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Brain Rot Emergency- These Internal Documents Prove They’re Controlling You!

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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  • Short-Form Video Shrinks Attention
    • Short-form video is shrinking our capacity for sustained attention and complex thought through neuroplastic changes.
    • Jonathan Haidt warns this undermines work, relationships, and human potential if unchanged. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt Yeah, because I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation, focusing on teen mental health. That was the mystery that popped up in the mid-2000s. Why are people born after 1995 so much more anxious and depressed? And I’ve been tracking down that mystery, and a lot of it points to social media and especially Instagram, social comparison, all the things we know about social media. When the book came out in 2024, since then, what I realized is that I vastly underestimated the damage because I focused on mental health, which is a catastrophe. But the bigger damage is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. Without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, ideally 10 or 20 minutes at a time, without that, you’re not going to be of much use as an employee. You’re not going to be of much use as a spouse. You’re not going to be successful in life. And that’s when I realized this is way beyond mental health. Steven Bartlett This is changing human cognition, changing human attention, and possibly on a global scale. Aditi, what perspective do you come at this from? And what’s (Time 0:04:03)
  • Phones Function As Skinner Boxes
    • Touchscreen devices act like Skinner boxes delivering variable rewards that reinforce compulsive swiping.
    • Jonathan Haidt explains this trains reward circuits differently than passive TV consumption. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt A television puts you in a state that psychologists call transportation. You get into a story and you find yourself pulled in and you’re rooting for the characters. And this is how a brain gets tuned up to social patterns. But it can’t happen in 10 seconds. It can’t happen in one minute. It takes a long period of time. And there is no reinforcement. There is no, the television doesn’t do anything to you. You don’t have any response. Whereas a touchscreen device is a Skinner box. So B.F. Skinner was one of the founders of behaviorism. And he put rats and pigeons in a box where he could deliver a reinforcement, a little grain of food on a schedule. And by giving them quick reinforcements for behavior, he could train them to do amazing tricks in just a few hours. When you give your kid a touchscreen device, it’s stimulus, response, swipe, get a reward or not, variable ratio. And you just keep doing that. So you are, as Aditi said, it is rewiring your brain. It’s not just wasting time. It is literally training you to do things where television didn’t do that. So this is a whole new game. (Time 0:08:52)
  • Delete Short-Form Apps From Your Phone
    • Delete short-form video apps from your phone and only access them on desktop if needed.
    • Jonathan Haidt says removing them from your pocket prevents constant attention-fragmenting prompts. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt Oh my God, yes, of course. But yes, the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity would be delete them. So what I advise my students to do is I say, just do this. Just delete one of the social media apps that you use, especially if it’s TikTok. Just delete from your phone. You can still check on your computer. If someone sends you a video, you can still watch it on your computer. You can even check it, you know, every weekend. You can spend some time on it. But just get it off your phone. Because on the phone, the phone is always with us, an extension of our body. And if it’s always there, then it’s going to take every, it’s called attention fracking. It’s going to break up your attention. (Time 0:23:21)
  • Use Grayscale And Geographic Boundaries
    • Use grayscale mode and geographic boundaries to reduce compulsive checking at night and during work.
    • Aditi Nerurkar recommends keeping phones out of arm’s reach to let the prefrontal cortex regain control. Transcript: Aditi Nerurkar But one thing that you could do is grayscale your phone. And so, especially at night, like it’s 9 p.m., like we talked about revenge, bedtime, procrastination, you know that you’re going to do it. You’re going to sit down or you’re going to scroll before you know it’s 2 a.m. Instead, grayscale your phone. This is a simple switch. You can toggle it. I have my phone set to grayscale, which simply means that you’re getting rid of your color, making it black and white. And so when it is grayscaled, then it doesn’t have that same addictive quality to it. It’s like going through a grocery store. A marketing executive described it this way to me. Going through a grocery store instead of the Technicolor junk food cereal, it’s just black and white. So you have a less, there’s a greater sense of compulsion to continue checking. So that’s like one strategy you could use. And the other is to set some boundaries. So geographical boundaries, keep your phone out of your arm’s reach. If you’re at a desk, if you’re a student, not right next to you because we know there’s this phenomenon of brain drain. So it’s not just that when you’re using your phone, it can have a potential distraction, but also just having it close by. It’s called brain drain. And so putting it in a desk drawer, keeping it in another part of the home if you are working, keeping it far away from you. And so you kind of can override that primal urstrescroll that your prefrontal cortex take hold again. (Time 0:25:33)
  • Platforms Knew And Optimized For Addiction
    • Internal documents show platforms knowingly optimized for addiction and hid harms from the public.
