6 Simple Science-Backed Hacks That Will Make Your Life Better

20 years of your life is spent just scrolling on your looking at your phone it'll be about for most of us 20 years on average wait what yeah it's something that you want to do over and over again you want to return to your screen you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you're not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you that's the only thing to ask yourself do I feel better happier like my life is more meaningful after this or do I feel worse off like I'm empty it's true I

do feel empty yeah that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling they feel kind of empty I hate that you put it like that yeah I I don't love that it's true but I think that's what's going on how do you stop it's very difficult I mean I think hey it's your friend Mel and today you and I are talking with one of the top psychology experts and professors in the world and he's going to reveal six specific things that play a huge role in your success happiness and health now these

are things that you interact with in your day-to-day life that you probably don't think about at all but after our conversation today you're going to know what they are and more importantly how to use them to your advantage Dr Adam alter is here in our Boston Studios today he is a renowned researcher and professor at nyu's Stern School of Business and the Robert stansky teaching Excellence faculty fellow he received his PhD in Psychology from Princeton University where he also completed to fellowships which means he's really smart and he's the author of three New York Times

bestsellers irresistible drunk tank pink and the brand new bestselling book anatomy of a breakthrough now Dr Alter is here today to break it all down share his research with you about the unexpected forces that shape how you think feel and behave including one change today that based on the research will give you 20 years of your life back so please help me welcome Dr Adam alter to the Mel Robins podcast thank you so much for making the trip to Boston thank you for having me it's good to be here it's terrific to be with you

I'm so excited to learn from you today and I wanted to start off by asking you if you could just speak directly to the person who's listening and tell them what they're about to learn and how their life could change if they really apply what you're going to teach them today sure so I think there are two things the first thing is I think we sail through life generally not really understanding what's shaping how we feel and behave and what's guiding Us in the the directions that we happen to be moving so the first thing

is I think you're going to understand a number of the things that are guiding you that you don't recognize are there but the second thing is because you understand what those things are you're able to act on them you're able to use them to your benefit maybe the ones that are pushing you in the wrong direction you can kind of Stave them off so I think it's it's a combination of both of those things what made you want to research things like colors and these Environmental I don't know like things outside of us and within

us that shape our experience of Life yeah so you know I think like a lot of people I'm sort of fascinated by this idea that so much of what goes on is hidden from us that um essentially life is kind of like the iceberg where there's a little bit above the surface of the water but a lot of really interesting stuff is unconscious it's hidden from us and so I wanted to try to understand as much of what's going on under the surface of the water and a lot of it is these things that are

shaping Us in ways we don't recognize so a lot of my research has been about trying to uncover those and then figure out what we can do about them I love this all right so let's dive in there is so much to learn so much of your research also focuses on the environment around us and how that can influence all different outcomes can you share some of that with us yeah so it's huge numbers of different factors but around us all the time there are colors um sometimes we're in a built environment like a room

and sometimes we're in a natural environment and so a lot of my work focuses on on how these different cues shape how we think feel and behave and our welfare our well-being a lot of the focus for me recently because I've been very interested in in the effect of spending huge amounts of time in front of screens is what happens when you go as far from screens as possible to Natural environments which we all sort of have that I think General sense that that's good for us it's good to be in a natural environment but

the the effects there are among the most profound I've ever seen in any research that just spending a bit of time near a body of running water or hearing wind r through trees or spending 12 hours driving to the Eclipse which is what I did that it it's a huge amount of energy that you put in perhaps to get to those kind of environments but they have a huge effect on your welfare and it's worth doing what effect does it have on your welfare so one thing about the way we live our lives today in

the modern era is that we are constantly sapped our attention is sapped we're asked to pay huge amounts of very focused attention all the time whether we're looking at screens whether we're having extended work conversations whether we're doing work and so by the end of the day you're kind of depleted depleted depleted if you wear one of those watches that tracks your body battery you see it just kind of goes down and down and down and that's that's a good metaphor for the way we live our lives it's it sums it up pretty well the

thing about nature is that apart from actually being asleep being in a natural environment is replenishing it basically turns that dial upside down and so your your your energy starts to climb again so it gives you back uh a lot of what what is sapped by that very focused attention cuz when you're in natural environment your attention is still grabbed by things you might hear a bird you might hear the Run running water you might look at trees whatever it might be looking at the ocean but that kind of less focused attention is really restorative

and there's actually a whole body of research called attention restoration therapy that focuses on exactly this idea that being in natural environments is one of the best forms of medicine we have so let's unpack that yeah because I could feel the person that is listening to us right now literally stop on the treadmill or hopefully they're you're outside walking or you just stopped loading the dishwasher and you're knowing that what Adam is saying is true yeah but there were a bunch of things you talked about that I would love for you to dig in further

the first one was this idea of the I think you said something about attention therapy attention restoration therapy what is that yeah it's it's basically this idea that your attention is constantly being sapped it's being taken away and the kind of attention you have in a natural environment which is not demanding it's replenishing it's true it restores you it brings you back it gives you something that you don't have I think the single most profound example of this for me was a study that was done at a hospital on people who were recovering from surgery

