Welcome to the Scrolling Backlash

How does the phone make you feel like how does a tiktok binge make you feel or or even just like a you know a before bed scrolling session that we all have oh like sick sick like absolutely sick it's like when the aliens get you right you know they take you up and then they they probe you or they do whatever they do and then when you come back down you don't know what have it's erased it's lost time so I feel like I have emerged from lost time and like what happens during that time is unclear but I don't feel good I don't know that I have the amnesia part of it but I what I have is I have the like like it promotes self-loathing in a way that like truly no other activity does because it just it just feels like like a deletion of my one precious life I'm Charlie Warzel and this is Galaxy Brain a show or today we're gonna answer a question maybe it's even the question of the online age how can we live lives where we use tech and don't let it use us this is the animating question of how to touch grass a new podcast series by my colleagues here at the Atlantic over five episodes Julie Beck and co-host and producer Natalie Brennan explore what exactly is happening in this moment that has so many of us out there feeling like we need to renegotiate our relationships to our technology at the beginning of this year I made a few predictions about trends that we might see and one of them was that there would be what I was calling a scrolling backlash that people are just really tired of their phones of the algorithmic internet of this idea that they're being manipulated all the time and that their attention is being directed towards things that don't make them feel good or whole or happy now as predictions go this is a pretty safe one but it's really been worn out in recent months these things are hard to measure but you can just feel it out there in the world in the artists who are asking that people leave their phones at home or in their pockets at concerts any genuine concern over whether younger generations are going to be able to read like older generations and while the data center backlash that we're seeing right now is complicated and it's about a lot of things including AI I also see that as an outgrowth of this larger frustration about the role that big tech is playing in our lives in the way that people just feel this fuzzy loss of agency right now it's a loss that just can't be separated from the devices that we use how do such grass digs into so many of the ideas that I've been trying to poke at here in the first year of this podcast our motto here at galaxy brain is that we pay attention to where we pay attention which also happens to be exactly what I found so valuable about Julie and Natalie's work and so I decided to bring Julie on here today to talk about this moment and to talk about what she's learned in this series how badly have our attention spans actually been fractured how is she reevaluated her relationship to all of her devices is the backlash that we're feeling and seeing right now justified and crucially where might we go from here Julie joins me now to talk about it all Julie welcome to galaxy brain hi Charlie thanks for having me so let's talk about this let's talk about the touchgrass moment that I think we are in even even the phrase itself right why is touching grass why is this something that people are talking about look and what need you want to just dig in and report on it yes so we had originally thought about calling the season how to log off um but that's not as fun but I think it also speaks to just a sort of general like renegotiation that people are doing right now between like how much they actually want to be on their devices and how much they actually want to like be inhabiting the embodied world around you and the grass and the trees and the people and everybody around you um so yeah we wanted to look at like the various shifts that are happening both in like the culture of the internet itself and the technology itself but also the shifts in like the culture of how people are thinking about their devices and how they're talking about them um and how much they want to use them so why for you did you feel like this was a project you wanted to work on I have deleted and re-downloaded tiktok on my phone like roughly four to five times um and it's usually like my friend ends up sending me like a Lord of the Rings meme and then you click it and to click it to to see it you have to re-download the app and they they give me every time but um Lord of the Rings memes are the gateway drug kids but um no it's I noticed something happening maybe six six months ago when whenever I was on my last like round of being on tiktok which is every time I would go on there I would get nothing but reels of like how to be offline more like how to live more analog how to heal your attention span on this app where I was actively in the process of degrading my attention span um so I thought that irony was interesting and so I think there was a shift that I was just sensing within myself but also like in conversations that I would have with people in real life and in what I was seeing online of people really trying to just be on their phones less be on social media less and I was curious why now when obviously we've had smartphones for a very long time we've had the internet for a very long time we've had social media for a long time what is the answer to that like why am I now why now um I think I think some of it is that we've had it for long enough that like the shines off the apple right um and I think some of it is a confluence of like these these different bigger conversations obviously there's like a big push by many to like get kids off of social media right or there's lawsuits you know against Instagram and um what is Instagram doing to our mental health and so I do think that those things have leaked down in some way but also even TikTok right has been pretty popular for a few years um we've had a few years of living in this sort of algorithmically optimized short form video environment um and it's gotten to the point where maybe people have had enough experience with it that they're starting to see the effects in their own lives and like starting to question that rather than just well isn't this fun I can watch Lord of the Rings memes you know and I think combining that with the sort of arrival of AI on the scene right and seeing all of these you know extreme stories about people replacing relationships with AI using AI as a friend or a lover or you know God forbid um I think there's been a sort of opposite if not equal reaction to valuing more sort of the the embodied world and the the the real social relationships that we had so I think people are reacting in part to the sort of evolution of like the internet culture and social media environment and the arrival of this new technology that's really like getting its little tendrils into every area of our lives so what one of the episodes to pivot here explores nostalgia which I think is a very big part of all of this hand-ringing that we are all personally going through right like is this moment different from others does it hurt uh are we doing something uniquely awful to our brains