Scrolling Ourselves Sick: The Hidden Cost of Constant Connection

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

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

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  So the more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse ironically, your loneliness actually gets. To be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. These intense addictive forms of distraction have a long-term effect on your cognitive health.

• 0:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap "Try Free" to start your seven-day free trial.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  So we have a major, and it's not just America, it's all the English-speaking countries for sure. It seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world, we're seeing suddenly, in the early 2010s, teens are getting more depressed and anxious. And so, this was a side project for me. But as I began to dig into it, and to realize that it's international, to realize that more and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation, but we're beginning to get experiments. Experiments where you randomly assign one group of college students to reduce their social media for a month, another group doesn't, you see what happens. So, once you have correlational studies and experimental studies, and you have massive eyewitness testimony from Gen Z, "Go find me."

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I cannot find, "Find me an essay online, find me an essay anywhere by a member of Gen Z who defends the phones." Who says, "Oh no, it's been great for us. Oh no, the phone-based life has been great. Don't take it away from us." You can't find that. But you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me, it destroyed my generation, destroyed my childhood. And we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers. The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, I can bet all, but you know, 90% in surveys say this is a problem, 80, 90%. Same thing for school principals. So, we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause.

• 2:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, well, you know, I think there was a sort of an attempt to rebut this by Candace Hodges in Nature and you on X basically replied to that, kind of rebutting a lot of what she said, which was that there was no cause of evidence. And you talk about a lot of the data that you cite, which is, you know, both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just some correlation.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So there are a few pieces to the argument. The first, as they said, there is experimental evidence and a meta-analysis came out six or eight months ago showing, yeah, some experiments show a big effect or an effect, some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air. But my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, were reanalyzing all the experiments. And actually, when you remove the short-term experiments, this is the key, some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day or two days. And if you're addicted to something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? Well, you know, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or two, it's going to be pretty bad. You have to wait. It takes, you know, two, you know, Anna Lymke

• 3:38Speaker 02

  says three or four weeks, but you know, I think we're seeing effects by, you know, by a week or two, you're getting over the roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one day studies and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly, they find that there are benefit, there are mental health benefits to getting off social media. So Hodges said that I have only correlation evidence, which is false. I keep saying, no, look, here's the experimental evidence. And the other thing that I think is very powerful is that this happened around the world at the same time. And, you know, most people say, oh, Haiti is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're going to be looking into phones and banning phones for little kids, when what we should be looking at is, you know, X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z is usually inequality and climate change and

• 4:20Speaker 02

  racism and Donald Trump and things like that. It's usually something about America.

• 4:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Probably all of it adds the soup for sure.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Well, fine, but, but, but why, what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during Obama's first term with the financial crisis, things were fine for teenagers. Mental health was norm, it didn't change in his first term. Then all of a sudden in his second term, what, suddenly like? Racism and or uh uh um school shootings, that's the other thing that people say. Twenty twelve was the Newtown massacre, so that does fit the timing because after that, kids had lockdown drills. Fine, if it was just the US, if if twenty twelve was the turning point in the US, but not anywhere else. Then I'd say, yeah, you know what? You could be right about that. But the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in the US, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  That's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that happened that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between twenty ten and twenty fifteen.

• 5:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram that then drove.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Not well, we have to be more more specific because Facebook comes out in two thousand four and or two thousand three.

• 5:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's when they put the like and the share buttons, right?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  That's right, so so we have, let's just trace it out. And actually, this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the internet comes out, the public gets access to it in the mid nineteen nineties. You know, I remember the first time I saw a web browser was AltaVista. And I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe, like, you mean, I can just like, ask for something and it comes to me instantly, I don't have to get in my car and go to the library, like anything, like omniscience.

• 6:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's crazy.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  You know, it was totally crazy. It was magical. And in the nineties, the teenagers who were Gen Z, I mean, who were millennials, they took to the internet, they were on AOL and, you know, AIM and and their mental health was fine. It the early internet was decentralized, it was fun, it was exploratory, it was amazing. And so we all think, well, this is good. And our kids are spending time on it, and that's good, we think. And then you get into the two thousands. Now, remember, everything's dial up, so there's no video, slow connection speeds, it's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Now you get into the two thousands, now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world and things, speeds are speeding up. And you get social media. Now we're beginning to get a more centralized internet. People can't, many young people won't know that the internet was not dominated by three or four companies for the first decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now, you know, three or four companies basically control our kids' consciousness. You know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a few others account for, I think, the majority of what they're doing with their day. For a lot of

• 7:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's basically TikTok, Google, Meta, and

• 7:16Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right. And especially the short videos, that's, yeah. X is not so important for adolescents. It's there and it's important for democracy, but it's not, X does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues. It's the short videos and as video content especially. Anyway, so, so 2003, you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first, and it's not particularly toxic. In the late 2000s, you begin to get, so you get the iPhone in 2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss Army knife. It's not harmful.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  There are apps, but there's no App Store, no push notifications. So all the way up to 2008, 2009, the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting, it's getting more engaging, but it's not, it's not like what we know now. And teen mental health is fine up until 2011. There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 2009, you get the like and the retweet buttons, and now Facebook and Twitter are able to algorithmicize everything, because you get share buttons as well. So retweet, share. So, so now, social media becomes much more about the news feed. Before then, it was called, they were called social networking systems. You just connect with people, you see their page, they see yours. Connecting people is generally a good thing.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  But now, it's about the news feed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on. Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric. If you can keep people on longer,

