August 16, 2024 • 27 mins
How often do you check your phone daily?
Do you feel anxious when you’re away from your phone?
Today, Jay addresses the growing concern of excessive phone and internet usage, exploring its detrimental effects on mental and physical health. He begins by explaining how activities like swiping, liking, and commenting on social media provide our brains with dopamine hits, which can create a cycle of dependency and compulsive behavior. Despite the benefits of technology, such as increased connectivity and access to information, many people feel less connected and more distracted, anxious, and impatient.
Jay elaborates on the neurological aspects of dopamine and its role in pleasure-seeking behaviors, emphasizing that problems arise when we expect constant rewards from our online activities. He draws parallels between the brain's response to food and its response to digital consumption, advocating for a balanced approach that avoids overindulgence in either.
In this episode, you'll learn:
How to become more conscious of your internet use
How to have wifi-free meals
How to replace morning phone use with healthier habits
How to stay mindful when using technology
How to engage in a cell phone detox
The ultimate goal is to create a healthier, more intentional relationship with technology, leading to a more fulfilling and balanced life.
With Love and Gratitude,
Jay Shetty
What We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
01:46 On Your Phone All the Time?
05:32 Losing Control Over Phone Use
06:19 Six Steps to Phone Detox
07:01 Dopamine
11:23 People Aren’t As Happy As Before
13:39 How Often Do You Check Your Phone?
14:27 Cortisol
17:26 Step 1: Become More Conscious
19:19 Step 2: Wait an Hour Before Going Online
21:18 Step 3: The WiFi-Free Meal
23:45 Step 4: Watch What You Consume Online
24:54 Step 5: Limit Potions
25:48 Step 6: Intermittent Fasting
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Every time we go online, and every time we swipe
or like something, or buy something or comment or hand
pick an emoji to send to our friend, our brains
experience a little bump of dopamine. Again, there's nothing wrong
with that, so long as we know what's happening. The
number one health and wellness podcast, Say Sety Jay Setty. Hey, everyone,
(00:27):
welcome back to On Purpose, the number one mental health
podcast in the world. Being here is an investment in
your mental health as we dive into incredible conversations and
insights to help you become happier, healthier, and more healed
with the world's leading experts. Now, let's be honest for
a second. How many of you feel like you've just
(00:50):
been on your phone too much recently? Right, You've been
sitting there and sometimes you're even doom scrolling and thinking
why am I here? What am I doing? Maybe you've
even thrown your phone, feeling a sense of anger or
disgust with how you've spent your time. And I think
all of us can relate. There's been moments where I've
(01:11):
thought afterwards to myself, I wish I was more present
with my friends. I wish I was more present with
my family. Why am I constantly needing to be distracted
from my phone even when I don't need it? Right,
sometimes you're like, I know I don't need it. I
know I don't get anything from it, but it still
keeps pulling me back. It keeps pulling me in, It
(01:32):
keeps sucking me in, even if I don't want to
be there. And I think that's what we all experience,
is this almost hopeless, helpless relationship. And that's why today's
episode is called the cell phone diet or the cell
phone detox. These are the devices through which most of
(01:52):
us make our way online. Over the past few years,
I'm guessing that we've read as many articles about the
miracles of technology as we have about some of the
issues it's brought up for us as humans. That despite
this wonderful newfound global connectivity, we have never felt less
connected to friends and loved ones. How despite having more
(02:15):
knowledge at our disposal than in any time in history,
we have never been worse informed. How at home and
at work, we're losing the ability to focus or concentrate,
that we've gotten more impatient and impulsive. The ad to
carte nature of the internet, where you want what you
want when you want, can sometimes even trickle over to
(02:35):
our real lives. A friend once confess to me that sometimes,
when he finds himself in a traffic jam, without even
thinking about it, he'll reach for his phone, not to
change the music or refreshes GPS, or to start a
new podcast, but to click himself out of the traffic jam,
as if his phone somehow featured a magic button that,
(02:57):
with a single click, could transport him home. One of
the most interesting things about being alive in twenty twenty
four is that there are hundreds of millions of people
in our midst, possibly your own parents and certainly your grandparents,
who remember a time before cell phones and Wi Fi existed.
They're dealing with two versions of reality, then and now,
(03:21):
And because we're always prone to see the past as
better than it was, it goes without saying that the
pre internet error was better, filled with space and silence
and stillness and opportunities for contemplation. Before long, the global
population will be made up of people who know only
one technological reality now. By now, we've also figured out
(03:44):
various ways we can make our phones and the impulse
to go online less attractive and alluring, less of a temptation.
We can turn off our notifications. Instead of our phones
ringing or chirping or making cricket noises, we can make
them vibrate with a little fiddling in our settings. We
can even turn our screens gray, which gets rid of
(04:05):
the visual triggers that make our phones look a lot
like a big bag of colorful candy. Maybe you've tried
one or more of these things, but you still feel
your reliance on the Internet is unhealthy and imbalanced, That
even when you're not online, you're thinking about being online,
That on those rare times your phone isn't within reach,
(04:26):
you're thinking, where is it? Why do I feel so
weirdly incomplete? This episode came about because of the many
messages I get from all of you who feel you've
lost control over your phone use, who don't trust yourself
to monitor how much time you spend online, who get
anxious whenever you're separated from your phone or a Wi
(04:49):
Fi signal for more than a few minutes, who are
coping with feelings of helplessness and shame. This episode is
for anyone who thinks I should really get my phone
in Wi Fi addiction under control one of these days,
Except that day never seems to come. It's okay, though,
because you're not alone. Everyone around you, from your thirteen
(05:11):
year old cousin to your seventy five year old lant
all the way through to me, seems to be wrestling
with this same issue. The six steps of the cell
phone detox are loosely repurposed from the steps you might
take if you embark on an actual diet involving food
and drink. As with any new regimen we start, you
(05:31):
want to banish any thoughts of overnight change or success.