that none of our ancestors ever did um and when you talk about nostalgia there's particularly um a focus on on young people uh you know who weren't really around to have that pre-internet life uh in that episode though you have this this moment where you describe a time that you got truly and deeply lost and so it's it struck me uh that your co-host who's slightly younger than you never had that experience you never been an adult without a smartphone yeah and so what do you think is the value of being in a place where you don't have a phone to save you like are we losing something when we don't experience that vulnerability yes and no I do look back on it with a fondness right like I would no longer unless my phone died I guess I would no longer ever be in a position where like I simply had to like throw myself on the mercy of strangers and like hope that they helped me uh if I were lost somewhere I can just like follow the blue dot until I like figured out um and I don't know that I yearn to go back to that right like in some ways like that wasn't very safe um I was like a young woman traveling alone in a country where I didn't speak the language and I had no idea where I was and like no way to really like communicate with anyone I'm not mad that I have google maps and I have like some sort of safety features to like keep me safe when I go places and I do think we have lost a little bit of something of just kind of being where you are and like letting the experience be what it is um and those opportunities for connection right like I would not ask someone for help I would just use my phone um so I feel ambivalent about it and I would say that in fact ambivalence is the primary emotion of the season and of just like today's technology so there's the stat that you reference um because we were talking a little bit about people who haven't had access to a life without smartphones uh and I found it honestly just racing, maybe even troubling, but the status essentially that 60% of Gen Z wishes that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, plugged in. And nostalgia is like a very common thing. You get in this in the episode, everyone has nostalgia for some period of time, but Gen Z is nostalgia for this time before they were alive. It seems like something else to me. It seems like a genuine indictment of this moment that we are in. How do you read that stat? What does that make you feel when you hear that? I take that status sort of like not actually indicative of like if you presented them with a time machine, it was like you can go live in 1985 that they would go in there and live in 1985. I don't think they actually want to give up on all of the other things that have happened since then, but it's just this sense of like something in my life isn't working. I attribute it to this device and it's being expressed as like I just wish we could go back, but I don't think it actually means they wish they could go back. Yeah. I think one thing that I'm trying to figure out is it, is it just, do you feel like it's just an escapist phenomenon in that way or just this coping mechanism? Or do you think it actually leads to or has the potential to lead to a genuine backlash or push or protest against some of this stuff? I think about just the physical media boom, a push to do some things in a more analog way, even if it is kind of niche or hipster or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I feel like maybe I went into this thinking it is just kind of like an escapist fantasy in the way that somebody might be like I should have been born in the 1920s. I would have made such a great flapper or whatever it may be. But the expert who we interviewed for that episode Clay Rutledge, he studies nostalgia and his sort of whole take on nostalgia overall is that it's about the future as much as it is about the past, right? It is just warm feelings for the past and go what a nice time I had doing whatever, but it's also telling you something important about the way that you want to live now and going forward. Especially seeing what you're talking about, the rise in people buying physical media, again, people giving up their smartphones for dumb phones, I do think it is inspiring some level of actual behavioral change and even if you don't go so far as to like get a dumb phone and try to larp your life like it's the 90s, I think it still tells you something important about what you value and like maybe smaller shifts that you do want to make and how you relate to technology and how you sort of set up your life. If there's one real theme of how to touch grass, I think it's that the tools that we use change us obviously in these unexpected ways, right? Our habits, how we see ourselves, how we see other people, how we talk to each other, everything and the show explores this from anxiety to body image and I want to play you another one from your own show here, please. I don't think anyone is supposed to see their own face as much as we do now, but I think about this a lot like how our ancestors would have felt like catching a glance at themselves in a lake and instead we're just like front facing camera front facing camera front facing camera and it's it's weird, it's it's walking our brains. That was our fellow staff writer, so if Gilbert talking to you, what strikes me a bit about being hyper connected is that in theory, right, the access to abundant information that we have should be a good thing I think and it just doesn't seem to work that way in practice, like the way that we can learn anything but we tend to gravitate towards information that confirms our biases, right, and pushes us deeper down whatever rabbit hole or how we can learn anything about our bodies and then it pushes us to, you know, go and Google these things that lead to more and more anxiety. The thing that that Sophie gets at in that clip really is like it's something that you hear a lot of people say, which is like we're we were never supposed to have this much access to ourselves other people information and yet we hold that up as like that that's the beauty of the internet. That's the great thing more, more, more, you know, abundance, the library of Alexandria, your fingertips, whatever, right, but like what do you feel like this this access is is doing to people? I think what I've been thinking a lot about since kind of wrapping up the interviews for that season is that there are costs to every way of living, right, and what is happening is that the design of our technology like the design of these apps of smartphones of honestly the design of like society in general right now is pushing you to accept a certain set of costs and trade-offs and that is constant distraction and the slow degradation of your attention span and maybe some like body image problems in exchange for, you know, the most abundance of like entertainment, connection, communication, relationships, information that you could possibly imagine and that is a trade-off that you may decide is worth making, right, like at this moment in time maybe I'm waiting for the bus and it is worth it to me to to grade my attention span a little and like be entertained, but are you actually consciously choosing those costs or are you just sort of being pushed by default