The Easy, Simple Fix for Exhaustion, Foggy Brain, and Back Pain | Manoush Zomorodi

Manoush Zomorodi https://www.manoushz.com/ is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and host of NPR's "TED Radio Hour, https://www.ted.com/pages/ted-radio-hour" where she explores fascinating ideas with the world's greatest thinkers. She is the author of a new book called BODY ELECTRIC: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250411204/bodyelectric/. You can also subscribe to her newsletter, Manoush Minutes https://www.manoushz.com/newsletter. In this episode we talk about: What constant screen time is doing to your brain and body Why feeling tired all the time might not be what you think A simple shift that could boost your energy and focus The hidden ways tech is messing with your physical health What you're missing when you ignore your body's signals Why more productivity hacks might actually backfire Small changes that could make a big difference in how you feel Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here. https://www.92ny.org/event/dan-harris-with-allison-gilbert Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party, or sign up to livestream here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-livestream! Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp: Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/happier https://betterhelp.com/happier. Wix: Ready to create your website? Go to Wix.com/Harmony https://wix.com/harmony. Fatty15: You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com/happier https://fatty15.com/happier and using the code HAPPIER at checkout.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? Here is a question for you. Do you ever feel like shit? Foggy, fatigued, distracted, exhausted, burned out? If so, this episode is for you. It turns out there is a reasonably simple fix that could make a massive difference. Side note, since we did this interview, I've been trying to inject this fix into my daily life, and it has made a big difference for me. My guest is Manoush Zomorodi, who is the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour and the author of a new book called Body Electric, in which she describes a gigantic problem for our society and for all of us as individuals. It's that our relationship to technology

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  is having really deleterious impacts on our health. For years, we've known about the impacts on our mental health, but Manoush is now focusing specifically on the impact on our physical health. Screens are leading to chronic headaches, back pain, diminished sleep, and rising rates of preventable diseases like type 2 diabetes. In other words, our devices are affecting our eyes, our lungs, our posture, and our whole nervous system. It's a real problem. But there are real solutions, and that's why I'm so excited about this conversation, which is coming up in just a minute. First, I just want to say it is very hard to have energy if you have not had enough sleep, which is why, over on the 10% app,

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  we're now going really big on sleep. Next week, we're adding 10 new sleep meditations, and we're going to do a live video session with our Teacher of the Month, Cara Lai, who's going to talk about how to best use meditation to help you sleep. You can sign up for the app by heading on over to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial, if you want to try it before you buy. Also, quickly, I want to say that if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got an event coming up at the 92nd Street Y on May 17. There's a link in the show notes if you want to get tickets. All right, we'll get started with Manoush Zomorodi right after this.

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• 3:23Dan Harris?

  Manoush Zomorodi, welcome back to the show.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  It's so great to be back, Dan. Thank you for having me.

• 3:28Dan Harris?

  It's great to see you and congratulations on your new book.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Thank you. It feels momentous. As you know, birthing a book is hard and exhausting and you want to get it right. And you want to get out of your head and into other people's heads and make sure you say the things they need to hear.

• 3:45Dan Harris?

  Well, we'll put you to the test.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm ready.

• 3:50Dan Harris?

  No pressure, no stress.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  None.

• 3:52Dan Harris?

  We'll at least start with a softball, although all of my questions are going to be softballs, but this is particularly soft. When's your interest in what I believe you call the mind-body tech connection?

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yes, okay, so this goes back a long time, right? For those of us who remember Gen Xers, what life was like before digital times. I think something very significant changed, I say, around 2012. So the iPhone came out in 2007. I didn't get one till like 2009, 2010. Social media started to pick up around then as well. And for me, it was noticing how much the way I used my brain started to change. And this is what my first book was about. I noticed that all the tiny little moments in my day,

• 4:45Speaker 03

  I could fill them. And as an efficient person who likes to be productive, I would fill them. I would check the headlines. I would text my husband. I would make sure I posted on Twitter, which was just at the, you know, coming out at the time. I found that I could smush as much as possible into my day, and yet I didn't feel great. Something felt off. The way I described it was that there was like a sand in my brain that I couldn't quite string things together anymore. I wasn't as creative. And that led me on this sort of journey to understand what were we getting rid of by filling all this time? I used to have time to be bored. And by cutting out boredom from my life, what was I actually

• 5:30Speaker 03

  missing? And I fell down a huge rabbit hole, ended up doing a major project with 20,000 public radio listeners intentionally trying to get bored together. This was in 2015, so a while back now, and learned so much about the brain and a new area of study called mind wandering. And it turns out that boredom can ignite a network in our brain called the default mode. The default mode is when we're doing nothing, or we're folding laundry and our mind begins to wander. And there's new research to support the fact that you can sort of nudge yourself towards something called positive constructive mind wandering. And this is where you tell yourself the story of your life. You come up with solutions

• 6:14Speaker 03

  to big problems in your life. You do your most creative thinking. All these amazing things that start from a place of feeling sometimes not great bored. So in any case, I was going for like boredom, trying to get people to get bored. And I went on to do other projects. One was about information overload. Another one is about our sense of privacy in our lives. And then the pandemic hit. And I, you know, like everything, it all stopped. What I noticed then was a physical response to the pandemic. And I don't mean COVID. I was so lucky. I was safe with my family. I had everything I could possibly have wanted. And yet, this utter exhaustion that I felt, and it wasn't just because of the headlines, it was a new

• 6:58Speaker 03

  kind of fatigue. And I just sort of started to think, like, I don't understand, why am I so spent that all I want to do at the end of the day is crawl from my desk and my laptop over to the couch and then like, stream Netflix and also look at my phone at the same time? And so that sort of led me on a journey to try to understand, were there physical effects of all the time that we spent with our devices? So that brings us back to the mind-body-tech connection. You know, you talk about this a lot on your show, the mind and the body work as one. They are a system. And so when we insert technology into that system, what are some of the effects that come of that? Some might be good, some might

• 7:39Speaker 03

  not be. We hear a lot about mental health issues that people have. But I wanted to understand the physical manifestation of all this time that we were spending on our screens. And that's sort of what this new book is about.

• 7:53Dan Harris?

  So would it be safe to say that your interest began as, what's this doing to our minds and our brains?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:03Dan Harris?

  Is now kind of instantiating, to use a fancy word, in specifically, what's it doing to our bodies?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Precisely. And you won't be surprised to learn that much of what I discovered also led me back to the brain, right? Like, it's that constant conversation that is happening between our mind and our bodies. And I think we've been, not here, I don't think you do this, you talk a lot about this idea of self-regulation physically, but in many places, I think we hear so much about the content that is online, or comparing ourselves to other people, the sort of psychological manifestations of what technology is doing to us. But I think we're missing something very fundamental. And that is this combination

• 8:50Speaker 03

  of sitting a lot and looking at a screen, and how that combination does something extremely disruptive to our ability to even sense what is going in our mind.

