Episode: 172
6 Simple Science-Backed Hacks That Will Make Your Life Better
with Dr. Adam Alter, PhD
Learn 6 simple mind and body hacks that play a huge role in your success, happiness, and health.
Dr. Adam Alter, NYU professor and bestselling author, shares actionable insights from groundbreaking research, including:
- A change that could add 20 years to your life
- A free productivity hack
- How small environmental shifts dramatically impact behavior
Learn how to make these small changes for big impact.
Listen on:
Every time you pick up your phone, you are losing time. And over a lifetime, it adds up to about 20 years.
Dr. Adam Alter, PhD
Featured Clips
Transcript
Mel Robbins (00:00):
20 years of your life is spent just scrolling on your phone?
Dr. Adam Alter (00:04):
Looking at your phone. It'll be about, for most of us, 20 years on average.
Mel Robbins (00:08):
Wait, what?
Dr. Adam Alter (00:09):
Yeah, it's something that you want to do over and over again. You want to return to your screen, you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you are not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you. That's the only thing to ask yourself. Do I feel better, happier, my life is more meaningful after this, or do I feel worse off like I'm empty?
Mel Robbins (00:27):
It's true. I do feel empty.
Dr. Adam Alter (00:28):
Yeah, that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling, they feel kind of empty.
Mel Robbins (00:33):
I hate that you put it like that.
Dr. Adam Alter (00:35):
Yeah, I don't love that. It's true. But I think that's what's going on.
Mel Robbins (00:38):
How do you stop?
Dr. Adam Alter (00:40):
It's very difficult. I mean, I think,
Mel Robbins (00:44):
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and today you and I are talking with one of the top psychology experts and professors in the world, and he's going to reveal six specific things that play a huge role in your success, happiness, and health. Now, these are things that you interact with in your day-to-day life that you probably don't think about at all. But after our conversation today, you're going to know what they are and more importantly, how to use 'em to your advantage. Dr. Adam Alter is here in our Boston Studios today. He is a renowned researcher and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and the Robert Stanski Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow. He received his PhD in psychology from Princeton University where he also completed two fellowships, which means he's really smart, and he's the author of Three New York Times bestsellers, irresistible Drunk Tank Pink, and the brand new bestselling book, anatomy of a Breakthrough. Now, Dr. Alter is here today to break it all down, share his research with you about the unexpected forces that shape how you think, feel and behave, including one change today that based on the research, will give you 20 years of your life back. So please help me welcome Dr. Adam Alter to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Thank you so much for making the trip to Boston.
Dr. Adam Alter (02:07):
Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
Mel Robbins (02:08):
It's terrific to be with you. I'm so excited to learn from you today, and I wanted to start off by asking you if you could just speak directly to the person who's listening and tell them what they're about to learn and how their life could change if they really apply what you're going to teach 'em today.
Dr. Adam Alter (02:26):
Sure. So I think there are two things. The first thing is I think we sail through life generally not really understanding what's shaping how we feel and behave and what's guiding us in the directions that we happen to be moving. So the first thing is I think you're going to understand a number of the things that are guiding you that you don't recognize are there. But the second thing is because you understand what those things are, you're able to act on them, you're able to use them to your benefit. Maybe the ones that are pushing in the wrong direction, you can stave them off. So I think it's a combination of both of those things.
Mel Robbins (02:54):
What made you want to research things like colors and these environmental, I dunno, things outside of us and within us that shape our experience of life.
Dr. Adam Alter (03:05):
So I think a lot of people, I'm sort of fascinated by this idea that so much of what goes on is hidden from us, that essentially life is kind of like the iceberg where there's a little bit above the surface of the water, but a lot of really interesting stuff is unconscious.
Dr. Adam Alter (03:19):
It's hidden from us. And so I wanted to try to understand as much of what's going on under the surface of the water. And a lot of it is these things that are shaping us in ways we don't recognize. So a lot of my research has been about trying to uncover those and then figure out what we can do about them.
Mel Robbins (03:33):
I love this. Alright, so let's dive in. There is so much to learn. So much of your research also focuses on the environment around us and how that can influence all different outcomes. Can you share some of that with
Dr. Adam Alter (03:47):
Us? Yeah, so it's huge numbers of different factors, but around us all the time there are colors.
(03:53):
Sometimes we're in a built environment like a room and sometimes we're in a natural environment. And so a lot of my work focuses on how these different cues shape how we think, feel and behave, and our welfare, our wellbeing. A lot of the focus for me recently, because I've been very interested in the effect of spending huge amounts of time in front of screens, is what happens when you go as far from screens as possible to natural environments, which we all sort of have the, I think general sense that that's good for us. It's good to be in a natural environment, but the effects there are among the most profound I've ever seen in any research that just spending a bit of time near a body of running water or hearing wind rustle through trees or spending 12 hours driving to the eclipse, which is what I did, it's a huge amount of energy that you put in perhaps to get to those kind of environments. But they have a huge effect on your welfare and it's worth doing.
Mel Robbins (04:42):
What effect does it have on your welfare?
Dr. Adam Alter (04:44):
So one thing about the way we live our lives today in the modern era is that we are constantly sapped. Our attention is s sapped. We're asked to pay huge amounts of very focused attention all the time, whether we're looking at screens, whether we're having extended work conversations, whether we are doing work. And so by the end of the day you're kind of depleted, depleted, depleted. If you wear one of those watches, the tracks your body battery, you see, it just kind of goes down and down and down. And that's a good metaphor for the way we live our lives. It sums it up pretty well. The thing about nature is that apart from actually being asleep, being in a natural environment is replenishing. It basically turns that dial upside down and so your energy starts to climb again. So it gives you back a lot of what is s sapped by that very focused attention because when you're in a natural environment, your attention is still grabbed by things. You might hear a bird, you might hear the running water, you might look at trees, whatever it might be, looking at the ocean. But that kind of less focused attention is really restorative. And there's actually a whole body of research called attention restoration therapy that focuses on exactly this idea that being in natural environments is one of the best forms of medicine we have.
Mel Robbins (05:52):
So let's unpack that because I could feel the person that is listening to us right now literally stop on the treadmill or hopefully you're outside walking or you just stopped loading the dishwasher and you're knowing that what Adam is saying is true. But there were a bunch of things you talked about that I would love for you to dig in further. The first one was this idea of the, I think you said something about attention therapy,
Dr. Adam Alter (06:19):
Attention restoration therapy.
Mel Robbins (06:21):
Yeah, what is that?
