Do This for 2 Weeks to Get Your Focus, Motivation, & Life Back

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (00:11):

The average American teen now spends five hours a day on social media, mostly watching short videos. I think 40% of American two-year-olds have their own iPad.

Mel Robbins (00:20):

With a new warning about how it impacts boys.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (00:24):

Boys now have a slot machine, a porn theater, a video game parlor. They have all of this stuff in their pocket with them all the time.

Mel Robbins (00:32):

Meta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion in damages due to the claims that Facebook and Instagram have harmed the mental health of young people. The

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (00:43):

Biggest damage is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention, to focus, and to pursue goals.

Mel Robbins (00:49):

Dr. Heid is here to teach you how to get your life back right now. If

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (00:54):

You're addicted to something and you stop doing it for the first few days, it actually can be painful. But if you stick with it, within a week or two, your life comes back.

Mel Robbins (01:05):

Jonathan Heit, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (01:08):

Mel Robbins, it is great to be here. And of course, one always says that, but the welcome that your team gave me, I have never seen anything like it. So it's a real pleasure to be here.

Mel Robbins (01:17):

Well, we are very, very excited that you made the time to come to Boston. I have had you on a list of people I want to sit down with for well over a year. And I want to start out by talking about what could change about my life or about my kids' lives or the lives of some of the youngsters that I care about. If I really take to heart everything that you're about to teach us and share with us about this shocking research, and I apply it to my life.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (01:48):

So what we'll be talking about here is how to regain your attention, how to improve your habits, especially your digital habits. And if you do this, then I can offer you, the listener, the viewer, the same thing that I offer my students at New York University. I teach a course called Flourishing. And they say, if you stay with the program, if you make these changes to your habits, by the end of the course, you will become smarter, stronger emotionally and more sociable. And if you become smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then you will on average be more successful in love, broadly construed and in work. And love and work is the magic formula in psychology for happiness and flourishing going all the way back to Sigmund Freud. So if you are more successful in love and in work, then I guarantee you, you will be happier.

Mel Robbins (02:35):

I feel like this is one of these topics that makes everybody anxious. The title of your blockbuster bestseller and all this research, The Anxious Generation is the right title because I know we have a sense that there is something deeply wrong. Yeah,

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (02:52):

That's right. That's right.

Mel Robbins (02:53):

And that we are losing parts of ourselves. We are losing parts of our connection to other people. We've all had that experience of just walking down the street and nobody's talking to anybody. Everybody's staring at their phones. You see families sitting out at a restaurant, everybody's on a device. And my heart quietly breaks and I also feel this deep sense of panic. And so are there things that we're going to learn today that may give us a sense of control back or exactly what to do? Because it almost feels like this is one of those topics that the genie's already out of the bottle and we're all screwed.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (03:28):

Yeah. So something big changed between 2010 and 2015, I've called it the great rewiring of childhood. And you and I are going to talk about that. What happened when everybody switched over from having flip phones or basic phones, the millennials went through puberty with the Motorola Razor, to by 2015, everyone has a smartphone. We've got to get to the point where we can return our phones to being tools that we use when we want to do something. You take it out. The smartphone used to be a Swiss army knife, even had flashlight and maps. It was amazing. We've got to get back to where it's a tool that you use when you want something as opposed to a thing that's dominating controlling your life and altering your consciousness and telling you what you need to do now and when. And it takes some work. I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's actually pretty simple.

(04:15):

The things you need to do aren't complicated. With a little practice, you really can regain control of your attention and then you'll regain control of your

Mel Robbins (04:23):

Life. I would love to start with just really digging into your research in this blockbuster book, The Anxious Generation.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (04:41):

Yeah. So the most important component of happiness, research and positive psychology has shown this for decades. The most important thing is relationships and relatedness. We humans are ultrasocial creatures. We have intense social needs. We need to have close relationships, supportive relationships in our family. And then as kids, especially as they reach adolescents, the plan is they kind of move out. They stop being under your tutelage, under your protection, and they need to begin creating their own life. And that means that they need to make it in the world of prestige of their peers. So that's always been the case. And that's why I was like for you, I hated seventh grade. Middle school was the worst. I generally liked school, but middle school was horrible. And suddenly you realize, wait, how I look, it suddenly matters so much. So middle school is a very, very difficult time.

