Speaker 1: The rate at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right,
Speaker 1: way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's part of the reason why we're in
Speaker 1: the situation that we're in in terms of trying to
Speaker 1: understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 2: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 2: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Our guest on this episode is Pete Etchel's, a psychologist
Speaker 2: and science writer. He is a professor of psychology and
Speaker 2: science communication at bath SPA University, where he studies the
Speaker 2: behavior effects of playing video games. Pete's writing can be
Speaker 2: found in BBC Science Focused Magazine and the psychology blog Headquarters. Today,
Speaker 2: Eric and Pete discuss his book Unlocked, The Real Science
Speaker 2: of screen Time and how to Spend it Better.
Speaker 3: Hi, Pete, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Ah you, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to
Speaker 3: be discussing your book Unlocked, the Real Science of screen
Speaker 3: time and how to spend it better, which is a
Speaker 3: really good topic because there's not a lot of nuance
Speaker 3: in the screen time discussions, and I am a big
Speaker 3: fan of nuance. I don't think anything is ever as
Speaker 3: simple as it's presented to us. So I really enjoyed
Speaker 3: your book for that reason. And we'll get to that
Speaker 3: in a second. But before we do, we'll start like
Speaker 3: we always do, with the Parable. And in the Parable,
Speaker 3: there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 3: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 3: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 3: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 3: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 3: and hatred and fear and the grandchild stops, they think
Speaker 3: about it for a second, they look up at their
Speaker 3: grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, and the
Speaker 3: grandparent replies, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 3: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 3: you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about this a lot over the past
Speaker 1: few days, and for me, it's about understanding that the
Speaker 1: sum products of the two wolves, right, you know, we
Speaker 1: all possess traits of both of them, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: You know, it's okay to be angry sometimes, but the
Speaker 1: critical thing is that you have choice. So you have
Speaker 1: choice over which traits, which behaviors, which habits you want
Speaker 1: to nurture. And this feels very relevant to me in
Speaker 1: terms of the debates that we're having at the minute
Speaker 1: around the influences of things like digital tech. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: things like social media or smartphones, video games, the internet
Speaker 1: at large are seen as things that very much feed
Speaker 1: our bad wolf, you know, and that they only feed
Speaker 1: the bad wolf, and kind of because of that, we
Speaker 1: don't have choice in the matter. So, you know, if
Speaker 1: you go on social media, you're going to have a
Speaker 1: bad time because that's what it's designed for, and for me,
Speaker 1: that removes the sense of agency from the equation. You know,
Speaker 1: there are so many good things that we get from
Speaker 1: our online lives, often without realizing it. But if we
Speaker 1: feel that all it's doing is feeding the bad wolf,
Speaker 1: we're left with a sense that we don't have any
Speaker 1: control over that, and maybe the only solution that we've
Speaker 1: got left is to ditch the tech, and it becomes
Speaker 1: a reinforcing thing. You know, we become more negative, more
Speaker 1: toxic in our interactions. So for me, the parable is
Speaker 1: about actively thinking about what the good and the bad
Speaker 1: things are in our relationship with digital tech and knowing
Speaker 1: that you have the power to feed the hopefully good
Speaker 1: ones that you want and staff the ones that you don't.
Speaker 3: I love that idea, and I love what you said
Speaker 3: in the beginning. We're sort of the sum of different things,
Speaker 3: and I think if we want to look at the
Speaker 3: impact anything as having in our lives, we have to
Speaker 3: look at the sum of it. And most everything in
Speaker 3: life is some degree of trade off. There's some good
Speaker 3: and there's some bad.
Speaker 2: You know, you have a child.
Speaker 3: There are great things about having a child, and there
Speaker 3: are things that are challenging about having a child, and
Speaker 3: your experience is sort of the sum of those. Before
Speaker 3: we get too much further into that, though, you had
Speaker 3: some great reviews for your book, and my favorite one
Speaker 3: was from your four year old daughter, who said, it's
Speaker 3: not for children, it's for adults because it's boring. I
Speaker 3: loved that you actually put that out there. That's very good.
Speaker 3: It's very good.
Speaker 4: I think she meant it in a super positive way
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 3: Right. The other thing that I wanted to hit on
Speaker 3: before we go too deep into the book is something
Speaker 3: you talk about fairly early on in the book, which
Speaker 3: is that you unearthed a journal of yours that you
Speaker 3: kept online, something called live journal.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It was sort of a blog you kept back in
Speaker 3: the day, your teenage self, and you were looking back
Speaker 3: on it. And I was really struck by that part
Speaker 3: of the book because your teenage self sounds a lot
Speaker 3: like my teenage self, like very troubled, deeply troubled. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I'm curious how you relate to that.
Speaker 1: Now, that's a great question. That was a really serender.
Speaker 1: It's a thing that happened, right, you know. I don't
Speaker 1: think I could have engineered it in a better way.
Speaker 1: Somebody asked me once, you know, did this actually happen?
Speaker 1: And I was like, yeah, it did. And you know,
Speaker 1: if I'd have made it up, it would be a
Speaker 1: really boring thing to make up that I got this
Speaker 1: random email. But you know, it was during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: I got this email completely out of the blue that
Speaker 1: reminded me that I had this thing, this live journal,
Speaker 1: and I think I'd completely forgotten about it up until
Speaker 1: that point. And there's a bit in the book where
Speaker 1: I have this like horrible realization that it's still there.
Speaker 1: Not only is it still there, it's not locked away anymore.
Speaker 1: It's you know, literally anybody can see it, and you know,
Speaker 1: this sort of really horrifying feeling at the time that oh,
Speaker 1: somebody's going to come along and take it and just
Speaker 1: put all of my deep seated worries and fears on
Speaker 1: the Nobody cares about what I was writing when I
Speaker 1: was seventeen eighteen. But it was a huge nostalgia trip
Speaker 1: for me to go through that. You know, I downloaded
Speaker 1: all of the posts that I put up and deleted
Speaker 1: it so it's not there anymore online, but spent a
Speaker 1: long time afterwards just going through it and you know,
Speaker 1: like you say, I went through them, and this sense
Speaker 1: that I got reading through them was, Wow, this kid
Speaker 1: was miserable. This was not a happy person and in
Speaker 1: not a happy place. And I think part of that
Speaker 1: is teenage angst, you know. I think it's very easy
Speaker 1: to put down in writing things that maybe sound overly
Speaker 1: dramatic sometimes. And I certainly know that I was a
Speaker 1: person like that when I was younger.
Speaker 4: I know that it came from a.
Speaker 1: Place of difficulty, though, so something that I don't talk
Speaker 1: about so much in Unlocked. It comes up a little bit,
Speaker 1: but is very much more a feature of my first book,
Speaker 1: which is about video games, which was actually not about
Speaker 1: video games in a way. It was about grief. Was
Speaker 1: that my dad died when I was fourteen, and I
Speaker 1: spent a long time not dealing with that because it
Speaker 1: was too big a thing to deal with as a kid.
Speaker 1: And I think over time that then starts to come
Speaker 1: out in different ways. Right, And this is what I
Speaker 1: saw in the live journal posts, that what was happening
Speaker 1: here was somebody who was trying to process something really
Speaker 1: horrible that had happened and not really letting it in
Speaker 1: and not allowing that grief process to happen. And when
Speaker 1: you do that, when you start to build walls and
Speaker 1: build dams, it leaks out in sometimes not very helpful ways. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really heartbreaking in a way.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: It's one of those points where you feel like you
Speaker 1: wish you had a time travel machine. You could go
Speaker 1: back and just say to that kid, You'll be all right.
Speaker 1: You know, things will work out. You will never get
Speaker 1: over these things, because that's not what happens with grief.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: We often think about when difficult things happen to us,
Speaker 1: or we experience death, that we will get over it
Speaker 1: at some point and then we'll go back to whatever
Speaker 1: life was like before. And that's not how grief works, right,
Speaker 1: You grow around it. It's always a part of you,
Speaker 1: but it stays with you and hopefully gets sort of
Speaker 1: smaller over time, or rather it stays the same and
Speaker 1: you get bigger. To be able to go back and
Speaker 1: say that would be a nice thing, but you know,
Speaker 1: such as life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think you even say this in the book.