into making those trade-offs? And there are trade-offs to inserting more distance between yourself and your phone as well, right, like the phone is kind of where the people are and so if you want to be on your phone less then maybe you are going to be a little bit less connected to like long distance loved ones or or maybe you're going to have a harder time getting you know figuring out what is the weather today or like getting that information that you need right now about how to get into concert venue. It's like there are costs either way however like all of society is kind of set up to push you towards one set of costs and I think people are starting to question that a little bit. Yeah and I think you know what if there's an insidious part of the the big tech experience right it is it is making people feel when they're using these things like there aren't any trade-offs right they are marketed as you know like connection is a universal good or this thing is a universal productivity increase or you should feel this way about them some of what we're feeling in this moment I think is basically you know maybe not fully being gaslit but you're experiencing the trade-offs the costs and you're sort of conditioned not to think that there are any right so you're like what's wrong in me that I can't get a handle on this right that I can't get a handle on my attention span or feel or feel this way and I think it's a bit of like no no no no no it's you have to like you have to do that inventory of of the give and take and you also have to know that like it's not a fair fight and that's okay you just need to be armed with that information I think I think that we're not you know as much these days well I also think a lot about the way that a lot of the response to this right like a lot of the sort of current movement to log off or do whatever is very like draconian it's like I'm getting rid of my phone and I'm getting a dumb phone and I'm never gonna look at social media ever again and like because I think the the the reasonable alternative unfortunately is that like you just kind of have to manage it forever like you said like they're the deck is stuck against you these companies are not going to decide that they want less of your attention um wake up one morning and decide that they've had enough um and so it feels for a lot of people that like the fantasy is like to just completely leave it behind forever and like walk into the sea and live like an analog existence and if you don't want to live that way or if it is not reasonable to live that way which I think for most people it's not then unfortunately the answer is just kind of like dealing with that push and pull and like designing something it's very DIY right it's like designing something for yourself with your phone with your technology that works for you and it requires kind of like constant upkeep constant management and constant like resistance of the forces that are trying to to suck you in and that's kind of exhausting yeah absolutely um you you devoted an episode to the ways that technology is changing the way that we learned right and I think that people can feel that disruption right now especially with chatbots uh I want to play a clip from interview you did with Michelle Miller who's a cognitive psychologist at northern Arizona university I think that teaching another human being how to do something that is one of the highest and best expressions of humanity that there is it's one of the the best and most positive ways that we interact with and contribute to one another so I do think it comes back to that core our self-agency and our connection to this great web of humanity I mean it comes about through learning I love the great web of humanity uh I hope we can preserve it uh so learning what I take away from this is you know learning is social and what's interesting about that is the current internet is full of other people other people's opinions broadcasting yourself for other people It's social, but it's also a lot of sympathy. a lot of synthetic stuff, a lot of synthetic people, a lot of people behaving in ways that they wouldn't or an antisocial ways. And it's also this medium that very clearly isolates us. And so as you're exploring this, do you feel like we're losing something fundamental here when it comes to learning? Or is it just a different way of learning that will produce different results? Where have you come out on all that? I think that doing this series also reminded me, and especially when it comes to learning all of the genuinely good things that I do get from technology. I like to knit and crochet. And where do I go to learn how to do a new crochet stitch? I go on YouTube because they have a video and it's perfect and I can see it and I can do it. So like I get a lot out of that, right? Or for my job, I read a lot of PDFs on the internet to obtain knowledge. And that is very useful. And I think that like Michelle was saying, like learning is extremely human. And at one point, you know, she mentioned that learning is sort of the way that you build the brain that you live in. Right. It's not just going to school and like doing your multiplication tables and then growing up to calculate all of your tips on a calculator for the rest of your life. It is literally like you cannot help but experience the world through the like black box of your own mind. And so to like build your own mind is building how you perceive the world, how you interact with the world. And so to outsource that to a machine to me, it's just like anathema into it's, you know, I found this really, really interesting talking to educators who, you know, as I'm covering AI. But the idea that like, yeah, the no one likes writing the whatever the five paragraph essay, right, that you. Yeah, in this essay, I will. But at the same time, it's actually like helping your brain understand like when I encounter new information, like these are the programs that I can run to figure out what I think about it. Right. Like it is just scaffolding in order to help yourself work through a complex idea and sort it. And I love that idea of of it is it is like related to your your brains perception that you live in the world built around your own critical thinking to sort of expand on that. We in the series, you talk a lot about attention, you end up doing an experiment near near the end of the series based off of, you know, finding a baseline of where your attention is at right now. And I don't want to spoil it, but I'm wondering what made you want to do this experience? What was worrying you about your own attention? So a lot of what I've heard from many people, right, which is just like feeling my attention pulled in so many different directions or just having sort of like a baseline feeling of like buzzies stimulation and not like the calm focus on one thing that I know at some point I was capable of. You see if the phone was indeed the culprit and if I could find that again. So I did, yeah, I didn't experiment, which was based on an actual study that came out like a year ago, where they blocked the internet on people's phones for two weeks and tested their attention before and after. I got in touch with one of the researchers who did that study and he kind of helped me do my own version of it where I took the same measures that they did. And I blocked like almost everything for 23 hours a day and did that for two weeks and then took the test again. So. So I again, I don't want to like totally spoil things for people, but I think what what we can say here is that in a short amount of time there were. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's like somewhat dramatic results or at least it's like meaningful results. I want to end here asking how your relationship to your devices has changed will exploring all of this stuff. Do you feel a little more positive about all of it just having had the experience of immersing yourself in this and with these experts who like to figure it out. A big part of the challenge for a lot of people, I think is not really knowing what to feel good or bad about, you know, like I got a sense going going through the series that, you know, you're orienting yourself to this problem. And sometimes that's like all we need right when it when it is so pervasive, but how is your relationship to the devices changed. I think you're right. I think I have a little bit more clarity around like my values and like my ideal scenario. I'm not always living up to it. Obviously, but I think for instance, like for me, I don't really use AI. Maybe that will change, but like if it does change, I'm going to be real careful about like how I want to use it and like in what very specific scenarios. One of the things that Jenny O'Dell said and we interviewed her for the attention episode was to sort of think about things as an experiment and then of course I went and did an experiment, but I think that that has helped me feel a little bit less like oh, like a guilt and shame if I like backslide or if I do it, it's like let me just try this thing and like see how I feel about it. And so sometimes when I do end up like on Instagram for, you know, 45 minutes or whatever it may be to just like take a moment and ask myself like did I see anything that added value to my life of those 45 minutes. And like sometimes I did, you know, sometimes I saw like some cute pictures of my friends babies and I got to see how they're doing or maybe I got an idea for a story. And sometimes I'm like, no, I saw nothing of value at all. And so that's important data for the ongoing experiment that is life. Thank you for coming on the podcast for talking about this, exploring it. And basically, you know, I see this as just such an extension of what we've been trying to do here, which is like pick these things off in small ways and and give people some just some understanding of the stew that we're all, you know, marinating in here every day. Yes, I'm always trying to understand the stew and I appreciate you having me. It's been so fun. Thanks so much, Julie. And now rather appropriately, we are pleased to share the final episode of how to touch grass season. It's called how to heal your attention span. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Are you happy with your relationship with your phone or are you not happy with it? I wish I could reduce some of the Instagram reeling, particularly at night, we're trying to go down the rabbit hole and just like, oh my god, it's been nice. Oh yeah, I've been there. It's like lost time. You know, even the aliens come and they get you. And then like they put you back down and it's lost time. It has impacted my attention span. I get bored after half a paragraph of reading. Do you have a sense in your mind of like when you notice that you feel like your attention span was getting worse? Probably been like since the start of COVID, like probably in the last five years. If a picnic kills me, sometimes how much I want to look stuff up in conversations, so I'm like constantly have a few books that I'm trying to read through and trying to rebuild attention, something like that. I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. This is How to Touch Grass. Julie, attention is one of the biggest things we've heard people talk about when they are renegotiating their relationship to their phone. Ironically, I feel like every time I go on social media these days, like I see someone talking about how they're trying to heal their attention span from technology that they're currently using. Yes, and it's always that word to like heal. It's like we're sick or we're injured and we must heal. Is it something that you've been worried about? I do worry about my attention sometimes, like every time I go to the gym lately, like I forget to lock the locker that they have in the locker room. I put my stuff in there, I shut the door and you don't lock. Then I guess I simply walk away and I don't realize until I get back that I mean no one has taken my stuff luckily, so it's all good. Good Samaritan's out there, but that has happened not once, not twice more than twice. Yeah, I guess the way that the attention span thing comes up for me the most is when I think about the number of hours that I spend on my phone, like your poorer and your attention into that phone. Yeah, I see those as very interconnected, but I've also noticed that I very actively try not to think about it. Like, yeah, I rush to swipe away the screen time notification every Sunday. Obviously that anxiety points to the fact that I want to have a different relationship with my phone, right? What do you think has stopped you from actively trying to get that screen time down? I think it's scary to sit with ourselves and we have grown really accustomed to all the stimuli, love stimuli. We talk a lot about, you know, looking at your phone is like, it's a negative thing. We talk about it in the negative, right? Like, I want to do less of this thing. There's this thing that I do a lot. I want to do less of it. And there's like, not as much talk about what I want to do more of. That's Jenny O'Dell, the author of How to Do Nothing. When that book came out in 2019, I remember at the time it was one of the first things I read that really raised a concern about what modern technology and social media were doing specifically to people's attention. So now it's seven years later. And I asked Jenny how her thinking has evolved and how she's doing with her own screen time habits. I mean, I'm, look, I'm doing great. I'm so happy to hear it. I can't say the same. I'm okay with my relationship with my phone and screen time. So can you walk me through a little bit? Yeah, I would say like part of the attention economy is the selling of quick fixes. When, you know, habits, they form over time, they're like grooves, right? Like, they need to be sort of formed over time. And so, like, geologically. Yeah, it's exactly. And I think, you know, if you try to say, like, go cold turkey, it can be frustrating when you don't see immediate results. Yeah. Or even, even within a couple of months, right? And then in that meantime, there's all this pill struggle of like, your friends are still doing it. You know, you need to be on Instagram to see this and that. And they're just muscle memory things, like things you're used to, you get up in the morning, you look at your phone. Like, these are just, this heart, you know, like those things are really ingrained, especially I think if you're younger. I'm