Distracted or Empowered? Rethinking Our Relationship with Technology with Pete Etchells

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Pete Etchells
The rate at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right? Way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects. And yeah, that’s part of the reason why we’re in the situation that we’re in in terms of trying to understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies.

00:00:24 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or your are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Pete Etchells, a psychologist and science writer. He is a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, where he studies the behavior effects of playing video games. Pete’s writing can be found in BBC Science Focused Magazine and the psychology blog Headquarters. Today, Eric and Pete discuss his book the Real Science of Screen Time and How to Spend It Better.

00:01:47 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Pete, welcome to the show.

00:01:49 – Pete Etchells
Hi. Thank you for having me.

00:01:50 – Eric Zimmer
I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book Unlocked the Real Science of Screen Time and How to Spend It Better, which is a really good topic because there’s not a lot of nuance in the screen time discussions. And I am a big fan of nuance. I don’t think anything is ever as simple as it’s presented to us. So I really enjoyed your book for that reason. And we’ll get to that in a second. But before we do, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent replies, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your Life and in the work that you do.

00:02:51 – Pete Etchells
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days and for me it’s about understanding that the sum products of the two wolves, right? You know, we all possess traits of both of them and that’s okay. You know, it’s okay to be angry sometimes, but the critical thing is that you have choice. So you have choice over which traits, which behaviors, which habits you want to nurture. And this feels very relevant to me in terms of the debates that we’re having at the minute around the influences of things like digital, digital tech, Things like social media or smartphones, video games, the Internet at large, are seen as things that very much feed our bad wolf and that they only feed the bad wolf. And kind of because of that, we don’t have choice in the matter. So if you go on social media, you’re going to have a bad time because that’s what it’s designed for. And for me, that removes the sense of agency from the equation. There are so many good things that we get from our online lives, often without realizing it. But if we feel that all it’s doing is feeding the bad wolf, we’re left with a sense that we don’t have any control over that. And maybe the only solution that we’ve got left is to ditch the tech and it becomes a reinforcing thing. We become more negative, more toxic in our interactions. So for me, the parable is about actively thinking about what the good and the bad things are in our relationship with digital tech and knowing that you have the power to feed the hopefully good ones that you want and starve the ones that you don’t.

00:04:33 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea and I love what you said in the beginning. We’re sort of the sum of different things and I think if we want to look at the impact anything is having in our lives, we have to look at the sum of it. And most everything in life is some degree of trade off. There’s some good and there’s some bad. You have a choice. There are great things about having a child and there are things that are challenging about having a child and your experience is sort of the sum of those. Before we get too much further into that though, you had some great reviews for your book. And my favorite one was from your 4 year old daughter who said it’s not for children, it’s for adults because it’s boring. I loved that you actually put that out there. That’s very good. It’s very good.

00:05:16 – Pete Etchells
I think she meant it In a super positive way as well. Right.

00:05:21 – Eric Zimmer
The other thing that I wanted to hit on before we go too deep into the book is something you talk about fairly early on in the book, which is that you unearth a journal of yours that you kept online, something called LiveJournal. Yeah, it was sort of a blog you kept back in the day, your teenage self. And you were looking back on it, and I was really struck by that part of the book because your teenage self sounds a lot like my teenage self. Like very troubled, deeply troubled.

00:05:50 – Pete Etchells
Yeah.

00:05:50 – Eric Zimmer
And I’m curious how you relate to that now.

00:05:53 – Pete Etchells
Well, that’s a great question. That was a really serendipitous thing that happened. Right. You know, I don’t think I could have engineered it in a better way. Somebody asked me once, you know, did this actually happen? And I was like, yeah, it did. And, you know, if I’d have made it up, it would be a really boring thing to make up that I got this random email. But, you know, it was during the pandemic, I got this email completely out of the blue that reminded me that I had this thing, this life journal. And I think I’d completely forgotten about it up until that point. And there’s a bit in the book where I have this like horrible realization that it’s still there. Not only is it still there, it’s not locked away anymore. It’s, you know, literally anybody can see it. And, you know, I had this really horrifying feeling at the time that, oh, somebody’s going to come along and take it and just put all of my deep seated worries and fears on me. And nobody cares about what I was writing when I was 17, 18, but it was a huge nostalgia trip for me to go through that. You know, I downloaded all of the posts that I put up and deleted it. So it’s not there anymore online, but spent a long time afterwards just going through it. And, you know, like you say, I went through them and the sense that I got reading through them was, wow, this kid was miserable. This was not a happy person in not a happy place. And I think part of that is teenage angst. You know, I think it’s very easy to put down in writing things that maybe sound overly dramatic sometimes. And I certainly know that I was a person like that when I was younger. I know that it came from a place of difficulty, though. So something that I don’t talk about so much in Unlocked, it comes up a little bit, but is very much more a feature of my first book, which is about video games, which was actually not about video games in a way it was about grief, was that my dad died when I was 14 and I spent a long time not dealing with that because it was too big a thing to deal with as a kid. And I think over time that then starts to come out in different ways. Right. And this is what I saw in the LiveJournal posts, that what was happening here was somebody who was trying to process something really horrible that had happened and not really letting it in and not allowing that grief process to happen. And when you do that, when you start to build walls and build dams, it leaks out in sometimes not very helpful ways. So, yeah, it was really heartbreaking in a way. It’s one of those points where you feel like you wish you had a time travel machine and you could go back and just say to that kid, you’ll be all right, things will work out. You will never get over these things because that’s not what happens with grief. We often think about when difficult things happen to us or we experience death, that we will get over it at some point and then we’ll go back to whatever life was like before. And it’s not. And that’s not how grief works. Right. You grow around it. It’s always a part of you, but it stays with you and hopefully gets sort of smaller over time. Or rather it stays the same and you get bigger. To be able to go back and say that would be a nice thing, but, you know, such is life.

