Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckermann and you're listening to Science vs. Welcome back to a brand new season.
We've got a lot of sighs, a lot of fun ahead.
We're really excited to share it with you.
So today we are pitting facts against having your phone stuck in your face as we tackle social media.
And before we jump in, I just want to say that this episode does discuss disordered eating.
It's a little bit later in the show.
We're going to do a warning when it's about to happen.
But please take care while you're listening and we're going to put some resources in our show notes.
Social media has become this huge bugbear.
If you ask a lot of people these days about their social media use, you will hear a lot of complaints.
When I feel the Instagram, I feel horrible.
I know it shouldn't matter, but I do worry about, OK, so why has this person's account gotten more followers than I did?
Why did I make a video in the same format?
But theirs went viral and mine didn't.
I feel like shit. It's just so soul sucking.
And it's like, why are you letting yourself, like, fall into this?
Well, exactly. Because even though a lot of us don't seem to like being on these apps, it's as if we can't look away.
A Gallup poll from last year found that teens are spending almost five hours on social media every day, and even us grown -ups are getting sucked in.
Senior producer Meryl Hawn asked a bunch of folks at Washington Square Park in New York City this simple question.
So how often are you on social media?
Oh, this would be a bad answer.
Like, two hours? Three hours?
How many hours a day do you feel like you're on it?
Do you want me to check?
Sure. Yeah. Yesterday I was on Instagram for an hour and 48 minutes, the day I was on Instagram for three hours and 18 minutes.
We all are just so stunned by how it's taken over our lives.
People were worried that social media had shortened their attention spans.
Oh yeah, 100%, for sure.
For sure. 1000%, I don't have an attention span, I want to leave whatever this podcast is right now because my attention span is so low.
And that it was the reason that they found it so hard to finish a book or even have a conversation with a friend without wanting to check their phones.
This morning, you know, I'm like, what do I do?
I read some of my Elon Musk book, and I'm just like, okay.
Like, I can only read so much of the Elon Musk book.
But until you're brain's like, okay, let's just do something else, and it goes back to this dopamine hit in my iPhone.
Last night, I was hanging out with these people in my dorm.
For five minutes, we were speaking.
For like 30 minutes, everyone was just on their phone.
Oh my god, that fucking kills me.
It's like, that's disgusting, that's disgusting, like talk, you're with people.
And a lot of these complaints around social media have been Tik -Tok -ing up for years.
But it feels like recently, they've hit fever pitch. A bestselling book is claiming that social media has created an entire generation of anxious and sad kids.
Or at least I think it did.
I couldn't really finish it.
But it has been great fodder for the press with headlines screaming that cell phones are killing our kids and that smartphones are a pocket full of poison.
There's all these fears that it's tanking our mental health and giving us depression.
The US Surgeon General says he wants to put a warning label on social media for adolescents.
Governments in the UK and Australia are now talking about banning social media for kids.
So today on the show we are going to find out.
One, is social media really changing our brains and shortening our attention span?
Two, why is it so hard to stay away from social media?
And three, is it responsible for tanking our mental health?
When it comes to social media, a lot of us have been wondering...
Why are you letting yourself, like, fall into this?
..but then there's science.
Science Versus is coming back just after the break.
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Welcome back to David's show.
Social media is it scrambling our brains and screwing with our mental health.
Merrill Horn, PhD, senior producer at Science vs. has been looking into this.
Hey, Merrill. Hi, Wendy.
So, Merrill, what's your relationship like with social media?
Oh, not great. Oh, really?
I actually thought you would be, I don't know, like bigger than social media really.
I just tend to use it a lot and then feel like afterwards.
TikTok I've had like delete at points because it's been so bad, like it's not good.
Yeah. I've had like a rocky relationship with social media.
And so when I read the headlines that or saying it's bad for our mental health, that resonates with me.
But I wanted to see what the science says.
So the first question I had was just like, what is it doing to our brains?
And right off the bat, I did find that using our phones can affect our brains in this kind of weird way.
So in order to use your phone, what body part do you use?
That's a strange way.
It feels like my hunched back is what I'm using.
But I guess your thumbs.
Yeah, yeah, your thumbs.
Well, one study found that if you've been using your phone a lot recently, the chunk of your brain that's devoted to your thumbs actually gets a little bit bigger.
No way. Right? Oh, that is weird. It's funny, it's kind of cool.