    • Jonathan Haidt cites whistleblower research revealing Meta’s own admissions of addictive effects. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt That’s not our fault. My general rule as a social psychologist is if a few people are doing something bad or self-destructive, well, you know, they should learn some self-control, or that’s something about Them. But when 90 or 95% of people are doing something self-destructive, that’s because of the companies that put us in an environment that encourages addiction. So I just want to read a quote. We have so much good stuff coming out from Meta, from all the whistleblowers. Now all the court cases are beginning in Los Angeles. Finally, if it’s their first time, Metta’s going to face a jury with all the parents who’ve lost kids. So here is, here’s a chat. So we have a lot of internal documents that came out from the attorneys general that are suing Metta. So while they’re talking about the results of some of their internal research, one of them says, oh my gosh, y’all, Instagram is a drug. We’re basically pushers. We’re causing reward deficit disorder because people are binging on Instagram so much, they can’t feel reward anymore, which is something Anna Lemke said. Like the reward tolerance is so high. And then he says, I know Adam, meaning Adam Osseri, I know Adam doesn’t want to hear it. He freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review. But it is undeniable. It’s biological and psychological. Top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. This is not on us. They designed it to be addictive. They’ve done research to make it maximally addictive. They push it on children. They tried to get Instagram kids for even littler kids. They know what they’re doing. They’ve done the research. My team, we put together, we found references to 31 internal studies that Meta did. They’ve done a lot of research finding harm. They bury it, but you can find it at metasinternalresearch.org. We put it all online. (Time 0:31:06)
  • AI May Rewire Attachment Systems
    • AI chatbots will shift attachment systems by offering ever-present, tailored companionship that can replace human secure bases.
    • Jonathan Haidt fears children may form primary attachments to AI agents. Transcript: Aditi Nerurkar So my work is now focused on AI chatbots, mental health, and the human connection. We haven’t yet kind of delved into loneliness, but there’s this unmet need for human connection, right? Deep human connection. We don’t have a sense of meaning or purpose right now because what happens is we can talk a little bit more about the default mode network and what happens to your brain when you don’t allow Yourself to get bored because you’re constantly on your devices. And that meaning and purpose, that self-referential thinking is really what develops from your board. And so all of this that we’re talking about, that feeling of disenchantment, it’s a fragmented society, you’re by yourself, it’s that echo chamber phenomenon, all of it leads to, it Kind of opens the door for AI chatbots. And so what the reason is because these tech companies are sensing that people aren’t really happy on social media and they’re thinking about getting off, right? They’re using it less because social media has become less social, more media. So they’re not really engaging as much and they’re spending time doing other things. And so The Atlantic had a fantastic piece about this. They’re billing it as the anti-social media. So tech companies are building AI chatbots and calling it, it’s the anti-social media. It’s a place where you can go to form deeper connections and really have someone understand you. One of the tech leaders said that there’s an unmet human need for connection and people don’t have as many friends as they want to. And so we’re going to introduce friendship through AI chatbots. There is a Reddit forum right now. So just to back up, AI chatbots, what we’re talking about in our conversation today is the publicly available chatbots, not, you know, AI for medical care, which has, you know, breast Cancer, so many wonderful in my field and like medicine, breast cancer diagnoses and detection five years earlier through AI. I mean, there’s some amazing things coming out of AI. This is about the publicly available conversational chatbot phenomenon. And so when Business Review found that the number one use case is not productivity, is not, you know, coding or the things that you think of when you’re using an AI chatbot, but it’s mental Health therapy and companionship. Number one use case of AI chatbots. So people are using AI chatbots as a life advisor, as a therapist, as a companion. And on Reddit, which is like the zeitgeist, it’s like, you know, where we- And why is this a bad thing? Oh, I mean, so many reasons why it’s a bad thing. To use it as for companionship, for example. There’s so many red flags about AI chatbots. And so Reddit has a forum. It’s, I think, last I checked, 45,000 people, AI is my boyfriend, people who are having a relationship with their AI chatbot. The reason it’s bad, I mean, AI chatbots are where social media is about attention, the attention economy, dopamine. What’s happening with the AI chatbot phenomenon, it’s that it is forming attachments. So oxytocin is a hormone, the bonding hormone. And we’re probably going to see more data on how