Dr. Adam Alter (06:22):
Yeah, it's basically this idea that your attention is constantly being sapped,
Mel Robbins (06:26):
It's
Dr. Adam Alter (06:26):
Being taken away and the kind of attention you have in a natural environment, which is not demanding, it's replenishing,
Mel Robbins (06:33):
It's true.
Dr. Adam Alter (06:34):
It restores you, it brings you back. It gives you something that you don't have. I think the single most profound example of this for me was a study that was done at a hospital on people who were recovering from surgery and they were randomly assigned to different rooms and some of the rooms looked out at a natural environment, a beautiful green lawn, some trees, and some of the rooms just where they happened to be in the building did not have that view. They were looking out at another part of the building and they wanted to track how these people recovered from identical surgeries depending on which room they happened to be assigned to. And they found they needed half as much pain medication. They spent three days fewer in hospital recovering. Just looking out at that natural environment was the best form of medicine there was. So it's true, I run maybe four or five days a week, and I try to do it outside when I can, and I know on some level it just feels good, but there's a huge amount of science behind that as well.
Mel Robbins (07:25):
So what do you recommend for us
Dr. Adam Alter (07:28):
To
Mel Robbins (07:29):
Put into our lives? Because we've had neuroscientists, medical doctors, sleep experts come on the show and talk about the importance of getting natural light first thing in the morning. We've also had someone talk about if you're kind of burnt out and you are having one of those moments where you just feel your energy draining, even looking off at the distance out the window can help you restore your energy. What are some of the takeaways or the science back things that people can implement in their lives to tap into this research?
Dr. Adam Alter (08:03):
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is I ran yesterday in a forest and it was wonderful and there was running water. There were all these ingredients and it was incredibly restorative. But as a runner, my instinct is to just keep going, which is how we live our lives. You're doing something and you want to keep going until it ends, till you finish doing it till you can check it off.
(08:22):
And I had to push myself to stop for five minutes to sit on a rock and just let the water go by. And that was by far the most restorative wonderful part of the day. And I think there's something to that, this idea of purposely stopping yourself. So I would say whether you're in a big city or whether you're not in a big city, find a little patch of natural environment. And by the way, if you're in an apartment in a big urban environment and you don't have that option, even little trees, little plants that you have in the apartment, the sound of a little fountain that you have with running water that stands in for that experience too is just spend say five minutes a day doing absolutely nothing but taking in drinking in that natural environment, even if it's a tiny one in your apartment, if you can get out all the better. But it's very important to do that, I think as a sort of daily practice
Mel Robbins (09:09):
And almost so as your research shows a countermeasure to the fact that modern life is requiring this intense focus that is just sapping your energy. You mentioned colors and there is so much that you have uncovered that is fascinating about how colors influence so much in terms of our mood, our behaviors, our physical strength. Let's unpack that.
Dr. Adam Alter (09:34):
Yeah, so some of this is my research, some of it's other people's research, and I got interested in color because I can't see color very well. I'm colorblind.
Mel Robbins (09:42):
Oh, you are?
Dr. Adam Alter (09:43):
I'm colorblind. So I'm sort of fascinated by
Mel Robbins (09:44):
Color. How did you figure out that you're color blind?
Dr. Adam Alter (09:45):
It took a while. When I was young, I would get colors right because all the colors in little picture books are so bright and obvious. So that was never a problem. But as I got older, it seemed like I lost the ability to distinguish colors. I think my parents were a bit concerned. They were like, what's going on? There's something going on in Adam's brain, we need to figure this out. So I did a series of tests and they identified that I had certain kinds of colorblindness, and so it made total sense, but it's kind of subtle, so you can't pick it up when kids are very young. Sometimes it takes a little while to figure it out. But it made me really interested in color and in particular in the question of the way I see the world is whether it's different from how you do, do we all see the world the same way? And then assuming that there is some uniformity to that, is that exposure to color influencing us in any way that's predictable? And the answer is yes, there are all sorts of interesting effects.
Mel Robbins (10:36):
Let me ask a question. So given that you're colorblind and you are researching the impact that color has on our mood, our emotions, even things like physical strength, it also can influence the actions that you take. Is the color influencing all of us the same way, even if you're colorblind and the color appears slightly dull or if you're color, you see what I'm saying?
Dr. Adam Alter (11:03):
Yeah, a hundred percent. So there are two ways it could affect you. So one of them is just association. So maybe I see the color yellow and it makes me think of the sun and fire and I see green and I think of natural environments. So it's just the association. It reminds me of other things that are green or yellow or blue or whatever the other one is. As you say, maybe it doesn't matter if you can actually see that it's green or yellow, maybe it's something about the wavelength. It hits your eye, it hits your retina, and your brain is doing something with that information that whether or not you can see that it's yellow or green or red or whatever. You're responding the same way. I think most of it is association for us that there are certain things that have certain colors and then that reminds us of those things. So a lot of us talk about blues and greens being more soothing, reds and yellows being more activating, which can be good or bad depending on what you're looking for. I think if I didn't know that a color was red and I couldn't see it and it looked washed out to me, it would have less of an effect for me.
Mel Robbins (11:56):
Got it. So what colors affect our moods?
Dr. Adam Alter (12:01):
Well, all colors have some effect. They have some effect not just on mood, but on all sorts of different outcomes. For us, there's a really interesting research looking at how the colors that competitors wear in sports affect how they play. So there's some work looking at Olympic athletes in combat sports like judo and wrestling and TaeKwonDo. And in the Olympics, what they did a while ago was they decided that they were going to randomly assign each competitor to either wear blue or red before each bout
(12:28):
As a way to just be fair, we're going to randomly pick red and blue and you're going to get your color and then you're going to go into the bout. But one of the things that researchers discovered was when we wear red, we feel stronger, we feel more dominant. And when you see someone else wearing red, you perceive them as more dominant. And there are very lower order reasons for this. If you look at animals, the animals with more red are more dominant in general. So if you look at a hundred birds from the same species, the ones with more red feathers or a red face will be the alpha birds, and that's going to be true for apes and other animals as well. So the color red has a really big effect, and it's associated with sort of how well your blood flows through your body and things like that. And it's a sort of signal that someone is strong and dominant. And what you actually find is in these Olympic bouts when the competitors are evenly matched, if you are assigned to wear red, you win about two thirds of the time despite being evenly matched
Mel Robbins (13:25):
Really.
Dr. Adam Alter (13:25):
So it has a huge effect on these outcomes. Yeah.
