May 4, 2026 • 45 mins
We hear a lot about how screens affect our mental health, but time spent on computers and smartphones is having just as much of an impact on our physical health — from brain fog and weakened core muscles to changes in our posture, our sleep, and even the shape of our eyes.
As part of our series on spring cleaning your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie sits down with journalist and podcast host Manoush Zomorodi, author of Body Electric, to explore how modern tech habits are affecting us physically, and what steps we can take to protect our health in a world where screens aren’t going away anytime soon.
Experts Mentioned:
- Manoush Zomorodi, journalist, author, and host of NPR's TED Radio Hour
- Dr. Keith Diaz, exercise physiologist and Florence Irving Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center
- Dr. Maria Liu, Professor of Clinical Optometry at UC Berkeley and founder of the Myopia Control Clinic
- Dr. Rick Neitzel, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan
- Dr. Peter Strick, Thomas Detre Professor and Chair of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh
- Dr. Sahib Khalsa, psychiatrist and neuroscientist at UCLA
Resources Mentioned:
- Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being, by Manoush Zomorodi (2026)
- Body Electric, a six-part podcast series by Manoush Zomorodi (National Public Radio, 2023)
- "Breaking Up Prolonged Sitting to Improve Cardiometabolic Risk: Dose-Response Analysis of a Randomized Crossover Trial," by Keith M. Diaz et al. (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2023)
- "The Mind-Body Problem: Circuits That Link the Cerebral Cortex to the Adrenal Medulla," by Richard P. Dum, David J. Levinthal, and Peter L. Strick (PNAS, 2019)
- Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, by Manoush Zomorodi (2017)
Related Episodes:
- "How I Stopped Fearing Boredom"
- "How Our Screen Habits Impact Our Stress Levels"
- "Smell, Taste and Touch: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses"
- “Sight and Sound: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
If you follow the research on the science of happiness,
you've probably heard a lot about the connection between screen
time and well being. It's a problem that I think
about a lot, and a topic that we talk about
on the show a lot. But lately I found myself wondering,
what if we're missing the bigger picture.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
We hear the mental health epidemic, growing rates of depression
and anxiety, has to do with the content that we
get right.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This is journalist Manush Zamarodi. Some of you may also
know Manush as the host of NPR's Ted Radio Hour.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
This idea that we are taking in outrage, headlines, violence,
also comparing ourselves to other people, that it is purely
sort of a psychological thing, that it's something going on
in our heads.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Manush says that give and all the focus on how
technology affects our minds, it's easy to overlook another important
part of the story.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
What we're not taking into account is what we actually
do with our bodies when we are spending all that
time taking in that content. We are sitting and looking
at a screen for long stretches of time, and we
now know that the average American adult spends twelve and
(01:36):
a half hours consuming media a day, and I mean
that's a lot of hours, Like it's a lot of ours.
That's incredible hours. Yeah, right, And I feel like for me,
like there was one day where I got into a
cab and there was a screen in front of me
on the back of the seat. I got out and
I went into an elevator and there was a screen
in the elevator. I got out of the elevator and
(01:58):
checked my phone and then check into the building on
another screen. And it just made me think, like my
entire life is now mediated by screens. I don't feel well, hurt,
I have a headache, I'm on my butt a lot
of the day. I do have a back ache. Is
that coincidence. I'm not really sure if that's coincidence. And
(02:18):
then after sitting all day, I go home and all
I really want to do is go lie on the
couch and look at my screen again, maybe two screens actually,
because maybe I'll watch a show while I'm looking at
my screen. And we've all heard like sitting is the
new smoking and all of those things, But this sort
of deep exhaustion that I think many of us are
(02:40):
feeling felt very like in my bones. You know, yes
I get exercise, but that didn't seem to be making
that much of a difference, And so that made me
want to understand how are my tech habits affecting my
physical health? And of course that has a lot to
(03:00):
do with your brain health as well, But I don't
think we think about it as a full system often enough.
