Catherine Price
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, I don't like things that have millions of views. I shouldn't say that. You have millions of views on YouTube, but you know what I mean? It's like such a trend. With that said, okay, so I don't like the term dopamine detox in the way that I often hear it bandied about. What should I say? Retrace my steps. I mean, insulted my host inadvertently.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But what I would say is that, yes, it is a good idea to try to reset yourself so that you are not so short term focused and so desirous of dopamine stimulation, to put it in a horribly phrased way. Let me back up and explain what dopamine is for a second here, because we often talk about it in the wrong way. It's not actually like just pleasure stimulation.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Dopamine is our brain's way of recording when things are worth doing again and important to pay attention to. So it's really a salience indicator. And the example I always use is that it actually helps us to remember to do things like eat.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So if you're walking through the woods and you come across a bush that has red berries on it and you eat those brightly colored red berries, they don't kill you. They taste good. They're raspberries. Your brain is going to release a little bit of dopamine.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
to indicate that it was worth paying attention to that bush of berries and that eating the berries was a good idea to do and that you should do it again. And that means that thanks to that dopamine, the next time you're walking in the woods, part of your brain is going to have been trained to pay attention for raspberry bushes so that you can repeat the behavior and eat the raspberry again.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So it actually is evolutionarily essential, dopamine is. It helps us remember to do things like eat, and it's released in response to other things like sex. So very important for reproduction. The problem is that our brains do not choose what to release dopamine in response to. It's just in response to a trigger, more like a light switch turning on and off.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, I mean, the generational thing is definitely true. So everyone is spending a lot of time on their phones, but younger people, which the terms are Gen Alpha and Gen Z, you know, basically up to 28 or 30 or so, definitely higher than Gen X or let alone boomers. But with that said, I do think that older people get off the hook too easily when it comes to screen time, because I think
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So anytime you encounter something that is a dopamine trigger, your brain's going to just release it, whether or not it's a good idea and whether or not it's reinforcing a habit that you want.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So the thing is that if you were trying to create an app or a product that will hook people, all you need to do is pack a ton of dopamine triggers into that product and people will start to associate your product with receiving some kind of reward because of the dopamine spritz that it's getting. They're going to seek it out and continue to use it over and over again.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So the machine that has the most dopamine triggers is the slot machine. And as I was talking about earlier, Smart phones are deliberately designed to mimic slot machines by having tons of dopamine triggers in them. For example, bright colors, huge dopamine trigger, unpredictability.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You'd think we'd want to know when something good would happen, but we're actually far more attracted to unpredictability and then the anticipation of waiting to find out if something good is going to happen, which is why we like watching movies better the first time and why no one who watches sports ever wants someone to tell them the final score.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Oh, yes. That's actually I say in my book that this is I say in my book explicitly that psychologists call this intermittent rewards and I call it the reason we date jerks. It's exactly that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yes. Yes. And so to answer your question, do I think that a dopamine detox is a good idea? I do, because I think that we have been habituated to expect constant. I don't know if spritz is the right word. I'm not a little sprinkling. A little sprinkling. We're habituated to receiving dopamine, stimulation from dopamine, constantly from our phones.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And that leads to an issue where real life can start to seem boring. And a lot of people who spend a lot of time on their phones experience this. You were experiencing that yourself when you found yourself twitching physically when you were trying to concentrate on a book. So it can be very useful to reduce dopamine triggers in your life so that you can kind of bring your...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
baseline down a bit back to what would be considered more normal. With that said, I don't know that the kind of the Silicon Valley version of a dopamine fast is what I would recommend where, you know, people are like not eating and abstaining from sex and like not watching TV.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