and they were randomly assigned to different rooms and some of the rooms looked out at a natural environment a beautiful Green Lawn some trees and some of the rooms just where they happened to be in the building did not have that view they were looking out at at another part of the building and they wanted to track how these people recovered from identical surgeries depending on which room they happen to be assigned to and they found they needed like half as much pain medication they spent 3 days fur in hospital recovering just looking out at

that natural environment was was the best form of medicine there was so it's a it's true you know I I run maybe four or five days a week and I try to do it outside when I can and I know on some level that just feels good but there's a huge amount of science behind that as well so what do you recommend for us to put in into our lives because we've had neuroscientists medical doctors Sleep Experts come on the show and talk about the importance of getting natural light first thing in the morning right

we've also had uh someone talk about if you're kind of burnt out and you are having one of those moments where you just feel your energy draining even looking off at the distance out the window can help you restore your energy what are some of the the the takeaways or the science back things that people can Implement in their lives to tap into this research yeah so I think the biggest thing is um I ran yesterday in a forest and it was wonderful and there was running water there were all these ingredients and it was

incredibly restorative but as a runner my instinct is to just keep going which is how we live our lives right you're doing something and you want to keep going till it ends till you finish doing it till you can check it off and I had to push myself to stop for 5 minutes to sit on a rock and just let the water go by and that was by far the most restorative wonderful part of the day and I think there's something to that this idea of purposely stopping yourself so I would say whether you're in

a big city or whether you're not in a big city find a little patch of natural environment and by the way if you're in an apartment in a big Urban environment you don't have that option even little trees little plants that you have in the apartment the sound of a little fountain that you have with running water that stands in for that experience too is just spend say 5 minutes a day doing absolutely nothing but taking in drinking in that natural environment even if it's a tiny one in your apartment if you can get out

all the better but it's very important to do that I think as as a sort of daily practice and also as your research shows a countermeasure to the fact that Modern Life is requiring this intense Focus that is just sapping your energy you mentioned colors and there is so much that you have uncovered that is fascinating about how colors influence so much in terms of our mood our behaviors our physical strength let's unpack that yeah so some of this is my research some of it's other people's research um and I I got interested in color

because I can't see color very well I'm color blind oh you are I'm color blind so I'm sort of fascinated by col figure out that you're color rine it took a while um you know when I was young I would get colors right because all the colors in little picture books are so bright and obvious so that was never a problem but as I got older it seemed like I lost the ability to to distinguish colors I think my parents were a bit concerned they were like what's going on there's something going on in Adam's

brain and we need to figure this out so I did a series of tests and I identified that I had certain kinds of color blindness and so it made total sense but it's it's kind of subtle so you can't pick it up when kids are very young sometimes it takes a little while to figure it out but it made me really interested in color and in particular in in the question of whether what the way I see the world is whether it's different from how you do do we all see the world the same way

and then assuming that there is some uniformity to that is is that exposure to color influencing Us in any way that's predictable and the answer is yes there are all sorts of interesting effects let me ask a question so yeah given that you're colorblind yes and you are researching the impact that color has on our mood our emotions even things like physical strength it also can influence the actions that you take is the color influencing all of us the same way even if you're color blind and the color appears slightly duller or you know if

you're if you're color you see what I'm saying yeah 100% so there are two ways it could affect you so one of them is just Association so I see maybe I see the color yellow and it makes me think of the Sun and fire and I see green and I think of natural environments so it's just the association it reminds me of other things that are green or yellow or blue or whatever the other one is as you say maybe it doesn't matter if you can actually see that it's green or yellow maybe it's something

about the wavelength it hits your eye it hits your retina and your your brain is doing something with that information that whether or not you can see that it's yellow or green or red or whatever you're responding the same way I think most of it is Association for us that there are certain things that have certain colors and then that reminds us of those things so a lot of us talk about blues and greens being more soothing Reds and yellows being more activating which can be good or bad depending on what you're looking for I

think if I didn't know that a color was red and I couldn't see it and it looked washed out to me it would have less of an effect for me got it so what colors affect our moods uh well all colors have some effect they have some effect not just on mood but on on all sorts of different outcomes for us um there's a really interesting research looking at how the colors that that competitors wear in in um in sports affect how they play um so there's some work looking at Olympic athletes in Combat Sports

like Judo and wrestling and Taekwondo and in in the Olympics what they did a while ago was they decided that they were going to randomly assign each competitor to either wear blue or red before each bout yeah as a way to just be fair like we're going to randomly pick red and blue and you're going to get your your color and then you're going to go into the bout but one of the things the researchers discovered was when we wear red we feel stronger we feel more dominant and when you see someone else wearing red

you perceive them as more dominant and there are very lower order reasons for this like if you look at animals the animals with more red are more dominant in general so if you look at 100 birds from the same species the ones with more red feathers or a redder face will be the alpha birds and that's going to be true for apes and other animals as well so the color red has a really big effect and it's It's associated with sort of how how well your blood throws flows through your body and things like that

and um it's it's a sort of signal that someone is strong and dominant and what you actually find is in these Olympic bouts when the competitors are evenly matched if you are assigned to wear red you win about 2/3 of the time despite being evenly matched really it has a huge effect on on these outcomes yeah wow so so Dr halter does that mean if I'm going in for a like a negotiation for a job I should be wearing red or an interview or a date yes with a caveat okay so the yes is yes

