distance for 20 seconds.

She's like, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but that is simply not. Enough. So she says what you really need to do is get, if you can, it all comes back to every half hour, Lori. Honestly, every single person I talk to about every part of the body, it's every half hour. She ideally would like you to go outside every half hour and look in the distance at a horizon. I was like, can I look out the window? She said, no, because your peripheral vision will know that there are walls. Like you need to get the full, yes. You need the full distance. Also, when you go outside, even on a cloudy day, you get sunlight, right? They don't quite know exactly what it is about sunlight, whether it's the vitamin D, whether it activates serotonin, the happiness hormone. In animals,

they have seen different kinds of retinal cells that actually produce serotonin when they're exposed to sunlight. So the bad news is if you're an adult and you're already near-sighted, hello, that's me. Uh, sorry, too bad. But the good news is your eyeballs are still growing and forming even into your 30s. So if you are a young person, you can still take breaks. You can still stop the myopia from happening to you. They did a study in China where they made kids go outside for two hours a day instead of the usual half hour for their recess. And they saw a drop in nearsightedness in kids. So going outside and playing isn't just to get your yias out. This is so you can see because higher rates of nearsideness or myopia has been linked to blindness. It's been linked to

glaucoma later in life. These are serious issues that we don't like to think about what happens decades down, but we're living longer and we want to live well, right? So we need to protect basic sensory organs. I love this recommendation to get sunlight, but I'm sure there are people listening right now who work in some huge office and are thinking like, okay, yeah, I would love to get sunlight, but I'm not going to head down in my big elevator and my huge size scraper every 30 minutes. I think there's also this worry that if you're getting up to leave all the time, either to go outside or just to get your legs moving, that your boss or your coworkers are going to be looking at you like, what is wrong with this person? So any advice for wanting to take these breaks?

Well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we used to say, like, I'm just going to pop outside for a smoke. That used to be completely normal. And no one would bat an eye if you were like, I'm just going to go out and grab a cigarette. I know that might be shocking to some people now, but that really was normal. So what if you, instead of going to get a smoke break, you were going to get a move break. I'm just going to go take a quick move break. Cool. Okay, see you in five minutes.

That would be great. But also, we need to start at the top, right? Like bosses, you need to know that the research is there, that when it comes to productivity, quality of work, worker engagement and satisfaction, people are not happy right now. There's so much talk of burnout. This is something simple you can do that is not a gift. to your workers. It is actually a gift to your bottom line because what you will see is higher employee retention, better work, and just a happier office from what we understand. Like, maybe there's a meeting and you kick off the meeting with walking around the conference table and sort of giving an update.

Or maybe 60-minute meetings are now 55-minute meetings. You can have that setting in Google Calendar where you build in a buffer of five extra minutes. Or maybe it's okay when you're on a Zoom to turn off your and shuffle side to side if you are not expected to present something on camera. It's these really small changes to cultural norms that we're going to need to have in order to make sure that we bring a little more movement, some more breaks, and optimize the way that we work because it's not working now. That is very clear. It's time for a quick break. But when we return, Manus and I will explore what screen time is doing to the rest of our bodies.

from our ears to our spines to even our lungs. And she'll share some simple practical ways to counteract those effects so that we can feel both physically and mentally a little healthier. The Happiness Lab. We'll be right back. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic,

hotel from tripcentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000. Cash. Download the free IHart Radio app. Listen to IHart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you at the show. Kiss all the time. Disco occasionally available now. As a podcaster, I was the most horrified by the section in your book on our ears. How is our technology negatively affecting our ears? Well, it is really interesting. So Rick Nitzel at the University of Michigan has been partnering with Apple to do the largest study of how people are listening these days, essentially. So you can actually join the study on your phone if you want to. And it's not going to come as any surprise to you that we are listening longer and more loudly, essentially. And it seems like in a different way where we have this thing in our ear in a way that we might not have before.