• 9:05Dan Harris?

  Right. So if this is a conversation between our minds, our bodies and technology, you can't really isolate one of them. Your book may have the intention to look at our physical health, but it's impossible ultimately to divorce it from our psychological health.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Precisely. That is exactly what I found out. Should I tell you the story of how that sort of unraveled?

• 9:28Dan Harris?

  Yeah, please.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  So I was thinking about this, you know, I was like, what is happening to our eyesight? What is happening to our hearing if we're wearing AirPods all the time? What is happening to like my mojo essentially? Why am I so freaking tired? And then I came across this guy's study. He's a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center. His name is Keith Diaz, and he published a report early in 2023 where he essentially is trying to understand how we can stop sitting from killing us, right? So what is the least amount of movement that we can get away with without our sedentary habits absolutely destroying our health? And what he discovered in his lab was that five minutes of gentle movement every half

• 10:13Speaker 03

  hour was enough to disrupt the harms largely of sitting. So when I heard that, Dan, I was like, wait, what? That's it? Like just five minutes? And when I'm talking five minutes of movement, I'm not talking like burpees or jumping jacks or anything like that. Literally walking like a stroll or standing up and moving side to side right now while you're on a Zoom call. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes slash the risks of prolonged sitting. So that included dramatically lowering blood pressure and blood sugar. In another study, he found that inactive people who traded 30 minutes of sitting for

• 10:54Speaker 03

  30 minutes of movement every day could lower their risk of a premature death by 18%. So we're saying like, just getting more movement in there, especially if you sit a lot all day, that could have huge implications for your health and your happiness. And so I was like, well, I gotta get in on this. So I called them and I was like, I want to join the study. So I went over to Columbia. First, they did a baseline test to understand, you know, what was my baseline glucose levels, oxygenation, the usual amount of exercise that I get on a daily basis. I was wearing all kinds of wearables, collecting all kinds of data. And then I went there for one day and I had like, kind of a typical day at the office.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Came in and I sat for the majority of eight hours working on my laptop. I was allowed a couple bathroom breaks. I got a lunch break, that kind of thing. And I felt really, as you will be surprised, shitty. At the end of the day, crawled back on the subway, made my way home, went to bed early, totally spent. Then I went back to the lab another day and they broke up my time with five-minute walks on the treadmill that was in the corner. And when I say walks, I mean like stroll, two miles per hour, right? And when they compared my physiological data from the day I sat all day compared to the day I took the breaks, it was extraordinary. I am a healthy person. My blood pressure dropped by five points. My blood sugar dropped by 60%.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And my mood and fatigue levels remained level all day long compared to the other day where I literally went like this by the end of the day. And so I just wanted to understand, like, what was that was happening inside my body that created such a big difference? So I started to understand, well, a couple of things Keith explained to me. One is that when we sit, Dan, we can think of our legs and our torso kind of like garden hoses. You know how when you kink a garden hose, you get like the water gets backed up? That's what happens to our blood. So we sort of kink our arteries. And without the stimulation, without the circulation,

• 13:05Speaker 03

  our leg muscles can't do really, really important functions. Those include clearing out blood sugar, clearing out lipids and oxygenating our brain. We literally cannot get enough oxygen to our brain. Combine that with sitting and often we're hunched over, not taking full breaths. What happens when you don't get enough oxygen to the brain? You start to create CO2 and you can't clear it out fast enough. And that is what results in fatigue, that sort of foggy feeling that we have not being able to concentrate. And so very basic biology explains why we feel so exhausted by sitting all day.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  But then I was like, well, where do the screens fit into all of this? And so I started to learn about a new sort of area of study called interoception. One of the researchers I spoke to, he sort of calls it the inner selfie. It's this idea that inside your body is sending you signals all day long. Some of those signals you don't even hear, right? It's like regulating your blood pressure. Your body's going to do that without letting you know, unless something goes wrong. You're going to take off your jacket because your body sends you a note. You're hot, you're starting to sweat, take off your jacket. But what they're starting to understand is that our interoception also, we don't pay attention to it when everything that's on a screen is so much more interesting to us, right?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Like, we don't hear, hey, you're getting really grouchy and tired. And like, whoa, dude, you're getting super anxious looking at all the headlines right now. Or you think you're doing work, but you're actually spinning your wheels. That's the messages that my interoception sends me generally. And I don't hear them, I'm looking at a screen, I'm in my world. So to me, that explained why sometimes I'd close my laptop and suddenly realized I hadn't peed in hours, or that my foot was asleep, or that my back hurt, or that I was low-grade depressed. This was sort of mind-blowing to me. I was like, this is so stupid and so easy.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Literally, if we just move for five minutes regularly throughout our day, we could solve the big mental and physical problems we have in the world. We should do that.

• 15:25Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I think there are two related things there, right? I just want to make sure I understand them. One is that you participated in the study with Dr. Diaz and you saw that in your own life, his macro results were true for you as an individual, that five minutes of movement, very low-grade movement, every half hour prevented fatigue and fogginess and all the other deleterious impacts of non-stop sitting and gorging on tech. The second thing you said is that tech is interrupting our inner selfie, our interoception, our ability to hear the messages our body is sending up to the brain all the time. And I believe what you're saying is those five minutes of movement every half hour

• 16:09Dan Harris?

  restore the interoception and that is what is making us feel better?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So this is relatively new, but there was a study in Germany where they tested people's ability to know what was going on in their body, depending on whether they took breaks or not. And they're starting to show this, right? Most people who are studying interoception are actually looking at how people potentially with anxiety disorders or eating disorders may have their interoception off. Either they're too highly tuned to their interoception in that they don't like the feeling of having their stomach being too full, or they're too sensitive to some of their emotions. And so maybe they need to dial down their interoception. And then there are other people who perhaps it's not high enough, that they're not listening

• 16:56Speaker 03

  to the signals that their body is saying and they breeze through them. There's no right answer for anyone. I mean, the ideal, as we all know, is always balanced, right? Like, listening to the signals that matter, ignoring the ones that maybe don't serve us. But I would argue that not listening to the signs that you're exhausted, fatigued, agitated and uncomfortable and potentially harming your own physical health because you've looked at a screen for three, four, five, six hours at a stretch, that's worth noticing. That has changed the way I interact with my technology, for sure.

• 17:31Dan Harris?

  I buy all of that. I would imagine, though, even if your interoception was perfectly dialed, getting up and moving for five minutes every half hour would have lots of beneficial effects, anyway.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yes, and it goes by different names. So Keith Diaz calls it a somatic check. His point is, like you talk about on the show, do a scan. You know, where are you feeling muscle tension? Where are you feeling pain potentially? Are you breathing properly? What needs resetting? And I think all day long, we're not paying attention to these things that are resetting. And if we were to calibrate them ever so slightly, they could make a huge difference on a daily basis of how we experience the world.

• 18:16Dan Harris?