it will do that it'll make you seem more dominant it also turns out to make people more attractive to others really which is interesting too yeah so there's research looking at dating profiles where you have the same picture you just change every two months the color of the shirt you're wearing people get much more attention online when they're wearing it's the same picture but when they're wearing red rather than any other color wow so um there's there was all sorts of good reason to surround yourself with red it's true even if you have a border

around your picture and it happens to be red border rather than blue or green or another color but red also has other meaning too right it's not it's not a color that we don't notice so you're signaling something Beyond just I'm dominant and making yourself look more attractive it's a it's a conscious choice and so if people are seeing that and making other drawing other from the fact that you've chosen red then maybe it's a it's something you don't want to do if it's very unusual in that context for example but beyond that as long

as that's not an issue there is very good reason to wear it wow and what colors Cal us down um the most calmon colors are generally blues and greens and I think a lot of that is the association we have with nature which we we discussed so natural environments are very calming um water the sky trees leaves things like that um and so I think a lot of it comes from from just the the sort of harness you get with the association with those colors so one of your uh International bestsellers drunk tank pink very

interesting name and there's very interesting research about that sort of bubble gum Pepto bismo pink color can you explain that yeah so the name is it's drunk tank pink is a name that was given to this very bright bubble gummy pink color it was used for a while inside um they would called drunk tanks where you put people who are kind of aggressive often drunk you're trying to calm them down and researchers found that if these drunk tanks were painted pink in their words you could calm these people down much more quickly that within 15

minutes they'd be calm and did it work there's some evidence that it worked I think the the research is a little bit shaky but there was some evidence that this pink color did calm people down it was it got a huge amount of attention in the 80s there was a 60 Minutes episode about it it really got a lot of attention um and so I thought it was just a sort of fascinating emblem of the kinds of effects you might see from cues that you might think would have a smaller effect on us but by

being surrounded by those colors there are huge effects in fact the the visiting locker room at the University of Iowa is painted drunk tank pink in an attempt to calm down the opposition when they spend time in that locker room so they've it's been used in a lot of different context more recently yeah well and I think what where my mind goes is both to the Miami soccer team right but they're a little bit more bright and also to the beautiful trend of athletes wearing pink for breast cancer awareness which obviously is signaling something else

but I think that's fascinating if you're put in a bubblegum pink room that it just sort of dulls your mood a little bit if you're a bit aggressive yeah regarding into Miami there are people who when they they box they will only wear pink boxing trunks because they think it'll make their opposition a little bit less strong and so there's I don't think that's why inter Miami is pink and they have that pink uniform but that's that's one of the theories wow so can you talk about mirrors and how can use them to change your

behavior yeah there's a lot of research looking at what happens when we see a human face so um one of the things that happens when you see a face particularly eyes is you feel that you're being watched and when you're being watched it changes your behavior in certain predictable ways okay so if you think about a store that has a lot of shoplifting one of the things these stores do if they can't afford constant surveillance is they put up more mirrors because we are less likely to behave badly when we have to look at ourselves

doing it really yeah why because it basically forces you not just metaphorically but to look into your own eyes literally and you have to decide is this the right way to behave it makes us much more introspective and thoughtful about what we're doing so there are these really interesting experiments where you say to people privately you can toss a coin and if you get heads you get a delicious Jelly Bean and if you get taals you have to eat something that's not very nice and if you let people do that without a mirror they all

report oh yeah I got heads there are a lot of people who report getting heads more than 50% which you would expect so people are kind of fudging the numbers a little bit when you get them to do that same task in front of a mirror where they're looking at themselves 50/50 so they become honest again really yeah so you know there are some I think interesting implications one of them that's that I've always found quite quite useful is if you a lot of people might have like a cupboard in their home somewhere maybe in

the pantry where they keep their chocolates and things that they want to eat only occasionally mine's in a drawer right or a drawer and when you open that cupboard or when you go into the pantry one thing a lot of people do now is they'll put up a little mirror what so what happens is you're like I'm reaching for the chocolate I have to look at myself in my eyes I have to scrutinize this decision and sometimes it's fine but other times maybe I look at myself and I'm like okay fine I'll I'll leave that

chocolate sitting there for a little bit longer so it basically forces you to be a little bit more thoughtful about your decisions well I could see how that would happen cuz you know if you think about opening up a fridge yeah if there was a giant mirror in there I'd be like oh you again uh okay shut the thing so I I might actually have to try this putting a mirror in the bottom of the drawer where I have all of our snacks we call it the snack drawer so could you use a mirror to

kind of cue yourself when it comes to bad habits is that like an environmental trigger that can be effective in making you stop and think yeah I think so so I think what the mirror does is it makes you think more deeply and it especially makes you think more deeply about doing the wrong thing where it's something that's contrary to what you think you should be doing because you have to do it in your own presence it's like you're watching yourself and so so it's it's a very powerful queue in all those cases I love

that yeah that's a I I can think of a lot of implications for that like if you're somebody who's trying to cut down on drinking having a mirror sitting there when you open up the cabinet where the AL okay I see you not so fast today um I understand there's some interesting research about how simply looking at money can change you yeah uh this there's sort of interesting evidence that it can do lots of different things so one thing it seems to do is it makes you a little bit more independent makes you feel a