Interestingly, they didn't find any difference between AirPods or earbuds and headphones. There hasn't been any of that. But I know people who wear them all. day long. So there are some people who are wearing them because they're blocking out the world because they need to concentrate or, you know, how many people do I see walking the dog and we're all listening to something or going to the grocery store? It's this sort of ambient music, podcast, news, phone calls, zooms, all the rest of it. We take sound with us wherever we go, which is cool a lot of the time. However, a couple problems here. One is that when we're outside,

we raise the volume because there's construction or a loud car or whatever else. And we're listening at volumes that are much too loud for us. Whereas when I was in my 20s, you know, you'd leave a club and you couldn't hear for a couple hours. People are having more of that like all the time and they're not even noticing. And there's good news and there's bad news when it comes to your ears. The good news is if you take a break and give yourself breaks from sound, your ears will recover. You have a little cilia, those little hairs in your ears, they get flattened, essentially. If you have some quiet time, they will come back to life. However, if they're constantly assaulted, they will die and they will never grow back ever. You don't get more cilia. So there is a concern, you know, will there be

rising rates of hearing disorders, essentially? And what we know is that when you have trouble hearing, that makes you more susceptible to dementia, to falling. You're also just missing out on conversation in life, on hearing the birds, all those other things. So once again, it comes back to giving your body breaks. And so those are our sensory systems. But beyond our sensory systems, we also need to address what technology is doing to our posture, which you've argued has two big physiological effects. One is on our spine and the other is on our lungs.

So let's start with our spine. How is our technology hurting what our spine needs to feel healthy? There's some really interesting new work being done to understand the connection between how we hold ourselves and various organs. So this is Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh, who has found that actually our adrenal glands, those are sitting right on our sides of our stomach, right? And these are the glands that squeeze out cortisol, like when we're nervous, when we're excited, we're like that anxiety, right? squish, squish. It turns out that there is a system that is linked between your abdominal muscles, the adrenal glands, and a section in your brain. So essentially, we're talking about, you know, why do people feel more relaxed after they do Pilates or yoga? This is the science as to why. There is this connection between our organs, our muscles, and our brain. They are all hardwired

and talking to each other in ways that we are just starting to learn, which is fascinating to me. So his whole thing is if you don't use your core and what do you do when you're slumped in front of a screen, you're not using your core, your spine is you're almost in this cashew shape kind of slumped over. Yeah. Exactly. You're compressed in some way. Then there's also the fact that when you're seated like this, you compress your diaphragm.

That's where you want to fill it up with lots of air so you can oxygenate your brain. When you don't take in enough oxygen, you don't feed your brain and there starts to actually be a buildup of CO2, which is when you start to lose focus. You get tired. You get foggy. Can't concentrate. Feel exhausted. Anxious. Any of that sound familiar after a couple hours on a screen?

So familiar. And one of the things I was so struck by in your work is just this connection between like what we're doing with our spines and our breath and our mental health. You know, we talk so much on this podcast and I talk so much with my students. about increasing anxiety in young people. And we often think that, again, that's because of the content of what we're seeing on our screens. We're seeing all this anxiety-provoking stuff. But it might just be the way that we're sitting when we are looking at our phones where we're hunched over that's kind of not allowing us to activate our core muscles that's literally causing us to secrete stress hormones, literally causing our brains to reinterpret how we're breathing as anxiety. It almost made me think,

like, I wonder how much of the anxiety crisis we are seeing in young people we could alleviate if we just got them to sit upright and activate their core muscles. 100%. I mean, that to me is what is so frustrating and exciting about what you're talking about. If that is one simple thing that we can do at a time when we feel so overloaded, you know, between the headlines and the economics and AI, there's a lot to be stressed out about. But if we can feel just the tiniest bit better and really all it is is, is getting up for five minutes and moving around and giving your ears a break from sound and giving

your eyes a break from looking at a screen and really taking some full breaths and making sure we're moving our limbs a little bit more. And if that can give us a reset to get on with our day and maybe feel a little more in ourselves, happier, joyful, like we can concentrate, like we can make better decisions. To me, I like to call that the mind-body tech connection. And, you know, we hear mind-body spirit and we accept that this is a holistic thing. But technology is as much a part of our lives as anything else. It is our lives, right? So how do we manage that sort of cycle that we put ourselves through? We have to be more intentional. It's that simple and that hard. But it also means that we can also be agentive, right? And I think this is the thing we forget. I think sometimes when we think about

