How To Reduce Loneliness, Depression, And Distraction By Adapting Our Relationship To Social Media

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction and.

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And now let's get on to this.

Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast.

The rise of social media has revolutionized.

The way we connect, share information and interact with one another. While it has undoubtedly brought numerous benefits, there is growing concern about its impact on our mental health, as we see significant increases in mental health disorders, especially among youth. In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about the costs of our social media use and how we can make different choices. Dr. Hyman speaks with Cal Newport about the myth that social media is going to make you happy, with Jim Quick about how digital distraction affects our brains, with Tobias Rose Docwell about the effects of social media on teen girls leading to higher rates of depression, and with Lori Santos about the social media habits of college students and how she encourages her students to make nutritious choices.

Let's jump in. People think if you're not on social media, you're not going to be able to maintain a healthy social life 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 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 soda doesn't make you fat. Well, it is true. It is true. So, I did a literature review recently, and 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. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say do nothing or send a note to a close friend or family member on social media, you'll be a little bit happier having sent a note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. Now it turns out that actually Talking to a non-close friend or broadcasting information to a large audience or reading information that was broadcast to a large audience, none of this even in isolation makes you happier.

But there's a few things in isolation.

So now you're Facebook friends, but you're actual friends. Yeah, actual friends and family. Yeah, at the same token though, the sort of best research we have that looks at the correlation between social media use in your life and indicators like perceived loneliness or social isolation, say that the more you use it, the less happy you are. Even when you do all of the standard controls that you would do for all the different demographic and economic variables you think might be relevant. And so what's going on, right? This seems like they're countervailing. And what's probably happening with 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 I'm connected to people. I'm talking to people all the time. I just sent these six messages in the last five minutes. And I talked to my high school roommate and here's my old college roommate. But the benefits you get from that is so small compared to what you're losing by doing less real conversation and analog interaction that you end up net negative. So the more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction The worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets.

Yeah, so face to face instead of Facebook.

Yeah, face to face instead of Facebook. I mean, our brain, the degree to which our brain has evolved to essentially be a social processing engine is incredible. If you look at the research on how much of our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues, it's completely impoverished when you take away this rich stream of input that you and I are seeing right now being in person and seeing facial expressions and movements and both tonalities, and you replace it with a one bit indicator, like a one and a zero, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't do it for our brain, right? It's leaving it anxious and without much to do. And so that's sort of the first myth that somehow you're gonna be happier in your social life of using social media. The inverse seems to be true. If you don't use it, now you're gonna have to do real social interactions to feed that urge and desire.

People have forgotten how to do that. I was amazed with these kids and millennials, They don't want to call each.

Other on the phone.

They are socially awkward and not able to actually have real connections and authentic relationships, but they're on social media doing that. And they've lost the skill of actually human connection interaction.

Yeah, and it's a vital skill. I mean, not just for navigating the world, but just for mental health and happiness. So, yeah, it is a big issue. So, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that 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. Can 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. And so I was doing an event on a college campus, it was an elite college, and I was talking to the head of the mental health services on the college, and we had talked about some of these issues, and she said, Cal, something I have noticed in my time here is that the issues we're dealing with with the students have changed dramatically. That what we used to deal with were sort of the standard mix of mental health issues you might expect in 18, 19, 20 year olds. There were sort of eating disorders and homesicknesses and some OCD and schizophrenia. some depression, sort of a mix, a variety. And she said it was like a switch flipped and it's all anxiety and anxiety related disorders. And not just that that's overtaken everything else, but the number of students coming in with these issues is well beyond what they ever saw before. And I said, okay, well what changed? And without a hesitation, she said smartphones. It was that first class that came in that had smartphones throughout their teenage years. They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get a few years later, you get Jean Twenge, who's one of the, or Twinge, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think, very important book last year called iGen. And she's one of the top generational demographers, the world expert on understanding trends and how they differ between generations. And her whole book is basically making this argument that that's not a mirage, that this entire generation, this entire iGen, the first generation to have smartphones starting from their teenage years is having off the charts, mental health and anxiety related issues. And it's not, there was some pushback that, okay, well maybe this was reporting has changed, we're more aware and acute to sort of mental health issues now. That's not the issue because we have hospitalizations for suicide attempts among the same group has gone up right along with the mental health issues. 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 it's smartphones and social media. It's really been the only thing that fits the only thing she's found that actually fits the timing and the characteristics of the data. So I think there's actually for young people a mental health crisis caused by these phones.