little bit stronger and reminds you of resources and having more of things um the other thing it can do is though it makes you a little bit less um helpful towards other people makes you a little bit less generous makes you a little bit more independent yeah so there's some research where if you show people money or you show them you know dollar bills or things like that and then you have a task where they have to be helpful they're going to be a little bit less helpful if they've just seen money than if they

haven't and I think that's because one thing you get from money is you can be you can stand alone a little bit more you don't need other people quite as much that's at least the theory and so it makes you more independent and less communal minded and it might make you a little bit less generous well Dr Alter maybe that's why I'm such a generous person because I never have cash in my wallet there you go it's all about the credit cards so are do you have favorite tweaks based on the research that you either

recommend or use in your own life that help cue you to be your best or to make Behavior change stick yeah I've talked about the one the biggest one six years ago I left New York City with my wife and two kids and we moved to a town where it was natural and beautiful and we could go less than a mile in any direction and we would have either a beach or we would have a forest or we we'd have something where is the shangrilla you still work in New York the shanga is in Connecticut

just outside yor so it's it's beautiful and and it means that on any day I can drive for 10 minutes or even walk for 10 minutes and be somewhere that does all of this restoring so I think being around nature for me is a huge one different people have different things that matter to them that was very important to me it also it drew me back to my childhood because being growing up in First South Africa and then Australia natural environments and especially the beach in Australia was a big part of what I was used

to and I missed that yeah and so being near near a beach the sand and the water was really important to me so I think picking the location that that does the best for you most of the time is really important that it's worth sometimes sacrificing other things for and that's something that I've always I've always followed you know that makes a lot of sense I remember this was decades ago but when I had just graduated from law school and I moved to New York City I basically spent all of my puny income so I

could live walking distance to Central Park and so that I could also get to the wests side highway because just being able in the big city to get to some green space was critical and you know you said that thing about it also has this sort of nostalgia thing of being able to be outside anything about your inside environment like the way that you think about your workspace or you might think about the kitchen or places where people want to be primed or prompted to be their best yeah so we mentioned earlier especially if you're

in a big city it's useful to have something natural inside that environment it could be hopefully a real plant but if it's not real a fake plant anything that gives you the sense of that Greenery and that nature maybe even like a little Fountain feature just a little thing that you plug in that maybe has a light and a little bit of running water even the sound of running water reminds you of all these things and I had the same experience in New York I was always in Central Park or running on the West Side

um and so to the extent that you can bring these features into your home there's a there's a huge amount of benefit to that um I think for me personally and this varies but I think the lack of clutter that you create in a place is really an important um source of well-being uh so for me trying my best and this doesn't always happen but trying to remove clutter from an environment especially where I'm trying to think is really important I think that's a really good way to think about doing your best work in general

that having blankness in front of you and just moving forward and pouring out your ideas is the best way to go without being infringed upon by other things that are in the environment around you why does lots of stuff around the environment where you're trying to work or Focus impact your ability to do your best thinking well every single thing even if it's in a small way is distracting everything draws you out of the Here and Now some things more than others a smartphone massively distracting for all sorts of reasons that are obvious even other

objects like if you have a momento that's in view that's really nice a picture of a loved one that's really nice but of course if you stare at it it's going to take you out of the here and now that doesn't mean you shouldn't have photos of loved ones on your desk but you should at least recognize that if there are a thousand different nice momentos around you the Clutter of that while it's lovely and it brings back good memories that's probably not the time and place to do it so having having Clarity in front

of you as you work I think is a really important driver of of good ideas and creativity in general I I'm sitting here thinking about my workspace at my home and it is knickknack attack [Applause] a l to me and I tell you this is probably an indication of just how distracted I am because I could go look at my computer and I've got like four little mason jars with all like the pens in one and Sharpies and another and pencils and then I got a photo of my uh mom and my grandmother at the

I and then I've got a little Compass my parents sent me and then I've got a mug that Chris gave me and then I I mean it just it's like a little zoo of objects if it makes you feel great though so I don't know that it does I just feel like holy cow even though I'm not staring at all this stuff you're saying that subconsciously your mind is still pulling it in to some extent to some extent it's processing things around you constantly and so to the extent there are things around you all the

time you might ignore them consciously right but they're always there they're always the Clutter is always there and on some level even if it's on a small level each little thing is pulling you away in some small sense and that's the opposite of what you need especially in the world that we live in now where everything is so distracting we're actually getting 10 minutes of good hard quality work is vanishingly impossible that's it 10 minutes I mean it's very very hard for a lot of people to work if you track them across the day to

get 10 15 20 minute bursts of good hard work it's tough for a lot of us especially if your phone is nearby if your your computer's dinging you with emails and things like that it's it's really hard to do the same task for 20 minutes in a row well Dr ala you are one of the most renowned and respected researchers when it comes to the impact of screens on our brains on our health and so let's talk about it you have written a huge book on this you are somebody that people look to for expert

advice on this and we've talked a lot about nature yeah but nature is combating yeah what has become the reality for all of us which is we spend most of our waking hours staring at a screen yeah yeah that's right so you the way I think about it is when you sit in today's age and you look out at whatever you're looking at almost all the time you can tell that it's this year it's 2024 or roughly 2024 you see screens you see all sorts of signs that we live in this particular Modern Age that

