BITESIZE | How Smartphones Are Rewiring Our Brains | Jonathan Haidt #554

A topic that I’m truly passionate about is the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives – and what impact this is having on us individually, collectively and, perhaps most urgently, what impact this is having on our children. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 456 of the podcast with world-renowned psychologist and author of the best-selling book ‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’, Jonathan Haidt. In this clip, Jonathan shares some eye-opening insights and we delve into practical strategies for parents. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore⁠⁠ Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/456 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com.⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 0:41Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 456 of the podcast with Jonathan Haidt, world-renowned psychologist and author of the bestselling book, The Anxious Generation. Now, a topic that I'm truly passionate about is the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives.

• 1:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what impact this is having on us individually, collectively, and perhaps most urgently, what impact this is having on our children. In this clip, Jonathan shares some eye-opening insights and shares some practical advice for parents.

• 2:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think a lot of us can understand why social media in particular can be toxic. So why in your view, do you think we should try our best to avoid giving our children smartphones until the age of 16?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  When I started writing the book, I thought the main story was going to be about social media and girls, because that's where the evidence is clearest. But, but pretty soon in, I realized, no, it's the phone-based childhood. It's when the phone moves to the center of your child's life, it blocks out everything else. And in fact, I call phones experience blockers, because they will, they'll reduce the degree to which your child has every other kind of experience. They won't read as many books, they're not likely to have hobbies, they're not going to sleep as much. And that's even true if they're not on social media, because the phone has so many fun things to do. So, look at the way kids behave now. At the beginning of class, it's silent. You know, students, most students are there a little bit early. It's silent, because it's a little awkward to start a conversation with someone who

• 3:19Speaker 01

  isn't your best friend. And everyone else is on their phone, and so you pull out your phone. Even if you don't have social media, you've got something to do there. Or maybe you, you get into an elevator, and you know, it's a little awkward in an elevator with some people that you sort of know. Do you make small talk? No, you just pull out your phone. That's what everyone else is doing. There's no need for small talk. And so, the technology is amazing at making our lives easier. And that's why we adults are hooked on it, and it's not necessarily bad. I love my iPhone, it does all kinds of amazing things for me, it's very, very helpful. But I guess the key idea I want to get for parents here is, the last thing you want to do for your child is make everything easy. The last thing you want to do is say, all the things that are difficult in life, here, here's a phone, it will take care of things for you.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  That's a way to guarantee that they will not grow. And so, even if your, your daughter, let's say, gets a smartphone, or your son has a smartphone, and you say, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no, you know, TikTok, there's still a lot of stuff to do there, and they will still use it as a crutch socially.

• 4:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  It feels that we are literally changing our experience of the world.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Having immediate access to everything all the time, I think actually is a problem. It makes us lazy.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's right. Kids need to strive and struggle for things thousands of times. And if we make it easy for them, they don't learn. But your point about how this feels different, this time is different. Almost all of us, no matter who you talk to, you know, our technology is a mixed blessing. We all see the value in it for our work, but we're overwhelmed just the number of emails and texts and distractions, the things we have to do. And then once we appreciate how hard it is for us, now transfer this to nine year olds, to children who are just about to begin puberty. What does it do as the brain is rapidly rewiring? Puberty is this incredibly important period of brain development.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  What does this crazy, insane, inhuman kind of overwhelming life do to our kids?