These tools are very powerful and they really are having
a huge effect.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So in today's episode another in our series on spring
Cleaning your well Being, Minush will share some of my
favorite takeaways from her new book, Body Electric, The hidden
health costs of the Digital Age, and new science to
Reclaim your well Being.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I am not anti tech, by the way. I don't
know if that's come across. I love this stuff, but
too much of a good thing, right like that is
the problem. My biology was not built to be doing
this NonStop, as much as the tech is happy to comply.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Get ready to hear more about how you can enjoy
your tech without all the crappy side effects. Right after
these messages from the Happiness Lab sponsors. These days, I
(04:09):
think a lot about how screens affect mental health. But
podcaster and tech journalists Manuche Sammarodi argues that we may
be missing an even bigger piece of the puzzle, how
screens affect our physical health.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
It's estimated five hundred million people around the globe are
going to have chronic illness by the end of this decade.
It's going to cost governments twenty seven billion dollars a year.
We know we have higher rates of obesity, the rates
of diabetes and young people have doubled over the past
twenty years. We hear about colon cancer on the rise
and young people under fifty as well. We also hear
(04:43):
about people just feeling like they can't concentrate anymore, that
they are so tired and in this weird sort of
like sure, we can call it burnout, but I think
it's just a sense of all we want to do
is crawl under our desks and go to sleep a
lot of the time. And so I wanted, I want
to be like, why don't we feel so crappy, like
what is going on? And honestly, you know, for many
(05:06):
of us, like the pandemic, that was the moment for me,
and I think it was because everything went to a screen.
It wasn't just work on the screen, it wasn't just
our social lives. It was just everything, And all I
knew was that I was very lucky. I was in
a safe place, I had plenty of food, I was
with my family, and yet I felt like total crap
(05:29):
at the end of the day, and I just could
not understand what was going on in my body. And
then we saw it too, rising rates of anxiety, sleeplessness.
You know. Sure a lot of that had to do
with the headlines, but a lot of it was people
who felt like, how is this possible that I feel
so bad when all I'm doing is sitting in front
of a screen.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And so talk a little bit about why our bodies
are such a bad fit with this environment you've talked
about where we're sitting all day watching screens, like in
our office, we come home, we PLoP on the couch.
What's so different about what we were built for? Well,
it was interesting to go back into, like the literature.
So the book is named after the Walt Whitman poem
Body Electric, where he speaks of the body electric and
(06:08):
this idea that there's this vivaciousness and pleasure in the
human body when it is functioning.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
As it should. And then he and lots of other
writers at the time start to observe the clerk, you know,
the guy the scribe sitting at the desk, and this
idea that he walks home and he is of chalky
face and slight stature. And so we saw very early
on as labor went from being a very physical thing
(06:37):
to be more of a mental thing, that it started
to affect people's vitality, that it started to affect their
basic physical health. That's what I wanted to understand. I
was like, first of all, why is sitting so bad?
Because I figured like, oh, well, maybe it's because you're
not burning calories, you know, I wasn't really sure. And
what I ended up learning from a physiologist that I
(06:58):
reached out to, Keith Diaz, was that when we sit,
we actually this is an image that's going to stay
with you. LORI starry in advance when we basically kink
our bodies at our knees and at our waists like
a garden hose. Right, So imagine a garden hose, you
know that kink that there is, and then things get
backed up there. So that's what's happening in our bodies.
(07:19):
Blood and fluid are getting backed up, and we need
that constant stimulation of our leg muscles for numerous reasons.
One is that without that, we don't flush out the
fats and sugars that can build up in those leg muscles.
And so that's where you start to see rising rates
of diabetes, you start to see higher blood pressure. And
(07:42):
then I started to find out about another relatively new topic,
which is something called interroception. This is what one of
the neuroscientists I spoke to, he's also a psychiatrist, He'd Calso,
who's now at UCLA. He described it to me as
like your inner selfie essentially, like your body is sending
(08:02):
you signals all day long. Some of them you don't
even recognize, right, Like it might tell you to take
off your ja because you're sweating, or you're hungry, go
get a snack. And what happens when we don't listen
to those signals, right You get cranky because you forgot
to eat or all of these things. And so my
theory was being on screens all day. I would get
(08:25):
up and I'd be like, oh my god, I haven't
gone to the bathroom in five hours? What is wrong
with me? Why is my foot asleep? And I didn't
even notice the sense of being almost disconnected from our
physical selves because there's so much going on in our screens,
Like my senses are completely overwhelmed and taken by everything
that's coming in off the screen, no wonder, I can't
(08:47):
pay attention to the fact that, like, oh my god,
my back is killing me, or my arm should not
be in that position for that long. So this sort
of disconnect between what our bodies need in order to
function is completely mismatched with technology, which it can go
all day long, plug it back in, upgrade the operating system.
