How Social Media May Be Ruining Your Life

[Music] so welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman a place for conversations that matter that's pharmacy fa RM Acy and today we're gonna have another amazing conversation about things that really matter that we might not really want to talk about which is social media and our addiction to our screens and technology and we have with us an amazing guest who's Cal Newport he's an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and he's researching cutting edge technology but he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture on our behavior on our thoughts on our performance he's written six books including digital minimalism out in February 2019 and deep work about doing work that is quality work that's based on focus and attention which we can't really do when were distracted by our technology and social media his work has been featured in lots of publications including New York Times Wall Street Journal The Economist and he's been writing essays for his personal website Cal Newport comm which I encourage you to check out for over a decade and he has never had a social media account and he is a millennial and he did an extraordinary TED talk which is almost 5 million views which disrupted our idea about whether or not social media is a good thing or a bad thing and he actually makes a case in this TED talk of staying off of all social media so welcome Cal we're gonna get into this now well yeah thanks for having me I'd like to say if you have any complaints direct them all towards Twitter right so now you did this TED talk which described why we should quit and you you talked about some of the key myths that are about why we have to be on social media and you challenge those myths you break them down and you talk about how social media interferes with both our social connections despite it being a social network and deep work so can you take us through what you presented in your TED talk cause it was very compelling and it made me want to shut off and turn off all my social media accounts which would basically affect my business but you know that's ok yeah but you might be happier yeah well actually just a quick a quick intro to this you know my wife and and I love to be together but often you know I'm on my phone or I'm focused on the latest whatever I gotta do or it's usually work-related but she all she wanted was the quality of my attention and you know when you look at relationships and what breaks and keeps relationships it's the quality of the attention we give to each other and so I for our anniversary I bought her a box a little wooden box and she was oh that's such a nice little box thank you thank you and I said no that's not the present the president take my phone I stick on the box for the weekend and I give you my full attention and she started crying and it was like a very emotional that's the best present ever got and you know sort of speaks to how much we've been attached to our phones and disconnect from real relationships yeah we have been and what's what's crazy is that you can get that strong of reaction about the idea of putting your phone in a box and yet most of us are so comfortable just using it constantly I mean could you imagine anything else in your life that was causing such contention or stress or what have you that your spouse would actually cry when you talked about I will step away this for a few weekends and that you want to be thinking this is now my number one priority yeah is to be wary of this llll in my life and yet somehow with phones and social media we've been given him a pass yeah we look at them we kind of wring our hands we say kids these days you know they're on their phones too much when we go back to business as usual so yeah I'm out there trying to disrupt the saying I think many fewer people should be used in social media yeah so tell us about your TED talk and what you you came up with which of those four different myths or ideas that we we get into in our way of actually limiting our social media yeah so so in my talk I called it quits o shil media my argument was maybe not everyone should quit it but I think many fewer people should be using it my analogies it should be like Game of Thrones right there should be you know a fair number of people that really like it but most people don't care it shouldn't necessarily be ubiquitous yeah like it is right now I think that's the problem so in that talk I decided I'd go over some of the common arguments in favor of social media and see they're not they're not nearly as as strong as people like to think so for example people think if you're not on social media you're not going to be able to maintain a healthy social life yeah in the 21st century and we don't have a lot of evidence that's true and in fact we have a lot of evidence that the the opposite is probably true I mean the literature is a little bit confused if you look at the literature you get peer-reviewed studies that are saying social media causes loneliness it causes isolation and then you'll see Facebook for example pointing to studies to say no look at this social media makes people happier usually in quotation marks if you use it correctly so like the soda company saying that so doesn't make you fat well it is true it is true every so I did a literature review recently almost every positive article did have a co-author that was a facebook data scientist but actually what's happening if you dig deeper into this literature is that 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 mm-hmm 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 the note to a friend or family member than doing nothing no 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 happy yeah but there's a few things in isolation so now your your Facebook friends but your actual your actual friends and family yeah yeah on this at the same token though the sort of best research we have it 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 you do all of the standard controls that you would do for all the different demographic and economic variables you think might be relevant and so what's going on right this seems like they're countervailing yeah and what's what's probably happening what the researchers thinks that's 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 connected the people I'm talking to people all the time I just sent these sex messages in the last five minutes and I talked to my high school roommate and here's me will call 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 social media the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse ironically your loneliness actually gets ya so face to face instead of Facebook