Stop trying to change in twenty four hours. If you
think you can build or break a habit in the
next twenty four hours, you're setting yourself up for failure.
The goal, as with any new plan we try out,
(05:52):
is to adapt one or more of these steps as
time goes on, in the hopes that before long a
new habit will be in. I want to begin by
acknowledging that our brains have a lot of heavyweight chemicals
working on their behalf. There's gabba, glutamate, oxytocin, adrenaline, neuropenephrine,
the list goes on. But of all these chemicals and hormones,
(06:15):
the brain favors four of them, the most in no order.
There's serotonin, which helps balance out our moods, and dolphins,
which are our body's natural painkillers, which our brains generate
when we fall in love, and that promotes trust and
intimacy between partners and also among new parents and their infants.
(06:36):
Of course, the best, most pleasure promoting chemical of these
four is dopamine, the brain's pre eminent reward and pleasure zone.
But dopamine isn't always well understood. A lot of people
are under the impression that dopamine provides pleasure, that it
gives us some mental or physical high, that in that way,
(06:56):
it's like a drink or a drug. The truth is
it doesn't. Instead of making us feel good, dopamine operates
in our brain by motivating us to go out and
seek pleasure, whether it's in the form of romance or
going out to dinner with a good friend, or having
a few drinks or going on a long bike ride
in a beautiful landscape. There's nothing wrong with seeking pleasure.
(07:20):
In fact, it's part of the wiring of our brains.
Problems only arise when we go overboard in that pleasure
seeking behavior and begin to expect rewards and another shot
of dopamine every hour of the day. This is because
of the very nature of dopamine. The more we seek
out pleasure seeking activities falling in love or anticipating sex
(07:43):
or romance, or a yoga class or a night out
on the town or even an upcoming vacation, our brains,
whose job it is to maintain homeostasis otherwise known as balance,
compensate for this blizzard of dopamine by making us feel
flatter and even a little bit depressed whenever we're not
engaged in that thing. Think about it. It's mind blowing.
(08:07):
I don't know about you, but in my experience, no
one likes feeling flat. It's almost as though without dopamine,
our own screens turn gray. We don't feel like doing much,
and the things we feel like doing don't seem exciting.
In response, most of us decide consciously or unconsciously to
re engage with the same activity we now know brings us,
(08:30):
if not pleasure, then the anticipation of pleasure. The thing
about most pleasure seeking activities is that they have a
built in time limit. We can only exercise for a
certain amount of time before our bodies tell us we've
had enough and we need a cold glass of water
and a shower. If we go out and drink more
than we should, our bodies and brains generally respond by
(08:54):
making our eyelids heavier until at least we fall asleep.
But as everyone knows, the internet is a twenty four
hour bizarre and our phones are always on the Web
never goes dark, never closes down, and never takes a vacation.
And don't misunderstand me, the internet can be a completely
magical place. It's like a city where the possibilities for
(09:15):
window shopping and people watching are so varied and interesting
that we could spend the rest of our lives there.
But if we do, it can have consequences on both
our mental and physical well being. This leads me back
to dopamine. Every time we go online, and every time
we swipe or like something, or buy something, or comment
(09:37):
or hand pick an emoji to send to our friend,
our brains experience a little bump of dopamine. This tells
us our reward system has been stimulated. Again. There's nothing
wrong with that, so long as we know what's happening,
and so long as we keep our Internet use intentional
and conscious, but that's not always easy or possible. For
(10:00):
many of us. Our Internet use is automatic and unconscious,
putting us in a place where we need more and
more dopamine just to feel normal, just to feel like ourselves.
Is there a connection between our dependence on our phones
and the internet and our declining levels of happiness. No
one can say for sure, but the answer is probably
a bittersweet yes. According to the World Happiness Report, humans
(10:25):
just aren't as happy as they used to be, especially
people who live in hire income countries. This might have
to do with that flattening effect I mentioned earlier, and
how when we're not engaged online we feel not exactly unhappy,
but not entirely happy either, as though we're missing something,
as though we're somehow sidelined or not at the center
(10:46):
of something we know exists, we just can't put our
finger on what that thing is. The Internet diet is
an attempt to provide at least the beginning of a
solution to this problem. Why do I refer to it
as a diet because I'm reminded of something that a
high school teacher friend told me recently. At the end
of each semester, my friend gives midterm and final exams
(11:08):
to his students. No cell phones are allowed in the classroom,
of course, while the students take their tests. In fact,
before the exam gets underway, the students all write down
their initials on their phones and place them in a
box next to the teacher's desk. When the exam ends,
they line up to collect them. But the interesting part
of this story is when my friend described the moment
(11:30):
his students were reunited with their phones, they clutched them
as if they were food and they hadn't had anything
to eat or drink for days. They appeared ravenous, and
the behaviors they then carried out, including checking their texts
and their inboxes going on to this and that website,
made my friend think that for his students, their phones
(11:51):
were a form of food or sustenance, a way to
keep hunger at bay. When you think about it, there's
a strong connection between food and the internet. Humans can't
live without eating, and today the ninety four percent of
all Americans with access to the Internet will tell you
that life without Wi Fi would be unimaginable. Without GPS,
(12:12):
how would we get from one location to another without
social media and text messages. How would we keep up
with friends and loved ones who live nearby and far
away without the alarm clock on our phones. How would
we manage to wake up in the morning. How would
we make lunch, your dinner reservations or split the bill
after a night out, or pay for groceries, or take
(12:33):
photos of videos or check out the weather conditions in Dubai, Dublin,
or Miami. According to the results of one study, I read,
Americans check their cell phones approximately one hundred and forty
four times a day. Even if we don't open our phones,
we make physical contact with our phones on an average
of two thousand, six hundred times a day just to
(12:55):
make sure they're snug in our position. All in all,
on average, this study says we spend nearly four and
a half hours every day on our phones. But along
with the reliable hits of dopamine that get released every
time we punch in our code or here, swish or ding,
we also get a bump of cortisol, the chemical that
(13:15):
enters our bloodstream whenever we're about to go into high
gear and take on a new day, or in this case,
when we're about to come face to face with what
being online means. As longtime listeners of this podcast know,
Cortisol is the steroid hormone produced by our two adrenal
glands which percha top our kidneys. Cortisol is the hormone
(13:38):
that gives rise to the fight or flight impulse. But
since most of us aren't about to get into a
wrestling match, what ends up happening is that the energy
supplied by all that cortisol sticks around inside our bodies.