It's like your brain realizing, oh, Oh, wow, she's really using her thumbs, like, I better, like, get more neurons doing that stuff.
So then you got social media affecting our brain.
Yeah. Of course it can, you know, like most things that we do.
But the thing that I really wanted to look into that you hear a ton is that it's also affecting our attention span.
Yes, that people can't even read a book anymore because of social media.
Is this true? So, I looked into that and to help walk us through this is Gloria Mark.
work. She's a chancellor's professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.
And Gloria is the perfect person to help answer this because she's been researching attention for decades.
So how does she measure out attention span?
So what she's done is she'd go and just like watch people at their desk jobs.
So people like administrative assistants or financial advisors and she'll bring a stopwatch and just like watch them you know you don't want to be too close you don't want to be leaning over their shoulder but it's it's close enough so you can get a sense of what's on the screen sometimes you see them picking up their phone sometimes you see them getting up and walking out of the office and we we try to follow after the person to the that we can.
Oh my god. I mean, I'm just having this reaction because I'm just like, imagine, imagine how many cups of tea she saw me make, how many times they have to have a little bit more chocolate, how many times she'd see me pick my nose.
But they know, right?
Like if Gloria's in the corner, I will never look at my phone.
Yeah. No, she said that, like, when she first started doing this, people would act way differently.
So they'd just, like, throw away the first few hours of data.
OK. But then people kind of got used to her, and then they just had to keep doing their jobs.
So then they just kind of went about things as normal as far as she could tell.
So she's been doing this for decades, and then did she see as smartphones came online how this was changing behavior?
Yeah, that's what we're going to answer.
And by the way, more recently, she's been doing this with computer software.
She won't literally go to people's offices anymore with a stopwatch. She just has computer software that tracks what they're doing.
Oh, okay. So what's she found?
So when we measured people using the stopwatch technique, we found that people averaged 2 .5 minutes on a screen before switching.
And so now, you know, fast forward 20 years, and we find that it's averaging 47 seconds.
47 seconds. Yes. So it shows that people switch their attention pretty frequently.
only, wow. So over just two decades, our attention span has gone down by two thirds?
That is insane. Yeah.
And a few different researchers have measured this now using the same approach and it's all hovered around this 47 seconds.
Right. And, like, we know that this has, like, physical consequences on our bodies to be doing all this switching around.
So like, Gloria measured people's heart rate variability to see like, more people more stressed out when they were switching around from like, one thing to the next.
We find that the faster the attention switching, the higher is the stress.
And other research also finds that, that like, going back and forth between different things stresses us out physically.
can like raise our blood pressure and make our immune systems kind of get activated.
That's really interesting.
I think I can. I feel that.
I mean, I wouldn't have thought about it in quite this way, but I think I do feel that that once you're kind of on your phone and you can be like switching between, you know, you've got a check social media and you check your email and you check WhatsApp or whatever, and you can kind of feel that stress kind of kicking in.
Okay, so this isn't just about not being able to watch some epic film without checking your phone.
So do we know that social media is to blame here for shortening our attention spans?
Well, technology has changed a ton in the past like 20 years, right?
So like, there's all these different apps now that are probably distracting us, but there is some research that says social media is partly to blame, to explain like, why, let me tell you about this thing that happens in your brain, And so, let's say that you are trying to watch that epic movie.
Part of you might be kind of thinking, like, I'm just gonna check my phone real quick.
Like, I'm just gonna do this.
And it's like almost like a little impulsive devil on your shoulder being like, you could just check this like real quick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
But then maybe there's another part of you that's like, no, don't do that.
It's movie time. Uh -huh.
And it resists that urge.
And well, it could be that when you're on social media, like you're not really exercising the part of your brain that's like showing restraint here.
You're just like scrolling and scrolling.
And it might be that it actually kind of like weakens that part of your brain that's like, don't do that.
Like that kind of the resists our impulses.
The sciency name for this is inhibitory control and scientists can like measure it in the lab.
And one study looked at this in teenagers So they followed thousands of teenagers for a few years, and they found that if they were on social media more, they could see their inhibitory control get worse.
Like they were basically more impulsive.
Oh, could it be that people who are more impulsive just like tend to use social media more?
Because that's kind of how their brain works, and it's not social media causing that.
It could be that too.
but in that study that I just told you about, they did see that like social media kind of came first. Like first people started using more social media and then they saw this drop in inhibitory control.