• 5:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you touched on something really important, I think, which is we all know how difficult it is for us to manage our own relationship and we have fully developed prefrontal cortexes, right? We have fully developed brains. So what is it doing to our kids?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let's start by talking about childhood because human childhood is unique among all other animals. You know, childhood in other animals is this temporary period between, you know, when you're a neonate and a tiny little thing, and then you have to quickly get to the adult form to be reproductive. But humans have this weird S shaped curve where we grow quickly the first couple of years and then we grow very slowly from, you know, age, you know, four, five, six, all the way in that period, what Freud called the latency period, up to, you know, 11, 12, 13, whenever the growth spurt starts. And in that period, the brain isn't really growing either, but it's rewiring itself up and it's wiring itself up based on experience.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  And if you're a young mammal, you have a relatively large brain compared to other taxa of animals. And you are programmed to play. All young mammals play. And there's a biological purpose for that play, which is they try out motor patterns at first. Just can I run? Can I walk? Can I climb? And then they try out social patterns. Can I tease? Can I take teasing? And this takes many, many years, 10, 15 years to do this, to wire up the brain. So what happens? What happens if we give our kids? And in the UK, I heard this horrible statistic. In the UK, Ofcom reported that 24% of your five to seven year olds have their own smartphone. Parents give them a hand me down, whatever here, kid, watch this. You know, I'm busy, I'm cooking, I'm doing email.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Here, here's a phone. A quarter of five to seven year olds have a smartphone. A smartphone is an experience blocker. Once a kid has it, it's so enticing, they're just not going to have many of those experiences that they need to wire up their brains properly. So when all this stuff was coming in, you know, we thought, well, sure, they're having social interactions on social media. It's very social. And, you know, the boys are talking to each other on video games or there, it's exciting. So we, you know, we thought, well, maybe these virtual interactions will be just as good. I even thought, I remember when I first saw Twitter and kids were like tweeting about a hamburger that they had or something. I was thinking, well, it's kind of weird. It's trivial, but maybe it's super social. Maybe, you know, maybe they're like, if you have, if you have 500 contacts with other

• 7:48Speaker 01

  kids during the day, rather than just 50 or whatever I had when I was in grade school, maybe that'll be good. But it's not. A real world interaction is one that involves our bodies. Like even right now, I'm moving my hands, you and I, there are all kinds of rules, like you're listening to me, so you look at me. I just make temporary eye contact. It'd be weird if I just stared at you. So this is a subtle thing about human social interaction that I can put into words, but I didn't know this until I like read it in a book, that this is what we do. So you and I are both practiced at this because we've had millions and millions of face to face interactions. But, but in a virtual interaction, there's no body. You're just interacting, I mean, you know, you're just interacting mostly through typing, through words.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And the person on the other end doesn't even have to be a person. It can be an AI. So, so the body is really important. We use our heads, our head position, we use all kinds of things. So nonverbal communication is crucial. And that's just the first feature. The next feature is synchronous versus asynchronous. So, right, see, you just said, yeah, like, we both know exactly when to put in that little sound. Too early, you'd be interrupting me. Too late, and we'd trip over each other. So it's this really, it's this really tight dance that we all know how to do with each other. But on social media, on virtual interactions, I post something, and then I check, and you didn't comment on it. And why not? But you commented on someone else.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Like, what's going on? So asynchronous interaction is much more prone to misunderstanding, stress, a lack of feedback. And so if kids are doing that, rather than joking around with each other, and wrestling, and putting their arms around each other, and playing, they're missing out on what they need. It's as though they were being kept flat on their back instead of learning to walk.

• 9:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it has to be in real time, right?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Real time, exactly. So, beginning in infancy, there's a real emphasis on the back and forth, almost like a tennis game. One person, you know, like, you know, you tickle the kid, and then she laughs, and then you laugh, and then she laughs. So we get this, this dyadic interaction going. And then when kids are older, they, they like to be with a small group, two or three other kids hanging around. So, so that, you're truly interacting, and when you interact, when you take turns, that bonds you. You, you, you trust more when you've done that turn-taking. You're not performing for your friends, you're playing with them. But when you put kids on, so let's say texting, okay? So texting the way the millennials did it on their flip phones, you text one other person, and you might joke around.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That's okay. I'm not against joking around on text, but it's one-to-one. Now, what kids on Snapchat and just regular texts are doing, a lot of group texts. I mean, you have 30 people on a group text, you have a whole large group, now it's performative. You're not bonding, you're performing.

• 10:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  It will change the nature of what you say, just because so many people are looking at it.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's performative rather than playful. Kids need a lot of play, they don't need much performance at all.

