NYU Professor: Do This for 2 Weeks to Get Your Focus, Motivation, & Life Back

The average American teen now spends 5 hours a day on social media, mostly watching short videos. I think 40% of American 2-year-olds have their own iPad.

Boys now have a slot machine, a porn theater, a video game parlor. They have all of this stuff in their pocket with them all the time.

The biggest damage, the destruction of the human ability to pay attention, to focus, and to pursue goals.

Mel Robbins, it is great to be here. And of course, one always says that, but the welcome that your team gave me, I have never seen anything like it. So, it's a real pleasure to be here.

So what we'll be talking about here is how to regain your attention, how to improve your habits, especially your digital habits. And if you do this, then I can offer you, the listener, the viewer, the same thing that I offer my students at New York University. I teach a course called Flourishing. And I say if you stay with the program, if you make these changes to your habits, by the end of the course, you will become smarter, stronger emotionally, and more sociable. And if you become smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then you will on average be more successful in love, broadly construed, and in work. And love and work is the magic formula in psychology for happiness and flourishing, going all the way back to Sigmund Freud. So if you are more successful in love and in work, then I guarantee you, you will be happier.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Yeah. So something big changed between 2010 and 2015. I've called it the great rewiring of childhood and you and I are going to talk about that. What happened when everybody switched over from having flip phones or basic phones? You know, the millennials went through puberty with the Motorola Razr, to by 2015, everyone has a smartphone. We've got to get to the point where we can return our phones to being tools that we use when we want to do something. You take it out. The smartphone used to be a Swiss Army knife. Even had flashlight and maps. Like, it was amazing. We've got to get back to where it's a tool that you use when you want something as opposed to a thing that's dominating, controlling your life and altering your consciousness and telling you what you need to do now and when. So, and it takes some work. I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's actually pretty simple. Like, the things you need to do aren't complicated. With a little practice, you really can regain control of your attention and then you'll regain control of your life.

Yeah. So, the most important component of happiness, research in positive psychology has shown this for decades. The most important thing is relationships and relatedness. We humans are ultra-social creatures. We have intense social needs. We need to have close relationships, supportive relationships in our family. And then as kids, especially as they reach adolescence, the plan is they kind of move out, they stop being under your tutelage, under your protection, and they need to begin creating their own life and that means that they need to make it in the world of prestige of their peers. So that's always been the case and that's why I don't know what it was like for you, I hated seventh grade. Middle school was the worst. Like I generally liked school but middle school was horrible and you know suddenly you realize wait, how I look, you know, suddenly it suddenly matters so much. So middle school is a very, very difficult time. It always is. You can't remove that. But if now suddenly everyone is online and everyone is connected and the companies tell us oh it's how you make connections. It helps kids you know get together. But what kids need is a few close friends. And early on what we were told was, 'Oh, this is, you know, let them, you know, have an Instagram page. They'll have all these friends. They have all these followers.' But it turns out that that doesn't bring you closer to your friends. It replaces them because the average American teen now spends 5 hours a day on social media, mostly watching short videos. They're not even liking each other's posts. It's mostly short videos. These 5 hours a day pushes out everything else. Time with friends, sleep, sunshine, reading books. You know, if you have kids, imagine taking 5 hours out of their day and saying, you know, you have to go do something for 5 hours a day. Now get everything else done. Everything else is going to suffer. And that's what these devices did. When the kids got on social media, it severely damaged their relationships because it gave them quantity at the expense of quality. They now had hundreds of friends that they never saw.

That's right. So, this is something very important for people to understand. Social media used to be social. Social media used to actually be called social networking systems. That was what we called them around 2006 to 10. Social networking systems. Facebook was a social networking system. You put up your page, you've got your information, maybe your photographs, and you can go check out your friend's page and they can check out yours. That's perfectly healthy. There's no problem with that.

Yeah. It was sort of like looking at a flyer.

Yes. So, a lot of things change. So, the iPhone comes out in 2007.

But very few kids have one and there's no app store, no push notifications. 2008 you begin to get the app store and push notifications. 2009 you get the share button, the retweet button. So now and then you get newsfeed in this period also. So instead of going to check out your friend's page now suddenly it's your newsfeed and it's not just updates from your friends, it's news updates, it's commentary, it's culture war stuff, it's isn't he stupid, it's can you believe those Democrats, those Republicans. So now you're getting push notifications about things that aren't your friends. And this begins to sort of ramp up the overstimulation, the anxiety.