yeah face to face instead of Facebook I mean our brain did 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 the our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues yeah it's completely impoverished when you take away this rich stream of input that you and I are seen right now being in-person and seen facial expressions and movements and vhost tonalities and you replace it with a one bit indicator like yeah like yeah yeah it doesn't do it for our brain right it's it's it's a leaving it anxious and and 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 of using social media the inverse seems to be true yeah if you don't use it now you're gonna have to do real social interactions to feed that urge people never forgotten he's amazing with these kids and Millennials you know they don't want to cause it 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 it's it's they've lost a skill of actually human connection interaction yeah and it's a vital skill I mean not just for sort of navigating the world with just for mental health and happiness so 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 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 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 yeah well so the first indication I had that there's something screwy going on with this constant connectivity was probably four or five years ago mmm-hmm and so I was doing an event on a college campus of 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 were 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 home sicknesses and some of OCD and schizophrenia and some depression they 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 the number of students coming in with these issues as well beyond what they ever saw before and I said okay well what changed and without a hesitation 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 Queen she's one of the or twins you might be pronouncing her name wrong but she wrote this I think very important book last year called ijen and she's one of the top generational demographers though 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 the this entire generation this entire ijen the first generation to have smartphones starting from their their teenage years they are 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 there were 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 with the mental health issue so there's 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 its 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 four young people mental health crisis caused by these phones yeah no I see that I do see that in patients I see in my family members and you know the the other part of it in addition to the anxiety and social isolation which you know and some what 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 said you don't even work after five o'clock and you've written six books and what are you 25 years old how are you 36 ok well that's pretty good it took me when I was like fifty to write six books out but 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 yet that's actually my entryway into this issue is so 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 are just used to in general pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up another tab as soon as you get a little bit bored to 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 you could I know distract you're on the plane and the Wi-Fi is not working you're gonna have a hard time focusing yeah and people think oh it's different yeah at home I'm you know I do this I get bored I look at the phone a lot but in work I really concentrate it has an effect yeah it's like an athlete saying I only smoke I only smoke on the weekends not when I'm training smoking still going to affect you when you're when you're on the playing field you're hurting 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 an eye sector job it's gonna make you worse at what you do yeah those are thing I was sitting at a lecture they and I with a friend of mine and she was on her phone and she was tweeting and she was picturing if we're doing 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 what's yours and I open mine it was like 60 or 70 times which is still a lot yeah but 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 yeah determines our success in life in terms our baby actually so to be able to be engaged with what's happening around us and that's a big that's a big deficit yeah I mean I think it's crazy if if we were professional athletes and we're eating junk food if we were smoking people said 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 a lead 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 it has new value that's at the core of probably a lot of your audience is living right that's going to make a living and to be on these phones all the time that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food yeah and yet somehow we're not seeing it that way so so you're a scientist what what is the date of it validates what you're saying because I can imagine people listening oh yeah that's just kind of sure maybe Nike I don'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 well one of the more deep workers that's right well I think one of the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is we call it sometimes economist 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 and not just our technology but income tivity and information people are connected in places they never were before they have essentially all 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 it's not going up it's shifting going up but it's not and there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that yes these technology is giving us more options and power and yet at the same time it's working against the way that our wetware works to actually fragment our intention in the way it does makes our brain actually worse at concentrating producing value and so the the downturn from that combined with the what should have been enhancing our productivity which is the tools is just flattening out yeah and so I think this has a real real issue and I can only imagine that we're gonna see if this is true non industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected 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 was basically the same idea there is no such thing right there is no such thing and he you know he actually helped a 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 threat 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 is finding is that when we think that we're not multitasking what we're doing when 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 5 