• 10:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Something that I read in, I think it was Sherri Turkle's book, Reclaiming Conversation.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  That's a great book.

• 10:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a wonderful book, and she shared how adolescents now...

• 11:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Would rather communicate, or some of them would rather communicate on text message because they can edit.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not real time.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Right, you're growing up on camera, you're always on camera, you don't want to screw up.

• 11:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  I found that remarkable.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  It's so sad.

• 11:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then, then if we think about what you're talking about throughout the book and what you've already said, if we are not developing the skill of real time interaction, we're going to struggle massively when we're adults.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 11:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  You make this case right at the start of your book, that we have over protected children offline in the real world and under protected them online.

• 11:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is remarkable how many children, young children now have a smartphone. I didn't know, actually, it was that much in the UK. That's quite, well, for anyone who's read your book or reads your book, I think that statistic becomes even more alarming. But I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of parents are trying to do their best. They probably don't know the impact

• 12:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  that that is having on their kids.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  That's right. So I think the way to understand this, because in my book, I don't blame parents at all. If parents all over the world are failing in the same way, then it can't be the parents' fault. There's something about the system, the product. So I don't blame parents.

• 12:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Kids and social media, kids and screens is something that I brought up on many occasions on this podcast over the previous years. It's something I'm very passionate about. Now, there's some pretty compelling graphs in the book. Can you explain what exactly happened in 2010? You've already touched on it, but if we're really trying to understand the causative link between social media use and mental health problems, particularly in girls, maybe explain some of that data for me, please?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Sure. anxiousgeneration.com is the website for the book. And so we now have a fantastic research page there. Just go to anxiousgeneration.com, you'll see that you click on the research tab, you'll see all these graphs. And the basic pattern is this, when you trace out levels of depression and anxiety, and you always need to do it separated by sex. Never trust graphs that merge all kids together. Always look at just girls separately and look at boys separately because they're very different. And what you find is that for the girls, everything was very stable from the late 90s, or wherever the data goes back to, generally in the 90s, and all the way through the early 2000s up to 2010, there's no real pattern. We're talking now about the millennials. When the millennials were teenagers, their mental health was very stable. When were you born, if you're a millennial?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  1981 to 1995. And so their mental health is very stable. But then, when Gen Z enters these data sets, Gen Z is, 1996 and later, when Gen Z enters, the numbers go up very, very suddenly around 2012. And it's not just because Gen Z has arrived, it's because this is the great rewiring period, 2010 to 2015. And if you're a millennial, you were mostly done with puberty by the time this happened. So if you didn't get your first Instagram account until you were 17 or 18, or maybe you were in university, you're probably fine. It was distracting, it wasted time, but it didn't rewire your brain because you were mostly done with puberty. Early puberty is the most sensitive, easily disrupted, open period.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Roughly 11 to 13 for girls, maybe 12 or 13 to 14, 15 for boys. That is the most important period for us to be careful about, about what's going into their eyes and ears. And so this is, I believe, what caused Gen Z to exist, rather than just being more millennials, is it's those kids around 2012 who got their first smartphone, Instagram account, front-facing camera, high-speed data, all of it comes in just in a few years. So kids 11 or 12, when they get all this stuff... Now their most sensitive period of brain rewiring is governed by like millions of little things flashing past with a status report. This got this many likes. This person has this many followers. Everything's quantified. Everything, you're on camera.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  So if you were in early puberty during the great rewiring period, you became Gen Z and you have more than a double the risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide if you're a girl. For boys, the interesting thing is that the percentage increases are often similar, but boys start from lower levels of depression, anxiety. At puberty, girls have always had their levels of depression, anxiety, what we call internalizing disorders, go up. So, boys and girls are both going up, but the difference is that for the girls, it's a hockey stick. It's almost always a hockey stick graph. That is, it's flat, you get to 2012, and then boom, it goes up, up, up. The boys, it's not usually a hockey stick. The boys, it's more of a slow curve. And for the boys, it begins a couple of years earlier.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And I think, I can't prove this part, but I think it's because the boys were getting on to multiplayer video games around 2007, 8, 9. The boys are getting on to multiplayer video games, which are great fun, but they're so much fun that they don't see each other in person much anymore. So the problem for boys starts a little earlier. It doesn't have an elbow in it that's as sharp. And that was one of the clues that the boys' story is just different from the girls' story.

