How Social Media Hijacks Your Time and What You Can Do About It

What are the issues with social media today? Wow, well, that's a big question and there's a lot of different aspects to that response that I I would dive into. The main one that I'm focused on is the issues surrounding having instant gratification in our pocket all the time as an escape. So, we could have a lot of different conversations about this. I mean, there's the social comparison, there's the mental health, there's, you know, the online privacy and cyberbullying and things like this. I'm really focused on the digital wellness space specifically surrounding the problematic use of social media as a coping mechanism for discomfort.

That's something that I really struggled with for multiple years, especially while while I was in college, and I've been extremely focused on figuring out how to help people develop a more intentional relationship with social media to combat that problem. What was your experience with it and what were the issues that you faced during your college years that led to all this? There's a lot to dive into here. I I So, when I first started using social media, it was really positive, I think, and I I think that's an important thing to acknowledge. Like, it's not all bad. When I was in middle school and high school, I was on Instagram and Snapchat, and I felt like, frankly, they were tools that made my life better.

I did get some lectures from the adults in my life about how bad they are, and I kind of just shrugged it off as people that didn't grow up with it, that don't really understand it. I was not concerned about it at all, and then I got to college, and that changed for a number of reasons. I think the major one being that transition into college is a pretty difficult one for a lot of people for a number of reasons. I mean, I went to UC Berkeley to study engineering, which was academically extremely rigorous, harder than anything I had ever done, and it was the first time in my life that I had almost full control over my schedule.

In high school, you're going from bell to bell to bell, you know, there's extracurriculars and sports I was doing. I didn't really have to manage my time, and then I got to Berkeley, and that wasn't the case anymore. I had no idea how to manage and prioritize things. So, I fell behind super bad and got a 20% on my first math test of college, which was a pretty big wake-up call for me, and led to me being basically chronically stressed out for the first time in my life. Um I had experienced stress and anxiousness before, but not to this extent, and that started me down this very slippery slope of using technology as an escape.

Um so, it really did start in an innocent way. You know, I I'd be studying for a math midterm, and I would get stuck on a problem and start to feel stressed, and I would rationalize using Instagram as a study break, and that's just a self-reinforcing habit because you're just avoiding whatever led to that stress in the first place, which is only going to bring more stress. And the more times you go through that loop, the lower your tolerance for all forms of discomfort becomes. So, I would say I just slowly became more and more dependent on my phone as a cope for not just stress anymore, but also anxiousness and boredom and loneliness and social awkwardness and fatigue.

Eventually, it got to the point that I I couldn't even fall asleep at the end of the day without being on my phone and watching YouTube videos until I passed out at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. And then that's just, you know, it gets you even deeper into this cycle because then I was getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep. I was waking up not well rested, so it's harder to resist the urge to go to my phone. So, I fall farther behind in school, and I get more stressed out, which makes me turn to my phone even more. So, for me, that was really the root of the problem. It It was just a a highly ineffective means of coping with discomfort that made me feel really trapped for multiple years when I was starting off college.

Now, you have spoken to, I believe now, over 30,000 high school students at various high schools about these problems. And I know you've heard a lot of students are going through a similar experience to the one that you had in college. What is it about the mindless scrolling that is so attractive as a stress reliever? Because it seems that students and adults believe it is a stress reliever, even though, just like you just illustrated, it leads to this negative reinforcing cycle of degraded um mental health and lack of sleep, and you're it takes you away from whatever it actually it is you need to deal with.

But what's what's the mechanism in Instagram, Snapchat, or other uh TikTok, other various social media platforms that makes it feel so good in the moment, even if we know it's not good for us long term? Well, I don't think there's just one thing. I mean, all the social media apps have been doing everything they can to make their apps more addictive for the last 20 years, right? They're built on a business model that's not aligned with our well-being. Their bottom line is a function of how much of our time they can get us to spend. So, they've partnered partnered with the world's leading psychologists and neuroscientists.

They've analyzed billions of data points. They've actually worked with the gambling industry to figure out how to make that never-ending feed closer to a slot machine. So, there's a lot of things that they've done that really make this an escape of a different kind relative to something like television, right? And then that's amplified by the fact that it's always on us, and it's socially accepted, right? Like, people were using cigarettes as a means of, you know, instant gratification that were sitting in their pocket. But you couldn't you can't pull out a cigarette in a library on a college campus and start smoking it, right?

You'll get kicked out, and there's an element of you would feel shame around that to a certain extent. Nobody bats an eye if you're scrolling through TikTok or Instagram in study hall or in the library. That's normal. Other people are doing that, too. As long as you don't have the audio playing out loud, nobody's going to give you a hard time about it. So, it's the fact that it's so unbelievably well designed, and we can get into the specifics of what they've done to make it so attractive. Um but in short, it's every single aspect of it has been tested and iterated on to keep people on it for longer, and there's the environmental factors of it sitting in our pocket and it being socially accepted that really makes it a problem of a different kind and not of a different degree in my eyes, at least.

In your talks, you've got this great visual that shows the amount of time we spend in a lifetime in various activities. I think that might be a good thing to jump into now. Can you Can you unpack what that uh visual looks like? Yeah, so I show how many months an 18-year-old has left assuming a life expectancy of 90, and we kind of break down what that time is going to be spent on. So, there should be about a third of that time that's going to sleep. For someone that works a normal 9:00 to 5:00, we, you know, map out it's about 126 months of actively working if they work till they're 65. And then I just pulled some US Bureau of Labor Statistics data on things like driving, cooking, eating, chores and errands, bathroom and hygiene.