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 around the phone and doing email already we're doing one thing but every 5 or 10 minutes it's check the phone phone or the app and what she's finding is that context switch and then back again you if it's very brief leave so what's called the tension 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 yeah and so they can see you start making more mistakes and yes in 20 minutes to actually get a reset and then you know 20 minutes you do another will you do another and so what most knowledge workers are doing is the Red Cliff NASA'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 new a tropic or something a drug that makes you worse it what 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 Wi-Fi unless I'm not researching some article yes and it's and I can literally sit and work for eight hours or reading and I just ordered 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 it's a tension residue yeah I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it and that's a it'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 that be productive to function and there's no such thing as multitasking yeah and even if you think you're single tasking if you're quit chuckin it can be just as bad quick checking yeah well that's sort of my I 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 diversity of being on devices versus social media cuz they're they're not always the same right yeah so what are the benefits of like doing this and by the way there are so many movements out there around digital detox yeah there are camps all over 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 engage meetings 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 Sunday's 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 again normally and so if you think about this if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we were addicted to it's not going to work that well if I said I'm an alcoholic so what I'm gonna do I would all figured out don't worry I'm gonna go away and on Sunday I'm not gonna 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 use take a little bit of time off 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 gonna 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 technology very intentionally and very selectively there's going to even boost and enhance those things you care about right I mean I'm a computer scientist I love tech 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 you get back to your original question I've been studying these digital minimalist and they're calm they're happy you can have a conversation with them for a long time and they won't once glanced at a phone they don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment they can just actually be there right they're much more productive in work they produce things of great value they're respected by their friends are involved in our community I mean you can go down the list but when they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining Poland attention and get back to here's what I care about this what I want to do I'll use technology selectively to help that and that's it it's it's a much more present mindful and satisfying type of life but that's not so easy because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive yeah and the data scientists and behavioral experts a sort of attention experts who work for these social media companies design 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 how do they come up with the ways to make these things so sticky yeah it was a depressing a depressing period when I dived into the reporting and research on how these companies make their products addicting it's it's a little bit dark actually so the the best go back the veil yeah so the light on the best way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what you're what they're trying to create is whether they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions so this is different than say a strong substance addiction so I mean if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user they're not going to sneak out of the middle of the night to you know go to an internet cafe because they have to get a fix on the other hand they might they might but if you're a heavy Facebook user and it's in your pocket and you can get at it anytime during the day you're gonna 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 yeah 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 they study this and so this is something they're pretty good at so I mean I can give you a couple 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 attention it's very hard to avoid the notion of this sort of inless scrolling mm-hmm right this was this was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerability is sort of like a slot machine would that there might be something blue one more one more scroll away there might be something really interesting these companies have invested millions of dollars to solve a really really hard computer science problems problems I know about as a computer scientist you're like programming issues programming issues 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 yeah you know that's dr. Hyman let's send them a you know a Nona said you want to tag this person right this is this is a 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 irresistible he comes to tap on so one of the things they optimize for is this is why the like button took off yeah right it was originally there for much more mundane reason 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 they're sometimes they are it's like that person hitting like it affects the person getting or 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 get that 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 in their average user minutes once the the company started introducing these in social media apps I mean the whole experience is engineered yeah to keep you obsessively clicking on this thing and looking at this what about the brain response to this cuz 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 ogonek a teen right so how does that play a role in here well it's the same effect that the you know the famous Sylar 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 want it and this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have it's not food nuggets its likes ya and tags but they're not always there right but sometimes they're there right and that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s that can be BF Skinner right yeah it's impossible it's impossible to ignore yeah the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement don't give them the