  I guess what I'm trying to get at, though, is are those five minutes of movement is the primary value, just that we're getting a somatic check and inner selfie, whatever you want to call it? Or that the body just simply needs to move more than we're currently allowing it to do?

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no. So the five minutes per half hour, and I could tell you about the global study trial that we did testing that, that in the lab was purely for biological, physiological indicators. So has there been a massive study about interoception and screens? No. But after I learned more about Keith Diaz's study and moving every five minutes, we put the call out to public radio listeners again, and we asked them, you know, could you do this? Could you add more movement to your life more regularly? And the results that we got there seemed to indicate a growth in higher interoception,

• 19:18Speaker 03

  more understanding of physiological feelings, mental health feelings, fatigue, all those other things.

• 19:24Dan Harris?

  Right, but again, the benefits range beyond more self-awareness. There's also plenty of just straight up physiological motivation that we should have to do this.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  As you know, the medical world, researchers, it's all very siloed, right? And I think what we don't necessarily do, and what I think I am trying to do is to bring some of those disciplines together and to sort of experiment and get people thinking about the different things that we do know about how basic biological systems, ideas about our sensory system, our tech habits, all these different ways we're learning more about motivation and how the body uses that. All these different things that sometimes I think we sense are true. There's not necessarily a prescriptive, medical, lab-tested research about it, but once you bring it all together, we can start to sort of tweak our own habits to find what works better for us.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  That's the direction I'm going in.

• 20:23Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I do want to go deep, as your book does, on the tweaks. I have a million questions, but let me just stay on the level of the problem before we get too deep into the solution. I want to read to you some of the language in your promo materials for your book, which I found bracing. "It turns out screens are literally reshaping our bodies from chronic headaches, back pain, and restless sleep to rising rates of preventable disease. Today's average 19-year-old is as physically active as the average 60-year-old. Rates of type 2 diabetes in young people have doubled." I could go on, but just to hold forth for a little bit on how grave this issue is, I believe you call it the human energy crisis.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  We can add to that, rising rates of colon cancer in people under 50. We are also seeing that three in four American adults have at least one chronic disease. Many of those are preventable, like obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes. We're in the midst of an energy crisis in that, what do you hear most people say? I hear people say like, "How are you?"

• 21:35Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Tired, exhausted. And yes, we can blame that on the news and responsibilities and a world that feels like it's on fire, but I think... The agency or the lack of agency that we feel these days about being able to do anything about that, if we can just do a little something on a daily basis that makes us feel more in our bodies, a little more joy, maybe even out our mood, just a tiny bit, and the answer is as simple as moving, that seems really worth investigating to me.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  I'm tired of feeling tired, Dan, you know? So it felt like something very optimistic and positive, that there are studies, let's get them out of the lab, let's get them into real life, let's test them out, let's do it together as communities, and let's see if we just feel a little bit better.

• 22:38Dan Harris?

  I mean, amen to what you just said, but just to stay again with the problem, the problems range beyond preventable chronic illness, but you also say, and this is another quote, "Specific systems of the body, your eyes, lungs, posture, nervous system, are adapting to and rebelling against our tech-saturated lives." So this isn't that, just that we might be putting on some weight, we might be fucking up our upper spine, our lower spine, we may be screwing up our hearing, our sight, our nervous system, and this runs deep.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think we see it. So let's use eyes as the example. Rates of myopia or nearsightedness have just shot through the roof over the last three decades in young people, in kids. Eye doctors are seeing that children can't see far into the distance as young as three, four, five years old. So as I sort of worked my way down the body, I started to find the specialists who are working in each of these places. And with eyesight, for example, there's an extraordinary ophthalmologist called Maria Lu. She made it her mission to explain that we used to think people went nearsighted

• 23:51Speaker 03

  because it was genetics. It just happened to you. It was bad luck. But she has shown it's actually behavior. So looking at something close to you, like looking at a screen for hours on end, your eyes will comply. They will get better at looking close. Literally, the shape of your eyeballs will change so that you can look close, which I just thought was amazing. And that's why so many people are going nearsighted so much earlier in life. But she also said, here's the thing, if your eyes are still growing, you can stop the clock on that. You can turn it back. Yes, you can add brakes, but also there is new technology that can reshape the eyeball of young people. So they don't have to wear

• 24:34Speaker 03

  glasses. So they can go back to being the proper, healthy shape. So to me, it's like, we gotta get on this, right? We're seeing the trend lines of all the things that are happening to our senses, to our muscular skeletal systems. But there are things we can do. The science is there. We just have to connect the dots.

• 24:56Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Manoush Zomorodi talks about why working out does not cancel out the impact of sitting all day, why standing desks, which I have, are not enough sadly to protect your health. And she gets very practical on a simple habit that really can boost your energy, your focus, and your productivity.

• 25:18Dan Harris?

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• 26:27Dan Harris?

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• 27:11Dan Harris?

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• 27:28Dan Harris?

  Okay, so now let's dive into what we can do. We'll get to the eyes. For people who are worried about that and feeling like I'm dropping the ball on that, I'm not. I'm going to come back to it. That's what we in the business call a tease. All right, well, let's get back to this five minutes of movement every 30 minutes because I have a bunch of questions. I suspect there are many people listening who have the question I'm about to ask, which is a question I have personally, which is, I'm already working out quite a bit. I also use a standing desk. And, you know, I walk around when I'm on the phone calls or, you know, I try to convince my reluctant staffers to not do Zooms, to just do audio, which for some reason they hate, but I sometimes win. And so I'm already doing a lot of this stuff, but I'm still fucking exhausted.

• 28:13Dan Harris?

  So it apparently isn't enough.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  You're definitely ahead of the curve here. So, okay, let's start with what you said about working out. As Keith explained to me, when people work out, that's actually makes up usually only about 4% of their day, right? And it's great that you work out. It's good for your muscles, your cardiovascular system, all the things. However, study after study has shown that if you work out and then sit for the rest of the day, it doesn't make a damn difference. So, sorry about that. Doesn't mean you should stop, but you need to know that your risk of all those chronic illnesses are just as high as someone who doesn't work out if you sit

• 28:55Speaker 03

  for the rest of the day. So, there's that. Then we have the standing desk. Unfortunately, the data is in on that as well. If you stand for two hours a day, let's say, at your standing desk, that has not been shown to reduce potential cardiovascular issues, such as risk of stroke. In fact, it can make things worse. You can get varicose veins, things like that. If the standing desk prompts you to get up and then move, by all means, keep your standing desk. Or if you're, you know, marching in place when you're at your standing desk for five minutes, or if it, people have back pain if it relieves their back pain, go for it. But don't think that a standing desk is going to mitigate the effects, once again, of sitting

• 29:35Speaker 03

  for nine, 10 hours a day. To your point, though, what you're prescribing to your team about turning off the camera on Zoom and moving during calls, hell, yes. Yes, that is the best thing you can possibly do. That would count towards the five minutes per half hour, or, you know, if you're in good shape, do it once an hour, once every two hours. The point is that we have to break up these long sessions of sitting and looking at screens because our biological systems are not, can't just plug us in or upgrade the operating system. These are ancient systems that we're talking about. They are finely

• 30:19Speaker 03

  calibrated to keep us alive. And if you don't give them what they need, which is constant churning of oxygen and blood, they will let you down. Now, why are you so tired? Let's figure this one out. How long are you sitting for, would you say?