So, we have this rough estimate of an 18-year-old having 334 months left optimistically for everything else in life. And they had a 2021 report that's the most in-depth research that we have on youth screen time in the United States. They found the average 13-to-18-year-old spending 8 hours and 39 minutes per day on non-productive online entertainment alone across all devices. And And just real quick, so that was you said over 8 hours per day for your average 18-year-old? Yes, and it's important to realize, again, that's non-productive. So, that doesn't count using a laptop for school. It doesn't even count Google Maps, texting, or phone calls.

It's literally just social media entertainment and video games. Yeah. So, 8 hours 39 minutes per day, and that's the average, right? So, half of them are above that, roughly. And I've personally seen screen time reports as high as 16 hours a day for actively enrolled UC Berkeley students in the middle of the semester. So, many people are spending a extremely significant portion of their waking life on non-productive screen time, and I wanted to map out, well, how does that scale, right? Let's take the long view and think about the rest of our lifetimes, and really analyze, like, what are we on pace for here?

And it turns out for the average 18-year-old in the US, they're on pace to spend 312 of their 334 months looking at a screen non-productively. So, that's about 93%. Now, the caveat here is there might be some overlap between these categories. That's a pretty hard thing to quantify, so maybe there's actually, you know, 300 and 45 months of free time or something like that, right? There could be be a slightly different degree, but still, it's a shocking percentage, right? 8 hours 39 minutes per day is more time than you spend sleeping. So, it's that's like half of your waking life. And when you factor in the other stuff, it's it's a shocking amount of your free time that's going to it.

Well, because this is basically you've stripped out in this graph all the time you spend on personal hygiene, on sleep, on work. And it's that piece left, that free time. I mean, that's what's going to make your life your life. Right? Every Everybody has to spend that time on eating and personal hygiene, but it's that free time that makes every life unique, and it is alarming that you have so many individuals who might spend, let's just say 50%. Let's be super conservative. 50% of that time just just sitting there doing this, unconscious, just scrolling. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book Flow, and I was a research associate for him for a number of years.

Oh, wow. And your um your your TED Talk made me think of him a lot because he had he wrote this in this book he wrote creativity. He had a similar graphic where there were blocks of time broken out for all these pieces of life. And and he really emphasized how it's a relatively small amount of your entire life that you get to direct in any direction you choose. And when he did this, this is all prior to the invention of social media. Uh but his the thrust of his message was that it's that time that makes your life your life. And I think you bring up a really important point here in that it's important to ask these young young people, adults, anybody that's spending that much time on social media, is that if you're if you can be conscious about it, is that how you want to spend your free time?

The chunk that you have that you can do anything with you want. So, yeah, I've never heard anyone say that's what they would prioritize. When I I give these presentations at schools, and I before I do the big reveal of the 312 months, I ask the students to reflect on what they think deserves the largest chunk of that time. And I have never gotten the answer Tik Tok. Not once. And I've showed it to, again, tens of thousands of students. So, I mean, the good news here is that people don't want this, right? They recognize that it's there's a desire to change, especially when you see it in that light.

Um so, I'm actually quite confident that you know, again, it's important to realize it's how much they're on pace for. It's not saying that's how much they will actually spend. I do believe that we can rein this in, and I've seen people reduce their screen time by quite a lot. So, it's I I don't want people to get the message that like, "Oh, we're doomed, and we're going to lose a generation to just being completely buried in their phones." Like, it's it's a scary visual, but I think the reality will be different, in a better direction. At least that's my hope. I'm in agreement with you there. I actually think young people today are probably better positioned to deal with these technologies than everyone who's older.

It may hurt them more in the short term, but in the long term they will be the ones who figure it out. And I want to hear more about your approach to talking to students cuz I think you take a unique tack in how you talk to students about this, which is that you are trying to educate them, ask them questions, and let them come to their own conclusions, rather than trying to bring a top-down solution that is, "Hey, we're the adults, we know best, this what you you're going to do, and this is what you're not going to do." And what did you just unpack that a little bit more in how you talk to students about this?

So, over the course of the last 4 years working on this, I've learned a couple of really key lessons about what students do and don't respond to. And that has led me to this philosophy of being almost completely non-prescriptive. I think you cannot tell them how they should be using it. In fact, most kids are really sick of people telling them what they should not and should be doing on technology. So, the approach that I take is success for me is for you to use it in the way that you want to use it, right? I just want to give you some things to think about, help you clarify what your ideal relationship with it is, and then give you the tools and strategies to make that a reality.

And people always ask me like, "Well, are students receptive to to that message?" It's like, how could you not be, right? It's when someone's trying to help you use it in the way that you want to use it, and is not placing judgment on what the right relationship with it is, they're inherently on your team, right? So, I do find that students are actually really willing to have this conversation when it's framed in that way. The advice that I do give them is around the mindset through which they should view it. So, I don't think there's a right relationship to have with it, but I think there are generally correct ways to think about your relationship to social media.

And the main things that I touch on there are one, none of these apps are actually free. Right? So, Snapchat, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, they don't charge us money to use them because we're not their customer, we're their product. They make money by giving advertisers access to our time and attention. So, I think it's really important for students to sit and grapple with that, and realize they are paying for this with their time. It's not actually free. So, my whole framing is, "Look, it's not that you shouldn't use it, or that you should throw your phone off a bridge, or never make a social media account.