our body's relationship with technology. It's like, well, I got to get rid of my phone. But this work is really suggesting there are forms of stress management that just take five minutes every, you know, hour or so. One of the things you talk about in your book is this idea of we can think about posture as stress management that like if you're feeling stressed out, just have this moment of like, let me get up and walk around when I sit back down. Let me make sure I'm not hunched over like a cashew the whole time. This is powerful stuff because it's giving us a way to fight back that we can actually control. You know, I can't control what's happening in this. international news. I can't control the spread of AI. I can't control the bad things happening in the

world. But I can definitely control whether I'm hunched over. I can definitely control whether I hop up from the desk five minutes every half hour to going to get a little movement in. These are things that are within our control to stop the stress cycle. I am smiling right now because how nice is it to think that there is something that you can do? Because I think what you've just talked about is this sort of prevailing sense right now is that like what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to be a person? in the world functioning. And I want to be careful, though, that we don't say, you know, this is on you individual because it feels like much of the responsibility is... We want our structural changes to, but just knowing that I can do something to make a difference in my own body,

or just knowing that I'm not making it worse inadvertently through my choices that I'm not paying attention to, just remembering that I can have inter receptive awareness. That feels really powerful to me. Yeah, I found it so interesting. So that neuroscientist, Dr. Seyip Kalsa, has been studying the effect of floats. Those are those like saline baths where you, you know, pay 45 bucks and then you lie there naked. And the idea is like no sensory input whatsoever to sort of reset your nervous system. And he's like, you can do this at home. Like go into your bedroom, put down the shades, put your phone out of the room. Don't listen to anything. Don't try to meditate. Just try to literally take everything away and just let your muscles relax and breathe and let everything

just sort of be. I was like, what, for five minutes? He was like, actually, no, try to go for 45 minutes once a week. He said, that's a nice goal for you. I was like, okay, thanks. But he was like, we're going and taking in so much all the time. What if you just don't do anything? for 45 minutes a week. I was like, that sounds really nice. So that's not doing anything for 45 minutes. But of course, we all have this time in the day where we are giving our body the natural reset of not doing anything, which is the domain of sleep. We've all kind of heard that blue light is really bad. But you've argued that the culprit might be something else. What do you mean?

Yeah. So I sort of got deep into the data to try to understand. I thought that blue light was the problem too. I was like, okay, so what is it about blue light that does this too? us. And actually, the thinking has changed a lot in the sleep research world. So this idea of blue light being like, you know, espresso for your body before you go to sleep came from one particular small Harvard study where it was a group of undergrads who were looking at iPads at the highest, brightest setting for hours before they went to sleep in the sleep lab. And even they didn't actually miss out on that much sleep. It disrupted some of their sleep, but also like, I don't know, know, if I was looking at an iPad for three hours at the brightest setting, like, that would definitely be a problem. Generally, what they're starting to find is it's not the blue light.

It's the habits that these screens put us into. So, oh, my God, we were watching Mad Men again last night and how much did we want to, like, just keep watching the next episode. That's what Netflix wants us to do. And so what do we do? Let's just watch half of the next episode. Oh, wait, and then we watch the whole episode. And there we are, going to bed, 45 minutes. minutes later, oh, we shouldn't have looked at a screen before bed. No, you shouldn't have stayed up and watched another episode. Like, let's be real. So really, like, what they're saying is it's not really the blue light. And frankly, that light is not that strong. This does not apply to kids. Kids, definitely, their eyes are in a different way. They are changing. They are forming. The light needs to be low at night.

there are some people who are very sensitive to light, in which case, you know, dimming the lights, following the sun is really useful, sort of bringing your body down. But at the end of the day, we have to take a hard look at ourselves in our own habits and not blame the blue light as much as the sirens call of what is going on on those screens. And also, a lot of us are using our technology to self-soothe before we go to bed, right? It is harder to maybe try and do a muscle reliance. relaxation or read a really boring book with a cup of chamomile tea. That just doesn't sound as interesting as scrolling on Instagram and, you know, mindlessly sort of trying to zone out. The problem is also that we use our phones to self-sues when we wake up in the middle of the night. I know I am guilty of this. I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm feeling anxious and I'm like, oh, let me look at my phone. And now I'm looking at my phone and that's going to keep me up. So for the chronic insomniac, like me, who feels like when they wake up in the middle of the night, they need their phone to self-soothed. Their phone is their only friend at three in the morning when no one's talking to them.