It stresses our muscles, our digestion, our breathing, and can
even negatively affect our immune systems. What can sssimbly relieve
(14:00):
these high levels of cortisol more dopamine, Because, after all,
when we feel stressed or dread going online for fear,
we might see a text or email we don't like.
Our brains might as well balance out that fear by
seeing if they can anticipate a positive reward Before we
even know it. We've been online for an hour, two hours,
(14:21):
or even longer. The internet, or rather the brain, has
gotten the best of us. It's tough to resist it.
We might as well throw in the towel, right. The
good news is that the six steps of the Internet
diet are focused on gradually reducing the amount of time
you spend online or gazing at your phone. Following these steps,
(14:42):
or even half of them, and you'll likely find yourself
with significantly reduced anxiety levels, along with an increasing clarity,
a greater, truer sense of perspective about yourself and the
world around you, a deeper connection, and a deeper presence
when you're a loan or surrounded by friends and loved ones,
(15:02):
as you are now genuinely listening to what they're saying
instead of quietly fretting that you need to respond to
your latest text or email. Lastly, it's safe to say
that the six steps of the Internet detox will increase
your capacity for gratitude for your own life, for our
five senses, for what you do have instead of what
you don't, which we all know the internet is well
(15:25):
known for eliciting. Before we begin, remember that, as with
any behavioral change, the most important thing is to start small,
take one step and see how you feel afterwards. All
or nothing thinking doesn't work here, but all or nothing
thinking never works. See if you can check off these
steps one after the next, and take your time as
(15:48):
you do it too. I'm not proposing you can cancel
your WiFi or trade in your smartphone for a flip
phone or a landline. What I am suggesting is that
you begin to think about your phone and being online
as the technological equivalents of the food you eat and
the liquid you put inside your body. Most of us
are careful about our nutrition and the ingredients in our foods.
(16:09):
So all that I'm proposing is you give the same care,
attention and respect to how you feed your brain, which
means not overwhelming it with the digital equivalent of ultra
processed ingredients additives transfats, potato, chips, salt, and sugar. Step
one of the Internet dyet is simple, become more conscious.
(16:30):
All I'm asking is that you become more aware of
your Internet use, and that you do it without any
judgment whatsoever. It's a fact that for many of us,
our phones have become almost like physical extensions of ourselves,
an extra hand or foot. One study I read reported
that eighty nine percent of Americans reach for their phones
within the first ten minutes of waking up. When you
(16:51):
reach for your phone in the morning, what are you feeling,
What are you looking for by wanting to reach for
your phone? What are you trying to achieve. Does it
make you anxious? And can we become more aware of that?
What is the reason not just that you reach for
your phone, but why are you doing it? What are
you seeking in the morning, and how can we substitute
(17:12):
it later on? Our phones are like mirrors. They reflect
us back to ourselves. They have a lot of valuable
information to tell us about who we are and what
it is we want. You might tell yourself, of course
I reach for my phone every morning, doesn't everyone. But
that's different from taking a step back from the routine
of it and asking why. For example, you might feel
(17:34):
that while you were asleep, people are having fun without you,
and you hate what it feels like to be excluded.
You might begin the morning feeling bored or sad or understimulated,
and consciously or unconsciously decide that the only way to
solve that feeling is by going online. Or you might
wake up feeling lonely or isolated and reach for your
phone instead of getting in touch with a friend and
(17:56):
making a plan to meet them later for coffee or
a drink. You might worry that a crisis happened overnight,
whether in your workplace or somewhere in the world, and
you're the last person to know about it, which makes
you worry your friends might not see you as hypervigilant
and responsible and in charge. Again, the most important part
of step one is observing your behavior without judgment. That
(18:18):
increased consciousness leads me to step two, wait an hour
before going online, but rather you sitting around wondering when
the hour is up. Step two proposes that instead of
going online, you replace that impulse with a better, healthier habit.
You could take that time to meditate or make a
list of the things in your life you're most grateful for.
(18:41):
You could listen to beautiful music, or read a few
chapters of a book, or do both at the same time.
In my experience, from a reading perspective, being online is
like taking one hundred quick showers a day. We're scanning
headlines and perusing emails and texts, but are we really
reading them. It's probably nearer the truth to say that
the only thing we're doing is scanning pixelated words. This
(19:05):
is why the early morning can be a fantastic time
to delve deeply into a book, as opposed to a
two minute shower. Reading a book is like syncing into
a bath tub. It's a form of time travel as
well as an exercise and empathy. In this way, you
can give your brain the opportunity not just to awaken naturally,
but to deepen your understanding of the world around you.
(19:27):
It doesn't need to be reading a whole chapter. You
can read a quote, a paragraph of your favorite book scripture.