we live in I think one really useful thing and why nature is so great is cuz it's Timeless that I think one way to measure how well you're living is are you spending at least some of your day in an environment that is timeless that is not attached and Tethered to the here and now that is not about the latest screen the latest device the latest tech the latest gadget so when you are sitting in a forest you could have been doing that a thousand years ago and seeing exactly the same thing and I think

there's some value to living at least part of our lives every day in an environment that is timeless what are some examples of how I can step into a Timeless environment if I can't get out into the forest today yeah so closing your eyes is really good for that right because you can then think of anything you like and people have been able to do that forever that's what makes us human is our ability to imagine outside of the here and now the other thing is I think just having a conversation with a loved one

which is again screens make that more and more difficult we spend so much time in front of them that we spend less time with people we we really connect to but having a face to-face conversation with someone that's also Timeless that was going on thousands of years ago as well our species has been doing that forever we do it less now than we ever have before so I think timelessness doesn't have to be about nature or even the environment you're in it can be the activity that you're doing and so anything where you're connecting with

another human being is timeless as well this is so important because so many of us and I'm going to include myself are searching for deeper meaning in life yeah searching for purpose search ing for a sense of being connected to self and connected to something Beyond just that sort of daytoday autopilot mode onto the next headline onto the next deadline onto the next thing on your to-do list and I love how you phrase this as how do you take a break from Modern Life that is always going to pull you to the next thing yeah

and step back into these things that you have described that escape a sense of what decade you're in yeah and what age you are and that have always been around right and so nature conversations with somebody else closing your eyes and escaping into your thoughts to remind you that there is something so much more important yeah than the here and now and is there anything else that you would recommend yeah I think physical activity is a big one right because a lot of the time we spend in front of screens is sedentary we're not moving

we're sitting maybe we're standing if you're at a standing desk but it's very Tethered to a particular place it doesn't involve a lot of activity so um I think there's a timelessness to physical activity our ancestors had to do much more of it just to stay alive and so they had to find food and they had to you know negotiate different Landscapes we don't have to do that anymore it's easy for us to get by and not move so I think exercise picking up heavy things uh moving our bodies for certain periods of time every

day all of that is also consistent with this time lessness that I think is important and I just think it's a good rule of thumb I've I've realized this over time that when you're trying to figure out am I am I living the way I'd like to live a lot of it is is those Timeless activities that go back to things that we were doing a long time ago that were very good for us as a species that brought us to where we are today it's a lot of the things that are kind of incredibly

new and different as I love technology I think it's wonderful in many ways but a lot of the aspects of it that we've kind of put as a gloss over our lives today I think leave us impoverished in some sense very much so and disconnected yeah and distracted and not feeling like you're doing something that's actually meaningful to you so you've done extensive research on screens on digital distraction and also just kind of this constant need to be occupied it's almost like the state of distraction that we've gotten used to what's some of the most

shocking things that you have come across in your research yeah so I've spoken to I don't know how many dozens hundreds of audiences of the kids themselves who use screens the parents of those kids teachers in schools School District heads um people in policy in government uh people in all sorts of different areas about the effects of screens and the most striking thing to me is that when you speak to kids in particular so especially teenagers you get this incredible difference between how how much they feel they have to use these devices and how much

they enjoy it how much it is good for them um so when you eat candy you might say to yourself that's delicious I kind of know it's not great for me but I'm going to do it anyway right with screens it's like a different tone it's this tone of I wish I and all my friends stopped doing this thing I wish we didn't keep returning to the same social media platforms because I know it's not good for any of us but if we don't if I'm the only one who says I'm going to draw back

then I'm isolated and so it's it's this very Collective problem where unless you can get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time it's not going to be easy to solve and you hear this from a lot of kids they say if only I could get everyone else in my class or at least a certain number of people not to do this I'd feel better and the parents say the same thing they say I wish I could be the parent who says we're we're going to be much more careful about exposing

our kids to these devices and social media and so on but we can't be the only ones cuz then our kids are just that's a different problem they're the only ones right so a lot of the work that I'm doing now is on on trying to push not just individuals to change how they behave but to work with say entire classrooms or entire schools or entire school districts so that the entire District pushes parents and the kids of those parents to to delay how long it takes them to use these devices well you know it's

interesting I remember reading a big write up of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts who you probably know have this new policy heads up which is no phones on campus period like they can be in your locker they can be in your backpack but they are not on your person yeah so there's a movement called okay to delay um for example and there are some others as well that are trying to deal with this at that Collective level for exactly the reason you mentioned there are very few benefits to having phones at school maybe a flip phone

so you can get in touch with someone in an emergency they can call the front office like I'm personally one of these people that's like get the freaking phones out of the schools parents can call the front office if there is an emergency it's a huge problem there is no need to have a phone on your person when you're supposed to be at school I mean that's just my opinion and I think it's it's it's fascinating that a lot of parents who can afford to love sending their kids to summer camp because why they take

their phones away yeah and they love giving their kids that break and the kids love it but you know I do think it's interesting that the shocking piece of research that's come out of it is we all know we need to do something we all know it's bad for us and we all wish there was an alternative and yet my entire social life is on this thing yeah I mean the way I opened this book was talking about how years before the rest of us were aware of this Steve Jobs with his own kids he