oxytocin is involved. And so it is going to reshape human connection. Jonathan Haidt If I could add on to that, that was beautifully put. Social media came and hacked our attention and took most of it with devastating effects. Now AI is coming to hack our attachments, which is going to have even more devastating effects. So think about it this way. Everyone needs to understand the attachment system. It’s this wonderful system that all mammals have that keeps the mother and other species, but for humans, mothers and fathers, keeps us connected to the child and the child to the parent. But it’s this cybernetic system in which as the kid is beginning to develop and is able to like, you know, you do like peekaboo games and you do the back and forth. And it’s just the most delightful thing. You get that back and forth. It’s called serve and return interactions. And all the time the child is developing what’s called an internal working model of the parent. And the model in their head is, oh, you know, when I get in trouble, this is the person that comes and soothes me. And the point of this isn’t just to make the child feel good. The point is that now the child can go off and play because that’s where the learning happens. It doesn’t happen when you’re in your mother’s arms. The whole point of the attachment system is to regulate the child going off and playing, taking risks, having experiences. And then when something goes wrong, as it always does, then they come running back to their secure base. And if they don’t have a secure base, then they’re much more anxious and they don’t explore as much and they don’t develop as much. All right. So this develops very gradually over all of childhood. And the internal working models you develop as a child are the models that you will reuse in puberty for romantic relationships. And so if you are securely attached as a child, you’re more likely to be securely attached as an adult on the dating market, which makes you a much better candidate for boyfriend or girlfriend Or husband or wife. What’s going to happen? AI is going to intervene very early. AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent because the parent has a job and the kitchen and two other kids and is not always there. But the AI teddy bear is always there for you. So the primary working models are going to be for the teddy bear, the AI chatbot and the teddy bear, and later the AI chatbot on your iPad and then on your computer. (Time 0:39:28)
  • Parent’s Plea After A Child’s Death
    • Jonathan Haidt met parents of children harmed or killed after viral online challenges and used those stories to fuel urgency.
    • He recounts a mother seeking TikTok records after her son died from a choking challenge. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt Like just for example, so I was in London. This was just so unbelievable. I was just in London two or three weeks ago and I met Ellen, Ellen Groom, I think was her name. Her son Jules was found dead, happy kid, found dead, strangled. It sure looked like it was the choking challenge, 13-year boy. Everything looked like the choking challenge on TikTok. What’s the choking challenge? It’s a challenge where kids are challenged to cut off the circulation to the point where they pass out. But then I think they’re supposed to try to film themselves waking up after they’ve passed out. And of course, if you don’t do it exactly right, you die. And so we don’t know how many have died. Hundreds for sure. We don’t really know. Because you find a kid dead, you don’t know what it is. If you don’t have the code, if you don’t have the password to get into your kid’s phone, you can’t get in. And so she was, I think she was able to get into the phone, but she couldn’t get into his TikTok. And she went to Delaware, she went to Sue to demand that TikTok release. What was he watching when he died? And TikTok says, oh, privacy issue. Oh, no, we won’t release that as if they care about privacy. And then in the courtroom, this was what was so disgusting, in the courtroom, in Delaware, this British woman coming over, trying to get some justice, trying to at least get some information. The lawyer for TikTok is trying to suggest that your son was depressed He was going to be suicidal. Basically, even if he was watching TikTok, that was just a correlation. TikTok didn’t cause it. He was going to die anyway. I mean, it’s just so disgusting the way these companies treat the parents and the kids that they’re crushing and stepping on. And so the more I see this, the more I realize this is, I mean, this is a level of cruelty that goes far beyond the tobacco industry. The tobacco executives, they had to go home at night, but they never saw during their workday, they never saw children suffering. They saw people dying, middle-aged and older, but they never saw children suffering. The social media executives, they have to go home knowing every day that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sextorted, shown eating disorder videos, many have Committed suicide. (Time 0:53:30)
  • Remove Slot Machine Apps To Reclaim Attention
    • Jonathan Haidt argues phones became attention-hijacking slot machines once apps and push notifications arrived after 2007–2008.
    • He kept his iPhone as a Swiss army knife by avoiding addictive apps, which removed the constant pull to check it.