Mel Robbins (13:28):
Wow. So Dr. Alter, does that mean if I'm going in for a negotiation for a job, I should be wearing red or an interview or a date?
Dr. Adam Alter (13:38):
Yes, with a caveat. So the yes is yes, it will do that. It'll make you seem more dominant. It also turns out to make people more attractive to others really, which is interesting too. Yeah, there's research looking at dating profiles where you have the same picture. You just change every two months, the color of the shirt you're wearing. People get much more attention online when they're wearing, it's the same picture, but when they're wearing red rather than any other color.
(14:03):
So there was all sorts of good reason to surround yourself with red. It's true, even if you have a border around your picture and it happens to be a red border rather than blue or green or another color, but red also has other meaning too, right? It's not a color that we don't notice. So you're signaling something beyond just I'm dominant and making yourself look more attractive. It's a conscious choice. And so if people are seeing that and making other, drawing other inferences from the fact that you've chosen red, then maybe it's something you don't want to do if it's very unusual in that context, for example. But beyond that, as long as that's not an issue, there is very good reason to wear it.
Mel Robbins (14:39):
Wow. And what color calm us down
Dr. Adam Alter (14:42):
The most? Calming colors are generally blues and greens, and
Dr. Adam Alter (14:45):
I think a lot of that is the association we have with nature, which we discussed. So natural environments are very calming, water, the sky, trees, leaves, things like that. And so I think a lot of that comes from just the sort of calmness you get with the association with those colors.
Mel Robbins (15:01):
So one of your international bestsellers, drunk tank pink, very interesting name, and there's very interesting research about that sort of bubble gum, Pepto BMO pink
Dr. Adam Alter (15:15):
Color.
Mel Robbins (15:16):
Can you explain that?
Dr. Adam Alter (15:16):
Yeah. So the name is Drunk Tank Pink is a name that was given to this very bright bubble gummy pink color. It was used for a while inside they were called drunk tanks, where you put people who are kind of aggressive, often drunk, you're trying to calm them down, and researchers found that if these drunk tanks were painted pink in their words, you could calm these people down much more quickly. Within 15 minutes they'd be calm.
Mel Robbins (15:40):
And did it work?
Dr. Adam Alter (15:41):
There's some evidence that it worked. I think the research is a little bit shaky, but there was some evidence that this pink color did calm people down. It got a huge amount of attention in the eighties. There was a 60 minutes episode about it. Wow. It really got a lot of attention. And so I thought it was just a sort of fascinating emblem of the kinds of effects you might see from cues that you might think would have a smaller effect on us. But by being surrounded by those colors, there are huge effects. In fact, the visiting locker room at the University of Iowa has painted drunk tank pink in an attempt to calm down the opposition when they spend time in that locker room. So it's been used in a lot of different contexts more recently.
Mel Robbins (16:17):
Well, and I think where my mind goes is both to the Miami soccer team, but they're a little bit more bright and also to the beautiful trend of athletes wearing pink for breast cancer awareness, which obviously is signaling something else.
(16:32):
But I think that's fascinating if you're put in a bubblegum pink room that it just sort of dulls your mood a little bit. If you're a bit aggressive
Dr. Adam Alter (16:41):
Regarding into Miami, there are people who when they box, they only wear pink boxing trunks. They think it'll make their opposition a little bit less strong. And so I don't think that's why Miami is pink and they have that pink uniform, but that's one of the theories.
Mel Robbins (16:56):
Wow. So can you talk about mirrors and how you can use 'em to change your behavior?
Dr. Adam Alter (17:00):
Yeah. There's a lot of research looking at what happens when we see a human face. So one of the things that happens when you see a face, particularly eyes, is you feel that you're being watched. And when you're being watched, it changes your behavior in certain predictable ways. So if you think about a store that has a lot of shoplifting, one of the things these stores do if they can't afford constant surveillance is they put up more mirrors because we are less likely to behave badly when we have to look at ourselves doing it.
Mel Robbins (17:25):
Really?
Dr. Adam Alter (17:26):
Yeah.
Mel Robbins (17:26):
Why?
Dr. Adam Alter (17:27):
Because it basically forces you not just metaphorically, but to look into your own eyes literally, and you have to decide, is this the right way to behave? It makes us much more introspective and thoughtful about what we're doing. So there are these really interesting experiments where you say to people privately, you can toss a coin and if you get heads, you get a delicious jelly bean, and if you get tails, you have to eat something that's not very nice. And if you let people do that without a mirror, they all report, oh yeah, I got heads. There are a lot of people who report getting heads more than 50%, which you would expect. So people are kind of fudging the numbers a little bit when you get them to do that same task in front of a mirror where they're looking at themselves 50 50, so they become honest again. Really? Yeah. So there are some, I think, interesting implications.
Dr. Adam Alter (18:10):
One of them that I've always found quite useful is a lot of people might have a cupboard in their home somewhere, maybe in the pantry where they keep their chocolates and things that they want to eat. Only occasionally
Mel Robbins (18:21):
Mine's a drawer
Dr. Adam Alter (18:22):
Or a drawer. And when you open that cupboard or when you go into the pantry, one thing a lot of people do now is they'll put up a little mirror. So what happens is you're like, I'm reaching for the chocolate. I have to look at myself in my eyes. I have to scrutinize this decision. And sometimes it's fine, but other times maybe I'll look at myself and I'm like, okay, fine, I I'll leave that chocolate sitting there for a little bit longer. So it basically forces you to be a little bit more thoughtful about your decisions.
Mel Robbins (18:47):
Well, I could see how that would happen. If you think about opening up a fridge, if there was a giant mirror in there, I'd be like, oh, you again? Okay, shut the thing. So I might actually have to try this putting a mirror in the bottom of the drawer.
Dr. Adam Alter (19:01):
Yeah, there you go.
Mel Robbins (19:01):
Where I have all of our snacks, we call it the snack drawer. So could you use a mirror to kind of cue yourself when it comes to bad habits? Is that like an environmental trigger that can be effective in making you stop and think?
Dr. Adam Alter (19:14):
Yeah, I think so. So I think what the mirror does is it makes you think more deeply, and it especially makes you think more deeply about doing the wrong thing, where it's something that's contrary to what you think you should be doing because you have to do it in your own presence. It's like you're watching yourself. And so it's a very powerful cue in all those cases.
Mel Robbins (19:31):
I love that. I can think of a lot of implications for that. If you're somebody who's trying to cut down on drinking, having a mirror sitting there, when you open up the cabinet where the, oh, okay, I see you not so fast today. I understand there's some interesting research about how simply looking at money can change you.