• 8:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You get paid for it.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  You get a bonus. You get a bonus, yeah. And so, you know, very smart people, they did it. They found ways to keep young people especially on longer. And that was the news feed and the algorithms. Much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So in 20, at the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone. They're mostly have flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer. They don't have high-speed internet through, it's not dial-up at that point, but it's not, it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram, it doesn't exist on January 1st, 2010. There's no front-facing camera on January 1st, 2010.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  In 2010, you get the front-facing camera and Instagram. Takes a couple of years before everyone has it. In 2012, Facebook buys Instagram. Doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls' social life, teen girls' social life, moves on to Instagram. It wasn't on it, it wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front-facing camera and an Instagram account and high-speed internet with an unlimited data plan. In 2010, you could not spend 10 hours a day on your flip phone. I mean, that would just be hell. But in 2015, you can spend 10 hours a day on your smartphone.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And now that's about the average. Eight to 10 hours a day is what teens now spend on their phones. That includes video games. But it's mostly phone and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids used flip phones to connect and see each other in person. In 2015, that's largely what's not gone, but it reduces greatly. And life is now, you sit on your bed scrolling and then your mom calls you down for dinner. That's now, that's a lot of teen life now.

• 10:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's, you know, it's happening almost invisibly in a way that's sort of at a subtext in our culture. And the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I, I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the, the data basically showed that, this is JAMA Pediatrics, from 2005 to 2017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by 52%.

• 11:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Those 12 to 17 who experienced a major depression in that same period went from 8.7% to 15.7% from 2005 to 2019.

• 11:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in Lancet Papers and others. And then to be really correlated or even potentially causal with this. And so the costs of this are staggering. I mean, just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of the total cost of care to society, not actually hospitalization and serious medication, but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years. It's the single biggest driver of of cost to society. And it's just beginning. It feels like we're just at the beginning of this. And what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last, I mean, 10 years, right? 10, 15 years.

• 12:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's very quick. And your, you know, your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue. But you also talk about, you know, what needs to be done to kind of solve it. And some of the things you talk about are seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers until they're 16, no smartphones, you know, making sure kids get out and play. I mean, all this stuff that we did when we were kids. I mean, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, you know, I was like seven years old, had my bicycle and left after school and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood.

• 12:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these solutions. But I can't imagine how you imagine they're going to get implemented because of the resistance and the change in the behavior, right?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, not, no, it's actually amazingly easy. I'm shocked at how easy this is. I've been involved in a lot of efforts at social change. I ran a gun control group in college, a handgun control group in college. And that was completely hopeless and we made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're going to be successful, why we're being successful, is that we don't have to persuade people. They already know. Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it, the child psychologist, everyone sees it. So I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book, Is give a clear diagnosis. Here's exactly what happened, when it happened and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms. Here are the developmental pathways that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works. Here's the way the brain changes during puberty.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history, how the internet was amazing in the 90s, but the internet we have now is nothing like the internet we had in the 90s.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  And then people, the key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyzed this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10-year-olds now have phones, have their own smartphone? And the answer is because that your 10-year-old comes home in fifth grade and says, "Mom, everyone else has a phone. I need, I need, I need an iPhone." And you say, "Well, no, but I gave you a phone watch. I gave you a flip phone. You know, you can call me if you need." "No, no, no. Everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me." And then, so you then you give in and you give your kid an iPhone. Well, once 90% of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have one or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem.

• 14:47Speaker 02

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

• 15:32Speaker 02

  But what if 10% of people get off? Well, now they have each other. Now they're not alone. They have each other. And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in fifth grade. And now some parents will say, no, you're not, you know, there's a pledge called the wait until eighth pledge, which is actually wait until after eighth, wait until ninth, really. Because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development. The worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information. We've got to keep this out of kids' lives, at least until high school. So, you know, the wait until eighth pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem. Parents sign up when their kid is in elementary school.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  They say, I'm not going to get my kid a phone until ninth grade. A smartphone, you can give them a phone watch, you can give them a flip phone. And then once 10 people, I think it's, or 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful. And, you know, I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March and April. Now it's clear we are being successful. And the reason is because, is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones. I mean, it's impossible to teach when, I mean, imagine when you and I were kids, if they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set, you can bring in your VCR, you can bring in your painty, your paint by numbers kit, you can bring in, you bring in anything, everything. Have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Go ahead, like insanity.

• 17:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  So, so phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts is, are going phone free. New York City is going to announce in a couple of weeks. The state of Virginia, I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say, oh, you can't use your phone in class, which is nonsense, because then you, you have to use it between classes. So that's terrible. But some states are going truly phone free from bell to bell. You're turning your phone in the morning. This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on the schools, we already are successful. Every day I'm getting notes from parents saying, thank you. My, I, I, your book gave me the courage to let my seven year old ride his bicycle to his friend's house or ride it up and down our street.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  And now other kids are riding their bicycles. So it's a collective action problem. And parents are ready for change, not all, but a lot are ready for change. And once they start and their kids are out having fun. Together, more parents are going to say, oh, it's kind of creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling. Why don't you go out and play? And I think that's going to happen over the next year or two.

• 18:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's incredible, John. I mean, I think, I think it's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness about that there's a problem and you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. And the interesting thing is, what's going to happen, you know, between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed? That's a, because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home. So you think that is enough?