00:09:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I think you even say this in the book. I’m not even sure that my 15 year old self would even believe me if I did. But I agree with you. I look back at my younger self and I’m like, I could just go back and be like, just relax a little bit. Things are going to be very different than you, than you imagine. I just look back at some of the ways I thought at 15 and 18 and 21, just this sense of finality about things. I mean, I was so young and I was just like, I’ll never find love again. I mean, that kind of thing. Right. You’re like, okay, it seems so real then. So let’s pivot now and talk about screen time. I’m going to summarize the gist of your book and argument very quickly here and then we’re going to unpack it and you’re going to clarify it. The gist of it to me is that there are a lot of voices out there declaring that screens are really bad for us. You know, we’ve lost a whole generation to screens. The kids are not all right. It’s claiming all of our lives. Our attention is breaking down on and on and on. You can find them constantly. But that if you look at the science, the science is not nearly so clear or settled as all of that. Is that a reasonable position to, again, sum up a lot very quickly?

00:10:20 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, I think so. This is something that I’ve always tried to do in my writing, is to try and start from an objective viewpoint. I tried really hard not to go into this going, I don’t think any of this is sensible. So I’m going to show that it’s all wrong. What happened when I started writing Unlocked was that I really wanted to get to a position where maybe there’s some things, some topics or some chapters where we go into the science and actually it supports what everybody’s worrying about. And what we can do is look at where things are really scary and justified and maybe where some of our worries could be better directed. Frustratingly, there was a consistent thing that any sort of area of research where you look at digital technology effects, you find a very similar story, which is that the public facing discussions around this particular thing, whether it’s social media and mental health, or screens and sleep or whatever it is at face value, are very scary, very definitive or very confident things being said about them that they are clearly detrimental. And you go into the research and that’s not what you find. You find some research to support that line of thinking, you also find research that doesn’t support it. And when you try and look at the entire picture, it becomes very difficult to get a sense of what we actually know, where the general direction of travel is pointing.

00:11:40 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that psychology can be good at doing, when done right, is that I think it shows us places that are common sense or our intuition may not be right. That’s one of the things that modern psychology research seems to do. And we all have an intuition or a feeling that screens are bad or are detrimental. Where do you think that’s coming from?

00:12:05 – Pete Etchells
That’s a good question. I think a lot of this comes from a lack of understanding how to use these technologies in the best sort of ways. So the rate at which technology develops and changes is really fast, right? Way faster than science can keep up with understanding its effects. And, yeah, that’s part of the reason why we’re in the situation that we’re in in terms of trying to understand the psychological effects of different sorts of technologies. I think it also Means in a day to day perspective, just in our normal everyday lives, these things appear and they don’t come with a training manual, they don’t come with a list of things like this is what you would use this technology for to better your life. These are the things to watch out for. If you use them in these sorts of ways, you’re going to have problems. There’s nothing like that. We wing it, right? So if you look at smartphones in particular. So smartphones have been around for a while, but really exploded in popularity around about 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. I remember getting an iPhone when they first came out. I was an early tech adopter at the time and I thought it was great. It really reminded me of, of like old school sci fi shows from like the mid-90s. There was one called Earth Final Conflict that I always really used to love, where people literally had like a thing that looked like a smartphone, right? It was a device that had a screen and you can make video calls with people and it’s like, this is the future. So there’s that really like cool, it’s happened now and then it was coupled with okay, so what do I do next? And you know, for our generation, for people who got those early smartphones, there was a built in gating mechanism, right. So when the first iPhone came out, it was a glorified phone, right. You know, you could make phone calls on it, you could go on the Internet with it, but it wasn’t a great experience. You could do emails, things like that. Social media wasn’t really a thing there. There was no app store when it first came out. Those things came out over time. So it takes a few years for the app store to kick in and then a few years after that for things like Instagram to appear. So that gave us this sort of natural gating where we could try and figure things out as we go along. And some people did that really well, some people didn’t so much where things are different now. And I think this is part of the reason why it feels so much more pressing that there are issues is that everything’s there now. They’ve got everything all at once. And particularly for kids and teenagers who are getting their first devices, there’s no staggering of these things. They’re getting everything all at the same time with no manual, no way of thinking about how do we navigate this sort of technology. And that’s where it becomes a little bit random in a way. You know, whether you’re going to have a good go of it or not. So because we’re in that trajectory of using them, you know, and it’s still the case for our generations now, but for every generation that what we’re doing is we’re figuring out how to do it as we go along. Right. And that lends itself very easily to having bad experiences. I think one of the great problems with the way that we talk about technology and the relationships that we have with technology is that all the things that we get that are good from them tend to be entertainment or convenience factors. And because of that we don’t notice them. Right. So you use your phone when you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll just bring up a map and then you’ll find where you’re going and you don’t get lost, you don’t have a bad time, so you forget about it. You don’t have your wallet on you or your card, so you can’t pay for a coffee or something or drink when you really need one, but you can pay with your phone and you don’t have a bad experience, so you don’t think about it. So we tend not to notice them. But when we do have bad experiences, they are more salient because they don’t align with fundamentally what we want to use the technologies for. All of us have got experiences of not using digital tech in a way that aligns with what we want to do in a way that feels like it’s messing with our well being. Right. You know, and I’m the same. You know, I say a lot. You know, there’ve been a few times recently that I got to like 10 o’clock at night and I’m really tired and I want to go to bed. And an hour later I’m still there scrolling through Instagram and it feels not good. It feels really unhealthy. Right. And there’s regret there. Like, man, that’s an hour that I could have had asleep and I know I’m going to be tired in the morning and it’s happened again. And we all have experiences of that. Right. And it’s very easy then to feel that we don’t have control over that experience, that this is something that’s happening to us and that because everybody has these, that it’s a feature of the system.