I still use Instagram on a daily basis, and YouTube as well, and I think that they are net positive things in my life." The ask that I have of them is figure out what it means for you to get a good deal out of it. And there's no one right answer to that, right? You've just got to know what value is this adding to my life? How much of my time is that worth? And any additional time you're spending, you're getting ripped off. And I think framing it in that way really makes students motivated to address this because even more so than, you know, seeing scary studies about the impact it's having on attention span and mental health.

Like, I tried really going deep on that at first, and I found they like kind of responded to it, but the biggest thing they respond to is nobody wants to feel manipulated. And I actually think that's where sometimes parents, teachers, administrators kind of go wrong in addressing this is they're too controlling over it, and naturally kids are going to fight back against that. So, my big thing from a mindset perspective is to get them to see that it's actually it's Tik Tok and Instagram and all the social medias that are trying to manipulate them, and they should be fighting back against that. So, that's like the the motivator {slash} mindset piece.

And then in terms of actually making it a reality, cuz it's one thing to say, "Okay, I'm going to spend less time on Tik Tok." It's another thing to actually do it, right? And if you're addicted to something, that means that you recognize it's something that you want to change, and you still can't do it because you're behaviorally addicted to it. So, there is a whole separate component to my approach, which is to help them make the internal and and external changes necessary to maintain healthy screen time for the long term. So, the external changes are the easy ones. That's just making your environment conducive to your intentions.

And there's a few ways to do this. The main ones I'll call out, moving the phone charger so you're not scrolling as you fall asleep and wake up. That's a huge one. If you can do that, if you can stay off technology for the last hour of the day and the first hour of the day, at least the other 22 hours are a lot easier, at least in my experience. Studying with your phone in a different room, it actually turns out you're measurably more intelligent when you are physically separated from your phone. There was a study out of UT Austin that showed that. So, those are both really easy wins. There's also apps out there like ClearSpace, which make it so much easier to be intentional.

ClearSpace forces you to take a pause before you get onto a distracting app, which is great because a lot of the times we turn to it, we're totally not conscious of it, right? So, interrupting unconscious response to stress, boredom, or anxiousness, and forcing yourself to ask, "Do I really want to be using this right now?" I think is a super helpful thing. It also asks you how long you want to spend on it. So, I can say, "I'm going to go on Instagram for 5 minutes." After those 5 minutes are up, it will kick me off. I have to go through another session, or another breathing delay to start another session.

I only get three sessions per day. If I do a fourth one, my friend gets a text message, and it tells him that I broke my streak. So, the just little behavioral nudges like that can be really helpful. And the main idea is you just want to make it easy. So, finding ways to leverage 5 seconds of and then turn those There's a lot of ways to do that, right? So, that's a big part of the program. The social environment is a big part of it as well, because unfortunately for a lot of kids right now, they kind of have to be on Snapchat and Instagram almost all the time because of the culture in the student body around those apps.

So, a big thing that I try to do when I come into schools is is spur some conversations between the students. And I think this is a big thing that's being overlooked right now. I feel like we're in the middle of this kind of knee-jerk reaction to the anxious generation by Jonathan Haidt and the surgeon general's warnings about social media. I'm seeing a lot of schools just trying to implement the top-down bands. And I think what they're missing there is the the most important factor here is the cultural norms among the student body that drive their online behavior. And change to that has to come from the students.

There's no top-down thing that you can do to really resolve that problem. You might actually make it worse because now it's a forbidden fruit. And some of the schools that are rolling out, you know, the phone pouches and everything, there are kids that are starting these underground magnet markets where they're selling magnets to unlock the pouches for profit on campus. So, you've got to get the students bought in and the good news is if you bring it up in the right way, they really do want to talk about it. And I just think we need to do a better job of getting their perspectives and recognizing, especially for the older high school students, they're almost adults, right?

They're about to go off to college. They're going to live life with phone in their with a phone in their pocket. They need to be ready for it. And we need to be hearing their perspective. I think the phone pouches and the phone bands make sense for K through 8. But I think for the older students, we've got to focus on working with them, not against them. And the great news is if we can get them on board and we can get them to share their perspective, if you're a freshman and you see a senior talking about how they don't like the way that they have to use Snapchat and they wish we could change it and move the group chats, you're actually going to take that to heart way more so than if a teacher or a parent brings it up or even me as a 25-year-old that comes and gives assemblies.

So, high level, that's the approach. We also do some work on habits and mindset and stuff because you know, you could get rid of your phone and the underlying problem, which is our response to discomfort, is still going to be there. But that's kind of a separate conversation. test prep and tutoring company 20 years ago. And so we've spent a lot of time with high school students at this firm. Without a doubt, I mean, teenagers, in my opinion, are biologically wired to reject adults telling them what to do. And I think you've really found a way to cut through the noise by treating them like adults and speaking to them like adults and then hey, is this something you want to spend your time on?

And then in a non-judgmental way, listen to what they say back. Because as it Yeah. Well, go ahead. I I didn't mean to cut you off there. No, no, not at all. Um I think we're totally aligned. It's for any parents listening, especially for parents of older kids. I mean, I think when your kid is lower school and below or even into middle school, you kind of have to play the parent card, right? You wouldn't really let them set their own intentions around drug and alcohol consumption before they're, you know, at a at an appropriate age for that. So, you shouldn't really do the same thing with the internet, right?

Like unrestricted access to social media for a 7-year-old is definitely not a good thing. And I think parents should be stepping in there. But as the kids get older, the transition you want to make is you want to go from being a judge that imposes rules without their consent or talking to them about it to being a guide that helps them figure out how they want to use it and then holds them accountable to that ideal. And again, the the great thing about the approaches no kid wants to spend 8 hours and 39 minutes per day. I haven't met a kid that really genuinely wants that, right? So, if you ask them the right set of questions in a curious and non-judgmental way, they will kind of put themselves into this corner, basically, where they're like, well, if I wanted you all these things and these are all the hours I have in school, yeah, I guess like two or three hours a day is my ideal amount of non-productive screen time.