So they thought that like maybe this is being caused by social media.
And there are other studies too that support this kind of idea generally, like finding that people who spend more time on social media are also more easily distracted.
Mm -hmm. Okay. So is it permanent?
Like are we just stuck with our crappy attention span?
I asked Gloria about that.
Whenever I see your study quoted, it's kind of in this like context of like, doom, like our attention spans, only 47 seconds long.
Like, what have we come to?
Do you actually think it's that bad, that it's gotten shorter?
I know I don't. I do not think it's good that our attention fans have gotten shorter, but I am an optimist in that.
I believe that people we can course correct.
And the reason she thinks that we can course correct is because she's seen it herself.
So like she had office workers go off email for a week and that worked to lengthen their attention span.
She also tried this by blocking a bunch of websites that people said were distracting them, like a lot of social media, and people felt like it helps them to lengthen their attention span too.
That's great. This is great news!
Because I feel like so much of, I don't know, the doomy headlines, it really does feel like this is permanent, but if we could just put our phones away, we can retrain our brains, we can get our attention span back.
But then I guess it leads to the question of why is it so hard for us to put our phones down I guess specifically when it comes to social media like people will say like oh it's so easy to say put your phone down but I can't I just yeah can't why why is it so hard to put this down yeah so I talked about this with Sofia Chukas Bradley she's an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and she also has another role the clinical psychology lead at the Harvard Center for Digital Thriving digital thriving that's what We all wanna be doing.
Yes. The trick is how to do that.
No. I asked... So, I asked her about, like, why it's so hard to get off social media.
Mm -hm. And Sophia said that part of this does have to do with the fact that it, like, taps into this craving that we already have for social approval.
So like, in order to survive, humans have to get along with each other in groups, and so it feels good to our brains when we feel like we are getting along.
And scientists can see this in brain scan studies.
Like when it feels like people like us, parts of our brains will light up, like this thing called the reward system.
And scientists have found that social media can also do this.
So they've put people into FMRI scanners when they're looking at photos of social media, and they'll find that their brains do light up more in these reward centers when they're looking at one of their photos that has a lot of likes on it.
Which makes sense. If you know what it feels like to see that a post has gotten a lot of likes, it feels really exciting One problem is that you kind of get sucked into it.
For me, what would happen is I would post something.
For example, my student got this award. I would get so excited by the response, by people tweeting it, retweeting it, liking it, I'm waiting in the checkout line, I'm walking from place to place.
I'm checking. Is there another like?
Is there a new comment?
And it's reinforcing.
If I check and there is something new it makes it much more likely I'm going to check again soon.
And so yeah, it kind of feeds into this thing where we end up staying on social media longer than we kind of mean to, because we don't really know, like, when are we going to get that next comment.
And in that sense, Sophia said that social media sort of ends up mimicking stuff like gambling.
What makes slot machines so addictive is the intermittent rewards that are involved.
So when someone is using a slot machine, most of the time, they win nothing.
But every once in a while, they win something.
So yeah, researchers in the gambling world think that this is part of what makes gambling addictive.
And while social media isn't officially considered addictive, like it's not in the DSM yet, which is used to diagnose people, it seems like social media might be doing something kind of similar, like a similar dance in our brains.
It's really hard to stop scrolling or to stop checking or to stop posting because what if I scrolled one more time and there was whatever it is I'm looking for.
Something hilarious, something fascinating, something extreme and attention -grabbing.
What if the next thing I post would get all the likes.
What if the next thing I check would bring me whatever it is that makes my brain happy.
I feel so sane. I feel so sane.
Right? It's so relatable.
It's very relatable.
This is why I still look at Facebook at all, because I know it's not even that good.
Like, 99 % of the time, it's just, like, crap.
But every once in a while they'll, like, get me with, like, one thing and then I end up spending way more time on it than I mean to.
Okay. Okay, so here is what we know.
We know that our attention spans have actually gotten shorter in the last two decades and We think social media is at least partly to blame for this, but it's not permanent.
If only we could fight the powers of intermittent rewards after the break.
We are finding out if social media is to blame for our mental health crisis.
Yes. And then later I've got some tips for if you want to cut down on your social media, and it involves potatoes.
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Welcome back today on the show we're looking at social media and a big thing is that social media is to blame for causing a mental health crisis.