Speaker 3: I'm not even sure that my fifteen year old self
Speaker 3: would even believe me if I did, but I agree
Speaker 3: with you. I look back at my younger self, and
Speaker 3: I'm like, I wish I could just go back and
Speaker 3: be like, just relax a little bit. Things are going
Speaker 3: to be very different than you imagine. I just look
Speaker 3: back at some of the ways I thought at fifteen
Speaker 3: and eighteen and twenty one. There's this sense of finality
Speaker 3: about things. I mean, I was so young and I
Speaker 3: was just like, O, I'll never find love again. I
Speaker 3: mean that kind of thing right where you're like, okay,
Speaker 3: you know, it seems so real. Then, so let's pivot
Speaker 3: now and talk about screen time. I'm going to summarize
Speaker 3: the gist of your book and argument very quickly here,
Speaker 3: and then we're gonna unpack it and you're going to
Speaker 3: clarify it. The gist of it to me is that
Speaker 3: there are a lot of voices out there declaring that
Speaker 3: screens are really bad for us. You know, we've lost
Speaker 3: a whole generation to screens. The kids are not all right.
Speaker 3: It's claiming all of our lives, Our attention is breaking down,
Speaker 3: on and on and on. You can find them constantly.
Speaker 3: But that if you look at the science, the science
Speaker 3: is not nearly so clear or settled as all of that.
Speaker 3: Is that a reasonable position to again sum up a
Speaker 3: lot very quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. This is something that I've always
Speaker 1: tried to do in my writing, is to try and
Speaker 1: start from an objective viewpoint. I tried really hard not
Speaker 1: to go into this going I don't think any of
Speaker 1: this is sensible, so I'm going to show that it's
Speaker 1: all wrong. What happened when I started writing and Locked
Speaker 1: was that I really wanted to get to a position where, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe there's some things, some topics or some chapters where
Speaker 1: we go into the science and actually it supports what
Speaker 1: everybody's worrying about, and what we can do is look at,
Speaker 1: you know, where things are really scary and justified, and
Speaker 1: maybe where some of our worries could be better directed. Frustratingly,
Speaker 1: there was a consistent thing that any sort of area
Speaker 1: of research where you look at digital technology effects, you
Speaker 1: find a very similar story, which is that the public
Speaker 1: facing discussions around this particular thing, whether it's you know,
Speaker 1: social media and.
Speaker 4: Mental health or screens and sleep.
Speaker 1: Or whatever, it is at face value a very scary,
Speaker 1: very definitive, or very confident things being said about them
Speaker 1: that you know they are clearly detrimental, and you go
Speaker 1: into the research and that's not what you find. You
Speaker 1: find some research to support that line of thinking, you
Speaker 1: also find research that doesn't support it. And when you
Speaker 1: try and look at the entire picture, it becomes very
Speaker 1: difficult to get a sense of what we actually know
Speaker 1: where the general direction of travels point in.
Speaker 3: One of the things that psychology can be good at
Speaker 3: doing when done right, is that I think it shows
Speaker 3: us places that are common sense or our intuition may
Speaker 3: not be right. That's one of the things that modern
Speaker 3: psychology research seems to do. And we all have an
Speaker 3: intuition or a feeling the screens are bad or are detrimental.
Speaker 3: Where do you think that's coming from.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I think a lot of this
Speaker 1: comes from a lack of understanding how to use these
Speaker 1: technologies in the best sort of ways. So the rate
Speaker 1: at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right,
Speaker 1: way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's part of the reason why we're in
Speaker 1: the situation that we're in in terms of trying to
Speaker 1: understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies. I
Speaker 1: think it also means in a day to day perspective,
Speaker 1: just in our normal, everyday lives. These things appear and
Speaker 1: they don't come with a training manual. They don't come
Speaker 1: with a list of things like this is what you
Speaker 1: would use this technology to better your life, These are
Speaker 1: the things to watch out it for. If you use
Speaker 1: them in these sorts of ways, you're going to have problems.
Speaker 1: There's nothing like that. We wing it right. So if
Speaker 1: you look at smartphones in particular, So smartphones have been
Speaker 1: around for a while, but really exploded in popularity around
Speaker 1: about two thousand and seven with the introduction of the iPhone.
Speaker 1: I remember getting an iPhone when they first came out.
Speaker 1: It was nearly tech a doctor at the time, and
Speaker 1: I thought it was great. It really reminded me of
Speaker 1: like old school sci fi shows from like the mid nineties.
Speaker 1: There was one called Earth Final Conflict that I always
Speaker 1: really used to love, where people literally had like a
Speaker 1: thing that looked like a smartphone. Right, it was a
Speaker 1: device that had a screen or you can make video
Speaker 1: calls with people, and it's like, this is the future.
Speaker 1: So there was that really like cool, it's happened now,
Speaker 1: and then it was coupled with okay, so what do
Speaker 1: I do next? And you know, for our generation, for
Speaker 1: people who got those early smartphones. There was a built
Speaker 1: in gating mechanism, right, So when the first iPhone came out,
Speaker 1: it was a glorified phone, right. You know, you could
Speaker 1: make phone calls on it, you could go on the
Speaker 1: Internet with it, but it wasn't a great experience. You
Speaker 1: could do emails, things like that. Social media wasn't really
Speaker 1: a thing there. There was no app store when it
Speaker 1: first came out. Those things came out over time, so
Speaker 1: it takes a few years for the store to kick in,
Speaker 1: and then a few years after that for things like
Speaker 1: Instagram to appear. So that gave us this sort of
Speaker 1: natural gating where we could try and figure things out
Speaker 1: as we go along, and some people did that really well.
Speaker 1: Some people didn't so much. Where things are different now
Speaker 1: and I think this is part of the reason why
Speaker 1: it feels so much more pressing that there are issues,
Speaker 1: is that everything's there now. They've got everything all at once,
Speaker 1: and particularly for kids and teenagers who are getting their
Speaker 1: first devices, there's no staggering of these things. They're getting
Speaker 1: everything all at the same time, with no manual, no
Speaker 1: way of thinking about how do we navigate this sort
Speaker 1: of technology, And that's where it becomes a little bit
Speaker 1: random in a way you know whether you're going to
Speaker 1: have a good go of it or not. So because
Speaker 1: we're in that trajectory of using them, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's still the case for our generations now, but for
Speaker 1: every generation that what we're doing is we're figuring out
Speaker 1: how to do it as we go along, right, and
Speaker 1: that lends itself very to having bad experiences. I think
Speaker 1: one of the great problems with the way that we
Speaker 1: talk about technology and the relationships that we have with
Speaker 1: technology is that all the things that we get that
Speaker 1: are good from them tend to be entertainment or convenience factors,
Speaker 1: and because of that, we don't notice them.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So, you know, you use your phone when you don't
Speaker 1: know where you're going, You'll just bring up a map
Speaker 1: and then you'll find where you're going, and you don't
Speaker 1: get lost, you don't have a bad time, so you
Speaker 1: forget about it. You don't have your wallet on you
Speaker 1: or your cards, so you can't pay for a coffee
Speaker 1: or something or drink when you really need one, but
Speaker 1: you can pay with your phone and you don't have
Speaker 1: a bad experience, so you don't think about it. So
Speaker 1: we tend not to notice them. But when we do
Speaker 1: have bad experiences, they are more salient because they don't
Speaker 1: align with fundamentally what we want to use the technologies
Speaker 1: for all of us have got experiences of not using
Speaker 1: digital tech in a way that aligns with what we
Speaker 1: want to do, in a way that feels like it's
Speaker 1: messing with our well being, right, And I'm the same,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: Say a lot.