It's like, great, let's go from there. I'd love to hold you accountable. And I've seen that work really well. There's a quote I want to read from Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, which I think is interesting because people read The Anxious Generation as adults and suddenly they want to come in with all these top-down solutions. However, directly from Haidt, he says, "Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance." And I think we can have a similar approach to the problem he's discussing here, which is an over-reliance on phones, in that we have to allow them to make their own choices, allow for the possibility of them stumbling and failing and having setbacks so they can learn how to overcome that stuff.

I mean, in just a bird's-eye view of this uh situation, what happens to that kid who's been told again and again and again, "You should never be mindlessly scrolling. You're spending too much time on your phone." And so fine, you restrict the phone as a parent. Well, at some point they're going to leave your house. Are they going to have any self-regulation skills at that point to deal with this? Or will they, like in your experience, go off to college, be on their own for the first time, and now get stuck in this negative spiral of not knowing how to deal with this tool in a productive way so that it's a net positive for their life rather than a net negative?

Yeah, so I've definitely had conversations with college students where that was the case, right? They were extremely restricted and then their first time having no restrictions coincided with their the structure of their schedule collapsing with their first semester of college. And that can definitely be a recipe for disaster. I It's tough cuz we haven't really seen comprehensive studies on this. It's a hard thing to to kind of collect data on. So, it's hard to tell like is that fully restrictive approach better than a totally unrestrictive approach? I mean, when I was growing up, there weren't really restrictions around this in my household.

I was pretty unregulated in my access to social media, YouTube, things like that. We didn't really talk about it very much and I don't blame my parents for that at all. They didn't really know, right? It was we were all guinea pigs for this. We weren't aware this could be such a big problem. So, I mean, I definitely faced the issues as someone who who didn't have those guardrails up and you would think was maybe developing the ability to live with it. But I wasn't, really. It just The problem was masked by the fact that I had such a busy schedule. And then the the structure of the schedule collapsing it became a big issue.

So, I think the right approach is a middle ground. You can't just say, "Okay, here it is. Use it however you want to and I'm not going to check in with you about it." There need to be conversations. They need to have some some guidance around it. But how you go about delivering that guidance is really the determining factor of whether it's beneficial or or potentially counterproductive. What are your thoughts on some of the stats that do come out of The Anxious Generation? Like when he states that between 2010 and 2020, the rate of suicide amongst US adolescents aged 10 to 14 increased by 121%.

Do you Do you think this this massive drop in positive mental health because it's it's also it's not just suicide. I mean, it's self-harm, it's anxiety, depression. And it has the causation hasn't necessarily been proven, but that correlation is really, really strong. So, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. Well, I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge there's probably quite a few factors at play. Also, quite a few factors in terms of the problems that come from technology, right? So, there's the escapism, using it as a coping mechanism. That has an impact to your level of resilience and tolerance for discomfort.

And then there's the social comparison and the cyberbullying and the loss of hope that comes from consistently consuming really humorist, you know, content on the internet. So, there's a lot of different reasons why I think that correlation is there. And I also want to acknowledge like I am not a mental health expert by any means whatsoever. And I think the conversation that I have about technology with kids is a subset of all the conversations that we should be having about it. So, I don't touch on like the digital citizenship, cyberbullying, online privacy, misinformation. I'm very specifically on related to your relationship to it as a means of escaping discomfort and the type of content you're consuming.

Um so, I definitely think there are things that are out of my scope that are impacting this that I'm not really qualified to speak on. And I think unpacking that correlation, there's a lot to dive into there. Um and it's really not black and white like it's Instagram or it's TikTok that did it. It's what kind of content were they consuming? How were they interacting with it? Was it impacting their sleep, right? We can't underplay the the importance of sleep, especially for a developing teenager. And I've talked to teens that are staying up until 4:00 a.m. every single night on TikTok and getting 4 hours of sleep, right?

So, it's no wonder that kids are feeling extremely anxious when they're not getting their biological needs met. So, I think I wish there was a more like clear-cut, this is why, this is the particular aspect of technology or the reason, but I don't think that's the case. I think there's a huge combination of a bunch of different things at play. Um And yeah, the the mental health ramifications of it are frankly just it it's not something I feel super qualified to speak on. I've definitely experienced mental health struggle struggles as a result of my relationship with it, but I think there's a bunch of other factors and I think it's different for girls and boys.

I mean, the social comparison aspect of it, the the feedback mechanism of getting the likes on selfies or the lack of likes and comparing to other people in your class and then having this never-ending feed of all the best-looking people, all the wealthiest people, all the most talented people in all the coolest places doing all the coolest things for 15 seconds at a time with these tiny little highlights. I think there's there's no wonder that has a tremendous impact on the self-esteem of kids. Um But it's a very multivariate issue. Yeah, you bring up a great point there, which is that the bulk of students are not falling into that category of extreme depression and suicidal ideation.

Um and what what you were tackling is the the big center of of kids and just discussing what what do you want your relationship to technology be? Um at the same time, I wanted to get your thoughts on government intervention here for some of these platforms because it does seem to me that when you hear stories about an algorithm that is pushing engagement at all costs and if the data points line up that you've got a young girl with uh some anxiety and self-esteem issues and maybe a little bit of a not great relationship to food, suddenly these algorithms will target that, start pushing First, it starts with dieting tips and then the level ups more and more because it's only trained to push engagement and next thing you know, they're getting videos pushed to them on how to hide anorexia, how to um be bulimic and not let anybody know.