I feel like the thing 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 I'd like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media because they're not always the same, right?

Yeah.

So what are the benefits of doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox. There are camps, people go to the weekend and they put their phone away. We and our Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phones and during meetings, we put them at the front of the table and no one can touch them. And we have much more productive engaged meetings.

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

Right?

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 that's going to even boost and enhance.

Those things you care about, right?

I mean, I'm a computer scientist who loves technology. Yeah, exactly. But you only use it in that way and then you ignore the rest. And so instead of cluttering your life with every possible form of technology that begins to eat away at your attention and happiness, you have this very intentional use of a few things that do really well and you're happy missing out on everything else. So, I mean, to get back to your original question, I've been studying these digital minimalists and they're calm, they're happy, you can have a conversation with them for a long time and they won't once glance at a phone. They don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment. They can just actually be in the moment. They're much more productive in work, they produce things of great value, they're respected by their friends, they're involved in their community. I mean, you can go down the list, but when they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining pull on their attention and get back to Here's what I care about, this is what I want to do. I'll use technology selectively to help that and that's it. It's a much more present, mindful, and satisfying type of life.

But that's not so easy because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive. And the data scientists and behavioral experts, 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 come up with the ways to make these things so sticky?

Yeah, it was a depressing period when I dived into the reporting and research on how these companies make their products addicting. It's a little bit dark, actually. So the best way-- Pull back the veil. Yeah, so-- Put the light on it. The best way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what they're trying to create is what they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions. So this is different than say a strong substance addiction, right? So I mean, if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user, they're not gonna sneak out in the middle of the night to go to an internet cafe because they have to get a fix.

On the other hand, They might.

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 gonna.

Drive you to do.

A lot of this absolutely is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological vulnerabilities. There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So I can give you a couple examples. On Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications 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 endless scrolling.

Mm-.

Right? This was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerability, sort of like a slot machine would, that there might be something one more scroll away, there might be something really interesting. These companies have invested millions of dollars to solve really, really hard computer science problems, problems I know about as a computer scientist. Like programming issues. Programming issues that they really didn't need to solve, like for example, auto-tagging people in pictures. This was a very hard problem in image recognition, but now if you post to Instagram, it can figure out, okay, this person, that's Dr. Hyman, let's send them a note and say, Do you want to tag this person? 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 a 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 there, sometimes they are.

It's like... How does that affect the person hitting the like?

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

What about the brain response to this? Because it's a dopamine response, which is the same hormone, or I mean, the same neurotransmitter that is stimulating your brain when you have cocaine or heroin or alcohol or nicotine, right?

So how does that play a role in here? Well, it's the same effect that the, you know, the famous Zeiler experiments with the pigeons pecking on the lever and if they intermittently got food, the way that messed with the dopamine system made them addictively tap in a way that if they knew they'd always get food, they wouldn't. And this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have. It's not food nuggets, it's likes and tags, but they're not always there. But sometimes they're there. And that messes with the dopamine system.

In a way we've known since those.

Experiments in the 1970s that can be- B.F. Skinner. Yeah, it's impossible. It's impossible to ignore.

And the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement. Don't give them the treat every time.

Make them guess and then keep them coming back. Yeah, there's even rumors, I don't know if it's true, that Facebook for a while was actually purposely introducing randomized delays into giving some of this feedback back.

Just to make sure that it was a little bit more intermittent. I don't know if that's true, but.

I wouldn't put it past them given what I've learned.

So then there's good science about how.

They'Re doing this and the technology that.

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. No, 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 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 clicking on this thing obsessively.

It's like an advertiser's dream. One of the things you talk about is the super villains, the four super villains that stand in our way of learning.

What are those? How do we conquer those things? So I think everyone could relate to these. I alliterated them so it makes them more memorable. So they all start with the letter D, and they're driven by technology. And technology didn't create them, but it certainly has amplified it really quickly. The first one is digital distraction. how do you maintain your focus and your concentration in a whirlwind of rings and pings and dings and app notifications, social media alerts, likes, shares, comments, you name it, right? And that's why we have a whole chapter dedicated to how to focus. Another one is digital deluge, which is this overwhelm you're talking about. They say, I mean, we did program long time for years. We train at Google and I remember the chairman there has a quote, he was chairman at the time, Eric, and he said, the amount of information that's been created since the dawn of humanity, since humans walked the planet to the year 2003, just a few decades, two decades ago, that amount of information is now created every two days online. Yeah, it's insane.