treat every time they make them guess and then keep them coming back yeah there's there's even room or something oh 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 there's 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 so there's good science about how they're doing this and the technology that they're using and it is addictive yes it's meant to be yeah yeah that's frightening so you think you're in control but you're not now you're the product yeah there's a reason you're not paying for this they have their clients which are the advertisers yeah and you're the product and they they wrap you up nicely I mean anyone who has a small business or a large business who's advertised on social media will tell you it's wonderful it's one and this is why is because they have something close to a billion users worldwide that are clicking on this thing obsessively it's like an advertisers dream so let's talk about this book digital minimalism a little bit more I mean it's coming out in February of 2019 and you know what are the main theses you have in the book what are the take-home so we really should pay attention and why why should we be reading this book and what I argue is that your digital life is as complicated and is important as say your physical health and we learned when it comes to our physical health we learned during the 20th century when our diet changed and we got the advent of a lot of highly processed food and food abundance people started to get really sick we get heart attacks we had people you know this was this was people got unhealthy and we learned that this issue is more complicated than just maybe throwing some tips at it try to eat healthier don't eat too much that didn't work I mean this is almost every guest on your show is that this is very complicated so we had to get much more sophisticated and how we thought about a relationship with food and we had to have whole philosophies developed that people could could could subscribe to you you would say that I'm now primal or paleo or something like this or vegan or vegetarian but we had all whole philosophies arise about different food it's the right way there's a values-based and I think of course we need this in our digital life because we're having the same type of health issues they're just cognitive happening as these digital technologies spiral into controls the same thing as fast food and processed food coming in the early 20th centuries we can't just throw at it that's all we're doing now just take Sundays off how many times do I hear someone say turn off notifications like that's kind of solve the underlying problem I mean that's like you know whatever telling people don't buy too many Doritos or something right there's deeper problem so my idea was to get healthy in our digital life we need the same type of thoughtful sophisticated philosophies we have and say physical health and so digital minimalism is one such philosophy and if it's not this you should have another but you should take it that seriously that you should say this is my philosophy towards my digital tools I thought about it it's based on my values and I can follow it I can use it to push back make a bulwark against these sort of addictive forces trying to get at my attention and so that's the that's the motivation for us with digital minimal is one such philosophy start with your values figure out how to use technology to help them ignore the rest so how does that practically work cuz you know you can give up alcohol cigarettes but you're gonna have your phone with you yeah yeah and it's usually connected to cell service or Wi-Fi yeah so how do you how do you then take that choice of wanting to be a digital minimalist but still have this powerful sense of addiction and need to obsessively check your phone well you know I was just writing an article about this this morning before coming over here so it says fresh on my mind but actually what I did in this article is I went back and looked at the video the original keynote address in 2007 where Steve Jobs walked out on that stage at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and said you know we call it iPhone I said today Apple reinvents the phone right so the very beginning of this age and what's interesting if you go back and re-watch it is how different it was people used to talk about these devices versus how we use them today yeah so you go back and watch this original keynote for the first 30 minutes you know what Steve Jobs is talking about is look at this beautiful interface look at how good we made the iPod we now have a touch interface it's beautiful and look at how much better the phone is in the phone you have now it's now much easier to make calls it's now much easier to do whatever I talk to one of the original teams before Facebook before Facebook Twitter yeah before Twitter before the App Store there was no App Store yeah yeah he didn't trust it he's like I don't want other people's stuff on here like we have a great experience I talked to one of the his original developers more recently when I was researching the book and he said oh yeah Jobs did not like the idea that someone else's app would be on there he thought it would be ugly and it would crash it and that he really did think of it as an iPod that made calls and so what the iPhone used to be yeah it was a beautifully engineered device that took a small number of things that people already valued and did everyday and made that experience even better yeah people loved music it was a beautiful music experience people make phone calls it was a beautiful phone call experience and my argument is go back to that you let the phone be what the phone was supposed to be which is a beautifully engineered phone if you need to find directions or call someone or load up the doctor's pharmacy you know and it's nice interface where it's gonna play that's great but let it be that it doesn't have to be what it's become now which is this constant companion this sort of like source of diverting information all day long so my advice in that article was take off your phone any app in which someone makes money from your attention yeah so get all the social media off there get off the breaking news stuff get off those games in which you obsess if we play and you pay money to get whatever like a bonus or whatever that is take that all off the phone take email off if you can if you're not sure if you can have a going yeah if you're not sure if you can try it and see if you actually get in I think people people over emphasize the necessity for them to be that accessible I mean it used to be with smartphones email had to be on there because laptops were huge and when people are on the road you