• 30:35Dan Harris?

  I almost never sit, except for when I'm doing the podcast. One of the reasons why... I'm thinking about doing less podcasting is I really hate sitting. My back is uncomfortable. I'm a generally fidgety person. I don't like sitting and doing the podcast.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Can we start a walking podcast, Dan?

• 30:52Dan Harris?

  Well, slight digression, probably of local interest only to podcasters, but there's a new podcast that I haven't watched or listened to the whole thing yet. I've just seen the clips on social media. Benny Blanco, the music producer and his friend Dave, I forget Dave's last name, but he was in a TV show also called Dave. That was very funny. I'm fans of both of these guys. I think they're both very funny. They're young guys. And they have a new podcast with Dave's wife. So it's three of them, three hosts, and they shoot it in the house and they're all wearing wireless mics and they move around. So they're like cooking things, just moving from one place. I would love this podcast way more if that was the structure of it because I like to move.

• 31:33Dan Harris?

  So I think another reason, and I don't want to go too deep into my stuff because it's not that interesting for the listener, I fear, but I think another reason why I hit a wall at three or four is I do a lot of writing and I find it just extraordinarily taxing, even when I have movement breaks. And so by mid afternoon, I just can't function.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  And I don't think you should be berating yourself for that. The brain consumes a ton of glucose, 20% of the power that needs to be produced. So there's a section in the book where we talk exactly about that, how as information workers, we are expected to, what do you do? You wake up, you read your email. Should you respond to that? No, you're going to file that one. I'll respond to this one. Actually, no, I'm going to sit on that because I have to call somebody else to figure out what I should respond, right? All these switches that we do throughout the day, that's one form of burning through glucose. And then there's the sustained concentration. You can only really do that for about half an hour.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  I can't tell you how hilarious and like I needed to be hit over the head. Every expert I talked to, from the eye experts to the hearing experts, to the cognitive scientists, half an hour came up over and over and over again. That sort of around that time is how long you can sustain something. Look, everyone is different, right? There's some people who are listening and like, actually, no, I can do definitely an hour, maybe even two. Amazing. Knock yourself out. That's great. But not having a snack, literally putting glucose into your body, not giving yourself enough oxygen because you're bent over. We can talk about how breath affects that, might be why you're so tired.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  You know, you need to go through the checklist of what your body needs. And when we say your body, we also mean your brain.

• 33:25Dan Harris?

  This is all super interesting. I'm going to keep going with my questions.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:30Dan Harris?

  I suspect I am speaking for a non-trivial percentage of listeners when I say that five minutes of movement every half hour actually sounds like a Titanic pain in the ass. It sounds attractive, like I'm down with it. But one of the things I hear from my listeners a lot is, you know, in this era of constant comparison and optimization and hyper productivity and biohacking and all this stuff, like, don't give me more to do. It's too much. I have no question about the outcome of your work and Diaz's work. I do have some questions about how to sanely apply it to our lives. And just let me have one more thing while I'm being a dick. I think there are a lot of people listening

• 34:15Dan Harris?

  who don't have enough control over their schedule and their workplace to be able to operationalize this advice.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  So, first part, I also was kind of bratty when I first read the study, about five minutes every half hour. I was like, that sounds stupid easy. But wait a minute, is this going to get annoying? And it was kind of annoying. I will admit, when I was in the lab, I was like, oh, this is stupid. I only, you know, answered one email and now I have to get back on the damn treadmill again?

• 34:42Dan Harris?

  Right.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  But here's what I saw in that one day, and then I want to extrapolate that out further. So on that one day, what I found was that the volume of work I got done was less, but the quality of the work was so much better. I did not have to go back and revise. I was very clear with what I wanted to get done. And when I checked it off my list, it was done. It wasn't like, ah, this is fine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, my question was exactly the same as yours. Can people actually do this? Let's find out. So I said to Keith, I was like, I don't know if people can do this, dude. I was in your lab and it was great because somebody tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to the treadmill and put me on there at two miles per hour. And that was awesome. So we put out the call.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  We were like, people, do you feel like shit after sitting and looking at your screen all day? Do you want to try this? We're going to open a global clinical trial. So this was a partnership between Columbia and NPR. And clearly, yes, people feel like shit because we had to shut down the signups at 23,000 people. We had every state represented, 74 countries around the world. People really wanted to see, like, could I feel better? And what we asked them to do was to choose a cohort. So they could choose to do five minutes of movement every half hour, every hour, or every two hours. They could do anything. They could march in place. They could shuffle side to side. They could walk around the house and pick up all the dirty glasses and put them in the dishwasher.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  They could do arm movement exercises if walking wasn't an option. We gave them lots of different possibilities. The point was, though, do this regularly. Do a self-survey. Track how your fatigue, your energy, and your ability to focus are affected. And what we found was that 80% of the people who stuck with it, loved it. They were like, this changed my frickin' life. They saw levels from 21 to 28% of less fatigue. The more they took the breaks, the higher levels of getting back more energy. It was sort of proportional to it. But we also found that people who took like four breaks a day, you know, not like stuck

• 36:53Speaker 03

  to it regimentedly, they also had huge breakthroughs and effects. At this point, we couldn't strap on blood pressure monitors or glucose monitors or all of that. But I did hear back from different people who had worked with their doctors. Who also saw a huge change. One of them, this woman Dana, she works in HR remotely. And she had been having all kinds of health issues and also just felt exhausted, like we've been talking about. She decided she was going to be really on this and she worked with her doctor. By the end of the study, her cholesterol issues had started to resolve and she was able to start tapering down her insulin. We've actually stayed in touch.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  She's now completely off her insulin for type 2 diabetes. She's become a health coach at the company where she works. And for her, this little change, she said it was like a, just a little nudge, a little spark. She started to change everything. She started to sleep better. She started to eat better. She started to feel more joy in her life. And she'd been frustrated because her doctor had said to her, you know what? Just take the dog for an hour long walk every morning. That was what she had been doing and her numbers weren't changing. She wasn't feeling great. And just by sprinkling this movement throughout her day, she just sort of kickstarted her life. And we heard other stories from people who said, you know, this helped me lose the last few pounds. This helped me just focus. This helped me be a better parent.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  You know, it wasn't easy. It's not like you suddenly like can change to your second point, which was, well, what about people who aren't in charge of their own schedules? Yeah, that's hard. But I think the key number to me was also that people's productivity did actually not drop. If anything, it rose a little. People would say they'd come back from like their five minutes, able to focus again. They could concentrate or they'd get a really good idea while they were out on their walk. That did not surprise me as someone who has researched boredom. Like a boring five minute walk can fix a lot of problems in our lives. It's really that simple. So. This is such a dumb little hack and yes, it's annoying, but the results are so outsized

• 39:05Speaker 03

  and it's free, by the way. Why not get your boss to give it a try? And we did hear people who said, you know, I told my boss, I was like, listen, I'm going to be doing this. It's an experiment. Is that okay? And one person in sales, their boss was like, actually, yeah, let me know how it goes because maybe we should make a change around here. And so they did. And there were other people, to be fair, who said, actually, we've got this one dude who gets us up off our feet every couple of hours, like yelling, "Fit break, fit break", and running around the office. I was like, okay, that's weird, but great. Awesome.

