Ep. 374: This Is Your Brain on Phones  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 374: This Is Your Brain on Phones - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/a9740cdf-b6bc-42c4-9cfa-16508ee229b8 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **How Motivation Circuits Vote** - The short-term motivation system fires pattern-recognizing neuron groups that vote for actions using dopamine-driven expected rewards. - The loudest vote wins, explaining moment-by-moment urges like picking up a phone. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So this is going to be a sort of high level view of what's happening low down deep within your brain. So here's the basic way I want you to think about what's going on in your head sort of moment to moment. There are numerous groups of neurons and what we can call the short term motivation system. These are neurons that have learned over time to recognize different situations as cues to take certain actions. We have situations that are acting as cues for taking certain actions. I'm going to draw you a picture here, God help us all, but I want to try to illustrate what I'm talking about, right? So let's start with, I have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. I'm going to draw a person here. It's going to be very clear exactly what they're doing. Is it clear what this person is doing here, Jesse? Yeah. Baseball player, right? Perfectly drawn baseball player. All right. So let's say it's a baseball player. It's a baseball game. You're playing baseball. It's a hot day. The inning break is over. This is based off of recent experience. I was coaching a little league game down in Anacostia, and the field, Jesse, was all artificial turf, but it was just baking in the sun. There didn't happen to be any shade. Yeah. Oh, my God. So this is coming from recent experience. But basically, let's say this. You're the baseball player. All right. You are coming off the field. You're really thirsty. And there's the water cooler. Okay. So what is happening in your head? You see that cold water cooler. You're really thirsty. Well, there's a group of neurons that are going to fire in response to the situation. It's a group of neurons that are pattern recognizers, and they're going to recognize the situation, both the internal state part of the state, which is that you're feeling very thirsty And some external cues. Like I see a water cooler that, you know, is nearby and it's in my dugout. So they're going to fire in response to that situation because they have learned through experience that drinking water in this situation is going to give you a big reward. The satisfaction you feel when you drink, when you're thirsty, you can imagine that group of neurons is essentially creating a vote. Like, okay, we're making a vote for you, the person to take the action of going to drink the water from that water cooler. Here's the only technical term I'll throw into this neuroscience discussion. This is where the neurotransmitter dopamine enters the scene. Dopamine is often misunderstood when people talk about it. It plays many roles in the brain, but it's often simplified to some notion of the pleasure chemical. Like you do something because you want the dopamine, it will release, it will make you feel good. That's not quite right. No, actually the role of dopamine in this situation is that that particular group of neurons that recognize this situation, the water cooler and you're thirsty, include dopamine Neurons. So when that pattern fires, it activates those neurons, and those neurons release dopamine. That dopamine is going to go down a pathway connected to that situation, a pathway that is going to connect to the action of going to get the water. You will experience the cascade of dopamine down that particular pathway as a sense of motivation. I feel motivated like that is something I want to do. Now, here's what's interesting about the brain is that there's often many different situations going on that are cuing potential actions. So if we go back to this picture again, this beautifully drawn picture, and no, it's not Norman Rockwell, Jesse, I just drew that myself. So I know you were, you were thinking about it. Um, in the same picture, maybe over on, you know, the dugout wall over here, you have, uh, like your bat and your helmet are over there, perfectly drawn, right? So like another possible action that you could take is maybe also, you know, that you are up the bat soon you're coming in off of the field and so you also have neurons a group of neurons That might recognize that situation is it recognizes the internal knowledge of i'm first up you know at the at the bottom of the inning and we're heading back to the dugout and i see my Batting equipment you know that's down here and so the relevant action that cues is well maybe i should go get my helmet on and get my bat ready, right? So now we have competing things you could do next. So what's going to happen is the bundle of neurons is associated with getting the bat and the helmet and getting ready to play. They're going to make their own vote and they'll flood some dopamine. The dopamine neurons will activate. They'll flood some dopamine down the relevant action pathway to try to make you motivated. Like, oh, maybe I should go get my equipment ready to bat. So you have different votes going on for different possible actions. In general, the vote's going to win is going to be the vote that's associated with the largest expected reward. And it knows this through experience. So the expected reward for drinking the water has been built up in that circuit through learning by drinking water in the past. And what was the reward like? There's a whole mechanism that dopamine is also involved in. I won't go into the details where it adjusts that reward. So if you think like, oh, it'll be kind of nice to drink water when I'm thirsty and then you do and it's great. There's a gap between what happened expectation. Actually use dopamine to mediate a change to that circuit so that next time it'll fire even stronger when it sees the water there. These circuits have learned through experience what reward to imagine. Very roughly speaking, the loudest vote in the situation wins. And in this situation, if you're really thirsty, that's going to win. You're probably going to drink the water and then you can vote. The vote for saying, get ready to bat might be stronger all right so something like that is sort of happening now neuroscientists i know already you're really upset you're saying i'm Simplifying too much i'm not talking about things like the ventral tegmental area or the nucleus acubinus or the incentive salience that dopamine types increases but i think we get Too bogged down in that i don't want to huberman this all. Let's just say this is what's happening here. Different parts of your brain, the short-term motivation system, recognize situations, the cue actions, their cue is like a vote. The strongest vote based on the strongest respect of reward tends to win, and that's the action you do. All right. ([Time 0:02:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6458b0fd-32eb-43d9-8c93-debffd72fb92)) - **Why Phones Win Every Election** - Phones overwhelm the short-term motivation system via clean rewards, intermittent big rewards, and ubiquitous cues. - Algorithms amplify pleasant surprises and boredom relief to create strong expected rewards. Transcript: Cal Newport So if you want to be precise, a big part of the problem we face when we look at our phones too much is that they overwhelm this particular short-term motivation system. There's three things at play here that lead phones to so effectively overwhelm this system. First, many of the things we do on our phones generate very clean and effective reward experiences. So when we're learning about the reward from different activities, the reward of many of the apps we look at our phone are designed to be very pure and to generate like a very strong association In our head and really make that circuit associated with the action looking at your phone generate a very strong reward. And we know why this happens, right? We talked about