00:16:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I felt a couple different things as I was reading your book. I had a couple ping ponging reactions. One reaction was, this all makes complete sense. The science doesn’t seem to be settled and people are taking tidbits of that science and amplifying it and blowing it up for clickbait and headlines, which people, you know, happens to science of all kinds, all the time. So I had that reaction where I felt like, okay, this is good nuance. The other reaction that I found myself having a couple times was this is what big tobacco and climate change did, too. They just kept saying, the science isn’t good enough. The science isn’t good enough. The science isn’t good enough. And so nobody did anything for a long time. And there really were and are legitimate problems underlying it. And so that was kind of the two things that were going on inside of me when I say that. What does that bring up for you?

00:17:30 – Pete Etchells
I think it’s a really understandable analogy to make, and I think a lot of people make it. So one thing I’ll say is that to use the old phrase, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. What we’re not saying here is, well, there’s no conclusive evidence to show that social media is bad for mental health. Therefore there’s nothing to worry about. That’s absolutely not what people are saying. And I think it’s often made out that that’s what’s happening. So I think if you talk to scientists on all sides of these debates, I think everybody’s trying to do the right thing, and everybody cares about the same end goal, which is everybody wants better, healthier relationships for everybody with their tech. I think where we differ is the means and the methods and the journey and the messaging towards that. I think where analogies with things like Big Tobacco maybe break down is that we actually knew very early on in those debates and in that research that chemically these things were really bad for us. And if you look at the intentional use of things like tobacco, if you use it as intended as in the quote, correct way that it was meant to be used, it has a ridiculously high chance of killing you. That’s almost what it’s designed to do. What we’re talking about with digital technologies is not something that has a chemical interaction with our bodies. And fundamentally, what it is about is connecting each other. And this, arguably, I fully admit that this is maybe a naive way of thinking about it with something like social media. I know there are other things going on here, but fundamentally, what those sorts of technologies are aiming to do is to bring people together. They’re technologies of entertainment, of pleasure, convenience, of connection, and they’re designed to facilitate that. So the analogy for me with I understand where it comes from, and it could well be the case that we get some conclusive research in a few years time that shows that actually, unequivocally, social media is bad for us. I don’t think that’s the case because we’re talking about fundamentally different things and different mechanisms, different ways in which we interact with them. But I really understand and empathize where those analogies come from, and they’re driven by deep seated worries about the way that we interact with these technologies. And I think it’s important that we don’t disregard them or just, you know, laugh people off and say, no, that’s a ridiculous analogy because, you know, you’re not, you’re not smoking phones or anything like that. The reason that these analogies come up and the reason that these conversations can be so vitriolic sometimes is because people are really worried and people really care about what the impacts are. For me, there’s been maybe a bit of a failure both in terms of science communication, but in the way that we do science, in that there are clearly lessons that we could learn. Even if you look at digital technology research, you look at the cycle of panics around digital tech effects. Before social media and smartphones, it was gaming addiction, and before that it was violent video games and aggression. And you can track these technology panics back. You never know whether you’re in a moral panic until you get out of it, right? So we can’t say that this is just another moral panic because we’re in it at the minute. But for me, though, what we’ve not done is figure out how to get out of them quicker and future proof ourselves a little bit more so that the next time a new technology comes along or a new thing that we’re worried about, we’ve got the means to research it quickly and understand its effects quickly so that we can figure out what to do with it and move on so we don’t keep getting stuck in these conversations.

00:21:20 – Eric Zimmer
Right. One of the big things that your book points out about the debate around screen time is that screen time is not a thing. I mean, it’s not one thing, right? You give a great example in the book of if we were to try and log an hour of, you know, either you or I or anybody’s screen time, right? It might be, well, I was on email for five minutes. I was writing my book for 25 minutes. I was on Twitter for 10 minutes. I’m all over the place. And then you make the point even further that even within Twitter, there are times that that might be an edifying experience. I’m connecting with a colleague and we’re having a good discussion versus I am whatever thing you get into that you know is not helpful to you. And so that we tend to say screen time or social media or these big blobs of things are bad for us. So the first problem is that we’re not making any differentiation there. And then you make the further point that when we talk about mental health effects, we are also not doing a very good job of tweezing that apart. What do we mean by bad for our mental health? And all that stuff is so squishy that it gets very hard to run this sort of. And have the same sort of randomized control trial that you would to see whether a medicine reduces blood pressure.