Speaker 1: You know, there's been a few times recently that it's
Speaker 1: got to like ten o'clock at night and I'm am
Speaker 1: really tired and I want to go to bed, and
Speaker 1: an hour later, I'm still there scrolling through Instagram and
Speaker 1: it feels not good because it feels really unhealthy, right,
Speaker 1: And there's regret there, Like, man, that's an hour that
Speaker 1: I could have had a sleep, and I know I'm
Speaker 1: going to be tied in the morning, and it's happened again.
Speaker 1: And we all have experiences of that, right, And it's
Speaker 1: very easy then to feel that we don't have control
Speaker 1: over that experience, that this is something that's happening to us,
Speaker 1: and that because everybody has these that it's a feature
Speaker 1: of the system.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I felt a couple different things as I was
Speaker 3: reading your book, I had a couple ping pong in reactions.
Speaker 3: One reaction was, this all makes complete sense. The science
Speaker 3: doesn't seem to be settled, and people are taking bits
Speaker 3: of that science and amplifying it and blowing it up
Speaker 3: before clickbait and headlines, which people, you know, happens to
Speaker 3: science of all kinds all the time. I had that
Speaker 3: reaction where I felt like, Okay, this is good nuance.
Speaker 3: The other reaction that I found myself having a couple
Speaker 3: times was this is what big tobacco and climate change
Speaker 3: did too. They just kept saying the science isn't good enough,
Speaker 3: the science isn't good enough, the science isn't good enough,
Speaker 3: and so nobody did anything for a long time, and
Speaker 3: there really were and are legitimate problems underline. And so
Speaker 3: that was kind of the two things that were going
Speaker 3: on inside of me. When I say that, what does
Speaker 3: that bring up for you?
Speaker 1: I think it's a really understandable analogy to make, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people make it. So one
Speaker 1: thing I'll say is that, to use the old phrase,
Speaker 1: you know, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence that
Speaker 1: you know, what we're not saying here is well, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no conclusive evidence to show that social media is
Speaker 1: bad for mental health. Therefore there's nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: That's absolutely not what people are saying, and I think
Speaker 1: it's often made out that's that's what's happening, right, So,
Speaker 1: I think think if you talk to scientists on all
Speaker 1: sides of these these debates, I think everybody's trying to
Speaker 1: do the right thing, and everybody cares about the same
Speaker 1: end goal, which is everybody wants better healthier relationships for
Speaker 1: everybody with their tech. I think where we differ is
Speaker 1: the means and the methods and the journey and the
Speaker 1: messaging towards that. I think where analogies with things like
Speaker 1: big tobacco maybe breakdown is that we actually need very
Speaker 1: early on in those debates and in that research that
Speaker 1: chemically these things were really bad for us. You know,
Speaker 1: And if you look at the intentional use of things
Speaker 1: like tobacco, if you use it as intended, as in
Speaker 1: like the quote correct way that it was meant to
Speaker 1: be used, you know, it has a ridiculously high chance
Speaker 1: of killing you. That's almost sort of what it's designed
Speaker 1: to do. What we're talking about with digital technologies is
Speaker 1: not something that has a chemical interaction with our bodies,
Speaker 1: and fundamentally, what it is about is connecting each other.
Speaker 1: And this arguably, I fully admit that this is maybe
Speaker 1: a naive way of thinking about it with something like
Speaker 1: social media. I know there are other things going on here,
Speaker 1: but fundamentally, what those sorts of technologies are aiming to
Speaker 1: do is to bring people together, their technologies of of entertainment,
Speaker 1: of pleasure, convenience, of connection, and they're designed to facilitate that.
Speaker 1: So the analogy for me with I understand where it
Speaker 1: comes from. And it could well be the case that
Speaker 1: we get some conclusive research in a few years time
Speaker 1: that shows that actually, unequivocally social media is bad for us.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's the case, because we're talking about
Speaker 1: fundamentally different things and different mechanisms, different ways in which
Speaker 1: we interact with them. But I really understand and empathize
Speaker 1: where those analogies come from, and they're driven by deep
Speaker 1: seated worries about the way that we interact with these technologies,
Speaker 1: and I think it's important that we don't disregard them
Speaker 1: or just you know, laugh people office that's a ridiculous analogy,
Speaker 1: because you know you're you're not smoking phones or anything
Speaker 1: like that. The reason that these analogies come up, and
Speaker 1: the reason that these conversations can be so vitriolic sometimes
Speaker 1: is because people are really worried and people really care
Speaker 1: about what the impacts are. For me, there's been a
Speaker 1: maybe a bit of a failure both in terms of
Speaker 1: science communication but in the way that we do science,
Speaker 1: in that you know, there are clearly lessons that we
Speaker 1: could learn, even if you look at digital technology research.
Speaker 1: You know, you look at the cycle of panics around
Speaker 1: digital tech effects. You know, before social media and smartphones,
Speaker 1: it was gaming addiction, and before that it was violent
Speaker 1: video games and aggression, And you know, you can track
Speaker 1: these technology panics back.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: You never know whether you're in a moral panic until
Speaker 1: you get out of it, right, So we can't say
Speaker 1: that this is just another moral panic because we're in
Speaker 1: it at the minute. But for me, though, what we've
Speaker 1: not done is figure out how to get out of
Speaker 1: them quicker and future proof ourselves a little bit more
Speaker 1: so that the next time a new technology comes along
Speaker 1: or a new thing that we're worried about, we've got
Speaker 1: the means to research it quickly and understand its affects quickly.
Speaker 1: So that we can figure out what to do with
Speaker 1: it and move on, so we don't keep getting stuck
Speaker 1: in these conversations.
Speaker 3: Right. One of the big things that your book points
Speaker 3: out about the debate around screen time is that screen
Speaker 3: time is not a thing. I mean, it's not one thing. Right.
Speaker 3: You give a great example in the book of if
Speaker 3: we were to try and log an hour of you know,
Speaker 3: either you or I or anybody screen time, right, it
Speaker 3: might be well, I was on email for five minutes,
Speaker 3: I was writing my book for twenty five minutes, I
Speaker 3: was on Twitter for ten minutes. I'm all over the place.
Speaker 3: And then you make the point even further that even
Speaker 3: within Twitter, there are times that that might be an
Speaker 3: edifying experience. Giants, I'm connecting with a colleague and we're
Speaker 3: having a good discussion versus I am. Whatever thing you
Speaker 3: get into that you know is not helpful to you,
Speaker 3: And so that we tend to say screen time or
Speaker 3: social media or these big blobs of things are bad
Speaker 3: for us. So the first problem is that we're not
Speaker 3: making any differentiation there. And then you make the further
Speaker 3: point that when we talk about mental health effects, we
Speaker 3: are also not doing a very good job of tweezing
Speaker 3: that apart, what do we mean by bad for our
Speaker 3: mental health? And all that stuff is so squishy that
Speaker 3: it gets very hard to run the sort of and
Speaker 3: have the same sort of randomized control trial that you
Speaker 3: would to see whether a medicine reduces blood pressure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge problem, not just for the research,
Speaker 1: but for the way that we talk about this more
Speaker 1: generally as well. So I've really struggled with this into
Speaker 1: to talking to journalists since the book has come out,
Speaker 1: because all will happen is you'll have a conversation where
Speaker 1: you go or they'll ask a question around you know,
Speaker 1: what does the research say on the effects of social media.
Speaker 4: On mental health?
Speaker 1: And you know, we'll start talking about some studies or
Speaker 1: some findings, and you know, we'll talk about the mess
Speaker 1: in the area and things like that, and then they'll say, yeah,
Speaker 1: but what about the effects on suicidal ideation? But yeah,
Speaker 1: what about the effects of these sorts of forms of
Speaker 1: social media? And the conversation feels like it's all the
Speaker 1: same stuff. It's screen time and mental health, but it
Speaker 1: bounces around in lots of different places. And part of
Speaker 1: the reason for that is, like you say, we don't
Speaker 1: have a good handle on this in the research literature.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason why you can point to a
Speaker 1: lot of studies that show negative effects if that fits
Speaker 1: with your worldview, or you can point to a lot
Speaker 1: of studies that show positive or non effects if that
Speaker 1: fits with your your particular worldview, is because they're all
Speaker 1: out there, yes, because they're all measuring slightly different things.