(09:08):
It's ready to go. Oh And as much as I
wish sometimes that I was as efficient as my technology,
I'm not. I'm just a human and I need breaks,
and breaks need to be part of the strategy, not
a reward.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And so this problem that you've talked about with interception
makes it hard for us to realize what we need
to do when we need this moment of rest, what's
the kind of fatigue we're experiencing now, And how do
we get it wrong when we try to solve for it.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
So I don't know about you, but for a long
time I just thought, well, I just got to get
it done, Like I just I mean, I'll just keep
working and you know, I'll put in four hours and
get that report finished. And that, I think leads us
to that sense of like I'm working really hard, but
(09:56):
why do I feel like I'm actually not getting anything done,
or that sense like I nailed it yesterday and then
you come back and you read something that you did
and you're like, this is a piece of crap. Actually
this is really bad. So this idea that productivity comes
with grinding through and just keeping at it and working
hard really speaks to me personally as a type a
(10:16):
good girl who wants to get the job done so
she can move on to the next thing on the list.
It was a really hard personal I'm still learning this
lesson Laurie that actually my best work and my happiness
to be honest and my sense of enjoying life on
a daily basis means that I need to build in
(10:39):
breaks and this idea of really sensory resets, and I've
just had to learn the hard way that often what
I need is a boring walk. It's just that simple,
and I always feel better and I always come up
with my best ideas and my back stops hurting and
I do my best work until the next time that
(10:59):
it's time to take a break. And that is painful
for me, and it's a lesson I teach myself every
single day. I just have to trust the process. I
know this works. I know from a scientific perspective it works.
I know from a personal perspective it works. It seems
silly when you say it out loud, you know, oh,
you gotta think breaks like, well, yeah, duh. But that's
(11:21):
not the world we've built around us, And so I
think of it as almost having to make sure we
get into that negative space that we have crowded out.
The screens around us are obviously not going anywhere anytime soon,
which is why Manush wants to understand how we can
live with them in a way that.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Doesn't make us feel absolutely terrible. Of course, sensory resets
can help, but in a culture that rewards constant productivity,
taking breaks can seem counterintuitive.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
So how do we actually build.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
In movement when we're expected to sit in front of
a laptop all day? This was the question Manush was
wrestling with when she came across the research of doctor
Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Medical Center.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Keith is obsessed with trying to understand what is the
least amount of movement that the body needs in order
to function well, in order to clear out the glucose
and the fats and keep your body and your mind
sort of functioning properly. But he's also like a realist.
He knows that a lot of us, for our jobs,
we have to spend a lot of time seated and
(12:26):
looking at a screen. So he made it his mission
to try and figure out what was the minimum amount
of movement we could do that our lives wouldn't kill
us at the end of the day, wouldn't lead to
diabetes and blood pressure and cardiovascular issues all those things.
And what he found in his lab was really interesting.
It was five minutes of very gentle movement every half
(12:47):
hour of sitting, largely offset the harms of those long
stretches of sedentary time.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
That's kind of a surprising result because it's actually not
that much time. But it's also surprising in a different way,
which is probably more frequent than I think a lot
of us think. I always had the sense of like, oh,
I need to take this super long walk one time
in the day, and then I'll spend ten hours doing
podcasting on my chair. That will be okay, Well, let's
talk about that.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So essentially what he said is if you work out
or you take that one long walk, that's basically like
four percent of your day, and that means that there
are still very long periods where you are not moving,
you are sedentary, you are looking at a screen. If
you then go on to sit for the rest of
the day, it doesn't matter. They have found in study
(13:33):
after study after study that even if you work out
in the morning or you do a workout late at night,
if you don't break up those long periods of sedentary
screen time, then you are putting yourself at risk for
serious health harms. And then I was like, oh, but
what about standing desks? Keith, He's like, yeah, sorry, Actually,
(13:55):
studies are now showing that, like, if you stand for
two hours a day, if that's a way to get
yourself moving, great, but standing alone can actually be shown
to have problems in terms of cardiovascular health and ferroicos veins,
so it's actually might be worse. I was like, oh, great,
I know it's so annoying, Okay, but here's the good news.