Yeah.

So the amount of information, Moore's Law, it's doubling at dizzying speed. The half-life is getting shorter. It's getting, you know, information is getting outdated. So you have to, you know, our ability to learn, to unlearn, to relearn is an incredible competitive advantage. I think it's the most, you know, most powerful hedge that we could get in our life and school and in our careers also as well. But that digital deluge creates challenges like information anxiety, right? Higher blood pressure, compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness, more rumination. And so that's why we teach people how to learn faster or read faster. It's so important. Third one is digital dementia, which is a digital care. yeah, it's where we're, the idea that we're Outsourcing our memories to our, these external hard drives, like our phone. I mean, think about it, Mark. How many phone numbers did you know growing up?

A lot. A lot. Now I know my own. I can barely remember my, my fiance's phone number. Right.

Exactly. And so we could be texting or calling every single day to, you know, a number of people. If we don't, if we don't check our phone, we don't really know what it is. And, and not that, let me back up. So not that we want to memorize 500 phone numbers, but it should be very concerning that we've lost the ability to remember one phone number or a pin number or a passcode or something we just read. I believe two of the most costly words in life sometimes are, I forgot. You know, I forgot to do it. I forgot that conversation. I forgot what I was gonna say. I forgot what I read. I forgot that person's name. I mean, just goes, nah, I forgot to go to that meeting. Every single time we have those thoughts, we lose time, we lose trust, we can hurt a relationship. On the other side, I think memory is an incredible magnifier when you can easily remember client information, product information, give speeches. without notes. Remember important things about the people that you love, your clients, your customers. I mean, life gets a whole lot easier. So that's why the largest chapter in the book is on memory improvement. And then finally, the fourth one outside of digital distraction, digital deluge, digital dementia, is a term I coined called digital deduction. And this is, I was reading research on saying that the new generation, the younger generation, it's the first time that they've had, they tested, worse than previous generations when it comes to logic and critical thinking. And they were correlating that to technology doing the thinking for us. I mean, you think about algorithms, even something simple like GPS, we don't have to build the visual spatial awareness and that intelligence, you know, that part of our brain, because there's technology doing it for us. And with algorithms, it's always telling you what think all the time, you know, based on what you're engaging with. It's true.

It's like hard to imagine a world without Google Maps, right? I mean, like, we all used to have to drive and remember where we're going and learn.

Yeah. They would have these tests, like at, you know, London cabbies that we talk about. We do a lot of research, you know, where they have to, in order for them to get their license, they have to go through years of studying. And they actually shown that that you know, the part of the brain, the hippocampus, it's more highly developed, more dense because they're, you know, neurons, what's the term? Neurons that fire together, they wire together, right? So that's how you do it. It's use it or lose it. It's similar to technology. Like if you have to go to the bank and it's eight blocks away and you choose to take your car, that's great. But you don't, that was an opportunity to get your steps in, right? Or if you have your apartment on the fourth floor, your office, you know, on the fourth floor and you choose to take a lift or an elevator, and you don't take the stairs. I mean, again, it's convenient. Technology is very convenient. But I think there has to be a balance with also keeping our minds mentally fit. And, you know, our brains are an organ, obviously, but they act more like a muscle. It's, it's use it or lose it. And I want people to have their strongest mental muscles, their sharpest memory, you.

Know, lots of energy, stronger, stronger memory and, and so on. And so, in a sense, you, you identify these, these things that stand in the way of our learning, right? the digital distraction, the deluge, the dementia, the deduction. Then I'm sure you give people a roadmap on how to think.

Yeah, that's why we have chapters for everyone. So the superpowers that we talk about, they're all the chapters. It's really a guidebook on meta-learning, what we should have learned in school, learning how to learn in fun, enjoyable, easy, simple ways. So, you know, the memory chapter is to combat digital dementia. that there's a whole thinking chapter on problem solving and how to think more clearly to help overcome the digital deduction and focus and concentration and flow to get over digital distraction and so on. So it's one of those things again, technology like fire, fire is technology, early form of technology, but it's how it's applied. Technology could cook your food or it could also burn down your home. It's just how it's utilized.

