Scrolling Ourselves Sick: The Hidden Cost of Constant Connection - Transcript
Cal Newport
So the more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets. To be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food. These intense addictive forms of distraction have a long term effect on your cognitive health.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.
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Jonathan Haidt
So we have a major and it's not just America. It's all the English speaking countries for sure. It's most it seems to be most of the developed world. Across the developed world, we're seeing suddenly, in the early twenty tens, teens are getting more depressed and anxious. And so this was a side project for me.
But as I began to dig into it and to realize that it's international, to realize that more and more studies are coming out showing not just a correlation, but we're beginning to get experiments, Experiments where you randomly assign one group of college students to reduce their social media per month, another group doesn't, you see what happens. So once you have correlational studies and experimental studies, and you have massive eyewitness testimony from Gen Z. Go go find me. I cannot find find me an essay online. Find me an essay anywhere by a member of Gen Z who defends the phones, who says, oh, no.
It's been great for us. Oh, no. The phone based life has been great. Don't take it away from us. You can't find that.
But you find thousands of essays about how it destroyed me. It destroyed my generation, destroyed my childhood. And we have massive eyewitness testimony from the teachers. The teachers all hate the phones. I mean, I don't know.
But, you know, 90% in surveys say this is a problem. 90%. Same thing for school principals. So we have all these different kinds of evidence converging on the fact that this really rapid movement of childhood from normal sort of play and social interaction onto the phones is not just a correlate of the collapse of mental health around the world, teen mental health, but a cause.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, know, think there was a sort of an attempt to rebut this by Candace Odders in Nature. Yes. And you on X basically reply to that kind of rebutting a lot of what you said, which was that there was no causative evidence. You talked about a lot of the data that you cite, which is, you know, both experimental and observational data that kind of lay out the reality that this is not just some correlation.
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's right. So there are a few pieces to the argument. The first, as I said, there is experimental evidence and a meta analysis came out six or eight months ago showing, yes, some experiments show big effect or an effect. Some experiments don't. It's kind of up in the air.
But my research partner and I, Zach Rausch, were reanalyzing all the experiments. And actually, when you remove the short term experiments, this is the key. Some of the experiments ask people to get off social media for a day or two days. And if you're addicted to something, you know, do you think quitting heroin or cocaine is a good idea? Well, you know, yeah, but if you quit it for a day or two, it's going to be pretty bad.
You have to wait. It takes, you know, two you know, Anna Lemke says three or four weeks. But, know, I think we're seeing effects by, you know, by a week or two, you're getting over the the roughest part. So the trick is when you remove the one day studies and you just look at those that went longer than a week, overwhelmingly, they find that there are benefit there are mental health benefits to getting off social media. So, Odgers said that I have only correlational evidence, which is false.
I keep saying, no, look, here's the experimental evidence. And the other thing that I think is very powerful is that this happened around the world at the same time. And, you know, most people say, oh, height is trying to make us bark up the wrong tree. We're gonna be looking into phones and banning phones for little kids when what we should be looking at is, you know, x, y, and z. And x, y, and z is usually inequality and climate change and racism and Donald Trump and things like that.
There's usually something about America.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Probably all of it adds the soup for sure.
Jonathan Haidt
Well, fine. But but but why what changed in Obama's second term? Why was it that during Obama's first term with the financial crisis, things were fine for a teenager? Mental health was norm didn't change in his first term. Then all of a sudden, in his second term, what?
Suddenly, like, racism and or school shootings. That's the other thing that people say. 2012 was the Newtown massacre. So that does fit the timing because after that, kids had lockdown drills. Fine.
If it was just The US, if if 2012 was the turning point in The US but not anywhere else, then I'd say, yeah. You know what? You could be right about that. But the fact that teenage girls start checking into psychiatric emergency wards at much higher rates, not just in The US, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The UK, that's just not compatible with any other theory. No one can come up with another explanation that fits internationally other than the great rewiring of childhood that happened between 2010 and 2015.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that rewiring that you're talking about essentially is the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram that then drove
Jonathan Haidt
Not well, we have to be more more specific because Facebook comes out in 2004 and or 02/2003.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's when they put the like and the share buttons. Right?
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. So so we have let's just trace it out. And actually, this is very, very important for people understanding why this time is different. So the Internet comes out. The public gets access to it in the mid nineteen nineties.
You know, I remember the first time I saw a web browser was AltaVista, and I almost dropped to the floor in shock and awe. Like, you mean I can just, like, ask for something and it comes to me instantly? I don't have to get my car and go to the library? Like, anything? Like, omniscience?
Crazy. You know? Yeah. It's it was totally crazy. It was magical.
And in the nineties, the teenagers who were Gen Z I mean, were millennials, they took to the Internet. They were on AOL and, you know, AIM, and and their mental health was fine. It the early Internet was decentralized. It was fun. It was exploratory.
It was amazing. And so we all think, well, this is good. And our kids are spending time on it, that's good, we think. And then you get into the two thousands. Now remember, everything's dial up.
So there's no video, slow connection speeds. It's just like text. You didn't have photographs early on. Now you get into the 2000s. Now you get fiber optic cable laid everywhere in the world, and things speeds are speeding up, and you get social media.