Um I mean, actually tips in this area and then you've got a kid who now has an eating disorder for the rest of their lives. Uh that one does strike me as one that that should be addressed from the top down because I think it is very difficult for a mother who is concerned about her daughter to go up against the biggest, most powerful companies on Earth. And it's all well and good to say, "Hey, you as a parent should control your kid's screen time." But it doesn't feel like a fair fight to me. Um and and in my mind, those companies should be held liable for what their algorithms do if they're if the algorithm is engaging in that kind of behavior.

Yeah, I mean, I I agree there needs to be a top-down approach that complements the bottom-up approach that I'm trying to kick-start by going and having these conversations with students around the country and the world. What that bottom What that top-down approach looks like is something I haven't put enough thought into and I know that there are some some really great people out there that are doing awesome work in this space. I mean, the Center for Humane Technology is awesome. I think the stuff that Jonathan Haidt has done has been awesome. I I slightly disagree with him about the phone-free schools in high schools, especially for those second two years, but by and large, his four norms that he advocates for, especially for K through 8 schools, I'm totally on board with.

So, we have some people that I think are pushing us in the right direction for these top-down changes, but I also see some things that I think are a little bit misguided in our response to them. So, like the TikTok thing for instance, I think it's important that we view that as purely a question of the role that China has in this and legislating around that. I don't think we should be under the impression that banning TikTok and forcing kids not to use it is going to solve the problem whatsoever, right? The cat is out of the bag. The algorithmically ranked short-form videos are on every single platform.

So, what needs to happen from a legislative perspective, I think, is controlling putting some like limitations on the architecture and the design of the platforms. The Center for Humane Technology has a bunch of great ideas around this. One of the ones that they have for controlling the rate of disinformation that spreads on the on Facebook is limiting the share button so that you can't share a post that's been shared by someone else. You have to actually copy and paste the post and they've shown that would cut down fake news by like a factor of I think it's like 6x on Facebook if they did that.

So, there are all of these like minor tweaks that can be made. I don't have a specific set of like these are the policies that should be implemented. Frankly, I think it's just a little bit out of my area of focus in which I feel I can be the most impactful, which is this bottom-up aspect of it, but we need to have the top-down policies and social norms and all these things that are are complementing the stuff that Project Reboot is trying to do in schools. Let's come back to to that then, uh to that lane of students' relationships with screen time. So, with Project Reboot, what are the suggestions that you make to to students and to schools in how to deal with these issues?

Uh because it does seem s- schools in general are very aware that there is an issue that needs to be dealt with, but there's a lot of variation in how what steps might be taken to deal with the issue at hand. So, with Project Reboot, what are those solutions that that you propose? On the individual student level, it's focus on your mindset, environment, and habits, right? It's that kind of high-level approach that I laid out earlier. On the student body level, it's minimize the social consequences of not being on social media, right? And recognize that I do think it made sense for all of us to use Snapchat as a default means of communication when it was a social media, but it's not a social media anymore.

It's addictive entertainment masquerading as social media. That's deliberately trying to engineer the social interactions of teenagers to make them more paranoid and neurotic so that they're constantly on the app. And there's some I just think really evil things that Snapchat has done in the design decisions that they've made regarding the streaks, the fact that you can see who other people's best friends on Snapchat are. I just think there's so much that Snapchat has done that should be pushed back on by students. And I think a lot of students do feel that way. So, that that's one of the like social norms that I advocate for is at least just move the group chats where there's logistical information being relayed off of Snapchat so that somebody can opt out without being socially isolated.

Can you dive into what those specific things Snapchat is doing, especially for parents that might be listening to this and they're not on Snapchat, so they might not even know what those things are. They might not know what the streaks are. Um just unpack that a little bit. Yeah, so the Snapchat streak is this feature where if if I were to send you a Snapchat and you sent me a Snapchat back in one day, that would add one day to our streak. And if we were to do the same thing again the next day, now our streak is at two. And these streaks build up and up and up. And what's happened is implicitly, it quantifies the strength of your relationship with someone over completely the wrong data, right?

So, it basically tells kids your social worth is a function of how many people you interact with on a daily basis, even if it's just sending a picture of a wall, right? Cuz the a lot of the streaks messages that that turn into you know, these 500,000-day-long streaks that kids have are literally them sending a picture of the ceiling or the wall, right? But they look at that and they kind of implicitly quantify their the health of their social life around their streaks and that's why they're devastated when they lose the streaks. When kids go on vacation and they're off of their phones for a week, they have another friend log in to keep their streaks up, right?

So, it just implicitly sends, I think, the wrong message around what we should be valuing in our social lives to kids. And now Snapchat's made it so that you can pay to reactivate a streak that has been lost, right? So, it's just like Wow. They've so clearly done it just to get people to come back to their app more and more and more and continue to engage in a way that I think has had some whether they're intended or unintended, some serious consequences for the ways in which kids view relationships. And then on top of that, now they've got it so that apparently now with Snapchat Premium, you can pay to see who people's best friends are on Snapchat.

So, you can imagine the drama that that creates in a school setting when you know who everyone else has been talking to, right? I mean, imagine if when I was in school lower school and stuff that we were like passing notes around. Imagine if every day you came into class and there were like stats on the board of who's passed the the most notes to who and like it just it's I don't think we should be quantifying things in that way and giving that kind of um just feeding drama between kids in that manner. They can also see if people have been active on the app if they haven't opened a Snapchat that they've been sent.