Yeah, it's so interesting. It sort of reminds me when you're talking about a Marvel series, right? It's like the super villains and the super powers. I think it's really nice way of framing it. And I think it's true. We have to be vigilant about the things that interrupt our ability to actually live a life that's fulfilled, engaged, that allows us to do what we want, build relationships, to build our well-being and our health, to build financial security. I mean, these are the basic skills in life we don't learn as we grow up. And most of us have to come back to that. So, Jim, you know, what inspired you to actually update this book? Because I thought it was a great book to start with. And I think there's some real interesting things in there that you bring in that I think are going to make a difference for people. So what are those sort of highlights from the book that are quite new and innovative.

So when the book came out a few years ago, I know you know this because you wrote the foreword for it. It came out in April 2020, which.

Was- Good time to release a book, right?

Yeah, interesting time to release a book. We're really proud of the book. We donated the proceeds to Alzheimer's Research for Women. Women are twice as likely to experience Alzheimer's than men in memory of my grandmother. Also, we built schools. I had learning challenges in school from a traumatic brain injury. And so we built schools in Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya. And so we updated the book though, just because the world has changed a lot over the past few years. So it's meant for a post pandemic AI world. And it has all the original strategies on how to read faster, improve your memory, brain optimization, focus, flow, changing your habits, but then also really focuses on the new material on creating momentum in your life. which is what we talk about in the original book, Mastering youg Mindset, you, Motivation and the Methods for Brain Optimization and Learning Faster. And this is really about gaining momentum. So AI to enhance your HI, your human intelligence, that will give you greater momentum understanding your brain cognitive type. I think there's a lot of self-awareness as a superpower allows you to lean into your strengths and your traits to help you create momentum velocity for the first time in over 30 years. I talk publicly about brain supplements, human studies on nootropics, and so it's vast. It's got 120 new pages, so very excited about that. And also my world, not only the external world has changed, my world has changed. I entered my 50s, we had our first child, and it really made me want to double down on my conviction and our commitment to to helping build better, brighter brains, especially for the new generation.

The harms of social media, I think, are very clear right now. My colleague at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, has focused really closely on the harms, particularly to a very specific subset of the population, which is teen girls, seem to have very, very negative reactions to social media. They're very special and tender parts of their life. And there's a lot of evidence showing that there's increased risk of depression and suicide for young girls as a result of increased social media usage. And that's partially a result of social comparison. That's partially a result of, I think, the social hierarchies that young girls are very prone to at a young age. And I cannot imagine growing up with social media in middle school or elementary school or even high school would be probably worse. But I cannot imagine what that would be like these days to actually have these tools, the likes of your friends and the, your enemies plotting against you in the hierarchy of middle school and high school. I think it's terrible. And so I think there is a role for government to step in and actually enforce age limitations, because it's a coordination problem for girls, right? If all of your friends are on it and you're not on it, then you're actually ostracized from the group, which is a huge problem, right? So I think there's a role for authorities to step in and say, Look, no social use social media use, but before a certain age. Now, what we can do about these broader problems, again, to come back to the kind of more specific items that I think are really important to focus on here, I think it comes down to three different buckets. And I think it's actually somewhat applicable to AI too, in terms of the three buckets are what individuals can do, what governments can do, and what platforms can do. as, as for, for governments, I think that focusing on Section 230 and making platforms more liable. What is P30?

Yeah.

So, sorry. Section CDA 230.

This is a law that was passed.

And thank you for, for asking. I'm sure everybody's familiar with all the.

Bills in Congress and what they're trying to do. Right.

100% of all the bills.

