Are Smartphones Ruining Our Lives?

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, "Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?" Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Altocracy in America, available now. So this is the Internet Addiction Test, an abbreviated version of God of Nervous. So the way it goes is this, you have to select the response that best represents the frequency of each of the behaviors I'm about to read from zero not applicable to five always. This is Adam Alter, he's a psychology professor at NYU and the author of a book about behavioral addiction and technology called Irresistible. Today he's trying to figure out if I am addicted to my phone. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended for? How often do you lose sleep because of late night logins? At three. How often do others in your life comply? How often do you find yourself saying just a few minutes? I would say four. How often do you check your email? Four or something. How often do you find that has to be a five unfortunately? Okay. God. Okay, so you were responding between frequently and always on pretty much every question there. Yeah, there was a lot of fours and fives there. I would say you probably are addicted. I am addicted to technology. You are among the 50 plus percent of adults who have at least one tech-driven addiction. That number really blew me away, but when I thought about it I wasn't really surprised. I do have a sort of dependency on my phone. I check it without thinking and it happens everywhere. In serious conversations with my boss, in the bathroom, on dates, while I'm watching TV, I've never been addicted to anything before, but with this I do feel hooked. People ask me are these companies just making the best products possible or are they making products that are designed to addict and the answer very clearly from behind the curtain is we are trying to addict you, we are trying to hook you. And it's not just me. Our national obsession with our digital devices has societal costs. You can pick your statistic up, I'll pick mine, depression up, social anxiety up, generalized anxiety up. Our smartphones and social media, the new cigarette of the 21st century. And if they are, do we need to start treating them like addictive substances? I'm Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This is Crazy Genius. Any addiction whether it's about a behavior or a substance is an experience that you return to compulsively over and over again because you want to do it in the short term, but in the long run it undermines your wellbeing. Most addictive products are substances, nicotine, heroin, but you don't ingest your phone. You don't mainline Facebook, instead these products create addictive behaviors is the idea of being addicted to a behavior extremely controversial within the neuro or psychological community. Or are we talking about earth is round, it revolves around the sun style stuff. I'd say it's somewhere in the middle, you know, gambling has a place in the diagnostic and statistical manual, which is the Bible in psychiatry. So that is a behavior though, there's no substance there. So anyone who says you can't have an addiction without a substance would struggle to explain gambling addiction. The thing about gambling addiction is there are a lot of tools that have been honed over the last five, six decades in the gambling world that have then been borrowed first by the video game world and then in turn by the social networking, other tech beyond video game world. So the casinos has essentially been moved from Las Vegas to your pocket. Even if you don't buy that half of Americans are the equivalent of a gambling addict, there's still no question that our phones have been engineered to keep us coming back. The first way that tech companies made our phones like casinos is rapid feedback. When you push the button on a slot machine, you immediately see those symbols worrying in front of you and within seconds, you find out if you're a schmuck or a millionaire. Now every experience we have online is like being in front of a slot machine. Just a photo, wait for likes, post a meme, wait for hearts, push the button, push the button, and before you know it, your phone has become a dopamine slot machine. An irresistible combination of rapid feedback and unpredictable rewards. The second tool that tech companies have copied is quantification. Yeah, this metrication process or metrification, whatever you want to call it, adding numbers when numbers didn't exist before creates goals. So suddenly you have a goal to walk 10,000 steps a day because you wear a device that beeps when you walk 10,000 steps. Finally, like a 4am blackjack table, social media offers entertainment without an ending. Historically, the way media worked, the way newspapers, books, even TV shows worked, they were enforced breaks or very heavily suggested breaks. You'd get to the end of a chapter in a book, you'd get to the end of an article in a newspaper, you would get to the end of an episode in a TV show where the next episode didn't arrive for another week. These were all stopping cues. Those don't really exist in the same way anymore and that's by design and that's partly because the platforms that deliver tech to us make the feed bottomless on Twitter and on Instagram. There are teams of people behind that platform doing everything they can to remove as many pain points or