So, like I could if I sent you a Snapchat and you haven't opened it yet, I can see that it's been delivered and not opened. But, if you've gone on the app and deliberately haven't open opened it because you're ignoring it, now I could see that too. So, there's just a bunch of things that they've done that I think are they're just messed up. And what does that mean now? It's like, well, now you know if I go on Snapchat I have to respond to all my Snapchats cuz everybody's going to know if I don't do it and they're going to think I don't like them. So, they just pull kids into sending more and more Snapchats to make it harder and harder to separate yourself from it.

And I just think that's really messed up. I know that they struggled once they went public. Those market forces really came to bear on that company. They said, "Hey, we have got to figure out a way to increase engagement to drive those top-line numbers and this is the result of that." And I think that strikes at the heart of the problem here, which is just like you said, their business model is your time. It is monetizing your time. They're not actually free. Uh and that's what leads to the manipulation. And sharing that information with students is really important. It's it it strikes me um that the the what you're getting at there with Snapchat is that the the medium is the message.

And so on on Snapchat they're teaching you that it is some form of daily communication back and forth even if it's meaningless is what constitutes a good friendship. What is the message in the medium of the other major social platforms? Well, I I think you get a lot of the same quantification of your social value via metrics that aren't really that important. So, I I would say the message of something like Instagram or TikTok is that it's better to have a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people that will give you transient social approval than a handful of really good friends that are actually deeply there for you, right?

So, I don't think they've been intending for that message to be received, but it's a byproduct of the design decisions that they've made because of their business model. And I want to be clear I I I don't think the people at Facebook or Snapchat are evil, right? I think it's very easy to sell yourself this idea that you're doing something actually noble here, right? Like their whole reason they're on this business model is cuz they decided to make their apps free because they didn't want to restrict access to them, right? And at first like Facebook becoming this free service to connect people all over the world, like that sounds like a really noble vision.

It's just an unintended of the business model they chose. And if you're an engineer it's very easy to sleep at night knowing that you are increasing engagement if you view engagement as, "Well, I'm giving the user what they want, right? They wouldn't be using it more if they didn't want to be using it. So, I'm making their experience on the app better." But, I think it's important to realize it's more nuanced than that how people make decisions, right? And if they're addicted to something, it's not what they want, it's what they feel compelled towards because of the addictive design. Um so, I I don't know.

I don't want to come off as like too harsh in in the Anybody that works at, you know, Facebook or Snapchat is evil. That's not what I'm saying at all. It's just the incentives are really really bad and I think that if we as a collective culture can wake up to that and push back against it and make that business model less successful as a result by boycotting and going to communication-only apps, then we can apply some market forces that will hopefully kind of correct for the bad incentives that the apps have been under for a long time. Yeah, and there are lots of good people that worked for tobacco companies over the years that worked for big pharma when they were pushing opioid addictions.

Um it Yeah, I don't necessarily blame the rank and file at these companies either. They've got a job and they're trying to do the job as best they can. I do think it's fine to point fingers though at the people at the top who are setting the incentives because they're aware of what their incentives drive and they are forsaking responsibility in the name of raking in more money. This is true. My perspective on it is like this is where you need legislation to come into play because if Mark Zuckerberg were to basically say, "You know what? We're fully taking responsibility for this. We're going to make Facebook way less addictive.

We're going to cut out all these things that we know work." Well, now TikTok is going to dominate, right? And like there will be competitors that do the same thing and Mark will probably get fired by the board. So, again, it really is if you're obligated to maximize shareholder returns to a certain extent, like the individual people at the top are still encumbered by bad incentives. So, this is where I think we need to have a combination of top-down and bottom-up interventions to to right the course and make it so that um the incentives are just better. So, I I agree that there is a level of responsibility there, but I I don't think it's realistic to expect that if we just swap with different people, the problem's going to resolve, right?

You make a great point there and it reminds me of one of the big bank executives prior to the financial crisis and they said, "How could you justify continuing to push these products that you knew were going to one day self-implode out to teachers' pension funds, right? They were selling them the collateralized debt obligations knowing that they really were selling them junk and that somebody else was going to be holding the hand grenade instead of them." And the executive said, he said, "Hey, man, you got to understand like when the music's playing, you got to dance. If I don't jump in because of these market forces or if our bank stops doing it, it's not going to stop all the other banks from doing it and suddenly we're getting killed in our margins and the shareholders will demand that we do something to be more profitable and the only way to really solve that is an industry-wide solution.

So, it's like if you want to have a social media product in the United States, there needs to be a federal intervention that says uh X, Y, and Z are not allowed to be pushed out to our consumers because we know those things are addictive. Um I I mean, much like we made advertising to children for cigarettes illegal. And then no one can do it, right? Then no one has an advantage by advertising cigarettes to children. I I don't I think the arc of this is going to be very similar to the arc with cigarettes. I think it's just the cigarettes of my generation, right? And it took a while for us to respond.

There's got to be a combination of things that come into play to correct the course, but I think we're seeing that start to happen. We're having a wake-up moment as a culture right now. The parents are realizing it, kids are reali- kid kids are realizing it. Trust me, kids see this as a problem. I think that's something that parents often discount. It's very common I think for parents to say, "Hey, you've been on that phone a lot. Like why don't why don't you go do something else?" And the kid kind of rolls their eyes and they think that they're not aware it's a problem. Most of the time they they know, they're just are confused as to why they can't control their behavior around it.

