BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health | Dr Anders Hansen #657

A topic that I’m truly passionate about is the introduction of social media and smartphones into all aspects of our lives - changing the way we think, feel and connect with one another. 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 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist, globally renowned speaker, and best-selling author Dr Anders Hansen. In this clip, he explains how our attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in today’s world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/381 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 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist and author Dr Anders Hansen. In this clip, he explains how our attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in today's world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention. And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realise that it's very hard. And that's because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product. Every second that we spend on our screens is money for them. And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that. And as a consequence, we spend more and more and more time on our screens. And today, for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours. For teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours. These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast. And what's the consequence of that?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much. We don't move as much and we don't meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions. So it's in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online.

• 3:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch up with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear that these things are having, for all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem. Yet, despite us talking about it, despite them hearing about it,

• 4:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  a lot of people just aren't able to change what they do.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Because it's so difficult. Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok, for instance. Every time you turn TikTok on, you have a $10 billion artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out, what should I show Wrangham so that he doesn't turn off? Because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies, especially directed to children and teenagers without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty because we constantly return to our phones. I do that as well. And I've just realised that it's not just about characters.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  These are very powerful stimuli and the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time because they will be too attractive.

• 5:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  This modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful. Because anything good in life comes from presence. Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work, me and you interacting now with no phones there, just me and you sitting across the table, me chatting to my wife about something important, me chatting to my children, right, me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh. All those things require attention and presence. If you're going to get the true value of them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, when we cannot maintain our attention.

• 5:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I guess what I'm trying to get to, Anders, is how do we change things? What do we do if we look at the addiction with smartphones? If I look at what's happening with children now? You can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity. You think, well, actually, where does this go in five years, in 10 years? Where do we end up in 20 years? You know, there's a, there's a, there's a book called reclaiming conversation, which is brilliant.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I read it.

• 6:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I love it.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this whole idea that we're losing the art of conversation. This is one of the things that makes us human. And many kids and teenagers, apparently, according to Sheri and her research, prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I, I've never forgot that since I read it, where you can edit a text message. You can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, me and you, we have to risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled. Right? Maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through. That's the risk that we are running by having this real time conversation. But it's also something that it's part of humanity.

• 7:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's part of who we are. We're not wired for these perfectly edited communications, are we?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's boring. But historically loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food. That's why we have so strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We, we, we read one another. We're very good at that and we try to create bonds, social bonds. And we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now, those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years, where we met physically. And now, all of a sudden, we, we, we meet like this.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  And we can replace some of that with a screen, but we can't replace all of it. It's not just what your face expression on the screen. You know, it's so many more signals that we are constantly registering. And if we, we all felt that during COVID, when we spent so much time on our screens, that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. But most of us felt very lonely and isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredibly strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this, the brain thinks that we're lonely. And if we're lonely, well, then we will die. That's the mortal danger.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And then we feel crappy, of course.

• 8:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  We have to intentionally create some rules for ourself. Because if we don't, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made where you have students doing tests for focus and for memory. And half of them bring their phone into the testing room. The other half leave their phone outside. And the ones that bring the phones with them don't pick it up. They just have it in the pocket. And it turns out that the ones who have left the phone outside perform better.

• 9:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Even if it's in your pocket?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Even if you don't pick it up. So it's just by being in the same room, it distracts you. And the reason is probably that it's providing you with so much stimulation that you must constantly think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. And then you get distracted. And that doesn't matter if you're doing something very ordinary. But if you have to be focused at your work or in school, you're studying for exam, leave the phone outside. There's also been experience made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between.

• 10:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject. And on half of these tables, there is a notebook, paper and pen. And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. And they don't pick up the phone. But it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table, they find their discussion less interesting. They even find the person they're talking to less reliable. And that's probably because they have to think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. So it steals some of your mental bandwidth just by being around. And we feel guilty for this. We feel, you know, I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time. But we shouldn't, because these are incredibly powerful stimuli.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And again, someone is making money from that.

