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This is Dr. Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab.
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Every time we go online and every time we swipe or like something or buy something or comment or handpicking 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.
Hey everyone, 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 in to 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 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 tore 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 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 dire or the cell phone detox.
These are the devices through which most of 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 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 got in more impatient and impulsive.
The ad to cart nature of the internet where you want what you want when you want can sometimes even trickle over to our real lives.
A friend once confessed 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 star a new podcast but to click himself out of the traffic jam.
As if his phone somehow featured a magic button that would a single click could transport him home.
One of the most interesting things about being alive in 2024 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, a then and now and because we're always prone to see the past as better than it was, it goes without saying that the pre-internet era was better, filtered 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 various ways we can make our phones and the impulse to go online less attractive and eluring, 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 grey, which gets rid of 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, 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 wifi 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 wifi 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 13 year old cousin to your 75 year old aunt all the way through to me seems to be wrestling with the 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 want to banish any thoughts of overnight change your success.
Stop trying to change in 24 hours.
If you think you can build or break a habit in the next 24 hours, you're setting yourself up for failure.
The goal as with any new plan we try out is to adapt one or more of these steps as time goes on in the hopes that before long a new habit will be ingrained.
I want to begin by acknowledging that our brains have a lot of heavyweight chemicals working on their behalf.
There's GABA, glutamate, oxytocin, adrenaline, neuroponephrine.
The list goes on. But of all these chemicals and hormones, 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 bodies' 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.
Of course, the best, most pleasure promoting chemical of these four is dopamine.
The brain's preeminent 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 a mental or physical high, that in that way 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.
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 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.
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 if not pleasure than 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 making our eyelids heavier until at least we fall asleep.
But as everyone knows, the internet is a 24 hour bizarre and our phones are always on.
The web never goes dark, never closes down and never takes a vacation.
You don't misunderstand me.
The internet can be a completely magical place.
It's like a city where the possibilities for 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 or handpicking 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 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 just aren't as happy as they used to be.
Especially people who live in higher 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 of something we know exists.
We just can't put our finger on what that thing is.
The internet dire is an attempt to provide at least the beginning of a solution to this problem.
Why do I refer to it as a dire?
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 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 his students were reunited with their phones, they clutts 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 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 94% of all Americans with access to the internet will tell you that life without Wi-Fi would be unimaginable.
Without GPS, 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 or dinner reservations or split the bill after a night out or pay for groceries or take photos or 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 144 times a day.
Even if we don't open our phones, we make physical contact with our phones on an average of 2,600 times a day, just to 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 hear swish or ding, we also get a bump of cortisol.
The chemical that 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.
Sometimes life can seem challenging and overcoming problems can seem impossible, but when you focus on your problems, it can keep you from seeing the good in your life.
One thing that helps me when I need a change in perspective is acknowledging the small winds in life.
I encourage my team to pay attention to small winds because it helps them see positive outcomes and the steps that they're achieving on the road to a bigger goal.
Use the power of small winds to shift your outlook and you will start to see positive changes.
State Farm is also there to help you find personal winds and celebrate the small things in life.
The State Farm Personal Price Plan helps you create an affordable price just for you.
Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can bundle and save.