• 39:42Dan Harris?

  How important is it in these breaks to stop working? In other words, you applauded me, I don't know if it was you humoring me, but you said approving things about the fact that I will take walks while I'm on phone calls. But that isn't going to restore my introspection, per se, because I'm not really checking in with myself. I'm just moving.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was definitely not humoring you. When we did this big clinical trial with these thousands of people, we did not specify. We were like, you figure it out, whether you want to get off your screen, stop working or not, you decide. And here's the bottom line. The people who did get off their screens had more, I would say, mental results. People who went outside, that won't surprise you, also felt better in terms of optimism, focus, mood, et cetera. But I think, you know, we're on this quest, Dan, to like, just tell me what to do, right? Like, just tell me exactly what to do so I can frickin' feel better.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  And the problem is, hate to tell you, everybody is different. Every person is different. We're in different work situations. Some of us are retired, other people are home with little kids. And as much as my phone can be personalized to trigger me in all kinds of ways, I need to take that personalization seriously for myself, is what I think I've learned and what I hear from a lot of people. Yes, we all want the one thing that's gonna fix it. But actually, what we need to be doing is having a conversation with ourselves. What do I need right now? Does my body need a walk? Maybe I should take this call outside because I can't miss this call. That's great. You're doing something.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Something is always better than nothing. And I think our devices prey on that. You know, it's just easier to lie down on the couch, to sit, to go from one screen to another. It's just easier. But what people said was, I wouldn't want to take my break. But the minute I would start to move my feet, I could feel myself starting to feel better. And it was the people who tuned in, did that somatic check, did that inner selfie. They trained themselves. They trained their bodies to crave it. Brings us to the other thing that we heard was, you know, people started by setting timers. Okay, every hour I'm gonna take this.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  And we now know, like, there is research behind this, that you can train your bodies to start to tell you. Many people said, I didn't need to use the timers by the end of the two weeks. I could start to feel it. I'd be like, oh, yep, there goes my weird twingie back. Time to get up. Or, oh, okay, I am doing busy work. Time to get up. And seeing that you can sort of train your body to figure it out for you, to the point where you don't have to convince yourself. Your body's like, yo, uh, excuse me, we need to take a break. That, to me, is huge. I mean, Keith is on a big mission, too. He's like, this is ridiculous.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  We talk about health and the workplace, like, you know, OSHA is in charge of making sure we don't injure ourselves at work. We're not doing it for the majority of people who are at work, working on digital devices. We are not taking this seriously. In various countries, you can imagine, in Scandinavia, they do take breaks very seriously. In Germany, they think it should be a workplace hazard to work without breaks. He's like, this is just a slow-moving, total health disaster that we are walking into by not mandating that people should have the ability to move and get up if they want to.

• 43:32Dan Harris?

  Makes perfect sense to me. And just to get back to something you were saying halfway through your last.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Diatribe, uh huh.

• 43:40Dan Harris?

  I would not have called it a diatribe.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks, Dan.

• 43:42Dan Harris?

  I would have called it a lovely avalanche of helpful information.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you.

• 43:47Dan Harris?

  Charming insights. Halfway through that, you were saying, you were talking about how people started to learn to pick up on their signals like, oh yeah, when my back starts feeling that twinge, okay, that's my signal. I don't need a timer. I'm going to get up and move. And it reminded me, there's a body of research that I've become really fascinated in over the past couple of years. And it's based around a term called self compassion. One of the little mantras that the pioneers in the research, whose names are Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. One of the little mantras they recommend to people is what do I need right now? If you can hold that question in your mind throughout the day, like, yeah, what do I need right now?

• 44:29Dan Harris?

  We tell each other all the time when we're leaving, take care and take care of yourself. But we never actually take care of ourselves because of tech, because of some idea that taking care of yourself is self indulgent. Whatever the reason, we rarely ask ourselves like, what do I need right now? That's a very interesting north star as you move through the day. So I say that just to see how it lands with you.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  It lands hugely with me, but because I come to it from a different angle. I'm the type of person who's like, show me the science. What's the data behind that? Why do we know that? I think I inherently in my heart know that that's what I should be doing. But when study after study after study, and now including my own study, shows it, there's no excuses. Like, I am so good at justifying, Dan. I'll be like, you know what? I am just going to do another hour because I really think I can get this done by three o'clock. And if I get up and by three o'clock, then I won't have to go and do the other thing. So if I take a break now, that's actually going to be a problem. It's wrong. I am wrong. I am on this battle every single day to power and push through.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  It is as a type A person who loves to get shit done. This is incredibly hard for me. And yet the proof is shown to me. Hour after hour after hour, I don't know how many times I can prove it to myself that this shit works. And yet, here I am continuing to do it. But this idea of what do I need right now? Sometimes I don't believe what I need right now. I try to trick myself out of it. I'm like, you don't, you're fine, you're good, just keep going. Maybe you're a little special even, that you don't need to do this. You ever told yourself that one?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  So not special, Dan, so not special, so just like every other human. And my system has not evolved in some way that it doesn't require enough oxygenation, or that I can power through email. You know, we think there are people who are special. I'm not one of them. So yes, the battle is daily. I think I'm winning. Didn't think I could say that. I actually think I am winning, because there's a gift at the end of every five minute break. Oh yeah, I feel better. I'm not as depressed. I'm not quite as anxious. I think I can actually get through the next hour without berating myself, without feeling like I am maxing and pushing myself to the absolute limit. That's for me.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  But I heard it from a lot of other people, too.

• 47:02Dan Harris?

  I relate to everything you said there, and I fall into that trap all the time of pushing, pushing, pushing, even though I know it's stupid. And if I did the counterintuitive thing of just stepping away, it would improve the quality of my work and probably help me get more done. And yet-

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Because I'm scared, right?

• 47:22Dan Harris?

  Yes, it's scary, that's it. There you go.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I run on fear, and it's taken a lot of work, and being in my 50s, to trust the process, trust the knowledge that I have, trust that this has worked in the past and it will work again. I think especially as I get older. That I can't cut corners like I used to when I was younger. You know, you write the book that you need, right, Dan?