most of us have probably had an experience when you're with someone in their seventies and they just have their phone out usually on Facebook, like all the time. And I recently heard a great word for that, which is screen your citizen.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Like, I mean, I don't know if that's your thing, go for it. But I think that a more effective or more useful thing to do for most people is just to change your relationship with your phone. Because honestly, like that's the main source of what I would consider to be, quote, unhealthy dopamine triggers. It's your screens. Real life dopamine is actually there for a reason.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I think it's actually kind of good to habituate yourself to seeking out real life dopamine triggers, you know, of the sorts that sometimes people try to avoid as well.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I think, you know, in terms of gender breakdown, like you tend to have different people doing it. It's all stereotypes, right? But it's like, women tend to be on social media more, men tend to be, and young men in particular, on gaming more. So it depends on the person, but those are the general kind of breakdowns.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, yeah, I mean, it's just, I'm trying to fully inhabit my squirrel brain right now, but it is as if that equation got messed up where suddenly you'll never run into nuts on the tree. You'll never go to the other tree because it takes more work to get to the different tree.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And the tree you're in is like occasionally popping up with new nuts or in the case of information, it's always popping up with more nuts, lots of nuts. So why would you do anything else? You can continue. I mean, yeah, we've all gone into internet rabbit holes or squirrel holes, maybe with We should call. That sounds so much dirtier. Anyway, but where you're like, what happened? Like why?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I spent an entire day once, an entire day searching for kitchen faucets online. I mean, granted, I was working on a kitchen renovation, but like I remember being like, oh, my God, it's getting dark.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, yes, I also was very into Victorian doorknobs, if you must know, and just architectural elements because I find those to be more interesting than the standard things one might find in Home Depot. But I did spend a lot of time on eBay looking at doorknobs and hinges after my need for doorknobs and hinges had actually been satisfied.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But yeah, I mean, younger people are on their phones more than the much older generations for sure.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I think I watched an entire 16-minute long video once on how to make like, was that like sushi rolls? No, it was soup dumplings. So that I could make fake soup dumplings out of like Play-Doh with my daughter. And that's when I was like, I don't think that was necessary. I don't think I needed that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, our phones are messing with our memory in a lot of different ways. I will highlight some of them for you. One is that in order to make a memory, you have to have an experience, right? So if you are on your phone in the middle of a social interaction, you're not actually in that interaction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I mean, if you're on your phone in general, all you're really experiencing is whatever is on the phone. So they're blocking experiences, to use John Haidt's terminology. And so if you're not having an experience to begin with, there's nothing to store. That's one way that they're impacting us.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Another way they're impacting us is that our phones and the amount of information they're feeding to us at all times are seriously taxing our working memory, the part of our memory that's holding on to, for example, trying to remember a phone number or trying to do math in your head. That's your working memory. It's very easily overwhelmed.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And so when your working memory is overwhelmed, you're also not going to remember things very well. That's happening all the time where we're trying to keep track of too much stuff. But one thing I find particularly fascinating that's not talked about is the impact that constant distraction has on long term memory storage.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So as I was just talking about, you obviously can't remember something if you didn't experience it in the first place. But the process of actually taking a short term memory and getting it into the form of a long term memory in your brain requires your brain to create new proteins and And that actually is easily interrupted by distraction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And so, and we've all had this happen where you're trying to remember someone's name at a party, you get distracted for a second, you no longer remember their name afterwards. That's interesting in and of itself. But the thing I find truly interesting is the impact this could be having on our ability to be creative and have insights and deep thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Because if you think about what an insight is, I think it's the ability and creativity, the ability to take things that don't seem like they're connected and make connections between them. But that requires having raw materials to make connections with. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So if you don't have any raw materials, if your mental pantry is bare because you haven't stored long term memories, you're not going to have anything to have an insight, make an insight out of. So I find that to be one of the most upsetting potential effects that our screen time is having on us is that it's making us dumber as a society and as individuals because we no longer have resources.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