Now we're beginning to get a more centralized Internet. People can't many young people won't know that the Internet was not dominated by three or four companies, for the first decade or so. It was a wide open space. Now, you know, three or four companies basically control our kids' consciousness. You know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a few others account for, I think, majority of what they're doing with their day, for for a
Dr. Mark Hyman
lot people. It's basically basically TikTok, Google, Meta, and
Jonathan Haidt
That's right. That's right. Especially the short videos. That's yeah. X is not so important for for adolescents.
It's there, and it's important for democracy, but it's not X does not seem to be playing a role in the mental health issues. It's the short videos, and as video content, especially. Anyway, so so 02/2003, you get Facebook, but it's only for college students at first, and it's not particularly toxic. In the late two thousands, you begin to get so you get the iPhone in 02/2007, which is an amazing digital Swiss army knife. It's not harmful.
There are apps, but there's no app store, no push notifications. So all the way up to 02/2008, 02/2009, the situation is not particularly toxic. It's getting interesting. It's getting more engaging, but it's not it's not like what we know now. And teen mental health is fine up until 2011.
There's no sign of a problem before 2011. In 02/2009, you get the like and the retweet buttons, and now Facebook and Twitter are able to algorithmicize everything because you get share buttons as well. So retweet share. So so now social media becomes much more about the newsfeed. Before then, it was called they were called social networking systems.
You just connect with people, you see their page, they see yours. Connecting people is generally a good thing. But now it's about the newsfeed, which is algorithmicized to fit you and keep you on. Facebook literally rewarded its engineers for increasing engagement time. That was the metric.
If you can keep people on longer
Dr. Mark Hyman
You get paid.
Jonathan Haidt
You get a bonus. You get a bonus. Yeah. And so, you know, very smart people, they did it. They found ways to keep young people, especially on longer.
And that was the news feed and the algorithms. Much more emotionally engaging content is selected. So in twin in the beginning of 2010, very few teens have a smartphone. They mostly have flip phones. They're using Facebook on their dad's computer.
They don't have high speed Internet. They it's not dial up at that point, but it's not it's not very fast. They don't have Instagram. It doesn't exist on 01/01/2010. There's no front facing camera on 01/01/2010.
In 2010, you get the front facing camera and Instagram. Takes a couple years before everyone has it. In 2012, face Facebook buys Instagram. Doesn't change it at first, but that's when it gets huge publicity. That's when girls' social life, teen girls' social life moves on to Instagram.
It wasn't on it. It wasn't there before. The point is that by 2015, the great majority of teens in developed countries have a smartphone with a front facing camera and an Internet Instagram account and high speed Internet with an unlimited data plan. In 2010, you could not spend ten hours a day on your flip phone. I mean, that would just be hell.
But in 2015, you can spend ten hours a day on your smartphone, and now that's about the average. Eight to ten hours a day is what teens now spend on on their phones. That includes video games, But, but it's mostly phone, and it's mostly consuming videos. So that's why I call it the great rewiring of childhood. In 2010, kids use flip phones to connect and see each other in person.
In 2015, that's largely what's not gone, but it it reduces greatly. And life is now, you sit on your bed scrolling and then your mom calls you down for dinner. That's now that's a lot of teen life now.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's pretty depressing just to talk about this because it's it's, you know, it's happening almost invisibly in a way that sort of at a subtext in our culture. And the consequences haven't fully been realized in downstream effects on the physical and mental health of the kids who are now growing up in this generation and the consequences of that for their behavior. And I think the data is pretty striking. I mean, the data basically showed that, this is JAMA Pediatrics, from 2005 to 2017, the rate of adolescents reporting symptoms of major depression increased by fifty two percent.
Those twelve to seventeen who experienced a major depression in that same period went from eight point seven percent to fifteen point seven percent from 2005 to 2019. And the heavy use of social media also has been correlated in The Lancet Papers and others and to be really correlated or even potentially causal with this. And so the costs of this are staggering. Mean just economically, the cost of depression and mental health is the major driver of the total cost of care to society. Not actually hospitalization and medication, but just when you count disability and loss of quality of life years, it's the single biggest driver of cost to society.
And it's just beginning. Feels like we're just at the beginning of this and what's coming around the corner is even worse because we haven't fully realized the consequences of what's just happened over the last, I mean, ten years, right? Ten, fifteen years. It's very quick. And your, you know, your work really sort of underscores that this is an issue, but you also talk about, you know, what needs to be done to kind of solve it.
And some of the things you talk about seem easy, but they also seem ambitious. In other words, getting phones out of schools, no phones for teenagers, until they're 16, no smartphones, you know, making sure kids get out and play. I mean, all the stuff that we did when we were kids. I mean, you and I are about the same age. And I mean, you know, I was like seven years old, had my bicycle and left after school and my parents didn't see me till dinner and run around the neighborhood.
I mean, and yet, you know, they seem very simple in terms of these solutions, but I can't imagine how imagine they're going to get implemented because of the resistance and the change in behavior.
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, no. Not. It's actually amazingly easy. I'm shocked at how easy this is. Been involved in a lot of efforts at social change.
Ran a gun control group in college, a handgun control group in college, and that was completely hopeless. Didn't have made no progress. It's very difficult to persuade people of things. But here, the reason why we're going be successful where we're being successful is that we don't have to persuade people. They already know.
Almost everyone who's a parent sees this. Almost all the principals and teachers see it. The child psychologist, everyone sees it. So I don't have to persuade anyone. What I had to do in my book is give a clear diagnosis.
Here's exactly what happened, when it happened and why. Here are the psychological mechanisms. Here are the developmental pathways that get blocked. Here's the way puberty works. Here's the way the brain changes during puberty.