It could also be listening to something that motivates you,
that inspires you. Now, what if you rely on your
phone as an alarm clock. Well, first recognize that our
phones are intentionally engineered so that they're indispensable. Like big
(19:48):
box department stores, they are for us anything anyone could
ever need. There are mailboxes, our phone centers, our bookshelves,
our jukeboxes, our maps, our photo albums, and our memory keepers.
There are sources of news and friendship. Add a tape
measure and an alarm clock, and your phone truly becomes
what it was designed to be, a one stop shopping destination.
(20:10):
But that doesn't mean you can't go someplace else. In
this case, why not go and buy a real alarm clock.
It's as simple as that. Step three of the Internet
diet or detox involves another deceptively simple change. I call
it the Wi Fi free meal, and it's exactly what
it sounds like. A Wi Fi free meal is one
where you make a conscious decision to enjoy your breakfast, lunch,
(20:32):
or dinner while keeping your cell phone in your pocket
or very yet in another room Entirely. This means that
instead of using one hand to hold your fork or
spoon and the other to scan for online information or
browse social media, you're devoting one hundred percent of your
attention and energy to the food and drink in front
of you. I evaders suggests that we chew morsels of
(20:56):
food sixteen to thirty two times. I promise you've if
you try this, you'll forget that you ever had a
phone in your hand. It's a really hyper mindfulness practice.
For many of us, this will feel strange at first,
as we've gotten into the habit of always doing two
things at the same time. Shopping while gazing at our phones,
for example, so we can see if another store offers
(21:18):
a better price, taking a walk while listening to music,
or driving a car while our GPS tells us which
turn or road to take. In step three, I'm suggesting
you do one thing at a time monotasking or solo
tasking as it's called, and in this case, it involves
eating and focusing on the textures and flavors of that food.
(21:39):
And if you find yourself racing through the meal because
your brain is busy anticipating the dopamine hit that's certain
to arrive the moment you set down your fork and
pick up your phone. Then set limits on yourself. Tell
yourself that during the next fifteen minutes that you set
aside for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you will not engage
with your phone, and you will not go online false stop.
(22:01):
The effects of taking that time to eat a meal
will surprise you. You'll find that you eat more slowly and conscientiously,
that you chew more properly, that you digest better, that
you appreciate your food more, and that you become more
conscious of your body's hunger cues and the effects food
has on your feelings. Step three of the Internet diet
(22:21):
has another strong thing to recommend. A study that was
done in Brazil a few years ago concluded that using
our phones while we eat increases our caloric intake by
almost fifteen percent. This means that even though staring at
our phone when we're dining out in a restaurant makes
us look busy and occupied. It can have real life
(22:41):
ramifications on our health and well being. In step four
of the Internet diet, we scale things up a little.
This time. I want to make a close analogy to
the food and drink we put in our bodies and
the content we take in online, because to my mind,
they're very closely related. By now, we all know some
foods just on that good for us, whereas certain other
(23:02):
foods promote good health, increase vitality and longer lasting energy
in the first group of things like sugar, salt, and
trans fats, and in the second group you'll always find
fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, nuts, and lagoons. Let me also
add that while most of us are aware that potato
chips and buttery popcorn aren't good for us, sometimes we
(23:23):
just feel like having a snack, and there's no harm
in that, so long as we don't do it every
day for the rest of our lives. The same goes
for the Internet. A lot of websites and digital apps
are the digital equivalent of a trayfall of Nacho's or
a chocolate milkshake or you can fill in the blank
and name your favorite guilty or not so guilty pleasure.
Junk content is harder to digest, just like junk food,
(23:47):
and the more junk content we expose ourselves to, the
unhealthier our minds get. Step five of the Internet diet
is limit portions. I touched on this already in step two,
which asked you to wait an hour after you awakened
before you check your phone, and also in step three.
Step five takes this idea even further. We all know
what it means to limit our portions when we're preparing
(24:09):
our or serving food. Studies have shown over time that
our plates and cups and glasses have got larger, and
so to have our portion sizes. You could equate that
to how the amount of data that our phones can
process now increases all the time. The amount of memory
and storage our phones have increases over time, which means
naturally our portions and desire to consume content also increases. Equivalently,
(24:34):
remember when your data used to run out, Remember when
there used to be a cap on the minutes you
could speak to someone on your phone. That's all gone
away now, and therefore there is no portion control. If
you've managed the first five steps of the Internet detox.
Step six probably won't come as a shock. It's intimate
and fasting. We're probably all familiar with that phrase as
it relates to food and placing boundaries on when we eat.
(24:57):
In step six, I propose you adopt this same idea
to your own online behavior. For example, one of the
best known intimate and fasting plans around is what's known
as the five point two plan. That's the one where
you eat as you normally would for five days a week,
but every Saturday and Sunday reduce your food intake into
a single five hundred calorie meal. Try this same method
(25:18):
with your own online use. Unless there's a pressing workplace
emergency where you have no choice but to remain reachable
over the weekend, why not start by turning off your
phone every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Instead of spending your
time off loosely tethered to technology, why not do something
that has nothing to do with it. Go outside, go hiking,
go kayaking, ride your bike, play two sets of tennis
(25:42):
or pickleball, or even three. The more time you spend
without your phone and without access to a Wi Fi signal,
the more confident you will be that you can regain
control of your time, energy, mental and physical health. Just
as we learn to eat when we're hungry and quit
eating when we're full, the internet die. It also teaches
us to take in information online when we want, and
(26:04):
not just because it's there or because we have nothing
better to do. By creating boundaries around your own online use,
you'll start to experience a new feeling of control and
authority across all aspects of your life. But remember, start small,
go step by step. Too much too soon, and the
brain's hypothalamus will act the same way it does when
(26:24):
we don't have enough to eat. What we're really trying
to do in any lifestyle change is create a new
balance relationship between the time we spend online and the
websites we ingest that are authentic, healthy and nutritious, which
in turn will lead to a new relationship with ourselves,
our friends, and the world around us. Thank you so
(26:45):
much for listening. Make sure you pass this on, maybe
even pair up with a friend to be accountable for
the new cell phone detox And remember I'm always in
your corner and I'm forever rooting for you. Thank you,
so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it,
you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort
(27:05):
is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking
your hidden potential. If you know you want to be
more and achieve more this year, go check it out
right now. You set a goal today, you achieve it
in six months, and then by the time it happens,
it's almost a relief. There's no sense of meaning and purpose.
