Your phone addiction is keeping you from achieving flow state | Arthur Brooks

0:00 A lot of people are not convinced that they're addicted to their devices.

0:02 And and one of the big reasons for that is because pretty much everybody is.

0:07 I mean, you go to societies around

0:09 the world where there's a ubiquitous addiction.

0:11 [music] For example,

0:11 in the Soviet Union before the the fall of the Iron Curtain,

0:16 drinking was so incredibly common that people who are hopelessly addicted

0:20 to alcohol had no idea that they were alcoholics because they,

0:23 you know, it's ask a ask a fish, you know, how's the water?

0:27 And he'll say, "What's water?" is what it comes down to.

0:29 So, that's one of the reasons you notice when somebody's

0:32 addicted to heroin because it's not that common for ordinary people.

0:36 You don't notice when somebody's addicted to their phone

0:39 because literally everybody is addicted to their phones.

0:41 My name is Arthur Brooks.

0:43 I'm a professor and a writer about the science of human happiness.

0:47 My latest book is The Meaning of Your Life:

0:51 Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.

0:57 Thank you for watching Big Think.

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1:18 And now back to the interview.

1:21 How to overcome your addiction to technology.

1:26 One of the most interesting areas of social science is that of human addiction.

1:31 A and addiction is such a fascinating area of human behavior because

1:36 it's based entirely on on a really great part of human life,

1:41 which is our ability to learn, our ability to make progress.

1:45 Our brains are designed to learn new things that make it

1:48 easier for us to pass the winner and pass on our genes.

1:52 and and we have neurochemicals that actually make this possible as well.

1:55 We want to make sure that when we learn something that's an adaptive advantage

1:59 that that we remember it and that we bank it and we learn new things after that.

2:04 This makes us fit.

2:06 This makes it more possible for us to find mates, for us to eat.

2:10 And this is a real advantage to homo sapiens.

2:12 It's one of the reasons that we're so unbelievably successful

2:14 is because we learn and we have brains designed to learn.

2:18 Part of this is a a neurochemical that neurom

2:21 modulator that most people are familiar with called dopamine.

2:25 Dopamine is often mischaracterized as a pleasure hormone.

2:28 It's not.

2:29 What it does is it gives you the anticipation of reward.

2:33 And and and here's how it works.

2:35 You learn something, you come across something,

2:37 you're surprised by something that that you like and you you

2:41 encode that such that the next time you think about it,

2:44 you get a little spritz of dopamine in your brain and that gives

2:47 you the anticipation of the reward for getting that thing again.

2:49 And so you go in search of it again.

2:52 If you find even more of it the second time,

2:54 more dopamine, which reinforces the cycle.

2:56 And this is a great thing.

2:58 This is why you would remember that there are gazels around a watering hole

3:02 or berries on a bush and you're looking forward to going and getting that.

3:06 The same thing as simple and as innocent today as I happen across

3:09 a deli with a great roast beef sandwich and the next morning I'm thinking about

3:14 that roast beef sandwich the first time

3:15 my stomach growls around 11:00 in the morning

3:17 and I say I'm going to go get another one of those sandwiches.

3:20 The problem with that is that we found a way

3:22 to to juice that dopamine system to give us even more of it.

3:26 So we have more anticipation of reward and more of the reward

3:30 when we get the thing that we that we want.

3:33 We found neurochemical ways to increase it artificially.

3:36 Now sometimes it's through drugs and alcohol.

3:39 If you use cocaine or even cigarettes,

3:42 you'll neurochemically enhance the amount of dopamine in your brain.

3:46 If you use something like methamphetamine,

3:48 you'll get about 10 times as much as you could naturally get,

3:52 but all sorts of other things will do it as well.

3:55 A slot machine will do it.

3:56 Your iPhone will do it, as a matter of fact.

3:59 And it's designed to give you the anticipation of reward to say,

4:03 "I want to see what's on my notifications.

4:06 I want to see if somebody actually texted me." What's going

4:09 on is your brain is working the way I was supposed to.

4:12 But it's been hijacked by modern technology to do that natural thing.

4:16 in a unnatural way.

4:18 It's entirely legitimate to say that the way that we interact

4:22 with technology today is a a lot like any other addiction.

4:25 It's involving the same neurochemistry in more or less the same ways.

4:29 We are in point of fact addicted to tech.

4:32 Here's a simple test.