Dr. Adam Alter (19:53):
Yeah, there's sort of interesting evidence that it can do lots of different things. So one thing it seems to do is it makes you a little bit more independent. It makes you feel a little bit stronger and reminds you of resources and having more of things. The other thing it can do is though it makes you a little bit less helpful towards other people, makes you a little bit less generous,
Mel Robbins (20:14):
Really, it
Dr. Adam Alter (20:14):
Makes you a little bit more independent. So there's some research where if you show people money or you show them dollar bills or things like that, and then you have a task where they have to be helpful, they're going to be a little bit less helpful if they've just seen money than if they haven't. I think that's because one thing you get from money is you can stand alone a little bit more. You don't need other people quite as much. That's at least the theory. And so it makes you more independent and less communal minded, and it might make you a little bit less generous.
Mel Robbins (20:43):
Well, Dr. Alter, maybe that's why I'm such a generous person because I never have cash in my wallet.
Dr. Adam Alter (20:49):
There you go.
Mel Robbins (20:50):
It's all about the credit cards. So
Mel Robbins (20:53):
Do you have favorite tweaks based on the research that you either recommend or use in your own life that help cue you to be your best or to make behavior change stick?
Dr. Adam Alter (21:07):
Yeah, I've talked about the one, the biggest one. Six years ago I left New York City with my wife and two kids, and we moved to a town where it was natural and beautiful, and we could go less than a mile in any direction and we would have either a beach or we would have a forest or we'd have something.
Mel Robbins (21:23):
Where is this? Do you still work in
Dr. Adam Alter (21:25):
New York? The Shangrila is in Connecticut just outside New York. So it's beautiful and it means that on any day I can drive for 10 minutes or even walk for 10 minutes and be somewhere that does all of this restoring. So I think being around nature for me is a huge one. Different people have different things that matter to them. That was very important to me. It also, it drew me back to my childhood because growing up in First South Africa and then Australia natural environments and especially the beach in Australia was a big part of what I was used to and I missed that. And so being near a beach, the sand and the water was really important to me. So I think picking the location that does the best for you most of the time is really important that it's worth sometimes sacrificing other things for. And that's something that I've always followed
Mel Robbins (22:10):
That makes a lot of sense. I remember this was decades ago, but when I had just graduated from law school and I moved to New York City, I basically spent all of my puny income so I could live walking distance to Central Park and so that I could also get to the West Side Highway because just being able in the big city to get to some green space was critical. And you said that thing about it also has this sort of nostalgia thing of being able to be outside anything about your inside environment, the way that you think about your workspace, or you might think about the kitchen or places where people want to be primed or prompted to be their best.
Dr. Adam Alter (22:58):
Yeah, so we mentioned earlier, especially if you're in a big city, it's useful to have something natural inside that environment. It could be hopefully a real plant, but if it's not real, a fake plant, anything that gives you the sense of that greenery and that nature, maybe even like a little fountain feature, just a little thing that you plug in and maybe has a light and a little bit of running water. Even the sound of running water reminds you of all these things. And I had the same experience in New York. I was always in Central Park or running on the west side. And so to the extent that you can bring these features into your home, there's a huge amount of benefit to that. I think for me personally, and this varies, but I think the lack of clutter that you create in a place is really an important source of wellbeing. So for me, trying my best, and this doesn't always happen, but trying to remove clutter from an environment, especially where I'm to think is really important. I think that's a really good way to think about doing your best work in general, that having blankness in front of you and just moving forward and pouring out your ideas is the best way to go without being infringed upon by other things that are in the environment around you.
Mel Robbins (24:00):
Why does lots of stuff around the environment where you're trying to work or focus, impact your ability to do your best thinking
Dr. Adam Alter (24:09):
Where every single thing, even if it's in a small way, is distracting. Everything draws you out of the here and now. Some things more than others, a smartphone massively distracting for all sorts of reasons that are obvious, even other objects, if you have a memento that's in view
(24:24):
That's really nice, a picture of a loved one that's really nice. But of course if you stare at it, it's going to take you out of the here and now that doesn't mean you shouldn't have photos of loved ones on your desk, but you should at least recognize that if there are a thousand different nice mementos around you, the clutter of that, while it's lovely and it brings back good memories, that's probably not the time and place to do it. So having clarity in front of you as you work I think is a really important driver of good ideas and creativity in general.
Mel Robbins (24:52):
I'm sitting here thinking about my workspace at my home and it is knickknack attack everywhere, like little stuff that I really love and means a lot to me. And I can tell you this is probably an indication of just how distracted I am, because I could look at my computer and I've got four little mason jars with all the pens in one and sharpies in another and pencils, and then I got a photo of my mom and my grandmother, and then I've got a little compass my parents sent me, and then I've got a mug that Chris gave me. And then, I mean, it's like a little zoo of objects.
Dr. Adam Alter (25:28):
If it makes you feel great, though I
Mel Robbins (25:30):
Don't know that it does. I just feel
Dr. Adam Alter (25:32):
Like,
Mel Robbins (25:32):
Holy cow, even though I'm not staring at all this stuff, you're saying that subconsciously your mind is still pulling it in to some extent.
Dr. Adam Alter (25:44):
To some extent. It's processing things around you constantly. And so to the extent there are things around you all the time, you might ignore them consciously, but they're always there. They're always, the clutter is always there. And on some level, even if it's on a small level, each little thing is pulling you away in some small sense. And that's the opposite of what you need, especially in the world that we live in now where everything is so distracting, we're actually getting 10 minutes of good, hard quality work is vanishingly impossible.
Mel Robbins (26:11):
That's it. 10 minutes.
Dr. Adam Alter (26:12):
I mean, it's very, very hard for a lot of people to work if you track them across the day to get 10, 15, 20 minute bursts of good hard work. It's tough for a lot of us, especially if your phone is nearby, if your computer's dinging you with emails and things like that, it's really hard to do the same task for 20 minutes in a row.
Mel Robbins (26:30):
Well, Dr. Alter, you are one of the most renowned and respected researchers when it comes to the impact of screens on our brains, on our health. So let's talk about it. You have written a huge book on this.
Mel Robbins (26:46):
You are somebody that people look to for expert advice on this, and we've talked a lot about nature, but nature is combating what has become the reality for all of us, which is we spend most of our waking hours staring at a screen.