Speaker 1: One of the things I tried to do with them
Speaker 1: not to say, okay, well what if we take everything altogether,
Speaker 1: what do we see? And that's where you get the
Speaker 1: mess right, You go, well, we don't have clear findings
Speaker 1: in one direction or another. The counter to that, I
Speaker 1: think in some ways is the book is about different
Speaker 1: aspects of screen time, and I think I was a
Speaker 1: hostage to fortune in some ways. And that almost immediately
Speaker 1: as soon as the book came out, that the conversation shifted.
Speaker 4: I don't think.
Speaker 1: Anybody really cares about screen time anymore. They care about
Speaker 1: social media and smartphones. So the first counter I get
Speaker 1: quite a lot as well, Yeah, that is like nobody
Speaker 1: cares about screen time. So that feels like a bit
Speaker 1: of a strong man argument. I think the same can
Speaker 1: be said of social media as a term I've not
Speaker 1: seen a sufficiently good definition of social media. You know
Speaker 1: that you might use for research purposes or also for
Speaker 1: regulatory purposes. Yeat, that doesn't inadvertently scoop up things that
Speaker 1: you maybe don't want to regulate, right. You know, very
Speaker 1: often the definitions will also include things like text messaging
Speaker 1: or WhatsApp messaging. Even things like forums or Google classroom
Speaker 1: and things like that share many of the characteristics of
Speaker 1: social media. And this is not me saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, very nerdy. You need to define your variables
Speaker 1: because I'm a scientist and I care about those sorts
Speaker 1: of boring details. We need to figure out what it
Speaker 1: is precisely that we're worried about, because then we'll have
Speaker 1: a better chance of doing something about it, something effective.
Speaker 3: One of the parts of the book that I found
Speaker 3: really interesting was the discussions on attention. You reference a
Speaker 3: person who's been a frequent guest of the show and
Speaker 3: a little bit of a friend, Johann Hari and his book.
Speaker 3: I think it's called Stolen Attention. I don't remember the
Speaker 3: exact title, but the idea is that our attention is
Speaker 3: being hijacked and stolen from us. Now, Johann has a
Speaker 3: particular view of the world. He's written a number of
Speaker 3: books on addiction on depression, and I have both those
Speaker 3: things in my past, so I find him interesting. And
Speaker 3: he has a view on the world that tends to
Speaker 3: take things and make them societal forces. The problem is
Speaker 3: bigger than the individual. It's all the stuff around the individual.
Speaker 3: And so he's got this idea that these things are
Speaker 3: competing for our attention. And yet you say that the
Speaker 3: science on attention is just as confused as the screen time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, it's one of those areas where we probably use
Speaker 1: the term attention in a general sense as a sort
Speaker 1: of capsual term when we mean other things. Maybe we
Speaker 1: mean other things at different times, but I think more
Speaker 1: often than not we mean our ability to hold concentration
Speaker 1: or not be distracted. And I think that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel as though things have gone wrong recently.
Speaker 1: That And yeah, this is how I lead out that chapter.
Speaker 1: That You've got a piece of work to do, and
Speaker 1: you sit down and try and do it, and you
Speaker 1: immediately get distracted by other things. So there's sort of
Speaker 1: two realities there as to what's going on. And I
Speaker 1: have this conversation with my university students quite a lot,
Speaker 1: you know. I'll have students come in and say I
Speaker 1: allocated today to writing an essay, and I sat down
Speaker 1: at my computer in the morning, and I really wanted
Speaker 1: to do this, and then like five minutes in and
Speaker 1: I'm on the phone or I'm playing a game, and
Speaker 1: the next thing i know, it's lunch time. And then
Speaker 1: I'm in panic mode because that's three hours that I've
Speaker 1: lost already. I'm already behind, and i know that I
Speaker 1: need to do it now, but I'm struggling to concentrate
Speaker 1: because I'm so worried. And then I go and play
Speaker 1: video games to try and calm myself down for a bit,
Speaker 1: and then you know, the day's gone and I've not
Speaker 1: done anything.
Speaker 4: I do this as well. I think everybody has experience
Speaker 4: of this, right.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to get distracted because we've got lots
Speaker 1: of stuff around us that makes us distractable. The fact
Speaker 1: that many of us have this sort of experience is
Speaker 1: not sufficient evidence to say that therefore there is a
Speaker 1: collective collapse in our attention. This has happened almost by design.
Speaker 1: That's a very substantial claim to make. So I talk
Speaker 1: about this in the chapter and think about Well, if
Speaker 1: that was the case, we would probably see that signal
Speaker 1: in the research literature. You don't even need to do
Speaker 1: a specific study on this. You just need to look
Speaker 1: at the past fifteen twenty years of research on attentional
Speaker 1: queuing or the postner queuing paradigm or something like that,
Speaker 1: and look at do you see declines in the averages
Speaker 1: in those studies over time?
Speaker 4: You don't see that.
Speaker 1: Nobody's noticed it anyway, you know, I think there are
Speaker 1: claims that I think one of the claims that take
Speaker 1: Johann's task on in the book is that, you know,
Speaker 1: it seems like we've all suffered this like collective twenty
Speaker 1: percent reduction in brain power. And again, that's a very
Speaker 1: substantial claim to make, and I think if that was true,
Speaker 1: that that would be disastrous for human civilization, right, And
Speaker 1: I think it would be so overtly obvious, more so
Speaker 1: than any claims around you everybody feeling a little bit distracted.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'd be having this conversation. I don't
Speaker 1: think there would have been a debate around it. There's
Speaker 1: another one of your guests, I think, who I spoke
Speaker 1: to you for the book, who I think has a
Speaker 1: different take on this is Near aar and I spoke
Speaker 1: to him for my book and we had this conversation
Speaker 1: around when you sit down at start of the day
Speaker 1: and you just feel completely distracted, you know, And he
Speaker 1: says that the first thing you do is ask people, well,
Speaker 1: show me how you planned your day. Again, I've done
Speaker 1: this with my students, do you use a diary or
Speaker 1: do use a calendar to plan when you're going to
Speaker 1: do things? And seven times out of ten they'll say no.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'll say yes, But even in the times they
Speaker 1: say yes, there's not really any structure to that. More
Speaker 1: often than not they don't really use a diary or
Speaker 1: a calendar. And you know, that's not to be disparaging,
Speaker 1: like I didn't use anything like that.
Speaker 4: When I was a student.
Speaker 1: But Near makes this argument, and he sort of said
Speaker 1: this to me when I was talking to him for
Speaker 1: the book, that how can you be distracted by something
Speaker 1: when you didn't plan your day? And I think, again,
Speaker 1: it goes back to this idea that we use technology
Speaker 1: in a haphazard way without really thinking about how it
Speaker 1: aligns with our goals. And some people they manage that fine,
Speaker 1: but for a lot of people that's when we use
Speaker 1: it in an inappropriate or an unhelpful way. So you know,
Speaker 1: I can think of days where I was writing un locked,
Speaker 1: where I knew that I needed to hit my word
Speaker 1: count for the day. I work really well under those
Speaker 1: sorts of circumstances. If I know that I've got a clear,
Speaker 1: well defined goal by the end of the day, that
Speaker 1: means that I know by the end of the day,
Speaker 1: I know whether I've had a good day or not,
Speaker 1: so I can manage accordingly. If I've not had a
Speaker 1: good day, I know I need to pick it up
Speaker 1: the day after. If I had a good day, I
Speaker 1: know I can relax more and pat myself on the back.