4:34 Put your phone away for an hour and then

4:37 write down how many times you think about that phone.

4:40 How many times you just reflexively reach for that phone

4:43 that you want to pull out that phone.

4:45 and you wonder if something is on that phone.

4:48 If it's more than once every 5 minutes, you're an addict.

4:51 That's just dopamine spritzing into your brain saying, "There's something there.

4:56 Go check it." Anticipation of reward.

4:57 Now, again, this is not to say that you need to go to the Betty Ford Clinic.

5:01 This is not saying that you need, you know,

5:03 some intensive detox at a far away site in the desert.

5:07 It just means that your brain has habituated itself

5:09 to that and that's something you need to deal with, which you can.

5:14 People often wonder is something wrong with me because I have negative emotions.

5:18 And the answer is no.

5:20 Quite the contrary.

5:21 If you didn't have negative emotions, something is wrong with you.

5:25 We are evolved for bad feelings.

5:27 We're evolved for good feelings, too.

5:29 Don't get me wrong.

5:30 But negative emotions are more intense than

5:33 positive emotions because negative emotions keep you alive.

5:36 There are four negative emotions.

5:38 They are anger, disgust, sadness, and fear.

5:41 They exist because uh different subp parts of the lyic system

5:46 of the brain have been evolved to produce those negative emotions.

5:50 When you're feeling those things, it means your brain is working properly.

5:53 Now, they can be exaggerated.

5:55 Don't get me wrong, there are psychiatric conditions in which they

5:58 are they are in events in life overemphasize those those negative emotions,

6:02 but for most of us, these are things that we feel every day.

6:05 As a matter of fact, the average American spends 16%

6:08 of her or his day in predominantly intense negative emotions.

6:13 Your results may vary, but if you're 16% of the day bummed out, you're normal.

6:19 That doesn't mean anything's wrong with you.

6:21 It means things are working correctly in your brain.

6:24 You need an alarm system for things that you should probably avoid.

6:28 That's normal.

6:29 Now, it's interesting when we study the different parts

6:31 of the lyic system of the brain that we're

6:33 that we have different parts that are designed to create

6:37 these terrible aversive emotions specifically and for specific reasons.

6:40 I'll give you an example.

6:42 There's a part of the lyic system called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex.

6:46 It's dedicated to help you feel social exclusion, sadness.

6:50 It lights up like a Christmas tree.

6:53 If you lose somebody that you love, if somebody leaves you at the altar,

6:57 if somebody that you love dies and you're feeling grief,

7:01 that dorsal anterior singulate cortex is on full blast.

7:04 Now, why would be evolved to feel grief or or any sadness for that matter?

7:09 I hear people say, "I want to live without sadness." No, you don't.

7:13 If you never had any sadness and it didn't really bother you,

7:16 if it were not incredibly uncomfortable,

7:18 you wouldn't do what you need to do to avoid it.

7:21 You'd say everything that's on your mind.

7:23 You do all kinds of things that would make people throw you out of the tribe.

7:27 250,000 years ago, that would mean that you're

7:30 going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone.

7:32 And you don't want that.

7:34 Today, it would mean that you're fired,

7:36 friendless, and divorced in about 2 weeks.

7:38 Not so good for you either.

7:40 Thank goodness for your dorsal anterior

7:43 singulate cortex and the sadness that you

7:45 hate and that you're afraid of and so you try to avoid.

7:49 Okay.

7:49 Now, how do we avoid it?

7:50 One way that we avoid it is by having good relationships with other people.

7:55 By apologizing when we hurt somebody's feelings,

7:58 by going out of our way to help people feel good around us.

8:01 That's the normal way to do it.

8:03 Here's another way.

8:05 Distracting ourselves with drugs and alcohol,

8:09 with workcoholism, with technology.

8:11 We distract ourselves from our negative emotions,

8:14 which are completely normal, very healthy.

8:17 We distract ourselves by opening up the screen,

8:20 by scrolling something we're not really interested in because

8:24 it captures so much of our brain activity neurocognitively.

8:27 We're we're just drawn in in ways that are well, they're designed to draw us in.

8:33 And in so doing, we we numb ourselves emotionally.

8:36 It's a numbing device, much as a bottle of whiskey is a numbing device,

8:40 much as staying 14 hours at the office because you're

8:43 not very happy with your marriage is a numbing device.

