What Screen Time Is Really Doing to Your Body with Manoush Zomorodi

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 https://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Digital-Science-Well-Being/dp/1250411203, 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 https://www.manoushz.com/, journalist, author, and host of NPR's TED Radio Hour Dr. Keith Diaz https://www.columbiacardiology.org/profile/keith-diaz-phd, exercise physiologist and Florence Irving Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center Dr. Maria Liu https://optometry.berkeley.edu/people/yue-maria-liu-od-phd/, Professor of Clinical Optometry at UC Berkeley and founder of the Myopia Control Clinic Dr. Rick Neitzel https://sph.umich.edu/faculty-profiles/neitzel-richard.html, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Dr. Peter Strick https://www.cnup.pitt.edu/people/peter-l-strick-phd, Thomas Detre Professor and Chair of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Dr. Sahib Khalsa https://www.uclahealth.org/providers/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 https://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Digital-Science-Well-Being/dp/1250411203, by Manoush Zomorodi (2026) Body Electric https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/body-electric/id1716971321, 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," https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36728338/ 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," https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1902297116 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 https://books.apple.com/us/book/bored-and-brilliant/id6754063669, by Manoush Zomorodi (2017) Related Episodes: "How I Stopped Fearing Boredom https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-i-stopped-fearing-boredom" "How Our Screen Habits Impact Our Stress Levels https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/bonus-good-screens-and-bad-screens" "Smell, Taste and Touch: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/smell-taste-and-touch-how-to-joyfully-awaken-your-senses" “Sight and Sound: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/sight-and-sound-how-to-joyfully-awaken-your-senses” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:06Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 0:13Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  We hear, you know, the mental health epidemic, growing rates of depression and anxiety has to do with the content that we get, right?

• 0:38Laurie Santos?

  This is journalist Manoush Zomorodi. Some of you may also know Manoush as the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:59Laurie Santos?

  Manoush says that given all the focus on how technology affects our minds, it's easy to overlook another important part of the story.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:33Laurie Santos?

  It's a lot of hours. That's incredible.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  A lot of hours, right? And I feel like, for me, like, there was one day where I got into a cab 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 checked 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

• 2:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:01Laurie Santos?

  So in today's episode, another in our series on spring cleaning your well being, Manoush 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.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  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

• 3:28Laurie Santos?

  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.

• 3:49Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes, and more about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your shows.

• 4:26Speaker 02

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• 4:54Laurie Santos?

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• 5:38Laurie Santos?

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• 5:54Laurie Santos?

  These days, we think a lot about how screens affect mental health. But podcaster and tech journalist Manoush Zamirodi argues that we may be missing an even bigger piece of the puzzle: how screens affect our physical health.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  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 in young people have doubled over the past 20 years. We hear about colon cancer on the rise in 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, um, all we want to do is crawl under our desks and go to sleep a lot of the time. And so I want to be like, why do we feel so crappy? Like, what is going on?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 7:34Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  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 is 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

• 8:29Speaker 01

  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, Laurie, 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.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  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 in 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.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  So this sort of disconnect between what our bodies need in order to function is completely mismatched 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 need breaks and breaks need to be part of the strategy, not a reward.

• 11:09Laurie Santos?

  And so this problem that you've talked about with interreception 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?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  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

• 12:04Speaker 01

  so she can move on to the next thing on the list. It was a really hard, personal, I'm still learning this lesson, Laurie, 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've 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.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  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 gotta 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.

• 13:17Laurie Santos?

  The screens around us are obviously not going anywhere anytime soon, which is why Manoush 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 Manoush was wrestling with when she came across the research of Dr. Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Largely offset the harms of those long stretches of sedentary time.

• 14:39Laurie Santos?

  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 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.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  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 varicose 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 like 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, sadly, it used to be true. And I had some bathroom breaks and that was pretty much the end of it.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And I, 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-

• 16:52Laurie Santos?

  Walking, walking, yes.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  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. 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 really need to remind myself what I had achieved. It was just like on point. You know what I'm saying? Oh, and I should mention, my blood sugar dropped by 40% compared to the other day.

• 17:29Laurie Santos?

  Wow.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  My blood pressure was down 5%. My fatigue levels and my mood 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.

• 18:10Laurie Santos?

  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 Manoush is describing actually sustainable in real life? We'll tackle that question when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.

• 18:38Laurie Santos?

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• 19:21Laurie Santos?

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• 20:06Laurie Santos?

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• 20:51Laurie Santos?

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• 20:56Laurie Santos?

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• 21:40Laurie Santos?

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• 22:24Laurie Santos?

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• 23:08Laurie Santos?

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• 23:28Laurie Santos?

  Podcaster and journalist Manoush Zomorodi argues that we need to spring clean our body's relationship with technology. Before the break, we were talking about Manoush'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, Manoush's role as a radio host gave her access to a huge group of willing participants.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  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, et cetera. And although we couldn't mimic the exact conditions as in the lab, we had surveys that went out constantly all through the

• 24:42Speaker 01

  day. But it was amazing. We had Uber drivers sign up, teachers, we had nurses, lawyers, you name it, across the board. Because screens don't discriminate. So, physically moving throughout the day made people, on average, between 21% to 28% 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 all day long.

• 25:21Laurie Santos?