• 10:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. You also write in The Attention Fix about low-tech parents. And you reference, I think, Steve Jobs and how, you know, we've heard this before, but I think it's worth reiterating that a lot of the creators of these products Did not allow their children on them.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. There was a journalist that came home to Steve Jobs and he thought that there would be iPads everywhere and you know, all the screens in every room and there weren't. He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads. And we remember Steve Jobs is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us, ever. And he himself was cautious about using it too much. That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that if you are looking at a screen more than you are looking at someone's eyes, you're doing something wrong. So the CEO of the

• 11:49Speaker 01

  company that makes the most money from screens says, "Don't use our products too much." That says something on how incredibly addictive these things are and how naive we have been in implementing them so widely. And again, especially toward children. And as I said before, I think the main impact of digital lives on our wellbeing is not what we do online, but what we don't do when we are online. We don't sleep as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet. But there is a big caveat to this, and that is over-usage of social media seems to be dangerous for teenagers. For girls in the age 12 to 13, boys 14 to 15. And that's probably because this

• 12:33Speaker 01

  is the time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think that part of your life, you really desperately want to belong to a group. And you have, we have compared ourselves to a small group during all of human history. You know, there were 50, 100 people who you met during your entire life. That was your tribe or your band. And you compare yourselves to perhaps 20 or 30 of them who were around your age. And now you compare yourself to the entire planet. And there's always someone who is smarter and better looking and more successful and richer than you are, and you feel that you are worthless. "I'm not good enough." And you get this signal from your screens five

• 13:18Speaker 01

  or six hours every day. And you have your friends' photos and for, you know, for every photo on Instagram, there was 100 photos that was discarded that you don't see. And if that wasn't enough, you have a whole... You have a whole army of Instagrammers and influencers who get paid to show their perfect life.

• 13:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough.

• 13:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  The thing is.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And then you feel lonely and then you feel like you're being pushed out of the group and that that is registered in the brain as something that is extremely dangerous. And that's why you feel so bad about it.

• 13:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, the problem is Anders, the way I see it is that we can know this with our rational brains. We know we're comparing, you know, the highlight reel of someone else's life to the mundane reality of our day to day life. We know that, we hear it, you've said it, I've said it, but I still don't think knowing it makes a jot of difference because you can know it, but your subconscious when you're scrolling is still picking on this idea that their life is better, their life is better. Their life is better. One morning, this is about, I don't know, a few months ago, I broke one of my rules.

• 14:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was, I was on Instagram very early. I don't know why, but you know, we're all human, we're all seduced by these devices. And I saw something, I can't remember what it was, but I started to feel bad afterwards. And then I was making a hot drink in the kitchen, I thought, wow, wrong, nothing has happened, right? Literally nothing has happened. You're still here in your house, your wife and kids are still sleeping, the birds are singing in the garden, right? Nothing has happened apart from the fact I went on Instagram for a few minutes. So nothing in the real world changed.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yet my mental state changed.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  From scrolling. And I was like, this is utter madness.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you take a step back, you let someone who you have never met, who you will never meet, make you feel inadequate.

• 15:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Because they had a better looking toilet, or more expensive vacation, or a nicer car, or what have you. I mean, that's that's insane. And of course, it happens to me all the time as well. But the more you think about these things, when you read about it, and you have to hear it many times, you have to hear it from many sort of different angles and present it in different ways. Then you start to seeing it being played out in yourself. And that's that's why we have to create a distance to it. I'm not gonna let any big American company steal my focus because they're making money from my eyeballs staring at the screen.

• 16:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what's your approach to deal with smartphone addiction and a lack of focus? I mean, how do you, as a busy professional?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I'm incredibly cautious about my focus. Focus is something that is very, very vulnerable. If you've lectured, you probably noticed that you could have a couple of hundred individuals listening to, and then one comes late, and everyone is looking at the person who's coming late. What does it matter if one person is late? Well, that's because we are not, the brain didn't evolve to be focused. It evolved to constantly scan your surrounding for danger. It says something there, there, there, there, there. So we are incredibly easily distracted. And focus, which is so valuable in today's society, is something that is very, very, that's hard for us.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And when I do my most important work, when I think the stuff that I really think is valuable, that's when I am really in a deep focus mode. And I want to protect that, preserve that, and then I have the phone outside. That's not gonna disturb me.

• 17:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you've you've taken preemptive action. You keep the phone in a different room when you're trying to do deep thinking.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  James Clear, the author, talks about the same thing. He says even if his phone is in the next room, so maybe just three seconds to get up, walk there and get it, even just having it in the next room means he's, you know, significantly less likely to look at it.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like candy. And therefore, I can't have it around all the time. So I don't have it in the bedroom. I don't have it when I work and so on. And I tried to be aware of this Achilles heels in my psychology, which are in reality, defence mechanisms or survival mechanisms that have become Achilles heels in our modern society. And everyone must find their own way of sort of working through this, but it's incredibly fascinating to learn more about it because you understand yourself better.

• 18:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And if you understand yourself better, well, then you can work around what's difficult for you. It's a constant uphill battle, but I mean, if we want to feel as good as possible, then we have to do this.

• 18:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend.

• 19:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.