So people needed a kind of a more complete understanding of what's happening. They needed to understand the history, how the internet was amazing in the nineties, but the internet we have now is nothing like the internet we had in the nineties. And then people the key thing that I think I did in the book that's really bringing about collective action is I analyzed this all in terms of collective action problems. Why is it that 10 year olds now have phones, have their own smartphone? And the answer is because that your 10 year old comes home and said in fifth grade and says, Mom, everyone else has a phone.
I I need I need this I need an iPhone. And you say, well, no. But I I gave you a phone watch. I gave you a a flip phone. You know, you can call me if you need no.
No. No. Everyone has an iPhone. They're making fun of me. And then so you then you give in and you give your kid an iPhone.
Well, once 90% of the kids have an iPhone, then everyone has to have one or they will be left out. So we got into this so deeply because it's a collective action problem. And this is the the the key to why it's so painful for kids, because social media is socially addictive. Now it is biologically addictive to some heavy users. Know, dopamine circuits get rewired.
So for some, we can say it's biologically addictive. But for the great majority of teens, they're on it not because their brain says they must be on it to feel normal, but because everyone else is on it. They can't quit. I talked to my students at NYU. They waste huge amounts of time.
They don't wanna waste all this time. I say, why don't you just delete it? I can't because everyone else is on it. I have to know what's going on. So these things are socially addictive.
And so what I did in the book is I said, once we understand the nature of collective action problems where if everyone is on it and you step off alone, you bear a cost and you don't make anything better for anyone else. But what if 10% of people get off? Well, now they have each other. Now they're not alone. They have each other.
And then now it becomes possible to imagine not having a phone in fifth grade. And now some parents will say, no, you're not know, there's a pledge called the wait until eighth pledge, which is actually wait until after eighth, wait until ninth, really. Because my argument has been we have to get kids through middle school. Middle school is early puberty, really important period of brain development, the worst possible period to hook kids up to TikTok and have weirdos around the world being their source of cultural information. We've got to keep this out of kids' lives, at least until high school.
So, you know, the wait until eighth pledge is a way to solve the collective action problem. Parents sign up when their kid is in elementary school. They say, I'm not going get my kid a phone until ninth grade. A smartphone. You can give them a phone watch.
You can give them a flip phone. And then once 10 people, I think it's or 50 people in each school sign up, something like that, then the pledge goes into effect. And so this is why we are being successful. And I'm you know, I I used to say we're going to be successful, but that was back in March and April. Now it's clear.
We are being successful. The reason That's remarkable. Is because schools all over the country, everyone hated the phones. I mean, it's impossible to teach when I mean, imagine when you and I were kids. If they said, you know, you can bring in your TV set.
You can bring in your VCR. You can bring in your paint to your paint by numbers kit. You can bring in you bring in anything, everything. Have it right with you in your pocket on your desk while I'm trying to teach you. Go ahead.
Like, insanity. Yeah. Right. So so phone free schools is happening very, very fast. Los Angeles school districts is are going phone free.
New York City is gonna announce in a couple of weeks. The state of Virginia, I forget which other states have done truly phone free. Some states just say, oh, you can't use your phone in class, which is nonsense because then you you have to use it between classes. So that's terrible. But some states are going truly phone free from bell to bell.
You turn in your phone in the morning. This is happening at lightning pace. I have never seen social change happen this fast. So on schools, we already are successful. Every day, I'm getting notes from parents saying, thank you.
My I I you your book gave me the courage to let my seven year old ride his bicycle to his friend's house or ride it up and down our street. And now other kids are riding their bicycles. So it's a collective action problem. And parents are ready for change, not all, but a lot are ready for change. And once they start and their kids are out having fun together, more parents are gonna say, oh, it's kinda creepy for you to just be sitting here all day long scrolling.
Why don't you go out and play? And I think that's gonna happen over the next year or two.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible, John. I mean, I think I think, it's hard to imagine something happening that fast, but it seems like there's a sort of global awareness about that there's a problem and you point a path to a solution that people are jumping on. And the interesting thing is what's going to happen, you know, between when they leave school and they go home and they go to bed. That's a because that doesn't stop the problem. They have a smartphone when they get home.
So do you think that
Jonathan Haidt
No, but it does. It does. It kinda does. Because the issue with the smartphone is that you have it with you always. And so because anything you can do on a smartphone, can do on a computer.
If you have a laptop at home and, you know, most nowadays, you know, middle school kids, they need a computer, access to a computer. So if you have, know, ideally, you know, if parents have like one desktop computer in the living room or the kitchen or someplace, I think that's great. That's very safe. The kid's not going to get into porn. They're not going to get seduced by sextortionist rings.
So having access to a computer is great. But that's just gonna be for, you know, an hour or two a day at most. When you have the phone, you can get sixteen hours a day. And that's what some of the kids are getting. Sixteen hours a day.
How is that possible? Because when they're on the bus, they're doing this. When they're in class, they're doing this. When they're on the bathroom, they're doing this. One teenager told me, now that iPhones are waterproof, kids are taking them into the shower so you can keep scrolling or doing things while you're taking a shower.
Okay? So so can't we just delay that till high school? Can't we just let kids get through early puberty without having that?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's quite striking. You know, I think you talk a lot about kids, but I would also sort of point out that there's been a significant increase in depression and anxiety among adults as well. It's not just kids.