Speaker 1: And then equally, there are other days where I didn't
Speaker 1: really give myself a goal. I was just I need
Speaker 1: to write, and those were the days that I got
Speaker 1: really distracted. So one of the things that I talk
Speaker 1: about in the book is, yeah, we don't have a
Speaker 1: clear idea of what we actually mean when we talk
Speaker 1: about attention. And I am also painfully aware that that
Speaker 1: is entirely useless for everybody in these conversations, for somebody
Speaker 1: like me, as I just come along and say, well,
Speaker 1: we don't actually know what we're talking about here, it's like, yeah, great,
Speaker 1: well done you. That doesn't help us with anything. But
Speaker 1: what a try and point to is a newer line
Speaker 1: of researchers emerging research over the past three four five
Speaker 1: years that tries to recharacterize attention in a way that
Speaker 1: I thought was really helpful for thinking about how we
Speaker 1: cope with digital technologies. So attention is not this simplistic
Speaker 1: thing that you know, when a notification on your phone pings,
Speaker 1: it will automatically in always grab it, and then as
Speaker 1: soon as you're on your phone, that's it. You're stuck
Speaker 1: for the next hour. That's not really the right way
Speaker 1: of characterizing attention. A better way of thinking about it
Speaker 1: is so in the literature they're called priority maps that
Speaker 1: you can think of them like heat maps. So if
Speaker 1: you imagine like your visual environment in front of you,
Speaker 1: your audio visual environment, an overlaid on that is like
Speaker 1: a heat map, and wherever there's a peak in that
Speaker 1: heat map, there's something that is worth your attention, and
Speaker 1: where it's flat, there's nothing. So for me at the minute,
Speaker 1: you know, I've got a microphone in front of me,
Speaker 1: a screen in front of that, my phone is off
Speaker 1: to one side my bags down here. Most of this
Speaker 1: map is flat apart from my screen because that's where
Speaker 1: my attention is focused, and I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you what affects that map. So it is bottom up processes.
Speaker 1: So if you know, visually something happens, if somebody came
Speaker 1: through the door, that would cause a spike in that
Speaker 1: area of the map. For me, if my phone pinned off,
Speaker 1: that would cause a spike. But top down processes have
Speaker 1: an impact as well. So top down processes are things
Speaker 1: like what are your goals, what are your motivations.
Speaker 4: Right now?
Speaker 1: I am really motivated to not sound like I'm talking
Speaker 1: complete gobbledygook on this, and I'm finding it an interesting
Speaker 1: conversation and this is fun for me. I know that
Speaker 1: if my phone were to go off a that would
Speaker 1: be really distracting. You know, I'd lose my train of thought,
Speaker 1: I'd lose what I was talking about. It would also
Speaker 1: be quite rude to you as well, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to do that. So I mean, I've got my
Speaker 1: phone on mute, so it's irrelevant. But if it did
Speaker 1: go off, that little spike on the priority map would
Speaker 1: be a little bit, but it wouldn't be sufficient to
Speaker 1: grab my attention. If you think about a different scenario
Speaker 1: where I'm sort of in the same environment, but maybe
Speaker 1: instead of having this conversation with you, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: write an email or I'm trying to write a document
Speaker 1: and I've not really thought about it, and I'm struggling,
Speaker 1: and I'm worrying about, you know, who's going to pick
Speaker 1: up the kids and what we're going to have for
Speaker 1: dinner and things like that. I'm not really in the
Speaker 1: task because I'm trying to avoid it because I've not
Speaker 1: really prepped for it, and then my phone pings off
Speaker 1: it will be a much higher spike on that map
Speaker 1: and I'll go ooh, something to distract me for a bit.
Speaker 1: So thinking about it in those sorts of terms, I
Speaker 1: think is more helpful, because when we talk about attentional collapse,
Speaker 1: that's such a scary thing that has happened to us.
Speaker 1: How could we possibly do anything about that? Whereas thinking
Speaker 1: about it in terms of these things in front of me.
Speaker 1: These screens are tools. They are there to help me
Speaker 1: do the things that I want to do. I just
Speaker 1: need to figure out what they are and make them
Speaker 1: work for me. You can curate that experience a little
Speaker 1: bit more and have more control over what is worth
Speaker 1: your attention.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I found those priority maps to be a fascinating
Speaker 3: way to think about attention. I think about attention a lot.
Speaker 3: I'm a long time meditator, so there's a certain way
Speaker 3: in which attention is used. Their attention is, in many
Speaker 3: ways one of our most fundamental assets. And I find
Speaker 3: the priority map to make more sense to me, you know,
Speaker 3: and it depends on both bottom up and top down processes.
Speaker 3: Makes complete sense to me. I also think that what
Speaker 3: you said your students described to you, I can say
Speaker 3: was happening to me in nineteen eighty nine. I thought
Speaker 3: I was going to be an author. I would sit
Speaker 3: down to write, and fifteen minutes later I'd be like, well,
Speaker 3: I am now reading. You know, my distractions might have
Speaker 3: been different. They might have been I'm reading a novel
Speaker 3: instead of being on Instagram. But I didn't know how
Speaker 3: to stay on task. I didn't know how to do
Speaker 3: any of those things. I do think that there is
Speaker 3: also something to be said for we have a whole
Speaker 3: lot more coming at us, and I'm a believer that
Speaker 3: we have more control over that than we often think
Speaker 3: that we do. It's all the classic stuff, turn off notifications,
Speaker 3: and you know, I use tools like I don't remember
Speaker 3: what this tool is called. It's something I've been using.
Speaker 3: I want to call it screen time, but that's the
Speaker 3: Apple app. But basically, all it does when I try
Speaker 3: and open something that I don't want to open all
Speaker 3: the time, it just pops up a little thing and says,
Speaker 3: more or less, take a breath, do you really want
Speaker 3: to do this? And very often that's enough?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: No, Actually I don't want to do that, right, So
Speaker 3: I think we can use technology. I think your other
Speaker 3: point is an important one, and I talk a lot
Speaker 3: about achieving your goals or changing your behavior, and you
Speaker 3: know there are structural elements of that, planning your day
Speaker 3: and turning off your notifications, right, and then there are
Speaker 3: emotional elements of that what's happening inside me, whether it's
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty nine and I think I should be
Speaker 3: writing a novel and I instead pick up a novel
Speaker 3: to read it, versus today if I were to hop
Speaker 3: over and start playing solitaire. You know there's a common
Speaker 3: thread underneath there. So problems with productivity didn't just start.
Speaker 3: We've been writing about this stuff for a long long time.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, I do think to me,
Speaker 3: it seems self evident that there are smart people who
Speaker 3: are trying to think about how to get me to
Speaker 3: spend more time on their app, their streaming service, their whatever.
Speaker 3: They know the emotional manipulation tricks, and so there's an
Speaker 3: element of individual agency for sure, and there's an element
Speaker 3: of somebody trying to get me to do something in
Speaker 3: the same way that I could say with fast food,
Speaker 3: there's an element of individual agency whether I eat a
Speaker 3: big Mac or not, and we know that those foods
Speaker 3: are designed in such a way to capture my attention.
Speaker 3: So I think it ends up being kind of back
Speaker 3: to where we started, right. There is a lot of nuance.
Speaker 1: Here, absolutely, and I think nobody is saying again, on
Speaker 1: all sides of the debate. Often there's a perception that
Speaker 1: people like me who are saying that actually the research
Speaker 1: doesn't support some of these more fear mong Greek claims
Speaker 1: that are made out there, therefore there's nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: That's absolutely not what people are saying. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people with similar views to me say
Speaker 1: the same thing as me, which is, you can hold
Speaker 1: two things true at the same time. One is that
Speaker 1: the research is not great in this area and it
Speaker 1: doesn't support some of these wilder claims they're made. At
Speaker 1: the same time, tech companies absolutely need to be held
Speaker 1: more to account and to design these platforms better so
Speaker 1: that they're more supportive for our well being. They play
Speaker 1: safety and well being at the core of their design,
Speaker 1: not just as something that we maybe want to think
Speaker 1: and talk about every now and again, but like they're
Speaker 1: absolutely fundamental to it. Those two things can be true
Speaker 1: at the same time, and I think, yeah, you're right
Speaker 1: that thinking about this in terms of there are pressures
Speaker 1: on social media platforms, let's kind of keep with them,
Speaker 1: for example. So there's this sort of naive view of
Speaker 1: what social media is, which is this way of connecting
Speaker 1: or facilitating human connection, which is wonderful and utopian and
Speaker 1: not really the full story. Right. There is also the
Speaker 1: business element of it, which is that you need to
Speaker 1: make money out of these platforms, and there are various
Speaker 1: ways in which you can do that. More often than not,
Speaker 1: it requires holding people's attention, but keeping them on those sites.