Dr. Adam Alter (27:04):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So the way I think about it is when you sit in today's age and you look out at whatever you're looking at
(27:14):
Almost all the time, you can tell that it's this year, it's 2024 or roughly 2024, you see screens, you see all sorts of signs that we live in this particular modern age that we live in. I think one really useful thing and why nature is so great is because it's timeless that I think one way to measure how well you are living is are you spending at least some of your day in an environment that is timeless, that is not attached and tethered to the here and now that is not about the latest screen, the latest device, the latest tech, the latest gadget. So when you are sitting in a forest, you could have been doing that a thousand years ago and seeing exactly the same thing. And I think there's some value to living at least part of our lives every day in an environment that is timeless.
Mel Robbins (27:53):
What are some examples of how I can step into a timeless environment if I can't get out into the forest today?
Dr. Adam Alter (28:00):
So closing your eyes is really good for that, right? Because you can then think of anything you like and people have been able to do that forever. That's what makes us human is our ability to imagine outside of the here and now. The other thing is I think just having a conversation with a loved one, which is again, screens make that more and more difficult. We spend so much time in front of them that we spend less time with people we really connect to, but having a face-to-face conversation with someone that's also timeless, that was going on thousands of years ago as well. Our species has been doing that forever. We do it less now than we ever have before. So I think timelessness doesn't have to be about nature or even the environment you're in. It can be the activity that you're doing. And so anything where you're connecting with another human being is timeless as well.
Mel Robbins (28:43):
This is so important because so many of us, and I'm going to include myself, are searching for deeper meaning in life, searching for purpose, searching for a sense of being connected to self and connected to something beyond just that sort of day-to-day autopilot mode. Onto the next headline, onto the next deadline, onto the next thing on your to-do list. And I love how you phrase this as how do you take a break from modern life that is always going to pull you to the next thing and step back into these things that you have described that escape a sense of what decade you're in and what age you are, and that have always been around. And so nature conversations with somebody else, closing your eyes and into your thoughts to remind you that there is something so much more important than the here and now. And is there anything else that you would recommend?
Dr. Adam Alter (29:51):
Yeah, I think physical activity is a big one, right? Because a lot of the time we spend in front of screens is sedentary, we're not moving, we're sitting, maybe we're standing if you're at a standing desk, but it's very tethered to a particular place. It doesn't involve a lot of activity.
(30:05):
So I think there's a timelessness to physical activity. Our ancestors had to do much more of it just to stay alive, and so they had to find food and they had to negotiate different landscapes. We don't have to do that anymore. It's easy for us to get by and not move. So I think exercise, picking up heavy things, moving our bodies for certain periods of time every day, all of that is also consistent with this timelessness that I think is important. And I just think it's a good rule of thumb. I've realized this over time, that when you're trying to figure out, am I living the way I'd like to live, a lot of it is those timeless activities that go back to things that we were doing a long time ago that were very good for us as a species that brought us to where we are today.
Dr. Adam Alter (30:46):
It's a lot of the things that are kind of incredibly new and different. I love technology. I think it's wonderful in many ways, but a lot of the aspects of it that we've kind of put as a gloss over our lives today, I think leave us impoverished in some sense,
Mel Robbins (31:00):
Very much. And disconnected and distracted and not feeling like you're doing something that's actually meaningful to you. So you've done extensive research on screens, on digital distraction and also just kind of this constant need to be occupied. It's almost like the state of distraction that we've gotten used to. What's some of the most shocking things that you have come across in your research?
Dr. Adam Alter (31:29):
So I've spoken to, I don't know how many, dozens, hundreds of audiences of the kids themselves who use screens, the parents of those kids, teachers in schools, school district heads, people in policy in government, people in all sorts of different areas about the effects of screens. And the most striking thing to me is that when you speak to kids in particular, especially teenagers, you get this incredible difference between how much they feel they have to use these devices and how much they enjoy it, how much it is good for them. So when you eat candy, you might say to yourself, that's delicious. I kind of know it's not great for me, but I'm going to do it anyway.
(32:09):
With screens, it's like a different tone. It's this tone of I wish I and all my friends stopped doing this thing. I wish we didn't keep returning to the same social media platforms because I know it's not good for any of us, but if we don't, the only one who says I'm going to draw back, then I'm isolated. And so it's this very collective problem where unless you can get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time, it's not going to be easy to solve. And you hear this from a lot of kids. They say, if only I could get everyone else in my class or at least a certain number of people to do this, I'd feel better. And the parents say the same thing. They say, I wish I could be the parent who says we are going to be much more careful about exposing our kids to these devices and social media and so on, but we can't be the only ones. Then our kids are just, that's a different problem. They're the only ones. So a lot of the work that I'm doing now is on trying to push not just individuals to change how they behave, but to work with say entire classrooms or entire schools or entire school districts so that the entire district pushes parents and the kids of those parents to delay how long it takes them to use these devices.
Mel Robbins (33:15):
Well, it's interesting. I remember reading a big writeup of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts who you probably know, have this new policy heads up, which is no phones on campus, period. They can be in your locker, they can be in your backpack, but they are not on your person.
Dr. Adam Alter (33:32):
So there's a movement called okay to delay for example. And there are some others as well that are trying to deal with this at that collective level for exactly the reason you mentioned there are very few benefits to having phones at school, maybe a flip phone so you can get in touch with someone in an emergency,
Mel Robbins (33:47):
They can call the front office. I'm personally one of these people. It's like get the fricking phones out of the schools. Parents can call the front office if there is an emergency. It's a huge problem. There is no need to have a phone on your person when you're supposed to be at school. I mean, that's just my opinion, and I think it's fascinating that a lot of parents who can afford to love sending their kids to summer camp,
Mel Robbins (34:10):
Because why? They take their phones away and they love giving their kids that break and the kids love it. But I do think it's interesting that the shocking piece of research that's come out of it is we all know we need to do something. We all know it's bad for us, and we all wish there was an alternative, and yet my entire social life is on this thing.
Dr. Adam Alter (34:28):
Yeah, I mean, the way I opened this book was talking about how years before the rest of us were aware of this, Steve Jobs with his own kids. He wouldn't bring the iPad into his house. And then you look at other tech titans, there's a school in the Bay Area that doesn't let kids near phones or use phones or use screens until about ninth grade until they learn to code that school. 75% of the kids there are the kids of Silicon Valley tech execs, so they are sending their kids. The people who know the most about what this tech is doing are keeping their kids as far away from these products as possible, especially in the school environment.
Mel Robbins (35:00):
I mean, it makes perfect sense. So do you think we're all addicted to the screen?