• 18:33Speaker 02

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

• 19:18Speaker 02

  on the bus, they're doing this. When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me, now that iPhones are waterproof, kids are taking them into the shower. So you can keep scrolling or doing things while you're taking a shower. Okay. So, so can't we just delay that till high school? Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that?

• 19:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's quite, it's quite striking. You know, I think you talk a lot about kids, but I would also sort of point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Let's talk about that. Wait, wait. Just let's just tell me what you've seen because What Zach Roush and I do is we have all these graphs of all the data sets we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age. And what we generally find is that when you track levels of, at least I've only done depression, anxiety, I haven't done everything. When you look at depression, anxiety, for people over forty or fifty, there's no change. They are, of course, we're all, we all feel frazzled. We feel there's too much stuff coming in. We're all hooked on our phones. But levels of depression anxiety are not really rising for older people. For Gen Z, it's a hockey stick. Gen Z is born nineteen ninety six and later. Hockey stick, huge. For the millennials, it's in between. And I, I need to try to break it up by early millennial versus late millennial. It might just be that those born

• 20:38Speaker 02

  in, millennial generation is usually nineteen eighty-one through nineteen ninety-five. And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early nineties, they had this stuff when they were, you know, late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see, for depression, anxiety, it's really a Gen Z and a little bit millennial thing. It's not a Gen X, an older thing. But you tell me, do you know, do you know specific?

• 21:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, the WHO basically says between twenty, uh, two thousand and five and twenty fifteen, there was about an eighteen percent increase in depression. In kids, it was more, right? In youth, it was fifty-two percent between twenty, two thousand and five and twenty seventeen. So it's certainly more in kids. I agree.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  And it's much more in girls. Wait, so, so the, who, you can say, if you look at a nation, you'll see an increase. But if you, you must always break this stuff up by gender, always, because you, sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls. Sometimes it's just bigger in girls. So if you take, so the, the increase for younger females is gigantic. The increase for other groups is not nearly so large.

• 21:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And, and how, how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society? And as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the internet, it's affecting them. And I, hopefully, your efforts will, will actually lead to sort of a reduction in this because of the prohibitions in school. But, you know, where do you see this going? I mean, it just, it just seems like we're heading kind of a slow motion disaster.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  We were heading in a slow motion disaster. And by 2019, you know, when I was really beginning to get into this, and Jean Twenge was writing about this, we were beginning to point out like, wait, we just did this gigantic, uncontrolled experiment. And now the results are in, look, things are going really, really badly. 2019, and then COVID hits. And everybody, you know, in 2019, I was saying, what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens, a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. And COVID comes, what do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing? Because we thought you could get COVID outdoors and you can't touch people. You know, we got it all wrong with kids. We really made COVID so much worse for kids than it than it had to be. But that confused us all.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  And of course, the kids were on screens all day long. You know, they had to be on Zoom and it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do. And so now that COVID has receded, now we can see the wreckage. We see the gigantic rates. And, you know, while numbers have come, some numbers come down a little bit from the peak in COVID, but in a sense, they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if COVID never happened. So, so now it's become becoming obvious. So I don't think it's going to be a slow motion disaster from here on in. I think we're at a cultural turning point. And we're now seeing this is not light playful stuff that lets kids be creative. This is not that. That's what Facebook and others have sold us on. Sure, they can do that. That is part of the experience. That is true. But, you know, a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to sext you or trying to, you know, people trying

• 23:35Speaker 02

  to sell you things like it's complete insanity that we let, you know, we're, as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online. Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both and we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light playful thing. This is not the early internet that I remember from my twenties.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  This is, we need to think of this much more like alcohol, or tobacco, or automobiles, or gambling, or strip clubs, or whatever. There are all sorts of things that we let adults do, but we don't let children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on, the reason why we block children from doing things, is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm, or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids, or it's sex and violence, or addiction, we tend to say, "No, you know, 12-year-olds can't do this. Even 16-year-olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this." Social media hits all five.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  The positive social media articles, what they're essentially finding is, in isolation, there are certain things that happen on social media that make you happier than if you weren't doing them. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say, "Do nothing," or "Send a note to a close friend or family member on social media," you'll be a little bit happier having sent a note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. Now, it turns out that actually, talking to a non-close friend, or broadcasting information to a large audience, or reading information that was broadcast to a large audience, none of this, even in isolation, makes you happier.

• 25:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  But there's a few things in isolation.

• 25:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So now you're Facebook friends, but you're actual friends.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Your actual friends and family. Yeah. At the same token, though, the sort of best research we have that looks at the correlation between social media use in your life, and indicators like perceived loneliness or social isolation, say that the more you use it, the less happy you are. Even when you do all of the standard controls that you would do, for all the different demographic and economic variables that you would think might be relevant. And so what's going on, right? This seems like they're countervailing.

• 25:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And what's probably happening, what the researchers think is happening, is that you get a little boost to do sort of virtual interaction with people. But real-world interaction is incredibly valuable, and incredibly useful and vital to being happy. And the more you use social media... The less of the real world interaction you actually do with friends. Because you have the sense of, I'm connected to people. I'm talking to people all the time. I just sent these six messages in the last five minutes. And I talked to my high school roommate, and here's my old college roommate. But the benefits you get from that is so small compared to what you're losing by doing less real conversation and analog interaction. You end up net negative. So the more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction,

• 26:34Speaker 01

  and the worse and worse ironically, your loneliness actually gets.