Jonathan Haidt
Wonder Let's talk about that. Wait, wait. Just tell me what you've seen, because what Zach Rausch and I do is we have all these graphs of all the data sets we can find, all the longitudinal studies. Some of them allow us to break it up by age. And what we generally find is that when you track levels of at least I've only done depression, anxiety, I haven't done everything.
When you look at depression, anxiety, for people over 40 or 50, there's no change. They are, of course, we're all we all feel frazzled. We feel there's too much stuff coming in. We're all hooked on our phones. But levels of depression, anxiety are not really rising for older people.
For Gen Z, it's a hockey stick. Gen Z is born 1996 and later. Hockey stick, huge. For the millennials, it's in between. And I I I need to try to break it up by early millennial versus late millennial.
It might just be that those born in millennial generation is usually 1981 through 1995. And it might just be that it's the millennials who were born in the early nineties. They had this stuff when they were, you know, late teenagers. It might just be them. But as far as I can see for depression anxiety, it's really a Gen Z and a little bit millennial thing.
It's not a Gen X and older thing. But you tell me, do you know do you know specific?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, the WHO basically says between 20, 2,005 2015, there was about an eighteen percent increase in depression. In kids it was more, right? In youth it was fifty two percent between 2005 and 2017. So it's certainly more in kids, I agree.
Jonathan Haidt
And it's much more in girls. Wait, so the who you can say, if you look at a nation you'll see an increase. But if you oh, you must always break this stuff up by gender always, because you sometimes the effect is entirely limited to girls. Sometimes it's just bigger in girls. So if you take so the the increase for younger females is gigantic.
The increase for other groups is not nearly so large.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And and how how do you sort of see this playing out in the future of our country and society and as kids sort of are hooked on social media, on the internet that's affecting them. I hopefully your efforts will actually lead to sort of a reduction of this because of the prohibitions in school. But, you know, where do you see this going? I mean, just it just seems like we're heading kind of a slow motion disaster.
Jonathan Haidt
We were heading in a slow motion disaster. By 2019, you know, when I was really beginning to get into this, and Gene Twenge was writing about this, we were beginning to point out like, wait, we just did this gigantic uncontrolled experiment. And now the results are in. Look, things are going really, really badly. 2019.
And then COVID hits. Everybody, you know, in 2019, I was saying what kids really, really need is a lot less time on screens and a lot more time outside playing. That's what we need to do. And COVID comes, what do we do? How about a lot more time on screens and no time outside playing because we thought you could get COVID outdoors and you can't touch people.
Know, we got it all wrong with kids. We really made COVID so much worse for kids than it than it had to be. But that confused us all. And of course, the kids were on screens all day long. You know, they had to be on Zoom, and it was really discouraging and dispiriting, but that's what they had to do.
And so now that COVID has receded, now we can see the wreckage. We see the gigantic rates. You know, while numbers have come some numbers come down a little bit from the peak in COVID, but in a sense, they're really just returning to the trend line that would have been if COVID never happened. So now it's become becoming obvious. I don't think it's going be a slow motion disaster from here on in.
I think we're at a cultural turning point, and we're now seeing this is not light playful stuff that lets kids be creative. This is not that. That's what Facebook and others have sold us on. Sure. They can do that.
That is part of the experience. That is true. But, you know, a lot of it is talking with strange men who are trying to get photos of you in a bikini or who are trying to sex store you or trying to you know, people trying to sell you things. Like, it's complete insanity that we let you know, we're as I say in the book, we have overprotected our children in the real world. We have underprotected them online.
Both were mistakes. We have to reverse both and we're going to. So I think we're at a cultural turning point where we're seeing this is not this light playful thing. This is not the early internet that I remember from my twenties. This is we need to think of this much more like alcohol or tobacco or automobiles or gambling or strip clubs or whatever.
There are all sorts of things that we let adults do, but we don't let children do. And in general, the reason why we put age gates on, the reason why we block children from doing things is either sex, violence, addiction, or physical harm, or other kinds of illness. Those are five reasons. If something's dangerous for kids or it's sex and violence or addiction, we we tend to say, no. You know, 12 year olds can't do this.
Even 16 year olds can't do this. You have to be 18 or 21 to do this. Social media hits all five.
Cal Newport
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. Mhmm. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say do nothing or send a note to a close friend or family member on social media, you'll be a little bit happier having sent the note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. 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. Yeah.
But there's a few things in isolation.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So now you're you're Facebook friends, but your actual friends.
Cal Newport
Your actual friends
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
and family. Yeah.
Cal Newport
Yeah. On the on the 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.
Yeah. And what's probably happening, what the researchers thinks is 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 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, you end up net negative. So the more you use social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse, ironically, your loneliness actually gets.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So face to face instead of Facebook.
Cal Newport
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, right? If you look at the research on how much of our brainpower 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 voice tonalities, and you replace it with a one bit indicator, like. Yeah.
Like.
Dr. Mark Hyman
A one and a zero, yeah.
Cal Newport
Yeah, that 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 if you're using social media, the inverse seems to be true. Yeah. If you don't use it, now you're gonna have to do real social interactions to feed that urge for
Dr. Mark Hyman
people's forgotten. I was with these kids and millennials, know, they don't wanna call each other on the phone. Yeah. 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.