You sort of expected it, and you would have been
disappointed if it didn't happen.
Every time we go online, and every time we swipe
or like something, or buy something or comment or hand
pick an emoji to send to our friend, our brains
experience a little bump of dopamine. Again, there's nothing wrong
with that, so long as we know what's happening. The
number one health and wellness podcast, Say Sety Jay Setty. Hey, everyone,
(00:27):
welcome back to On Purpose, the number one mental health
podcast in the world. Being here is an investment in
your mental health as we dive into incredible conversations and
insights to help you become happier, healthier, and more healed
with the world's leading experts. Now, let's be honest for
a second. How many of you feel like you've just
(00:50):
been on your phone too much recently? Right, You've been
sitting there and sometimes you're even doom scrolling and thinking
why am I here? What am I doing? Maybe you've
even thrown your phone, feeling a sense of anger or
disgust with how you've spent your time. And I think
all of us can relate. There's been moments where I've
(01:11):
thought afterwards to myself, I wish I was more present
with my friends. I wish I was more present with
my family. Why am I constantly needing to be distracted
from my phone even when I don't need it? Right,
sometimes you're like, I know I don't need it. I
know I don't get anything from it, but it still
keeps pulling me back. It keeps pulling me in, It
(01:32):
keeps sucking me in, even if I don't want to
be there. And I think that's what we all experience,
is this almost hopeless, helpless relationship. And that's why today's
episode is called the cell phone diet or the cell
phone detox. These are the devices through which most of
(01:52):
us make our way online. Over the past few years,
I'm guessing that we've read as many articles about the
miracles of technology as we have about some of the
issues it's brought up for us as humans. That despite
this wonderful newfound global connectivity, we have never felt less
connected to friends and loved ones. How despite having more
(02:15):
knowledge at our disposal than in any time in history,
we have never been worse informed. How at home and
at work, we're losing the ability to focus or concentrate,
that we've gotten more impatient and impulsive. The ad to
carte nature of the internet, where you want what you
want when you want, can sometimes even trickle over to
(02:35):
our real lives. A friend once confess to me that sometimes,
when he finds himself in a traffic jam, without even
thinking about it, he'll reach for his phone, not to
change the music or refreshes GPS, or to start a
new podcast, but to click himself out of the traffic jam,
as if his phone somehow featured a magic button that,
(02:57):
with a single click, could transport him home. One of
the most interesting things about being alive in twenty twenty
four is that there are hundreds of millions of people
in our midst, possibly your own parents and certainly your grandparents,
who remember a time before cell phones and Wi Fi existed.
They're dealing with two versions of reality, then and now,
(03:21):
And because we're always prone to see the past as
better than it was, it goes without saying that the
pre internet error was better, filled with space and silence
and stillness and opportunities for contemplation. Before long, the global
population will be made up of people who know only
one technological reality now. By now, we've also figured out
(03:44):
various ways we can make our phones and the impulse
to go online less attractive and alluring, less of a temptation.
We can turn off our notifications. Instead of our phones
ringing or chirping or making cricket noises, we can make
them vibrate with a little fiddling in our settings. We
can even turn our screens gray, which gets rid of
(04:05):
the visual triggers that make our phones look a lot
like a big bag of colorful candy. Maybe you've tried
one or more of these things, but you still feel
your reliance on the Internet is unhealthy and imbalanced, That
even when you're not online, you're thinking about being online,
That on those rare times your phone isn't within reach,
(04:26):
you're thinking, where is it? Why do I feel so
weirdly incomplete? This episode came about because of the many
messages I get from all of you who feel you've
lost control over your phone use, who don't trust yourself
to monitor how much time you spend online, who get
anxious whenever you're separated from your phone or a Wi
(04:49):
Fi signal for more than a few minutes, who are
coping with feelings of helplessness and shame. This episode is
for anyone who thinks I should really get my phone
in Wi Fi addiction under control one of these days,
Except that day never seems to come. It's okay, though,
because you're not alone. Everyone around you, from your thirteen
(05:11):
year old cousin to your seventy five year old lant
all the way through to me, seems to be wrestling
with this same issue. The six steps of the cell
phone detox are loosely repurposed from the steps you might
take if you embark on an actual diet involving food
and drink. As with any new regimen we start, you
(05:31):
want to banish any thoughts of overnight change or success.
Stop trying to change in twenty four hours. If you
think you can build or break a habit in the
next twenty four hours, you're setting yourself up for failure.
The goal, as with any new plan we try out,
(05:52):
is to adapt one or more of these steps as
time goes on, in the hopes that before long a
new habit will be in. I want to begin by
acknowledging that our brains have a lot of heavyweight chemicals
working on their behalf. There's gabba, glutamate, oxytocin, adrenaline, neuropenephrine,
the list goes on. But of all these chemicals and hormones,
(06:15):
the brain favors four of them, the most in no order.