friction points as possible to take every stopping cue and eradicate it from the experience. You put it all together, the instant rewards of the social media slot machine, the power of metrics and the end of endings. The problem with gambling addictions is that we lose money. The problem with smartphone compulsions is that we give up another currency, our attention. People have researched this. In one study, a smartphone was placed on a table between two participants face down. It's not even facing you, there are no notifications popping up. It's the mere presence of the smartphone and the studies show that when there is a smartphone between you, when it's within vision, the visual field, you become less creative, you become less focused on any task that you're working on and you become less capable of engaging with this stranger who's in front of you. It's taken a while for the psychiatry community to acknowledge behavioral addiction. Gambling has been a serious problem for decades, but it was only in 2013 that the diagnosis was added to the DSM-5. That's the Bible of psychiatry, alter mentioned earlier. Today, a lot of people are asking if we should add tech addiction to the same Bible. There's an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that the way the brain responds to smartphones does seem to have parallels with addiction. That's Dr. Jean Twangie. She's a psychology professor at San Diego State University. She is a publishing machine. She's written studies, six books, and notably one of the Atlantic's most popular features on tech and teenagers. A few years ago, she stumbled across a data set that completely shocked her. I've been doing work on generational differences for about 25 years. In the data around 2011 or 2012, I started to see some sudden changes. More teens started to say that they felt left out and that they felt lonely. Happiness started to decline. Life satisfaction started to decline. More teens started to say that they felt like they couldn't do anything right, or that they felt useless, or that they didn't enjoy life, and those last three are classic symptoms of depression. Then there's data that came out showing a huge increase in self-harm, things like cutting or taking too many pills, particularly among teen girls. It changed very suddenly. Old changes tend to take decades. Here was a catastrophic event in American teenage mental health, and it only took five years. What happened? There would be this large change in how teens were feeling. When you study cultural change, you always want to think about economic cycles first. Well, that didn't fit at all because the US economy was improving during that time period of 2011 to 2016. Looking at the time sequence, it turns out, according to the Pew Research Center, that the majority of Americans owned a smartphone by the end of 2012. Then in these same data sets I was looking at during that same time period between about 2011 and 2016, that's when going on social media every day went from optional to virtually mandatory among high school students. What is it about this interaction between smartphone users and these social media networks that seems to be driving this mental health crisis? It's always difficult to pinpoint the exact mechanisms. I think a good bet is just that sheer amount of time with teens, that's what happens all the time, is that they're spending so much time on screens that, as the data shows, then they're spending less time with each other face to face, so that sheer amount of time and how it sucks you in for so many hours a day is top of my list. We need more experiments like this, but we have a few. There's one that randomly assigned people to either give up Facebook for a week or not, and those who gave up Facebook ended the week happier, less lonely, and less depressed. So, it's not just that our phones are rapid feedback machines. It's also that the feedback makes us miserable. But who's responsible for this public health crisis? Is it tech companies? Or is it us? Tech addiction is right now getting into the moral panic phase. The most important question is what do we do, right? We can have an intellectual discussion about the nature of addiction, but I think what most people want to hear is, is how do we manage this? We'll be right back. I'm Ann Appelbaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Who's responsible for this public health crisis? Is it the big tech companies? Is it us? Or is it this guy? Everything is supposedly melting our brain when it's a new technology. And it happened before, right? We said it about television. We said it about radio. We said it about the printed word for God's sakes. That's near I all. He's an expert on building products that get people hooked. The name of his best selling book is literally hooked, not to build habit forming products. And so the first reason I wrote the book was to help people build these products to produce healthy habits in others' lives. The second reason is that, look, I'll be honest with you, I found myself becoming unhealthfully hooked to some of these products that I found that I was overdoing it. Is it fair to say that you are personally part of the reason why I can't put my phone down at night to sleep? Like can I call you near it like when I am in the morning when I can't fall asleep because of excess blue light exposure for my screens? You can call me, but I won't pick up because my phone is charging