And so Merrell my first question is is just like And why would social media, I know why it might make us feel like a little crappy, but why would it give us depression?
Well, one idea that you hear a lot is that it's that social media makes you feel crappy because it's just like taking time away from you that you would normally be spending doing other stuff that actually makes you happy, like hanging out with your friends.
And this came up a lot in the park in New York City.
When I start a screen for too long it literally it kills me because it's like I need to be outside to be talking to people but if I'm on a screen I can't be doing that.
If I'm spending a ton of time on social media it means I'm not spending time doing things that actually are fulfilling.
And it's not just these guys, like scientific experts are also saying that one of the reasons there is a mental health crisis right now in teenagers is because they're spending all their time inside on their phones looking at social media instead of like being out in the real world.
So, to find out if this is true.
Oh, it's not necessarily true.
No. It kind of makes sense that it would be doing this.
But there's actually research that's looked at this.
So, let's look at that.
So the best study that I could find on this, it just came out a few months ago, was really intense.
So they got a group of like 600 teenagers and they had been studying them for 15 years, So it started when there were like four, and every couple of years, they would bring them in to do this, like, battery of psychiatric tests.
I love that we're still doing studies like this, by the way.
I thought we stopped them in the 80s.
No, still bringing on these kids.
I talked to one of the researchers who did the study.
They come to the university clinic.
So we have huge psychiatric interviews.
We interview their parents.
Yeah, so it's a huge, huge data base.
So that's Celia Steinbeck.
She's a psychology professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and she said that when these kids were 10 years old they realize like oh we should ask them about social media too like how often they use it and I've also been asking them about how much they socialize with their friends like in person and so now we can answer this question.
So we wanted to test whether is it a case that they spend less time with friends over time if they use social media more or not.
And what did you find?
Yeah, it was quite astonishing actually.
Those who liked and commented and posted more on social media over time, they were more likely to spend more time with friends offline, not less time with friends.
Wait, so like the exact opposite of how people feel the more time on social media are also equalled more time with friends.
Uh -huh. Yeah. Huh. So they just have more time in the day?
Yeah. I mean, so according to one review, it seems like it's actually more likely to be taking the place of other stuff.
Like reading books, watching TV, magazines, so we do less of that stuff now than we used to.
So, yeah, for most of us, like, it's probably not ruining our social lives.
It's not ruining our social, that we can blame something else for that.
And so, once I found out about that, I was like, well, what about all this other stuff that people keep saying over and over again?
That like, if you spend a lot of time on social media, your mental health in general is gonna be crappy, like, more anxiety, more depression.
And so, like, there are dozens of studies that have done that, that like look for a link between how much time we spend on social media and then they'll also ask them questions that get at whether they have like depression or anxiety and that kind of a thing.
And we can look at all of these studies to see like, is there a link here?
That's what you really want to do, is not just look at one study but kind of put them all together and see if there's an effect or not.
Yes. And when studies do this, they mostly find that there is, like, a small correlation, so, like, you can see this general trend where if you spend more time on socials, you are more likely to have, like, depressive symptoms. Uh -huh.
But, like, a lot of researchers have been pointing out that, like, it actually does matter that this link is, like, really small.
What do you mean? So, like, one review paper said that it's, quote, "...unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance," Which is basically nerd speak for like, we can measure something here, but it may not mean anything in like the real world.
Oh, so by like the link being small, like they're not necessarily saying that people who spend a lot of time on social media are really, really, really depressed.
It's like, they see, they feel a little bit crappier than the rest of us.
Yeah. And if social media is actually really bad for our mental health, you would expect that like, if you have people get off it, their mental health would get better.
Some studies have actually done this, they'll have people cut down on social media and a lot of the time people don't really feel any better.
Oh, really? Wow. I mean, that is a far cry from some of these headlines that we see, right?
Because very fancy and important people are building careers and writing bestselling books saying that social media is too lame.
Yeah, it's like I mean the obviously like the internet can be a really crappy place But like I was surprised that the evidence on like Depression wasn't stronger.
Yeah, right but like Despite all of that Basically, everyone agreed that there are certain things that you might find yourself doing online that are really bad One of those things yeah, so one thing is that researchers have founds that if you compare yourself a lot to the people that you're looking at on your screens, then you're gonna feel crappier.
And so if you're the kind of person who is constantly scrolling through and thinking like, oh, they're better than me, not consciously.