this a few episodes ago on apps like TikTok, for example, you have these machine learning algorithms. And what do machine learning algorithms do? They try to estimate, build an approximation of some sort of unknown process that generates rewards in response to different types of inputs. And it might not know in advance how that process works, but it learns by observing how to approximate that so it can get the biggest reward. So what's really happening here with one of these machine learning algorithms is that it's basically building an approximation of the reward generating circuits in your head. And then it's selecting things to show you that are going to generate the strongest, cleanest rewards from that system. So we're getting these really pure reward signals when we're looking at our phones because if we're looking at algorithmic curated content, they are devised to give you much stronger, Sort of like artificially stronger consistent rewards in a way that you might not actually encounter in the real world. Now, there's a couple different types of reward signals you get from social media style apps on your phone. One is the pleasant surprise signal. So this is why like funny things or unexpected things happening in TikTok videos are popular. Because pleasant surprise, these machine learning algorithms curating the content learn, is something that generates like a very strong reward signal for humans. Sometimes it's negative. There's a negative reward. So what you're getting, what I mean by negative is you're escaping the negative state of boredom. Of course, this is another like really positive, consistent reward you get from a phone is because you're often able to use it in a situation where you're otherwise bored. This is not the case with a lot of other rewards. Like I like watching movies, but by the time I'm sitting down in a movie theater and I'm there with like my wife and we got some popcorn, I'm excited about the movie. I'm not bored when that movie starts, but our phone is something we can pull out at moments of boredom. The alleviation of boredom is a very strong, positive signal. You take a negative state and get rid of it. Your mind feels very strongly about it. So this is why, you know, interesting tidbits or things that give you like emotional arousal, like really outraging stuff. This frees you from the negative state of boredom in a really strong way. And that's a very positive signal for our brain as well. The other piece of this, okay, so I'll leave that there for now. That's the first thing I want to say. Okay, so we get very clean, consistent reward signals. They're almost artificially good. Our brain is like, my God, we get messy rewards in the real world. Sometimes things are good. Sometimes they're bad. Not looking at this little screen here. Good, good, good, good. And we're adjusting that circuitry every time. Oh, this is, we should expect a reward almost always. We're getting like a very strong expected reward associated with looking at the phone. All right. The second reason why phones overwhelm the system in our brain is that they, in addition to having a very clean and consistent positive the expected reward is good. They occasionally deliver big rewards, especially again, when we're using things like social apps, really, really positive rewards, which they can't, the really big rewards they Can't offer all the time, but they can offer them occasionally. What do I mean by that? Well, you know, this would be like social approval indicators is one. This was part of the power of like Facebook's early rise after they switched to mobile and added the like button. The idea that sometimes when I go on and check and I click that, that's the Q. When I, when I click that F app, I could see unexpectedly that a post of mine got a lot of likes. That's a big reward because we care a lot about social approval. TikTok has this as well with like views or favorites. You're posting videos with your friends, you're doing dances and you're like, you know, most of the time no one cares, but every once in a while, 10,000 views. That's a big reward. In fact, TikTok knows that and will just artificially sometimes pump up those numbers to give you that experience from every once in a while. Or like if you're someone like me, forget even social media, like me during baseball trade season, the closest I get to what like a gambler addiction feels like is the MLB trade rumor Site. You know this one, Jesse? Well, just from you. Yeah, right. I mean, so they track trade rumors coming up to the trade deadline in MLB. Most of the time you go to that website, it's nothing's there for you, but occasionally it's, we just traded for Max Scherzer and it's a huge reward if you're a baseball fan. Okay. Here's a problem. Those really big rewards are delivered intermittently. That also really messes with this type of system. Intermittent rewards, we know this, of course, is why slot machines are so effective and they're all over Las Vegas casinos. Big rewards that might come but might not, that plays into our expected reward system in a way where we're like, well, we got to check because it could be this time, it could be next time. It could be next time. The hunting for the big reward, the way that generates an expected reward calculation, that really gets us wanting to check things a lot. The third reason why phones overwhelm these brain systems is that the cue, unlike many other things we encounter in life, is ubiquitous, right? There's certain things that I have very strong expected rewards with, and I'm going to get a really strong incentive saliency is a technical term with dopamine cascading down the action Pathway. There's certain things where that's really going to be the case, right? Like if I'm super hungry and I come home and there's like a big pizza out there that like my kids just started eating, it would be very hard for me not to grab, you know, a piece of that pizza, Right but it's pretty rare that i'm hungry and they're like someone's putting a pizza in front of me it would be a problem right if there's someone uh like an italian pizza chef who followed Me and he kind of just waited until i was hungry and then was like hey here you go pizza i imagine it was mario you know i would eat too much pizza right that'd be a problem. But how often does it come up? It's okay. The problem with phone is the queue is ubiquitous because it's in your pocket. So that means that circuit that's looking at the situation and saying, is there a pattern in this situation that matches my circuit that means I have to calculate reward and maybe incentivize Action? It's always firing off because the phone is always with you. And ([Time 0:08:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/96a0d1e9-2e20-4336-b225-cb82510c4403)) - **Mild Friction Usually Fails** - Adding mild friction or mindset shifts rarely outcompete the phone's strong reward circuits. - To stop impulsive checking, you must apply interventions far stronger than small inconveniences. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So let's start with the idea of adding friction. So I have this on the screen here. So if you're watching instead of just listening, you can see this on the screen here. Okay, so let's start with the idea of adding friction. This is this notion of, for example, I'm going to move my TikTok or Instagram apps to a folder within a folder on the third screen of my phone so it's harder to get at. This might mean using one of these tools where you have to look at a picture of a tree before you click on it or maybe even one of these things where you have to have a physical fob you have To hold to your phone to unlock it or maybe you've taken the apps off for some of these social media so to access them you have to go through your browser and that's that's less convenient. So we think like yeah adding friction maybe then I'm less likely to do it. This doesn't make much of a difference. And why does it not make much of a difference? Because again, those brain bundles that are voting, they're making an expected value calculation and they have a really big value they think is going to happen. If you add friction, weigh that friction that's integrated into the expected value. So it reduces the value some. The value of picking up this phone is a little bit lower because there's some extra action I have to do. But that friction, the cost of that friction is minor from the brain's perspective compared to that like massive neurochemical change to your subjective state that you're going to Get by seeing the good content and potentially getting the big reward. So the difference it makes is minor. In order for friction to be powerful enough to actually outweigh that reward to the place where you don't even want to pick up your phone, it would have to be way more severe, way more severe Friction than like I have to click through a few screens or I have to touch a fob to my phone before I can unlock it. It would literally have to be something like if I look at Instagram, you know, someone's going to kick me in the groin. That would be a case where you're like, you know what, I'm not going to look at Instagram, but you really have to have something kind of that powerful. Actually, there's a, you know, my friend Ramit Sethi, his brother, who I also know, Manish Sethi, had a viral video once years ago and it was a stunt, but he hired someone to sit next to Him and slap him every time he loaded Facebook. It became like this big thing. I mean, he was kind of making a point about it. Before you're going to outweigh the reward that your brain has learned from these phones to actually have a major change to your behavior. All right, let's look back at this list of things that people suggest. Another one is mindset change. Change the way you think about these devices, right? Like let's think about social media, and I'll tell you why it's bad from like a societal point of view. Let me tell you why it's bad because of the people who run it and and these are like fair arguments like is it really that important to you that you're donating a lot of your time to quote Like one of my recent newsletters toiling for free in an attention factory so that like mark zuckerberg can buy the second half of kawaii but those mindset shifts aren't likely on their Own again to make a major change to your behavior because we go within your skull we look at brain, there's the bundle of neurons that are recognizing the situation, that here's the phone And I could pick it up and they have a high expected value. I'm going to get this reward if I do it. Let's do it, right? That mindset shift does not have a major disinhibiting effect on this much more simpler short-term motivation circuit, which says we have a good chance of getting a good expected reward In terms of how we feel, believing in the negative state of boredom or pleasant surprise, if we pick this thing up. So again, this makes sense on paper, but not once we understand your brain. All right, what about moderation? Telling yourself, okay, what I just need to do is have better rules. I'm only going to use Instagram for 30 minutes a day. TikTok, I'll have a limit of like 30 minutes of TikTok total or whatever. Again, those brain bundles don't know about your time limits. They don't care about your time limits. What they care about is your phone is here. And if I pick it up and I touch on that icon, that's a clear cue. It's like pulling the lever on the slot machine handle. My expected reward in terms of like the positive impact on my subjective affect is high. So let's do that. Right? It's like going to someone who's addicted to a slot machine and be like, okay, here's the thing. You should have a rule about how much you play it and say, I'm not going to play it more than that. That's no match for what's happening in a short-term motivation system. Same thing with egalification. Yeah, you can make your phone black and white. That reduces the expected value of looking at one of these services a teeny bit. That's not nearly enough to make a difference. Let me cross that one off as well. Detoxing, by far the most common. I got to break. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to, you know, my internet Shabbat. I don't, I'm going to follow the Jewish tradition, and I'm not going to, on Saturdays, I'm not going to use technology and I'm not going to use my phone. And that has benefits for sure, right? Like it feels good that day. You have a better day that day not being on your phone. But one day without your phone is not nearly enough to change anything about those circuits. Now, maybe if you detoxed for eight months without your phone, the lack of use on those circuits, eventually the expected reward would come down and your phone would seem less appealing. But taking a day off or going on a week-long meditation retreat once a year, lots of benefits, but one benefit you're not going to get out of there once we understand the neuroscience Of phone use. You're not going to get a notable reduction in your urge to check your phone. All right, the final thing that people think about is escape. What if I just get rid of my phone altogether? ([Time 0:17:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a3acc6bc-0e42-4afd-84f6-3f0f3d8bbea8)) - **Take Algorithms Off Your Phone** - Remove algorithmic apps from your phone to cut the clean reward signal tied to the device. - Use those services on a computer so the phone no longer triggers the strong pick-up vote. Transcript: Cal Newport This is what becomes interesting. If we know how the brain works and we know why those other things aren't helping us out because it's not going to solve the way our brain activates. What will work? So how can this knowledge of the brain help point us towards fixes that will help us use our phone less often? That is what I want to get to next, the advice that actually will work. But first, we need to take a quick break to talk about some of our sponsors. So you know what I like, Jesse, a good pair of jeans. This is a true story. It's an embarrassing story, but it's a true story. I recently lost my favorite pair of jeans. This was a few months ago in the worst possible way. I was driving into campus and I realized the jeans, this is all true, had a hole in them, not in the place you want there to be a hole in your pants when you're like going to a public place. So I was like, okay, I need a new pair of jeans. Okay, I need a new pair of jeans. So I went looking and I found exactly what I was looking for with Rag& Bone's infused denim. With Rag& Bone, you get jeans built to move with you. They hold their shape and develop character over time. 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Get them from rag-bone Use the promo code DEEP so you get 20% off. And when they ask you on the site where you heard about us, please mention our show so they know you came from us. All right, I also want to talk briefly about our friends at Grammarly. Look, in the knowledge economy, the ability to communicate clearly is everything. Not only does it help you do your job, if you're a good communicator, it'll help you get promoted. You really should care about how you communicate, but most people struggle because writing is hard and it's not obvious how to get better at it. This is where Grammarly enters the scene. Grammarly is the essential AI communication assistant that boosts both the productivity and the quality of your writing. I don't think people fully realize how powerful Grammarly has gotten. Let me tell you about a particular feature I've been enjoying, the proofreading agent. I'll give you a real example. I had to write an email that was going to go out to a large group of people, so I typed out a quick draft. But before sending it, I had the proofreading agent and Grammarly take a look. It found a straightforward mistake. You know, Grammarly is very good at that. That's great. But it can do a lot more. There's a whole list of different functions. So I clicked, for example, sharpen opening point, and it suggested ways to be less wishy-washy and more precise in explaining up front like what this email was about. It actually gave me ideas that made the email better. And this was without me having to sit there and give this email, which I didn't care that much about, the same type of thought I would give if