00:22:48 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, it’s a huge problem, not just for the research, but for the way that we talk about this more generally as well. So I’ve really struggled with this in terms of talking to journalists since the book has come out, because what will happen is you’ll have a conversation where you go, or they’ll ask a question around, what does the research say on the effects of social media on mental health? And we’ll start talking about some studies or some findings, and we’ll talk about the mess in the area and things like that. And then they’ll say, yeah, but what about the effects on suicidal ideation? But yeah, what about the effects of these sorts of forms of social media? And the conversation feels like it’s all the same stuff. It’s screen time and mental health, but it bounces around in lots of different places. And part of the reason for that is, like you say, we don’t have a good handle on this in the research literature. Part of the reason why you can point to a lot of studies that show negative effects if that fits with your worldview, or you can point to a lot of studies that show positive or non effects if that fits with your particular worldview, is because they’re all out there. Yes, because they’re all measuring slightly different things. One of the things I tried to do with Unlocked is say, okay, well, what if we take everything altogether? What do we see? And that’s where you get the mess. Right. You go, well, we don’t have clear findings in one direction or another. The counter to that, I think in some ways is the book is about different aspects of screen time. And I think I was a hostage to fortune in some ways in that almost immediately, as soon as the book came out, the conversation shifted. I don’t think anybody really cares about screen time anymore. They care about social media and smartphones. So the first counter I get quite a lot is, well, yeah, nobody that is like nobody cares about screen time. So that feels like a bit of a straw man argument. I think the same can be said of social media as a term. I’ve not seen a sufficiently good definition of social media, you know, that you might use for research purposes or also for regulatory purposes. Yet that doesn’t inadvertently scoop up things that you maybe don’t want to regulate. Right. So, you know, very often the definitions will also include things like text messaging or WhatsApp messaging, even things like forums or Google Classroom and things like that share many of the characteristics of social media. And this is not me saying, oh well, you know, very nerdy. You need to define your variables because I’m a scientist and I care about those sorts of boring details. It’s we need to figure out what it is precisely that we’re worried about because then we’ll have a better chance of doing something about it, something effective.

00:25:45 – Eric Zimmer
One of the parts of the book that I found really interesting was the discussions on attention. You reference a person who’s been a frequent guest of the show and a little bit of a friend, Johann Hari, and his book, I think it’s called Stolen Attention. I don’t remember the exact title, but the idea is that our attention is being hijacked and stolen from us. Now Johan has a particular view of the world. He’s written a number of books on addiction, on depression, and I have both those things in my past, so I find him interesting. And he has a view on the world that tends to take things and make them societal forces. The problem is bigger than the individual. It’s all the stuff around the individual. And so he’s got this idea that these things are competing for our attention. And yet you say that the science on attention is just as confused as the screen time.

00:26:36 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, again, it’s one of those areas where we probably use the term attention in a general sense as a sort of catch all term when we mean other things. Maybe we mean other things at different times, but I think more often than not we mean our ability to hold concentration or not be distracted. And I think that’s where a lot of people feel as though things have gone wrong recently. That and yeah, this is how I lead out that chapter that you’ve got a piece of work to do and you sit down and try and do it and you immediately get distracted by other things. So there’s sort of two realities there as to what’s going on. And I have this conversation with my university students quite a lot. I’ll have students come in and say, allocated today to writing an essay. And I sat down at my computer in the morning and I really wanted to do this. And then like five minutes in and I’m on my phone or I’m playing a game and the next thing I know it’s lunchtime. And then I’m in panic mode because that’s three hours that I’ve lost already. I’m already behind and I know that I need to do it now, but I’m struggling to concentrate because I’m so worried. And then I go and play video games to try and calm myself down for a bit. And then the day’s gone. And I’ve noticed done anything. I do this as well. I think everybody has experience of this, right? It’s very easy to get distracted because we’ve got lots of stuff around us that makes us distractible. The fact that many of us have this sort of experience is not sufficient evidence to say that therefore there is a collective collapse in our attention. This has happened almost by design. That’s a very substantial claim to make. So I talk about this in the chapter and think about, well, if that was the case, we would probably see that signal in the research literature. You wouldn’t even need to do a specific study on this. You just need to look at the past 15, 20 years of research on attentional cueing or the post narcuing paradigm or something like that, and look at. Do you see declines in the averages in those studies over time? You don’t see that nobody’s noticed it anyway. I think there are claims that. I think one of the claims that take Johan to task on in the book is that it seems like we’ve all suffered this collective 20% reduction in brain power. And again, that’s a very substantial claim to make. And I think if that was true, that that would be disastrous for human civilization. Right? And I think it would be so overtly obvious, more so than any claims around, everybody feeling a little bit distracted. I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. I don’t think there would have been a debate around it. There’s another one of your guests, I think, who I spoke to for the book, who I think has a different take on this is Nir Eyal. And I spoke to him for my book and we had this conversation around. When you sit down at the start of the day and you just feel completely distracted and he says that first thing you do is ask people, well, show me how you planned your day. Again, I’ve done this with my students. Do you use a diary or do you use a calendar to plan when you’re going to do things? And seven times out of ten they’ll say no. Sometimes they’ll say yes, but even in the times they say yes, there’s not really any structure to that. More often than not, they don’t really use a diary or a calendar. And that’s not to be disparaging. I didn’t use anything like that when I was a student. But Nir makes this argument, and he sort of said this to me when I was talking to him for the book, that how can you be distracted by something when you didn’t plan your day? And I think, again, it goes back to this idea that we use technology in a haphazard way without really thinking about how it aligns with our goals. And for some people, they manage that fine. But for a lot of people, that’s when we use it in an inappropriate or an unhelpful way. So, you know, I can think of days where I was writing Unlocked, where I knew that I needed to hit my word count for the day. I work really well under those sorts of circumstances. If I know that I’ve got a clear, well defined goal by the end of the day, that means that I know by the end of the day I know whether I’ve had a good day or not. So I can manage accordingly. If I’ve not had a good day, I know I need to pick it up the day after. If I had a good day, I know I can relax more and pat myself on the back. And then equally, there are other days where I didn’t really give myself a goal. I was just, I need to write. And those were the days that I got really distracted. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is, yeah, we don’t have a clear idea of what we actually mean when we talk about attention. And I am also painfully aware that that is entirely useless for everybody in these conversations. For somebody like me, as I just come along and say, well, we don’t actually know what we’re talking about here. It’s like, yeah, great, well done, you. That doesn’t help us with anything. But what I try and point to is a newer line of research, emerging research over the past three, four, five years, that tries to recharacterize attention in a way that I thought was really helpful for thinking about how we cope with digital technologies. So attention is not this simplistic thing that, you know, when a notification on your phone pings, it will automatically in always grab it. And then as soon as you’re on your phone, that’s it, you’re stuck for the next hour. That’s not really the right way of characterizing attention. A better way of thinking about it is. So in the literature they’re called priority maps, but you can think of them like heat maps. So if you imagine your visual environment in front of you, your audio visual environment, and overlaid on that is like a heat map. And wherever there’s a peak in that heat map, there’s something that is worth your attention. And where it’s flat, there’s nothing. So for me, at the minute, you know, I’ve got a microphone in front of me, a screen in front of that, my phone is off to one side, my bag’s down here. Most of this map is flat apart from my screen because that’s where my attention is focused and I want to talk to you. What affects that map? So it is bottom up processes. So if you know, visually something happens, if somebody came through the door, that would cause a spike in that area of the map. For me, if my phone pinged off, that would cause a spike. But top down processes have an impact as well. So top down processes are things like what are your goals, what are your motivations? Right now I am really motivated to not sound like I’m talking complete gobbledygook on this. And I’m finding it an interesting conversation. And this is fun for me. I know that if my phone were to go off a, that would be really distracting, you know, I’d lose my train of thought, I’d lose what I was talking about. It would also be quite rude to you as well. And I don’t want to do that. So I mean, I’ve got my phone on mute, so it’s irrelevant. But if it did go off, that little spike on the priority map would be a little bit. But it wouldn’t be sufficient to grab my attention. If you think about a different scenario where I’m sort of in the same environment, but maybe instead of having this conversation with you, I’m trying to write an email or I’m trying to write a document and I’ve not really thought about it and I’m struggling and I’m worrying about who’s going to pick up the kids and what we’re going to have for dinner and things like that, I’m not really in the task because I’m trying to avoid it, because I’ve not really prepped for it. And then my phone pings off, it will be a much higher spike on that map and I’ll go, ooh, something to distract me for a bit. So thinking about it in those sorts of terms I think is more helpful. Because when we talk about attention or collapse, that’s such a scary thing that has happened to us. How could we possibly do anything about that? Whereas thinking about it in terms of these things in front of me, these screens are tools. They are there to help me do the things that I want to do. I just need to figure out what they are and make them work for me. You can curate that experience a little bit more and have more control over what is worth your attention.