(05:32):

It always is. You can't remove that. But if now suddenly everyone is online and everyone is connected and the companies tell us, oh, it's how you make connections. It helps kids get together. But what kids need is a few close friends. And early on what we were told was, oh, let them have an Instagram page. They'll have all these friends, they have all these followers. But it turns out that that doesn't bring you closer to your friends. It replaces them because the average American teen now spends five hours a day on social media, mostly watching short videos. They're not even liking each other's posts. It's mostly short videos. These five hours a day pushes out everything else, time with friends, sleep, sunshine, reading books. If you have kids, imagine taking five hours out of their day and saying, you have to go do something for five hours a day.

(06:25):

Now get everything else done. Everything else is going to suffer. And that's what these devices did. When the kids got on social media, it severely damaged their relationships because it gave them quantity at the expense of quality. They now had hundreds of friends that they never saw and instantly.

Mel Robbins (06:40):

Well, I also think it's stunning that the five hours is spent watching short form, it's not even five hours spent chatting with friends or talking to friends or doing something with friends. That's right. So this

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (06:52):

Is something very important for people to understand. Social media used to be social. Social media used to actually be called social networking systems. That was what we called them around 2006 to 10, social networking systems. Facebook was a social networking system. You put up your page, you've got your information, maybe your photographs, and you can go check out your friend's page and they can check out yours. That's perfectly healthy. There's no problem with that. And

Mel Robbins (07:15):

It was also very static. Yeah,

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (07:17):

Static.

Mel Robbins (07:18):

It

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (07:18):

Was

Mel Robbins (07:18):

Sort of like looking at a flyer. Yeah,

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (07:20):

That's right. It was not addictive. There was no dopamine issue. It connected people and it let you catch up with your friends very quickly.

Mel Robbins (07:26):

Yes.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (07:27):

So a lot of things change. So the iPhone comes out in 2007,

(07:31):

But very few kids have one and there's no app store, no push notifications. 2008, you begin to get the app store and push notifications. 2009, you get the share button, the retweet button, and then you get newsfeed in this period also. So instead of going to check out your friend's page, now suddenly it's your newsfeed and it's not just updates from your friends, it's news updates, it's commentary, it's culture war stuff. It's isn't he stupid? It's can you believe those Democrats, those Republicans? So now you're getting push notifications about things that aren't your friends, and this begins to ramp up the overstimulation, the anxiety. But you can only do Facebook when you sit down at your computer. And if you're a teen, you may have to sit down at your parents' computer. So nobody is on for five hours a day. So that's where we are in 2008, nine, 10.

(08:23):

2010, the iPhone, I think the five, has the first iPhone with a front-facing camera. That's also your Instagram comes out, but it's a photography site. Teens aren't on it.

(09:12):

Everyone's commenting on your skin, your breasts, your hair, everything. This is horrible for girls. This is a horrible way to put girls through puberty. So that's why we see girls suffering immediately. And that was what my early research was on. It was really clear. Social media, especially Instagram, is harmful for girls, especially anxiety, depression. And for older Gen Z, which is those born 1996, seven, eight, nine, I think that's the main story. And it looks like the boys aren't doing so bad. Okay. But now let's trace it forward a bit more because everything changes. By 2015, now the video games are moving onto the phone and now boys get their quick dopamine hits. They begin to get addicted to their phones for video games. Now that everyone has high speed internet, now porn, boys can watch porn anywhere, anytime. And so a lot more boys are getting addicted to porn, which makes it much harder for them to ever talk to a girl or flirt with a girl or seduce a girl or get a girlfriend.