• 26:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so face to face instead of Facebook.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, face to face instead of Facebook. I mean, our brain, the degree to which our brain has evolved to essentially be a social processing engine is incredible, right? If you look at the research on how much of our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues. It's completely impoverished when you take away this rich stream of input that you and I are seeing right now, being in person, and seeing facial expressions and movements and voice tonalities. And you replace it with a one bit indicator, like.

• 27:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A one and a zero, yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't do it for our brain, right? It's leaving it anxious and without much to do. And so that's sort of the first myth, that somehow you're going to be happier in your social life if you're using social media. The inverse seems to be true. If you don't use it, now you're going to have to do real social interactions to feed that urge.

• 27:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  People have forgotten, I was amazed with these kids and millennials, they don't want to call each other on the phone. They are socially awkward and not able to actually have real connections and authentic relationships. But they're, you know, on social media doing that. And it's, they've lost the skill of actually human connection, interaction.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's a vital skill. I mean, not just for sort of navigating the world, but just for, for mental health and happiness. So, yeah, it is a big issue. So, you know, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that, you know, I learned how to do all of that. I grew up before there were cell phones and social media. And so the, the big risk for someone my age might be that I get away from that too much. But if you're younger, and it's all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem.

• 28:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Now, the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier, but you quote research that it actually makes you anxious and depressed. And impairs your cognitive function. So not only is it not helpful, but it may be harmful. So you talk about the harm part?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so the first indication I had that there's something screw going on with this constant connectivity was probably four or five years ago.

• 28:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And so I was doing an event on a college campus. It was an elite college and I was talking to the head of the mental health services on the college and we had talked about some of these issues. And she said, you know, Cal, something I have noticed in my time here is that the issues we're dealing with with the students have changed dramatically. That what we used to deal with were sort of the standard mix of mental health issues you might expect in, you know, 18, 19, 20 year olds. There were sort of eating disorders and homesicknesses and some OCD and schizophrenia and, you know, some depression, sort of a mix, a variety. And she said it was like a switch flipped and it's all anxiety and anxiety related disorders. And not just that that's overtaken everything else, but

• 29:11Speaker 01

  the number of students coming in with these issues has is well beyond what they ever saw before. And I said, okay, well, what changed? And without a hesitation, she said, smartphones. It's that first class that came in that had had smartphones, you know, throughout their teenage years. They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get a few years later, you get Jean Tween, she's one of the, or Twinge, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think, very important book last year called iGen. And she's one of the top generational demographers, the world expert on understanding trends and how they differ between generations. And her whole book is basically making this argument that that's not a mirage. That this entire generation, this entire iGen,

• 29:53Speaker 01

  the first generation to have smartphones, starting from their teenage years, is having off the charts, mental health and anxiety related issues. And it's not, there was some pushback that, okay, well, maybe this was, reporting has changed or more aware and acute to sort of mental health issues now. That's not the issue because we have hospitalizations for suicide attempts among the same group has gone up right along with the, with the mental health issues. So this is actually real issues that are happening. And she looked at every cause she could. She did not want the answer to be something so simple as it's smartphones and social media. It's really been the only thing that fits the, the only thing she's found that actually fits the timing and the characteristics of the data. So I think there's actually for young people, a mental health crisis caused by these phones.

• 30:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, no, I see that. I do see that in patients. I see it in my family members and um. You know, the, the other part of it, in addition to the anxiety and social isolation, which, you know, in some way are a little surprising, you think it makes you more connected, is, is the effect on your cognitive function. And you talked about the intensity of your focus and attention being related to the quality of your life, your productivity, your success in life, you know, that you actually say you don't even work after five o'clock and you've written six books and what are you, 25 years old?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I went.

• 31:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, how old are you?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Thirty-six.

• 31:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, well, that's pretty good. It took me until I was like 50 to write six books. But I, I think that, that, you know, that's a very interesting point because what happens to your ability to focus, pay attention, engage with your life, be present and alert to what's actually happening when you use social media?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's actually my entryway into this issue. So I, I wrote this book back in 2016 called Deep Work. And the premise of the book is that the ability to focus intensely without distraction, that's what I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy, at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology and that this created a mismatch. And so that you would have this big advantage, if you're one of the few, to really care and cultivate your ability to concentrate. And one of the things I discovered in researching this book is that, yes, these tools are having a permanent effect on people's ability to concentrate. It's not a matter of whether the tool is in front of you right now in the moment in which you're trying to concentrate. If you're just used to, in general, pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up

• 32:15Speaker 01

  another tab, as soon as you get a little bit bored, you give yourself a little bit of hit of stimuli, it permanently changes your brain, or at least for a long term, such that if I then take you away from all those stimuli and then put you in, you know, a Faraday cage, where you're gonna have no distractions, and you're on the plane and the wifi is not working, you're gonna have a hard time focusing.

• 32:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And people think, oh, it's different. Yeah, at home, I'm, you know, I, I do this, I get bored, I look at the phone a lot, but in work, I, I really concentrate. It has an effect.

• 32:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  It's like an athlete saying, I only smoke, I only smoke on the weekends, not when I'm training. The smoking's still gonna affect you when you're, when you're on the playing field, you're hurting your, your physical health. And so these intense addictive forms of distraction have a long-term effect on your cognitive health. And this has professional impacts. If, if you work in a knowledge sector job... It's going to make you worse at what you do.