I was writing like a New Yorker article or something. So it just, in places where I'm not even like thinking much about writing or my brain is tired, it can still help you write better. But here's what I would suggest. If you're a knowledge worker, have Grammarly be like an editor who sits behind you and looks over your shoulder. Have it take a look at any communication that's going out to people that you care about, how they think about you. Let it fix mistakes. Let it comment on your precision. Let it detect or adjust your tone. It can help you brainstorm titles or ideas if you get stuck. This will all make you a better writer, and that's what makes the difference in our current economy. You use a keyboard, you need Grammarly. You can download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com/podcast. That's grammarly.com/podcast. All right, Jesse, let's get back to our deep dive. All right, so before we took a quick break, we talked about the common advice for using your phone unless it doesn't work. And we use our new understanding of the short-term motivation system to explain why it doesn't work. Now I want to do the opposite, and I want to look at a few ideas that do work. And now we can understand why they work based on our understanding of the brain. All right, the first idea I want to mention here that I think actually does work is eliminate the strongest reward signals. One of the things you can do is prevent the brain circuit that recognizes the pattern of your phone being nearby from being exposed to such a constant stream of highly purified reward Signals. We want to reduce the expected reward that that brain circuit associates with looking at your phone. The easiest way to do that is basically stop using on your phone algorithmically curated content. The best rewards come from content that is selected using a machine learning algorithm that uses your engagement as input. They're building an approximation of your reward estimator in your brain, and they're going to give you a very clear signal. So just stop using. I know this sounds both simple and impossible, but it's what I'm telling you. Stop using on your phone things like TikTok or Instagram or X or anything that you have an algorithm trying to choose things that's going to free you from boredom real easily or give you Pleasant surprise. When you reduce that reward signal over time, the power of the vote of the pick up the phone circuit is reduced. And it goes from being like a really well organized campaign to a sort of haphazard campaign. And that's good. And now the urge is lower. ([Time 0:24:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4e7a03d-dab4-445c-b747-abc5baba8e6f)) - **Make The Phone Less Present** - Reduce cue ubiquity by keeping your phone plugged in away from common living spaces, like the kitchen. - Check it intentionally instead of having it constantly within reach during routines. Transcript: Cal Newport The second category of advice that we think will actually work is reduce the ubiquity of the cues. So if you don't have your phone right with you all the time, then the amount of time during your day where the pick up the phone pattern fires is reduced because the phone actually has to Be accessible for that pattern to fire. So even if the expected reward is really high for looking at your phone, if the phone is not there, the pattern that's going to generate that vote is not going to fire. Now, the easiest way to do this, I've been now saying this for a while now, people don't like this advice, but I'm telling you, you need to do this. When you're at home your phone is plugged in in your kitchen plug in your charger whatever that is where your phone lives if you need to check on like a text message conversation you go To the kitchen and you check on it if there's a call you're expecting you put on the ringer like an old-fashioned phone and if it rings you go in there and you check on it if you want to listen To a podcast while you do the dishes, you use earbuds. You use wireless earphones so that the phone can stay where it is plugged in. So importantly, if you're reading, if you're at the dinner table, if you're watching TV, you're brushing your teeth, like whatever it is, the phone isn't actually there for you to grab. So it makes this the easiest thing you can do to make the cue non-ubiquitous. And if the cue is not there, the pattern won't fire and you don't have to fight that vote. All right. ([Time 0:31:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b9d7b302-9221-4d9a-b9ac-e7c47aed2abd)) - **Boost Your Long-Term Drive** - Strengthen your long-term motivation by practicing disciplined, goal-driven projects. - The long-term reward system can override short-term phone-driven votes over time. Transcript: Cal Newport So the short-term motivation system is really good at like, yeah, go get that water, go pick up this phone because that's like most of what we do during the day. But there are other brain systems that can overwhelm or overwrite the short-term reward system because like, of course there are. If there weren't, things would get pretty primal pretty quickly. So one of the systems that can overwhelm the vote from the short-term system is our long-term motivation system. The system that does a better job of simulating the long-term future of certain activities, right? So we don't just have a direct connection. The short-term system is like, I can associate the immediate reward we'll get by doing this. When I eat the cookie, it will feel like this. When I pick up the phone, almost immediately we'll get something like this type of reward. The long-term system is thinking about, for example, when you're picking up a weight, it's looking down the line for you being in shape. Or when you're, you know, working on a book chapter, it's looking down the line towards the book being done. And it's doing more of a complex simulation. So instead of it just being an association, this cue with this reward, it actually does a whole simulation. There's a fascinating literature about how these simulations work. I've talked about them before on previous episodes, but it uses like stored memories about experiences from the past. It has like a logical simulator that then takes those memories. They try to figure out possible futures and based on those memories, what can it expect? Anyway, the reward signals from that system can easily overwhelm those from the short-term system. This is why like we do boring hard stuff at our jobs even though there's like more fun things nearby we could be doing, because like the long-term reward of like keeping our job and like Having this thing that my boss is asking me for is like swamping the short-term reward of like, well, don't we want to go to like the snack machine right now? Wouldn't that be fun? So you can strengthen this long-term reward system by practicing and introducing discipline into your life. And by discipline, I mean getting used to the long-term pursuit of goals that require consistent action over time and have really good rewarding outcomes on the other end. The more of these you have, the more power you're giving to your long-term reward system. And the more comfortable it is saying, hey, short-term system, I don't care about your vote. The reward that really feels good is when these big long-term projects succeed. Let's go work on that type of thing. And so the more your brain gets used to discipline, it gets used to working on long-term projects and reaping big rewards down the line, the easier time you'll have basically pushing Aside the incentive ([Time 0:33:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/97122d9e-d9f0-4e3f-a2c2-7a8d1c1e2eee)) - **Parents Didn’t Sign Up For This** - Cal recounts talking at his kid's school and the pressures parents face deciding on phones for children. - He emphasizes empathy for parents forced into a societal experiment with smartphones. Transcript: Cal Newport Who do we got first, Jesse? Jesse Miller First questions from Andy. My 11 year old son is the only one in his class without a smartphone. He gets bullied and he feels left out of trends. Smartphones aren't allowed at the school the school, but