There's serotonin, which helps balance out our moods, and dolphins,
which are our body's natural painkillers, which our brains generate
when we fall in love, and that promotes trust and
intimacy between partners and also among new parents and their infants.
(06:36):
Of course, the best, most pleasure promoting chemical of these
four is dopamine, the brain's pre eminent reward and pleasure zone.
But dopamine isn't always well understood. A lot of people
are under the impression that dopamine provides pleasure, that it
gives us some mental or physical high, that in that way,
(06:56):
it's like a drink or a drug. The truth is
it doesn't. Instead of making us feel good, dopamine operates
in our brain by motivating us to go out and
seek pleasure, whether it's in the form of romance or
going out to dinner with a good friend, or having
a few drinks or going on a long bike ride
in a beautiful landscape. There's nothing wrong with seeking pleasure.
(07:20):
In fact, it's part of the wiring of our brains.
Problems only arise when we go overboard in that pleasure
seeking behavior and begin to expect rewards and another shot
of dopamine every hour of the day. This is because
of the very nature of dopamine. The more we seek
out pleasure seeking activities falling in love or anticipating sex
(07:43):
or romance, or a yoga class or a night out
on the town or even an upcoming vacation, our brains,
whose job it is to maintain homeostasis otherwise known as balance,
compensate for this blizzard of dopamine by making us feel
flatter and even a little bit depressed whenever we're not
engaged in that thing. Think about it. It's mind blowing.
(08:07):
I don't know about you, but in my experience, no
one likes feeling flat. It's almost as though without dopamine,
our own screens turn gray. We don't feel like doing much,
and the things we feel like doing don't seem exciting.
In response, most of us decide consciously or unconsciously to
re engage with the same activity we now know brings us,
(08:30):
if not pleasure, then the anticipation of pleasure. The thing
about most pleasure seeking activities is that they have a
built in time limit. We can only exercise for a
certain amount of time before our bodies tell us we've
had enough and we need a cold glass of water
and a shower. If we go out and drink more
than we should, our bodies and brains generally respond by
(08:54):
making our eyelids heavier until at least we fall asleep.
But as everyone knows, the internet is a twenty four
hour bizarre and our phones are always on the Web
never goes dark, never closes down, and never takes a vacation.
And don't misunderstand me, the internet can be a completely
magical place. It's like a city where the possibilities for
(09:15):
window shopping and people watching are so varied and interesting
that we could spend the rest of our lives there.
But if we do, it can have consequences on both
our mental and physical well being. This leads me back
to dopamine. Every time we go online, and every time
we swipe or like something, or buy something, or comment
(09:37):
or hand pick an emoji to send to our friend,
our brains experience a little bump of dopamine. This tells
us our reward system has been stimulated. Again. There's nothing
wrong with that, so long as we know what's happening,
and so long as we keep our Internet use intentional
and conscious, but that's not always easy or possible. For
(10:00):
many of us. Our Internet use is automatic and unconscious,
putting us in a place where we need more and
more dopamine just to feel normal, just to feel like ourselves.
Is there a connection between our dependence on our phones
and the internet and our declining levels of happiness. No
one can say for sure, but the answer is probably
a bittersweet yes. According to the World Happiness Report, humans
(10:25):
just aren't as happy as they used to be, especially
people who live in hire income countries. This might have
to do with that flattening effect I mentioned earlier, and
how when we're not engaged online we feel not exactly unhappy,
but not entirely happy either, as though we're missing something,
as though we're somehow sidelined or not at the center
(10:46):
of something we know exists, we just can't put our
finger on what that thing is. The Internet diet is
an attempt to provide at least the beginning of a
solution to this problem. Why do I refer to it
as a diet because I'm reminded of something that a
high school teacher friend told me recently. At the end
of each semester, my friend gives midterm and final exams
(11:08):
to his students. No cell phones are allowed in the classroom,
of course, while the students take their tests. In fact,
before the exam gets underway, the students all write down
their initials on their phones and place them in a
box next to the teacher's desk. When the exam ends,
they line up to collect them. But the interesting part
of this story is when my friend described the moment
(11:30):
his students were reunited with their phones, they clutched them
as if they were food and they hadn't had anything
to eat or drink for days. They appeared ravenous, and
the behaviors they then carried out, including checking their texts
and their inboxes going on to this and that website,
made my friend think that for his students, their phones
(11:51):
were a form of food or sustenance, a way to
keep hunger at bay. When you think about it, there's
a strong connection between food and the internet. Humans can't
live without eating, and today the ninety four percent of
all Americans with access to the Internet will tell you
that life without Wi Fi would be unimaginable. Without GPS,
(12:12):
how would we get from one location to another without
social media and text messages. How would we keep up
with friends and loved ones who live nearby and far
away without the alarm clock on our phones. How would
we manage to wake up in the morning. How would
we make lunch, your dinner reservations or split the bill
after a night out, or pay for groceries, or take
(12:33):
photos of videos or check out the weather conditions in Dubai, Dublin,
or Miami. According to the results of one study, I read,
Americans check their cell phones approximately one hundred and forty
four times a day. Even if we don't open our phones,
we make physical contact with our phones on an average
of two thousand, six hundred times a day just to
(12:55):
make sure they're snug in our position. All in all,
on average, this study says we spend nearly four and
a half hours every day on our phones. But along
with the reliable hits of dopamine that get released every
time we punch in our code or here, swish or ding,
we also get a bump of cortisol, the chemical that
(13:15):
enters our bloodstream whenever we're about to go into high
gear and take on a new day, or in this case,
when we're about to come face to face with what
being online means. As longtime listeners of this podcast know,
Cortisol is the steroid hormone produced by our two adrenal
glands which percha top our kidneys. Cortisol is the hormone
(13:38):
that gives rise to the fight or flight impulse. But
since most of us aren't about to get into a
wrestling match, what ends up happening is that the energy
supplied by all that cortisol sticks around inside our bodies.