Cal Newport
Yeah and it's a vital skill. I mean not just for sort of navigating the world but just for mental health and happiness. So yeah, it is a big issue. So, you know, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that, you know, I learned how to do all of that. I grew up before there were cell phones and social media.
And so the big risk for someone my age might be that I get away from that too much. But if you're younger and it's all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Now the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier but you quote research that it actually makes you anxious and depressed and impairs your cognitive function. So not only is it not helpful, but it may be harmful. So can you talk about the harm part?
Cal Newport
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, you know, 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. I said, okay, what changed?
And without hesitation, it said smartphones. It was that first class that came in that had 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 Twins, she's one of the, or Twins, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think, 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. 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, this was Reporting has changed or 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 it'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, 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, no, I see that. I do see that in patients. I see it in my family members. You know, the other part of it, in addition to sort of the anxiety and social isolation, which, you know, and somewhat are a little surprising, you think it makes you more connected, is is the effect on your cognitive function. And you talked about the intensity of your focus and attention being related to the quality of your life, your productivity, your success in life.
You know that you actually say you don't even work after 05:00 and you've written six books and what are you 25 years old?
Cal Newport
I win.
Dr. Mark Hyman
How old are you?
Cal Newport
36.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay well that's pretty good. It took me till I was like 50 to write six books. But I think that you know that's a very interesting point because what happens to your ability to focus, pay attention, engage with your life, be present and alert to what's actually happening when you use social media?
Cal Newport
Yeah that's actually my entryway into this issue. So I wrote this book back in 2016 called Deep Work. And the premise of the book is that the ability to focus intensely without distraction, that's what I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy, at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology, and that this created a mismatch. And so that you would have this big advantage if you're one of the few to really care and cultivate your ability to concentrate. And one of the things I discovered in researching this book is that, yes, these tools are having a permanent effect on people's ability to concentrate.
It's not a matter of whether the tool is in front of you right now in the moment in which you're trying to concentrate. If you're just used to, in general, pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up another tab as soon as you get a little bit bored, give yourself a little bit of hit of stimuli, it permanently changes your brain or at least for a long term, such that if I then take you away from all those stimuli and then put you in, you know, a Faraday cage, you get no distractions when you're on the plane and the Wi Fi is not working, you're gonna have a hard time focusing. Yeah. And people think, it's different. Yeah, at home, you know, I do this, I get bored, I look at the phone a lot, but in work, really concentrate.
It has an effect. Yeah. It's like an athlete saying, only smoke on the weekends, not when I'm training. Smoking's still gonna affect you when you're on the playing field. You're hurting your physical health.
And so these intense addictive forms of distraction have a long term effect on your cognitive health. This has professional impacts. If you work in a knowledge sector job, it's gonna make you worse at what you do.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That was interesting. I was sitting at a lecture the other night with a friend of mine and she was on her phone and she was tweeting and she was picturing and she was doing all kinds of stuff, Instagramming. And I said, give me your phone. And I grabbed the phone from her and said, open your phone.
And so I opened the screen time app. Yeah. And it shows not only the amount of screen time which was a lot for her but it showed the number of times you pick up your phone. It was like a thousand times in a day. Yeah.
And she said what's yours? And I opened mine and it was like 60 or 70 times which is still a lot. Yeah. But I was like, wow, that's a lot. And I think you know people don't realize that it affects your ability to be engaged in any particular work for a long period of time.
That's concerning because the things that matter to us, quality of work we do Yeah. Determines our success in life, in terms of our ability to actually sort of be able to be engaged with what's happening around us. And and that's a big that's a big deficit.
Cal Newport
Yeah. I mean, I I think it's it's crazy. If if if we were professional athletes and we're eating junk food, or we were smoking, people said, that's crazy. Like, you make a living off of the physical health of your body. But it's the same thing if you're in elite level knowledge work.
I mean, it's literally your brain and its ability to concentrate. Its ability to take in and process information and produce new information that has new value. That's at the core of probably a lot of your audience's living, right? That's how they make a living. And to be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food.
And yet somehow we're not seeing it that way.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So so you're a scientist. What what is the data that validates what you're saying? Because I I can imagine people listening, oh yeah, that's just kind of sure maybe, I can't believe that, I'm fine. You know, like what is the actual hard data that supports this thesis that being on your phones all the time or being distracted by social media is actually impairing your ability to focus?
Cal Newport
Well, one of the the more
Dr. Mark Hyman
deep work.
Cal Newport
That's right. Well, I I think one of the the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is we call it sometimes economist a productivity paradox, which is if you study non industrial productivity, so the economic metric of productivity, so the amount of actual output produced per hour spent working, it should have continued to increase over the past ten years as we've had this revolution in not just our technology, but in connectivity and information. People are connected in places they never were before. They have essentially all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. They can move files and information from a device that fits in their hand with supercomputer like power.
Like, this is amazing. And yet during this entire period, productivity has been stagnant. It's not going up. It should have been going up, but it's not. And there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that, yes, these technology is giving us more options and power, and yet at the same time, it's working against the way that our wetware works.
To actually fragment our intention in the way it does makes our brain actually worse at concentrating producing value. And so the downturn from that, combined with what should have been enhancing our productivity, which is the tools, is just flattening out. Yeah. And so I think this has a real issue, and I can only imagine that we're gonna see if this is true. Non industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected than anyone before starts to come into the workforce.