But I, I personally haven't kept up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the, the, the communication decency act that was passed in, I believe, 1995. Section 230, it's called. And if you hear people talking about social media and regulation, usually it involves Section 230. But basically it makes platforms not liable for the harms that come from people using their tools. So it was a super instrumental and important law for regulating the internet in such a way that allowed for free and open exchange of information. You can post something and the company that that is responsible for serving that content is not liable for what you post, right? Which I think in general was a fantastic idea. But when it comes to the algorithmic amplification of content, there are opportunities for great harm that make this not a neutral, like, telephone system, right? It's not like a neutral kind of, oh, I'm just sharing this with my friends. It's actually something that is serving content that might actually cause real harm in the world. And so I think that focusing on Section 230, updating it to make sure that platforms are more liable for some of the things that happen on them, I think is really important. On the platform side, I think that there's many, many, many interventions that can be done to help improve our relationship with these tools. There was a handful of actually using AI. There's a bunch of interventions that you can use AI to actually help identify content and not demote content based on the identification, but to give users basically the ability to see, for instance, when a kid is about to post something like a comment that is extremely toxic and bullying of someone else. the platform can cause you to pause and it can identify that content and it can cause you to pause and say, actually, maybe you should think about not sharing this or maybe you should just take a minute. You can share this still, but here's a little bit of friction in place that keeps you from doing the worst thing. And I think there's a tremendous number of possible frictions that can be employed that reduce a little bit of the kind of outrageous engagement and addiction problems with this, which is again, part of the bottom line in these companies, but they make it a much less toxic place for us, for us all. So if you give users more choice and more frictions at key intervals, it can actually really dramatically improve the kind of content that's shared on these tools. And that's been shown in studies that frictions actually really do dramatically help. They help us make sense of misinformation. They help us keep they keep us from sharing on the worst type of information to all of our friends. And they keep us a little bit saner because we're seeing fewer, fewer that are just stuffed up in our feeds.

So that's one way to create these regulated structures within social media to give pause when there's content that might be damaging, right?

Yeah.

And that goes a long way. I just want to note that actually goes a long way. If you think about these vectors of information sharing, if you stop a single share, of a single piece of outrageous inflammatory conflict. Like if in Myanmar, right, during these ethnic pogroms that happened, if you had put small frictions in place at that moment in time, it probably could have saved thousands of lives. And that's the kind of thing that's really important to recognize. These are really influential things.

Yeah, I think that's powerful, but do you think it's enough? I mean, do we need to go further and figure out how to, you know, change the economics of social media so that it doesn't sort of create this perverse incentive of the worst information that there is, the more inflammatory, the more disturbing it is, the more likely it is to spread. Is there a way to sort of say, like, wait, guys, like, business model change? Like, is that, is that even possible? Because, or, or how do we fix that? It just seems like that is such a pernicious force where all the incentives, even if you put, like, a little pause, like, okay, well, you can't, you know, so you have to kind of, you know, be asked a question if you want to drink a bottle of wine. Well, maybe you think you want to drink that bottle of wine. Maybe it's not so good for you. We're like, ah, and I'll just drink that bottle of wine. You know, like, I just. I don't know. Like, is it gonna really work?

Yeah.

I I think that, you know, we have. We have small frictions like this throughout Society at large. Right. To keep. Try to keep people a little bit more on track in their lives to keep. from getting totally sucked into a to a problematic thing, a problematic behavior, you know, certain certain extremely addicting drugs are illegal for a reason. You know, I'm not for legalization of every single drug that's available. I think the world is would maybe be worse off with if we had heroin that you could buy at the corner store. Well, we do.

It's called sugar.

That's actually true. That's a good point. That's a good point. And a huge, huge, huge other problem. of them there for sure. And thank you for fighting a good fight on that. But yeah, I do think so. And just to qualify and put some historical context here around advertising as a business model, before we had advertising as a business model, we actually didn't have newspapers. Newspapers rely upon advertising as being a real foundational subsidizer of our sense-making capacity, right? So NPR just laid off 10% of its workforce earlier this year because they had an advertising down tick, right? So there is a huge subsidy on sense making that comes from advertising. And I think that that's important to note that advertising itself is not the most demonic thing in the world. It is the kind of internal structures at these platforms that are pushing a level of engagement with the extreme. And it's really important to note this, right? It's like they are going to fix it if enough of us are pissed off about the extreme stuff that we're getting served on a regular basis. It's just we can't really coordinate well right now because there's so many other issues that seem pressing and urgent. We've been kind of flooded with threatening information and problems. And it's very difficult to coordinate collectively when everyone has a different problem. And I think this is one of the core problems that we're facing is that we can't cohere if there is more misinformation than real information. so that's a big part of it.

Yeah.

So that was sort of one strategy is about this sort of regulation and sort of enforcing this pause. What other things can we do to sort of solve this problem?