• 33:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that was interesting. I was sitting at a lecture the other night with a friend of mine. And she was on her phone and she was tweeting and she was picturing and she was doing all kinds of stuff, Instagramming. And I said, give me your phone. And I grabbed the phone from her, I said, open your phone. And so I opened the screen time app. And it shows not only the amount of screen time, which was a lot for her, but it showed the number of times you pick up your phone. And it was like a thousand times in a day. And she said, what's yours? And I opened mine. It was like 60 or 70 times, which is still a lot. And I was like, wow, that's a lot. And I think, you know, people don't realize that it affects your ability to be engaged in any particular work for a long period of time. And that's concerning because the things that matter to us, the quality of work we do.

• 33:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Determines our success in life in terms of our ability to actually sort of be able to be engaged with what's happening around us. And that's a big, that's a big deficit.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy. If we were professional athletes and we're eating junk food. We were smoking, people say, that's crazy. Like you make a living off of the physical health of your body. But it's the same thing if you're in elite level knowledge work. I mean, it's literally your brain and its ability to concentrate, its ability to take in and process information and produce new information that has new value. That's at the core of probably a lot of your audience's living, right? That's how they make a living. And to be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. And yet somehow we're not seeing it that way.

• 34:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so you're a scientist. What, what is the data that validates what you're saying? Cause I can imagine people listening, oh yeah, that's just kind of sure. Maybe I can't believe that I'm fine, you know, like what is the actual hard data that supports? This thesis that being on your phones all the time or being distracted by social media is actually impairing your ability to focus.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Well, one of the.

• 34:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And do deep work.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, I think one of the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is, we call it sometimes economists, a productivity paradox. Which is if you study non-industrial productivity, so the economic metric of productivity, so the amount of actual output produced per hour spent working. It should have continued to increase over the past 10 years as we've had this revolution in not just our technology, but in connectivity and information. People are connected in places they never were before. They have essentially all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. They can move files and information from a device that fits in their hand with a supercomputer like power. Like this is amazing. And yet during this entire period, productivity has been stagnant.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  It's not going up. It should have been going up, but it's not. And there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that, yes, these technologies giving us more options and power. And yet, at the same time, it's working against the way that our wetware works. That to actually fragment our intention in the way it does makes our brain actually worse at concentrating, producing value. And so, the downturn from that, combined with the, what should have been enhancing our productivity, which is the tools, is just flattening out.

• 35:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And so, I think this has a real, real issue. And I can only imagine that we're going to see if this is true. Non-industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected than anyone before starts to come into the workforce. So, we have that piece of evidence. Then we have a lot of more close study, those individual type studies, actually trying to understand work. The late work by the late Cliff Nass of Stanford University. He did a lot of work actually in the lab, the psychology lab, with individuals, working on what he called multitasking, but it's basically the same idea.

• 36:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There is no such thing, right?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  There is no such thing. And he, you know, he actually helped spread that, spread that idea. But he was the one who actually had some pretty good research on chronic multitaskers. Think they're really good at concentrating, but they're much worse than people who don't. Another thread of research I'd like to point people towards is to work on attention residue. That's done by a professor named Sophie Leroy. And what she's finding is that when we think that we're not multitasking, what we're doing when we, we've rejected multitasking now, we know we're not supposed to do it. So, we try to do one thing at a time. We only have one window open. But every five or 10 minutes, we do a quick check, right? So, we don't have multiple windows open. We're not doing the late 90s style of multitasking where you're on the phone and doing email variety.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  We're doing one thing, but every five or 10 minutes, it's

• 37:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Check the phone.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  The phone, or the tab. And what she's finding is that context switch and then back again, even if it's very brief, leaves what's called attention residue, which you can measure in the lab, reduces your cognitive capacity and takes a while to actually clear out. And you can measure this easily in the lab because you actually have people doing cognitively demanding puzzles.

• 37:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  And so they can see you start making more mistakes and it takes 10, 20 minutes to actually get back up.

• 37:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To reset. And then in that 20 minutes, you do another one.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  You do another. And so what most knowledge workers are doing is they read Cliff Nass's work and they say, I don't multitask, I'm so advanced, I just single task. But because they're quick checking every five to 10 minutes, they put themselves in a state of persistently reduced cognitive capacity. It's like a reverse nootropic or something, a drug that makes you worse at what you know.

• 37:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow. Yeah, I know when I write my books, I literally have to turn off my phone. I turn off email. I often turn off wifi unless I'm not researching some article. And it's, and I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read and I just, or I just print it out in paper and do it, you know, because it's so powerful and I get so much done. And yet, you know, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, I feel like I'm never really productive.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  It's attention residue.

• 38:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And then that's a, that's a very interesting thing because what you're saying is that by using our phones and technology that we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function, and there's no such thing as multitasking.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even if you think you're single tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad.