you didn't have access to email but now laptops are really small and really light and tablets are much better and so you don't need it on the thing that also comes with you to your stands baseball game and also comes from you to church take that off if you can bring it back to just being an elegant device that does a small number of things really well you pull it out occasionally to do specific things and then otherwise it's you know in your bag or on the the table by the doorway yeah the minimalist approach to a phone is to make it into a phone but you know hear true confessions i Iowa's at a conference and I was an electric and of boring so I put my phone I stuck my phone and I listened to your TED talk and I felt like I got real value more than what I was doing so that would all go away right I'm yeah yeah you'd be bored more but actually it's good to be bored more because here's the problem if your brain gets trained this Pavlovian response that every time I get a little bit bored I get a really nice stimulate that gets rid of my boredom the problem is when it comes time to do something hard almost always a hard thing is going to be boring in the technical sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli you're focusing on the blank page to try to write something or whatever it is right and if your brain has learned boredom and stimulate boredom you stimulate it doesn't tolerate it yeah and so when I was helping people in business and be better at concentrating I had to tell them you need to be bored way more often in your life outside of work or your brain is never going to tolerate the the type of concentration we all used to be used to the sort of the boringness of just doing one hard valuable thing so I don't think boredom thought that bad actually so how is it affected your life being a digital minimalist well I think it's been an important part of my life so I've never had a social media account I don't even know what you're missing yeah yeah people say that but I never taken your first snorted cocaine it's true but but I don't think social media is rocket science I think I have a pretty good sense of how it works right I don't think it's a you know it's not the the secret meetings of the Masons over here I sort of know what goes on on Facebook if I don't have an account so I've never had a social media account I don't web surf so I don't have like a stable of sites to cycle through when I'm bored when I work I work really intensely with a lot of organization when I'm done I'm done I have you know clear cut offs between the two and it's been great for me I mean I'm my line of work depends on concentration so I'm a writer and a theoretical computer scientist and so I stare at blank you know pages and I try to solve theorems and so the ability to concentrate is everything yeah it's like my my 40-yard dash time if I was a linebackers yeah that's right and so I think it's had a huge positive effect I'm very comfortable boredom I'm comfortable concentrating for long periods of time so I can produce more work in less time this is one of the big advantages of it yeah so there's everybody more work in less time we're working less time you know the the factor that came up a lot when I was researching deep work was to in the sense that in different lines of work people who were really intentional about their ability to concentrate would produce about a factor of two more work throughout years 2x yeah and in hard fields I mean it's not it's not about you're a little bit less distracted or maybe the moral argument that we shouldn't be so we're so distracted it's nice to be more focused it's about massive massive improvements to do the amount of work you produce it almost looks like a superpower in some fields it can almost be like a superpower so besides the deep work what about deep life yeah and that aspect of it because you're saying not only does it affect your quality of your work but also the quality of the rest of your life yeah I've definitely discovered that to be true I mean I have three boys under the age of six yikes I have a busy household but I can just spend time with them a lot I mean I don't I don't have my phone out I I mean this gets me in trouble I yesterday I had the I was with my two older kids and we were gone for maybe three or four hours I had him at summer school the temple and we did a couple of things and I realized about an hour into it that I guess my phone was somewhere still at home yeah cuz then even you know I don't I don't notice these type of things necessarily so it's great for the relationship maybe bad if my wife needed three just in an emergency but I can be more present with them I read a lot yeah which is I to me is really important and I hate Murray you read paper look I read a lot of books yeah like that's important to me I walk a lot that's important to me I think if I was constantly plugged in through all these social indicators and news and entertainment I would probably be an anxious wreck I know myself right George Packer The New Yorker writer had this essay once about what he doesn't use Twitter and he says the reason I don't use it is not because I think I'm above it but because I worry if I did I've let my kids go hungry if I'm kind of in that that camp I don't know what would happen if I open myself up to that I mean I think I'm a patsy when it comes to to these type of manipulation so I don't even want to go there yeah honey you said it took you an hour to figure out you didn't have your phone I think for most people will be like five minutes they feel like they lost their arm and where thing I do yeah there's something to recommend that yeah or go somewhere in a city without your phone it's really nice to try to figure out the directions right like we all used to have to do like okay well literally that's East because the sun's over there and I need to go into 22nd Street and I don't know it's not even open I don't even think no they make actual maps anymore like when there's last time you saw a map for sale in the gas station I don't know I bought one a few years ago I have it on my cards it's spiral-bound is it's all the roads in America what a great piece it's not just you you know you you when you're writing your book you do this investigation of people who wanted to do a digital detox and you thought you know maybe who's gonna do a 30-day detox you'd find like five people but you had like 1600 people sign up to do this voluntarily yeah 1600 people New York Times end up write an article about it like it became the big thing but I didn't call it a detox because what did you call it the clutter because what I was the idea between this was you take 30 days away from all optional personal