good now, but I just want to stress that, you know, it took some time. And in that time, there's a little bit of a leap of faith. Yeah, I mean, I deleted TikTok off my phone for the third or fourth time, who's counting. But like, you're saying the muscle memory of like the thumb going up and down, like has just transferred to Instagram, unfortunately. So we got to work on that. Yeah. I would say there's like, honestly, you know, I'm almost 40, actually standing like with your very heavy head, you know, like on your neck. You get older, you start to notice the problems from that and it's like that is another kind of physical limit. I can't sit at a computer for that long without injuring myself. And then I think, you know, I really had to think about my relationship to the news. It was a really big one that I hadn't quite figured out when you're kind of scrolling, you're scrolling through it. You're not like really deeply engaging with any one particular issue. You're just seeing a list of bad things and they're bad in all different kinds of ways and they're terrible, like even just sitting with one of those things produces this paralysis. It's like in order to do something, you need an orientation toward the future and the situation in which you feel that you have some agency. There are certain things that I have started to do in the last couple of years. One of them is volunteering at a native plant restoration project every week. I've also been going to a lot of kind of repair fairs, also kind of volunteering type things that are in person where you bring with like broken, like toaster or something in there. Yeah, totally when I'm there, there is no desire to look at my phone. It's just so far from my mind and it has this weird lasting effect throughout the week, actually, because I had this experience that was so direct, that was so meaningful. Tell me what is the good thing about the repair cafe, about weeding the native plants, what is the good thing? I think some of it is just recognition. I think we as humans, we want to be socially recognized. We want to feel seen, we want to feel heard, we want to feel welcomed. It's like cheers or whatever. You want to walk into a room and have people, "Hey, it's you, I know you. I'm happy to see you." This is just kind of like a really basic thing that we want and I kind of think that social media, especially early on, like it's sort of the evil genius of it was that it was high jacket in that. And so I feel like these are in-person events. I feel incredibly recognized and acknowledged. And then it's like when you feel like this is the real thing, it becomes very obvious what is not the real thing. That's a big part of it and I think you're there, you have a shared project. You're getting some traction with something. Instead of just this sort of constantly being washed over with information and not really having anything to grasp on to. For most people in this day and age, totally going without a smartphone just isn't possible or at least not practical. Like the Infrastructure of Society, you know, they've got the QR code menu at the restaurant. The stores are all accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay and so many websites like require you to receive a text and then put the code in to even get in there. So trying to resist getting sucked into your phone just feels like resisting the inevitable sometimes. Have you found a way to resolve this tension for yourself? I live in the same society, I just use my phone to pay for lunch before this. But then I put it away. I use the phrase standing apart as a way of kind of not leaving or believing in the fantasy of escape from something and just sort of being like, I'm standing in a position from which I can see the thing. You're now running away from it. But I have critical distance and I think about something like food, you know, you go to the grocery store and I mean depending on the grocery store you're in, you kind of understand that 80% of the food in it is bad for you. Like we're all, you kind of kind of know that, right? Like we're all, it's been that way a lot of me from getting the flame and hot Cheeto's face, I do know. But it's just this understanding that that space is just not set up for me to thrive. And I think that it's helpful to maybe transpose that to your phone. What is a phone? A phone is a communication device. What I want from this is communication. The apps, you know, social media in particular are not designed for you to thrive. They are designed for the opposite. These are actively bad for me and I won't feel good. Like for me, it's sort of a level of acceptance of like antagonism has been helpful. It's like, I'm never going to have a peaceful relationship with that universe. And I'm just going to kind of like accept that and take what I need and leave. You know, recently I hear so many people both online and in real life talking about healing their attention spans from the damage that they feel like technology is done. And I'm curious why of all the things you think people are worried about their attention specifically. One would hope that what you pay attention to is what is important to you. That's an ideal situation. Not always the case. Right, exactly. So if you're not paying attention to things that are important to you, there's something I think like deeply unsettling about that on the level of identity. Because it's like am I even who I am right like am I who I want to be if I am paying my attention to something that I don't feel I ever chose. I think it really deeply affects people kind of like on the level of like self control and their sort of understanding of their identity. Yeah, well, it seems like the solution that many people have landed on for healing their attention span is just trying to be online less, however they can. So do you think that logging off is the answer or no. I think that the best approach personally is to just treat it as an experiment. Honestly, it makes it interesting like I'm a curious person, you know. And I'm curious about my self and my own reactions to things kind of being like, okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to see what happens when I try this. Natalie immediately after this interview, I really felt that it's to do what Johnny said to try an experiment. And when I was thinking about how to do that, I remembered this study I had seen from 2025 where researchers blocked the internet on people's smartphones for two weeks. Okay. And just doing that, they found that the improvement to people sustained attention was equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. After two weeks after two weeks, that discrepancy feels huge. It's huge. So I tried the experiment on myself for two weeks. Now I didn't perfectly replicate the conditions of the 2025 study to be clear. They blocked mobile internet using an app called Freedom. I used instead this device called a brick huge among my friends. Oh, your friends are all into it. So you know, so I use this device. I picked all the apps I was going to block. And you have to physically touch your phone to the device to unlock it. Right. I tried to, you know, keep all of the things that would allow me to communicate with other people. And so I blocked all