Yeah, yeah, or sometimes consciously.
Yeah. Yeah, basically.
Yeah. For me, it's always like the house, like interior decorating videos that the algorithm gives me, and then I feel like, oh, my house looks like that.
Right, this person's got more legs.
I feel like social media that it just to find that little insecurity that everyone has.
You know, so for you, it's about your house, but for me, it's like, you know, how many likes does their podcast have?
How much bigger is their podcast?
I don't know how social media does it, but it just finds your insecurity.
Whatever it is. You know, your body's not good enough.
Yeah, so that is the thing that… body image is the thing that a lot of research is on actually.
Like, let's dive into that one.
Oh, okay. So for this, I talked to Rachel Hogg.
She's a senior lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia.
And she told me, like, you know, I actually worry about this body image stuff too.
And I came off a live TV interview the other day.
And I said to one of my friends, I know that this is peak irony, but did my neck look chunky in that interview?
So, what are we really clear?
I'm not outside of these at all.
So, Rachel did this study published just a month ago, where she basically wanted to see whether watching content with disordered eating from TikTok can make people feel worse about their bodies.
So, if this is something that like, for listeners, they think they maybe should avoid, then they should definitely skip ahead about seven minutes.
Mm hmm. And so here's what they did, the researchers made two different compilations of videos that they drew from TikTok.
In the control video, here's what they saw.
Videos of nature, we had pets and cooking videos and that kind of quite neutral content.
So here's some snippets from that.
One was like telling people how to parallel park.
Pull up next to the car that you want to park behind and line up the back of your car with the back of theirs.
You knew that you always wanted to be a professional drag queen.
I just wanted to be a star any way I got it.
Grab your purse. Put it over your head, okay?
Your hand's through here.
It's a backpack now.
It's a backpack. It's a backpack.
Okay. Very neutral.
Also, a little bit helpful.
Handy tips in there.
So what was the non -neutral stuff people had to watch?
For the same amount of time, they watched content on disordered eating behaviours, ranging from the very explicit.
But we also had lots of slightly more benign content, so the Fitspo videos and the general kind of day on a plate content when people are describing what they're eating.
What's the Facebook that's like people just kind of like showing off their bodies or doing like here's how to get abs like follow this workout routine.
Okay. Okay. Clearly my algorithm's not giving me any of those.
I get like old people giving me life advice and for some reason Amish people explaining their culture is really big for me right now.
Fascinating. Less than less.
So how long do people have to watch these videos for?
There were only, like, eight minutes long.
OK. Yeah, so they had around 250 women, mostly in their 20s watch these videos.
And they did surveys to see if people were less satisfied with the way they looked in their bodies after watching these videos.
So what did they find?
It made a difference.
The people who watched the video with the disordered eating stuff were feeling crappier about their bodies afterwards after just watching eight minutes of this stuff, right?
So it was really the fact that it took that short a period of time for us to observe this effect.
This is horrific, really.
And one of the most kind of horrific things to me was just, like, how common it was to see this kind of stuff on TikTok.
Because in the study they asked people like, do you see this kind of content on your for you page?
64 % of the participants in our study had encountered disordered eating content.
55 % of them said that they had seen videos about suicide.
45 % of them said they saw a content about self harm.
And they didn't happen to get a bunch of people who already had an eating disorder.
Like, they actually excluded those people from the study.
So here's Rachel's take.
work, we know that a lot of them are not searching for this content.
So this is not about telling them just to be careful with what they search for.
They're not in control.
The algorithm has more control than they do.
And a lot of people talk about this kind of thing happening to women.
We know from other research that it happens to men too.
Most research finds that there's actually like no difference in how badly like men are affected by seeing these like, idealized bodies on social media, compared to women.
And by the way, we did reach out to TikTok about racial study and in their view, it has some limitations.
Like the data was collected three years ago.
They told us, quote, we continually enhance our platform and policies to promote a positive and safe experience and regularly consult with experts, remove content that violates our policies and provide access to supportive resources.
end quote and so I know that these sort of concerns around social media and body image they've been around for a couple of years now when you look at like the whole body of research in this space is it all finding that we go on social media chances are we're gonna feel crappier about our bodies afterwards yeah and so like Rachel study and others do really seem to find these scary effects.
But not all studies do find this, so it's important to say that.
Some studies don't actually find that the people who spend more on time on TikTok, for example, have a worse body image.