8:45 But the most ubiquitous of all is the device

8:48 that we're looking at that's in our pockets.

8:51 And that is not just not healthy.

8:54 It's actively making us sicker.

8:57 Now, often people tell me, and not just young people,

9:00 people my age as well, they say, "Look, I I get it.

9:03 I shouldn't be 12 hours a day on my screens.

9:05 I get it.

9:06 I get it.

9:06 But, you know, there are times when I just want to veg out.

9:08 You know, I want to lie in my bed or I want to sit

9:11 in my comfy chair and I just want to doom scroll for 45 minutes for an hour.

9:14 I want to detach from the world." Now, that sounds good,

9:18 but it's very problematic for a couple of different reasons.

9:21 Number one is that when you're highly

9:24 engaged in information that's being thrown at you, especially on social media,

9:28 which is conflictive or or which is exposing you to social comparison,

9:33 you're actually unbelievably stressed out.

9:35 It's actually raising your anxiety, not lowering your anxiety.

9:38 What it's doing is it's detaching you.

9:40 So you're you are in fact veging but in a very very anxious stressed

9:45 out way and you're not designed to relax

9:48 with something that actually stresses you out.

9:51 It's an unnatural way to do it.

9:53 Number two is you're fueling the dopamine cycle.

9:56 And when you fuel the dopamine cycle

9:58 unnaturally again and again and again and again,

10:01 you get something that feels like short-term relief but turns

10:03 into long-term problems as sure as I'm sitting here.

10:06 You know, one of the things that we find with alcohol,

10:09 and this is a parallel I make a lot, alcohol, what it does very effectively,

10:13 it cuts the connection between the part of your lyic

10:16 system that makes you feel anger and fear,

10:18 the amygdala, and your prefrontal cortex, your executive center,

10:22 in which you consciously understand that you're feeling fear and anger.

10:26 It you are feeling fear and anger,

10:28 but you just don't know it when you drink alcohol.

10:31 That's a very very short-term solution because guess

10:34 what happens when you come down from the inebriation

10:37 the next day for example more fear and anger than you felt the day before.

10:42 You get a rebound effect which leads to escalation and that leads to addiction.

10:47 It also leads to an inability for your brain

10:49 to work the way it's supposed to naturally when you

10:51 do have actual threats and impairs your ability to feel

10:55 pleasure in the ways that you should as well.

10:58 Same thing is happening with our devices.

11:00 We don't feel pleasure the way that we should and we cut

11:03 off our ability to feel the emotions that we're designed to feel.

11:07 It's bad for you.

11:08 There's a huge literature on on how people recover from addictions.

11:11 People have been addicted for a long long time.

11:14 And so we've had plenty of time to figure out how to how to cope with it.

11:18 One thing that we know is it's not easy.

11:20 It's not simple.

11:21 It's not as straightforward as snapping your fingers and saying,

11:24 "Oh yeah, I shouldn't drink a fifth of whiskey a day.

11:29 Silly me." and just stop it.

11:31 It's harder than that because your brain is captured.

11:34 Your dopamineergic cycle is is actually working and it's impaired

11:38 in such a way that that you've become dependent on that.

11:42 Now, what we do know from from the the behavioral science

11:45 on addiction is that breaking free from addictions is absolutely possible,

11:49 but it requires three basic parts.

11:52 Number one is you got to get mad.

11:55 You got to get tired of this thing.

11:58 You have to become resentful and that that something

12:00 has captured your brain and has

12:02 taken over your life and you need to have the spirit of the rebel.

12:06 That's why they often talk

12:08 in in in the in in the literature on drug and alcohol addiction,

12:11 you got to hit rock bottom.

12:12 What does hit rock bottom mean?

12:13 It doesn't necessarily mean that you're sleeping in a gutter,

12:16 that you're getting in car crashes, that you're getting in bar fights.

12:20 It means that you've had it and you're not going to take it anymore.

12:25 The second step is detoxing.

12:27 Is actually understanding that there are brain processes involved.

12:30 That this is a biological phenomenon and and dealing with it as such.

12:34 Is actually changing your behavior in such a way that you're

12:38 going to interrupt the brain the way that your brain works.

12:41 The cycles of activity in your brain that are keeping you addicted.

12:43 And then the hard part comes.

12:45 Part three is you got to live in a different way.