Dr. Adam Alter (35:04):
Yeah, so this term addiction is, I use it in the book as a sort of shorthand to describe a lot of what I think is going on in this case because the definition that I use is it's something that you want to do over and over again. You want to return to your screen, you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you are not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you, one balance and that it has negative effects in the long run for your social wellbeing. Your relationships are degraded for it. It means you're more sedentary, so it's not good for you physically. It exposes a lot of us to bullying, anxiety, aggression, loneliness, other negative psychological consequences. It's also a way to overspend. A lot of people spend too much money using
Mel Robbins (35:45):
These devices. I feel like Instagram has turned into the home shopping network.
Dr. Adam Alter (35:48):
Exactly. Yeah. It's a very powerful way to sell products.
Mel Robbins (35:52):
Yeah. Wow. You said earlier this interesting metaphor that, for example, we all know candy's delicious, but if you just pound a gigantic like five pound chocolate bar, I love Tony's chocolate I, and I also love Mr. Beast's snoo line like, oh, I just love chocolate and Halloween go out trick or treating. I'd fill that pillowcase up, man. I would come home sort all the candy and I would just start munching, but then I would have a huge stomachache and I wouldn't want to look at candy again for another month.
Mel Robbins (36:29):
And it's almost as if that Halloween candy hangover is what's happening every single day where we wake up, we know we don't want to spend nine hours, what is the average amount of time that people are spending on their phones?
Dr. Adam Alter (36:42):
It's hard to get really good definitive data, but it's many hours a day. I had a high school class that I was teaching at NYU for a while over summers. I'm not doing it at the moment, but I did it for several years, and at the beginning of that six week class, I would ask the students to download an app that would track their usage, which now most phones do anyway, and the numbers I was getting were absolutely staggering. Some of the students were on their phones like 10, 12 hours a day. Their average was something like six or seven or eight hours a day, and this was a number of years ago. I think it's only gone up since then. I've heard 3, 4, 5 hours described as the average for adults as well. So it's a huge amount of time. One of the things it's doing is it's changing your tolerance for spending a long time doing something that involves hard deep work and thinking, what
Mel Robbins (37:30):
Does that mean with a simple brain like mind? What do you mean it reduces tolerance?
Dr. Adam Alter (37:33):
What it means is if you are getting 2000 messages a day, each one lasting, maybe a second or two seconds, that's how your brain starts to process information in these bite-sized chunks, and they're all also chosen to be maximally enjoyable. Interesting. They bombard you with interesting content, and so what happens is you assume the rest of the world is going to be like that. We get into an elevator for five seconds and that's too much. That's hard. So we pull out our phones to be entertained in that moment, and that's how the rest of the world becomes. So if I say to a 7-year-old kid who's on a screen all day, it's time to learn to read the amount of energy and intense concentration you're asking for there is so different from what that kid is used to. If it's been about sort of scrolling through videos that that's deeply problematic.
(38:16):
You can't expect people to just suddenly turn on this muscle that they haven't been using. So it makes us less used to having to try really hard. And so that's I think one big problem. The other thing is if you look at how many hours a day we're doing this for, there's a huge amount of other stuff. The opportunity cost there is so great that we are leaving this other stuff behind. So I could be spending that time having a conversation with a loved one or a friend. I could be spending that time in a natural environment or I could be exercising, I could be doing lots of different things, but I don't do any of that stuff because I'm spending time mindlessly scrolling. So there's a huge amount there.
Mel Robbins (38:52):
Can you explain the mindlessly part? Why do we doom scroll? There's so many of us, Adam, that come home from work. You cook dinner, you've got kids, you're married, you're doing all the stuff, you're packing up the backpacks, you're cleaning up the dishes, you're letting the dog out. You're hopefully having a moment of quiet yourself and you say to yourself, I'm going to go to bed early tonight, or I'm going to work on that project, and next thing you know, two hours have gone by and you've just wasted your evening doom scrolling. Why do we do that?
Dr. Adam Alter (39:27):
Yeah. There's this interesting theory about gambling that I think a lot of people have this naive idea that when people are gambling, they're just like, this is amazing and this is so much fun and I'm getting all this feedback, and then I hit a jackpot. People don't gamble because that's true. They gamble because they get into this kind of trance. There's something about sitting in front of a slot machine that is deeply soothing and numbing, and that's what the screen does at the end of a hard day. What you don't want is to be massively excited. Most of the time you're exhausted.
(39:56):
You just want to have this kind of comfort, this lull. It's like taking a bath in the screen and it brings this sense of comfort and reliability, and I'm, nothing is being asked of me. I don't have to do anything. I just move my phone, move my finger, and that's all I have to do.
Mel Robbins (40:12):
It sounds so lovely.
Dr. Adam Alter (40:13):
It sounds lovely, right? Yes. And what else gives us that sort of really uncomplicated dose of calm at the end of a long day? Alcohol. Alcohol, that's the other option. And so there aren't that many options. It's substances or it's screens, and many of us just turn to screens. So I think what's happening for most of us,
Mel Robbins (40:30):
I hate that you put it like that.
Dr. Adam Alter (40:31):
Yeah, I don't love that. It's true, but I think that's what's going on.
Mel Robbins (40:35):
How do you stop?
Dr. Adam Alter (40:37):
It's very difficult. I mean, I think the biggest thing when we try to stop doing something is we don't replace it with something else. So the first thing to think about is if I want to stop doing this thing, whatever this thing is, whether it's drinking, using a substance, scrolling through TikTok, whatever it is, when you would have done that thing, there needs to be something else there and preferably something else that you enjoy that's not bad for you, something that you feel better about doing, and that's going to be different for everyone. You've got to cultivate that habit, that change, and so just saying, I'm going to not do this thing and I'm going to use my willpower. No one has that much willpower. That's exhausting. You can't expect yourself to be superhuman, but figure out what else you could be doing that's more enriching, but that also makes you feel good and do that other thing, plaster over that gap.
Mel Robbins (41:23):
This is a pathetic question, but given that you are the renowned guy that is doing the research on this, do you some suggestions, because even my first thought was, well, I've been addicted to, well, I shouldn't say addicted. I've been loving this fantasy audio book cord of Thorn and Roses. I am living in a different land and it's on my phone. I think about, oh, okay, well, I could just slump on the couch and watch something on tv. There's another screen. So in the research or in just kind of really digging into this topic, are there things that have come up that could offer just a spark of a suggestion for those of us that would really like to not have this be a habit and not be lulled every night
Dr. Adam Alter (42:14):
And
Mel Robbins (42:14):
To giving our evenings away to our phone?