wouldn't bring the iPad into his house and then you look at other Tech Titans there's a school in the Bay Area that doesn't let kids near phones or use phones or use screens until about 9th grade until they learn to code yep that school 75% of the kids there are the kids of Silicon Valley Tech execs so they are sending their kids the people who know the most about what this Tech is doing are keeping their kids as far away from these products as possible especially in the school environment I mean it makes perfect sense

so do you think we're all addicted to the screen yeah so this term addiction is um I use it in the book as a sort of shorthand to describe a lot of what I think is going on in this case because that the definition that I use is it's something that you want to do over and over again you want to return to your screen you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you're not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you on balance and that it has negative effects in the long

run for for your social well-being you know your relationships are degraded for it um it means you're more sedentary so it's not good for you physically it exposes a lot of us to bullying anxiety aggression loneliness other negative psychological consequences it's also a way to overspend a lot of people spend too much money using I feel like Instagram has turned into the Home Shopping Network exactly yeah it's a very powerful way to sell products yeah wow you you said earlier this interesting metaphor that for example we all know cand is delicious yeah but if you

just pound a gigantic like 5B chocolate bar I love Tony's chocolate I and I also love Mr BEAST's new line like oh I just love chocolate and Halloween go out trick-or-treating y I'd fill that pillowcase up man I would come home sort all the candy and I would just start munching but then I would have a huge stomach ache and I wouldn't want to look at candy again for another month and it's almost as if that Halloween candy hangover is what's happening every single day where we wake up we know we don't want to spend

nine hours what what is the average amount of time that people are spending on their phones it's hard to get really good definitive data but it's many hours a day um I had a high school class that I was teaching at NYU for a while over Summers I'm not doing it at the moment but I did it for several years and at the beginning of that six week class I would ask the students to download an app that would track their usage which now most phones do anyway and the numbers I was getting were absolutely

staggering some of the students were on their phones like 10 12 hours a day um their average was something like six or seven or eight hours a day and this was a number of years ago I think it's only gone up since then um I've heard three four five hours described as the average for adults as well so it's a huge amount of time um one of the things it's doing is it's changing your tolerance for spending a long time doing something that involves hard deep work and thinking what does that mean with a simple

brain like mine what do you mean it rces Toler what it means is if you're getting 2,000 messages a day each one lasting maybe a second or two seconds that's how your brain starts to process information in these bite-sized chunks and they're all also chosen to be maximally enjoyable interesting they bombard you with interesting content and so what happens is you assume the rest of the world is going to be like that you know we get into an elevator for 5 seconds and that's too much that's hard so we pull out our phones to be

entertained in that moment and that's how the rest of the world becomes so if I say to a a seven-year-old kid who's on a screen all day it's time to learn to read the amount of energy and and intense concentration you're asking for there is so different from what that kid is used to if if it's been about sort of scrolling through videos that that's deeply problematic you can't expect people to just suddenly turn on this muscle that they haven't been using so it makes us less used to having to try really hard and so

that's I think one big problem the other thing is if if you look at how many hours a day we're doing this for there's a huge amount of other stuff the opportunity cost there is so great that we're leaving this other stuff behind so I could be spending that time having a conversation with a loved one or a friend I could be spending that time in a natural environment or I could be exercise I could be doing lots of different things but I don't do any of that stuff because I'm spending time mindlessly scrolling so

there's a a huge amount there can you explain the mindlessly part like why do we Doom scroll I there's so many of us um Adam that come home from work you cook dinner you you've got kids you're married you know you're doing all the stuff you're packing up the backpacks you're cleaning up the dishes you're letting the dog out you're hopefully like having a moment of quiet yourself and you say to yourself I'm going to go to bed early tonight or I'm going to work on that project and next thing you know two hours have

gone by and you've just wasted your evening Doom scrolling why do we do this yeah there there's this interesting theory about gambling that I think a lot of people have this naive idea that when people are gambling they're just like this is amazing and this is so much fun and I'm getting all this feedback and yes and I then I hit a jackpot people don't gamble because that's true they gamble because they get into this kind of trance like there's something about sitting in front of a slot machine that is deeply soothing and numbing and

that's what the screen does at the end of a hard day what you don't want is to be massively excited most of the time you're exhausted you just want to have this kind of comfort this lull it's like a taking a bath in the screen and it it brings this sense of comfort and reliability and I'm I'm nothing is being asked of me I don't have to do anything I just move my phone move my finger and that's all I have to do it sounds so lovely it sounds lovely right and what what else gives

us that sort of really uncomplicated dose of calm at the end of a long day very little alcohol that's the other option and so there aren't that many options it's substances or it's screens and many of us just turn to screens so that's I think what's happening for most of us I hate that you put it like that yeah I I don't love that it's true but I think that's what's going on how do you stop it's very difficult I mean I think the biggest thing when we try to stop doing something is we we

don't replace it with something else so the first thing to think about is if I want to stop doing this thing whatever this thing is whether it's drinking using a substance scrolling through Tik Tok whatever it is when you would have done that thing there needs to be something else there and preferably something else that you enjoy that's not bad for you something that you feel better about doing and that's going to be different for everyone you've got to cultivate that habit that change and so just saying I'm going to not do this thing and