    • Practical step: delete addictive “slot machine” apps (social media, crypto gambling, etc.) from your phone to neutralize its pull.
    • With those apps gone, you can even keep your phone near you at night without it disrupting sleep or focus.
    • Angela Duckworth’s point: where you place your phone at night can be one of the most important behavioral-control decisions you make. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt It had, you know, a telephone, a browser, maps, a music player. There was a flashlight, okay? There was no app store. There were no push notifications, 2007, 2008. It’s just a Swiss army knife. There’s no problem, okay? Now, I’m very lucky in that my iPhone has always stayed that. I’m always on a computer, so my attention problems are on my computer. But my phone, because I never had any addictive apps on it except during the crypto craze where I played around with it and I got hooked. And I was checking 50 times a day. And I saw the addiction. So once I got rid of that and lost all the money that I was willing to lose, once I got rid of that, my phone has no addictive power over me. Because when I see it, there’s no – it’s not a slot machine calling, hey, come back and play, come back and play. Aditi Nerurkar So your phone right now, on your personal device, you don’t have any social media apps or anything like that? Jonathan Haidt Right. I do have Twitter, but I never check it there. I never use that on the phone. You know, now texting and email is a little bit like a slot machine, but it’s very mild. So this is, again, this is what works for my students. Just get the slot machine apps off your phone, and then you’ll find that then you could even have your phone near you when you go to bed. But if you’ve got addictive apps on your phone, you can’t have it when you go to bed. Angela Duckworth, the woman who gave us the concept of grit, she has this amazing graduation speech at one of the schools in New England. And she says something like, where you put your phone at night may become the most important decision you make in your life. (Time 1:05:05)
  • EdTech Rollout Damaged Lower-Performing Students
    • Introducing computers and devices into classrooms without safeguards lowered learning for the bottom half of students.
    • Jonathan Haidt argues edtech rollout harmed education more than it helped. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt Math tutoring or only did tutoring, and you couldn’t watch videos on it. I’m totally open to believing that that can speed up teaching. But here’s what’s happened. We put computers on everyone’s desks around 2014, 2015. We used to think in America that it was an equity issue, even back to the 90s. The rich kids all have computers. The poor kids don’t. Let’s get philanthropists to buy computers for school districts that every kid can have a computer on their desk. Okay, now what is a computer? It’s a play device. It does everything. Kids use it at home. They watch videos. They do all sorts of things. You put it on their desk and you tell them to do math homework. What happens? It’s mostly short videos. That’s what research is showing. It ends up, because they don’t, you know, they always, they don’t block YouTube. They might say, oh, we block porn, we block video games. They can get around all that. And if you let them do YouTube, it’s YouTube shorts, which is TikTok. So what happened to test scores in the United States? From the 70s through 2012, they were rising. We actually were improving what kids knew, what kids learned in the United States. We have very good data. The NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, goes up till 2012. And then by 2015, it starts going down. And it’s going down before COVID. And it goes down more during COVID. And everyone thinks like, oh, it’s COVID. But it started, the peak was 2012. And what’s happening, what we now can see, is that the top students, the very best students, who are the ones with executive function, they’re the ones who can pay attention. If you put a computer on that kid’s desk, he’s not destroyed by it. He can actually still learn. But the bottom 50% cannot. So all of the drop in educational stats is the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% in terms of capacity to pay attention, their education is being devastated. And that’s what happened when we put laptops and we put Chromebooks and iPads on their desks. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff, and it has damaged education. And if we’d spent a quarter of that on teachers, we would be in such better shape today. So we made a colossal blunder with ed tech in the 2010s. (Time 1:14:30)
  • Brief TikTok Use Sharpens Memory Loss
    • Short TikTok breaks can cause acute drops in memory accuracy and prefrontal function, unlike other platforms.