It stresses our muscles, our digestion, our breathing, and can
even negatively affect our immune systems. What can sssimbly relieve
(14:00):
these high levels of cortisol more dopamine, Because, after all,
when we feel stressed or dread going online for fear,
we might see a text or email we don't like.
Our brains might as well balance out that fear by
seeing if they can anticipate a positive reward Before we
even know it. We've been online for an hour, two hours,
(14:21):
or even longer. The internet, or rather the brain, has
gotten the best of us. It's tough to resist it.
We might as well throw in the towel, right. The
good news is that the six steps of the Internet
diet are focused on gradually reducing the amount of time
you spend online or gazing at your phone. Following these steps,
(14:42):
or even half of them, and you'll likely find yourself
with significantly reduced anxiety levels, along with an increasing clarity,
a greater, truer sense of perspective about yourself and the
world around you, a deeper connection, and a deeper presence
when you're a loan or surrounded by friends and loved ones,
(15:02):
as you are now genuinely listening to what they're saying
instead of quietly fretting that you need to respond to
your latest text or email. Lastly, it's safe to say
that the six steps of the Internet detox will increase
your capacity for gratitude for your own life, for our
five senses, for what you do have instead of what
you don't, which we all know the internet is well
(15:25):
known for eliciting. Before we begin, remember that, as with
any behavioral change, the most important thing is to start small,
take one step and see how you feel afterwards. All
or nothing thinking doesn't work here, but all or nothing
thinking never works. See if you can check off these
steps one after the next, and take your time as
(15:48):
you do it too. I'm not proposing you can cancel
your WiFi or trade in your smartphone for a flip
phone or a landline. What I am suggesting is that
you begin to think about your phone and being online
as the technological equivalents of the food you eat and
the liquid you put inside your body. Most of us
are careful about our nutrition and the ingredients in our foods.
(16:09):
So all that I'm proposing is you give the same care,
attention and respect to how you feed your brain, which
means not overwhelming it with the digital equivalent of ultra
processed ingredients additives transfats, potato, chips, salt, and sugar. Step
one of the Internet dyet is simple, become more conscious.
(16:30):
All I'm asking is that you become more aware of
your Internet use, and that you do it without any
judgment whatsoever. It's a fact that for many of us,
our phones have become almost like physical extensions of ourselves,
an extra hand or foot. One study I read reported
that eighty nine percent of Americans reach for their phones
within the first ten minutes of waking up. When you
(16:51):
reach for your phone in the morning, what are you feeling,
What are you looking for by wanting to reach for
your phone? What are you trying to achieve. Does it
make you anxious? And can we become more aware of that?
What is the reason not just that you reach for
your phone, but why are you doing it? What are
you seeking in the morning, and how can we substitute
(17:12):
it later on? Our phones are like mirrors. They reflect
us back to ourselves. They have a lot of valuable
information to tell us about who we are and what
it is we want. You might tell yourself, of course
I reach for my phone every morning, doesn't everyone. But
that's different from taking a step back from the routine
of it and asking why. For example, you might feel
(17:34):
that while you were asleep, people are having fun without you,
and you hate what it feels like to be excluded.
You might begin the morning feeling bored or sad or understimulated,
and consciously or unconsciously decide that the only way to
solve that feeling is by going online. Or you might
wake up feeling lonely or isolated and reach for your
phone instead of getting in touch with a friend and
(17:56):
making a plan to meet them later for coffee or
a drink. You might worry that a crisis happened overnight,
whether in your workplace or somewhere in the world, and
you're the last person to know about it, which makes
you worry your friends might not see you as hypervigilant
and responsible and in charge. Again, the most important part
of step one is observing your behavior without judgment. That
(18:18):
increased consciousness leads me to step two, wait an hour
before going online, but rather you sitting around wondering when
the hour is up. Step two proposes that instead of
going online, you replace that impulse with a better, healthier habit.
You could take that time to meditate or make a
list of the things in your life you're most grateful for.
(18:41):
You could listen to beautiful music, or read a few
chapters of a book, or do both at the same time.
In my experience, from a reading perspective, being online is
like taking one hundred quick showers a day. We're scanning
headlines and perusing emails and texts, but are we really
reading them. It's probably nearer the truth to say that
the only thing we're doing is scanning pixelated words. This
(19:05):
is why the early morning can be a fantastic time
to delve deeply into a book, as opposed to a
two minute shower. Reading a book is like syncing into
a bath tub. It's a form of time travel as
well as an exercise and empathy. In this way, you
can give your brain the opportunity not just to awaken naturally,
but to deepen your understanding of the world around you.
(19:27):
It doesn't need to be reading a whole chapter. You
can read a quote, a paragraph of your favorite book scripture.
It could also be listening to something that motivates you,
that inspires you. Now, what if you rely on your
phone as an alarm clock. Well, first recognize that our
phones are intentionally engineered so that they're indispensable. Like big
(19:48):
box department stores, they are for us anything anyone could
ever need. There are mailboxes, our phone centers, our bookshelves,
our jukeboxes, our maps, our photo albums, and our memory keepers.
There are sources of news and friendship. Add a tape
measure and an alarm clock, and your phone truly becomes
what it was designed to be, a one stop shopping destination.
(20:10):
But that doesn't mean you can't go someplace else. In
this case, why not go and buy a real alarm clock.