00:34:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I found those priority maps to be a fascinating way to think about attention. I think about attention a lot. I’m a longtime meditator. So there’s a certain way in which attention is used there. Attention is in many ways one of our most fundamental assets. And I find the priority map to make more sense to me, and it depends on both bottom up and top down processes. Makes complete sense to me. I also think that what you said your students described to you, I can say was happening to me in 1989.  I thought I was going to be an author. I would sit down to write and 15 minutes later I’d be like, well, I am now reading. You know, my distractions might have been different. They might have been, I’m reading a novel instead of being on Instagram, but I didn’t know how to stay on task. I didn’t know how to do any of those things. I do think that there is also something to be said for we have a whole lot more coming at us and I’m a believer that we have more control over that than we often think that we do. Yeah, it’s all the classic stuff. Turn off notifications and, you know, I use tools like, I don’t remember what this tool is called. It’s something I’ve been using. I want to call it Screen Time, but that’s the Apple app. But basically all it does. When I try and open something that I don’t want to open all the time, it just pops up a little thing and says, more or less, take a breath. Do you really want to do this?

00:36:05 – Pete Etchells
Yeah.

00:36:06 – Eric Zimmer
And very often that’s enough, right? No, actually I don’t want to do that. Right. So I think we can use technology. I think your other point is an important one. And I talk a lot about achieving your goals or changing your behavior. And there are structural elements of that. Planning your day and turning off your notifications. Right. And then there are emotional elements of that. What’s happening inside me, whether it’s in 1989 and I think I should be writing a novel and I instead pick up a novel to read it versus today if I were to hop over and start playing solitaire. There’s a common thread underneath there. So problems with productivity didn’t just start. We’ve been writing about this stuff for a long, long time. And at the same time I do think to me it seems self evident that there are smart people who are trying to think about how to get me to spend more time on their app, their streaming service, their whatever. They know the emotional manipulation tricks. And so there’s an element of individual agency for sure. And there’s an element of, you know, somebody trying to get me to do something. In the same way that I could say with fast food, there’s an element of individual agency whether I eat a Big Mac or not. And we know that those foods are designed in such a way to capture my attention. So I think it ends up being, you know, kind of back to where we started. Right. There is a lot of nuance here.