that doesn't change the fact that he's clearly missing out. Cal Newport Well, I mean, first of all, I'll say I recognize the issues here. And I recognize that it's really hard. And it's also not really fair for my generation of parents, and especially the people in my generation who are a little bit older, like whose kids are in high school or just going into College now because we didn't sign up to have to be part of this experiment of let's take this incredibly powerful new technology. It socially ubiquitous and then leave it on individual parents to like, okay, you got to go read like John Heights, 700 page, you know, annotated bibliography online about mental health Impacts of smartphones and make a decision that's going to make you like a complete outlier in your community. It is really, uh, we really put a really big burden on parents. So I have a lot of empathy. This is a really hard time. A couple of things I want to say here. It's probably not true that you're 11 year olds you're only kidding your class, not without a smartphone, but it can really feel that way. And at some schools, that is more true than others. That's changing now, which I think is good, but that hasn't completely changed yet. I would also say if he's being bullied, the phone is not going to help. So one of the big concerns, and I did a talk recently at my kid's school where I went through and said, why are the experts actually concerned about these things? And I broke those concerns in the four categories, and I talked about the four categories. And one of the categories was the sort of negative externalities of digital sociality, which, by the way, Jesse, is exactly the way to talk when you're trying to impress a bunch of seventh Graders. They really liked that. It was funny because we were doing it for the students and their parents. But there's these negative externalities of digital sociality. And one of them is there's whole parts of our brain that give us sort of like interpersonal guardrails that, you know, prevents me from like trying to club Jesse when I'm upset about, You know, an ad transition or something. We have all these interpersonal guardrails that makes us more reasonable people. We need that to survive as a community-oriented species. A lot of them turn off when social interactions become purely linguistic. So when I am just sending text to you on Snapchat or on WhatsApp, yes, if you ask my prefrontal cortex, is there a person, like, am I talking to Jesse over WhatsApp? It knows it, right? It's not confused about it. But many of these other deeper social circuits aren't seeing a person. They're not hearing a person. So they are turned off. The guardrails get turned off. Which means in purely linguistic interaction, we're basically like worse people. And we're much more likely to be mean or to bully. I mean, obviously we see this among adults on social media all the time, just like the stuff they say on X, you know, it's crazy, right? Like how enraged or outraged or how mean or how terrible they get. It's because the stuff that stops us from saying that in person is turned off when it's linguistic. So anyways, bullying goes up when you move more conversation digital. And then if you're in a compromised social situation in school, and by the way, tell your 11 year old that it does get, you know, it will get better. Middle school is not great necessarily, but like keep doing what you're doing, you know, be you, have interest, develop skills, develop discipline, start doing stuff that's like Really hard and following through it will get better. But if you're having a struggle socially, then the other thing that happens when I have a smartphone, again, man, such a burden is your relief goes away. So those interactions are happening all the time, not just at school, at home. You're doing your homework when you're at dinner, you're going upstairs at bed. It's right there on your phone all the time. So you get no cognitive relief from high stakes social interaction, which is exhausting. And if, and if you're in a socially compromised situation, they're also really negative potentially. And so that's like even worse. So this is not a solution. If you're upset about your social situation in middle school, like in a classic social middle school, like I'm not fitting in as a bullying situation. Hey, here's a phone that people can be like bigger jerks and you have to be in touch with them all the time. That's not necessarily going to make that better. There's a couple of things that can help with this collective action problem. I'm a fan of things like the wait for eighth pledge where you get parents in your grade to sign up and you use the wait for eight website onto this pledge if I'm not going to give a phone to My kid until after eighth grade, which is like roughly when like John Haidt recommends when the Surgeon General recommends it, the last Surgeon General. It's sort of like an emerging consensus, wait till high school to have your first smartphone. And it gives you statistics and that's where it's powerful. And then you can say, you know what? You're not the only kid not to have a phone. 33% of your grade has signed on to a pledge saying that their kids aren't going to get a phone till high school anyways. So that social evidence of you're not the only one is very effective because you do not need 99% of your class to not have a phone before you feel comfortable with that. You need roughly like 15 to 20% before that becomes a socially acceptable option so i'm a big fan of those you can help organize one of those pledges the way this works is it's really parents And grades at individual schools say i want to pledge for our grade and they get together with a couple parents and you put together an email and you tell the school and the school gives The email addresses and you send it out that's all it is And grade by grade, you begin to create these pledges, which I think are very powerful. We should start those as early as third or fourth grade. So you have different options there. Okay. And then you have lots of logistical things like, you know, if there's group chats you want to be a part of, you can have set up group chat on a family iPad and you have certain times set aside Where you can, you can look at the iPad and do the group text and stuff like that. But I really want to add friction to the idea of like, wouldn't it all just be easier if I just gave him the phone? I wouldn't have to be dealing with this. This is really so bad. And I really want to emphasize it is. That is not going to be the solution to these things, the social things you worry about, his social things. There's so much bad that comes with it. What I want to do here, I don't know if we have this, Jesse. Do we have that clip? Yeah. I want to play, here's an ad that's been going around the internet. It's from a smartphone-free childhood. It's a nonprofit organization. They did an ad. We only have the audio here, but you can kind of imagine the visuals here, which I think does a good job of making you confront the reality of what happens if you give, you know, your 11-year A smartphone. So we're going to hear the audio. So just to set the visual of this ad, there's like 11-year kid. I think it's like a 10- or 11-year looking kid, like a young-looking kid that age. And a dad, he's in bed, and his dad is like at the doorway like saying goodnight to him. All right, let's hear this audio, Jesse. Hey, kiddo. It's about time for bed, okay? Okay. Well, remember, there's a box in the corner over there with all the pornographic material that's ever been made in the world, even the rea... ([Time 0:46:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/265855fb-5c3a-4634-b8e9-7ee11fedaf33)) - **Use Collective Pledges For Kids** - Organize a grade-level 'wait until eighth' pledge so parents share a norm of delayed smartphone adoption. - You only need ~15–20% adoption to make non-phone norms socially acceptable. Transcript: Cal Newport I'm a fan of things like the wait for eighth pledge where you get parents in your grade to sign up and you use the wait for eight website onto this pledge if I'm not going to give a phone to My kid until after eighth grade, which is like roughly when like John Haidt recommends when the Surgeon General recommends it, the last Surgeon General. It's sort of like an emerging consensus, wait till high school to have your first smartphone. And it gives you statistics and that's where it's powerful. And then you can say, you know what? You're not the only kid not to have a phone. 