the raw materials we need, the memories we need, the experiences we need to have stored in order to be interesting, insightful people. And as a side note, I thought when I first came up with that insight, I guess, of my own, I thought, am I being too dramatic? Maybe I'm being too dramatic. And then I had the weirdest fact-checking experience of my life where I sat down on a train between D.C.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
and Philadelphia here in the States and And there was an old man sitting across from me, and I couldn't figure out who he was, but I somehow knew he was relevant to my work.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I eventually figured out it was Eric Kandel, who happens to be the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who got the Nobel Prize for discovering, among other things, that creating long-term memories requires the creation of new proteins in your brain and that it can be disrupted by distraction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And so I said, and I quote, holy shit, out loud, on the Acela, raced across the aisle, knelt down next to this old guy. He was like, oh, hello. And I was like... I wrote this book. I was just talking about your work. Like I literally had just been talking about his work at a conference.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I'm like, is it insane to say that the disruption of the creation of proteins in the formation of long-term memories might be having an impact on our ability to be creative and insightful as a society as a whole? And he said, yes, I think that makes sense. Yeah, it was so weird.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I certainly hope so. I was like, wow. But I will say one of the reasons I noticed Eric Kandel sitting diagonally across from me on the train was that I wasn't looking down at my phone. So it was very reinforcing for my own memory. My own beliefs in what I already believed in and what I'm trying to convey through my work.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Confirmation bias. But I mean like confirmation bias with like a Nobel Prize winning biochemist. So I think it's like good confirmation bias.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, I think the opportunity cost is something that people need to pay more attention to. I will say, though, that I think a lot of times people are multi-screening and that because I thought about the same thing. How does this math actually work?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I have many thoughts in response to that because screens do make our perception of time speed up. So I would say that while time itself is not speeding up, as you pointed out, I do think our experience of time can be modified by what we're doing. It can seem to go fast. It can seem to go slow, even though it's objectively moving at the same speed. And I think that Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You know, there's like teenagers are supposedly spending something like seven hours a day on screen based leisure that doesn't have to do with schoolwork. I'm like, how is that possible? School's eight hours a day. So a lot of it is multi-screening. You're watching TV. You're also on your phone. You're playing a video game. You're also chatting like that kind of thing. multi-screening.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But going back to what you were saying, I think that we really do need to think about this in terms of opportunity cost, because there are only 24 hours in a day, and every time we spend an hour on one thing, let alone six hours, we end up with six fewer hours to spend on anything else in life.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I always say, like, if you are aware of this and you decide you want to be spending that much time on a screen... It's your life. But I think that for a lot of people, it's not an intentional choice. You get sucked in and then you don't really recognize your life is being stolen from you in these little increments that add up to weeks and months and literally years.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I don't know if we always want to be doing it kind of. I think a lot of times it's an automatic habit by this point.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
We've been so conditioned, and we can talk more about this, but we've been so conditioned to associate our phones with some kind of reward, emotional reward, usually, like the alleviation of boredom or anxiety, that we do it on autopilot, and then we get sucked in, and we don't even recognize how much time we're spending.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
what he calls the not the attention economy but the intimacy economy which is not porn which people often think when I bring it up but it's rather creating an algorithm that makes us feel as if we are in a relationship with it and so we start to interact with it not as a machine but more as a person And we are very vulnerable to that psychologically.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
We are built to want to trust things and to answer questions about ourselves and want to get psychologically intimate with people. If you have an AI chatbot that is able to do that, I actually am deeply concerned about that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