(14:16):
When he was talking about gentle movement. I'm talking gentle movement.
So I went to his lab and joined the study
just to see what it was like. So I had
one day where it was like kind of a typical
day where I sat at my laptop and I worked
for eight hours straight and I had a lunch break
at my desk. Sadly it used to be true. And
I had some bathroom breaks and that was pretty much
(14:38):
the end of it. And I literally fell asleep twice
during the day and crawled onto the subway and went
home and went to bedterly, and I was hooked up
to like glucose monitors and oxygenation monitors and all of
these things. And then another day someone would tap me
on the shoulder every half hour and I would go
and walk on the treadmill two miles per hour, Laurie,
(15:01):
so like a stroll. Like not I'm not talking about
breathless here, I'm talking about like walking walking. Yes, yeah,
I could have just marched in place. And at first
I was annoyed. I was like, well, this is very disruptive,
but I did feel better, stayed awake all day. I
didn't need the sweater that I had packed to deal
with the AC that was blasting, And actually I didn't
(15:23):
get as much work done, but the work I did,
the quality was so much better. I didn't need to
go back the next day and revise it. I didn't
need to remind myself what I had achieved. It was
just like on point, you know what I'm saying. Oh,
and I should mention my blood sugar dropped by forty
percent compared to the other day. Wow, my blood pressure
(15:45):
was down five percent. My fatigue levels and my moon
levels and concentration levels they fell off the charts on
the day I sat all day. They stayed incredibly level
throughout the day on the day that I took the breaks.
So I had the data, I saw it, and I
felt it. So when that happened, I was like, dude,
I am bought in. This clearly works, but are people
(16:07):
actually going to do it? And Keith was like, yeah,
I know. That's the problem with these lab studies is
like we can figure out the best, but if no
one can do it, then like what does it even matter? Right?
So I was like, well, let's find out maybe.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
People can do this, But what happens when you try
to take a break every thirty minutes in the real world,
filled with real bosses and offices and deadlines, is the
kind of routine Manush is describing actually sustainable in real life.
We'll tackle that question when the Happiness Lab returns. From
this quick break, podcaster and journalist Manuch Sammaroni argues that
(17:02):
we need to spring clean our body's relationship with technology.
Before the break, we were talking about Minusha's lab, based
with physiologists Keith Diaz, which found that we can counteract
the physical effects of sitting in front of screens by
taking a five minute movement break every half hour. But
does that intervention work for real people working real jobs
(17:22):
in the real world. Fortunately, Minusha's role as a radio
host gave her access to a huge group of willing participants.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So we put out the call to public radio listeners
and he did it properly, this time, a proper clinical
trial with twenty three thousand people enrolled. They had to
shut it off after that it was too many people
be We're like, please help me, I need to feel better.
We had three cohorts, so you could try to go
for the gold standard, which was five minutes every half hour.
(17:52):
You could go for five minutes every hour or you
could even do five minutes every two hours. And we
weren't able to obviously monitor everybody's glucose levels or their
blood pressure, et cetera. And although we couldn't mimic the
exact conditions as in the lab, we had surveys that
went out constantly all through the day. But it was amazing.
(18:15):
We had uber drivers, sign up teachers, we had nurses, lawyers,
you name it across the board, you know, because screens
don't discriminate. So physically moving throughout the day made people
on average between twenty one to twenty eight percent less tired,
fatigue levels dropped in terms of mood and happiness. Again
(18:38):
that stability. In terms of productivity, it actually didn't get worse.