So we have that piece of evidence. Then we have a lot of more close study, those individual type studies actually trying to understand work, the late work by the late Cliff Nash of Stanford University. He did a lot of work actually in the lab, the psychology lab with individuals working on what he called multitasking. Was basically the same idea.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. There is no such thing.
Cal Newport
Right? There is no such thing. And he, you know, he actually helped spread that spread that idea. But he was the one who actually had some pretty good research on chronic multitaskers. Think they're really good at concentrating, but they they're much worse than people who don't.
Another thread of research I'd like to point people towards is the work on attention residue that's done by a professor named Sophie Leroy. And what she's finding is that when we think that we're not multitasking, what we're doing when we we've rejected multitasking now, we know we're not supposed to do it. So we try to do one thing at a time. We only have one window open. But every five or ten minutes, we do a quick check.
Right? So we don't have multiple windows open. We're not doing the late nineties style of multitasking around the phone and doing email while writing. We're doing one thing. But every five or ten minutes, it's-
Dr. Mark Hyman
Check the phone.
Cal Newport
The phone or the tab. Yeah. What she's finding is that context switch and then back again, even if it's very brief, leaves what's called attention residue, which you can measure in the lab, reduces your cognitive capacity and takes a while to clear out. And you can measure this easily in the lab because you actually have people doing cognitively demanding puzzles. Yeah.
And so they can see you start making more mistakes and it takes ten, twenty minutes to actually get
Dr. Mark Hyman
that To reset. And then in twenty minutes you do another one.
Cal Newport
You do another. And so what most knowledge workers are doing is they redcliffe NASA's work and they say, I don't multitask, I'm so advanced, I just single task. But because they're quick checking every five to ten minutes they put themselves in a state of persistently reduced cognitive capacity. It's like a reverse neurotropic or something. Drug that
Dr. Mark Hyman
makes you
Cal Newport
Wow. Worse at what you
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah I know when I write my books I literally have to turn off my phone. I turn off email. I often turn off WiFi unless I'm not researching some article. Yep. And it's And I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read and I just or I just print it out in paper and do it you know because it's so powerful and I get so much done.
And yet, you know, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, feel like I'm never really productive.
Cal Newport
It's attention residue.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And then that's a that's a very interesting thing because what we're what you're saying is that by using our phones and technology that we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function, and there's no such thing as multitasking.
Cal Newport
Yeah. And even if you think you're single tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Quick checking. Yeah. Well, that's sort of like multitasking. Now, you know, I I feel like the thing that that is is fascinating about your work is that you also sort of talk about the positive benefits of not being on your social media or devices. And and I I'd like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media because they're they're not always the same.
Right?
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So so tell what are the benefits of like doing this? And by the way there are so many movements out there around digital detox. Yeah. There are camps, people over the weekend and they put their phone away, know. We in our Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phones and during meetings we put them you know, at the front of the table and no one can touch them.
And we have much more productive engaged meetings.
Cal Newport
Yeah. Well, so the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit. Right? It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to, whatever, put my phone away for a weekend or, you know, 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 are addicted to, it's not gonna work that well. If I said, I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm gonna do, I have it all figured out, don't worry, I'm gonna go away and on Sunday I'm not gonna drink, but then get back to it again on Monday. Yeah. Is that really solving the problem?
Right? 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 is, and this is the new book, is not digital detoxing but digital minimalism.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. What is that?
Cal Newport
So it's 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. Love technology. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly.
Cal Newport
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. Can just actually be They're the much more productive in work.
They produce things of great value. They're respected by their friends or involved in their community. I mean, can go down the list by when they free themselves from this constant sort emotionally draining pull on their attention and get back to, here's what I care about, this is what I wanna 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 designed 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?
Cal Newport
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. Best
Dr. Mark Hyman
Just way pull back the
Cal Newport
veil. 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, 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, you know, go to an internet cafe because they have to get a fix. On the other hand
Dr. Mark Hyman
They might. Yeah,
Cal Newport
they might. But if you're a heavy Facebook user and it's in your pocket and you can get at it any time 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. Yeah. A lot of this absolutely is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological vulnerabilities.
There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So I mean, I can give you a couple examples. On Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications, right, on the mobile app, the designer said clearly this should be within the Facebook palette, which is gray and blue. Right?
So it's like sort of a very nice aesthetically pleasing thing. But the attention engineers came back and said, no, it needs to be alarm red because we get a much higher click rate if it's that color. It catches your attention. It's very hard to avoid. The notion of this sort of endless scrolling.
Mhmm. Right? This was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerabilities sort of like a slot machine would that there might be something Cool. 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, like programming issues.
Cal Newport
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, you know, that's Doctor. Hyman, let's send them a note and say, do you want to tag this person, right? This is 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 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 it 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
Dr. Mark Hyman
like But how does that affect the person hitting the like? It affects the person getting the like.
Cal Newport
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. They get the tagging so you could get social approval indicators. And that plays on this deep seated psychological vulnerability.
Someone is thinking about me and I can get evidence of it if I touch this button right here. That's an incredibly powerful thing and it really shot up their profitability and their average user minutes once the the company started introducing these into their social media apps. I mean, the whole experience is engineered Yeah. To keep you obsessively clicking on this thing and looking at that screen.
Dr. Mark Hyman
What about the brain response to this? Because there's a dopamine response, which is the same hormone, 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?
Cal Newport
Well, 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 Yeah. And tags. But they're not always there.
Right. But sometimes they're there. Right. And that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s that can be
Dr. Mark Hyman
Be a Skinner, right?