Oh, do we know why?
Are they finding different results?
Well, it seems like it might depend on who you are, so maybe some people aren't really affected by this.
And then when you lump everyone together like some studies do, you might not seeing effects on average, but we know that this body image stuff can hit harder if you're the kind of person who compares yourself a lot to other people.
So it's not necessarily, I don't think that like everyone going on Instagram is going to get a worse body image, but if you're the kind of person who tends to do that then it's going to affect you more.
And maybe even those days also find a stronger link to depression too, between using a lot of social media and whether or not oppressed.
So, if you are someone who feels like you're affected by this, what's the answer?
Is it getting off social media?
Yeah, that's what I wanted to know.
I asked Rachel, kind of like, what do you do here or actually I kind of wanted to know if you're a parent, because we know that this can affect kids, especially, like what should you do?
Should you not let your kid go on social media?
And she said it was like a tough call.
If all of your 14 year old daughter's friends are on social media and she's the only person in her group who is not on social media or doesn't have a phone, then that legitimately can be a very isolating thing when everyone else is communicating on a particular platform that you don't have access to.
So it's a rockin' a hard place.
What I would say to parents in this position is that you cannot protect them from harm.
you can try to limit the harm, what you can do is build as much protective armour around them psychologically as you possibly can.
So that when you experience the harm, you're still going to experience it, but hopefully it doesn't go all the way to your bones.
And, like, there is some evidence that teaching kids about how social media might mess with your body image can help like insulate them a little bit.
And then also, spending less time on social media can help when it comes to body image.
One study found that limiting people to only spending an hour a day can help.
And that makes sense, right, the less likely you are to see this content, the less harmful it can be.
So I guess my last question is...
Meryl, you've got any tips on how we can spend less time on these apps.
Yes, actually there is so there's one like tip that I feel like actually is really helpful So one thing that we have not talked about yet is that social media does fill this particular need that we have for like Just taking a little break.
So like this came up a lot at the park It's like this is like my moment of the day to like feel some feel nothing I guess feel something but also feel nothing honestly like it's what I do like after I get home just, like, de -stress time.
It's how you unwind, yeah.
Mmm. It's like a little vacation for a brain.
Yeah, yeah, when you're like, really filled up, and you're not actually going to use this time to learn chess.
Your brain can't do that.
It can only do stupid.
Yes. Yeah, so that is what Gloria Mark, our attention expert, she calls this kind of activity a roach activity, where it's like really engaging, sucks up our attention, but also like does not demand too much effort from our brains.
I personally don't think it's bad to do road activities they can have a function for us, they can have a function to help settle the mind.
And so, you know, spending five minutes scrolling through Reddit, there's no problem with that.
What is bad is when you get stuck doing them and you can't pull out.
Like, one of the things that you can do is just like, if you don't like social media and you're just kind of, you know, on it out of habit, then just find something else that, like, fulfills that same kind of role that you can switch it out with.
So, it can be like, you know, just playing like solitaire or like, something off your phone.
So, a lot of people talk about knitting.
It calms them. It settles their mind, and if they have a break, they pull out knitting.
One guy who I spoke to, bounces a ball against, it's like a net, and he bounces the ball against it, that's his productivity, and it just calms him.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that peeling potatoes gave him his greatest ideas.
He loved to peel potatoes, and that's, that's very rude activity.
Can't bring knitting into the toilet though, can you?
No, knitting is a whole thing.
Yeah, so I try - I try to detox myself from social media.
So for the past like three weeks, I haven't been on Instagram, TikTok, or just like scrolling on Reddit, Facebook.
Great! How do you, how did you do it?
What was your trick?
I mean, I feel like I wouldn't have actually done it if I wasn't producing this episode.
okay, but like, it was, I think it was really interesting because it like, it just kind of created this vacuum in my life where I had to find some other activity to do like what Gloria was talking about.
So first, I tried like a little dumb game that I could play in my phone that she mentioned in her book, that was not great because then I just got addicted to that instead and was spending like an hour on that every day.
And so I had to put like a limit on how long I spend on that stupid game but then I feel like I found other stuff that works better so one thing I've been doing is just scrolling through my own photos and like liking the ones that I like the most so it's like my own little social media not without anyone else on it.
Oh that's really nice that's really good!
I guess because I can't quit social media because I need up for work I think it's for a lot of people actually but what I do is I have phone off days like just a single day.