games. I blocked all social media, email, Slack, internet browsers, and most internet connected apps. Okay. So I blocked all of that for 23 hours a day. I was allowed one hour of non-brick to time if I needed it or wanted it. And I could do whatever I wanted on a computer, same as in the study. It was only the phone that was restricted. And how were you going to test this? So I got in touch with someone from that 2025 study and they shared an attention pre-test with them. me and a self-report questionnaire. So I took those for a baseline. How long was the test? It felt like 1,000 hours. I think he told me it's actually like eight minutes. I did both of those things before I started the experiment and then I took them again at the end of the experiment. And I agreed to record a little audio diary along the way. Captains log day one. My phone has been bricked pretty much all day. I've definitely been kind of low energy. I don't know if that's like dopamine withdrawal. I've definitely been like carrying my phone around with me everywhere. Even though there's not really that much for me to look at. Morning, it's day two. My husband is out of town right now, so it is daunting to have two of my biggest sources of entertainment. My husband and my phone are available to me at this time, but we persevere. It is Saturday. It's my first like full weekend day. I ordered a big order of yarn. So I have a lot of knitting and crochet stuff to work on. Good morning, it's day five. Knitting right now. Joe and I went birding. The one thing that I am noticing mood-wise is that I do feel pretty calm, like maybe more calm than usual. Okay, Julie, first check in. What off the bat did you think you were going to do more of with your time that you didn't wind up doing? Using the phone as a communication device, right? Actually, like calling my loved ones to catch up, you know, what the phone was invented for shout out Alexander Graham Bell, but I think because I had blocked so much and I was getting more used to just not having my phone on me and in my hand at all times, I was just thinking about my phone less overall. Which was the goal, but I kind of come to think that as much as the distraction of the phone like has a cost, there's also a cost to putting more distance there because the phone is where the people are. It's interesting how much our relationship to our phones is intertwined with our relationship to others. Yeah. When we overuse our phones, that isn't good for our relationships. And the way we use our phones is definitely influenced by other people. I think we don't realize how much of our habits are kind of live in other people. Like, think about it. Like, when do you pick up your phone? It's when the person you're talking to picks up their phone. Right? Like, doesn't make sense of their phone? Where are you going to do? Except there is during the space that habit lives between people. It's so true because my friends will text me TikTok still even though I am trying to go off TikTok. And then if I'm like, okay, I'll just watch the Lord of the Rings meme that they sent me. Of course, my phone prompts me like, don't you want to download TikTok again? And so it is sort of driven by the relationship of wanting to see this meme. But I guess my bigger question is, is logging off to pay attention to something else in the real world actually better? Or is it just different? I always think about like, if you saw someone hiking and looking at their phone, you could be like, that's so depressing. But then it's like, what if they're looking at I naturalist? And they're like, identifying a plant. There are good things on the phone. There are bad things on the phone. There are good things I wrote. There are bad things I wrote. Like, one thing that you can say is that the sort of quality of attention that one often experiences on the phone, the things like social media is pretty narrow versus things, you know, off the phone. There are so many different kinds of experience, so many different scales of time, so many different scales of space. I love seeing movies in a movie theater. I'm like a movie theater junkie. I love to see horror movies in a theater. So there's things like that. But then there's things like, you know, looking at a very small bird in your neighborhood or being at like a table with a group of people and sort of and like being part of a conversation. Like, these are all just so different. Like, even if you think about your body in those spaces, it's so different. And I think it's good to have a variety of different contexts for your attention. Like, I think that's probably healthy. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how the way we think about our phones affects the way we use them. I think about it more is like, when I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool and it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole underworld or something. Yeah. Plus, did Julie fix her attention span? The results of her experiment, coming up. So day six, a bunch of fricking know it. I do the exact same thing at the gym again. Sure enough, I forgot to lock it again. I'm legitimately concerned. But anyway, my attention is not fixed yet. Good morning. It's a day seven of the experiment. My average screen time is down 74% from last week. I certainly haven't been like, you know, a perfect like screen abstinent person this week. I've watched plenty of TV. I have been able to, I think, focus a bit better. I read 200 pages of my book yesterday. I wonder how much of this could be achieved without such a draconian approach. I've been pretty surprised by how quickly I kind of like submitted. But yeah, just like the, how quickly the cravings to like check my phone all the time really receded. Julie, day seven was midway through your experiment. What started to shift for you by that point? Did the way you think about your phone start to change? I think what you learn or at least where I learned when you block access to almost everything on your phone is that the phone is not just one thing. There's a lot of different stuff in there. Like, you know, I think in our frustration with our attention span sometimes, people, myself included, will demonize the phone as a device. Like, smartphones are evil. Smartphones are sucking our life force and they're making us stupid. And that kind of flattens the problem, I think. But coming up for me is there's a lot of different things I turn to my phone for. And some of them are more problematic than others. Like, checking the weather is very helpful. You made a mistake in blocking that one. I did like, I realized that actually the first day. But I suppose that is the point of the experiment, right? To figure out which parts of my phone are actually adding to my life and which are taking away from it. Jenny, have you heard of these devices that block certain apps on your phone? There's like the Freedom app, the like unplug the brick device. Yeah. What do you think of the like recent popularity of these things? Honestly, I'm all for it. I don't use any, I'm not trying to brag. I don't need them. I think they're great. There's one in particular that I think is called social focus. And it lets you kind of change the appearance of websites. Like, you could