(10:06):

For boys, the thing to keep your eye on isn't necessarily social media, it's quick dopamine. Boys now have a slot machine, a porn theater, a video game parlor. They have all of this stuff in their pocket with them all the time. And you are a boy, it's going to be just lots and lots of stimulation, which is going to make it very hard for you to ever pay attention. Boys, especially lose executive function, the ability to make a plan and follow it. For girls, it's constant social comparison. It's constant stuff about clothing, looks, makeup, was it get ready with me videos that the girls watch. So it is having a different effect on boys and girls, but they end up in the same pit of despair.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (11:19):

That's right. So the original internet was wide open. It was very difficult to make money on it. People put things up. But once you get push notifications, the app store, all that stuff, a lot of companies develop what's called an advertising-based business model. They make their money from showing you ads and a company like Facebook was the first to really pioneer this. If they make money from showing you ads, then they'll make more money if they show you more ads to keep you on longer and keep you more intense. And so the business incentive for them was to figure out how to keep everyone on longer. And they told their engineers that they said, "Your bonus will depend in part on you increasing the engagement numbers, which means time spent on the device." And

Mel Robbins (11:59):

You know this because you're involved with class action lawsuits

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (12:03):

Now.

Mel Robbins (12:03):

And so we have the evidence that these are designed in a way to keep you and your kids on them longer.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (12:10):

That's right. So first, I know people who worked at Facebook and they told me about the bonus structure, but because so many parents are suing Meta, in the course of the lawsuits, we have a process of discovery. The attorneys can request documents. Also, they're whistleblowers like Francis Haugen who brought out thousands of screenshots of internal documents. And so here, I'll just read a couple. So here's a discussion among two researchers at Instagram. One of them has a PhD in neuroscience and he says, "It seems clear from what's presented here in this internal report that some of our users are addicted to our products, and I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our product more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day. Intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines."

Mel Robbins (13:03):

Now I want to just make sure that as you're listening or watching, you understand what that means for you and me. One of the reasons why you catch yourself, and it's not your fault, sitting on your phone for two or three hours when you didn't mean to, you just went to go get a text, next thing you know you're scrolling. That's

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (13:18):

Right.

Mel Robbins (13:18):

Is that if you notice as you scroll, every once in a while you get a funny meme. Exactly.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (13:23):

It's reinforcing.

Mel Robbins (13:24):

But then you scroll through a bunch of boring stuff and then you get another funny one and then you scroll and you start to think, "Oh, I should get off this thing." And then you see a funny one. That's

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (13:32):

Right.

Mel Robbins (13:32):

But you don't know how often. And then you go to put your phone away and then what ends up happening, at least for me I notice, is that I feel this lingering pull that maybe there's something good that is on that thing.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (13:46):

That's right.

Mel Robbins (13:47):

And so I go to pick it up again and because I don't know, there's this interesting thing that happens when you start to realize that this is by design, that it's the fact that you don't know if there's a funny thing coming yet. You don't know if you're going to like the next thing that keeps you on it. That's

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (14:04):

Right. That's exactly right.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (14:09):

That's right.

Mel Robbins (14:10):

It's the software that's on the device and the apps in particular and the social media platforms and the shoppingification of social media that has led to all of this addictive behavior.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (14:25):

Exactly. So it's going to devastate the deep connections. They're not going to have the deep connections. They're going to have lots of shallow connections. That's really bad, especially for girls. That's one.

Mel Robbins (14:32):

Why is it really bad for girls to have shallow connections?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (14:36):

Boys are developing friendships. As my friend Richard Reeves says, he runs the American Institute for Boys and Men. He says girls like to connect face to face. Boys like to connect shoulder to shoulder, like we're doing something together. We're hiking, we're building something, we're whatever. There's also an enormous difference between connecting and performing. And there are times when kids need to learn how to boast, how to impress others, but it shouldn't be most of the time and it shouldn't be when they're with their friends. And as soon as girls get social media and now everything's about their profile and who liked them and why did he like her post, but he didn't like my post and all the stuff that girls do a lot more than boys about the going further on why they though that or did that, it drives them into just an endless loop of that kind of thinking as opposed to just connecting and having fun and sharing secrets with a friend.