• 38:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Quick checking, yeah. Well, that's sort of like multitasking. Now, you know, I, I feel like the thing that, that is fascinating about your work is that you also sort of talk about the positive benefits of not being on your social media or devices. And, and I'd like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media because they're, they're not always the same, right?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so what are the benefits of like doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There are camps, people go to the weekend and they put their phone away, you know, that we, in our Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phones and during meetings, we put them, you know, at the front of the table and no one can touch them. And we have much more productive, engaged meetings.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit, right? It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to whatever, put my phone away for a weekend or, you know, Sundays, I step away from the phone and I don't use my phone or something like this. But then you go back and start using it again normally. And so if you think about this, if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we're addicted to, it's not going to work that well. If I said, I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm going to do, I have it all figured out, don't worry, I'm going to go away and on Sunday, I'm not going to drink, but then get back to it again on Monday. Yeah. Is that really solving the problem? This is, this is my issue with the, just the detox notion, or the, the digital Shabbat notion of you just take a little bit of time off.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  And so the lifestyle I often pitch is, and this is the new book, is not digital detoxing, but digital minimalism. Yeah, what is that? So it's, it's a philosophy of technology use that says, you should start with your values. What do I value? What's important to me in my life? Then for each of those, you ask, okay, what's the best way I can use technology to help these specific values? And then that's it. In terms of your engagement with technology, you can ignore the rest, miss out on the rest. Yeah. As opposed to this maximalist approach of, if I can think of anything interesting about using this app, I'll download it. If I can think of anything that might be cool about this gadget, I'm going to buy it. Minimalism says, no, no, my life is about doing the things I really care about, really value. Often, there's some way that you can use

• 40:57Speaker 01

  technology very intentionally and very selectively that's going to even boost and enhance those things you care about, right? I mean, I'm a computer scientist, I love technology. Yeah, exactly. But you only use it in that way, and then you ignore the rest. And so instead of cluttering your life with every possible form of technology that begins to eat away at your attention and happiness, you have this very intentional use of a few things that do really well, and you're happy missing out on everything else. So, I mean, to get back to your original question, I've been studying these digital minimalists, and they're calm, they're happy, you can have a conversation with them for a long time, and they won't once glance at a phone. They don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment. They can just actually be in the moment. Be there, right.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  They're much more productive in work, they produce things of great value, they're respected by their friends, are involved in their community. I mean, you can go down the list, but when they, they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining pull on their attention and get back to... Here's what I care about, this is what I want to do. I'll use technology selectively to help that, and that's it. It's a much more present, mindful, and satisfying type of life.

• 42:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But that's not so easy, because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the data scientists and behavioral experts, sort of attention experts, who work for these social media companies, designed these programs to be addictive. So can you talk about what you mean by that? Is it truly addictive? Is it just a metaphor? And what's actually happening biologically? How do they come up with the ways to make these things so sticky?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a depressing, a depressing period when I dived into the the reporting and research on how these companies make their products addicting. It's a little bit dark, actually. So the best way-

• 42:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Pull back the veil.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so-

• 42:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Put the light on it.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  The best way to understand it is, what psychologists think is that what you're, what they're trying to create is what they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions. So this is different than, say, a strong substance addiction, right? So, I mean, if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user, they're not going to sneak out in the middle of the night to, you know, go to an internet cafe, because they have to get a fix. On the other hand-

• 43:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They might.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they might. But if you're a heavy Facebook user, and it's in your pocket, and you can get at it any time during the day, you're going to have a very hard time not using it a lot, because that's what a moderate behavioral addiction is going to drive you to do.

• 43:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  A lot of this absolutely is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological vulnerabilities. There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So, I mean, I can give you a couple of examples. On Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications, right, on the mobile app- The designer said, clearly, this should be within the Facebook palette, which is gray and blue, right? So it's like sort of a very nice aesthetically pleasing thing. But the attention engineers came back and said, no, it needs to be alarm red, because we get a much higher click rate if it's that color. It catches your attentions very hard to avoid. The notion of this sort of endless scrolling, right?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  This was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerability as sort of like a slot machine would, that there might be something one more scroll away, there might be something really interesting. These companies have invested millions of dollars to solve really, really hard computer science problems, problems I know about as a computer scientist.

• 44:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're like, programming issues?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Programming issues that they really didn't need to solve, like, for example, auto-tagging people in pictures. This was a very hard problem in image recognition. But now, if you post to Instagram, it can figure out, okay, this person, you know, that's Dr. Hyman, let's send them a note and say, do you want to tag this person? This is very complicated technology. Why did they do it? Because if you say, yes, I want to tag them, that sends to you what they call social approval indicators. And the richer the stream of intermittently arriving social approval indicators that's arriving in your sort of virtual app inbox, the more irresistibly it comes to tap on. So one of the things they optimized for is, this is why the like button took off, right? It was originally there for a much more mundane reason,

• 45:11Speaker 01

  but every time someone clicks like, social approval indicator. Every time someone tags you in a photo, social approval indicator. So now, you have, inside this app, every time you click on it, indicators that other human beings are thinking about you. Sometimes they're not there, sometimes they are.

• 45:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How does that affect the person hitting the like? It affects the person getting the like?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Getting the like. They want the richest possible stream of social approval indicators coming at you from your network. That makes it almost irresistible to click on that app to see what's going on. I mean, that's just pure psychological vulnerability. There's no reason for there to be like buttons on these things. Original design of social media was not so two-way. You would post things that people could read. They added that because you get social approval, and they get the tagging, so you could get social approval indicators. And that plays on this deep-seated psychological vulnerability. Someone is thinking about me, and I can get evidence of it if I touch this button right here. That's an incredibly powerful thing and it really shot up their profitability and their average user minutes once the company started introducing these into their social media

• 46:10Speaker 01

  apps. I mean, the whole experience is engineered to keep you obsessively clicking on this thing and looking at that screen.