33% of your grade has signed on to a pledge saying that their kids aren't going to get a phone till high school anyways. So that social evidence of you're not the only one is very effective because you do not need 99% of your class to not have a phone before you feel comfortable with that. You need roughly like 15 to 20% before that becomes a socially acceptable option so i'm a big fan of those you can help organize one of those pledges the way this works is it's really parents And grades at individual schools say i want to pledge for our grade and they get together with a couple parents and you put together an email and you tell the school and the school gives The email addresses and you send it out that's all it is And grade by grade, you begin to create these pledges, which I think are very powerful. We should start those as early as third or fourth grade. So you have different options there. Okay. And then you have lots of logistical things like, you know, if there's group chats you want to be a part of, you can have set up group chat on a family iPad and you have certain times set aside Where you can, you can look at the iPad and do the group text and stuff like that. ([Time 0:51:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e593dd72-a3c0-4eb0-ad60-418d3e005c32)) - **Phones Don’t Fix Bullying** - If your child faces bullying, a smartphone often worsens the problem and removes relief from social stress. - Avoid giving a phone as a presumed solution to school social problems. Transcript: Cal Newport Next up is Natasha. Jesse Miller I want to quit social media. However, I sometimes get an irrational urge to show off i think everybody feels this to some extent they want to brag about their looks their lifestyle body wealth job intelligence Whatever i was often the weird loner at school and as an adult i still have that chip on my shoulder how should i overcome this all right well ([Time 0:55:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/106290b4-d24c-43bd-a4ea-a7641fdce848)) - **Why MMOs Are Especially Addictive** - Massively multiplayer online games intensify reward loops by simulating reputation and community. - These games pose higher addiction risk than many single-player titles. Transcript: Cal Newport Playing these so much? Well, if we go through our model of how the brain works, there's a lot of these same brain mechanisms at play. Like games are designed to give you, it's going to be a pretty consistent reward because it's such an artificial environment and it's calibrated to be difficult, but not too difficult. So the rewards you get is one of both novelty of your scene stuff. You get a little bit of adrenaline if it's like an action game. And most importantly, you get sort of progress. And so it fits roughly in that model. Like, oh, I see my video game is here. I'm at home. I could go to the gym. I could read a book or I could pick up the controller. The queue is right there. The controller is right there. And because it's this artificial environment, it can give me like a really clean reward. So it does build up like a strong association. There's a certain type of game that really messes with this system even more than our phones do, and that is massive online games. If you talk to people within like technology overuse type related fields and research, the real things they fear are massively online games because they add in some extra elements To make their attraction even more powerful. They have like an endless increase in score. So if you're playing, you know, World of Warcraft or something like this, you're going to get this steady leveling. You do a little bit of effort in level. That's simulating like in real world, building up competency and getting more respect for it, which is a very powerful driver. They simulate it in those games. Now, of course, you get this when you're just playing like Mario a little bit because you're making progress. But in the online multiplayer games, your mind is like, no, no, no. Other people know what level I'm at and they see it. So that's much more powerful. It's simulating like I am in a real community of people and I am earning their respect. I just talked about that in my answer to Natasha that that's a strong urge. This thing grabs it way stronger than like getting hearts on instagram and like really twist it so that is super compelling um also the sense of uh it hijacks this sense of like i have this Is my tribe because i hear them in my headset we're on like a discord server while we play or whatever and i'm with them all the time and we're doing stuff that kind of pushes the buttons Of like adventures and trials. It's not the real thing. So it's not nearly as strong as like I'm actually in battle with people. But it simulates that sort of band of brothers type connection. This is super, super addictive on top of all the other just standard like we have nice positive reward signals to get associated with it. That's where we have the most problems. It's where like if you look to South Korea where they're sort of 5x all the problems we have with technology here because it's like a much more technology-focused culture. They have detox centers there for these video games. Not for phones, but for massively online video games. They have cases over there of people dying because they played the game so long that it was like dehydration and they had heart issues. So you got to be worried. Probably the most addictive consumer facing technology we have are some of these massively online player games. I'd be really worried about it. Like my advice about those games is like a game where a lot of people are playing at the same time. Just don't play them. Just don't use it. Just I would just stay away from it. Right. It's like don't get you know you might be like a marijuana user don't get near the stuff that might have fentanyl in it like why even like play with that okay so I am very wary uh I am very wary Of those games what what I would recommend if you're playing video games AAA games are usually the best that are non-multiplayer a AAA game it costs 60 bucks it has about 50 hours of gameplay Programmed into it. It's supposed to be stretched out. It's challenging. I'm going to want to take breaks because it's hard. I'm not leveling up in a way that like someone's watching me and like, yeah, that's like your, your equivalent of like me watching a lot of movies. I'm not so worried about that, but I worry about the massively online, uh, online player games. ([Time 0:59:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/049db8b1-a811-4478-885d-9f71b5af7abc)) - **Choose Single-Player Games Or None** - Avoid massively multiplayer online games altogether; favor single-player, time-limited AAA titles. - Treat such games like TV: occasional, scheduled entertainment rather than constant engagement. Transcript: Cal Newport I'd be really worried about it. Like my advice about those games is like a game where a lot of people are playing at the same time. Just don't play them. Just don't use it. Just I would just stay away from it. Right. It's like don't get you know you might be like a marijuana user don't get near the stuff that might have fentanyl in it like why even like play with that okay so I am very wary uh I am very wary Of those games what what I would recommend if you're playing video games AAA games are usually the best that are non-multiplayer a AAA game it costs 60 bucks it has about 50 hours of gameplay Programmed into it. It's supposed to be stretched out. It's challenging. I'm going to want to take breaks because it's hard. I'm not leveling up in a way that like someone's watching me and like, yeah, that's like your, your equivalent of like me watching a lot of movies. I'm not so worried about that, but I worry about the massively online, uh, online player