  It didn't take. I think that's what we're all worried about. We think like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna have like a whole less episode done at the end of the week because I'm taking these breaks." But that's not what we're seeing.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  No, exactly. The fear of you're like, "Well, if I'm interrupted all the time, how am I gonna 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 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.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  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 that meeting?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  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, is a full-body experience, right?

• 27:07Laurie Santos?

  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 set 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 that, 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 need these little breaks?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:53Laurie Santos?

  You'd forget, you'd just forget.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  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-hoo, 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.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  This is like, skipping one break's not gonna 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 in 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

• 29:18Speaker 01

  long, actually has a huge impact and is good for you and makes you feel good, that seems unbelievably surprising to me and exciting.

• 29:29Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yes. I think I subconsciously, and many of us subconsciously, knew that something was happening, but you, 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 nearsighted, 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 Lu at Berkeley, who literally has been studying what happens to the shape of our eyeball when we spend lots

• 30:30Speaker 01

  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 202020 rule, like for every 20 minutes of sitting, look 20 feet into the distance for 20 seconds. She's like, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but that is

• 31:15Speaker 01

  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, uh, 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,

• 31:57Speaker 01

  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 nearsighted, 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 ya ya's out.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  This is so you can see because higher rates of nearsightedness 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? We need to protect basic sensory organs.

• 33:03Laurie Santos?

  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 like, I'm not gonna head down in my big elevator and my huge skyscraper 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 gonna be looking at you like, what is wrong with this person? So any advice for wanting to take these breaks?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we used to say like, oh, I'm just gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  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 OK when you're on a Zoom to turn off your screens 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,

• 34:55Speaker 01

  and optimize the way that we work, because it's not working now. That is very clear.

• 35:02Laurie Santos?

  It's time for a quick break. But when we return, Manoush 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 will be right back.

• 35:31Laurie Santos?

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• 36:16Laurie Santos?

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• 36:59Laurie Santos?

  On this show, we talk a lot about how the little things in our daily lives shape our well-being, often more than the big flashy milestones. And that includes what we drive. Because when something you use every single day feels aligned with your life, it removes friction. It makes ordinary moments smoother, less stressful. That's where Cars.com comes in. They have over 2 million new and used cars, and powerful filters that let you narrow your search by price, mileage, features, whatever actually matters to you. And their deal badges highlight when a listing is a great price, so you can feel confident you're making a smart choice. It's not just about buying a car. It's about choosing something that truly fits your routine and your next chapter.

• 37:45Laurie Santos?

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• 38:28Laurie Santos?

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• 39:11Laurie Santos?

  With CVS, you can schedule appointments for up to four family members at once, so you can take care of everyone in one go. Just visit CVS.com/flu or use the CVS Health app to find an appointment that works for you. So make protecting yourself this flu season one less thing to worry about. Did you know that flu shots are free with most insurance plans? Visit your local CVS Pharmacy for your flu shot and get a $5 off $20 coupon with any vaccine. Schedule today at CVS.com/flu. Flu shots are no cost with most insurance. Eligibility varies by patient and insurance plan. Coupon offer not available in select states and is subject to availability. Restrictions apply.

• 39:54Laurie Santos?

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• 40:03Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:34Laurie Santos?

  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.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  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, podcasts, 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...

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Couple of 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 twenties, 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 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

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:28Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  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, anxiety, right? Squish, 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?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  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

• 43:52Laurie Santos?

  You're almost in this cashew shape, kind of slumped over.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  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?

• 44:25Laurie Santos?

  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.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. 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 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

• 45:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:24Laurie Santos?

  But it also means that we can also be agentic, 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 gotta get rid of my phone. But this book is really suggesting there are forms of stress management that just take five minutes every 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, oh, let me get up and walk around. And 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 the 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

• 47:07Laurie Santos?

  hunched over. I can definitely control whether I hop up from the desk five minutes every half hour to get a little movement in. These are things that are within our control to stop the stress cycle.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  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...

• 47:41Laurie Santos?

  We want our structural changes to...

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:43Laurie Santos?

  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... Can have interoceptive awareness. That feels really powerful to me.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found it so interesting. So that neuroscientist Dr. Sahib Khalsa 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.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  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 like for 45 minutes a week? I was like, that sounds really nice.

• 48:59Laurie Santos?

  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?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  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 to 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, if I was looking at an iPad for three hours at the brightest setting, like that would definitely be a problem.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  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 and 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 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.

• 51:29Laurie Santos?

  The problem is also that we use our phones to self-soothe 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-soothe. Their phone is their only friend at three in the morning when no one's talking to them.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:50Laurie Santos?

  What's the first step to breaking that feedback loop?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  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 Said Khalsa 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.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna lie here and just like bask in the luxuriousness and wait for my destination. That is my own sort of personal hack.

• 52:42Laurie Santos?

  Mine, when I'm doing the right kind of thing, is a hack 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 in 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, works pretty well for me, too.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Oh, that's nice. That's really nice.

• 53:05Laurie Santos?

  So, we definitely need more sensory resets to support our physical and mental health. But Manoush 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."

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I will say, that phrase is not from 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 reorging, 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 a really important time because we need to give ourselves space to...

• 54:09Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:02Laurie Santos?

  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 Manoush 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 Manoush'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 5. If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at [email protected], or leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can

• 55:46Laurie Santos?

  also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlauresantos.com. That's D-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-S-A-N-T-O-S.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.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:26Laurie Santos?

  That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 56:37Laurie Santos?

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• 58:42Laurie Santos?

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• 59:27Laurie Santos?

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