You don't use your phone at all for the whole day?
No no that's right that's right.
I couldn't turn my lights on without my phone I couldn't do anything how do you wake up?
Yeah and I did learn that when I'm catching up with friends like it's really 90s you know I don't know exactly what to mean of it.
And people respect the phone off day.
And I genuinely feel like I feel better at the end of it.
Oh, wow, that's great.
I also ask the researchers that I talked to about this.
And Sophia told me that she has an app where every time she tries to open stuff like social media, it asks like, are you sure you really want to open this?
And she said like that helped her to cut down.
Another scientist told me that she only puts social media on her computer, not her phone.
So you might want to try that, like, you know, just putting in some of these little speed bumps that just make it, like, a little bit harder to go to.
And Meryl, how do you feel now that you're off social media?
I think I am probably happier.
I'm a little more bored, I think, like, in those downtime moments.
I'm still not sure what to do anymore.
But maybe that's a good thing.
It feels like that's kind of a good thing for my brain to not really be sure.
And I'll probably go back on it, you know, a little bit but not as much as I was before.
Yeah, yeah, I think from this episode I guess I just really want to be more aware of how these apps are worming their way into my brain.
Also, I really need to keep reminding myself that behind these apps are these bazillion dollar companies that are just creating these algorithms to keep us glued to them.
I really shouldn't be placing any self worth on what these algorithms decide to shove in my face, right?
Yeah, totally. Screw them.
Get out of my brain.
I don't actually want to care about that person's beautiful living room.
My living room is fine.
If you're listening to this episode, if you have any tips and tricks for how you stay in control of your social media use, I would love to hear them.
How are you going to tell through social media?
Ah! You can find us on Instagram at Science Undersc Ban V S, deep irony in my voice as I'm saying this.
And on TikTok, I am at Wendy Zuckerman.
Send me photos of your beanies and jumpers if you started knitting.
Thanks so much, Meryl.
Thanks, Wendy. That's Science vs. And how many citations are in this week's episode?
We have 70 citations.
And if people want to see them in all their glory, where should they go?
So, they can go to our show notes and then we'll have a link for the transcripts in those so they can read the whole scripts and all the citations.
And also in our show notes we'll have a link to Gloria's book called Attention Span, which was really good and has even more tips for how to take control of your life and social media habits.
Also completely unrelated.
Meryl, did you know that New Zealand's bird of the year competition is on right now and everyone can vote and I have a favourite bird that I want everyone to vote for.
Yeah. Have you voted yet?
I have not. Oh my God.
Okay, so the Tawaki Pikitoka, Tawaki Pikitoka, it's the eastern rock -hopper penguin, super cute, looks punk -ish.
We're in the top five!
The top five. And voting closes this weekend, so if anyone wants to vote, just go to birdofthe year .org .nz and pick the tawaki piki toka.
It's a beautiful penguin.
It's in serious trouble because of climate change.
Tawaki. Pika. I'm looking for it right now.
I'm gonna do it right now.
Its populations declined by 30 % in the past 30 years.
I found it. Oh my gosh.
It looks so fierce.
Anyway, we're in the top five for New Zealand's.
I've heard on good authority that we are now in the top five, but we are not New Zealand's number one bird of the year.
That's why, science versus We Need Your Help.
We'll put the link in the show notes.
Thanks, Penguin. I think that's good.
Thanks. Thanks, Meryl.
Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy.
This episode was produced by Meryl Hawn, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimmler, Aketi Foster -Keys and Michelle Dang.
And edited by Blythe Terrell.
Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Bear.
Music written by Bobby Lorde, Emma Munger, Boomi Hideaka and So Wily.
Thanks to all of the researchers we spoke to for this episode including Professor Hunt -Alcott, Dr Jacqueline Nessie, Professor Patricia Conrad, Dr Robert Kraut, Dr Andrew Westbrook and Dr Nicholas Ison.
A big thanks to everyone who talked to Meryl about social media in Washington Square Park.
We really appreciate it.
And thanks to Lori Siegel, Ali Settlemeier and Whitney Potter.
An extra thanks to Christopher Sudha, Beverly, the Zuckerman Family at Joseph Lovell Wilson.
Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original.
Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. If you are listening to us on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you'll get a notification every time a new episode comes out.
I'm Wendy Zuckerman, back to you next time.
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