It even went up a little bit. Four percent on
average went up, so, you know, maybe not huge, but
this sense of all those interruptions it didn't take.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I think that's what we're all worried about. We think, like,
oh my gosh, I'm gonna have like a whole less
episode done at the end of the week because I'm
taking these breaks.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
But that's not what you were seeing.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, exactly, the fear of you're like, well, if I'm
interrupted all the time, How am I going to get
any work done? And actually that wasn't the case. People
would say they'd come back from one of the these
breaks and they knew exactly what they needed to get done.
They were focused, they were more efficient, and I think
that's really interesting to me that you can spend less
time on your screen and simply be more efficient. And
(19:21):
they said things like just lifting my legs, I would
start to feel my mood improve. They would say things like,
you know, how did they get people to do it?
In their office? They'd be like, I'm in this weird
clinical trial. You want to try it with me? And
that sort of gave people permission to have a walking
meeting or be standing on a zoom call and shuffling
(19:42):
side to side while they talk to each other. You know,
it's for science, LORI right, or like one woman was like,
it was our busiest time of the year and I
was pulling like fifteen hour days. Was like the final
sales push. She had her best sales quarter ever, like
a proof was in the pudding. And then of course
a lot of young people who said I don't have
(20:03):
a choice, like there are some professors at college who
make sure we get breaks during our three hour electu
but there are others who don't. And they said, I
see the difference in how I learn during the ones
where I get to take breaks codify the knowledge that
I have taken in. And actually, you know, we stuff
(20:23):
our brains full of information. But these breaks also help
people think, like what did we talk about in that meeting?
What are the next steps I want to take? How
do I make the most of the information that I
took in? And that is is a full body experience, right.
I think this is so critical because I think this
is just another domain where our minds lie to us.
(20:44):
I'm picturing myself trying to do the experiment that you
were talking about and having a person come tap you
on your shoulder and be like, all right, it's time
to go now.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Or if I sit a little alarm on my phone of.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Like five minutes take a break, my sense is like
I'll be in flow doing some work for something, and
I'll be annoyed. I'll be like no, I want to
keep working and my brain just cannot compute. They're like, no, no,
take a break, walk around. You'll get back to it
faster and do it better than if you didn't take
the break, And so how do we convince to ourselves, like.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Our slave driving minds, that we need these little breaks.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Yeah, so that was really interesting. What people found was
they started. The number one way they started was using
a timer right to remind themselves because they wouldn't remember
to take the break. You'd forget, you'd just forget exactly.
But what ended up happening is their bodies started reminding them.
After a certain amount of time, they started to build
(21:35):
that sense of interception. I just was talking to some
researchers who are studying how circadian rhythms can affect motivation.
So your body literally will create a clock in you
to be like you who time to get up and move.
You can't concentrate anymore. I love that that, Like, even
if our monkey brain is like I don't want to
(21:56):
get up and move, your body will be like I'm
compelling you right now because I need this and we
can start to hear it. But also I think there's
something to be said, like, if you're in flow, fine,
so skip a break. This is like it's going me.
One break's not gonna make that big a difference. And
the people who actually succeeded and saw benefits. Did four
(22:16):
breaks a day, five breaks a day. It wasn't like
sixteen breaks a day. And I think to me, like,
we can look at clinical data, we can talk about
gold standards and science, but honestly, the best movement is
the one you take right. So, like, if you take
one break in the middle of the day, amazing. Start there.
If you take eight and that works for you, awesome.
(22:39):
We are setting the bar pretty low here, and it
has outsize effects. That's what for. Once something that is free,
that's easy to do, that doesn't take that long, actually
has a huge impact and is good for you and
makes you feel good. That seems unbelievably surprising to me
(22:59):
and exciting.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And so as we take this exciting news and engineer
more movement back into our days, we also have to
address the specific sensory organs and the parts of our
bodies that are under digital assault. Were you kind of
surprised when you started to learn the work about how
much digital life is reshaping all our sensory organs?
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yes, I think I subconsciously and many of us subconsciously
knew that something was happening, but we always think like, oh, well,
it's just me. I'm the weirdo, and it's not. I mean,
we now know that, for example, one out of three
children are nearsighted, meaning they can see close but can't
(23:39):
see far. And you think like, huh, we must be
genetically passing that on to our kids. No, that's not why.