• 47:52Dan Harris?

  I do want, as promised, to get to the eyes and ears and all that other stuff. But let me ask one last question on this five minutes per 30 minutes protocol. For people listening and still feeling a lot of resistance, for whatever reason, I don't want to do it, I really can't do it, et cetera, et cetera. I believe you said in there that we can start small. So if you were to do it every half hour in an eight hour day, it's 16 breaks.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  It's a lot of breaks.

• 48:20Dan Harris?

  But you said some people were just doing four. And even that can make a difference.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Even one minute saw an effect in some of Keith's studies. The key metric to remember is that it's breaking up these long periods of sitting and staring at a screen, just sitting as well. So let's say you're sitting for eight hours straight. If you're breaking it into two, four hour sections, that's great. If you're breaking it into four, two hours, do the math, right? However, you can break it up, that's great. It's always better than none. The key is you, just that one long sitting stretch. It compounds in terms of mood and physical health.

• 49:06Dan Harris?

  Thank you. Okay. Eyes and ears.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 49:13Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Manoush talks about how your screens are reshaping your eyesight and what to do about it, same for your ability to hear, and some simple fixes for posture, breathing, and better sleep.

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• 50:28Dan Harris?

  What are our devices doing to us? You've said a little bit about it, but if there's anything more to say, please tell us and then let's get to what we can do about it.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so 1 in 3 kids these days is nearsighted. That is triple the rate that there was in 1990. So, nearsighted myopia, just for the lucky people out there who don't have to wear glasses, this is when you can see what is close, right in front of your face, but if you look into the distance, it starts to get a little blurry. And the thing is that by the time someone notices this, usually the damage is done, right? For me, you know, I was in my late 30s. I was like, huh, there are 2 moons in the sky. What's up with that? I needed glasses to drive, to go to the movies, right? Just stuff like

• 51:20Speaker 03

  that. And then, as we get older, inevitably, it does happen that you need reading glasses. I have these things where I can read and I can see in the distance. But it always used to be like, when we were growing up, there was the, you know, maybe a couple kids who wore glasses to see the blackboard. Now, they're seeing, lots of kids are having issues seeing the blackboard. The theory is that, well, it's a couple things that's compounded. One is that there's more close-up work. You are looking at phones, you are looking at screens. My kids, like, they have a laptop in school, then they come home and they work on their laptops for their homework, and then they look at YouTube on their phones,

• 52:02Speaker 03

  maybe to relax a little bit. It's just constant near work that's going on. And what has been shown is that literally the eyeball changes shape. It morphs so it can do the job better of seeing close up. It's like, you want me to look at a screen? Great, I will get really good at looking at a screen. You don't need me to look into the distance, right? Fine, I won't. And the earlier that happens, you know, it gets worse and worse and worse. Later in life, it raises your risk of having glaucoma, even blindness. It also means that you just don't experience the world, right? There's a lot you're missing if you can't see. The good news is, as long as your eyes are still growing, you can turn back the clock on that. You and I are screwed, Dan.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  But younger kids, and actually young adults in their twenties, even into their thirties, their eyes are actually still growing and you can start to take breaks. Unfortunately, the 2020 20, have you ever heard that one?

• 53:02Dan Harris?

  No.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  2020 20 is like the old standard, which is every 20 minutes, look up for 20 seconds at something 20 feet in front of you. That's actually not the best thing to do. Dr. Maria Lu, who I talked to, who specializes in this, actually says, one of the key things that we all need to be doing is getting outside more for multiple reasons. One is sunlight increases serotonin production. Another is that your eye needs to see a horizon. It needs to see the entire distance. I was like, oh, can I just look out the window? She's like, no, your peripheral vision will start to cut out the sides. It needs to actually experience a horizon. So ideally, she wants us to go out every half hour for five minutes.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  I was like, what, again? Half hour for five minutes? Everybody keeps telling me this. She's like, yeah, sorry. You know, I can't do that. My eyes are already screwed. But it just goes to show, kids need to get outside. They need to be out in the sunlight, looking into the horizon. You know, I take my little niece and nephew and we go look for birds. That's like the best thing you could possibly do with little kids. Like, go outside and look for birds because they're looking into the distance. They're getting the sunlight using their peripheral vision. There are treatments now where you can reshape the eyeball. They're actually contact lenses that kids and young adults can wear at night. They're called Ortho-K. There's also different kinds of drops that you can wear that sort of turn back the clock

• 54:28Speaker 03

  and combine that with better lifestyle habits and you can delay the myopia from setting in. For those of us who are screwed, my number one hack is buy yourself computer glasses. So I measured the distance between my eyes and my laptop and got a pair of glasses just made for that and it made a huge difference for me in terms of headaches and dry eye and fatigue. Again, always take a break.

• 54:58Dan Harris?

  What about working on paper? Not great because it's not awesome for the trees, but I try to print things out when I'm writing and really work on paper instead of a screen.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that can make a difference, you're still doing the close up work, right? But it has been shown that people blink less when they're looking at a screen and therefore you're not moisturizing your eye and that can lead to dry eye, which then feel irritated and then you get tired and all of those things. But I think the key again is what works for you and mixing it up essentially. I also like to print out articles once in a while and I'll go sit by the window and get some light and read there as opposed to being in my cave with my laptop.

• 55:40Dan Harris?

  All right, let's talk about the ears.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:42Dan Harris?

  I was bummed to read this. One of my favorite things in the world is for an hour a day to blast punk rock in my ears and workout.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  How loud are we talking here, Dan?

• 55:57Dan Harris?

  Well, since I started preparing for this episode, I've been not going as loud as I usually go, but pretty fucking loud.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Oh dear. Okay, all right. Do you not listen to anything after that?

• 56:10Dan Harris?

  No, I don't listen to anything after that.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Okay, that's great. That's really great. So there's an amazing studying happening right now. Your listeners can even sign up to join it. It's Apple combined with these researchers at the University of Michigan. They are doing the largest ever study of how long people are listening on their phones, what volumes they're listening. They are even sending hearing tests to people's phones that you can join and take.

• 56:35Dan Harris?

  Yes, I saw it recently. They sent it to me.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  So cool.

• 56:39Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, isn't that cool? I love that. And so like they can, you know, do you have tinnitus, which is a ringing in your ears? Can you hear this tone? Do you hear that tone? So there's data coming out of this study all the time. And you won't be surprised to learn that we are listening not only louder, but longer. I walk around my neighborhood and walk my dog and everybody has their AirPods in. We're always, you know, the podcasts and news and call my mom and like, oh, some music is nice. Nobody wants to be alone with their thoughts. So we're all just stick those bad boys in our ears and listen, which is fine, except a couple of things. Your ears actually need breaks as well. Honestly, Dan,

• 57:24Speaker 03

  like, I don't know how many times I could hear this. Your body needs breaks. So the ears, their cilia are these tiny little hairs inside your ears. And they get tired, right? So let's say you go to a punk rock concert and you come out and you can't hear for like a couple of days. You really need to be gentle and let them recover. If they die, these little cilia, they do not grow back. Like, that's it. You get a finite amount. So honestly, what they told me, well, first of all, one in three people now is listening at what the WHO says are harmful noise levels across the world. But also, what do we do?