Yeah. So as individuals, I think it's really important to recognize, so I have this concept of healthy influence online, which is recognizing that we are not just influencers. We are being influenced by these platforms as well. So it's important to recognize this kind of multidimensional influence. It's omnidirectional, right? It goes both ways. We are influenced by these tools and we are influenced by our communities as well as we are influencing our communities. And taking some responsibility for the stuff we post is really, really critical. It's a really important piece of that, right? Don't just do it for the metrics. Do it because you think this is actually a really important healthy thing for the rest of the world. I think that's an important piece of it, right? Recognizing that you are a steward of an audience. You are actually creating content that other people will see. And I feel this, I'm sure we've all felt this to some degree, the FOMO that comes from someone posting something about something that's happening, and you're like, oh, I wasn't invited to that. That sucks, right? Oh, bummer.

Yeah.

There's a simple way around that, which is like, holding on to the post for a couple of weeks and then posting, post posting essentially, post posting well after the fact so that people don't feel in your existing audience, they don't feel as kind of left out by that particular thing. And, you know, I think it's important to think about social media as like a community. Like we are in these communities together and you need to approach your communities online as if they are real life communities because these are real humans that you're impacting with your content. It's not just for you, this is for other people too. So I think that's a really important piece of it.

Interesting. So that's sort of individuals can sort of be more conscious about their use about, I mean, I try to go on social media holidays. I don't really look at Facebook. I don't really pay attention to Twitter. I use Instagram to post stuff for myself to educate people about health issues. Sometimes I'll just get, you know, scroll while I'm standing online or something and look around, but I don't spend that much time doing it. And I feel like if I do, it's just a big suck. and, you know, my life energy is really important to me. And I think, you know, the question is, what are we missing by not picking our heads up? You know, what are we, what are we not getting? And I think you talk a lot about in the book about how we need to kind of reconnect. We call it social media, but it's almost anti-social media.

Right.

And how do we get back to really be being in connection with each other in person? Yeah. And real world relationships. And why those are really important. And how, you know, when you think about what's going on with our children today, I mean, the rising rates of mental illness, depression, anxiety, suicidality, you know, ADD, mental illness, obesity. I mean, it's all connected. And so how do we kind of help our generation of kids who are growing up in this social media world to actually shift what they're doing? Because it seems it's like taking a, it's like taking a, you know, heroin needle out of somebody who's an addict's hand. It's like good luck, you know?

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, the, the diction is very real, and I think it's, it's important to recognize that it is real and that these these are pretty powerful tools for addicting us and keeping us there. I can offer a couple of really pragmatic, easy things that people can do that are helpful. There's an app called OneSec, which is great. It takes about five minutes to set up, five to 10 minutes to set up on your phone, but it actually will probably save you dozens of hours of your life over the course of the next few months. But basically it's a content blocker. When I say content blocker, it's actually just a little piece of friction that you can employ. What it does is that when you click on your app, you open up your phone and we impulsively reflexively always go to the app that we black out for a second and we wake up 20 minutes later and we're in someone else's stream or watching a crazy video or on TikTok, whatever it is. But this app, it basically forces you to take a breath before you enter into the app. And something as simple as taking breath, it reformats, it snaps you out of that impulsive click, and it makes you think about your intention, why you are doing this. And I found it to be amazingly helpful things like that, content blockers like that to keep you from just defaulting to the instant habitual behavior. There's another app called Self-Control for the desktop that's really fantastic as a content blocker that you can set time limits for yourself that is extremely helpful for managing your time if you find yourself automatically going to a new site or to Instagram or to Facebook or to TikTok. But a lot of these tools, I think they will become much more prevalent because we need to renegotiate our time with these tools. We need to renegotiate our attention with these tools. And there are increasingly better ways of doing that that actually just they snap us right back into that system two processing, right back into that better part of ourself. We're like, ah, this is why I'm doing this. I'm not just an impulsive, emotive human doing things with no control. I actually have agency.

And what can the platforms do? I mean, are there ways that they're self policing or regulating?

Yeah, there are a lot of great people at these companies working on trust and safety teams that are trying their hardest to figure out what to do to help people. I think that these platforms could invest more in those teams. I think they've been some of the first to get cut in this recent round of layoffs. but no, the trust and safety teams are incredibly important for helping us understand what is best for us, right? So all the research that Francis Haugen pulled from Facebook, that was the result of trust and safety teams internally doing good research on what Facebook's harms are to the world. And so there are good people inside these companies really trying to make these tools better. I think that, you know, you can see, it's all the work that you don't see behind the scenes to kind of keep the really toxic stuff from social media. I think that if social media was just had zero moderation, you would be horrified by the kinds of things that would end up on a regular basis. And you kind of see this with different platforms.