There already have been plenty of examples of people who become obsessed with the boyfriends or girlfriends they've created for themselves on things like replica or character AI. There are teenagers who have died by suicide as a result of the relationships and the interactions they had with some of these chatbots that they created.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I think that it's very easy for me, at least, to see a situation in which it really can become a form of mind control. If you can get into a relationship, like say I was a bad actor, like a foreign adversary or something, what better way to have mind control over an entire population than to... get people to have relationships with the chatbot driven by an algorithm that I've created.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, that's true too. I mean, people are definitely not having as much sex as they used to because of their phones. Have not seen studies specifically looking at that, but like, let's be realistic. They totally are. Anyway, the AI thing, I don't know. I would push back on. I'm interested to hear why you don't think it will be a problem in terms of relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I've noticed that it's even started to get pushed out. I mean, the aggressiveness with which some of the social media platforms are pushing these things is kind of crazy. Like, I hate social media, as you might have gathered by my line of work. But I did look at Instagram the other day and I noticed I noticed a very buxom suggested for you person, quote unquote.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
in the middle of like my feed after one post. And I thought, that's interesting. I wonder why they're suggesting that person to me. She had like a flower in her hair. It was kind of a Hawaiian look. I'm like, oh, it's not a person. It's an AI chat bot. And I clicked into it. So now my Instagram thinks that I've been chatting.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I do think you raise a really important point, which is that one of the most effective things you can do if you're trying to, quote, break up with your phone, as I put it, or change your relationship with your phone, is to become more aware of when you reach for your phone. And so I do have a couple exercises I always recommend to people.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I just was like, oh, my God, they're pushing. They're pushing this. Another thing Tristan Harris pointed out is that this was two years ago. So ancient history, Snapchat had started to pin and quote AI friend at the top of people's friend lists. And one thing he made a point he made in a talk he called the AI Dilemma. is that that AI friend is always available.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
That AI friend wants to keep talking about your problems with your girlfriend. You know, that AI friend is always there for you. And I even started noticing this myself. You know, if I use ChatGPT for something or like ask for feedback on stuff, it's so affirming. It's never like, hey, Catherine, actually, that's a really dumb idea. It's always like, great point, you know? So I can easily see that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Many of us falling into the ease of these fake, well, I don't know, I guess they're real interactions, but our interactions with these AI creations versus the awkwardness that it takes to have a real life relationship or the discomfort.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, exactly. And I'm sorry, I'm rambling. You got me on a thing. But I will say also that I recently rewatched the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. I don't know.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I have not. It's too it's too much.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But seriously, like her, I believe, came out in 2013. It's about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with an operating system, which is basically what we would now think of as an AI, you know, character. And I remember seeing that around 2013 and thinking, wow, that's really crazy. Like that'll never happen. I watched it like six months ago and I was like, holy shit, that's like a year from now.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Like it's so spot on and so upsetting.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And one of them is this mindfulness-based exercise I call What For, Why Now, and What Else. So WWW for short. And I always recommend people start by putting something on their phone like...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
First, what do I call... I'm not a bro, so what do I call my reasoning? I don't know what these... You can be a bro.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
a rubber band or some kind of like i tell women like a hair tie the point being that when you pick up your phone on autopilot you'll notice there's something on the phone and you'll have a split second of being like why is this thing on my phone and that will be a reminder to ask yourself these three questions and the way that works is you ask yourself what for like what did i pick up my phone for right now like did i actually have a purpose or was it just kind of like an autopilot thing and you might have a purpose but what what did you pick it up for
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I don't think anyone's saying it's a solution, but sorry, go on.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So putting that aside, you know, hopefully some men also want... There's more reasons.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
There's a couple more reasons. We can talk about that later if you want. But I don't know. I think I genuinely am concerned, even at the level... When you start to hear some of the voice chatbots that already exist, and you start to see some of the... I haven't seen any of those.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Oh, if you want to flirt with a fake thing, you have a lot, you could have a great night because yeah, you can do exactly what you're talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, exactly. Oh no, this is, this is a bad influence. What if this podcast is the turn, your life turns for the worst, but no, but like it's, it's already possible to do that. I mean, my, I haven't used VR headsets that do this, but there's such already like
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