go to YouTube and not see the auto suggestions, for example, or maybe like not see comments, like kind of allows you to change what you see. And I think like, there was a Chrome extension that came out called newsfeed eradicator. And guess what happened? I stopped going to Facebook. And it's, I didn't decide to do that. It was because the newsfeed is there to keep you on Facebook. So if you eradicate it, replace it with some sort of like mindfulness quote. You go to the site, it's inert. It can't grab you in that way. And so I just simply stopped going. It was like a totally unremarkable thing. I didn't even tell anyone, "Oh, I'm quitting Facebook. I just stopped going to it." And I think that's really powerful. So that's why I'm like, I'm a big fan of anything that can give someone sort of granular control over what it's sort of reintroduced choice in areas where people have never experienced choice because that in and of itself will cause someone to reflect upon what it is that they want. All of this reminds me of a study I've been thinking about a lot lately that found using an app that was similar to the brick. Yeah. For two weeks had such a big effect on people's attention span that it amounted to like reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. Oh my god. Which seems really huge. Wow. That's incredible. I am surprised and not surprised. Actually, honestly, this reminds me of like ecological restoration because when you restore a site, there's some things come back quickly and some things don't. Right? Like you restore wetland. Some species are going to come back almost immediately. The nutrient cycling of the entire site might take 100 years. Maybe our attention is similar in that or our behavior, let's say like it takes a long time to totally overhaul something But at the same time, I think you might be surprised at how quickly certain things change like in times when I was a little bit more like embroiled online and using my phone a lot and then I would you know maybe go somewhere Put it away for a while or whatever I found that like after a couple of days I would notice that my attention fell different and by attention fell different. I mean like I would notice Details or like small differences and things. That's almost like having a higher resolution image or something Are there other like seemingly small changes to your routine that you feel like might have that kind of big cognitive benefit? You know, I think trying to like replace habits with other habits. I meditate in the morning Only it just for like 10 minutes, I kind of like calm down to a level where then it's not going to as easily Occur to me to then pick up my phone or at least I'll have to be a little bit more reflective about it Yeah, my things so far my recent thing has been taking up knitting and crochet and this seems like so small But it's like now while I'm watching TV instead of looking at my phone I'm like my hands are in hand. Jail right? I'm doing knitting and It doesn't seem like so virtuous when I'm like now. I'm only looking at one screen But I feel like you know, it's an improvement. I think that's great. Maybe I'll get down to zero screens TBD but the other like layer to that that I was just thinking about When it comes to phones and social media and stuff is like a lot of times where I'm going to like learn how to do this new stitch Or whatever is YouTube so I it's not you know One is totally replacing the other but like there is sort of a relationship like now I am using that tool kind of like for this other thing. Yeah, right and I think that points to an important distinction Which is maybe maybe a bit more nuanced than just like just say screen time as a statistic You know, you were asking earlier about my like change relationship to my phone. I think about it more. It's like When I look at it as an object It looks like a tool and it did not look like a tool to me before it looked like a black hole Frankly like I wasn't even looking at it. I'm already picking it up like I'm already in there I'm already in that world. There wasn't even a point where I perceived the phone as an object Yeah, you know, right ahead And now I feel like you know, the things that I use it for The Merlin app. It's like Shazam for bird songs. I use that. I use I naturalists I use the constellation app voice memos for you know, like According birds that relationship to me feels really different because the Intention and the the purpose I feel like I'm in control of that. I mean on my phone The first home screen is all what I would call observational apps. So like camera voice memo I naturalist Merlin. I'm kind of trying to remind myself of how I want to use the phone Like I now associate my phone with those activities. You write a lot about nature Yeah, being inspired by nature. How being a nature helps you, you know, pay attention a common piece of advice for those who have been Brain-rounded by the internet is to go touch grass So are you also telling us to touch grass? Yeah, pretty much and I mean the weeds that I weed at my Weekly project are grass. So actually I'm saying kill grass. No, I'm just kidding But the reason I think it became such a that phrase caught on was because like it's just so obviously true The obvious truth of it is like why it's funny and annoying at the same time What is it that you think the natural world has to teach us about attention Complexity basically like I think it's like the semester class and complexity. It is kind of an antidote to the idea of the easy answer which I think um I really I I really blame Instagram for for the oversimplification of political issues. Like personally that is just my axe to grind and and the idea that you could sort of absolve yourself by reposting something is just like Yeah, I just like it's upsetting to me, but I think there's no easy answers to anything like If you are a birder and you like birds, I guess what you're gonna have to learn about trees, you know, and then you're gonna have to learn about like seasons and then I don't know. There's just all like everything is so tied to everything else and There are so many things that are sort of like neither good nor bad or sort of arguable We need lessons in that right now like we need lessons in the sort of like let me pick a point in space to look at and then like and then Let me look at the context around that. Okay. Now let me look at the context around that and now you've like sort of wide into this whole ecosystem Like that I think the opposite of that is what happens online So Jenny if someone is just starting to rethink the relationship they have with their devices What advice would you give them? Try to take an outsider's perspective on yourself. I'm a big journalist so like a pep journalist since I was a kid So that would work for me like I would look at my phone Look at some stuff on my phone and then I would just write down like kind of what it was and then how I felt about it You know, and I would be like brutally honest. Oh man. Just yeah, well just pretend like you're a scientist and just talk to your friend about it You could write it down like whatever, but like you know, I think there needs to be that like Every so often you step to the side and you go okay What did I just do