    • Aditi Nerurkar cites the Munich study showing a ~40% decline in prospective memory after 10 minutes of TikTok. Transcript: Steven Bartlett Mean, that brings up this study that I have in front of me here, which was a 2022 study, a Munich study, which tested the idea of brain rot, which I believe was the Oxford Dictionary Word Of the Year, 2024. And what they did is they gave 60 participants a test, then a 10-minute break, and then another test. During the break, they either rested or used TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube, and the results showed the following. The TikTok group, so they had a 10-minute interval to do anything, and this group got TikTok to look at, their memory accuracy dropped from 80% before the break to 49% after the break, A nearly 40% decline just from a 10-minute break. In contrast, the Twitter and YouTube groups showed no significant change in the Munich study. And there’s an image I’ll throw up on the screen. Results from the Munich study showed a 40% drop in prospective memory accuracy in the TikTok group after a 10-minute break, which is unbelievable. Yeah. It’s unbelievable. What the hell is going on there? How can a 10-minute TikTok break drop my memory accuracy by 40% TikTok is brain rot. What’s going on? Aditi Nerurkar There’s so much going on in the brain. So, you know, when you’re thinking about, here’s the thing. Brain breaks are not nice to have. They’re actually essential for your brain. And so we talked a little bit about that, you know, default mode network and what happens to it. When you’re engaging with your devices and, you know, that’s not a brain break. That’s activating all of the aspects. So it’s activating your amygdala. It’s dampening or decreasing the volume of your prefrontal cortex. It’s creating that reward system, the dopamine hit, those addictive behaviors. So it’s only, you know, when you’re thinking about memory, planning, what was the metric here? It was memory, right? That was the metric that they were using to study. And so when you’re thinking about working memory or cognitive function, complex problem solving, this is all prefrontal cortex. And so when you’re engaging with TikTok, 10 minutes, five minutes, whatever it is, you are dialing down that biology in your brain. And so of course, you’re going to see changes and you’re going to see the flip side, increased hypervigilance, irritability, distractibility, fragmented attention. It’s just, again, this is not to say that this whole conversation, right? Or when you’re reading studies, you might say to yourself, what’s wrong with me? You know, is there something wrong with me? Is my brain broken? Am I weak? It is not you. You are not alone. It is not your fault. It is the biology of your brain doing exactly as it should. So we talked about the amygdala and prefrontal cortex here. Your amygdala is not wrong or broken. It’s by design supposed to think about your immediate needs, survival, self-preservation. (Time 1:16:51)
  • Race Dynamics Push Risky AI Acceleration
    • Commercial pressure and geopolitical race drive AI companies to accelerate development despite safety concerns.
    • Jonathan Haidt highlights a collective-action problem that pushes firms to move fast. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt And then they all say we’re in a collective action problem against China because if we don’t do this, then China will. Now, one thing I learned, again, I don’t know if Tristan said this on your podcast or whether it was on his podcast, but is that China is focused on using AI to make its economy more efficient, To make manufacturing better and cheaper. They are using these applications, which we’ve talked about before. There’s lots of great applications of AI. The Chinese also have so many spies in America and in the tech companies, and they can hack into anything. So the point is, the faster our companies are in a headlong race to create AGI, to create a country of geniuses that can replace all human workers, put us all out of work, and it can run everything. They’re in a race to create that. And one of the arguments is, if we don’t do it, China will. But what I understood from this and from this conversation with you is that the faster we go towards AGI, the faster China goes because they just take all our discoveries. So can’t we slow down on the race to AGI and do more safety testing? You know, what we all saw with Maltbook and, you know, communities of agents who are talking to each other and making up languages. And even if part of that was human-driven now, in a year, it’s going to be much more than what we saw. So I think the risks are extraordinary. I think that some of these guys, look, they’ve been in AI for a long time. They might not have realized the existential risk they were putting us all in 10, 15 years ago, and now they can’t stop. They can’t pull the plug. They can’t say, oh, let’s shut down the whole business. So it is a very, very risky time. And I think Dario Amodai just read his long essay on the adolescence of technology. At least you get the feeling he’s really wrestling with it. And I think he’s more open than some of the others. (Time 1:59:23)
  • Tech Correlates With Youth Meaninglessness
    • Rising feelings of meaninglessness among youth correlate with the rewiring of childhood by digital consumption.