12:48 You know, if you're hanging out with a bunch of drunks,

12:51 you got to get new friends is what it comes down to.

12:54 If you're working in a job that keeps you chained to your desk 16 hours a day,

12:58 you got to go on the job market and do something else for a living.

13:02 You have to change your circumstances.

13:04 And in so doing, you need to become comfortable

13:06 with the thing that was making you most uncomfortable with.

13:09 And I'm going to tell you right now what it was.

13:11 It was you.

13:12 The problem isn't that you were trying to go someplace else.

13:14 The problem is you were trying to escape from inside your own head.

13:17 And you need to become comfortable with with boredom.

13:20 I teach the science of happiness and and it might sound

13:24 like I'm just going to say studies show studies show studies show.

13:27 But that's not it at all.

13:28 When you're studying human happiness,

13:30 you you got to start with the best questions.

13:32 And the best questions never come from behavioral scientists like me.

13:35 They don't.

13:35 They come from philosophers and theologians and the wisdom tradition.

13:39 The big questions of life, which means I'm reading philosophers all the time.

13:43 I'm asking my students to actually read

13:45 philosophers to get the right questions before

13:47 we can go to the neuroscience and the behavioral science in the first place.

13:50 So since I do that, one of the questions that a lot of my students ask me is,

13:54 you know, professor, who's your favorite philosopher?

13:57 Ah, maybe Aristotle was so great.

13:59 I don't know, maybe throw in a little bit of uh Thomas Aquinus.

14:03 Got to love that.

14:04 Yeah, I do.

14:05 I love all that stuff.

14:07 But my favorite philosopher hands down is

14:09 an American from the 19th century from the 1840s.

14:13 That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, the really the most American philosopher,

14:17 because he talked about the spirit of self-reliance,

14:20 what it actually means to rebel against the things that are holding you down.

14:24 It's like a tall glass of cold water on a hot summer's day,

14:28 as far as I'm concerned, because we all need to rebel against a lot of things.

14:32 You know, we're we especially need to rebel

14:34 against ourselves when we're chained by our technology.

14:38 And Ralph Aldo Emerson writing in 1841, his most famous essay,

14:43 self-reliance, talks about exactly how to do it,

14:46 even though there wasn't even the shadow of an iPhone in his pocket.

14:51 Nonetheless, he had the philosophy that we can all still use today.

14:54 Emerson's philosophy has a lot of different parts

14:57 to it and and I write about it extensively,

15:00 but but really what it comes down to is this.

15:02 If we want to be free, we need to be honest.

15:05 And and and that doesn't mean, you know,

15:07 going and telling mom everything you did when

15:08 you were a kid that you're ashamed of.

15:11 Do that.

15:12 [snorts] Fine.

15:12 It means being honest with yourself.

15:15 To get off the sauce.

15:16 If you're drinking too much alcohol,

15:18 you need to get honest with yourself that you're doing something

15:20 that you shouldn't be doing and you're ashamed of it and you don't

15:23 like it and you want to stop and you've been lying

15:25 to yourself all this time and thinking that it's going to be okay.

15:27 And you you finally drink enough that you'll just lose the urge to do so.

15:31 You know that's a lie.

15:33 you know that you're doing something that you shouldn't

15:35 be doing and you feel rotten about yourself, admit it.

15:38 Be honest with yourself.

15:40 Emerson talks about the fact that everybody

15:42 needs a radical honesty in their lives, in all parts of their lives.

15:46 And it's hard.

15:47 It's hard to do.

15:48 I mean, there's a ton of behavioral science literature,

15:51 even research I've participated in myself that shows

15:54 that we don't know ourselves very well.

15:55 And the main reason is because we lie to ourselves all day long.

15:58 We got these biases that make us feel better about ourselves, you know.

16:02 Yeah.

16:02 You know, it's like I think to myself,

16:04 yeah, Arthur Brooks, he's a guy with good hair.

16:06 You know, I can kind of I'm bald.

16:08 It's time for me to actually suck it up and be honest with myself.

16:12 Now, that's an easy one.

16:14 You know what's not an easy one?

16:16 My personal faults, my foibless, the ways that I'm actually insincere,

16:20 the way that my personality isn't what I want it to be.

16:23 And Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Be honest with yourself." Because when you do

16:28 that, then you're actually able to think for yourself.

16:32 When you're honest with yourself, then you're able to think for yourself.