games. So, uh, to give you actual advice, Carl, don't play those, just stop playing those, you know, just grownups, shouldn't play those games. Stop playing those games. If you like other video games like work of art that are single player and triple A, then like, yeah, you could treat it like TV, you know, like, yeah, instead of watching a movie on when I get home on Friday night, I'm going to play the video game for two or three hours. ([Time 1:02:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/79033428-85ea-438d-846c-b7c4ad1d4764)) - **Reroute Messaging, Set Expectations** - Reroute necessary logistics off constant messaging and reset expectations about response times. - Use calls for urgent matters and schedule check-ins to reduce compulsive texting. Transcript: Cal Newport Yeah, that's a complicated question. We did an episode about this earlier in the summer about text messaging actually being a major driver of phone use, especially when you get a little bit older and you have more responsibilities And maybe you're doing logistics for kids or you just have like a complicated social life or work slash social life you're trying to navigate. And this really complicates the picture because when we're talking about something like TikTok, that's purely optional. Like it gives you a nice reward signal, but you do not need that particular reward signal to function in any way. And no one notices or cares if you stop using TikTok. People do notice if you stop becoming available on the messaging services. So the hard thing with these is trying to differentiate between logistical necessity and social-driven addiction cues. And so here's the issue. You might be using this a lot mainly because I'm just involved in six threads that are all relevant because they're all logistics and timing, and I have to figure it out. But there's also a really strong cue here that our short-term reward center is going to really care about, which is there might be people waiting for me to respond. And the negative affect they have towards me will increase the longer I'm not responding. That catches our attention. People are getting madder every minute I don't look at my phone, potentially, makes you really want to look at your phone. And for obvious reasons, right? So these two things together can make this really powerful. The best solutions here, as we talked about in the episode of the summer, is not just to abstain. I just don't use my phone anymore. But to try to reroute the actual necessary communication more out of these text messages and or to reprogram over time the expectations of people who communicate to you through these Apps so that your mind is not so worried that people are upset like you know uh we we have different ways of organizing different logistics ways we check in i'll call someone once a day Or we figure out a plan in advance so there's like less stuff that's probably coming in urgent and also people have learned in my circles my phone's in my kitchen and so I come and I check It but if maybe once an hour but there might be a two-hour break and they can call if there's something really time urgent that tells your brain like they're not just sitting there upset And stewing they know and understand the way you use your phone you basically have to change your relationship to communication so that frequent time-sensitive communication coming Through text messages is not that common anymore, that people understand you're not always checking it. And because of that, you have the backup phone calls and other types of logistical types of things you do. That's all a pain. What I'm saying is do that pain. It's worth the pain because the cost on the other hand is to almost addictively have to check that phone all the time. ([Time 1:03:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33cad9eb-227c-47db-9e9f-b7d4f06b4be8)) - **Treat News Apps Like Newspapers** - Read news apps like a newspaper: one intentional session each day rather than frequent casual checks. - Treat the app as a morning briefing to avoid habitual, low-value refreshes. Transcript: Jesse Miller It's not the worst thing in the world. Cal Newport What I would recommend if you're going to look at like the New York times app is treat it like a newspaper and just say like, yeah, this is when I sit down like with my morning coffee or something. And I go through because it's, it's not super dynamic. They kind of set it for each day and then have some minor changes throughout the day based on what's happening. Let me go through and like, see which articles I read. Maybe one of the opinion pieces I read. And then you're kind of like done with the New York Times for the day. Just like you would have done in a day where you had the newspaper and you would read it over breakfast and that's it. And now you're done reading the newspaper. If you treat it that way, it doesn't really matter what medium you're reading it on. An interesting thing about the New York Times in particular is in their app design and in the way that they're now thinking about news stories, they're highly influenced by the success Of other news-bearing social media, which they see as their competitors, and it's reflected in the way they actually cover news now. So you'll notice two things they do to try to prevent you from bypassing them and going straight to something like Twitter when there's breaking news. The first thing they do is the live updates. That is a direct response to social media. So they want to give you a sense if there's some sort of breaking thing happening, that if you're on the app, there will be updates. It'll keep updating and you can click the thing, show me the new updates or whatever, because they know people have now learned through social media. It's not enough of like something happened. I'm going to wait till we know more about it. Then I'll read an article that summarizes what we know. And then maybe later that day or the next day, I'll get like this. Okay. A day later. Now, what do we know? I need to be like collecting information, right? That's what social media taught us. I have to be like Woodstein and Woodward and Bernstein and all the president's men, like trying to put together all the pieces. Like you want to have just like information coming at you. So they try to simulate this. Like, oh, we'll do these like breaking like reports. The other thing they do, which is very conscious reaction to social media, is they'll do five articles on an issue. Like instead of just like, OK, here's what happened. Here's what's going on. Right. And here's our article where we explain what's going on. Like we'll do five articles on it. Here's what's happening. Here's another take on it. Here's a news analysis on it. Here's looking at the other side of it because they want you to feel like we're flooding the box. I have lots of things I can read about this thing I care about. Again, 15 years ago, this would be weird. I just have a good article on it that you put in what you know, but social media trained people, again, they want to be reading lots of stuff. I want to read this and that and this, and I kind of want to immerse myself in what's happening. So they do that now. So they'll generate five articles on something right away as opposed to one. So it's interesting. So they've had to respond. They've had to respond to social media that try to be attractive. But it's fine. You can read it on your phone. Just do it once a day. I mean, again, they don't update those apps that much because it's a newspaper model. So there's not that much for you to see there, even if you check it all the time. ([Time 1:06:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fa1c3c67-1521-46b1-8bfe-e41a463a3844)) - **Watch Removed, Grades And Social Life Recovered** - A listener removed their daughter's Apple Watch after it harmed grades and social life, then saw academic and social improvements. - Replacing it with a flip phone and in-person activities restored balance. Transcript: Cal Newport John says, our daughter is currently finishing fifth grade. At the end of fourth grade, she began walking home from school, so we got her an Apple Watch for calls and location