• 16:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's really powerful. I have seen this in practice. I have seen at least three kids where I can directly see a link between their social media use and their mental health. And I've also seen how quickly it can change if you help them reset their relationship.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've mentioned that it's different for girls than it is for boys. This is incredibly fascinating, Jonathan. Can you walk us through that, please? Why is social media particularly harmful for girls?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. The big difference between boys and girls, men and women, is not in their abilities. It's in their, it's in what they enjoy. When you look at what, what boys and girls choose to do when they are left alone, playing however they want, the boys tend to go for, they'll form into groups and then they will compete. They just enjoy that. The boys will work more with things. They'll build things. So, boys are more oriented towards things, girls are more oriented towards people, just on average. These are just differences on average. So when you let kids play, the girls will tend to spend more time in pairs or small groups, talking, and especially talking about other people.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Girls are really interested. They have a much more sophisticated mental map of social space. So this is no judgment on either sex. This is just what we find. So what happens when everybody gets devices all day long? The boys get their phones and their video controllers and they say, wow, rather than like going out and it's raining and we're gonna, you know, we want to play basketball or football, rather than that, how about we all just, let's play video games. It's more exciting anyway. What's happened, once we got high-speed internet, the games became more and more amazing, multiplayer, distributed games. So now, if a boy wants to play with his friends, he has to go home alone. He can't go over to a friend's house because he needs his own headset, his own

• 18:26Speaker 01

  controller, his own screen. And then, he can play with his buddies and a bunch of strangers, Fortnite or whatever war game they want to play. But he's not really with them, is he? Exactly. That's right. Now, it is synchronous. So video games are better than social media, because video games, at least they're synchronous. The boys, you know, my son, like during COVID, we finally relented and got him an Xbox and he'd play Fortnite with his buddies. And they'd be laughing their heads off. So there are some good things about these video games. But when those video games displace time together, they're really losing out. So that's the boy's story. Video games and porn are at the heart of what's blocking the boy's development. But social media takes that natural girl interest in

• 19:08Speaker 01

  the social map and exploits it and says, do you want to know what someone just said about someone else? Here it is. What do you think about that? Do you want to know what someone else just said about you? Here it is. So, social media is really targeted at girls' insecurities. And we know this from some of the documents that Frances Haugen brought out of Facebook, the Facebook whistleblower. There's one, I mentioned it in the book. Where they have a little seminar within Facebook, now Meta, they have a little seminar on brain development. And they show slides about how the prefrontal cortex is the last part to myelinate, the last part to lock down. How the emotion centers are very powerful in a 12, 13, 14 year old kid. But the ability to regulate impulse control and say no is much weaker.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I mean, they, they knew exactly what they were targeting in their battle to keep, girls especially, to keep them on their platform and not let them go to other platforms.

• 20:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's, it's so powerful to hear the difference between boys and girls. Because as you say, boys are getting harmed by this new tech world, but just in a different way.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  To girls. And so I appreciate it's difficult in every family. Everyone's got unique challenges. At the same time, we're not blaming parents. You're very clear in the book to not blame parents. This is a collective action problem. But whilst we are waiting for this collective action problem to get solved, I think there are some things that we can do.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. In fact, yeah, let's not put it as while we're waiting for it to get solved. Let's put it as we all have to get going today to improve the habits and exposure of our kids. You don't want to keep your kid away from the internet entirely. To have, to have a desktop computer, a big computer with a big screen out in the living room or the kitchen or someplace where it's somewhat public is probably a good idea. I mean, you know, there are many times when you want your kid to do something on the internet. The problems, from what I hear, and here I'm drawing on, there's a woman named Melanie Hempey, who runs Screen Strong, an organization in the US. She says the really bad stuff happens when they can take a device into their bedroom at night. And they're not monitored. And that's when they're talking to strangers.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And that's when a lot of the really horrible stuff happens. So don't think you have to keep your kid away from the internet. What you have to do is you have to delay as long as you can the day at which your child has unlimited immersion in the internet on demand. And that's what a smartphone gives them, unless, as in your case, when they come home, they have to put aside the smartphone. That's what we do too for my daughter. She comes in, she has to put on the kitchen counter. It's supposed to stay there. It doesn't always stay there.