the, the, the realism of the voices of, of being able to have an interaction with like a AI generated voice like that already is so sophisticated, even within the past couple of months that you could easily spend your evening tonight having a quote phone conversation with a, you know, beautiful. And then I think, you know, maybe right now the video is not quite there, but give it six months.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Like I actually genuinely think it will be
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
quite possible and in many cases more appealing to a lot of people to have those relationships and I would also say again going back to the scam idea that you can scam people by doing that so if you think about what's happening to older people in terms of financial scams but also people taking advantage of lonely women or men who you know really want to feel wanted and loved but they like it's so easy to have them fall in love with a fake relationship
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
character whether just to be a dick or because you're trying to scam them out of money wow yeah i mean imagine if andrew tate had access to this ai technology when he was sex trafficking a couple of years ago that would have been insane well that's also really terrifying right like and then oh my god we get we could get dark very quickly welcome to what it's like in my head before bed it's like not fun it's amazing you're getting nine hours i was gonna say nine hours of sleep imagine what could happen if i wasn't this dystopian 10 hours that was all the time
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And then you ask why now, you know, is it a time sensitive reason? Like you actually wanted to send a specific text message or email, or you really wanted to check something in particular, or this is more likely, is there an emotional reason behind it? Like you were, you were bored and you wanted a distraction or you were feeling lonely. You wanted a connection. Something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I mean, think all the things you just mentioned are pretty deep, you know, like look at what's happening in the United States right now. We're so polarized. It seems impossible to talk to someone across the aisle and there's so much misinformation. I think one of the biggest impacts is that there's no shared definition of the truth anymore. And actually a story comes to mind.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
that seems relevant i was at ted a couple years ago when some of these first ai things were being rolled out there was something um there was a guy there was a company that had this like fake tom cruise like deep fake tom cruise and they had these videos deep fake tom cruise and part of the reason they chose to do a deep fake of tom cruise is there was someone on their team who kind of looked like tom cruise and so they had him do stuff and they used ai to make it look like he was really tom cruise but i remember talking to him and trying to ask i was like
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Are you at all concerned about what you're creating? Because it's like all fun and games of all you're doing is pretending to be Tom Cruise doing stuff. But you're essentially making it so that we no longer can trust that anything we see or hear online is true. And what happens to society and the world when we can no longer trust anything unless we were there in person?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And he was entirely not willing to engage in that. He actually stepped into my face. I think if I was a guy, like there was a group of people watching this, I actually think he would have punched me. He did not. But he was like, this is no different from just photoshopping a Christmas card. It was like a weirdly weird.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
antagonistic interaction but I think it was a very valid question an obvious question that I was asking is like this generative AI stuff that we're using now like we're playing with fire like you can see what's happening to us we're in I mean it's terrifying to think the direction that the world is going in the world that you know the direction the United States is going in regards to what side of the aisle you're on
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I think that this is, again, fundamentally changing who we are as people, who we are as a society, how we treat each other, you know, how we spend our time. And it deeply bothers me. I mean, thank you for listening to me because my husband is a little tired of this conversation. This is like all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I mean, do you feel that way? Or are you like, oh, it's okay.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And once you identify this reward that your brain is after, that's when you can ask the final question of what else? What else could you do in this moment to alleviate or give yourself that reward that doesn't involve reaching for your phone? So instead of, I always say, instead of checking social media for a quote connection, you can actually call a friend or find someone to just chat with.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
No, no, he doesn't really switch off. I just think he's like, I'm like, hey, you want to chat? And he's like, I know where this is going to go.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You know, I think it's a different way of saying what I was trying to get at before. And I like the way that you're phrasing this. It's very interesting because this is what I say when it's changing what it means to be human and it's changing who we are. is exactly what you're saying. Because I think I'd never thought about this particular way.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You could take a break by going for a walk around the block. But I also always say to people, you might decide that for your what else, you actually want to do nothing, which is an excellent choice because our brains need more time to decompress from all the stuff we're putting into them. And then you also might just decide, I want to be on my phone right now.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