tracking. However, at the end of fifth grade, she began focusing on the watch to the exclusion of people around her, at times becoming visibly upset by some of the group techs she was on. Then her grades began suffering. So after a few attempts to work around the tech, we took the watch away permanently, locked up the TV remotes until 5 p.m. During the week, and allowed unlimited books. Last month, she tested in the eighth grade math and achieved the highest score in her grade on an end-of literature exam. Her social life certainly hasn't suffered either. She now has a flip phone for calls and emergencies, but the novelty wore off quickly and it lacks the intense stimulus of the watch. We otherwise do our best to favor in-person interaction through hangout sports and scouting. So surprise, surprise, Jesse, you give these technologies that completely overwhelm the short-term motivation centers in our brain and you give it to a fourth grader and their brain Goes haywire. And, you know, I feel like we, we pretend like this is not true, but it is, it's like that commercial that we just played for. You're giving all these capabilities to someone who's, you know, nine and you're like, okay, we just like trust you to use this well. So well done, John, realizing that like, yeah, you can change your mind. I get this all the time at talks where people are like, man, I wish I hadn't, I wish I hadn't given like this phone to like my kid, like what can I do? You know? And I was like, well, you are the parent, like you can change your mind. And if you're not willing to fully change your mind, the thing I've been recommending that people do say, okay, uh, yeah, you have a phone. It's not yours. It's ours. We pay for it. It's not your property. You have no right to it. I always joke in my talks that these kids who, you know, talk monosyllabically when it comes to like you try to take their phone away, become like Berkey and private property scholars. Like this is liberty is built on the private possession of property and you may not trot on my freedom. It's your phone. And so you just say like, okay, at home, my phone lives in the kitchen. So when you're home, we plug it in there. And you can go there if you need to text your friends or you need to check in on things, but you don't have it at the dinner table and you don't have it at the couch and you certainly don't have It upstairs in your room with the sheets over your head. The phone lives here. None of this. I really don't like when I hear the parents like, I wish, please, please stop using your, we're trying to eat dinner. Oh, please stop using your phone. What can you do kids these days? I don't know. It's your phone. You're paying for it. It lives in the kitchen. So you can go back. All right. What I do with my kids. So people do ask what we do. None of my kids have phones. We own a couple family flip phones, not a kid's phones, family phones. Like the phone we leave if one of our kids is at home and we're out going for a walk like that's our equivalent of the the old fashion phone if you need to like there's an emergency or whatever Um and if you're going somewhere like taking the public bus to baseball practice where it would be good to have a backup or you could tell us something went wrong you can basically like Check out one of the family flip phones which are terrible to use and it's like really bad technology. You can check one out to bring with you to have in case there's a problem. When you get back, we take it back. And just like John was talking about, there's something interesting on these phones. They don't actually want to use them. ([Time 1:14:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43237aee-a447-4d6e-a2ba-90abac711f2e)) - **Run Professional Social Media From Your Computer** - If you need Instagram for work, manage it on a laptop and never log in on your phone. - Schedule posting sessions and use social media breaks to test real impact. Transcript: Cal Newport Right, it's a good question. I don't know that it's vital for you to be successful. But let's say you're worried about it and we want to alleviate this worry. Understanding what we now know about how the brain works and creating that urge to look at your phone that we talked about in the beginning of the show, this gives us some options here That can give us a little bit more confidence. And the clear option that comes to mind for your situation is if you need an Instagram presence for your photography, it should have nothing to do with your phone. Do it from your laptop. Now, this is going to be easier for you, by the way, because if you're a professional photographer, your photos are not being taken on your phone, so you're going to have to be, like, uploading Them onto your computer anyways, before you post them. One of the reasons why Instagram is so successful is you had to, it was mobile native. Because for most people, the photos they were posting were taken on their phone. And so it was mobile native. And the reason why it took off ahead of Facebook at the time when it really began to take off in the 2010s is because Facebook was just moving on the mobile. But people didn't yet have that ingrained habit of like, oh, I want to go to Facebook on my phone. They were used to this like something they did at work when they were bored. It was like a website they went to. But Instagram was mobile native because the whole idea was I took a picture on my phone and now I can go over into Instagram and post it. And so it got this really big user growth. It wasn't just the user growth. It was the engagement that really made Facebook perk up. Oh, wow. Instagram users use it a lot because the camera was on your phone. And so it was the first real social app where people associated it with like, oh, I do this on my phone. And then they built up that – the reward signal got really strong and they built up that pattern recognizer in the short-term motivation system and they started picking up their phone All the time. So Instagram more than Facebook actually got people looking at their phone more than they planned. Okay. So do your photography Instagram on your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Don't log in to Instagram on Safari on your phone. Have a bad password and never type it in on your phone. So it's not something you can do impulsively by bad. I mean, good. Like in the sense of it would be complicated to remember. It kind of confusing here. Bad, like cool. You know what I'm talking about. Right. And so now, and then this could be like, you know, have a plan to think about your Instagram for photography is like one of the boring things that you have to do it's like sending out your Stupid invoices and like the invoice reminders like i gotta go into like quickbooks and like click these buttons and i hate it and no one ever really knows what's happening in quickbooks And you just press these buttons you're like i think this kind of worked right like it treat it like that i gotta log it on my computer i gotta import the photos and i'm gonna change the format And make it more of this. I go to my Instagram account. I load it in and I have this copy and I post that and then I log out again and you do it three times a week and that's how your stuff gets up there. The queue of your phone being involved. You're not really, without your phone, you're not going to consume a lot of Instagram. So you're not going to have that strong reward signal associated with it. And so you're not going to get that like strong vote being fired up in your brain all the time. And it's not going to lead the technology over you. It's unless like you work at your computer all the time. And maybe you could learn that queue if I want to go to the Instagram website. So do it that way. But the other thing I would recommend, this is an idea for my book, Deep Work. At some point, either before you do this or after you've done it for a while, take a 30-day break where you don't do anything on social media and see, does anyone matter? Does anyone notice? And does it make any difference? ([Time 1:18:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b04358d6-ff12-46d8-8b7a-3c1f773e981b))