technologies no social media no online news anything could get away with not using but the idea was not just to go back to it all when the 30 days were over instead it was the start from a blank slate so the 30 days you were detox you no longer felt sort of compelled to use all these things your slate was clean and then you could start and start reintroducing technology very carefully and really make it earn its keep back into your life so before you download the random app that you sometimes click you say is that really something that's the best way to support something I value it if not don't put it back in and you do that again and again with everything you used to have in your life and so these 16 hundred participants ended up with much more minimalist much more intentional technologies in their life and for a lot of them was a huge difference and what did they notice well there's a couple things they noticed so first it was really hard for the first week people said they had this compulsion I had to check something I had to look at something one young woman's I took everything off her phone right and had this compulsion to check things on her phone that was so strong that she ended up Cecily looking at the weather app because it was the only thing on her phone that still actually had information you could click on and get all my information and like it's gonna change temperature in five minutes well she said for that first week she could have told you up to the minute the temperature and like twelve different cities worldwide or something like this but they're not faded the second thing a lot of people noticed was that they had forgotten how much pleasure they got out of the analog activities that used to fill a lot of their day like they has stopped you know hobbies long conversations sports and athletics things that use their hands and their bodies in their mind in the real world manipulating the real world interacting with real people painting writing and that came up a lot knitting woodworking getting back to playing soccer getting back to the Ultimate Frisbee four or five different people sent me sort of long bounds to return to the library and how much they forgot how much they loved going to the library and just browsing yeah and coming away with the stack of books and they had forgotten how much pleasure they got out of it and by comparison how much less enjoyable their life was when they filled all of those moments with this much yeah or a light weight type thing and then the final interesting thing is some of these people afterwards said forget the declutter I'm going back to everything and found they'd lost a taste for it really and so they said I'm so excited the 30 days are up let's get everything back on there and and it was you know after you stopped eating fast food right we're gonna come back to it after a while I got so salty yeah and they lost they lost their taste or these this is him this is impoverished doesn't taste as good yeah and so that was a big eye-opener to you yeah both the the scope of how many people are interested in this but also how quickly they can make their life so much better it's true you know I I found it fascinating that Apple introduced this new feature on the iOS 12 which is screen time yeah and you know it's curious people underestimate the amount of time they spend on their screens on my nephew I asked him to start sharing with me he's 25 and he's like why I cuz I only use two hours of screen time a day and that was his report every day to me yeah and when he actually looked it was seven hours most of it on social media or YouTube which is a sort of social media innocence platform and it was stunning to me and to him and it's all the interstitial space that gets filled up yeah that actually has a negative effect on your mood your concentration your ability to function work tension happiness all these things that we think it's giving us it's actually taking away we write all these story lines about how all these technologies are so vital I used to get such hate mail yeah I bet you're not popular not popular yeah I said quit socially but I've written about this before and in various major publications get off social media I used to get you know just just tons of hate mail but I'll tell you now people saying it's absolutely vital and here's all the ways and which is at the core of you know all things that are good in the world that's really started shifting and so this has been the other interesting thing I've noticed a backlash in the past couple of years you know people are getting much more comfortable with this idea that maybe whatever General Mills doesn't have all of our interests in mind maybe I shouldn't be eating Lucky Charms every day for breakfast that same type of thing is going on and and there's this this backlash growing where people are starting to get interested in hearing other options yeah okay so what if I said for me because you know having on this show is not necessarily my best interest because I share a lot of my content through Instagram through Twitter through Facebook through email and and it's really how people connect to things that are meaningful or that are life-changing or that help them you know grow how do you how do you reconcile that yeah well there's an interesting I think that's good and had this interesting idea that he wrote about recently and I can at best paraphrase it but he basically said for example Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa is huge on social media but you know the Mona Lisa doesn't tweet Mona Lisa is big because she's like Hanukah right not because you know she's really good at using using these tools or something like this and so people do your social media share things that's good if you're producing things yeah that are good and that people want to share but it doesn't mean that you have to be heavily engaged in it yourself yeah and that's often that's all how is it fair to ask my listeners or people who are interested in my work to be on it list looking and listening for it yeah well there's attention I mean I I think there is attention right I mean I think already listening make sure you just watch my stuff nobody else's it's fine just keep my hair well but there's nothing wrong with a pot right I mean like a long-form podcast is fantastic right I think it's intellectually stimulating or this or that but I but I think we'll find out about if people have to that's what you're getting at right and should you be encouraging you know if you have to encourage people to be on these tools so they can find out about this good stuff but on the other hand these tools could be really addictive there is attention so the the best way I