And if you're a teen, you may have to sit down at your parents' computer. So nobody is on for 5 hours a day. So that's where we are in 2008, 9, 10. 2010, the iPhone, I think the 5 has the first iPhone with a front-facing camera. That's also the year Instagram comes out, but it's a photography site. Teens aren't on it. By 2012, now lots of teens are getting an iPhone, whatever, 6, whatever it was by then, an iPhone with a front-facing camera and an Instagram account because Facebook buys Instagram in 2012 and that's when all the girls rush onto Instagram. And so 2012 is the pivotal year for girls especially. For boys, the curve is a little more linear. There's not such a sharp elbow for boys at 2012. For girls, it's very sharp 2012. So imagine being a 12 or 13-year-old girl in 2010 versus 2015. You're always concerned about your status, your reputation, your looks with the small group that you're talking to. And now suddenly by 2015, everyone is talking about your looks. Everyone is commenting on the dress you wore. Everyone's commenting on your skin, your breasts, your hair, everything. This is horrible for girls. This is a horrible way to put girls through puberty. So that's why we see girls suffering immediately.

And that was what my early research was on. It was really clear. Social media, especially Instagram, is harmful for girls, especially anxiety, depression. And for older Gen Z, which is those born 1996, 7, 8, 9, I think that's the main story. And it looks like the boys aren't doing so bad. Okay. But now, let's trace it forward a bit more because everything changes. By 2015, now the video games are moving onto the phone. And now boys get their quick dopamine hits. They begin to get addicted to their phones for video games. Now that everyone has high-speed internet, now porn, boys can watch porn anywhere, anytime. And so a lot more boys are getting addicted to porn, which makes it much harder for them to ever talk to a girl or flirt with a girl or seduce a girl or get a girlfriend. For boys, the thing to keep your eye on isn't necessarily social media. It's quick dopamine. Boys now have a slot machine, a porn theater, a video game parlor. They have all of this stuff in their pocket with them all the time. And if you're a boy, it's going to be just lots and lots of stimulation, which is going to make it very hard for you to ever pay attention. Boys especially lose executive function, the ability to make a plan and follow it. For girls, it's constant social comparison. It's constant stuff about clothing, looks, makeup, you know, is it get ready with me videos that the girls watch.

Exactly.

That's right. So the original internet was wide open. It was very difficult to make money on it. People put things up. But once you get push notifications, the app store, all that stuff, a lot of companies develop what's called an advertising-based business model. They make their money from showing you ads. And a company like Facebook was the first to really pioneer this. If they make money from showing you ads, then they'll make more money if they show you more ads to keep you on longer and keep you more intense. And so the business incentive for them was to figure out how to keep everyone on longer. And they told their engineers that, they said, you know, your bonus will depend in part on you increasing the engagement numbers, which means time spent on the device.

That's right.

That's right. So first, so I know people who worked at Facebook and they told me about the bonus structure. But because so many parents are suing Meta, in the course of the lawsuits we have a process of discovery. The attorneys can request documents. Also, there are whistleblowers like Frances Haugen who brought out thousands of screenshots of internal documents. And so, here I'll just read a couple. So, here's a discussion among two researchers at Instagram. One of them has a PhD in neuroscience. And he says, it seems clear from what's presented here in this internal report that some of our users are addicted to our products. And I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our product more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day? Intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines.

Next thing you know, you're scrolling.

Exactly.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right. That's exactly right.

That's right. It's the software that's on the device and the apps in particular and the social media platforms and the shoppingification of social media that has led to all of this addictive behavior.

Boys are developing friendships as my friend Richard Reeves says. He runs the American Institute for Boys and Men. He says, 'Girls like to connect face to face. Boys like to connect shoulder-to-shoulder, like we're doing something together, we're hiking, we're building something, we're whatever.' There's also an enormous difference between connecting and performing. And there are times when kids need to learn how to boast, how to impress others. But it shouldn't be most of the time. And it shouldn't be when they're with their friends. And as soon as girls get social media and now everything's about their profile and who liked them and why did he like her post but he didn't like my post and all the stuff that girls do a lot more than boys about like the going further on why they thought that or did that. It drives them into just an endless loop of that kind of thinking, as opposed to just connecting and having fun and sharing secrets with a friend.

Then there's the sexualization. If you just think about what healthy development is for a girl, the British have a phrase, 'Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mr. Worthington.' It's from like an old play or something, but you know, you don't want to raise a girl on a stage. That would be devastating to her because what matters is her looks. The world judges her for her looks and that's what she cares about. Social media is just devastating for all the things girls need to do to turn into competent, happy women. So that's why my group says, we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16.