It's as simple as that. Step three of the Internet
diet or detox involves another deceptively simple change. I call
it the Wi Fi free meal, and it's exactly what
it sounds like. A Wi Fi free meal is one
where you make a conscious decision to enjoy your breakfast, lunch,
(20:32):
or dinner while keeping your cell phone in your pocket
or very yet in another room Entirely. This means that
instead of using one hand to hold your fork or
spoon and the other to scan for online information or
browse social media, you're devoting one hundred percent of your
attention and energy to the food and drink in front
of you. I evaders suggests that we chew morsels of
(20:56):
food sixteen to thirty two times. I promise you've if
you try this, you'll forget that you ever had a
phone in your hand. It's a really hyper mindfulness practice.
For many of us, this will feel strange at first,
as we've gotten into the habit of always doing two
things at the same time. Shopping while gazing at our phones,
for example, so we can see if another store offers
(21:18):
a better price, taking a walk while listening to music,
or driving a car while our GPS tells us which
turn or road to take. In step three, I'm suggesting
you do one thing at a time monotasking or solo
tasking as it's called, and in this case, it involves
eating and focusing on the textures and flavors of that food.
(21:39):
And if you find yourself racing through the meal because
your brain is busy anticipating the dopamine hit that's certain
to arrive the moment you set down your fork and
pick up your phone. Then set limits on yourself. Tell
yourself that during the next fifteen minutes that you set
aside for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you will not engage
with your phone, and you will not go online false stop.
(22:01):
The effects of taking that time to eat a meal
will surprise you. You'll find that you eat more slowly and conscientiously,
that you chew more properly, that you digest better, that
you appreciate your food more, and that you become more
conscious of your body's hunger cues and the effects food
has on your feelings. Step three of the Internet diet
(22:21):
has another strong thing to recommend. A study that was
done in Brazil a few years ago concluded that using
our phones while we eat increases our caloric intake by
almost fifteen percent. This means that even though staring at
our phone when we're dining out in a restaurant makes
us look busy and occupied. It can have real life
(22:41):
ramifications on our health and well being. In step four
of the Internet diet, we scale things up a little.
This time. I want to make a close analogy to
the food and drink we put in our bodies and
the content we take in online, because to my mind,
they're very closely related. By now, we all know some
foods just on that good for us, whereas certain other
(23:02):
foods promote good health, increase vitality and longer lasting energy
in the first group of things like sugar, salt, and
trans fats, and in the second group you'll always find
fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, nuts, and lagoons. Let me also
add that while most of us are aware that potato
chips and buttery popcorn aren't good for us, sometimes we
(23:23):
just feel like having a snack, and there's no harm
in that, so long as we don't do it every
day for the rest of our lives. The same goes
for the Internet. A lot of websites and digital apps
are the digital equivalent of a trayfall of Nacho's or
a chocolate milkshake or you can fill in the blank
and name your favorite guilty or not so guilty pleasure.
Junk content is harder to digest, just like junk food,
(23:47):
and the more junk content we expose ourselves to, the
unhealthier our minds get. Step five of the Internet diet
is limit portions. I touched on this already in step two,
which asked you to wait an hour after you awakened
before you check your phone, and also in step three.
Step five takes this idea even further. We all know
what it means to limit our portions when we're preparing
(24:09):
our or serving food. Studies have shown over time that
our plates and cups and glasses have got larger, and
so to have our portion sizes. You could equate that
to how the amount of data that our phones can
process now increases all the time. The amount of memory
and storage our phones have increases over time, which means
naturally our portions and desire to consume content also increases. Equivalently,
(24:34):
remember when your data used to run out, Remember when
there used to be a cap on the minutes you
could speak to someone on your phone. That's all gone
away now, and therefore there is no portion control. If
you've managed the first five steps of the Internet detox.
Step six probably won't come as a shock. It's intimate
and fasting. We're probably all familiar with that phrase as
it relates to food and placing boundaries on when we eat.
(24:57):
In step six, I propose you adopt this same idea
to your own online behavior. For example, one of the
best known intimate and fasting plans around is what's known
as the five point two plan. That's the one where
you eat as you normally would for five days a week,
but every Saturday and Sunday reduce your food intake into
a single five hundred calorie meal. Try this same method
(25:18):
with your own online use. Unless there's a pressing workplace
emergency where you have no choice but to remain reachable
over the weekend, why not start by turning off your
phone every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Instead of spending your
time off loosely tethered to technology, why not do something
that has nothing to do with it. Go outside, go hiking,
go kayaking, ride your bike, play two sets of tennis
(25:42):
or pickleball, or even three. The more time you spend
without your phone and without access to a Wi Fi signal,
the more confident you will be that you can regain
control of your time, energy, mental and physical health. Just
as we learn to eat when we're hungry and quit
eating when we're full, the internet die. It also teaches
us to take in information online when we want, and
(26:04):
not just because it's there or because we have nothing
better to do. By creating boundaries around your own online use,
you'll start to experience a new feeling of control and
authority across all aspects of your life. But remember, start small,
go step by step. Too much too soon, and the
brain's hypothalamus will act the same way it does when
(26:24):
we don't have enough to eat. What we're really trying
to do in any lifestyle change is create a new
balance relationship between the time we spend online and the
websites we ingest that are authentic, healthy and nutritious, which
in turn will lead to a new relationship with ourselves,
our friends, and the world around us. Thank you so
(26:45):
much for listening. Make sure you pass this on, maybe
even pair up with a friend to be accountable for
the new cell phone detox And remember I'm always in
your corner and I'm forever rooting for you. Thank you,
so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it,
you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort
(27:05):
is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking
your hidden potential. If you know you want to be
more and achieve more this year, go check it out
right now. You set a goal today, you achieve it
in six months, and then by the time it happens,
it's almost a relief. There's no sense of meaning and purpose.
You sort of expected it, and you would have been
disappointed if it didn't happen.
Host
Jay Shetty
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