Speaker 1: That's where the tension comes, or one of the tensions,
Speaker 1: one of many tensions that that maybe is not with
Speaker 1: our best well being interests at heart. But again, for me,
Speaker 1: I think a big aspect of this is yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: we do need to push more for better safety by
Speaker 1: design principles and well being by design, but that's going
Speaker 1: to take time, and there are still things that we
Speaker 1: can do very immediately that support our well being that
Speaker 1: we can do for ourselves. I'll give you an example. So,
Speaker 1: and this has happened really recently to me. I was
Speaker 1: on a debate and online debate recently, and I know
Speaker 1: that there was somebody who was sending some not nice
Speaker 1: messages on one particular social media platform I'd come across inadvertently.
Speaker 1: I think one of my friends had sent me. I
Speaker 1: was like, hey, have you seen what this person is
Speaker 1: saying about them? I'd already blocked them a long time ago,
Speaker 1: but I was still able to see them. And you know,
Speaker 1: that was not a nice feeling for me. You know,
Speaker 1: I felt very low about it, very nervous. I'm constantly
Speaker 1: anxious in this debate that you know, have I just
Speaker 1: you know, what if I've just got this wrong? You know,
Speaker 1: And that's why I sort of try and keep to
Speaker 1: the evidence as much as possible. But I wasn't in
Speaker 1: a particularly happy place with all of that happening, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I remember going, I wonder what they're
Speaker 1: saying about me on other platforms, and I went onto LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: Actually I went onto LinkedIn, and it turns out I'd
Speaker 1: already blocked them on there, so you know, this is
Speaker 1: somebody who had had prior experience with and I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to unblock them, and I know that this
Speaker 1: is a stupid idea. This is not going to be
Speaker 1: good for me, because what's going to happen is I'm
Speaker 1: going to unlock them.
Speaker 4: The best case.
Speaker 1: Scenario is that they've not said anything about me. I'm
Speaker 1: expecting that they've said something, and that's going to make
Speaker 1: me not feel good.
Speaker 4: Why am I doing this to myself?
Speaker 1: And I didn't know how to unblock anybody in LinkedIn,
Speaker 1: so I had to kind of figure it out, and
Speaker 1: it turns out it was really what I feel is
Speaker 1: a really healthy system of unblocking on LinkedIn that if
Speaker 1: you block somebody, you've got to go into a certain
Speaker 1: part of the settings, find them, and when you click unblock,
Speaker 1: you get a little pop up that says, are you
Speaker 1: sure you want to do this? If you do this,
Speaker 1: you can't block them again for another forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: So I didn't unblock them because I thought, hang on
Speaker 1: a sec. This has just given me enough chance to
Speaker 1: pause and go, I'm not going to get a good
Speaker 1: outcome for myself from this. I was expecting I could
Speaker 1: just like unblock them, have a quick look, and then
Speaker 1: quickly block them again. I clearly can't do that, and
Speaker 1: that leaves more risk open. So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do it, and I think my mental health is all
Speaker 1: the better for it, you know. I took more time
Speaker 1: to think about it afterwards and go, actually, I don't
Speaker 1: care what this person thinks. I don't know them. I've
Speaker 1: never met them. They're just not nice at interacting with
Speaker 1: me online. And it's probably best that we don't talk
Speaker 1: to each other. And that's the fact of life that
Speaker 1: some people don't get on. That's okay, and let's just
Speaker 1: both go on with our lives. And I think that
Speaker 1: was the best outcome. That was thinking carefully about the
Speaker 1: tools that we've got at our disposal to curate our
Speaker 1: existence on these sorts of platforms and what we want
Speaker 1: to get out of it. But in that particular scenario,
Speaker 1: there was a bit of a buffer mechanism in place
Speaker 1: that almost kind of like protected me from myself a
Speaker 1: little bit. And I think that's a really good example
Speaker 1: of where little tips and tricks and tools can help us.
Speaker 1: And obviously there are lots of other examples on other
Speaker 1: social media platforms where things maybe aren't so great. And
Speaker 1: I think it's that sort of thing where there's an
Speaker 1: educational element to this, which is around thinking about what
Speaker 1: do we want out of our tech use, whether that's
Speaker 1: a particular social media platform or our laptops or whatever
Speaker 1: it is that we're talking about video games. And then
Speaker 1: there's the other side of it, which is what can
Speaker 1: the tech companies do very quickly to give us more
Speaker 1: helpful tools to help us create that experience? And what
Speaker 1: are things that are a little bit harder to implement
Speaker 1: that need to be done over the long term, and
Speaker 1: how do we push for that? Yeah, And the sad
Speaker 1: fact of this conversation, I think is that at some
Speaker 1: point regulation needs to come into the conversation, because you know,
Speaker 1: I think if you ask industries to self regulate, they're
Speaker 1: not good at that, right for obvious reasons.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So for me, then the question becomes around where do
Speaker 1: we direct regulatory efforts so that they're most effective for
Speaker 1: helping us with these things. And that's maybe where we've
Speaker 1: got some of the conversation wrong.
Speaker 3: At the minute, I want to pause for a quick
Speaker 3: good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and
Speaker 3: a mistake I see people making, and that's really that
Speaker 3: we don't think about these new habits that we want
Speaker 3: to add in the context of our entire life. Right,
Speaker 3: habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
Speaker 3: in the life that we have. So when we just
Speaker 3: keep and I should do this, I should do that,
Speaker 3: I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
Speaker 3: really thought about what we're not going to do in
Speaker 3: order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
Speaker 3: you to think about where is this going to fit
Speaker 3: and what in my life might I.
Speaker 2: Need to remove.
Speaker 3: If you want to step by step guide for how
Speaker 3: you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
Speaker 3: go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
Speaker 3: the free masterclass. The part of the book that I
Speaker 3: probably struggled with the most was the sections on addiction,
Speaker 3: given that I have addiction history, alcoholism, heroin, addiction in
Speaker 3: my past, and I've been around addiction for a long
Speaker 3: long time. And you sort of start that chapter off
Speaker 3: by saying pretty clearly you are not addicted to your
Speaker 3: cell phone. I sort of understand your argument because I
Speaker 3: read the book, but help listeners understand why you feel
Speaker 3: confident making that claim.
Speaker 1: That was actually a sentence in the book that I
Speaker 1: agonized over a lot. You know, it's a very strong
Speaker 1: claim to make, and I fully appreciate that it's one
Speaker 1: that doesn't sit very well with many people's experiences of
Speaker 1: their phone use. So I try and unpack that in
Speaker 1: the rest of the chapter, and I think for me,
Speaker 1: one of the big things here is around the language
Speaker 1: that we use in terms of characterizing our relationships with
Speaker 1: our digital tech and also perhaps the influence therefore that
Speaker 1: that's had on the direction of research in the area.
Speaker 1: That we use the word addiction a lot in day
Speaker 1: to day speak when I don't think we should. You know,
Speaker 1: I think we overuse it, and we use it inappropriately,
Speaker 1: We use it in a way that I think can
Speaker 1: be unhelpful to what we're trying to do sometimes. So
Speaker 1: you know, my take on a lot of this is
Speaker 1: that when you say I'm addicted to my phone or
Speaker 1: I'm addicted to social media. That what people very often
Speaker 1: mean is that they feel like they're using it a lot.