Dr. Adam Alter (42:16):
Yeah, so I'll say one thing. I think this is a good moment to say that screens are not one thing, right? It's not like looking at a screen is automatically a bad thing. You could be reading a really enriching book on the screen, and that's great. It makes you feel good, or you could be watching a show or a documentary or whatever. It doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with spending hours in front of the TV at the end of the night if that's mindfully what you want to be doing with your time. There's also nothing wrong with briefly scrolling through a social media platform. The problem is none of us have the willpower to just do it for two minutes.
(42:45):
So I don't think you have to find something that's not screen-based. You just have to find something that's not making you feel hollow and unhappy, that doesn't make you feel like you've kind of been robbed of your self-control and your agency. So if that means you're going to watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix, and then you're going to go and read five chapters of your favorite book, and then you're going to have a conversation and then you are going to try a new recipe that you wanted to cook, whatever it is, it doesn't really matter what it is. It just should be something that doesn't leave you feeling hollow. That's the only thing to ask yourself, do I feel better, happier, my life is more meaningful after this, or do I feel worse off? I'm empty? And that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling. They feel kind of empty. So just find something else. Even if it's on a screen that doesn't leave you feeling that way.
Mel Robbins (43:32):
It's true. I do feel empty, and it then makes you feel stupid for wasting that much time. And if you add it up cumulatively over the years, it's a large part of your life.
Dr. Adam Alter (43:44):
20 years.
Mel Robbins (43:45):
Wait, what?
Dr. Adam Alter (43:46):
Yeah,
Mel Robbins (43:47):
20 years of your life is spent just scrolling
Dr. Adam Alter (43:51):
On your phone, looking at your phone. It'll be about, for most of us, 20 years on average, something like that, 15 to 20 years we'll be doing this. Just looking at 22nd videos. Yeah.
Mel Robbins (44:05):
Dr. Alter, I mean, as a researcher, what do you think when you hear that figure?
Dr. Adam Alter (44:13):
Well, I think one thing to think is imagine it's the end of your life. You've hopefully lived a very fulfilling long life. You get to that point and then someone says, would you like 20 extra years? And the answer is no. I'd rather have spent 20 years scrolling mindlessly. No one's going to say that. So I think if the first step to fixing this problem is having people say, I really want to change this. That to me is a good place to begin. That idea that you are shortening your life effectively by 20 years or 15 years or however long it ends up being because you spend all this time consuming sort of eye candy, mental candy by scrolling, I think almost everyone would say, when you zoom back, assuming you have the self-control, I think there are better things I could be doing with that time. Maybe I'll save a year or two for the scrolling, but then that leaves me still 15, 18 years to do other things.
Mel Robbins (45:03):
You just basically dropped a grenade on any excuse that somebody would have that they don't have time or it's too late or I couldn't possibly fit this thing in because you have all this found time.
(45:16):
Is there a difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on the television in terms of the impact to your brain?
Dr. Adam Alter (45:23):
Yeah, so well, the way you interact with those screens is very different. So when you watch TV content, it's just something that's kind of being visited upon you. You're not interacting with it. So there are good and bad parts to interacting with a screen. If you're learning a language, you're going to learn it less well on a TV than on a phone. You can interact with the phone.
Dr. Adam Alter (45:41):
If you are using a social media platform, no one uses that social media on a screen like a tv. You can't have that bi-directional relationship where you act on the thing and then it acts back on you,
Mel Robbins (45:51):
Right?
Dr. Adam Alter (45:52):
That's critical. That's what goes on phones that make it so immersive. So a TV screen is less kind of weaponized to draw our time and attention away from us. It gives us a little bit more agency. That doesn't mean it's perfect. If you're watching a show, there's a cliffhanger and someone says to you, just sit here for 10 seconds, the next episode will begin. That's where binge viewing comes from, and we almost all do that, but what we do with our screens when we're on phones is I think much more difficult for us to resist.
Mel Robbins (46:23):
I think it just got something that I'd never thought about before, Dr. Alter, which is that your brain is getting so many fast signals and messages from the ads to the popups, to the notifications to you yourself switching between the texting and the email and search. And what is getting fused together is a brain that now is constantly expecting this go, go, go. And I had not thought about the fact that, because if you're using your phone and you can interact with it, so now you've also got your hands involved, and there's that whole body of research around neuro rubics and marrying the physical movement, and particularly movements of your hands with new thought patterns and how that fires and wires your brain quicker. That to me makes so much sense that because you're actually typing and you're interacting with it, you're programming your brain faster almost to expect short form. I hear people also talking anecdotally like there's a rise in A DHD, but it's actually a rise in your brain getting trained to be distracted.
Dr. Adam Alter (47:37):
Yeah. So I think what's happened is we live in an age of time contraction. Everything happens in really brief chunks. Everything's five seconds long, 10 seconds long. It's time is contracted. If you go on a vacation to a beach and you spend a week doing nothing, you get time dilation. Time suddenly works on a different scale. You think of five minutes as no time at all. Whereas in the way we live our lives, many of us, most of the time, five minutes, you could do a hundred things. You could look at a hundred videos. There are a million things you could do in five minutes, and that creates a sense of massive urgency. For what purpose? I don't know. Probably not a good one for most of us, most of the time. So I think there's some value in changing the scale of things in going for a four hour drive. I drove 12 hours there and back to see the eclipse.
Mel Robbins (48:22):
Where'd you go?
Dr. Adam Alter (48:22):
I went to Northern Vermont, and it was incredible. I drove six hours with a friend.
(48:27):
We got out of the car for five minutes, watched the eclipse, got back in and drove home. So it was 12 hours of driving for three minutes of magic. But the one really interesting thing that did that was several days ago now, was it changed how I feel about time. There's a hangover period where I'm like, A few hours, no problem, not a problem at all. I can focus on things for a few hours. I did it for 12 hours the other day. When do we ever do one thing for 12 hours? It's just very rare. So I think doing things that are extended and protracted is really valuable because it resets what you think of as a kind of meaningful chunk of time.
Mel Robbins (49:00):
Well, and this goes back to something that you also talked about, which is I guarantee that those five minutes that you probably spent at Burke Mountain right up in that area.
Dr. Adam Alter (49:12):
Yeah, exactly.
Mel Robbins (49:15):
That there was something about those five minutes that felt like five hours. And you use the word time dilation, which means that you're stretching your own perception of being in the moment. And you gave us a list of things like being in nature, having plants or some sort of water element in your house, meditation, a conversation with somebody where you're really in the moment is a way for you to actually slow down time and get important time back. So you also have this research, it's very interesting. It's this concept called stopping cues. What does that mean?