This is actually the moderated version we're getting, is what you're saying. Right.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

Which is creepy and strange to think about, but like social media could be so much worse. And in fact, in a lot of other countries, Trust and safety teams don't have as much of a significant say in presence. So a lot of the social media that goes to other countries is actually some of the worst stuff.

Some ways of spending our time and some behaviors are a little bit more nutritious for our well-being than others. It doesn't mean we always have to make the nutritious choice. But if we're not kind of feeding ourselves nutritious behaviors at least some of.

The time, there's going to be a problem. I love that idea. Sort of like nourish happiness. How do you nourish happiness? It's such a great concept. and most of us don't think about that directly. And I think, you know, you mentioned social media and I know in your class you tell your students for time being to delete all their social media accounts as an experiment. Why is that important and what do they find and what is your experience?

Yeah, I mean, so in full truth, there's actually not much really good data on social media and whether it affects happiness, mostly because we can't do the right experiments, right? There's no control condition. There's not like, you know, college students today that have not interacted with social media and don't want to, right? Like, this doesn't exist. We've inadvertently put these tools in the pockets of six billion people without really understanding how they're going to affect our lives, our well-being, our attention, all this stuff, right? But, and also with the caveat that social media is just a tool, right, that we could use for all kinds of different things. Problem is that, well, the way we tend to use it allows us to do things that don't look a lot like the behaviors we know map onto happiness. So take social connection, you know, one of the things that we know is super important for happiness. In theory, these tools should be great for social connection, but in practice they're often at the opportunity cost of social connection. You know, I remember sitting, you know, in a restaurant looking over at different tables of families who all have their, you know, they're together as a family in this setting that's for, you know, millennia has been used to allow humans to connect really closely with the people they care about, and they're all privately on their own devices doing things, right?

Yeah.

I just want to tell you a quick story before you go on. I went to Google to give a talk, and I got a tour after, and I walked around and there was a lunchroom. And when I met with the human resources folks there, they said one of the most important requests was for more connection with each other. They felt isolated alone. and they wanted more interaction and connection. So I walked around campus and over lunch, I walked into this room where I remember just sitting on a couch on their computers. It must have been 30 Googlers, they call them. And I'm like, is this the silent lunchroom? And they're like, no, it's not. And they were all literally sitting next to each other on their computers, disconnected from each other. And it was just the most funny, strange experience I've had.

And it's not just Google. I mean, this was one of my most shocking observations when I became a new head of college was that I walked into the dining hall, which in college I remember is like the loudest place on campus, you know what I mean? And it's not so much that it's dead quiet, but it kind of feels more like a library because they all have, you know, these big Bose headphones on and they're little things. They're sitting at tables altogether, completely disconnected. And then you have, you know, 65% of college students report feeling very lonely most days, right? And they're around hundreds of other people that they could connect with, but the, you know, the startup cost of like having that first conversation can be tough and it's just much easier to kind of go online. So I think of a lot of the kind of social connection we get on social media, sort of the mutual suite of social connection.

You know, it feels, you know, it.

Kind of feels like it's sort of like that and it's easier to get and stuff. But the other thing is that it, social, we know that not social media per se, but I think just devices in general, because I think you don't have to be on Facebook, like your email, like games, like the internet, like all the stupid stuff on our phone is just as much of a culprit in stealing our attention. These things are known to affect sleep, right? In part because of things like blue light before we go to bed, but just the attentional opportunity cost of like, I know I'm supposed to go to sleep, but I just want to scroll through one more page of Reddit, right? Like, again, these things might feel fun, but there can be a real opportunity cost. One of the things we teach about in class is this funny feature of the brains that there's like this interesting disconnect between the stuff that we really like in the world, like the stuff I would say we find really nutritious, we really get some benefit out of, and the stuff that we want. Like there are literally different circuits in the brain for wanting and liking, which you see dissociate most strongly in the context of addiction, right? So like an active heroin addict really craves, really wants a drug, but when they finally get it, you know, they're habituated to it. So their reward system doesn't even fire for it that much because they don't even like it that much. And then I see disconnects of the opposite way, right? There's stuff that we really like in the world, you know, I think a really hard cardio session or, you know, like putting the work in to have a really nutritious meal or gratitude or social connection, all the stuff we're talking about. But we don't like have circuits that crave it, right?