Cal Newport
Yeah, it's impossible. It's impossible to ignore.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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.
Cal Newport
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. Don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't put it past them, given what I've learned.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So then there's good science about how they're doing this and and the technology that they're using, and it is addictive. Yes.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
It's meant
Cal Newport
to be. Yeah.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
I think it's important to think about, the harms of social media, not in terms of just one specific thing. You know, these are very complex systems. Humans are very complex. Right? The human body, the human mind is very complex.
So if we approach it as if there's just one silver bullet, we're not going to get anywhere, right? If it's just fixing advertising, I don't think that's actually going to solve the problem necessarily. So I think it's more important to think about it like you would maybe like a human body and an illness, right? You're not going to solve your athlete's foot with the same thing that will solve your broken arm, right? So I think there's this, I think, some good analogies the world of medicine in terms of thinking about how social media influences us and how we can intervene and make it better.
We'll just talk about the problem for a second, which I think is important to just be clear about. One of the primary problems social media in terms of mental health and anxiety is that it is our it's becoming our primary source of news and information for a lot of people. It's becoming you know, even if you still go to The New York Times or you go to Fox News or wherever you get your your news from, social media actually is a certain type of filter on the news. And more than half of American adults get news from social media today. And social media posts tend to be negatively valence when it comes to news.
We actually tend to respond more immediately to news that is negatively emotionally valence. So stuff that is outrageous, missing context, anger inducing, disgusting, we actually tend to respond to that most quickly and immediately. And then it's a really good signal for algorithms to track, right? And if you build a basic engagement algorithm that's trying to track what people are interested in, this actually goes back to traditional news. If it bleeds, it leads.
Algorithms have figured that out. Right? If it if it makes you, if it if it if it gets you stuck on the item, you are going to keep responding to it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Is that why I get so many gorilla videos?
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Maybe. Perhaps.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean I love it, actually. Totally. Totally.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
And I, you know, I want to I want to calibrate that, you know, we've been with this with these tools for for a little bit now, long enough, I think, in some ways to start to see new versions of of slightly more kind of healthy algorithmic curation that have begun to be that have tried to keep you happy and not keep you, depressed and sad and doomscrolling. Right? But we have we have a word for it, doomscrolling. Right? Like it's that consent.
It's like everyone knows what that is. Everyone has done it at this point in time. It's a strange new pathology that it has no clinical, you know, reflection yet. But but it's something that we that we absolutely feel. And I think that when we are exposed to too many of these negative stories, too many of these negatively valenced posts, it does create a sense of learned helplessness, right, which is when we feel a stressful situation consistently and repeatedly.
We basically start to believe that we can't control the situation and we can't actually respond and we can't do anything to solve the world's problems. And that's really problematic, right? Like, that's really that's a problem in itself. We we need to feel we need to feel like we can actually tackle the problems that we're facing. And if social media has given this given us this huge new body of available problems and issues, if we are feeling helpless to solve those issues, then that's a recipe for extreme depression.
Right? It's a recipe for disaster in terms of our mental health. And that's really important.
Dr. Mark Hyman
We think about, you know, what's the sort of the genies out of the bottle, right? You know, and our identities, our beliefs are, you know, it's like I can't think of any better analogy than the matrix. I feel like we're all plugged in the matrix and we like in the frickin unplug so we can actually have a sense of what's true and real. And and we don't even know where to go to find out what the truth is anymore. It's it's a little bit disorienting for people.
It's disorienting for me, and I I feel like I'm fairly well educated, fairly well read. Yeah. You know, I I pay attention. I travel the world. I meet all sorts of people.
I listen to different perspectives. And it's like, you know, what actually is true? And and and what is what is actually a person to do as they're trying to navigate their life and figure out, you know, how to make sense of the world? And and and and in a way, social media has has helped us make nonsense of the world. Right.
And and so how do we start with sense making again? How do we how do we deal with these digital technologies that we have now? Is there a way to sort of put the genie back in the bottle? And and I wanna eventually get to artificial intelligence where the genie is not quite fully out of the bottle yet, and what do we gotta do?
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Scary genie. That's yeah. I was like, it's a little little pinky out of the bottle right now. Yeah. So I think I think focusing on the issue of sense making is really important.
So in studying this book, I I kept on so this book is actually a history book. You once you get through the first half of it, it's I go straight back to every previous media disruption in history that I go back to as far as the printing press, trying to understand what, you know, basically what happens when you increase people's ability to see knowledge, share knowledge, and be emotionally excited by knowledge. And every single major media technology has had a tremendous influence on our species. And so, yeah, starting about halfway through the book, it goes back to to Martin Luther and the printing press and, like, what happened when we were introduced to the printing press. And it turns out the printing press was arguably the most violent invention introduced to Continental Europe in in up until that point in history.
Right? It it caused huge schisms within the existing power hierarchies. It totally upset society, and it caused about a hundred years of civil wars.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The printing press.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
The printing press. The The printing press.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Printing
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
We want people to go back the old ways. But there was this deep, deep, dark period in which people were deeply confused. You know, in that era, a tolerance like tolerance, the idea of tolerance was actually a sin, like it was actually a sin that that someone was of a different political persuasion or religious persuasion. It was kind of your job to go up to them and, like, confront them about it and or be violent with them about it. Right.