can recommend people to maybe step away with it in a cautious way is recommend take this all off your phone right if you don't have it on your phone you've gotten rid of 99% of the power of these tools to hijack your brand that's where almost all of the attention engineering effort goes but you still have the account and you can still log on on your desktop computer you know once or twice right and see what's going on and in fact I would argue that most people could probably fulfill 99% of the value they get from social media in about 20 to 40 minutes a week yeah maybe like Sunday and Wednesdays log it into an account so maybe this is this is the the balance we can strike right now is get it off your phone if it's on its phone it's using you if you're accessing it through your computer then you're probably using it for very specific things like seeing is there a new episode of the doctors let me see yeah right yeah without it being something you check all day so maybe that'll be our and you face the same thing you're publishing books you want people to know about I'm gonna get out there do you write blogs yeah but how do you get blogs to people right yeah I you know people find it you yeah I mean I'm not on social media use to be this used to be heresy my publishers were you know I remember having publicity meetings they bring in the the sort of the young person who was like okay I'm the social media marketing expert who's gonna help you with your book and let's talk about all the things we're gonna do and then I would watch their face fall yes I said I don't have any those accounts it has an impact you know like I you know I done a lot of promoting of my work through social media and you know I actually asked Hugh Jackman to because he read my book to do something on social media so he did a little Instagram post I think it might have been fifteen seconds I think I had over a million views and the impact on my book sales was far greater than even television or mother before that was like what happened here I just shot up at the top of Amazon yeah and it was just his ability to sort of communicate what mattered to him and what helped him allowed you know everybody to kind of have the social proof and then buy the book and then they actually got healthy I mean I mean I said with a guy lunch who yeah randomly I just sat with and he had lost 60 pounds using my 10-day detox diet and you know that there's there's some value there so how do you sort of reconcile all that I think it's hard because I think these platforms have a lot of dangers with them and you'll have to wait against the values so have a glass of wine but not three bottles yeah yeah or maybe maybe yeah maybe you don't drink wine and but the idea is you know your books important people will find it yeah and if they can't find it I mean I know all about all of your books right and and I didn't find it through Hugh Jackman's it is Lady gaga something like this right so it's true right it is very intriguing post by the way I said yeah so it is very influential and it moves a lot of things but I still think we have to be really worried about I mean I think that's true that's true but it's also really dangerous and so I don't know like maybe I would have sold more books if I was on social media I'm not sure how much the difference would be yeah yeah all right well so what's your advice to people who want to minimize their technologies where do they start so I mean something like this 30-day declutter is a good way to do it step away for 30 days and then make everything that comes back into your life earn its way keep your phone but delete all the apps and all the other ones that are essential yep like google map 'über exactly yeah exactly yeah you keep the Google Maps keep do but anything is optional you take off and including news get your news through the radio newspaper for us yeah a month right and then be very strict about what you let back in I think that people the podcast podcast that's my idol right but be strict about what you what you let back in yeah it's a curate your own experience rather than created for you and do it with intention right I mean if you're using something have a really good reason why you're using it and it can't just be that it helps something you value it should be the best way to help that things that you value for example I don't do social media but I blog I've been a blogger for over a decade and it's something I've thought a lot about and I think it's a technology that is really really important for something I value which is the ability to sort of explore a lot of ideas to reach an audience online but do so in a way that's you know sort of respectful of of their time and attention to get a lot of feedback from smart people to meet interesting people social media could give me some of those things I think blogging doesn't matter so I check what I thought was the best way he's a very intentional very selective amazing so if you you know were the ultimate authority for DES King or you know had some autocratic power to change laws regulation to sort of affect this trend which you see clearly is impacting our successes of society people's individual ability to work to focus concentrate have great relationships you know what would what would you say we should do as a society yeah well so I'm a huge booster of the internet for example I think the social Internet which is the ability to use the internet to find information or connect to people and ideas is massively important it's as important as the printing press you know I found you yeah so I'm a huge booster of that I think the problem is when you get the attention economy yeah into this equation so when you use an economic model in which your attention is going to be monetized this is what Facebook does this is what alphabet' does this is what the major social media platform says that's the source of the issues and so I mean I often talk about I think using the Internet the connected people and ideas and the find information the pursue activism is a powerful use of it but we need to try to divorce that more and more in our personal choices from these giant giant companies that extract your attention as their main resource I mean Facebook is valued at twice as much as ExxonMobil yes and instead of extracting oil from the ground they're literally extracting minutes of your life and packaging it up that's what I think is scary so if I was in charge of the in charge of the world if I could influence everyone's behavior yeah I would keep people's love for the internet but I would get them away from any sort of product where your attention is what they're trying to extract I think that's where the issue is I would love