16:35 You're able to go against the crowd.

16:36 The crowd will tell you anything that you want to hear.

16:40 Basically, you'll surround yourself with yes men

16:42 and sickopants who'll tell you all is well.

16:44 You're not drinking too much.

16:46 You drink like everybody else.

16:47 That's cuz your friends are drunks.

16:48 What we need to do after we're honest with ourselves

16:51 is to be is to is to really think as individuals.

16:55 and and and that's hard because the truth of the matter

16:58 is that once you start forming your own opinions, I don't know,

17:00 maybe you're on a college campus and everybody is

17:03 is is protesting against this one thing and you're like,

17:07 I don't want to do that.

17:08 I disagree with that.

17:09 Well, you're going to lose friends.

17:10 And you know, one of the places you can lose

17:13 friends the most is on the internet, on social media.

17:16 Have a a weird contrary opinion on the internet

17:18 and watch how many friends that you actually lose.

17:21 So critically important that you actually think for yourself.

17:25 And then step three, go your own way.

17:28 Once you're thinking for yourself, walk by yourself if you need to walk away.

17:32 You know, it's so it's so amazing.

17:34 You know, I've talked to in the context

17:37 of what we're discussing here and addiction to tech.

17:39 You know, I've talked to students in my own classes and I said,

17:43 "What would happen if you just like got rid of your social media accounts?

17:48 You became invisible on social media.

17:50 It makes them panic because that that would mean

17:52 that I'm not going to be able to distract myself.

17:54 That means I'm going need to be honest

17:55 with myself and confront myself with my own life.

17:57 I'm going to need to think for myself as opposed to being in an echo chamber.

18:01 What's going on around me?

18:03 And and then most subversive all of most countercultural of all.

18:07 I got to be alone in the global internet commons.

18:10 Nobody's alone.

18:11 But when they do it, they say, "I'm free.

18:15 I'm free.

18:16 I feel like I've taken out my horse and ridden into the western frontier.

18:21 Is it lonely?

18:23 Yep, it is lonely.

18:24 It's hard, as a matter of fact.

18:26 But there's a bracing quality to it.

18:28 There's a goodness to it.

18:29 And and that's the essence, as far as I'm concerned,

18:32 of the philosophy of what we actually need to rebel today.

18:36 The good news about tech addiction is that it's

18:39 actually easier to break than many chemical addictions.

18:41 The truth is that many people have and so can you.

18:45 Now, it's harder if you don't remember the before times.

18:48 It turns out it's much easier for people my age to break tech addictions

18:52 because my brain was almost completely formed

18:54 before there were devices in my life.

18:56 And so, there are a lot of things that people

18:59 find just uber addictive that I don't even find especially attractive.

19:02 It's hard for me.

19:03 It would be very hard for me to spend

19:06 an hour on Instagram because it just wouldn't be as interesting

19:08 to me as it would be for somebody whose

19:11 brain was formed in the era of Instagram, for example.

19:13 But everybody, including people who are born after 2008, can absolutely do this.

19:18 And what it comes down to is a certain

19:20 set of protocols that I'll break into three categories.

19:22 Number one is tech-free times.

19:25 Number two is techfree zones.

19:27 And the third is tech fasts.

19:30 And just with these basic protocols, which are not that hard,

19:34 they're not simple, but they're not that hard,

19:37 you can reorient yourself toward technology.

19:39 You can have a different relationship with your devices,

19:42 and your and your I promise you, your life is really going to change.

19:45 Now, the tech-free times are really only three-fold.

19:47 It's the first hour of the day,

19:49 and and that's when your neurocognitive programming is most important.

19:53 you set the tone for the day.

19:55 And you know, there's all kinds of literature out there

19:57 that shows that if you have a a bad habit, a tick or something,

20:00 if you can control it in the first hour,

20:03 you probably will have control over it over the rest of the day.

20:05 But if you give into it in the first hour, that's it for the day.

20:08 There's a lot of literature that actually shows that this is the case.

20:11 It's also true when it comes to the way that you used your devices.

20:14 Now, some people have to, you know,

20:16 if you're a doctor or a journalist or something,

20:18 you got to make sure nothing's on fire.

20:20 So you open up your phone when you need to and and just check

20:22 your email and your text and then put it down for the rest of the hour.

20:26 Just that first hour of the day.