• 58:06Speaker 03

  We walk by a busy construction site, we crank up the volume, or we go to the gym and obliterate any thoughts that we're having by blasting the punk rock and getting on the Stairmaster. I don't know what you do there. You gotta take the breaks. You gotta have the quiet, the silence. What I find most interesting is like, I know some people who just listen to music all day long with their AirPods in, all day. And they need to give themselves some silence. They need to take a little chill out time just as much as the rest of your body does. So yeah, that's the gist of it there.

• 58:40Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I can listen to loud music for an hour, maybe not as loud as I have historically done it.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, maybe not that loud. What they told me was, look at the settings in your phone. If you can, limit it to 70 decibels automatically so that your phone won't play it any louder than that. And let's say you are like, but it's really loud in the gym. I can't hear my music. Okay, then put noise cancelling. You have that on your phone? You have that ability to put noise cancelling? Okay, and then just stick with that. If you can, look, there are treats we want to give ourselves. If you want to give yourself a delicious hour of like, I don't know what your favorite punk rock band is. A delicious hour of Nine Inch Nails, then knock yourself out. If that's your jam, do it. Also, like, maybe not.

• 59:31Dan Harris?

  Just to say that's industrial, Manoush.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. Oh, right. No, that is true. What is your favorite punk rock band?

• 59:39Dan Harris?

  Well, I don't know if I have a favorite. So this is, my producer is probably going to cut this, but I, I got interested in indie rock, alternative rock, punk rock, whatever. I was 15. I remember the moment when Tim Smith, the goth kid in my sophomore year homeroom, turned around and gave me a tape with The Minutemen on one side and Sonic Youth on the other. And so that started a 40-year obsession. Now I listen to like new bands that are coming out all the time. A buddy of mine is a frontman of a group called Culture Abuse. I really like them. Another band with a very dumb name that I don't understand, Military Gun, and they don't even spell military the right way. But that's a great band. So stuff like that.

• 1:00:22Dan Harris?

  Tons of female-fronted bands out of Australia now.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:00:25Dan Harris?

  I love them.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  I'm not even going to tell you a music I like, which is...

• 1:00:30Dan Harris?

  Are you, is it Anya?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Oh, God, no. In the 90s, man, like Britpop, just like I-

• 1:00:37Dan Harris?

  Oasis.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  No, not Oasis. I'm more like Blur and whatever Damon Albarn does and that sort of direction. More sort of like, anyway, we digress.

• 1:00:49Dan Harris?

  I don't find that embarrassing at all, and I think that music is having to come back amongst the youngsters. It's aged well. I loved that stuff in real time.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  It has aged well, yeah. I went to see Jarvis Cocker-

• 1:00:59Dan Harris?

  Nice.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  -from Pulp recently, and that was just a delight. I was like, man, this guy knows how to age. He looks amazing. Still got it.

• 1:01:08Dan Harris?

  Damon Albarn's doing well, too. The Gorillaz are still putting out-

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Totally, they're amazing.

• 1:01:13Dan Harris?

  Okay, back to our regularly scheduled, less pathetically aged conversation. And sorry to the boomers who are listening and saying you guys are kids and calling yourself old, so nothing but love to you. Posture and breath, what do we need to know about that?

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Okay, so, I mean, breath is something you talk about regularly here on the show. You will not be surprised to know that that sort of cashew shape that we often put ourselves in when we're on something restricts our diaphragms. Diaphragm is right under our lungs. If you constrict that, you're not able to take full breaths. Lack of full breath can lead to many things, including anxiety, health problems, bad breath, lack of oxygenation, loss of focus, all those fun things. And this part, like, knocked my socks off when it comes to posture. There is new research that shows that there is a conversation happening between our abdominal

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  muscles, our brain, and our adrenal glands, the ones that pump out cortisol and stress and make us feel, you know, anxious all the time. That, they think, is the reason why yoga, Pilates, make us feel good. The muscles start to send a message to the brain to not take in as much cortisol. So there's all these systems that we don't even think of as working. You know, thousands of years, people have been doing yoga. Now we're starting to show the biology that there is behind it. So I'm sure you know this one, the physiological sigh.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  That one?

• 1:02:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I know what it is, but can you explain for listeners?

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  So I didn't know about this. It's something super easy that just hyperoxygenates you very quickly. And the idea is you take one big breath in, then you top it up with a little more breath, and then let it all out. And James Nestor, the author of Breath, actually taught me that one, but I heard it again and again from people, so.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  And you literally feel better, and that's even just 10 seconds. The other thing that someone convinced me to have by my desk is a kazoo, Dan, so.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Walking around, you, there's no way you cannot breathe properly when you're playing on a kazoo. Also, you just feel like an asshole and start laughing at yourself, and that is another way to reset your day.

• 1:03:40Dan Harris?

  James Nestor was on this show once, and I'll drop a link to that episode. And I believe it was James who taught me box breathing, which I, I constantly, when I'm guiding meditation, I often have people do three deep, deep, deep inhales through the nose, and then exhale through the mouth with lips pursed as if you were blowing through a straw. And you want the exhale to be three, four, or five times longer than the inhale. And I often joke that it's like, you remember those Colt 45 ads from when we were kids? The malt liquor and the Billy Dee Williams would come on and say the slogan, which was, "Works every time." And I find that with box breathing, it really does. You just feel your nervous system resetting.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Totally. Oh, I love that. That also relates to the vagus nerve. I don't know if you've talked much about that on the show. The sort of system that's connecting our brain all the way down into the rest of our body and its rest and relaxation, sort of triggering that ability. And it's so, it's, once you know that it works too, you're like, I have a little bit of magic in my pocket and I can pull it out anytime. And so now, you know, waiting for the elevator, my little reset physiological sigh.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Ready to go.

• 1:05:02Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, you brought me exactly where I wanted to go, which is sleep and rest and resetting. You have a whole section in the book about that. Can you tell us?