Yeah. What's the first step to breaking that feedback, Luke? Well, you've heard it before, right? Don't keep your phone in your bedroom, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I don't ascribe to that. I have elderly parents and I have a kid away at college. I keep my phone next to my bed for emergencies. But I do have it set so that only their calls can come through. So I will not, you know, be woken up by spam. Okay, so I'm going to let you in on my secret technique, which Saip Kausal would say, like, pretend you're in a float, right? while you're lying there and you're awake. I pretend that I'm on a first class airline flight and there's no Wi-Fi on the flight and all I can hear is the rush of the engines and there's nothing I can do. And isn't it great that I upgraded to this bed that lies out flat? I am so lucky. I'm just going to

lie here and just like bask in the luxuriousness and wait for my destination. That is my own sort of personal hack. Mine when I'm doing the right kind of thing is a house. where I imagine that I'm in this one hotel room I stayed at where I could hear the ocean outside. It was this gorgeous hotel room on Puerto Rico where you could hear the waves outside. And I'm just imagining what the waves sound like. That when I'm doing it right and not waking up in the middle of the night to look at Reddit, it works pretty well for me too. Oh, that's nice. That's really nice.

So we definitely need more sensory resets to support our physical and mental health. But Manush says it's not just about five-minute breaks or even a full night of sleep. We also need longer stretches of downtime, time to reconnect with ourselves and make better decisions. In her book, she calls this kind of time the neutral zone. I will say that phrase is not for me. It is from a consultant, actually, a couple decades ago. He's no longer with us who studied how corporations, how did they make it through big transitions? And what he found was that the companies that survived, big upheaval actually didn't rush from like, okay, there's layoffs.

We're reordering. This is what we're doing next. They actually went through this space of sort of absorbing the shock of change, sitting with it before deciding what to do next, sort of taking the time. And in my personal life, I try to think of it that way too. Like there might be times in your life when you feel like you are spinning your wheels a little bit. And actually, this is really important time because we need to give ourselves space to think through what just happened, process it. Start to imagine what could. be next. Maybe it's something that doesn't occur to us straight away. Maybe you need some long, boring walks. Maybe you need a couple months of, you know, just not trying to strategize your way out of a situation, just sort of allowing your brain to make sense of the world you're in, the place you're going. We think we can process as quickly as our technology can, and we cannot. And, you know, Claude and ChatGPT, they might try to talk you into doing something. And they might sound really convincing, but at the end of the day, that gut feeling, there's a reason why it's called

the gut feeling. The gut and the brain are connected. There is a wholeness, a whole body sense that we need to tap into in order to make sense of our lives and figure out how we go forward. Technology isn't just affecting our minds. It's also shaping our bodies. The way we sit, scroll, stare, and listen can significantly impact how we feel. But as we learned from Manushe today, small changes like a boring walk or a quick sensory break can make a meaningful difference in our physical health and our well-being. If you'd like to learn more about how to improve your body's relationship with technology, be sure to check out Manusia's new book, Body Electric,

the hidden health costs of the digital age and new science to reclaim your well-being, which is out on May 5th. If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at Happiness Lab at pushkin.fm. or leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, Dr.Larysantos.com.

That's d-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-S-A-N-T-O-S dot com. Next week, we'll continue our season on how to spring-clean your well-being, with one of my favorite episodes from our Happiness Lab archives. This time, we'll look at what happens when life gets too crowded. We'll share some evidence-based ideas for clearing out your busy schedule and making room for what matters most. I just taught two classes and had two hours of office hours. All I'm thinking about is, when am I going to drink water?

When is my next nap? You're just literally, it feels like survival. That's all next time. On the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.