20:28 No scrolling, no reading the news, no social media because your neurocognitive

20:33 programming should be life in real life.

20:36 Go for a walk outside, watch the sun come up,

20:40 work out without devices, which is something that I just regularly do.

20:45 Well, and by the way, there's a reason for that.

20:47 that ignites the default mode network in your brain.

20:50 Kind of like taking a shower, which is when you get your best ideas,

20:54 it's because the phone isn't in there.

20:56 So, using that first hour to actually come alive.

21:00 Second is meal time.

21:01 Homo sapiens are designed to get a lot

21:04 of a neuropeptide called oxytocin when we have eye

21:07 contact with our kin while we're putting pieces

21:10 of yak meat in our mouths around a campfire.

21:13 That's how the ancient humans were designed.

21:15 That's how we knew who a kin was.

21:17 This is with the bonding neurochemistry would when it would when it would occur.

21:21 There are even studies showing that if you

21:23 have your phone face down on the table

21:25 while you're having a meal that you'll look at it and every time you notice it,

21:29 you'll wonder if there are notifications or something

21:31 on your phone and that will interrupt your neuropeptide exchange.

21:34 That will cut off your oxytocin flow which will

21:37 make it harder for you to bond to other people.

21:40 Third is the last hour of the day.

21:42 Now, most people watching this, they already know

21:44 that screens are not good before you go to bed.

21:47 What what does the blue light do?

21:49 The blue light, it interferes with the proper functioning of your pineal gland.

21:52 So, you don't get enough or you know the proper level of natural melatonin,

21:58 which wrecks your sleep architecture.

22:00 Everybody knows that.

22:00 So, you can get some fancy blue blocking glasses and keep looking at your phone.

22:04 Better yet, don't look at your phone because you get the side benefit.

22:07 If you don't live alone, you live with other people.

22:10 you'll be focused on them.

22:11 And what we're supposed to do as we're getting ready

22:13 to sleep is be with the people that we actually love.

22:16 Giving us a sense of connection, giving us a sense of harmony.

22:20 These are the three times.

22:21 First hour of the day, meal time.

22:24 Last hour of the day, watch your life change.

22:28 Second is tech-free zones.

22:29 That means literal places where you don't have devices.

22:32 And you get used to it.

22:34 And I promise you, you'll get used to this really, really fast.

22:37 The first is the bedroom.

22:38 Now, obviously, if you're not looking at your phone for the last

22:41 hour of the day or the first hour of the day,

22:43 you shouldn't look at it between those times.

22:45 So, don't have your phone in the bedroom.

22:46 Now, that's hard for a lot of people.

22:48 I have students who say, "Professor, that's how I wake up.

22:51 It's with my phone." And I say, "I have this new fangled new invention.

22:55 It's called the alarm clock.

22:57 It's incredible.

22:58 You can get one for five bucks on Amazon.

23:00 It's great.

23:01 Your phone should not be next to your bed.

23:04 I recommend having it in a different room, locked up in a closet,

23:07 plugged in someplace else, and you simply don't see it.

23:10 Now, here's the good news.

23:11 After 6 or 7 weeks, you won't even want to look

23:14 at it if you do have it at your bedside.

23:16 So, if I'm traveling and I don't have my alarm clock, I can have my phone there.

23:19 I will not look at it at night because I'm out of the habit.

23:21 The second tech-free zone is the classroom.

23:24 There shouldn't be a school from kindergarten through PhD

23:27 that allows phones at any time during the school day, especially during lunch.

23:32 And it's crazy that they still have more than half

23:35 the states in the United States that allow unfettered access to phones.

23:39 That's simply a lack of courage and knowledge at this point.

23:42 It's insanity.

23:43 I understand it.

23:44 I mean, what happens is that students hate it at the beginning and and so

23:48 their parents freak out and they convince themselves that it's a it's a danger.

23:52 It's a security risk.

23:53 And so they call the principal,

23:55 who calls the superintendent, who calls the governor.

23:57 I don't know.

23:58 The bottom line is this is a lack of political

24:01 and and moral will and this should get done now.

24:04 We have the technology to get all phones out of all schools at all levels.

24:08 Last but not least is tech fasts.

24:10 I recommend 96 hours a year.

24:12 That's just 4 days.

24:14 I take a spiritual retreat.

24:15 I go away and I pray and meditate

24:18 for 4 days in complete silence with no devices.