(15:29):

Then there's the sexualization. If you just think about what healthy development is for a girl, the British have a phrase, "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mr. Worthington." It's from an old play or something, but you don't want to raise a girl on a stage. That would be devastating to her because what matters is her looks. The world judges her for her looks and that's what she cares about. Social media is just devastating for all the things girls need to do to turn into competent, happy women. So that's why my group says, we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16. Why

Mel Robbins (15:59):

Is the internet a uniquely dangerous place for a young person to be wandering around unprotected?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (16:06):

So it's kind of insane to put children in with anonymous adults. I mean, imagine if there was some place where you could just drop your kids off and they're going to interact with all kinds of men who are wearing masks and we never know who they are. That's completely insane, but that's what happens on a lot of platforms. Even Roblox. Roblox is a virtual space where people wander around, they interact with other people. Some of them are men who want sex. So once you get into any of these platforms that allow communication among strangers, this is a sick thing to do to children, but it's common. We just accept it. It's just common. And where did all the sexual predators go? If you hang out at a park, people report you get arrested. So they all moved to Instagram and a few other platforms. So research done by Arturo Behar was a Facebook employee.

(16:54):

He was at work from Instagram. And his daughter, his 15-year-old daughter created an Instagram page because the two of them enjoyed restoring classic cars and she kept getting hit on by men showing creepy things. 15-year-old girl, photographs of her fixing cars, she has to go through this. And so Arturo says, "I wonder how common this is." And he's able to do research and he finds that 15% of, I think it was 14 to 16-year-old teens, and here boys and girls were getting it equally. He said 15% of them get an inappropriate approach from a stranger every week. Every

Mel Robbins (17:29):

Week?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (17:29):

Every week. If you just look in the past week, the question he asked was in the past week. And what year was this? This was around 2018, 2017?

Mel Robbins (17:35):

So this was eight years ago? Yeah. It was 15%?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (17:39):

Yes. So his questions were, "In the past week, has this happened to you?" And one of them was an inappropriate approach from a stranger made you feel uncomfortable, something like that. And so it is just ubiquitous. Of course, look, most men are very decent and would not harm a child, but if it's 5% or whatever it is, some percent, these platforms give them free rein. And I should clarify, once your daughter gets on Instagram or TikTok, it's not just strange men who are going to be doing stuff. It's the boys in her class also. There's a book called American Girls. It's horrifying. I forget the author, but she goes through how boys use nude pics of their female classmates as currency. And the eighth grade boys, if they can get a pic of an eighth grade girl's breasts, they can then trade that to a high school boy who will get them beer.

(18:28):

I mean, things like that, just that girls' bodies become currency and the degradation and the humiliation. So there's a degree of sex and degradation to life online where children are interacting with strangers and there's no rules and no one's accountable. So that's why my group says, we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16.

Mel Robbins (18:49):

I find it really fascinating that you have two divergent things happening when it comes to parenting and modern society. On the other side of the coin, in real life, we've become so psycho overprotective that we're overprotecting our kids from real life

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (19:16):

Experiences.

Mel Robbins (19:17):

I want to read to you from page 90, "American parents have lost so much trust in their fellow citizens and their own children that many now endorse the near total elimination of freedom from childhood." Now, this is a report that's over 10 years old and it's still - So it's worse now. Stunning and it's way worse. And this report's from Pew Research Center. Parents on average say children should be at least 10 in order to play unsupervised in their own front yard. This was 10 years ago. People were saying, "I don't want my kids playing alone in my own front yard, even if I'm in the kitchen." Holy cow. They say that kids should be 12 before they're allowed to stay alone in their own home unsupervised for one hour. They should be 14, which is basically high school, "Before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park."

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (20:16):

That's right. That's right. I can summarize the whole book by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world where they need a huge amount of experience unsupervised and we have underprotected them online where there's a huge amount of threats and not a lot of benefit. We've denied kids the freedom to become tougher, stronger, more independent. We put them on computers instead because we though, well, that's safe. They're on computers. Maybe they'll be like Steve Jobs. Maybe they'll start a company. Good, he's on a computer. And we didn't understand as the internet changed, we didn't understand that putting our kids on the internet exposes them to all kinds of terrible people and companies that want to addict them. While most people are focusing on the phones, the larger message that I want to bring to everyone is keep your eye on childhood. Don't focus on the phones.