Dr. Adam Alter (49:59):
Yeah, so stopping cues, if you think about how we consumed information in the 20th century and the early 21st, everything had a natural endpoint to it. These are known as stopping cues. So you'd read a book and you'd get to the end of a chapter or the whole book, you'd watch a TV show, the credits would roll.
(50:15):
These were all gentle signals that you probably wanted to do something different, move on to the next thing. And they were built into everything we did. So those are called stopping cues. Now the thing about a lot of the tech we use is that tech companies have systematically eradicated those stopping cues. They've removed them, they've weeded them out. So the bottomless feed that you get on social media platforms, that is a good example of the absence of stopping cues. So because we are humans who are creatures of inertia, we just keep doing the same thing over and over until something pushes us to the next thing. In the absence of a queue that says, Hey, maybe you want to move on to the next thing, we just keep going. And that's a lot of why once we start using a social media platform, there's no queue to move on the same way when you're on a slot machine, there's no queue to move on. So we just keep going. So
Mel Robbins (51:01):
Some of my favorite cookies, Pepperidge
Dr. Adam Alter (51:04):
Farm,
Mel Robbins (51:05):
And they come in these stacks and these trays, and when I clean out a whole tray, the empty trays are stopping queue.
Dr. Adam Alter (51:10):
That is a stopping queue
Mel Robbins (51:11):
Not to keep going.
Mel Robbins (51:15):
What is your biggest takeaway after researching so much about how distracted we've become by our phones?
Dr. Adam Alter (51:26):
Yeah, so I think the biggest one is that the simplest solution to this problem is actually an analog one, which is to cultivate habits where there are certain parts of the day that are sacred and free of screens. I think that's very important, and it's different for different people. So it could be every day, dinnertime, no screens, we all put our phones in a cookie jar, we put a timer on. We are not allowed to go into that jar for 30 minutes. Maybe that's one example.
Mel Robbins (51:50):
It seems kind of psycho that we have to do this. Honestly,
Dr. Adam Alter (51:52):
It's totally ridiculous that we are in this position as consumers of this tech to have to do it. But we do.
Mel Robbins (51:57):
And it's because though, and I think this is a really important piece of the research that you're explaining to us, this isn't because you're weak, it's because this technology is designed to keep you going. That sort of emptiness that you described when somebody's sitting in front of the slot machine where you're just sort of lulled into this state that that's why you have to have these stopping cues and you have to have these boundaries. One of the things I'm curious about, because you've researched this and you're also a father of two and you're married and you're teaching, and so you're seeing students of different ages and you've seen these platforms change. Since you have been writing all of these books and doing this research, Dr. Alter, what does your morning routine look like?
Dr. Adam Alter (52:48):
So one thing I try very hard to do, and I'm better at this some mornings than others, is to spend as much time after I wake up not looking at a screen as possible. It's really useful to kind of ease your way into the day by not immediately picking up the phone and looking at whatever's on the screen.
(53:02):
So that's one important thing. There are different days where I'm doing different things, but usually the very beginning part of the day is with my kids and often my wife. And so that's obviously a deeply connected time where you are discussing what we're going to have for breakfast, and there are little conversations that happen. They themselves are not necessarily full of meaning and philosophy and richness, but there's a richness just to the kind of routine of connecting over that period of the day. And I think that's really useful if you live with someone else. That is a time when some of us need a little bit of time to wake up and a coffee. But once you get past that to connect I think is really important, and I try to do that as much as possible in the morning.
Mel Robbins (53:41):
Got it. So if you could speak directly to the person who's been listening to this who's now panic stricken that they're going to lose 20 years of their life looking at their phone and they're thinking about stopping cues and they're thinking about all of the amazing things that you've made us think about and want to try, what do you think the one action, if you had to say, there's one thing I really want you to do, what would it be?
Dr. Adam Alter (54:10):
So I think the easiest thing you can do that will give you back years of your life is to take your device for an hour a day. You pick the hour, it could be in the morning, could be in the afternoon, could be in the evening, put it in a drawer or a cookie jar, put it somewhere, make sure it's roughly the same time every day.
Dr. Adam Alter (54:26):
So it's a habit. And if you do that for enough days, you will literally give yourself back years of your life where you would've spent that time mindlessly scrolling. You're going to be doing something more enriching. Just do that one small thing to start so it'll have a massive effect on your wellbeing.
Mel Robbins (54:42):
Wow. Dr. Adam Alter, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here with us. Thank you for having
Dr. Adam Alter (54:48):
Me.
Mel Robbins (54:48):
You heard him. I want you to get 20 years of your life back, and I want you to use that time to create a more meaningful life for yourself because you deserve that. And in case no one else tells you today, let me be the one to say, I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to change your life and to use all of these amazing things that you learned today to help you do that. Alrighty, I'll see you in a few days, and I know that you want more videos to watch more inspiration. I'm going to recommend a video in just a second. But first I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you for subscribing to the channel. It takes a second. It's one way you can support me and give back to our team. It really helps us bring you world-class experts at zero cost. So thanks for doing that, and thanks also for sharing this with people in your life that you love. It's one way that you can make a difference with them already. I know you're looking for more inspiration, so check out this video next.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Adam Alter
Dr. Adam Alter is a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, bestselling author, and expert in understanding human behavior and decision-making.
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Books
Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a midlife crisis, wrestling with writer’s block, trapped in a thankless job, or trying to remedy a fraying friendship, the resulting emotion is usually a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is the “deeply researched and compelling” (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism) roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction.
Artfully weaving together scientific studies, anecdotes, and interviews, Alter teaches us that getting stuck is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections, we can reach even our loftiest targets.
Resources
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- The New Yorker: The Surprising Psychology Of Names And Labels
- The New York Times: Where We Are Shapes Who We Are
- Psychology Today: Strange Truths About How We Perceive Time
- The Atlantic: How Nature Resets Our Minds And Bodies
- New York Post: How Subtle Cues From The Weather To The Letter K Encourage Overspending
- Psychology Today: Why It’s Dangerous To Label People
- Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology: Missing The Trees For The Forest, A Theory Account Of The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth
- American Psychological Association: How To Get Unstuck, With Adam Alter
- American Psychological Association: The Dark Side of Screen Time
- Association For Psychological Science: Investigating The Irresistible
- Harvard Medical School: Screen Time and the Brain
- National Institute on Drug Abuse: Can Too Much Screen Time Harm You?
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