Speaker 1: They feel like maybe they're using it too much, and
Speaker 1: they feel like they're not happy with the amount that
Speaker 1: they're using it. That's entirely understandable. My problem with couching
Speaker 1: this in terms of an addiction framework is that it
Speaker 1: leaves you with very few solutions that particularly when we're
Speaker 1: talking about this in terms of it's not just that
Speaker 1: you're addicted to your phone, but that you are addicted
Speaker 1: by design, that this is something that has happened to
Speaker 1: you without you realizing. Like, if you'd have known that
Speaker 1: this was an addictive product, then you would have done
Speaker 1: something different. You might not have used it at all.
Speaker 1: You know, you weren't given the full facts, and therefore
Speaker 1: this is the space that we've got ourselves into. It's
Speaker 1: totally understandable when you frame it in those terms that
Speaker 1: what you then reach for in terms of how to
Speaker 1: deal with this is to remove it, to either get
Speaker 1: governments to regulate it, or it needs to be kind
Speaker 1: of removed, you know. So you see all these digital
Speaker 1: detox programs and things like that they're very much grounded
Speaker 1: in the language of substance use. They are very different
Speaker 1: things that we're talking about. So one thing to say
Speaker 1: there is that if you look at the research on
Speaker 1: digital abstinence or digital detox, so where you get these
Speaker 1: studies where people are asked to either not use their
Speaker 1: phone completely for a certain amount of time, or to
Speaker 1: not use a particular social media app or things like that,
Speaker 1: you get very mixed findings, very weak effects, and certainly
Speaker 1: nothing in the sense of long term effects. Now, I
Speaker 1: know that there are some scientists out there who disagree
Speaker 1: with me on this, and that's actually a big debate going.
Speaker 4: On at the minute around that.
Speaker 1: And again it goes back to that what are we
Speaker 1: talking about, How are we defining this. I've seen some
Speaker 1: people point to a bunch of studies that show that
Speaker 1: digital abstinence works, and therefore this is what we should
Speaker 1: be implementing for kids. That are studies on people adults
Speaker 1: stopping using Facebook. Right, That is not what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Kids don't use Facebook, Right, It's completely useless line of
Speaker 1: research for the thing that you're worried about. The other
Speaker 1: thing to say about this is that if you look
Speaker 1: at the trajectory of research on digital behavioral addictions. That
Speaker 1: the sort of this similar trajectory that happens over time,
Speaker 1: which is people start talking about this thing in the
Speaker 1: way that we mentioned earlier, that people use addiction in
Speaker 1: a common day to day sense, and so scientists came
Speaker 1: along go everybody's talking about Internet addiction or something like that,
Speaker 1: we should study this, and that's correct, and we absolutely should.
Speaker 1: But it always comes from the starting point that this
Speaker 1: thing exists and is very quickly and easily definable, and
Speaker 1: I think that's where we get things wrong quite a lot.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 1: Nobody's sort of saying that people don't have problematic use
Speaker 1: issues with their phone or with social media. But how
Speaker 1: we characterize it helps us define it better. It helps
Speaker 1: us understand the populations who are really struggling with it,
Speaker 1: and that leads to more useful treatments in those situations.
Speaker 1: And then for the vast majority of people who are
Speaker 1: not addicted to these sorts of devices or these sorts
Speaker 1: of platforms, whatever, if you use other frames of thinking
Speaker 1: about this, then you open up a whole new tool
Speaker 1: set of ways that you can deal with it and
Speaker 1: again get better outcomes for yourself. Maximize the benefits, minimize
Speaker 1: the harms.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can see why nobody in the research and
Speaker 3: the findings in this area are all over the place
Speaker 3: because we've been trying to define alcoholism or drug addiction
Speaker 3: for a long time and we still really can't. Generally,
Speaker 3: we've moved away from if you answer yes to six
Speaker 3: out of twelve questions, now you're an alcoholic. We talk
Speaker 3: more about alcohol use disorder that falls along a spectrum, right,
Speaker 3: And so I think a similar way of thinking about
Speaker 3: phone use could be helpful. I also think that the
Speaker 3: other thing that's challenging is and I've had this discussion
Speaker 3: on the show with countless people of different stripes. Is
Speaker 3: it helpful to call yourself an addict? Is that empowering?
Speaker 3: Is that disempowering? Lots of people have different experiences with that.
Speaker 3: Some people find that that, yes, that's really a helpful
Speaker 3: way to think about it. I find that good. I've
Speaker 3: gotten recovery that way, and other people go it just
Speaker 3: made me feel like I couldn't do anything. Why would
Speaker 3: I say that I'm powerless over something that doesn't empower me?
Speaker 3: And so I think the same thing is kind of
Speaker 3: going on here, and there's a point made in the
Speaker 3: book that you know, sometimes we may be framing something
Speaker 3: as addiction that's something else, like it's a self esteem issue,
Speaker 3: or it's a coping mechanism, which I think all addictions
Speaker 3: are to some degree, right, All addictions, in my experience,
Speaker 3: are generally there's an underlying something that you're trying to
Speaker 3: accomplish with the thing. So I think it's possible, probably
Speaker 3: in the way that I understand addiction to be Again,
Speaker 3: I'm hesitant like you to use the word addicted, because
Speaker 3: I think gambling is our best example that mirrors it,
Speaker 3: meaning that it's a behavior, it's not a substance, and
Speaker 3: so I don't think it has to be a substance.
Speaker 3: I do think behavioral addictions exist, But I also agree
Speaker 3: with you that probably most people in the same way
Speaker 3: that if we look at the number of people who
Speaker 3: use alcohol, or who use an opiate, or who use cocaine,
Speaker 3: it's a percentage of them that go on to have
Speaker 3: real problems with it, and I would imagine that it's
Speaker 3: a similar thing. It's really hard to use the language
Speaker 3: of habits, and I've done a lot of coaching with
Speaker 3: people over the years on changing behavior, and boy that
Speaker 3: line between a habit and an addiction, like, what even
Speaker 3: is it? How do you even really know? It's very muddy,
Speaker 3: But I do think I think that broadly speaking, claiming
Speaker 3: addiction across the board for all of our interactions is
Speaker 3: probably not helpful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think probably the closed analogy here is gaming addiction,
Speaker 1: which is the only digital addiction that is formally categorized
Speaker 1: as a clinical disorder anywhere. So the World Health Organization
Speaker 1: classified this as a disorder in twenty eighteen in ICD eleven,
Speaker 1: the International Classification of Diseases, and there was a big
Speaker 1: debate at the time between broadly speaking, two camps of
Speaker 1: researchers and clinicians about whether this was the right thing
Speaker 1: to do or not.
Speaker 4: So I totally take the point that you may and the.
Speaker 1: Point that the people on the other side of the
Speaker 1: debate made in twenty eighteen, which is that it's too
Speaker 1: simplistic to say, well, you need to know whether this
Speaker 1: is a coping strategy for something else, or whether it's
Speaker 1: just better accountable by depression or something like that, because
Speaker 1: very often with addictions they are comorbid with other disorders.
Speaker 4: That's very often the case Chicken and egg, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the problem from the side that I
Speaker 1: was on, which was that not that there aren't some
Speaker 1: people out there that struggle with gaming to the point
Speaker 1: that it becomes actively harmful, but that we don't know
Speaker 1: enough about it yet. Is this a unique disorder? Is
Speaker 1: it better characterized as another form of disorder, maybe like
Speaker 1: an impulse control disorder or something like that. And we
Speaker 1: need to answer those questions if what you want to
Speaker 1: do is help the people that actually need help. So,
Speaker 1: if you look on the World Health Organization's website for
Speaker 1: gaming disorder, which is what they call gaming addiction, there
Speaker 1: is a link there to a twenty twenty systematic review
Speaker 1: of papers in the area, and that review covers about
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty papers. And across those one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty papers, there are thirty five different ways in
Speaker 1: which gaming disorder is assessed, not one, thirty five, And
Speaker 1: across those thirty five studies, you get a prevalence rate
Speaker 1: of anywhere between zero point two percent of the gaming
Speaker 1: population up to about fifty eight percent. Now, what that
Speaker 1: says to me is that you don't know what this
Speaker 1: thing specifically is. If either nobody has it or pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody has it. That's not a helpful thing for people.