So you think about how disruptive that was to go from one way of being to another way of being in the world. And so so we we don't tend to think about information technology as being such a disruptive and violent thing, but it it absolutely can be. And the reason is because it confuses us. It confuses us. It gives us access to huge new, huge new models of kind of moral reasoning about the world, and it also ex exposes us to a tremendous number of possible outrages.
And many of those outrages are real. Many of those outrages are not real. To figure out the differences between what is worthy of our attention is really part of the problem that we're facing right now. So when we talk and just kind of like lean towards some optimism towards solutions here, coming back to the beginning of our conversation. Yeah.
It's, you know, I can't emphasize enough how problematic mis and disinformation is. And we have, you know, as Americans, I think we have a healthy skepticism of authorities. You know, we we have we have this kind of anti authoritarian disposition where it's like, don't, you know, don't trust the don't trust the government. Don't trust the experts. Like, we can figure it out on our own.
That's that's in a very American disposition. Right? But there is a real difference between between authoritarian speech, right, and and mediated speech, right, which is like speech and information that comes from from media entities that are that are built to help try to parse truth from falsehoods. And they don't always get it right. They're not always going to, you know, they're not always going to give you the exact right the exact right result, the exact right truthful item.
But but it's going to be oftentimes much better than your average person trying to figure it out by doing their own research online. And so that's that's, you know, we we do need to find these proxies, these middle layers of proxies, and you can you know, it's it's we're actually lucky insofar as good information has a fingerprint. And what I mean by that, by good information, I'm not just saying good information. I'm saying that good information, accurate information, a fingerprint. It tends to be well cited.
It tends to go through a few of these layers of refutation and peer review and people that are trying to figure out whether or not it's accurate, right? And we can look at that in how the information travels, right? If it's one person's idea that just comes to you directly, it's less likely to be true than one person's idea that has gone through three or four cycles, other people calling bullshit on that idea Yeah. Trying to actually figure out if it's true Yeah. Or not.
And because we we're much better at identifying the the failures of other people's logic and the failures of other people's, you know, assertions than we are our own. So and that's that's really the the point of free speech in the first place is so that we can share and we can criticize each other openly and improve the available knowledge for everyone.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's increasingly disturbing to hear, you know, censorship happening and
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, you know, range of opinion not being heard and, you know, debate being shunned. And I think, wow. Like, what kind of a society we're in where we're burning books? You know? Totally.
You know, I just watched the Ken Burns documentary, US and the Holocaust. And it was just, you know, I thought, you know, gee, you know, we had this sort of this sort of relatively new rise of division in society, but it would always existed. It's always sort of been a threat in America, right? The North and the South, the slave owners and the not. You know, the the sort of isolationists and, you know, the globalists in America.
And, you know, I think it's you know, we're sort of, I think, always prone to this. But, you know, how do we how do we find the, you know, as as sort of Abraham Lincoln talked about, how do we find the search for our better angels? You know, we're how do we how do we get to our better angels who are gonna inspire us instead of take us down the path of the worst aspects of humanity? You know, there's been war and violence and rape and destruction for millennia. But, you know, I feel like human consciousness, it seems like it's slowly getting better, but it's in again, these these forces that are at play now in technology are are seemingly taking us really out of any age of enlightenment that we were in for any period of time.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
How do we find a way back from that?
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Yeah. So I I think that's really it's really important to recognize that, and this is why I kind of come back to the misinformation point a lot, because the feeling right now is one of deeply there's threats everywhere, right? We feel deeply threatened by the world, by our political enemies, our ideological enemies, our enemies to the identities and the people that we hold dear. And that is something that social media does very well, is serve us threats more than it would more than traditional media would. Right?
It's like it's like social media would focus on a single threat at a time, and now social media has exposed us to basically infinite threats always, right? It's like if you're worried about something, can find an anecdote that represents that deepest fear. And social media is very, very good at serving us up those algorithms that prioritize certain content over other content. And our own biases play together to actually make us see these threats more apparently than otherwise. And something strange happens when we are exposed to a lot of threats, right?
We actually seek there's basically this kind of tribal switch that happens in our brains in which we start to affiliate ourselves more strongly with in group and out group behavior. So we look for safety in identities that feel like they are more like us, right? And we look to denigrate the outgroups that are threatening, right? And if you're curious about why there's so many identity this, identity that on social media, that is actually one of the reasons why is because everyone feels a little bit threatened on social media, and they feel like, I need to declare my allegiance. I need to protect the things that I hold dear in this space.
And I think it really does come down to this fundamental idea of threat, that if we're exposed to too many threats, then it actually causes us it causes these basic travel emotions to increase dramatically. And there's some decent research showing that this Jay Van Bevel at NYU has a great book called The Power of Us, which I'd recommend on this topic as well, which shows how much identity shapes our behavior, particularly online. It really does influence our how we see others. It's like a lens that we suddenly are putting over our eyes. Like, I see you, and you are not you know, you're not you're not this you're not just a human.
You are that you are now a Republican. You are now a Democrat. You are now and you will be these identities become far more instantaneously salient to us, because we're looking at everything through the lines of social media. And these and, unfortunately, doesn't just stay on social media. That's, I think, one of the biggest Right.
Problems here. It's like these narratives stick with us. They, you know, they follow us to our dinner tables, to our congregations. They follow us everywhere we go. And if the if the if the threat is is pernicious enough, then if it's scary enough, then it will it will keep running a little process in the back of your head, it will it will kind of infect most of your interactions.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am 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 and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner.
And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.