So, it's kind of insane to put children in with anonymous adults. I mean, imagine if there was some place where you could just drop your kids off and they're going to interact with all kinds of men who are wearing masks and we never know who they are. That's completely insane. But that's what happens on a lot of platforms, even Roblox. You know, Roblox is a virtual space where people wander around, they interact with other people. Some of them are men who want sex. So once you get into any of these platforms that allow communication among strangers, this is a sick thing to do to children, but it's common. We just accept it. It's just common. And where did all the sexual predators go? If you hang out at a park, the police, you know, people report you, you'll get arrested. So they all moved to Instagram and a few other platforms. So research done by Arturo Bejar, who was a Facebook employee, he was working on Instagram, and his daughter, his 15-year-old daughter, created an Instagram page because the two of them enjoyed restoring classic cars and she kept getting hit on by men showing creepy things. 15-year-old girl, photographs of her fixing cars, like she has to go through this. And so Arturo says, 'I wonder how common this is.' And he's able to do research and he finds that 15% of, I think it was 14 to 16-year-old teens, and here boys and girls were getting it equally, he said 15% of them get an inappropriate approach from a stranger every week.

Every week. If you just look in the past week, the question he asked was in the past week.

So this was 8 years ago it was 15%.

And so it is just ubiquitous. So, of course, look, most men are very decent and would not harm a child, but if it's 5% or two, whatever it is, some percent, these platforms give them free reign. And I should clarify, you know, once your daughter gets on Instagram or TikTok, it's not just strange men who are going to be doing stuff. It's the boys in her class. Also, there's a book called American Girls. It's horrifying. I forget the author, but she goes through how boys use nude pics of their female classmates as currency. And the eighth grade boys, if they can get a pic of an eighth grade girl's breasts, you know, they can then trade that to a high school boy who will get them beer. I mean, things like that. Just that girls' bodies become currency and the degradation and the humiliation. So it's just there's a degree of sex and degradation to life online where children are interacting with strangers and there's no rules and no one's accountable. So that's why my group says, we say very clearly in the book, no social media till 16.

Exactly.

That's right. I can summarize the whole book by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world where they need a huge amount of experience unsupervised and we have underprotected them online where there's a huge amount of threats and not a lot of benefit. We've denied kids the freedom to become tougher, stronger, more independent. We put them on computers instead because we, well, that's safe. They're on computers. Maybe they'll be like Steve Jobs. Maybe they'll, you know, start a company. Good, he's on a computer. And we didn't understand as the internet changed, we didn't understand that putting our kids on the internet exposes them to all kinds of terrible people and companies that want to addict them.

While most people are focusing on the phones, the larger message that I want to bring to everyone is keep your eye on childhood. Don't focus on the phones. Keep your eye on childhood. What kind of childhood do you want for your child? Do you want a childhood that's going to prepare them for adulthood? It's going to give you a confident young person able to go off and travel, go get a job, go to college. Or do you want someone who's going to just spend their life keeping up with the memes on five different platforms?

Right. So for boys, don't keep your eye on social media. For boys, keep your eye on anything that's like a stimulus-response-reward thing. So it starts with video games. And I remember my son, you know, we had simple games on the iPhone and I remember seeing addictions form where he would get very irritable, you know, if you took it away he'd scream, he had to have it. If when you take something away the kid is very upset, that's a definite sign of dopamine adaptation. That is their brain has gotten accustomed to a lot of quick dopamine that when you take it away now their brain is in a deficit state. It takes a couple of weeks, you know, a couple of weeks to sort of get over that for the brain to restore itself.

That's right. Maybe a metaphor that would be helpful here is imagine, you know, imagine a thousand, it's kind of a weird metaphor. Let's try it. Imagine a thousand fishermen with big hooks dropping their hooks down and your boy is sitting there on the ocean floor and all of these hooks are baited with the most amazing possible things and they're all trying to get your boy to bite and this is his entire childhood. It starts with the video games and those are amazing and there's so many coming at him on every possible surface. And it's the short videos and the memes and then when it gets a little older it's the porn and then it's the sports betting. My god, you know, states have legalized sports betting and kids are able to get around the age limits, but there's gambling in almost everything now. So for boys, it's open season on their dopamine system. Open season. Companies are sending out fishing fleets to try to suck out all the dopamine. That's what you need to keep your eye on for boys.

Dopamine is the hormone of motivation. And what you want is slow dopamine. What you want, especially for boys, boys' outcomes are more variable than girls'. Boys can be incredibly successful and they're overrepresented at that. And also among society's losers, they're way overrepresented in that. So boys, the outcome of their life is much less certain than it is for girls. If boys are able to apply themselves and work towards a long-term goal, they can be incredibly effective and successful in the world and they often end up with a certain kind of ambition that you find more in boys than girls. But boys are also so easily lured into becoming lazy bums that never move out of the house.