Recently, my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here, Rob Mohr, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first. And then coming back to social media has actually turned out to be more challenging.
Huh. And you really experienced the friction coming back the other way. And then one experiences the lack of friction, and that's where it gets scary.
It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt, the friction leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because, I think, of course, many people listening are, you know, have work that they really need to focus on. They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, et cetera.
I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life, you know? It provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects. But I guess through the lens of the, let's just call it the Cal Newportian lens, one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.
Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void, right? You have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about, right? I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life, right?
Social media, and before this, it was other things, right, there was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of, essentially, putting a screen over that like gaping void. And it like, just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life.
And so it is true, if you just rip it out, you see the void. And that's really difficult, right? I mean, 'cause I did this experiment for one of my books.
I ran an experiment with 1,600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days. 30 days. 30 days, right?
These are young people, old people? A whole mix, a whole mix, right? So not just university students.
I recruited them from my newsletter readership, so they weren't university students. And it wasn't formal research, it was, you know, I put out the call, right? So this is not randomly sampled, right?
But I put out the call and I said, "Here, I'm going to walk you through this. " And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went.
And this was like, the number one thing I heard was, it's really hard at first, right? And so, who are the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who didn't? The ones who didn't succeed, tended to just try to white knuckle it, just be like, "I don't like how much I'm using social media, I'm just going to stop because it's bad and I don't want to do a bad thing.
I'm just going to like, you know, hold onto the table with white knuckles. " They wouldn't make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly, aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days.
So it's like, go learn new hobbies, join things right away, get like really structured about your day, get into exercise again, learn how to knit again. A lot of people said, "Oh, I forgot how fun libraries were. Like, you can go into this building and like, all the books are free and you could just grab whatever.
And it's okay if you don't like the book because you didn't have to pay for it. I'm going out with friends again. Okay, every week I'm going to have, you know, we're going to have drinks with this person and every Thursday morning I'm going to go running with this person.
" The people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative through self-reflection experimentation, they lasted the 30 days and beyond, right? And so then I came to realize like, oh, I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs. These tools can give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them.
I'm a social being, I need to be connected to people. Well, I'm texting and like doing comments on social media, it sort of touches that a little bit, just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely, but it's not really fulfilling that. I have a need to, like, see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world, humans want to do this.
Well, I'm, you know, posting these things and people are responding, it's sort of this simulacrum of real creation. So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable, right? And so what happens is if you remove that, you have to actually fill those things the right way.
So now I'm not socializing on social media, but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people. I'm feeling the social void in the right way, now I don't really feel like I need to go back. I'm actually making my intentions manifest, I'm learning skills and building things.
Now this sort of pseudo construction and collective attention economy of social media, I'll post this and you'll like it, I don't like this, I don't need that anymore to fill that void. So it's like you have to fill the void first. So, you know, five years ago I wrote a book, it was about reforming this part of your life.
And a lot of the book had nothing to do with technology, but about how to actually just rebuild parts of your life. And on my podcast, honestly, like one of the big topics we talk about, which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus in a distracted world, is this thing we call the deep life, which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101. And it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it, but on the other hand, it's not, because mine is the podcast people go to when they're fed up with the digital world.
And it turns out if you don't get the analog world working right for you, you need something to avoid staring to that void, and the digital world will do that well enough. It's like just good enough to keep life tolerable. Thank you for tuning into the Huberman Lab Clips channel.
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