It's because of our technological habits. So I reached out
to people who are studying things like this, like doctor
Maria lu at Berkeley, who literally has been studying what
happens to the shape of our eyeball when we spend
(24:01):
lots of time looking at a screen doing near work,
and the eyeball your body wants to help you. That's
what I've learned. We go along. If you're like I
need to look at things that are really close to
me all day, your eyeballs will be like I got you,
and they'll form a shape that helps you do that
all day long. Trouble is, when you're back in class,
(24:24):
or you go to drive a car, or you go
to the movie theater, you will not be able to
see very far because your eyes are like, well, we
don't do that anymore. So that is fascinating to me,
and you hear like the twenty twenty twenty rule like
for every twenty minutes of sitting twenty feet into the
distance for twenty seconds. She's like, I'm so sorry to
(24:45):
tell you this, but that is simply not enough. So
she says, what you really need to do is get
if you can. All comes back to every half hour, Laurie. Honestly,
every single person I talk to about every part of
the body, it's every half hour. She ideally would like
you to go outside every half hour and look in
the distance at a horizon. I was like, can I
(25:07):
look out the window? She said no, because your peripheral
vision will know that there are walls. Like you need
to get the full Uh, yes, you need the full distance. Also,
when you go outside, even on a cloudy day, you
get sunlight. Right. They don't quite know exactly what it
is about sunlight, whether it's the vitamin D, whether it
activates serotonin, the happiness hormone in animals. They have seen
(25:29):
different kinds of retinal cells that actually produce serotonin when
they're exposed to sunlight. So the bad news is, if
you're an adult and you're already in your sided, hello,
that's me. Sorry, too bad. But the good news is
your eyeballs are still growing and forming even into your thirties,
(25:50):
So if you are a young person, you can still
take breaks, you can still stop the myopia from happening
to you. They did a study in China where they
made kids go outside for two hours a day instead
of the usual half hour for their recess, and they
saw a drop in your sidedness in kids. So going
outside and playing isn't just to get your yayas out.
(26:12):
This is so you can see. Because higher rates of
near sidedness or myopia has been linked to blindness, It's
been linked to glaucoma later in life. These are serious
issues that we don't like to think about what happens
decades down, But we're living longer and we want to
live well, right, so we need to protect basic sensory organs.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I love this recommendation to get sunlight, but I'm sure
there are people listening right now who work in some
huge office and are thinking like, Okay, yeah, I would
love to get sunlight, but like, I'm not gonna head
down in my big elevator and my huge SIAS scraper
every thirty minutes. I think there's also this worry that
if you're getting up to leave all the time, either
to go outside or just to get your legs moving
that your boss or your coworkers are going to be
(26:54):
looking at you like what is wrong with this person?
So any advice for wanting to take these breaks?
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we
used to say like, oh, I'm just going to pop
outside for a smoke. That used to be completely normal
and no one would bat an eye if you were
like I'm just gonna go out and grab a cigarette.
I know that might be shocking to some people now,
but that really was normal. So what if you instead
of going to get a smoke break, you were going
to get a move break. I'm just gonna go take
(27:19):
a quick move break. Cool, Okay, see you in five minutes.
That would be great. But also we need to start
at the top, right Like bosses, you need to know
that the research is there that when it comes to productivity,
quality of work, worker engagement, and satisfaction, people are not
happy right now. There's so much talk of burnout. This
is something simple you can do that is not a
(27:41):
gift to your workers. It is actually a gift to
your bottom line because what you will see is higher
employee retention, better work, and just a happier office from
what we understand, Like, maybe there's a meeting and you
kick off the meeting with walking around the conference table
and sort of giving an update, or maybe sixty minute
meetings are now fifty five minute meetings. You can have
(28:02):
that setting in Google calendar where you build in a
buffer of five extra minutes. Or maybe it's okay and
you're on a zoom to turn off your screens and
shuffle side to side if you are not expected to
present something on camera. It's these really small changes to
cultural norms that we're going to need to have in
(28:22):
order to make sure that we bring a little more movement,
some more breaks, and optimize the way that we work.