00:37:33 – Pete Etchells
Absolutely. And I think nobody is saying again on all sides of the debate. Often there’s a perception that people like me who are saying that actually the research doesn’t support some of these more fear mongering claims that are made out there, therefore there’s nothing to worry about. That’s absolutely not what people are saying. And I think a lot of people with similar views to me say the same thing as me, which is you can hold two things true at the same time. One is that the research is not great in this area and it doesn’t support some of these wilder claims that are made at the same time. Tech companies absolutely need to be held more to account and to design these platforms better so that they’re more supportive for our wellbeing. They play safety and well being at the core of their design. Not just as something that we maybe want to think and talk about every now and again, but they’re absolutely fundamental to it. Those two things can be true at the same time. And I think, yeah, you’re right that thinking about this in terms of there are pressures on social media platforms, let’s keep with them. For example. So there’s this sort of naive view of what social media is, which is this way of connecting or facilitating human connection, which is wonderful and utopian and not really the full story. Right. There is also the business element of it, which is that you need to make money out of these platforms and there are various ways in which you can do that. More often than not, it requires holding people’s attention, keeping them on those sites. That’s where the tension comes. Or one of the tensions, one of many tensions that. That maybe is not with our best wellbeing interests at heart. But again, for me, I think a big aspect of this is, yes, yeah, we do need to push more for better safety by design principles and wellbeing by design. But that’s going to take time. And there are still things that we can do very immediately that support our wellbeing, that we can do for ourselves. I’ll give you an example. And this has happened really recently to me. I was on a debate, an online debate recently, and I know that there was somebody who was sending some not nice messages on one particular social media platform I’d come across inadvertently. I think one of my friends had sent me. I was like, hey, have you seen what this person’s saying about. I’d already blocked them a long time ago, but I was still able to see them. And that was not a nice feeling for me. I felt very low about it, very nervous. I’m constantly anxious in this debate that, what if I’ve just got this wrong? And that’s why I try and keep to the evidence as much as possible. But I wasn’t in a particularly happy place with all of that happening. And I remember going, I wonder what they’re saying about me on other platforms. And I went onto LinkedIn, actually, I went onto LinkedIn and it turns out I’d already blocked them on there. So this is somebody who I’d had prior experience with and I was like, I’m going to unblock them. And I know that this is a stupid idea, this is not going to be good for me because what’s going to happen is I’m going to unblock them. The best case scenario is that they’ve not said anything about me. I’m expecting that they said something and that’s going to make me not feel good. Why am I doing this to myself? And I didn’t know how to unblock anybody in LinkedIn, so I had to kind of figure it out. And it turns out it was really what I feel is a really healthy system of unblocking on LinkedIn, in that if you block somebody, you’ve got to go into A certain part of the settings, find them and when you click unblock, you get a little pop up that says, are you sure you want to do this? If you do this, you can’t block them again for another 48 hours. So I didn’t unblock them because I thought, hang on a sec, this has just given me enough chance to pause and go, I’m not going to get a good outcome for myself from this. I was expecting I could just like unblock them, have a quick look and then quickly block them again. I clearly can’t do that and that leaves more risk open. So I’m not going to do it. And I think my mental health is all the better for it. I took more time to think about it afterwards and go, actually, I don’t care what this person things, I don’t know them, I’ve never met them. They’re just not nice at interacting with me online and it’s probably best that we don’t talk to each other. And that’s fact of life that some people don’t get on, that’s okay and let’s just both go on with our lives. And I think that was the best outcome. That was thinking carefully about the tools that we’ve got at our disposal to curate our existence on these sorts of platforms and what we want to get out of it. But in that particular scenario, there was a bit of a buffer mechanism in place that almost kind of like protected me from myself a little bit. And I think that’s a really good example of where little tips and tricks and tools can help us. And obviously there are lots of other examples on other social media platforms where things maybe aren’t so great. And I think it’s that sort of thing where there’s an educational element to this which is around thinking about what do we want out of our tech use, whether that’s a particular social media platform or our laptops or whatever it is that we’re talking about, video games. And then there’s the other side of it, which is what can the tech companies do very quickly to give us more helpful tools to help us create that experience? And what are things that are a little bit harder to implement that need to be done over the long term and how do we push for that? And the sad fact of this conversation, I think, is that at some point regulation needs to come into the conversation because I think if you ask industries to self regulate, they’re not good at that.

00:43:05 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:43:05 – Pete Etchells
For obvious reasons. Right. So for me then the question becomes around where do we direct regulatory efforts so that they’re most effective for, you know, helping us with these things. And that’s maybe where we’ve got some of the conversation wrong at the minute.

00:43:38 – Eric Zimmer
The part of the book that I probably struggled with the most was the sections on addiction. Given that I have addiction history, alcoholism, heroin addiction in my past, and I’ve been around addiction for a long, long time. And you sort of start that chapter off by saying pretty clearly you are not addicted to your cell phone. I sort of understand your argument because I read the book, but help listeners understand why you feel confident making that claim.