I'm going to use my willpower no one has that much willpower right that's exhausting you can't expect yourself to be superhuman but figure out what else you could be doing that's more enriching but that also makes you feel good and do that other thing PL plaster over that Gap this is a pathetic question but given that you are the renowned guy that is doing the research on this do you have some suggestions because even my first thought was well you know I've been addicted to well I shouldn't say addicted I've been loving this fantasy audio

book C of thorn and Roses I am living in a different land and it's on my phone um I think about oh okay well I could just slump on the couch and watch something on TV there's another screen yeah so in the researcher in just kind of really digging into this topic are there things that have come up that could offer just a spark of a suggestion for those of us that would really like to not have this be a habit and not be lulled every night into giving our evenings away to our phone yeah

so I'll say one thing I think this is a good moment to say that screens are not one thing right it's not like looking at a screen is automatically a bad thing right you could be reading a really enriching book on the screen and that's great it makes you feel good or you could be watching a show or a documentary or whatever it doesn't matter there's nothing wrong with spending hours in front of the TV at the end of the night if that's mindfully what you want to be doing with your time there's also nothing

wrong with briefly scrolling through a social media platform the problem is none of us have the willpower to just do it for two minutes right so I don't think it you have to find something that's not screen based you just have to find something that's not making you feel hollow and unhappy that doesn't make you feel like you've kind of been robbed of your self-control and agency so if that means you're going to watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix and then you're going to go and read five chapters of your favorite book

and then you're going to have a conversation and then you would you're going to try a new recipe that you wanted to cook whatever it is it doesn't really matter what it is it just should be something that doesn't leave you feeling Hollow that's the only thing to ask yourself do I feel better happier like my life is more meaningful after this or do I feel worse off like I'm empty and that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling they feel kind of empty so so just find something else even if

it's on a screen that doesn't leave you feeling that way it's true I do feel empty yeah and it then makes you feel stupid for wasting that much time and if you add it up cumulatively over the years it's a large part of your life 20 years wait what yeah 20 years of your life is spent just scrolling on your looking at your phone it'll be about for most of us 20 years on average something like that 15 into 20 years we'll be we'll be doing this just looking at 20 second videos yeah Dr Alter

I mean what as a researcher what do you think when you hear that figure well I think one thing to think is imagine it's the end of your life you you've hopefully lived a very fulfilling long life you get to that point and then someone says would you like 20 extra years and the answer is no I'd rather have spent 20 years scrolling mindlessly no one is going to say that so I think when when you if the first step to fixing this problem is having people say I really want to change this that to

me is a good place to begin that idea that you are shortening your life effectively by 20 years or 15 years or however long it ends up being because you spend all this time consuming sort of eye candy mental candy by by scrolling I I think almost everyone would say when you zoom back assuming you have the self-control I think there are better things I could be doing with that time maybe I'll save a year or two for the scrolling but then that leaves me still 15 18 years to do other things you just basically

dropped a Grenade on any excuse that somebody would have that they don't have time or it's too late or I I couldn't possibly fit this thing in because you have all this found time is there a difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on the television in terms of the impact to your brain yeah so well the way you interact with those screens is very different right so when when you watch TV content it's just something that's kind of being visited upon you you're not interacting with it y so there are good

and bad parts to interacting with a screen if you're learning a language you're going to learn it less well on a TV than on a phone because you can interact with the phone okay if you are using a social media platform no one uses that social media on a screen like a TV because you can't have that bire relationship where you act on the thing and then it acts back on you right that's critical that's what goes on on phones that makes make it so immersive um so a TV screen is is less kind of

weaponized to to draw our time and attention away from us it gives us a little bit more agency that doesn't mean it's perfect you know if you're watching a show there's a cliffhanger and someone says to you just sit here for 10 seconds the next episode will begin that's where binge viewing comes from and we almost all do that right but what we do with our screens when we're on phones is I think much more difficult for us to resist you know I think I just got something that I'd never thought about before uh Dr

Alter which is that your brain is getting so many fast signals and messages from the ads to the popups to the notifications to you yourself switching between the texting and the email and search and what is getting fused together is a brain that now is constantly expecting this go go go and I had not thought about the fact that because if you're using your phone and you can interact with it so now you've also got your hands involved and there's that whole body of research around neurobics and marrying the the the physical movement and particularly

movements of your hands with new thought patterns and how that fires and wires your brain quicker like that to me makes so much sense that because you're actually typing and you're interacting with it you're programming your brain faster almost to expect short form I hear people also talking anecdotally like there's a rise in ADHD but it's actually a rise in your brain getting trained to be distracted yeah so I think what's happened is uh we live in an age of time contraction everything happens in really brief chunks everything's 5 Seconds long 10 seconds long it's

it's time is contracted if you go on a vacation to a beach and you spend a week doing nothing you get time dilation time suddenly works on a different scale you think of five minutes as no time at all whereas in the way we live Our Lives Many of us most of the time five minutes you could do a 100 things you could look at 100 videos there are a million things you could do in 5 minutes and that creates a sense of massive urgency for what purpose I don't know probably not a good one