like why did I do that? How did that make me feel like you be super brief about it Just do it for a week, you know like just see what it tells you yeah before you try to make any changes because the danger is that A person feels shame they feel that it's bad. They're like okay, I need to change this and then they try really hard to change it And then it doesn't go the way they wanted and then they feel more shame and now it's just like it's like a spiral Yeah, I think especially with attention for whatever reason It's just like it does feel very shameful this like oh, I can't focus like I can't pay attention I can't even like read a book without having the desire to pick up my phone. Yeah people think it means that they're a bad person And it doesn't you just gotta be patient and and try a bunch of different things and like, you know, maybe it'll be more interesting than you think Guys huge news Huge news I locked my gym locker today Nature is healing. I am I am the virus For once in my god damn life. I locked my gym locker Is day 13 was on a computer all day for work because computer is where the money comes from And still screen fatigue yourself the old-fashioned way Captains log the final full day of the experiment Over the past two weeks, I read one full novel. I started to other books. I finished in Audio book. I crocheted a little hat. I watched all of the first season of the traders It's not like I you know found myself with a magical abundance of time I think it's more like I just paid more attention and spent more time doing the things that I already like to do That was time mostly well spent So attention mostly well spent Julie when you set out to go on this experiment you got in touch with one of the researchers from the 2025 study Costadine Kushlev from Georgetown University Who agreed to go over the results of your post-experiment attention test with us And before we call him up are you nervous about your results not so nervous about these results Will it mean less to you if your attention span didn't change? On paper. I mean, I guess I'm a little nervous. I mean look like I And the nerd and I always want to get an A+ on my progress But I I really do feel better and if it's just a placebo effect well a placebo effect is still in effect right like I'll take it Okay, I'm gonna dial cost up Hello, hi, I'm Natalie. I'm Julie's producer. I'm also gonna be sitting in on this call. Hi, Natalie. Hey costadine. It's Julie. How are you? Pretty good. How are you doing? I'm doing okay So can we just dive right in and tell me before I started the experiment How was my baseline attention span? So your core was about three three point oh two is that good good for average 35 year old good that pretty good I mean essentially you did about how our participants did it's a little closer to the level You might see young adulthood or somebody in their 60s Okay humbling humbling humbling yes, yeah - Yeah, but you know, but once we get to your post-core. - Yes, let's do a big reveal. - Yes. - What do you mean? - So your post-core was actually hugely better. So it was 3.8, that is much bigger improvement than we saw on average in our study. So your improvement is about four to five times bigger than what the average participant in our study gained. - Don't show me. - Write it down Natalie. - Write it down. - I'm taking notes. - Yeah, so you did really well on that. - Amazing, I think, is 3.1 to 3.8 good? Have I reversed my cognitive decline or how would you characterize that? - You basically all of the charge, but it might take a while to read the benefits of this, this improved attention. - Right, and it'll probably go away if I just start scrolling Instagram again. - Right, yeah. - It's certainly not a permanent increase, but I do like to point out that just taking a two week break and not even a complete break from your phone, just sort of like reducing your use, can actually improve that ability to stand attention because our lives are just like so tied to these devices. So sometimes the question might be like, have we essentially permanently damaged our brain, like have we changed our neurobiology and so forth? And so this seems to suggest that, no, there is a way out. So it might be worth doing some of those digital detox interventions. - Thank you so much, Costa. It was great chatting with you. - All right, thank you, bye-bye. - Bye. - Julie, how do you feel about that? Unbearably smug. (laughs) No, no, no, no, I'm just kidding. No, I feel relieved, honestly. Like, even if the true effect size isn't as big as it seemed 'cause I am just one person, it's not a full scientific study. It still feels really good to know that it's possible to improve so quickly. - Right, so it's actually kind of wild that you can do something as simple as this and bounce back so quickly. - Are you going to keep using the brick? How are you feeling about where's your relationship at between you and your phone right now? - My relationship with my phone is cordial. We're not, it's not warm, but it's not cool. We're cordial, we're friendly acquaintances. - That sounds like how people describe their exes. - Yeah, well, we haven't broken up. It's really, it's a situation ship that is ongoing forever. No, I'm definitely gonna continue using the brick and I have been still 23 hours a day, you know, maybe not. - Yeah. - I have been breaking my phone out of minimum like before bed, so I can't doom scroll right before I sleep and I can't look through my emails or Instagram the second that I regain consciousness. - Yeah. - So that does help. But I would say that throughout this, I kept thinking about my favorite poet, Mary Oliver. And one thing that she wrote was to pay attention. This is our endless and proper work. That's beautiful. So this season I think what I've learned is your attention is your life. - Yeah. - And I think on some level I knew that already, but after this experiment, I've really been feeling it. - Yeah, we started this season because we wanted to understand why so many people were feeling the pull to log off, right? We've explored a lot of the ways in which the internet can pull you into thoughtless patterns, whether it's the way Instagram makes us feel about our bodies or the way that AI chatbots can send us into an anxious spiral, but it seems like what we're maybe actually looking for right now is ways to be more thoughtful. - Yeah. I wanted to feel more thoughtful about my life. I wanted to not feel as much like I'm literally giving my life away to things I don't even care about. I wanted to stop nickel and diming the moments of my life away. Being intentional about where you give your attention. (birds chirping) (gentle music) - This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Hizela Salim-Pierre. Our engineers are Rob Smerciag and Miguel Catascale. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdas. (gentle music) - Thank you again to my guest, Julie Beck. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you're getting your podcasts these days. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, like Julie and Natalie, you can subscribe to the publication at theAtlantic.com/listen. That's theAtlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the internet. (gentle music) [MUSIC]