• 46:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What about the brain response to this? Because there's a dopamine response, which is the same hormone, or I mean, the same neurotransmitter that is stimulating your brain when you have cocaine, or heroin, or alcohol, or nicotine, right? So how does that play a role in here?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's the same effect that the, you know, the famous Zeiler experiments with the pigeons pecking on the lever, and if they intermittently got food, the way that messed with the dopamine system made them addictively tap, in a way that if they knew they'd always get food, they wanted. And this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have. It's not food nuggets, it's likes and tags, but they're not always there, but sometimes they're there. And that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s that can be-

• 47:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Be a skinner, right?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's impossible. It's impossible to ignore.

• 47:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement. Don't give them the treat every time, make them guess, and then keep them coming back.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's even rumors, I don't know if it's true, that Facebook for a while was actually purposely introducing randomized delays into giving some of this feedback back, just to make sure that it was a little bit more intermittent. I don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't put it past, given what I've learned.

• 47:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So then there's good science about how they're doing this, and the technology that they're using, and it is addictive.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yes, it's meant to be, yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  I think it's important to think about the harms of social media, not in terms of just one specific thing. You know, these are very complex systems. Humans are very complex, right? The human body, the human mind is very complex. So if we approach it as if there's just one silver bullet, we're not going to get anywhere, right? If it's just fixing advertising, I don't think that's actually going to solve the problem necessarily. So I think it's more important to think about it like you would maybe, like a human body and an illness, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna solve your, you know, your athlete's foot with the same thing that will solve your broken arm, right? So I think there's this, I think- Some good analogies from from the world of medicine in terms of thinking about how

• 48:17Speaker 03

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

• 48:56Speaker 03

  We actually tend to respond more more immediately to news that is that is emotionally negatively emotionally valence. So stuff that is that is outrageous, missing context, anger inducing, disgusting, we actually tend to we tend to respond to that most most quickly and immediately. And then it's a really good signal for algorithms to track, right? And if you just if you build a basic engagement algorithm that's trying to track what people are interested in, you know, this actually goes back to traditional news. If it bleeds, it leads. Algorithms have figured that out, right? If it if it makes you if it if it gets you stuck on the item, you are going to keep responding to it.

• 49:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right. Is that why I get so many gorilla videos?

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Maybe, perhaps.

• 49:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I love it, actually.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Totally, totally. And I, you know, I want to I want to calibrate that, like, you know, we've been with this with these tools for for a little bit now, long enough, I think, in some ways to start to see new versions of of slightly more kind of healthy algorithmic curation that have begun to be that have tried to keep you happy and not keep you depressed and sad and doom scrolling, right? But we have we have a word for it, doom scrolling, right? Like, it's everyone knows what that is. Everyone has done it at this point in time. It's a strange new pathology that has no clinical, you know, reflection yet, but but it's something that we that we absolutely feel. And I think

• 50:22Speaker 03

  That when we when we are exposed to too mu- too many of these negative stories, too many of these negatively valanced posts, it it does create a sense of learned helplessness, right? Which is when we feel a stressful situation consistently and repeatedly. We basically, we basically start to believe that we can't control the situation. And we can't actually respond and we can't do anything to solve the world's problems. And that's really problematic, right? Like, that's really, that's a problem in itself. We we need to feel, we need to feel like we can actually tackle the problems that we're facing. And if social media has given this, given us this huge new body of available problems and issues.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  If we are feeling helpless to solve those issues, then that's a, that's a, that's a recipe for, for extreme depression. Right? It's a recipe for disaster in terms of our mental health. And that's really important.

• 51:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Let me think, think about, you know, what's, what's the sort of the genius out of the bottle, right? You know? And, and our, you know, identities, our beliefs, our, you know, it's like, I, I, I can't think of any better analogy than the matrix. I feel like we're all plugged into the matrix and we like, need to friggin unplug. So we can actually have a sense of what's true and real. And, and we don't even know where to go to find out what the truth is anymore. It's, it's a little bit disorienting for people. It's disorienting for me and I, I feel like I'm fairly well educated, fairly well read.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

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

• 52:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

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

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Scary genie. Yeah, it's like a, it's a little, little pinky out of the bottle right now.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think, I think focusing on the issue of sense making is really important. So in studying this book, I kept on, so this book is actually a history book. You, once you get through the first half of it, it's, I go straight back to every previous media disruption in history. That I go back as far as the printing press, trying to understand what, you know, basically what happens when you increase people's ability to see knowledge, share knowledge, and be emotionally excited by knowledge. And every single major media technology has had a tremendous influence on our species. And so, so yeah, starting about halfway through the book, it goes back to, to Martin Luther and the printing press.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  And like, what happened when we were introduced to the printing press? And it turns out the printing press was arguably the most violent invention introduced to continental Europe in, in, up until that point in history, right? It caused huge schisms within the existing power hierarchies. It totally upset society and it caused about a hundred years of civil wars.

• 53:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The printing press.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  The printing press, literally.