24:22 And it's it's a miracle.

24:24 The first day you're screaming in your head, where's my phone?

24:27 The second day you're calming down.

24:29 The third day you're saying,

24:30 "I understand this tranquility." The fourth day you say,

24:33 "I wish it were all year round." If you're not religious,

24:36 find a secular way to do it.

24:37 But the bottom line is that you need a 4-day

24:40 tech fast per year if you can possibly manage it.

24:43 And you probably can.

24:45 There are a few other ways that we can change the odds

24:48 in our favor with respect to the technology and the dopamine.

24:51 One of the biggest problems is that the design of the technology

24:54 in the in the portable devices is that they they're bugging us.

24:58 They're trying to get our attention and and when they can get our attention,

25:02 what that does is that stimulates dopamine to give

25:05 us the anticipation of reward which fuels the wanting,

25:08 l learning, liking, craving addiction cycles in our brains.

25:12 The way that you can interrupt that is

25:14 by getting rid of things that that that touch you.

25:17 Look, it's bad enough that you think of the phone on your own.

25:20 It's even worse when the phone is thinking of you.

25:22 It's trying to remind you of itself.

25:24 So, the best way to do that is to turn off your notifications.

25:27 There's one notification that should be on your phone

25:29 and that's when your mother is calling.

25:31 That's it.

25:32 Or that person, whoever it happens to be.

25:34 But everything else, you don't need notifications for really anything else.

25:37 I know it's convenient.

25:38 I really, really got it.

25:40 But the truth of the matter is that mostly

25:42 what it's doing is it's stimulating your dopamine.

25:44 There's another way that the devices will will

25:46 will will really capture your brain in full,

25:49 which is making sure that it's it's audio and visual

25:52 and visual in the the most intense way possible,

25:56 which is in color in really really high definition

25:59 while giving you all sorts of of sounds that are

26:03 designed to hook your brain maximally across the different

26:06 uh cortices of your brain for the different senses.

26:09 I mean, if they could make you smell it, they would is the bottom line.

26:12 So turn down the fidelity of of the sensory experience that you're getting.

26:16 And the best way to do that is with your strongest sense, which is your sight.

26:20 Now, the occipital lobe of your brain, which functions,

26:22 it's the whole back of your head, basically, is is dedicated to sight.

26:26 And and we're really attuned to color.

26:28 Color is unbelievably important for homo sapiens.

26:30 It's how we decide between all kinds of things.

26:32 We can tell if somebody likes us because they flush a little bit.

26:36 We can tell if a piece of fruit is ripe and ready to eat.

26:38 we can tell if something is probably going to poison

26:40 us often by color as well as by smell.

26:43 So, one of the ways that you can actually get less hooked by social media or any

26:48 screenbased uh technology is by turning off

26:50 the color and turning it to black and white.

26:53 Sounds like such a little thing, right?

26:55 But you'll be amazed that when when your screen is black and white,

26:59 you will care less about your screen and you will look at it less.

27:03 There's a wonderful body of social psychology by Mikai Chiket Mikai,

27:09 the great social psychologist.

27:11 He invented the idea of flow, the flow state.

27:15 Most people have experienced this.

27:17 When you're involved immersively in something and hours turn to minutes,

27:21 you lose track of time.

27:23 It's intensely pleasurable.

27:24 You get into this kind of almost hypnotic state in which you're able

27:29 to do things that are hard but not too hard and they're not boring.

27:35 It's almost like a state of Buddhist meditation.

27:38 People want this and it's really one of the great sources of happiness.

27:42 When you have your sense of calling, you get that.

27:45 As a matter of fact, the trouble is it's getting harder.

27:49 One of the reasons that happiness has been in decline,

27:51 especially for young adults,

27:52 is because they're less likely to attain a a flow state.

27:55 To get into a flow state, you need to be fully immersed in something.

27:59 You need to be concentrated on something.

28:01 Now, not anything.

28:02 You can't just like focus on something that you hate.

28:05 That's not going to work unless you are really really adept as a, you know,

28:10 if you're a yogi maybe.

28:11 But for the rest of us, it has to be something that you're truly interested in.

28:14 The problem is that what technology has created

28:18 staying in the the category of Buddhist thinking,

28:21 it's given us the the monkey mind.

28:23 The monkey mind is that in which the mind

28:26 is um is a monkey that's jumping from tree

28:29 to tree that can't stay in one particular location

28:32 that you can't you can't get a bead on it.