The optimistic way to look at this is that algorithms are learning who we are and predicting what we want. That gives us a lot of agency. That is happening. But I think what's happening more and more is exactly what you're saying. They're actually changing us to be more predictable. It's this homogenization of who we are. And I've heard that from so many people. And you see it around all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
If you look at how... I think all people, but if you think about young women in particular, the Instagram look. I mean, people are literally getting plastic surgery to look more like... influencers on Instagram. That's a physical example of what you're talking about. The algorithm fed them more pictures that showed them, quote, beauty of a certain kind. And they're actually shaping their bodies
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
with the scalpels to look like that so yes i think that's really important to recognize and i think the result is that you end up going back to what we were talking about before in terms of memory and creativity you end up with a much less interesting society you end up with people who are more the same who don't have independent creative thoughts who don't who all look the same and think the same and act the same and talk the same because they're being fed stuff on algorithm by algorithms much more homogenized culture someone wrote this i really should go back and
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, I think that that's true in many ways. I think also that the subcultures that do exist, if they start to become an identity that exists online, that itself can start to get homogenized. When you see people who are goth and you're like, well, there's a look. Everyone looks the same within that subculture. It's kind of interesting to think about.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I really like to emphasize, that's fine. That's the whole point. If you end up on your phone after asking yourself those questions, you've succeeded because you know it's intentional. And that, going back to your original question, is how you know that you're not just sacrificing your life and suffering from opportunity costs. You actually wanted to spend that time on the phone.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I also think it's interesting to think that rebellion, what is rebellion today for young people? One of the biggest forms of rebellion is to not be on social media and not be on these platforms and to take a conscious stance and public stance that you are not going to be part of that culture because you want to maintain your own identity, which I think is interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And it actually gives me some hope in my bedtime ruminations if I think there's a growing number of young people who are like, I actually don't want to be like everybody else. And one thing that defines what everybody else means is constantly being on your phone, on social media in particular. And so I'm going to take a stand by not doing that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I'm going to become a unique individual because I am not part of that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Well, for sure, keeping my phone out of the bedroom and charging it. I charge it in the closet, and that's really helpful. I also don't have problematic apps on my phone. For me, email and the news are my biggest problems. I've never been sucked into social media. So I don't have email or the news on my phone. It's also just doesn't make sense to type an email with your thumbs.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Like that's just annoying. So making my phone as boring as possible is very useful. I would also say mindfulness has been enormously helpful for me. I've done a lot. I mean, some of my previous work was about mindfulness. mindfulness-based stress reduction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So basically just training myself to notice my own emotional triggers and to notice when I'm on my phone and then to non-judgmentally ask myself, like, do I want to be on my phone right now? So doing the WWW, the what for why now, what else exercise with myself, that has been very useful.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I will also say though, that a big thing I think is missing from a lot of these conversations is that we focus so much on taking the phone away, but we don't talk about what are we going to replace it with? Because you're going to end up with this huge void when you stop using your phone so much. And this is what I went through myself and what many people I speak to go through.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
People who go through the breakup plan on my book are like, oh, my God. All right. I reclaimed time for my phone. Now, why am I existentially depressed? Which is what happened to me. So I think we really need to focus on what do we want to pay attention to?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You know, I mean, because one thing, my biggest personal takeaway from writing How to Break Up with Your Phone was that our lives are ultimately what we pay attention to, because we only, as we were talking about, experience the things we pay attention to. We only remember the things we pay attention to.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And so anytime we're making a decision in the moment about where or how we're spending our attention, we're making a much bigger decision about how we want to spend our lives. And that to me was so important.