Because it's not working now that is very clear. It's
time for a quick break.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
But when we return, Minusia and I will explore what
screen time is doing to the rest of our bodies,
from our ears, to our spines to even our lungs,
and she'll share some simple practical ways to counteract those
effects so that we can feel both physically and mentally
a little healthier.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
As I was the most horrified by the session in
your book on our Ears, how is our technology negatively
affecting our ears?
Speaker 3 (29:17):
While it is really interesting? So Rick knightsl at the
University of Michigan has been partnering with Apple to do
the largest study of how people are listening these days essentially,
so you can actually join the study on your phone
if you want to, and it's not going to come
as any surprise to you that we are listening longer
(29:37):
and more loudly, essentially.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And it seems like in a different way where we
have this thing in our ear in a way that
we might not have before. Interestingly, they didn't find any
difference between air pods or earbuds and headphones. There hasn't
been any of that. But I know people who wear
them all day long. So there are some people who
are wearing them because they're blocking out the world, because
they need to concentrate, or you know how many people
(30:02):
do I see walking the dog and we're all listening
to something or going to the grocery store. It's this
sort of ambient music podcast, news, phone calls, zooms, all
the rest of it. We take sound with us wherever
we go, which is cool.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
A lot of the time. However, a couple problems here.
One is that when we're outside we raise the volume
because there's construction or a loud car or whatever else,
and we're listening at volumes that are much too loud
for us. Whereas when I was in my twenties, you know,
you'd leave a club and you couldn't hear for a
couple hours. People are having more of that like all
(30:37):
the time, and they're not even noticing. And if there's
good news and there's bad news when it comes to
your ears, the good news is if you take a
break and give yourself breaks from sound, your ears will recover.
You have a little sillia, those little hairs in your ears,
they get flattened, essentially, if you have some quiet time,
they will come back to life. However, if they're constantly assaulted,
(31:03):
they will die and they will never grow back. Ever,
you don't get more sillia. So there is a concern,
you know, will there be rising rates of hearing disorders essentially,
And what we know is that when you have trouble hearing,
that makes you more susceptible to dementia, to falling. You're
also just missing out on conversation in life, on hearing
(31:26):
the birds, all those other things. So once again it
comes back to giving your body breaks.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And so those are our sensory systems. But beyond our
sensory systems, we also need to address what technology is
doing to our posture, which you've argued has two big
physiological effects. One is on our spine and the other
is on our lungs. So let's start with our spine.
How is our technology hurting what our spine needs to
feel healthy.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
There's some really interesting new work being done to understand
the connection between how we hold ourselves and various organs.
So this is Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh
who has found that actually are a drenal glide. Those
are sitting right on our sides of our stomach, right,
and these are the glands that squeeze out cortisole like
(32:14):
when we're nervous, when we're excited, we're like that anxiety right, squitch,
squis squish. It turns out that there is a system
that is linked between your abdominal muscles, the adrenal glands,
and a section in your brain. So essentially we're talking about,
you know, why do people feel more relaxed after they
(32:34):
do pilates or yoga. This is the science as to
why there is this connection between our organs, our muscles,
and our brain. They are all hardwired and talking to
each other in ways that we are just starting to learn,
which is fascinating to me. So his whole thing is
if you don't use your core, and what do you
(32:54):
do when you're slumped in front of a screen.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
You're not using your core. Your spine is you're almost
in this cashew shape, kind of slumped over. Yeah, exactly,
you're compressed in some way. Then there's also the fact
that when you're seated like this, you compress your diaphragm.