    • Jonathan Haidt links loss of usefulness and real-world roles to spikes in youth nihilism. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt And the saddest one is the one, my life feels meaningless. Do you agree with that? Disagree with it? And the percent that agree, I think it’s something like eight or 9% agreed for the millennial generation. I think it’s in chapter seven, the end of chapter seven. And then it’s fairly flat. And then all of a sudden, we hit this period, the great rewiring, 2010 to 2015. So right around 2013, it goes way, way up. Young people feel useless. And I think the reason is that they are useless. What I mean is people need to feel useful. People need to do things for other people. That’s how you feel useful. If you were to disappear, would the world change? If yes, you’re useful. Are people depending on you for something? If yes, you’re useful. So if kids are doing errands for the family, they’re useful. But as childhood change from a mix of things to just consuming content, if that’s all you do, and five hours a day is the average for social media, eight to 10 on devices, not counting school. If all you’re doing is just, you’re just consuming content, you are useless. Now, what’s happening? The chance to have a job where you actually do something for people, you know, it used to be if you work in a store, at least you’re helping people buy something and you might talk to them. And now you’re just there watching as they use the machine. The more technology makes things easy and cheap by replacing people, the more people will feel my job is to just, I don’t have a job, it’s just consume content. The AI guys tell us, oh, such abundance. Oh my God, it’s going to be such abundance. No one will have to work. We’ll give everyone UBI. We’ll give everybody universal basic income. That is hell on earth. (Time 2:02:28)
  • No Screens In Bedrooms Or At Dinner
    • For parents, ban devices from bedrooms and remove screens from dinner to protect sleep and family connection.
    • Jonathan Haidt says these household rules make enforcing broader limits far easier. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt The rule I wish I had followed, I recommend to all parents, especially with younger children, is have the clear rule. No devices in the bedroom, no screens in the bedroom ever. That’s just our family rule. We have a TV in the living room. We have a computer. You can sometimes use those, but we never take screens into the bedroom, at least for kids. You know, maybe later on you’ll have to relent. In middle school, they’ll have so much homework they can take the laptop in. And maybe if you live in a small apartment, of course, it’s difficult. But if you can afford to do that, to have that rule, that’s the main rule I wish I had done in my family. And that will make everything a lot easier. Also, same thing at the dinner table. No device. We don’t have screens at the dinner table. (Time 2:12:32)
  • Three Steps To Reclaim Attention
    • Reclaim attention by fixing morning/evening routines, silencing most notifications, and removing slot-machine apps.
    • Jonathan Haidt says these three steps return hours each day and improve focus. Transcript: Jonathan Haidt And you can do it very quickly and I can just explain it. The first is you have to get your morning and evening routine right. The great majority, as soon as they open their eyes, they’re on the phone, and it’s the last thing, and it’s everything in between. So you have to have a good morning routine. What are the first seven things you want to do after you open your eyes? And at a certain point, you can check your phone, but it shouldn’t be in the first few. Do things to set up your own day. Otherwise, your day will be taken by your phone and be controlled by your phone. So you’ve got to reclaim your morning and your evening. That’s step one. Step two, you have to shut off almost all notifications. Go into your notifications, look into your settings, what’s giving you all the notifications. Most of my students get an alert every time they get an email. They don’t understand that they have that, you know, because they don’t want to miss anything. But they don’t understand that if you are always being alerted, then you miss everything else. So shut off alerts for almost everything. Obviously, Uber and Lyft, you want to keep on. You want to know when the car is coming. But news outlets, everything else, get a daily email. Don’t get alerts when… And then the third, as I said before, is get rid of all the slot machine apps. Whatever apps you habitually use, whatever apps you feel compulsion towards, you have to get it off your phone. And in that way, your phone is no longer a dopamine trigger that’s going to always call out to you like an addictive product. Do those three things. You’ll reclaim a lot of your attention. (Time 2:13:27)
  • Use A 3-Second Reset Before Scrolling
    • Use the ‘Stop, Breathe, Be’ three-second reset before checking devices to interrupt the primal urge to scroll.
    • Aditi Nerurkar also advises changing only two habits at once and allowing eight weeks for neural change. Transcript: Aditi Nerurkar So before you check your devices, before you engage, stop, breathe, and be. Ground yourself in the present moment. What it does is it decreases that what-if future-focused thinking. Anxiety is a future-focused emotion, and it gets you back into the here and the now. And so maybe the compulsion, you’re bored, you’re checking, what about doing something else? You’re, you know, you, we often use that checking as a substitute for many things. And so it gives you that opportunity. And then the rule of two is something that we haven’t talked about, which I would love to propose to us today is that your brain can really only handle two new changes at a time. And so give yourself two things of all of the things that we’ve talked about. If you want to try in your life, two at a time, give yourself eight weeks and then add two more and two more. This is why New Year’s resolutions fail because we try to do everything all at once. And so just stepwise, two at a time. (Time 2:14:51)