00:44:08 – Pete Etchells
That was actually a sentence in the book that I agonized over a lot. It’s a very strong claim to make, and I fully appreciate that it’s one that doesn’t sit very well with many people’s experiences of their phone use. So I try and unpack that in the rest of the chapter. And I think for me, one of the big things here is around the language that we use in terms of characterizing our relationships with our digital tech. And also perhaps the influence, therefore, that that’s had on the direction of research in the area that we use the word addiction a lot in day to day spe when I don’t think we should. I think we overuse it and we use it inappropriately. We use it in a way that I think can be unhelpful to what we’re trying to do sometimes. So my take on a lot of this is that when you say I’m addicted to my phone or I’m addicted to social media, that what people very often mean is that they feel like they’re using it a lot. They feel like maybe they’re using it too much, and they feel like they’re not happy with the amount that they’re using it. That’s entirely understandable. My problem with couching this in terms of an addiction framework is that it leaves you with very few solutions that particularly when we’re talking about this in terms of it’s not just that you’re addicted to your phone, but that. That you are addicted by design, that this is something that has happened to you without you realizing. Like, if you’d have known that this was an addictive product, then you would have done something different. You might not have used it at all. You weren’t given the full facts. And therefore, this is the space that we’ve got ourselves into. It’s totally understandable when you frame it in those terms that what you then reach for in terms of how to deal with this is to remove it, to either get governments to regulate it or it needs to be kind of removed. So you see all these sort of digital detox programs and things like that. They’re very much grounded in the language of substance use. They’re very different things that we’re talking about. So one thing to say there is that if you look at the research on digital abstinence or digital detox, so where you get these studies where people are asked to either not use their phone completely for a certain amount of time, or to not use a particular social media app or things like that, you get very mixed findings, very weak effects, and certainly nothing in the sense of long term effects. Now, I know that there are some scientists out there who disagree with me on this. And there’s actually a big debate going on at the minute around that. And again, it goes back to that. What are we talking about? How are we defining this? I’ve seen some people point to a bunch of studies that show that digital abstinence works and therefore this is what we should be implementing for kids. There are studies on people, adults stopping using Facebook. That is not what we’re talking about. Kids don’t use Facebook. It’s a completely useless line of research for the thing that you’re worried about. The other thing to say about this is that if you look at the trajectory of research on digital behavioral addictions, there’s this similar trajectory that happens over time, which is people start talking about this thing in the way that we mentioned earlier, that people use addiction in a common day to day sense. And scientists come along and go, everybody’s talking about Internet addiction or something like that. We should study this. And that’s correct, we absolutely should. But it always comes from the starting point that this thing exists and is very quickly and easily definable. And I think that’s where we get things wrong quite a lot. Again, nobody’s saying that people don’t have problematic use issues with their phone or with social media, but how we characterize it helps us define it better. It helps us understand the populations who are really struggling with it. And that leads to more useful treatments in those situations. And then for the vast majority of people who are not addicted to these sorts of devices or these sorts of platforms or whatever, if you use other frames of thinking about this, then you open up a whole new tool set of ways that you can deal with it and again, get better outcomes for yourself. Maximize the benefits, minimize the harms.

00:48:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I can see why nobody in the research and the findings in this area are all over the place. Because we’ve been trying to define alcoholism or drug addiction for a long time and we still really can’t. Generally we’ve moved away from. If you answer yes to 6 out of 12 questions now you’re an alcoholic. We talk more about alcohol use disorder. That falls along a spectrum. Right. And so I think a similar way of thinking about phone use could be helpful. I also think that the other thing that’s challenging is, and I’ve had this discussion on the show with countless people of differing stripes, is it helpful to call yourself an addict? Is that empowering? Is that disempowering? Lots of people have different experiences with that. Some people find that yes, that’s really a helpful way to think about it. I find that good. I’ve gotten and recovery that way. And other people go, it just made me feel like I couldn’t do anything. Why would I say that I’m powerless over something that doesn’t empower me. And so I think the same thing is kind of going on here. And there’s a point made in the book that sometimes we may be framing something as addiction that’s something else, like it’s a self esteem issue or it’s a coping mechanism, which I think all addictions are to some degree. Right. All addictions in my experience are generally there’s an underlying something that you’re trying to accomplish with the thing. So I think it’s possible, probably in the way that I understand addiction to be. Again, I’m hesitant like you, to use the word addicted because I think gambling is our best example that mirrors it, meaning that it’s a behavior, it’s not a substance. And so I don’t think it has to be a substance. I do think behavioral addictions exist. But I also agree with you that probably most people, in the same way that if we look at the number of people who use alcohol or who use an opiate or who use cocaine, it’s a percentage of them that go on to have real problems with it. And I would imagine that it’s a similar thing. It’s really hard. You use the language of habits. And I’ve done a lot of coaching with people over the years on changing behavior. And boy, that line between a habit and an addiction, like what even is it? How do you even really know? It’s very muddy. But I do think that broadly speaking, claiming addiction across the board for all of our interactions is probably not helpful.

00:51:22 – Pete Etchells
Yeah, I think probably another close analogy here is gaming addiction which is the only digital addiction that is form categorized as a clinical disorder anywhere. So the World Health Organization classified this as a disorder in 2018 in ICD 11, the International Classification of Diseases. And there was a big debate at the time between, broadly speaking, two camps of researchers and clinicians about whether this was the right thing to do or not. So I totally take the point that you made and the point that the people on the other side of the debate made in 2018, which is that it’s too simplistic to say, well you need to know whether this is a coping strategy for something else or whether it’s just better accountable by depression or something like that. Because very often with addictions they are comorbid with other disorders. That’s very often the case.

00:52:17 – Eric Zimmer
Chicken and egg, right?

00:52:18 – Pete Etchells
Yeah. Yeah. I think the problem from the side that I was on, which was that not that there aren’t some people out there that that struggle with gaming to the point that it becomes actively harmful, but that we don’t know enough about it yet, is this a unique disorder? Is it better characterized as another form of disorder, maybe like an impulse control disorder or something like that? And we need to answer those questions if what you want to do is help the people that actually need help. So if you look on the World Health Organization’s website for gaming disorder, which is what they call gaming addiction, there is a link there to a 2020 systematic review of papers in the area. And that review covers about 160 papers. And across those 160 papers, there are 35 different ways in which gaming disorder is assessed. Not 1. 35.