• 53:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I have all the books.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Those books, right? And like, you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't at the end of that point have, have said, no, we don't, we don't want that printing press. We don't all this book, these books, we want people to go back the old ways. But there was this deep, deep, dark period in which people were deeply confused, you know, in that era, a tolerance, like tolerance, the idea of tolerance was actually a sin. Like it was actually a sin that, that so someone was of a different political persuasion or religious persuasion. It was kind of your job to go up to them and like confront them about it and. Or be violent with them about it, right? So you think about how disruptive that was to go from one way of being to another way of being in the world. And so, so we, we don't tend to think about information technology as being such a disruptive and violent thing, but it absolutely can be.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  And the reason is because it confuses us. It confuses us. It gives us access to huge new, uh, huge new models of kind of moral reasoning about the world. And it also exposes us to a tremendous number of possible outrages. And many of those outrages are real. Many of those outrages are not real. And to figure out the differences between what is worthy of our attention is really part of the problem that we're facing right now. So, so when I, uh, when I, when we talk and just kind of like lean towards, uh, uh, lean towards some optimism towards solutions here, coming back to the beginning of our conversation. Yeah. It's, um, you know, I can't emphasize enough how problematic misinformation is.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  And we have, you know, as Americans, I think we have a healthy skepticism of authorities.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  You know, we, we have, we have this kind of anti authoritarian disposition where it's like, don't, you know, don't trust the, don't trust the government, don't trust the experts. Like, we can figure it out on our own. That's, that's a very American disposition, right? But there is a real difference between, between authoritarian speech, right? And, uh, and mediated speech, right? Which is like speech and information that comes from, uh, from media entities that are, that are built to help try to parse truth and falsehoods. And they don't always get it right. They're not always gonna, you know, they're not always gonna give you the exact right, um, the exact right result, uh, the exact right truthful item. Uh, but, but it's gonna be oftentimes much better than your average person trying to figure it out by doing their own research online.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  And so that's, that's, you know, you, we, we do need to find these proxies, these middle layers of proxies. And you can, you know, it's, it's, we're actually lucky insofar as good information has a fingerprint. And what I mean by that, by good information, I'm not, I'm not just saying like good information. I'm saying that like good, good information, uh, like accurate, accurate information has a fingerprint. It tends to be well cited. It tends to come, it tends to go through a few of these layers of refutation and, uh, and, uh, and peer review and people that are trying to figure out whether or not it's accurate. Right? And, uh, and we can, we can look at that in how the information travels, right? If it's one person's idea that just comes to you directly, it's less likely to be true than one person's idea that has gone through three or four, uh, cycles, other people calling bullshit on that idea.

• 56:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Trying to actually figure out if it's true, uh, or not. Um, and call it, cause we, we're much better at identifying the, uh, the failures of other people's logic and the failures of other people's, uh, you know, assertions than we are our own. So, and that's, that's really the, the point of free speech in the first place is so that we can share and we can criticize each other openly and improve the available knowledge for everyone.

• 57:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's increasingly disturbing to hear, you know, censorship happening and

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, free, you know, range of opinion not being heard and, you know, debate being shunned. And I think, wow, like what kind of a society we're in where we're burning books, you know?

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 57:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I just watched, uh, the Ken Burns documentary, US and the Holocaust. And it was just, you know, I, I thought, you know, gee, you know, we had this sort of, this sort of relatively new rise of division in society, but it would, it always existed and it's always sort of been a threat in America, right? The North and the South, the slave owners and the not, the, you know, the, the, the sort of isolationists and, you know, the globalists in America. And, you know, I think, um, it, it, it's, you know, we're sort of, I, I think always prone to this, but you know, how do we, how do we find that, you know, as, as sort of Abraham Lincoln talked about, how do we find the search for our better angels? You know, we're, how do we, how do we get to our better angels who are going to inspire us instead of take us down the path of the worst aspects of humanity?

• 58:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, there's been war and violence and rape and destruction for millennia. But, you know, I feel like human consciousness, it seems like it's slowly getting better, but it's in, again, these, these forces that are at play now in technology are seemingly taking us really out of any age of enlightenment that we were in for any period of time.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How, how do we find our way back from that?

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think it's really, it's really important to recognize that, and this is why I kind of come back to the misinformation point a lot is because the feel, the feeling right now is one of, of deeply, there's threats ever, everywhere, right? It feels that we feel deeply threatened by the world, by, by, you know, our political enemies, our ideological enemies, our, the enemies to the identities and the people that we hold dear.

• 59:11Speaker 03

  And that is something that social media does very well is serve us threats more than it would, more than traditional media would, right? It's like, it's like, social media would focus on a single threat at a time, and now social media has exposed us to basically infinite threats.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Always, right? It's like, if you, if you, if you, if you're worried about something, you can find an anecdote that represents that deepest fear. And social media is very, very good at serving us up those algorithms that prioritize certain content over other content. And our own biases play together to actually make us see these threats more apparent, more apparently than other, than otherwise. And something strange happens when we are exposed to a lot of threats, right? We actually seek, there's this, there's this basically this kind of tribal switch that happens in our brains and which we start to affiliate ourselves more strongly with, with in-group and out-group behavior. So we look for, we look for safety in identities that, that feel, that feel like they are more like us, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  And we look to denigrate the out-groups that are threatening, right? And if you, you know, if you want, if you're curious about why there's so many hashtag identity this, hashtag identity that on social media, that is actually one of the reasons why is because everyone feels a little bit threatened on social media. And they feel like, I need to declare my allegiance, I need to protect the things that hold, that I hold dear in this space. And I think it really does come down to this, this, this, this fundamental idea of threat. That if we're exposed to too many threats, then it actually causes us, it causes these basic tribal notions to increase dramatically. And there's, there's some decent research showing that this, Jay Van Bevel at NYU has, he has a great book called The Power of Us, which I'd recommend on this topic as well, which, which shows how much identity shapes our behavior, particularly online.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  then it will, it will keep running a little process in the back of your head and it will, it will kind of infect most of your actions.

• 1:01:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

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• 1:02:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at DrMarkHyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at DrMarkHyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in, we'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

• 1:03:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

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