outside of my bedroom, which is one of the first rules of managing distractions to not sleep next to your cell phone. According to critics, like Adam Alter and Dr. Twengi, today's tech companies are making something purposefully addictive, like smoking cigarettes. Technology is like smoking, but it's not like smoking tobacco. It's like smoking cannabis. Because it turns out that there's actually nothing addictive, chemically addictive, about cannabis. It's a behavioral addiction. There are other things going on in these people's lives that they are using these products that they are looking for an escape from an uncomfortable reality. And whether that escape comes from internet porn or smoking too much pot or too much news or too much television, they are looking for an escape from an uncomfortable reality and they are using this substance or behavior to zone out. The overarching problem here is not the phone. Anya Kemenetz agrees. She's an NPR reporter who wrote a book on digital devices and kids called The Art of Screentime. If you think about the circumstances of a teenager, how did she get to the point she's spending four hours a day in her bedroom on her phone? The idea that the phone somehow caused all of these things in her life that are contributing to anxiety and depression seems far fetched to me. It seems to me that if she weren't on her phone for hours a day, she might be just sitting and watching television or she might just be sitting staring at the wall. A-all and Kemenetz are right to be skeptical. To be totally honest with you, this research is all over the place. Some studies suggest the teens that spend more time with screens are 70% more at risk for depression. What other research has found that social media use is no worse for teens than eating potatoes, literally potatoes. This is a new area of research and new research is rarely conclusive. But here's something we do know. In many ways, today's teenagers are quietly doing a lot better than we did. If we're going to make this claim that social media goes up and depression and suicide goes up, well then why are we only stopping at those factors? What about all the other things that are also happening? You know, at the same time that social media use is increasing. Drug use is at an all-time low for teenagers. True and C is down. Teen pregnancy record lows. According to government surveys, today's teens are less likely to binge drink, smoke cigarettes, use heroin, fight and school. Why are we not also considering those things that have these positive aspects? Either we do one or the other. Either we say, "Well, we can't correlate any of this stuff," or we say, "Maybe there's a positive aspect as well to all these connected devices." And let's not forget there are positive aspects to our digital devices. They help us work, connect with loved ones, access information. They can even be worthwhile for the most vulnerable group that uses them, little kids. Children can get prosocial behavior from watching screens, watching Sesame Street, helps kids get ready for school, kids do adopt these things, as long as their parents are talking about it with them. So what you're saying is there's a middle ground. We can't compare screens to cigarettes, because there's literally no upside to nicotine and tobacco. So, what's a better metaphor? Well, the metaphor I use in the book is food, and I talk a lot about food. You know, I use Michael Collins, slogan, and I say, "Enjoy screens not too much mostly together." Say that one more time? "Enjoy screens not too much mostly together." So when I look at this slogan, when I look at your three-part mantra, I read "Enjoy screens." And I think, "Yes, I get that." I read not too much. I say, "Yep, I totally identify with that mostly together. Why mostly together?" What the evidence is telling us is that the detrimental effects of screens proceed from the kind of immersion in them that children do and that parents also do. The American Academy of Pediatrics is very clear in the new guidelines. They say, "Avoid solo use." So, Anika Menitz can help parents, but what about me? What can I do? Things got bad for me when I was having dinner with my two daughters at our home in Los Angeles. That was in the early days of the Huffington Post. Yep, that's Ariana Huffington. I was dealing with something that had just broken some news, and my youngest daughter is a bell. I started crying because I was at dinner, but I was on my blackberry. And that was an amazing moment for me that made me understand early on the impact that this computer we carried everywhere was going to have on our relationships and increasingly on our health. Huffington had an epiphany. She left the Huffington Post to found Thrive Global, a publishing and consulting company dedicated to help people live with less stress and less burnout. A big part of that is resisting the allure of screens. I think there's no question that tech companies have a responsibility to help us set boundaries in our relationship with technology. Everything is designed to hijack more and more of our attention. So Huffington did the obvious thing to get people off their phones. She builds an app. And I know it sounds paradoxical, but truth is paradoxical. So we've developed a Thrive app that puts your phone on Thrive mode. And when you're on Thrive mode to have a meal with your family or do deep work or meditate or whatever it is you're doing, if I text