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that this is, we've blamed technology for things, and yes, technology is part of the problem, but it's actually more that it exacerbates our human tendencies. So, for example, with sleep, there was this one study with a bunch of undergrads, and they didn't sleep as well after they looked at an iPad for four hours at the brightest setting. So what do we do? We say, oh, blue light. This is a disaster. Don't look at blue light. It ruins your sleep. Actually, study after study since then has shown it might mess with your sleep, but maybe like by three minutes, 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes max. Really, what it is, is it's that what do we do instead of sleeping? We watch one

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  more show. We play one more game. We're just gonna check the headlines one more time. Oh, you meant to respond to that guy. Let's just do it. You won't be able to sleep if you can't do that. Right? So it's not really necessarily the light that is making us not sleep. It's the habits that are spurred on by this. That is not to say there are some people who are very sensitive to light. Children, absolutely. Those young eyeballs, as we've discussed, they are sensitive to light. Keep them off the screens before bedtime. But don't blame the screen for your bad night's sleep. So they call this more the displacement theory, this idea that what has displaced our sleep, it's screens that has displaced them. And then there's also the interruptions, because I don't know about you, but I keep

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  my phone right next to my bed, just in case of emergency, right? I've got teenagers and I've got older parents. The problem is, what do those interruptions do? It's really hard to get back to sleep. It's not just because you looked at your screen and the light. Sure, that's not great, but really, it's you got your brain going, and then you can't get back to sleep, and you're worried. Interestingly, though, there is very little research into the best way for adults to use their devices as it relates to sleep, because researchers are obsessed with young people and teens. And what we do know is teens also look at their phones a lot and get interrupted, but they're doing it more for social reasons, right? So it's not because there's an emergency. So like, yes, they should have the phone out of the bedroom.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  You and I, though, you know, there are settings. You can make it so only certain people's calls come through. My mom's not going to call me at 2:00 in the morning to just chat, right? So if her call comes through, great, it can be there and I'll get it, but I can turn off the rest of it. So I think we need to look as much at our behaviors around these devices and not necessarily think like, ugh, blanket, turn it off, throw it away, get off your phone. Sorry, that's not going to work for a lot of people. People who have to work late, or maybe you leave work so you can get home at 4:00 so you can pick up your kids and make them dinner and all those things, and you do need to get back on your laptop at night. Don't think that

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  the blue light is necessarily going to destroy your sleep, but set yourself a time when you're done and let yourself wind down and relax. Dimming lights is a good thing still to do as well, but we can't just blame the blue light. It's more complicated than that.

• 1:08:23Dan Harris?

  That's really interesting. You talked about kids, and I'm saving this to the end of the conversation because I'm always sensitive to the fact that there are people who don't have kids, and I don't want to do episodes that don't speak to them. But a lot of us do have children in our lives, either our children, or nieces and nephews, or grandchildren, or just mentees, or whatever. How do we set some limits, set some boundaries, talk to them without being screamingly annoying? What's your advice?

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  I struggle with this. A lot of the air right now has been taken up by this idea that there should be bans, right? Take away their phones before 13, and kids shouldn't be on social media before 16. And as much as I agree with all of these rules that people like Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, has put out there, I absolutely agree with them. I think it leaves a few things wanting. One is that many of us have a different relationship with younger people than we did a generation ago. This finger wagging and we know what's good for you. I just don't think it flies anymore. There's a conversation that needs to be had because frankly, it's not like you turn 16 and suddenly magically you can handle social media.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Uh-uh. There needs to be a constant conversation and not every kid will get that at home, but hopefully more and more in schools, just talking about what does it look like when you are getting something good out of your technology? What does it look like when you are not? And also more importantly, what I would like to add to the conversation, what does that feel like in your body? I think we are very quick to slap a label on I have an anxiety disorder and many people do. I don't want to minimize that in any way, but I think the things that are happening to us because of our technology are not just mental health, they're very much related

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  to our physical health as well. My kids, when they were younger, and if you took the iPad away, they'd be total jerks afterwards. Like it was very clear, there was like cause and response. And so what I just want to do is like have experiments if you can in your family. How do you feel right now before you go on your screen? Pretty good? Okay, great. Let's remember that. An hour later, you're getting off your screen. How do you feel now? Oh, you're grouchy. Okay, so maybe next time we'll try half an hour, see what that looks like. You still feel okay? Great, let's put it away. Oh, did you see that I got a new jump rope? Let's try that. You know what I mean? Like instead of being like, you're on your phone too much, you're scrolling all the time.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Maybe we say something more positive, like, did you take a walk? Did you get your stroll time in? How do we start to sort of make it less like guilting and shaming and more like, let's go be in the world, let's move our bodies, not because we want to kill it at sports or because we want to look good in a bathing suit, but because we just want to feel like that we are flesh and blood and it's amazing to be alive.

• 1:11:34Dan Harris?

  All this stuff we're talking about, the wonderful but often deleterious impacts of technology, how does this evolve, do you think, as we get deeper into AI and robotics and maybe neural implants and wearable tech and technology is not going away at all. It's just getting more and more sophisticated and potentially insidious, but also potentially wonderful. So I don't know. When you project forward, what does it look like?

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  I am an optimist by nature. So part of me wants to really think, oh, won't this be amazing? When AI takes over some of our work, we'll be able to have more time to frolic in the sunlight. That would be so cool. Unfortunately, as the first chapter in the book lays out, every point when innovation has been added that adds convenience to humans' lives, it's resulted in them moving less. Every time. I would also say we've gone through this with social media as well. And I think the battle over that was lost. And then we are now have to look forward to what happens with AI. The good part about

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  AI when it comes to our health is I talked to a lot of medical researchers and the advances there are quite extraordinary. I do believe there's going to be amazing breakthroughs because of a lot of that. A lot of the data that we're collecting about how the body works is going to result in a lot of personalized healthcare. They now know there's not just two types of diabetes. There are tens, maybe hundreds of different types of diabetes. We just didn't have the data to know that. We are all different. Every body is different. However, I want more movement and more in-person interaction. And I think we see this. People want to be

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  With other people. They want to be in spaces with other people. They want to have a face-to-face conversation. They want to read people's body language. I hope that there's a sense that we are more than just like bags of flesh, meat sacks, right? We are extraordinary human beings who need to be out in the air, in the sunlight, experiencing the world and moving our bodies. And if we can give ourselves more opportunities to do that, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's making sure that we have parks that are available for people, that we can set up workplaces where it's not frowned upon, if you even just get up and like shuffle side to side during a Zoom meeting, we have

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  to change the cultural norms around movement and using our bodies. We just have to because literally our lives depend on it.

• 1:14:25Dan Harris?

  Well said. Laudable rallying cry, really. Before I let you go, Manoush, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book, maybe also the name of the previous one and your podcast? Plug, in other words.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks. So the old book was called Bored and Brilliant. The new one is called Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. And you can find me, I host NPR's TED Radio Hour. Please join me in a movement to bring back movement into our lives.

• 1:14:59Dan Harris?

  Consider me joined. Manoush, awesome to talk to you as always. Thank you.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Great to be here, Dan. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:15:11Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Manoush Zomorodi. Always love talking to her. Don't forget, if you're interested in boosting your sleep quotient, we're adding a bunch of new sleep meditations to my app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've also got a live video session coming up next week with Cara Lai, where we're going to talk about how meditation can help you sleep. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:16:07Speaker 08

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