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I'm not a tattoo person, but I have a bracelet that I had made that actually says pay attention as a reminder to myself, because I think that that, you know, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Like it adds up.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I think that one of the biggest things we need to do is to really figure out what is our what else in a broader sense, not just the what else in the moment when you automatically reach for your phone, but what's your what else in life? Like, what do you want to be spending your time and attention on?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And I would also say the more you can figure that out and the more you can prioritize those things, the less you're going to want to spend time on your phone. Your screen time will naturally decrease. And so I actually think one of the this is a long way of answering your question.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
One of the most effective things I've done is to really try to think about what do I want to spend my time on and to make space and time for those things. And then screen time naturally decreases. And also the more fun, genuine, what I call true fun. I can talk more about that if you want.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
The more fun you're having in your real life, the less attracted you're going to be to your phone because you're going to realize that it is actually not real true fun. It's kind of like junk food and you want more of the good stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And yes, it leads to existential despair. It makes me think of the reason that people use drugs and alcohol in particular, right? It's to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Like we're trying to soothe ourselves and get rid of pain. And as you're saying, pain and discomfort and awkwardness and distress are inherent parts of the human experience.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And our phones are serving, I truly believe, as drugs. So going back to where I think of like, can you be addicted to your phone? That's one of the reasons I think, yes, you can, because we're using them as drugs. If you take away the drug, you're going to have withdrawal and you're also going to have to deal with whatever it was that you were using the drug to deal with. And that's really hard.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So, you know, I'm in the midst right now of running this phone breakup challenge for my subscribers on Substack. We're spending a whole month going through the 30 day plan of the breakup from my book together. And it's been very interesting because one of the main things people have been talking about is.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It's how they're excited that they're spending less time on their phones, but they're noticing their levels of anxiety and distress are increasing because they've taken that source of self-soothing away from themselves. So I truly believe that breaking up with your phone and creating a better relationship with your devices will change your life for the better. But there's going to be a dip.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Like I do tell people, You're using these things for some reason. They're serving a purpose. You're mindless scrolling. You're doing it for a reason. And if you remove that, you're going to uncover what that reason is and you do have to be ready to deal with that.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I don't know that I'm smarter than you, but I will say what I know, which is that at the moment, there's no such official thing as a phone addiction, at least in the States. Like that's not an official term that is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in their manual of disorders. With that said, they have materials on their site that talk about technology addiction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I can assure you that if you can get out of that pit and discover what you truly want to spend your time on, you're going to feel more alive. Not like great all the time, but you will feel more alive. You'll feel everything more.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You're funny, but not fun. I would love to talk with you more.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
My sub stack is called how to feel alive. And it's where I write about how to scroll less and live more, you know, phones, fun, community, all those things. So that's Catherine price.substack.com. And that's my main internet home. And then the book we've been talking about is called how to break up with your phone. And it is available. Well, I hope, I hope wherever books are sold.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Everywhere books are sold.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So that's a little contradiction there. So I always am cautious about straight up saying that you can have a smartphone addiction. With that said, a couple things. The devices and apps themselves are definitely designed to be addictive because they're modeled directly off of slot machines, which are some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
And also, there is such thing as a behavioral addiction. And gambling actually is the first ever behavior to be recognized as having the potential to lead to an addictive disorder.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It's hard to get a firm answer on how many hours, but the best statistics I found range between four and six hours a day that people are spending on their phones. If you want to go for the middle number there, five hours a day, it adds up to about 75 days a year. It's really a shocking amount.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Oh, that direction. I thought you were going the other healthier direction. No. Oh, that's not good. Does he need an intervention?