to get back to what David Ross cough calls the weird internet the sort of more ad hoc personal creative internet people would create their own sites they would use tools that were supported maybe dinnah and by open source as opposed to a giant company you blow up the walled gardens and instead as people can just find it interact with other people through open protocols there's a lot of interesting emergent bottom-up sort of democratic type ideas out there on the Internet and that's what I think we need to get back to get away from these massive massive companies that have to get as many minutes as possible from your from your mind in order to keep their stock price high so do we need to regulate that or legislate around it or I mean is your policy that can actually help shift this in the right direction I mean I've been there's been a big ups well in regulation talk I've certainly noticed this at the events I've been speaking out I'm not necessarily a believer that that's going to be the way to do it I think we look at it similar to the same way we looked at food and health yeah consumer education was the way to do it we couldn't regulate Doritos out of existence like this food is bad you're not allowed to sell Doritos anymore but what we could do is go to tax it you can tax it yeah you could try to your soda tax incentivize to good food you could try to incentivize good food but none of that's going to move to needle nearly as much as you know reading one of your books or something yes and so I think that's going to be the key is is is letting people know get them away from this sort of cognitive junk food and give them back in control of their life and their values get the same skepticism around their technology people have around their food get people smarter more intentional more selective taking control their digital life I think could be a lot better and and it's really a powerful idea that you can sort of reclaim your life and and actually improve the quality of your experience and work and relationships and all that and it's you know I think getting the word out there and helping people understand the harms the technology and what they're being taken advantage of for yeah I think that that can help move the needle so like we know that soda causes obesity and people don't understand that technology or social media is the issue that's driving anxiety concentration issues and only to do deep work and many many other issues and that the benefits so it's not just limiting something that you like it's actually selling the benefits of actually being in the world again and I've noticed that I mean I I when I put my phone away for the weekend I literally it was like first mmm and I was like no I get to just sit on the floor and listen to jazz and just snuggle with my cat and ya do nothing and not have to look for my phone to fill the gaps in my day where I'm looking for something to learn or something to do or someone to communicate with her some momentary dopamine fix right and I was a it was really powerful and Ida and made me again feel like you know I'm almost 60 and it made me feel again like when I was in college we just had these vast spaces and it's fast openness because you know computer started in 1984 and I was my first computer yeah which is quite a while oh you probably born then and maybe you were you're this born that's - and and you know just to actually have that quality of spaciousness in your life is something that I think we all miss and you know it was it was it was just a real reminder of what matters in life and you're not trying to take away people's pleasure and experience you're suggesting that our lives will be improved by actually thinking about this thoughtfully and actually making some choices in our personal life that actually can can improve that quality yeah I think it's a good way of thinking about it I mean digital minimalist have nice lives yeah it's not either/or it's not it's not either/or yeah I mean as I like to say I'm a technologist I make my you know what I'm not a Luddite I mean I make my living as a computer scientist I study I try to advance technology and I think we can the same way you can say I love food but I'm not you know obese and unhealthy with type 2 diabetes form eating habits you can say those two things that makes a lot of sense and I think you can say I love technology but I hate this idea that I'm going to spend all day sort of renting my my brain out to facebook's advertiser client so get rid of the junk food technology get rid of the junk food technology get back to the cool stuff technology's great but I mean your life was gonna be a lot better I don't you can't be someone I think he was really serious about your physical health and not start to think about this aspect as well I think you have a harder job than I do which is tum be able to stop sugar and starch you're like this is much harder it's not that because people people don't like this stuff as much as they think people you take a week away well you take a week away from bread you still want to eat bread right but you take a waik away from Facebook and you see it differently yeah I find it's really important for me in my life take at least two or three weeks a year where I'm gone somewhere well there is no certain service or signal so I go on a rafting trip this summer for a week and I brought my family and the teenagers and everybody I was like everybody was just present with each other nobody was like on their phone a whole time we're wired for that I mean yeah that's that's how we're supposed to encounter the world if you get rid of that I mean of course the brains gonna go haywire yeah I can't you can't drastically change the cognitive environment that we spent two million years evolving to me used to do something completely different and it expected we're just gonna be fine well thank you for your work and inspiring us to think about what we do automatically and how that's affecting us and how being attentive to it might actually improve the quality of your life so thanks Cal for joining us on the doctors pharmacy if you've been listening the doctors pharmacy with dr. Mark Hyman a place for conversations that matter and if you like this podcast please leave a review share with your friends and family and you can subscribe anywhere you subscribe to podcasts and they we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 33,549

Rating: 4.9476333 out of 5

Keywords: Cal Newport, Social Media, Mental Health, Boredom, Productivity, Dr. Mark Hyman, The Doctor’s Farmacy, Podcast, Health, Mindfulness, Technology, Depression, Anxiety

Id: lHLoE4fCuZ0

Length: 57min 9sec (3429 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019