28:35 It's always jumping around.

28:36 And everybody watching me, you know how it feels to have the monkey mind.

28:39 I'm doing this.

28:40 I'm doing that.

28:40 I'm distracted.

28:41 When you're addicted to tech, it's not just that you have a flow state

28:44 and you're knocked into the monkey mind by the evil exterior.

28:48 You're doing it to yourself.

28:50 You're turning on five things.

28:51 You're constantly multitasking because you

28:54 have a hard time distinguishing between

28:57 immersion and the dreaded boredom that you become completely averse to.

29:01 Here's the thing about immersion.

29:03 Here's the thing about flow.

29:04 You got to get a little bored before you get into it.

29:07 But if you can't get a little bored because you've lost your ability,

29:11 your the fortitude to actually do that because

29:14 you've you haven't felt that way in days,

29:18 months, years, you'll never get into that state.

29:21 And the moment that you start to feel a little bored,

29:24 that could lead to something blissful, could lead to a divine experience.

29:28 That's when you turn on the podcast and scroll the the social media

29:34 and read something and do something else and you know where it goes.

29:38 You're a monkey jumping around from tree to tree.

29:42 I don't know that much about my greatgrandparents.

29:46 I know some of their names.

29:48 My paternal great-grandfather was Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in tha Kansas.

29:55 And Leroy married the sheriff's daughter, Mary Ellen.

29:58 And he was a farmer like a lot of people in those days.

30:02 Now, I don't know much more about him

30:04 than that, but I'm going to make a supposition.

30:06 I'm going to imagine that Leroy never came home from work and said,

30:11 "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." And there's a reason.

30:17 Because all Leroyy's brain was working the way it was designed to work.

30:23 Now, let me give you the contrast between Leroyy's brain and our brains today.

30:29 Leroyy's life behind that mule was pretty boring moment to moment.

30:33 I mean, hours a day looking at a mule's butt.

30:36 How great is that?

30:38 Pretty boring moment to moment.

30:39 But I promise you, at the end of his life when he was taking his dying breath,

30:44 he wasn't saying, "What a boring life

30:46 that was." Because it wasn't a boring life.

30:49 It was a real life.

30:51 Now, let's think about us.

30:52 We're not bored.

30:54 We're not bored moment to moment.

30:56 On the contrary, we've wiped out boredom moment to moment.

31:00 We crack the case.

31:01 We look at the phone.

31:03 We scroll the social media.

31:04 We listen to the podcast.

31:05 We wipe out every moment of boredom.

31:07 But when you do that all day, be honest with yourself.

31:11 How interesting is your life?

31:13 I bet it's grindingly boring.

31:15 And if you're spending 10 to 12 hours a day

31:18 behind the screen and checking your phone 205 times a day,

31:21 you're in danger of getting to the end of your life saying,

31:25 "Well, that was pretty boring because I was never

31:29 bored." If you want to know the stakes here,

31:33 think about your eulogy and what you want people to say about you.

31:37 Think about what you want to think about yourself at the end of your days.

31:42 How do you want to look back on your life?

31:45 Now, compare it to how you're spending your life right now.

31:48 I dare say that if you're like the average American,

31:51 checking your phone 205 times a day,

31:54 spending somewhere between 4 and 9 hours on your screens,

31:59 small and large, if you were honest and you got

32:01 to the end of your life right now, you'd say,

32:03 "I spent a lot of time online." But one thing you wouldn't say is,

32:07 "I sure wish I'd spent more time online." You'd say,

32:10 "I wish I'd spent more time with my loved ones, with my friends,

32:15 with my family, getting to know people,

32:17 having real life experiences." That's what you'd say, right?

32:21 Well, that's what to go do.

32:23 That's the argument for this.

32:24 I know breaking a tech addiction is hard.

32:27 I get it.

32:27 It's hard for me, too.

32:29 And the younger you are, the harder it is.

32:31 But those are the stakes.

32:32 What are you going to say when you come to the end of your days?

32:36 It was really boring cuz I wiped out boredom.

32:38 Well, and and I could have done even even

32:40 better if I spent even more time on Instagram.

32:43 I don't think so.

32:44 I think you're going to want to have had deeper relationships and love,

32:50 been fully and passionately alive in the world.

32:56 So, you got to get after it now.

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