Speaker 1: Let's just for the sake of argument, let's just say
Speaker 1: that the true rate is three percent. If you go
Speaker 1: around thinking that the prevalence rate is sixty percent, you
Speaker 1: are diagnosing a lot of people with a clinical disorder
Speaker 1: that they don't have. If you think the true rate
Speaker 1: is zero point two percent, you are missing a lot
Speaker 1: of people that need help. And this is where I
Speaker 1: struggle with that debate. Again, me saying I don't think
Speaker 1: addiction is the right way to talk about this is
Speaker 1: not me saying there aren't people that really really struggle
Speaker 1: in the apathological sense or in a heart you know,
Speaker 1: they are experiencing harm through their tech use. That is
Speaker 1: not what I'm saying at all. It's that we don't
Speaker 1: have the right ways of talking about it to help
Speaker 1: to identify who they are, to figure out what the
Speaker 1: unique features are of that particular disorder, and to help them.
Speaker 1: And I think just rushing along and saying problematic smartphone
Speaker 1: use is actually smartphone addiction and this is how you
Speaker 1: test it doesn't actually help people in the long run.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, we could talk about this for four hours
Speaker 3: because I find it a fascinating subject both gaming use
Speaker 3: any disorder, and people have been debating what exactly these
Speaker 3: things mean for a long long time. I do think
Speaker 3: that there's a generally common sense approach we used to
Speaker 3: say in twelve step programs, which is, if your drinking
Speaker 3: is causing problems, then you probably have a drinking problem.
Speaker 3: Exactly where you categorize it, what you call it is
Speaker 3: probably not as important as the fact that, like, okay,
Speaker 3: something needs to be done here right, something needs to
Speaker 3: be tried. And to that end, I don't want to
Speaker 3: put this in the post show conversation, which is going
Speaker 3: to make this longer than normal, but I don't want
Speaker 3: to talk about a problem for a long time without
Speaker 3: it all addressing your thoughts on how we work with this,
Speaker 3: and you sort of end with if we want to
Speaker 3: think differently about the relationship with our screens, we need
Speaker 3: to take a couple different steps. So what are some
Speaker 3: of your broad takeaways for what is a useful way
Speaker 3: to think about this thing that we don't quite know
Speaker 3: what to call. We don't know how bad it is,
Speaker 3: and yet, as you've said clearly, we know there are
Speaker 3: some problems that emerge out of it for some people.
Speaker 3: So how do we think about or talk about this
Speaker 3: in a way that is helpful.
Speaker 1: I think being reflective on your tech use is a
Speaker 1: really helpful thing to do here, and I appreciate that
Speaker 1: very often that's not an easy thing to do. So
Speaker 1: there's no quick fix, right. This is not like a
Speaker 1: here's one weird psychological trick that you can use to
Speaker 1: magically fix everything about your screen timeline. If there are
Speaker 1: things that you're not happy about with your tech use
Speaker 1: or your screen time. Things like that actually give yourself
Speaker 1: a pattern back for identifying that to begin with, because
Speaker 1: more often than not, we don't notice when we're getting
Speaker 1: into these sorts of bad habits and developing, you know,
Speaker 1: bad relationships with them. So when you start noticing it,
Speaker 1: that's the first step, right. That means that you can
Speaker 1: do something about it. If you're thinking about this in
Speaker 1: the context of I have the power to do something
Speaker 1: over this. You know this is not something that's happened
Speaker 1: to me. You know these things are designed to enable
Speaker 1: habits and enable bad habits sometimes, but you know I
Speaker 1: still have control over this.
Speaker 4: I can fix this.
Speaker 1: Then what happens next is experimenting, So figuring out what
Speaker 1: works for you This is where you know, I always
Speaker 1: like to take an evidence based approach with this sort
Speaker 1: of writing all these sorts of things like I do.
Speaker 1: And this is where it breaks down in the book
Speaker 1: because there's not much good evidence anywhere to say this
Speaker 1: is a really effective solution for fixing things, so it
Speaker 1: becomes very individualistic. So for example, in the book, I
Speaker 1: talk about sleep at one point, and iPhones have speech
Speaker 1: called night shift, which is it turns the screen yellow,
Speaker 1: and the idea is that less blue light I mean
Speaker 1: out of your screen doesn't disrupt your sleep as much.
Speaker 1: There are studies which actually show that this doesn't work.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have an effect, so it's a bit of
Speaker 1: a placebo effect. But I also say in the book
Speaker 1: that I still have night shift mode on my phone,
Speaker 1: not because I think it has some sort of biological effect,
Speaker 1: but it's a really over marker when if I'm playing
Speaker 1: a game or on Instagram or whatever at night, I've
Speaker 1: set it to twenty minutes earlier than i want to
Speaker 1: go to bed, so I've got a nice clear marker
Speaker 1: that now is the time to start shifting to doing
Speaker 1: something else. It doesn't always work, but the important thing
Speaker 1: is that when it doesn't work for me when I
Speaker 1: still find myself like scrolling or whatever. Every time I've
Speaker 1: found that happening recently, it's because I'm avoiding something like
Speaker 1: something difficult, you know, and maybe I've had a bad
Speaker 1: day or something difficult's happen at work, or even sometimes
Speaker 1: it's just been things like I've not been able to
Speaker 1: sit down until like quarter to ten at night, and actually,
Speaker 1: you know what, I want some time to myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so giving ourselves a break, I think is a good
Speaker 1: thing to do here that you know, we all struggle
Speaker 1: with building these sorts of healthy relationships, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: You know, it's never too late to start changing things,
Speaker 1: and it just starts with those little steps being more
Speaker 1: aware of what you're doing, thinking about what you want
Speaker 1: out of your tech use, and you know, catering things
Speaker 1: to align with that goal. I was in hospital about
Speaker 1: six months ago and I downloaded a game I don't
Speaker 1: think I would have ever downloaded otherwise. It was like
Speaker 1: a city building game. Awful, awful game, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: you could spend thousands of pounds on that game. It's terrible,
Speaker 1: but I was just like, I just want to play
Speaker 1: something mindless like this. For a bit and I started
Speaker 1: playing it lots, and I left notifications on and it
Speaker 1: was one of those annoying games where other people can
Speaker 1: come and attack your city whenever, and I found it
Speaker 1: being really unhelpful.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: I would be at the dinner table and I get
Speaker 1: a buzz on my phone saying somebody's attacking your city,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, oh, oh, I need to do something
Speaker 1: about that, and I don't want that situation to happen,
Speaker 1: so I turn the notifications off. What happened was that
Speaker 1: more people started invading my city and killing me lots.
Speaker 1: And then I realized, I don't care because that game
Speaker 1: was something that served a purpose for me when I
Speaker 1: was in hospital, and actually it's not now, so I'm
Speaker 1: going to delete it. All of the time and energy
Speaker 1: and effort that I'd invested to get in a certain
Speaker 1: level it all disappeared. And you know, art doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because what I'm getting is a nicer experience now. I
Speaker 1: value protected time at the dinner table with my kids,
Speaker 1: and this was something that I'd allowed to happen. I
Speaker 1: didn't beat myself up about it, but I thought, next time,
Speaker 1: I'm in a space where I'm going to download a
Speaker 1: game that does something like that. I'm going to think
Speaker 1: about the knock on effects later on, and you know,
Speaker 1: get rid of notifications, be more ruthless basically about when
Speaker 1: I stop playing them. Things like that and just little
Speaker 1: shifts in thinking like that can help. They're not going
Speaker 1: to fix everything, but they will help a bit.
Speaker 3: That's a great place for us to wrap up. Pete,
Speaker 3: thank you so much. Like I said, I really did
Speaker 3: enjoy the book. I appreciate nuance. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of good nuance, and you know, I didn't feel like
Speaker 3: you were dragging the science one way or the other
Speaker 3: to suit an opinion, and I think that is always
Speaker 3: a useful service.
Speaker 4: So thank you, thank you.
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