They're blaming themselves. They're insecure and they don't want to acknowledge it. So, what I found is that the the majority of kids, especially high school kids, really like see that this is something that is not good. So, that's a good thing, right? Like there's a level of awareness that we have around it. There are people that are starting to push legislation around it. We're starting to get tools like ClearSpace that will kind of make it easier for us to combat the persuasive design prior to us getting potentially stronger um legislation around this. So, I think things are trending in the right direction and I do feel optimistic that we'll make a lot of progress in this domain over the course of the next decade or two.

What what are some of the stories that you've heard from students when they have made a change and you hear back from them? Yeah, I've got a lot. Um I had a student in the course that I taught at Berkeley that was the the first work that I did on this. He cut his screen time by 6 hours a day and said he was a lot happier, in better shape, getting more done. Felt like the class laid the foundations for the rest of his life. So, I mean, when you get that much time back, you know, there's a lot that you can do with it. I mean, for me personally, I went from being pretty miserable, completely out of shape, like not doing well in school to getting straight A's and running marathons and doing all these things because of my the change in my relationship with technology.

I've had multiple students get straight A's for the first time in college after taking that course and cutting their screen time down. So, there's a lot of anecdotal stuff that I've heard from students that I've worked with, especially if you're in a class where it's graded on a curve and you're competing against everybody else in the class and everybody else is spending like 5 to 7 hours a day. If you're down at two, which you can still watch a whole movie every day and still have time to check social media, that's like a superpower. You've got an extra, you know, 3 to 5 hours a day you can use however you want to.

So, um in some ways it's an opportunity for kids growing up today. If you can figure out the right way to use this, not only will you not be so held back by the sink on your time and energy and attention span, you can actually really be empowered if you're using it in the in the right way. Um so, I think there's lots of reasons to be optimistic and for anybody that is struggling with it right now, um you can feel really trapped and like you're just never going to be able to get out of it, but it's it's resolvable. I've seen people resolve it. And there are still ups and downs and I loved what you said earlier about it really being about being able to bounce back and handle setbacks cuz I still have setbacks, too.

Like I've go through days or weeks where my screen time rises and I've just gotten really good at figuring out for myself what I need to do to get it back on track. So, that's a major thing to focus on, I think. Dino, as we wind this down, um what are some practical tips for adults that want to have a better relationship to technology, for parents that want their kids to have a better relationship, and then a third category of of students who want to do this on their own and have a better relationship with technology? Yeah, great question. So, I think there's commonalities between all three of those cases.

Again, my main thing is first get really clear on what your ideal relationship is. You want to know what you're working towards before you start doing the work to to get there, at least to a certain extent. So, reflecting, having a having a conversation with yourself about, you know, what aspects of this are useful to me. How much time do I really want to be spending? What do I want to be doing with the time that I have on social media? And sometimes the best way to get clarity on that is actually to take take a step away from it. So, for people that are actively struggling with this, I do recommend doing some form of a digital detox.

And sometimes this idea gets mixed responses from people because from an addiction standpoint, doing a cold turkey thing is generally not regarded as the best approach. But I do think because you have the option to just delete the apps and get rid of them off of your phone and and tell someone you're not going to use them for 1 week, it's helpful to do that as long as you approach that break with the right set of steps. So, the things that I would try to do while taking a break from it are one, start to recognize the times in which you unconsciously go to open those apps without realizing it. Cuz if you delete the Instagram app, you will notice your thumb navigates you to where that app was without you even realizing it, right?

And that's a great prompt for you to say, "Whoa, why? Why did I just do that? What was it that triggered that unconscious response for me to go open it? And how can I respond to that differently?" And my framework for changing your response is prioritize satisfaction over pleasure. So, I think we're prone to this fallacious line of thought where we we think that when we are feeling low or bored or anxious or whatever, what we need to do is engage in something pleasurable that makes us feel really good and that will serve as a break and we'll be able to come out on the other side re-energized and ready to, you know, be productive or whatever it is again.

In reality, usually the opposite happens when we binge on watching these short videos, we come out on the other side and it feels like we've taken an anti-nap almost. So, recognizing that and sometimes it's helpful to actually let yourself do it and then really sit with how you feel afterwards and you'll realize you feel lethargic and kind of zapped, right? So, a better alternative is when you do need a break, seeking something that is satisfying where it doesn't feel bad to do in the moment, but you come out on the other side and you genuinely are recharged. And that can be different for different people.

For me, it's going for a walk without my phone without my phone. It's FaceTiming a friend. It's reading a book outside. I mean, there's a million different ways to do this, practicing an instrument, doodling, journaling. There's all these different things that we can do that are mildly effortful, but still a productive break. It's almost like this idea of active leisure. Cal Newport talks about that in his book Digital Minimalism and I'm a big fan of that idea. Um so, using that break as an opportunity to retrain those responses and also get clarity on what aspects of it do you really miss, right?

Cuz there will be reasons you're like, "Ah, I wish I could go on Instagram right now to do this thing." Now you know, like that's the thing that you use it for, right? That's the value that you get out of it. So, get clear on it um and then just make it easy for yourself. So, ClearSpace again is the best tool that I have found for this. I think this the stuff that they've done is they're brilliant at designing behavioral nudges and they make it really fun, too. So, you can even do a a challenge on ClearSpace where you have to do push-ups to earn minutes of scrolling on social media. So, you literally set your camera up and you have to record yourself doing push-ups and it tracks how many you've done and you can say, you know, three every three push-ups is a minute of scrolling that I get.