00:53:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:53:11 – Pete Etchells
And across those 35 studies, you get a prevalence rate of anywhere between 0.2% of the gaming population, up to about 58%. Now what that says to me is that you don’t know what this thing specifically is. If either nobody has it or pretty much everybody has it, that’s not a helpful thing for people. Yeah, let’s just for the sake of argument, let’s just say that the true rate is 3%. If you go around thinking that the prevalence rate is 60%, you are diagnosing a lot of people with a clinical disorder that they don’t have have. If you think the true rate is 0.2%, you are missing a lot of people that need help. And this is where I struggle with that debate again. Me saying I don’t think addiction is the right way to talk about this is not me saying there aren’t people that really, really struggle in a near pathological sense or in a heart, you know, they are experiencing harm through their tech use. That is not what I’m saying at all. It’s that we don’t have the right ways of talking about it to help to identify who they are, to figure out what the unique features are of that particular disorder and to help them. And I think just rushing along and saying problematic smartphone use is actually smartphone addiction and this is how you test it doesn’t actually help people in the long run.

00:54:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Yeah, we could talk about this for four hours because I find it a fascinating subject. Both gaming use, any disorder, and people have been debating what exactly these things mean for a long, long time. I do think that there’s a generally common sense approach. We used to say in 12 step programs, which is if your drinking is causing problems, then you’ll probably have a drinking problem. Exactly where you categorize it. What you call it is probably not as important as the fact that like, okay, something needs to be done here. Right? Something needs to be tried. And to that end, I don’t want to put this in the post show conversation which is going to make this longer than normal, but I don’t want to talk about a problem for a long time without it all. Addressing your thoughts on how we work with this, you sort of end with, if we want to think differently about the relationship with our screens, we need to take a couple different steps. So what are some of your broad takeaways for what is a useful way to think about this thing that we don’t quite know what to call. We don’t know how bad it is. And yet as you’ve said, clearly we know there are some problems that emerge out of it for some people. So how do we think about or talk about this in a way that is helpful?

00:55:51 – Pete Etchells
I think being reflective on your tech use is a really helpful thing to do here. And I appreciate that very often that’s not an easy thing to do. So there’s no quick fix. This is not like a. Here’s one weird psychological trick that you can use to magically fix everything about your screen time life. If there are things that you are not happy about with your tech use or your screen time, things like that, actually give yourself a pat on the back for identifying that to begin with because more often than not we don’t notice when we’re getting into these sorts of bad habits and developing bad relationships with them. So when you start noticing it, that’s the first step, right? That means that you can do something about it if you’re thinking about this in the context of I have the power to do something over this. This is not something that’s happened to me. These things are designed to enable habits and enable bad habits sometimes, but I still have control over this. I can fix this. Then what happens next is experimenting. So figuring out what works for you. This is where I always like to take an evidence based approach with this sort of writing, all these sorts of things that I do. And this is where it breaks down in the book because there’s not much good evidence anywhere to say this is a really effective solution for fixing things. So it becomes very individualistic. So for example, in the book I talk about sleep at one point and iPhones have this feature called night shift, which is it turns the screen yellow and the idea is that less blue light coming out of your screen doesn’t disrupt your sleep as much. There are studies which actually show that this doesn’t work. It doesn’t have an effect. So it’s a bit of a placebo effect. But I also say in the book that I still have night shift mode on my phone. Not because I think it has some sort of biological effect, but it’s a really overt marker when if I’m playing a game or on Instagram or whatever at night, I’ve set it to 20 minutes earlier than I want to go to bed. So I’ve got a nice clear marker that now is the time to start shifting to doing something else. It doesn’t always work. But the important thing is that when it doesn’t work for me, when I still find myself scrolling or whatever, every time I found that happening recently, it’s because I’m avoiding something, like something difficult. Maybe I’ve had a bad day or something difficult has happened at work, or even sometimes it’s just been things like I’ve not been able to sit down until like quarter to 10 at night. And actually, you know what? I want some time to myself. So giving ourselves a break, I think is a good thing to do here, that we all struggle with building these sorts of healthy relationships and that’s okay. It’s never too late to start changing things. And it just starts with those little steps, being more aware of what you’re doing, thinking about what you want out of your tech use and catering things to align with that goal. I was in hospital about six months ago and I downloaded a game I don’t think I would have ever downloaded otherwise. It was like a city building game, awful game. Like you could spend thousands of pounds on that game, it was terrible, but I was just like, I just want to play something mindless like this for a bit. And I started playing it lots and I left notifications on. And it was one of those annoying games where other people can come and attack your city whenever. And I found it being really unhelpful. I would be at the dinner table and I’d get a buzz on my phone saying, somebody’s attacking your city. And I’m like, oh, I need to do something about that. I don’t want that situation to happen. So I turned the notifications off. What happened was that more people started invading my city and killing me lots. And then I realized I don’t care. Because that game was something that served a purpose for me when I was in hospital. And actually it’s not now, so I’m going to delete it. All of the time and energy and effort I’d invested to get in a certain level, it all disappeared. And you know what? Doesn’t matter, because what I’m getting is a nicer experience now. I value protected time at the dinner table with my kids. And this was something that I’d allowed to happen. I didn’t beat myself up about it, but I thought next time I’m in a space where I’m going to download a game that does something like that, I’m going to think about the knock on effects later on and you get rid of notifications, be more ruthless. Basically about when I stop playing them and things like that. And just little shifts in thinking like that can help. They’re not going to fix everything, but they will help a bit.

01:00:12 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a great place for us to wrap up. Pete. Thank you so much. Like I said, I really did enjoy the book. I appreciate nuance. There was a lot of good nuance and I didn’t feel like you were dragging the science one way or the other to suit an opinion. And I think that is always a useful service. So thank you.

01:00:30 – Pete Etchells
Thank you.