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So if you think about the fact that smartphones and more specifically many apps are deliberately designed to mimic slot machines and that gambling is considered to be a behavioral addiction to carry the potential for a behavioral addiction, I personally think it's a matter of time before we officially recognize that there is such thing as a smartphone or social media or gaming addiction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I don't think we need to get too caught up in the words because I think there's no question that we are using them compulsively, that we have problematic habits when it comes to our smartphone and app use, you know, so I think you can kind of use whatever words feel right to you.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I always do like to just be very clear for the psychiatrist in the audience that to acknowledge that it's not yet a quote addiction.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I am not sure that there's been research done that actually has two groups of like a randomized controlled trial of you're going to look at your smartphone for three hours a day and you are not. Although there are some interesting longitudinal studies that are ongoing about the effects of screen time on children's brains in particular.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But I will say I have done interviews with attention researchers such as Gloria Mark, and I've talked to people about this and done a lot of research myself. And I think it is, it would be kind of ridiculous to think that they were not having an effect on our attention spans.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
probably the number one complaint people bring to me when they say that they're having problems with their smartphone is their attention span is shot. They can't focus anymore. They can't read a book. They used to love reading books. Now they can't even make it through a magazine article. And I think it makes total sense that our smartphones are training us to be distractible
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
For a number of reasons. One of them is that our brains actually want to be distractible. Our natural state is not a state of concentration. It's a state of distractibility. And that makes evolutionary sense because if you think about it, if you are totally concentrating on one thing, like the pages in a book, you have to shut out everything else.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Otherwise, that is what attention and concentration is. It's the choosing one thing to focus on and ignoring everything else. That's great if you're reading a book. like in this where I am right now in this room, it's safe, it's quiet.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
But if I were an ancient human and they were actually things that might want to eat me, I actually want to be tuned into distractions because they might represent threats. A real life example of that, I was once walking on the street talking to my husband on the phone and I was very absorbed in my conversation.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I did not notice when a car pulled up with a group of teenagers in it and one of them got out with a gun and walked toward me and mugged me. So that's an example of how concentration actually can be a bad thing. My point being, that's our brain's natural state. It's where our brains are always going to want to drift to distractibility.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It takes a lot of work to be able to sustain your concentration to do something like read a book. So if you introduce this device that is basically a nonstop stream of distractions, that's going to have an effect. And it is distracting us in two ways.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
You have the fact that your smartphone is pulling your attention away from your real life experience and the way that my phone was when I got mugged. So that's a distraction, training you to go back and forth and back and forth. But if you think about what we're doing on our phones themselves, we are not reading books for the most part on our phones.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
We are looking at short posts, tiny bits of content, headlines, like you're saying, videos that are 15 seconds long. And every time we do that, we're training our brains to be more and more distractible.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So the analogy I always use is that it would be as if instead of going to the gym and doing the hard work of working out and developing muscles, you actually had a trainer, your phone, that was encouraging you to lie on the couch and eat potato chips, like what you wanted to do anyway.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So yeah, but one thing I will say that is a moment or a note of hope is that when people do start to break up with their phones and make a point of trying to get back into the habit of attention building practices such as reading or meditating, it's actually astonishing how quickly their attention spans can come back. So if anyone out there is like, I am a god, like a no hope, there is hope.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
It does take work, but I've actually personally been surprised by how quickly you can start to see the effects.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I think it's very possible, but I think you have to want to do it. So the two things I always recommend to people, well, in general, I say try to build an attention building practice into your day as often as possible. The easiest thing to do is just to put your phone in a different room and read a book.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So I always say you can get two birds for one stone if you get your phone out of your bedroom at night and then put a book on your bedside table where the phone used to be, a book that you want to read, and then it will be easier to reach for the book than it will be to go get your phone. So you can spend the time during,
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
your bedtime routine when you normally would have just scrolled reading instead. And you can build in some practice for your attention span there. It's going to be hard at first, but be patient and kind to yourself. You also can do something more formal, like actually do something like a meditation practice, mindfulness meditation in particular, where you're focusing on
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
one anchor, like your breath or sounds in the room or bodily sensations and just coming back to it over and over again. Excellent way to build your attention span. But I know that not everybody wants to or feels they have time for meditation. So it can be as simple as reading a book. And I'd also recommend just try to do one thing at one time, you know, at a time. I noticed for myself that like...
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I'm always like brushing my teeth while making the bed. Neither is as well done as it could be as a result of that multitasking. So just getting in the habit of trying to do one thing at a time can be very helpful in helping our brains start to quiet down a bit and be able to tolerate sustaining our attention for more than five seconds at a time.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Yes, I've witnessed that. It did not have a name for it, but I witnessed it, yes.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
So that's a separate category. So you have like 18 to 29-year-olds, 29 to 40, and then you have like club managers. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
Did you swipe the page? Did you try to swipe it? No.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
We're on the plane also that moment when it's like you may now turn your cell phones on and then you hear that. But I will say, no, I've seen videos of small children, toddlers trying to swipe magazine pages. That was a serious question. It's an iPad. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#921 - Catherine Price - How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction
I hadn't thought about that.