for most of us most of the time so I think there's some value in in changing the scale of things in in going for a 4-Hour Drive I drove 12 hours there and back to see the eclipse where'd you go I went to Northern Vermont and it was incredible I drove 6 hours with a friend yeah we got out of the car for 5 minutes watched the eclipse got back in and drove home so it was 12 hours of driving for 3 minutes of magic but the one really interesting thing that did that was several

days ago now was it changed how I feel about time there's a hangover period where I'm like a few hours no problem not a problem at all I can focus on things for a few hours I did it for 12 hours the other day when do we ever do one thing for 12 hours it's just very rare so I think doing things that are extended and protracted is really valuable because it resets what you think of as a a kind of meaningful chunk of time well and this goes back to something that you also talked

about which is I guarantee that those five minutes that you probably spent at Burke Mountain right you know up in that area yeah exactly um that there was something about those five minutes that felt like five hours yeah and you use the word time dilation which means that you're stretching your own perception mhm M of being in the moment and you gave us a list of things like being in nature having plants or some sort of water element in your house meditation a conversation with somebody where you're really in the moment is a way for

you to actually slow down time yes and get important time back right so you also have this research it's very interesting it's this concept called stopping cues what does that mean yeah so stopping cues if you think about how we consumed information in the 20th century and the early 2 first everything had a natural end point to it these are known as stopping cues so you'd read a book and you'd get to the end of a chapter or the whole book you'd watch a TV show the credits would roll yes these were all gentle signals

that you probably wanted to do something different move on to the next thing and they were built into everything we did so those are called stopping cues now the thing about a lot of the tech we use is that tech companies have systematically eradicated those stopping cues they've removed them they've weeded them out so the bottomless feed that you get on social media platforms that is a good example of the absence of stopping cues so because we are humans who are creatures of inertia we just keep doing the same thing over and over until something

pushes us to the next thing in the absence of a Quee that says hey maybe you want to move on to the next thing we just keep going and that's a lot of why once we start using a social media platform there's no cue to move on the same way when you're on a slot machine there's no que to move on so we just keep going so some of my favorite cookies are pepp Farm yeah and they come in these stacks and these trays and when I clean out a whole tray the empty tray is

a stopping not to keep going um what is kind of your biggest takeaway after researching so much about how distracted we've become by our phones yeah so I think the biggest one is that the the simplest solution to this problem is actually an analog one which is to to cultivate habits where there are certain parts of the day that are sacred and free of screens I think that's very important and it's different for different people so it could be you know every day dinner time no screens we all put our phones in a cookie jar

we put a timer on we're not allowed to go into that jar for 30 30 minutes maybe that's one example it seems kind of psycho that we have to do this honestly it's totally ridiculous that we are in this position as consumers of this Tech to have to do it but we do but and it's because though and I think this is a really important piece of the research that you're explaining to us this isn't because you're weak it's because this technology is designed to keep you going that sort of emptiness that you described when

somebody's sitting in front of the slot machine where you're just sort of lulled into this state that that's why you have to have these stopping cues and you have to have these boundaries you know one of the things I'm curious about because you've researched this and you're also a father of two and you're married and you're teaching and so you're seeing students of different ages and you've seen these platforms change since you you know have been writing all of these books and doing this research yeah uh Dr Alter what does your morning routine look like

so one thing I try very hard to do and I'm better at this some mornings than others is to spend as much time after I wake up not looking at a screen as possible it's really use ful to kind of ease your way into the day by not immediately picking up the phone and looking at whatever's on the screen so that's one important thing um I have there are different days where I'm doing different things but usually the very beginning part of the day is with my kids and often my wife um and so that's

that's obviously a deeply connected time where you're discussing what we're going to have for breakfast and you know there are little conversations that happen they themselves are not necessarily full of meaning and philosophy and richness but there's a richness just to the kind of routine of of connecting over that period of the day and I think that's really useful if you live with someone else that is a time when some of us need a little bit of time to wake up and a coffee but once you get past that to connect I think is really

important and I try to do that as much as possible in the morning got it so if you could speak directly to the person who's been listening to this who's now panic-stricken yes that they're going to lose 20 years of their life looking at their phone and they're thinking about stopping cues and they're thinking about all of the amazing things that you've made us think about and want to try what do you think the one action if you had to say there's one thing I I really want you to do y what would it be

so I think the easiest thing you can do that will give you back years of your life is to take your device for an hour a day you pick the hour it could be in the morning could be in the afternoon could be in the evening put it in a drawer or a cookie jar put it somewhere make sure it's roughly the same time every day so it's a habit and if you do that for enough days you will literally give yourself back years of your life where you would have spent that time mindlessly scrolling

you're going to be doing something more enriching just do that one small thing to start so it it'll have a massive effect on your well-being wow Dr Adam alter thank you thank you thank you for being here with us thank you for having me you heard him I want you to get 20 years of your life back and I want you to use that time to create a more meaningful life for your because you deserve that and in case no one else tells you today let me be the one to say I love you and

I believe in you and I believe in your ability to change your life and to use all of these amazing things that you learn today to help you do that all righty I'll see you in a few days and I know that you want more videos to watch more inspiration I'm going to recommend a video in just a second but first I want to say thank you thank you thank you for subscribing to the channel it takes a second it's one way you can support me me and give back to our team it really helps

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