Like there's not, you know, our dopamine system kind Misses that, right? And so- People get addicted to exercise.

I know I'm like that. If I don't do it, I get depressed. That's true. I think there's a big individual difference there. I exercise, but I wish my brain could like develop a craving for it. And in the same way I crave like sugar or like, you know, hedonic craze, whatever. But yeah, so I think we have to, you know, and I think one, but there is one way to hack this system. And that gets to the stuff we were talking about before with Buddhism that, you know, one way researchers are finding you can hack the system is through mindfulness.

Mindfulness, right?

If after that activity that you find really good, you take a moment to realize like, huh, when I was scrolling through Reddit, that didn't feel super hot. But like when I had a really nutritious, like deep conversation with a friend that felt better, like when you kind of force your brain to notice that what you're feeling, that can kind of remind your dopamine system, wait, wait, hang on, there is a reward there. Like let me update what I want to create in the future. And so this practice of mindfulness research by folks like Hedy Kober and colleagues at Yale are showing like can help us update the craving system. It can help us kind of come to terms with the fact that even though I thought I wanted this before, it's actually not as good as I thought. And, you know, even though I didn't really think I needed to seek this out, I noticed that it feels good. Like maybe I should bump that up.

In my own behavioral repertoire a bit more. So when your students do this digital detox, what do they report? Do they love it? Do they hate it?

Are they feeling they get withdrawal and seizures? Or are they just- yeah, yeah, yeah. Many, many people. Many people report withdrawal at first. I think that's the strongest. Withdrawal, but also like noticing their own behavioral tendencies.

People can't even walk into another room without their phone. It's like, you know, I gotta bring my phone with me everywhere I go. And if you don't have it, like if you go to the kitchen or look around and say, Where's my phone?

Right?

It's like a weird thing. It's like an appendage. No, it's super, super hard. For my podcast, I interviewed this woman, Catherine Price, who has this wonderful book called How to Break Up with youh Phone. And she suggests putting like, you know, a little hair band or an elastic on your phone so that every time you go to use it, you notice this thing and it can just make you a little more mindful of like, wait a minute, I didn't even realize I was picking it up, right? She has this wonderful acronym she calls WWW, which is like, you know, what for, why now, what else, you know, what was I even picking up for? You know, why did I need to do it now? And like, what else could I be doing? And, you know, having read her book, now using that technique myself, I can watch it. what for is for nothing? Or it's just I was just anxious or I just was momentarily fleetingly bored. Yeah, like even in social situations, like having a conversation with some friends and I have this momentary feeling of boredom and I'm like, already, you know, there's, am I already reaching for the phone? And it's like, is that gonna be nutritious in the context of this otherwise good conversation? I think, you know, when you think about evolutionary history, like never in the history of our species have we had a stimulus that's so compelling is this object. Like our brain knows that on the other side of that phone is, you know, every cat video on the internet, my email since 1999, like porn, like, you know, like good recipes, like, you know, politics and like our president's Twitter feed. Like my brain knows that, you know, and it's making opportunity costs to realize, like, I'm having a fun conversation with my husband, but, you know, is that as good as every cat video that could be out there? I don't know. And so, you know, it's taking an attentional cost. that I think we don't realize a lot of the time. And I think that cost is stealing us from presence that would normally be bumping up our well-being.

And those students, are they happy after a little bit after they go through withdrawal and the seizures?

Yeah, yeah.

So some of them, once they get through, often they report just like having just super awareness of it. Like I didn't realize how much I was doing it. Some of them stick with it. A lot of them, you know, like any athlete, they'll kind of go back to it. But I think hopefully they go back to it with a little bit more mindfulness. Some of them do say that they end up deleting the apps that are most problematic. So that after having done it, it's like, well, I didn't really get rid of Snapchat because that's my lifeblood in the college these days. But I kind of got rid of that one video game that was stealing my attention. Or I noticed that Instagram specifically was making me feel bad, so I got rid of that. So I think they come out with a little bit more awareness. And that's really the goal. It's not to say shut off your social media forever because that's probably not realistic for most of our lives. like phones and these tools are not going away. It's more just finding a like slightly more mindful relationship with some of these devices.

Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier, and better and live younger longer. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It's not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner now. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. And in keeping with that theme, I'd like to express gratitude to those sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman plus on Apple podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.