(21:03):

Keep your eye on childhood. What kind of childhood do you want for your child? Do you want a childhood that's going to prepare them for adulthood, that's going to give you a confident young person able to go off and travel, go get a job, go to college, or do you want someone who's going to just spend their life keeping up with the memes on five different platforms? So

Mel Robbins (21:24):

Dr. Haigh, let's talk about boys because we've talked specifically about the reasons why social media is psychologically devastating for girls, especially ages 10 through 14, which is why your recommendation is no social media until 16.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (21:53):

Right. So for boys, don't keep your eye on social media. For boys, keep your eye on anything that's like a stimulus response reward thing. So it starts with video games. And I remember my son, we had simple games on the iPhone and I remember seeing addictions form where he would get very. If you took it away, he'd scream, he had to have it. If when you take something away, the kid is very upset, that's a definite sign of dopamine adaptation. That is, their brain has gotten accustomed to a lot of quick dopamines that when you take it away, now their brain is in a deficit state. It takes a couple of weeks to get over that, for the brain to restore itself. Okay,

Mel Robbins (22:33):

So just hover here for a second. So for boys, what you're teaching us so far is it's less about all of the stuff on social media. The bigger picture is when it comes to boys and brain development, the addictive nature of social media and short form content and all this stuff makes them super addicted to it. And then when you go to try to limit it, now you're going to get the outbursts. Now you're going to get the issues, and that's a sign that you got a problem. That's

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (23:04):

Right. Maybe a metaphor that would be helpful here is imagine a thousand. It's kind of a weird metaphor. Let's try it. Imagine a thousand fishermen with big hooks dropping their hooks down and your boy is sitting there on the ocean floor and all of these hooks are baited with the most amazing possible things and they're all trying to get your boy to bite. And this is his entire childhood. It starts with the video games and those are amazing. And there's so many coming at him on every possible surface. And it's the short videos and the memes. And then when he gets a little older, it's the porn. And then it's the sports betting. My God, states have legalized sports betting and kids are able to get around the age limits, but there's gambling in almost everything now. So for boys, it's open season on their dopamine system.

(23:57):

Open season, companies are sending out fishing fleets to try to suck out all the dopamine. That's what you need to keep your eye for boys. And

Mel Robbins (24:05):

What does it do psychologically to your son?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (24:10):

Dopamine is the hormone of motivation, and what you want is slow dopamine. What you want, especially for boys, boys' outcomes are more variable than girls. Boys can be incredibly successful and they're overrepresented at that. And also among society's losers, they're way overrepresented in that. So boys, the outcome of their life is much less certain than it is for girls. If boys are able to apply themselves and work towards a long-term goal, they can be incredibly effective and successful in the world, and they often end up with a certain kind of ambition that you find more in boys than girls. But boys are also so easily lured into becoming lazy bums that never move out of the house because -

Mel Robbins (24:49):

So if you're frustrated because your son is not launching or he is in the basement or he's dropped out of college or he's lost motivation or never sees his friends, there is a direct link? Yes,

Dr. Jonathan Haidt (25:00):

A direct link. So think about it this way. We all have to learn how to do hard things. Children have to do hard things over and over again. If you present a child with a path, either you can do this really hard thing to get a candy bar or you can just have the candy bar, which do you want? I'll take the candy bar. So it used to be that you had to work to get things. So for example, the biggest project for me when I was in middle and high school was getting a girlfriend. I'm not saying sixth grade, but by ninth grade it was painful to not have a. Because some boys had a girlfriend. So that was sort of a long-term project and I would try to flirt a little bit and I didn't know what I was doing, but that's how you learn is by trying and failing, trying and failing.

(25:45):

And then when you finally succeed, it's amazing. And yes, it's dopamine, but it's also a deep feeling of satisfaction. And so if boys have that over and over again, they struggle for something, they get it, they get the pleasure of success, that's how you make a man. Whereas if you always say, "You have a choice, you can work harder, I'll just give you the reward." What you're going to end up with is a boy who's not really capable of doing much in the world.