So, there's ways to to make it kind of fun and challenge yourself a little bit, but the biggest thing is just don't rely on willpower as much as possible to overcome this. Do the few small things that have an outsized return and that applies to your habits as well, right? So, focusing on what do you do in the first and last hour of the day, really paying attention to sleep. I think is a huge thing for me. I notice a massive correlation between poor sleep and high screen time for myself. So, I think prioritizing that, finding a way to wind down and start your day off right, it's just so much easier to be intentional in the other 22 hours if you can nail the the first and the last.

And then on top of that, giving your brain the space and time that it needs to just daydream and process things. That's something I think we're chronically deprived of these days. I mean, I there was not a moment during the day where I was alone with my thoughts for multiple years when I was in college and your brain needs that, right? So, again, going for a walk without your phone, staring out a window, journaling, meditating, all of that is a great way for your brain's default mode network to just kind of run and process. Um and you don't really fully get that when you're always plugged into some form of technology.

So, that's my general kind of approach for it. And then as a parent that is trying to help a kid with this, it's really dependent on how old that kid is. So, I think there's different approaches for a kid that is not yet on social media and a smartphone, that are currently getting onto it, or that are already on it and are already facing a problem. But the generalizable advice is you want to be on their team, right? So, actually being vulnerable vulnerable and transparent with them, I think is an an important approach to take. I mean, if you're struggling with this, don't hide that from them, right?

It's I think it should be encouraged for you to say, "Yeah, I got to be honest. I got sucked down a Facebook rabbit hole today and I think my relationship with it could use some work." If you're a kid who is struggling with this and is beating yourself up about it and berating yourself because you think it's downstream of you just being weak and you have these insecurities and this shame around it. And then you hear dad say that, all of a sudden it's not just you, right? And you're more comfortable to kind of open up and talk about it and maybe you'd be more willing to do some form of a challenge around it.

But I also think it's important that you approach it with the right level of nuance and be curious and open-minded because again, a lot of this is social media's changed the social fabric of childhood, right? And I would be cautious of coming in and thinking that you know what's right in terms of how they should be using something like Snapchat. You don't want them to be socially isolated, right? So, I think treat the mindless content consumption and the active socialization differently. Even if that socialization on Snapchat is them sending a picture of the wall, I mean, have a conversation about it, but at the end of the day, that that's a very different engagement with technology than the passive scrolling through Instagram Reels and TikToks.

And then for kids that are dealing with this, I think the main piece of advice is don't blame yourself for it. I I can't emphasize this enough. I think a hugely important factor of how you use technology is the identity that you have around it, right? And if you believe that you're struggling with this because it's your fault, because there's something wrong with you, because you are weak. If you identify as someone that is addicted to technology and is not capable of resolving it, it's going to be very hard for you to resolve it. So, instead just having that shift in mental posture and saying, "You know what?

I've gotten a little sucked into this as everyone else has to a certain extent, and it's because these apps are really well designed to be addictive. I'm going up against neuroscientists and the gambling industry, basically, that know how to change my behavior, and it's okay that I haven't been perfect about it, and that doesn't mean that I'm doomed and that I'm never going to resolve it. If I slowly work on becoming more intentional and I do some things to make it easier for myself, and critically, if I drop the shame element of it and actually just talk to a friend or a family member and get an accountability buddy, I can see progress on this over time.

And hey, if I can compound very small improvements over a long period of time, I will become the kind of person that has a positive relationship with this, and if I can do that, the world is my oyster, right? Having that kind of inner monologue, I think is really important, and recognizing that you are going to have slip-ups. You're going to fall into it. I still do, and that's okay, and it's really just about how you bounce back from those things. So, tracking your screen time and giving yourself credit for when you make progress on it, because then when you are in those dips later on and you've had those setbacks, being able to look at that empirical evidence that you have overcome this in the past makes it a lot easier to bounce back quicker because you know that you can do it cuz you've done it before.

So, there's a lot more to say. I mean, I'm coming out with a whole course about how to do this that I'm working on right now. So, I I wish I can I could condense it all into a 5-minute explanation, but unfortunately, there's there's more that needs to be unpacked to to really get the full approach, I think. Sure. And it sounds like you mentioned earlier, big ones are for the students, not having the phone around when you're doing homework, moving the place where you charge your device so that it's not next to your bed when you're going to sleep and when you wake up. That's a huge one. Grayscale is a good tip as well.

Auditing your notifications, those are some other really easy ones to do. Um but yeah, I think I've covered all the main pieces of advice now. Okay, fantastic. And then, if anybody is interested in having you come to their school to speak to students and parents, if anyone wants to learn more about what you're doing, where can they go find that information? Yeah, so my website is projectreboot.school, and there's a school services page on there that's got all of the different types of work that I do with schools. Um so, just forward that to a school administrator or a teacher with a little note about why you think it would be helpful.

And yeah, my calendar's finally starting to open up after a crazy sprint. Uh I think I just did 51 talks in 36 days. So, I just got back from this insane insane sprint. Um but now things are finally starting to to open up. So, I am available to to come speak at schools for the rest of the year. Um so, yeah, I'd love to make that happen if it's possible. Great. And then there is a course that you are developing right now, which will be available in the future. Yeah, it should be published by the end of this month. Okay. Excellent. And I assume we can find that course on the website as well. That's correct.

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, we'll have that in the show notes, too. Dino, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for all of your time. Uh this was a great conversation. These are These are ideas I really want to help spread because it's going to help a lot of people. So, thank you for all of it. Yeah, Nick, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it. Okay, everybody, until next time. Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. And be curious. So far away. So far away. So far