• 21:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  But at least there's a framework there. Even if it doesn't always stay there, you're setting

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Expectations.

• 21:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Expectations, right? There's a framework for how to live and how to use this device. Even if it doesn't get followed 100% of the time, your daughter was still growing up knowing that I shouldn't be on this thing the whole time because mum and dad are prioritizing this.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  That's right. And in the solutions, I really focus on solving what we call collective action problems. This is the key to the whole thing. A collective action problem is one in which if one person does something, it might be very difficult, but if several of us do it at the same time, it becomes much easier. And so if you're the only parent who says to your son, no, you're not getting a smartphone, and he says, but everyone else has one, I'm left out. They're all, you know, they're all on various platforms. They're doing things and I don't even know what's going on. It's very painful for the kid and it's painful for you. So if you are the first one to do what you thought was the right

• 22:49Speaker 01

  thing, you are imposing a cost on your child. But what if you can team up with a few of your child's friends' parents so that, you know, when your kids reach eight or nine or 10, or whatever it is that you're thinking giving them a smartphone, you all say, you know what, the five of us, the five families, we're all going to do the same thing. We're going to keep you on flip phones or brick phones, whatever you call them here, until, you know, in the US, I would say 14 high school here, 16, end of secondary school. We're going to keep you on those, but guess what? We're going to give you a fun childhood. The families of your best friends, we're all going to give you an enormous amount of freedom. You can hang out at any of our houses. You can go between them without supervision.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And with like eight, nine, 10 year olds, this is incredibly healthy. We're going to, you know, we'll pay for you to take trips to an amusement park or to, you know, something that you can do fun without supervision. That's the way we can give our kids back a healthy childhood. And if the school Is on board. Then you have, you saw, you break the collective action problem instantly. Because now you have the whole community is saying, let's delay smartphones. Let's give our kids more independence and free play without smartphones.

• 23:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. What about parents who are listening, who go, okay, I don't know what to do. And the practical area is brilliant, by the way, so for people, get the book, because it actually, it's so clear, you've set it out for different age groups, what to do, right? It's really, really clear. But what about for someone who might feel that, I don't know, the ship has sailed? Like, they've got a 15-year-old who already is hooked on their smartphone. This is very challenging, isn't it?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 24:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you have any advice for that parents?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. You know, I hear this a lot, you know, the trains left the station, the ship has sailed, so we can't call it back. You know, but if a train left the station carrying 100 kids and it was headed for a bridge that was out and we knew they were going to fall into a ravine, we'd call it back, like, we'd do something. And so I think, you know, I think we can do it here, but it's very, very hard. If you just call your kid back and nobody else does, that's really painful for your kid. You don't want your kid, once your kid has all these social relationships through technology, it's very hard to rip them out and say, no, those relationships are gone, because now you're condemning your kid to social death. So the first thing is, team up with a few other families. If it's a few families doing it together, it's much easier, much less painful. That's the first thing.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Second thing is, once you're aware, once you have the concept of a phone-based childhood versus a play-based childhood, now you can think, again, with other families and perhaps the whole school, how do we give our kids more of a play-based childhood rather than a phone-based childhood? Because don't think about this just as, we've got to rip the phones out of their hands, we've got to get them off screens, period. What are they going to do all day if you take them off screens? You have to give them back a human childhood, where there's a lot of time with other kids unsupervised. So the more you think about it as giving your kid a play-based childhood, instead of just taking away the phone-based childhood, the easier it's going to be.

• 25:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, no, I love that. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday, and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.