you Derek, I would get a text back that says Derek is in Thrive mode until such and such a time. And also at the end of each day our Thrive app gives you a dashboard that shows you how much time you've spent on your Instagram account, on Candy Crash, on Fortnite, on whatever it is that you spend time on that day. So you're saying the Thrive app both gives me information about my usage of the phone. Where I spend time, what apps I look at the most. And then it also allows me to manage time and say I'll only use my phone for this number of hours and it can sort of shut off the phone and even shut off certain apps once I use them past a certain threshold. Yes, exactly. Samsung was the first to partner with Huffington and now Apple is working with her too. This month Google unveiled its own app to help users manage their phone time. More and more companies are trying to help us have a healthy relationship with our devices. And is it really any surprise that Europeans are leading the way? There's a Dutch design company called Heldergrun, which means bright green. And their theory is that if you prevent your workers from accessing their computers at a certain point in the day, they'll be happier and healthier for it. So what they did in their studios is they tethered the desks to the ceiling. And at 6pm, no matter what their workers are doing, their desks automatically rise to the ceiling. Freeing the floor. Freeing the floor. Freeing the floor. Freeing the floor. Freeing the floor. They tethered to the ceiling by heavy duty cables, industrial cables and they basically are like, if it's a big account, I'd better start that phone call at 3pm. Everything I've heard from people who work there is positive. But even if your parents read Anya Commandants and your boss listens to Adam Alter and your phone company consults with Ariana Huffington, that still leaves you and me. How can we manage chronic checking when there's nobody looking out for us? In his next book, Neary All is writing a roadmap for staying undistracted. There are three steps. So first is managing internal triggers. In order for a habit forming product to take hold, it has to attach itself to a negative emotion. So when I'm lonely, I check Facebook, when I'm bored, I go YouTube, when I'm uncertain, I Google. So we have to identify what it is that we are looking to escape. What's that negative emotion that feeling? So it's not that you have to see a therapist right away, but it is important to note the sensation. Right. That's number one. What's number two? What we have to do is to actually plan our day, very few people actually keep a calendar. And so when I ask them, I say, you know, what did this evil Twitter distract you from? Let me see your calendar. Let me see what you plan to do today. I don't know. It's blank. So you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. The third step is to remove these external triggers. So of course, we get these pings and dings and rings and notification all day long. We have to change those settings or else we're at the mercy. Only two thirds of smartphone owners ever change the notification settings. Give me a break. Seriously? Two thirds of people who own a smartphone don't take 10 minutes and turn off those goddamn notifications. We get all day. It's ridiculous. It takes 10 minutes. You're turning what could easily be a productivity machine into a distraction machine. Right. So please, just take those few minutes. Keep the triggers that serve you, right? The workout app, the calendar app that helps you do acts of traction. Terrific. Keep them. That acts of distraction. The things that get you to do things you didn't want to do, you got to turn those off. There's a lot of debate about how serious technology addiction is and who's to blame. But the funny thing is, I kind of agree with everybody. Our devices are engineered to make us love them a little too much. The connection between social media and mental health, while unclear, is way too serious to ignore. And our devices share all the pitfalls of an all you can eat buffet. You can be responsible and leave happy or you can binge and regret it later. But the point is, when we walk up to the buffet table or when we pull out our phones, the power ultimately doesn't reside with the meatloaf or the cheesecake or with Facebook or Twitter. We know what we have to do. And we don't have to wait for an academic consensus to help ourselves. And the most important thing, the most important, is that we have to maintain our sense of, of agency that studies have found that the number one determinant of whether someone changes their behavior is their belief in their own power to do so. So if we believe that we are powerless, we are. Crazy Genius was produced by Krista Ripple, Catherine Wells and Cashima Highlevech, with help from Abdelafayad and Kevin Townsend. David Herman is our engineer, break master cylinder composed our theme song and all the music in this episode, special thanks to Matt Thompson, and an extra shout out to all the kind people who have left us five star reviews in Apple Podcasts, including Kenu Ten, who called us "crazy smart, crazy provocative, and crazy worth your time." I am Crazy Blushing, I'm Derek Thompson, see you next week. I am Ann Appelbaum, over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, "Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals?" Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.