That's where you want to fill it up with lots
of air so you can oxygenate your brain.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
When you don't take in enough oxygen, you don't feed
your brain, and there starts to actually be a build
up of CO two, which is when you start to
lose focus, You get tired, you get foggy, can't concentrate,
feel exhausted, anxious. Any of that sound familiar after a
couple hours on a screen.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
So familiar.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And one of the things I was so struck by
in your work is just this connection between like what
we're doing with our spines and our breath and our
mental health. You know, we talk so much on this podcast,
and I talk so much with my students about increasing
anxiety and young people, and we often think that, again,
that's because of the content of what we're seeing on
our screens. We're seeing all this anxiety provoking stuff, But
it might just be the way that we're sitting when
(33:53):
we are looking at our phones, where we're hunched over.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
That's kind of not allowing us to activate our core muscles.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
That's literally causing us to secrete stress hormones, literally causing
our brains to reinterpret how we're breathing as anxiety. It
almost made me think, like, I wonder how much of
the anxiety crisis we are seeing in young people we
could alleviate if we just got them to sit upright
and activate their core muscles one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
I mean, that to me is what is so frustrating
and exciting about what you're talking about. If that is
one simple thing that we can do at a time
when we feel so overloaded. You know, between the headlines
and the economics and AI, there's a lot to be
stressed out about. But if we can feel just the
(34:38):
tiniest bit better. And really all it is is getting
up for five minutes and moving around and giving your
ears a break from sound, and giving your eyes a
break from looking at a screen, and really taking some
full breaths and making sure we're moving our limbs a
little bit more. And if that can give us a
reset to get on with our day and maybe feel
(35:01):
a little more in ourselves, happier, joyful, like we can concentrate,
like we can make better decisions. To me, I like
to call that the mind body tech connection. And you know,
we hear mind body spirit and we accept that this
is a holistic thing. But technology is as much a
part of our lives as anything else. It is our lives, right,
(35:22):
So how do we manage that sort of cycle that
we put ourselves through. We have to be more intentional.
It's that simple and that hard.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
But it also means that we can also be agentive, right,
And I think this is the thing we forget. I
think sometimes when we think about our body's relationship with technology,
it's like, well, I got to get rid.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Of my phone.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
But this book is really suggesting there are forms of
stress management that just take five minutes every hour or so.
One of the things you talk about in your book
is this idea of we can think about posture as
stress management, that like, if you're feeling stressed out, just
have this moment of like, h let me get up
and walk around. When I sit back down, let me
make sure I'm not hunched over like a cashew the
whole time. This is powerful stuff because it's giving us
(36:01):
a way to fight back that we can actually control.
You know, I can't control what's happening in the international news.
I can't control the spread of AI. I can't control
the bad things happening in the world. But I can
definitely control whether I'm hunched over. I can definitely control
whether I hop up from the desk five minutes every
half hour to kind of get a little movement in.
These are things that are within our control to stop
(36:21):
the stress cycle.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
I am smiling right now because how nice is it
to think that there is something that you can do?
Because I think what you've just talked about is this
sort of prevailing sense right now, is that like what
am I supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
How am I.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Supposed to be a person in the world functioning? And
I want to be careful though that we don't say
you know, this is on you individual, because it feels
like much of the responsibility is we want our structural
changes act. But just knowing that I can do something
to make a difference in my own body, or just
knowing that I'm not making it worse inadvertently through my
(36:56):
choices that I'm not paying attention to, just remembering that
I can have interceptive awareness that feels really powerful to me. Yeah.
I found it so interesting. So that neuroscientist doctor SOYBCLSA
has been studying the effect of FLOWA. Those are those
like saline baths where you you know, pay forty five
bucks and then you lie there naked, and the idea
is like no sensory input whatsoever to sort of reset
(37:19):
your nervous system. And he's like, you can do this
at home, like go into your bedroom, put down the shades,
put your phone out of the room, don't listen to anything,
don't try to meditate, just try to literally take everything
away and just let your muscles relax and breathe and
(37:39):
let everything just sort of be. I was like what
for five minutes he was like, actually, no, try to
go for forty five minutes once a week. He said,
that's a nice goal for you. I was like, okay,
but he was like, we're going and taking in so
much all the time. What if you just don't do
anything like for forty five minutes a week. I was like,
(38:02):
that's what's really nice.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
So that's not doing anything for forty five minutes. But
of course we all have this time in the day
where we are giving our body the natural reset of
not doing anything, which is the domain of sleep. We've
all kind of heard that blue light is really bad,
but you've argued that the culprit might be something else.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
What do you mean? Yeah, so I sort of got
deep into the data to try to understand. I thought
that blue light was the problem too. I was like, okay,
so what is it about blue light that does this
to us? And actually, the thinking has changed a lot
in the sleep research world. So this idea of blue
light being like you know, espresso for your body before
(38:39):
you go to sleep came from one particular small Harvard
study where it was a group of undergrads who were
looking at iPads at the highest brightest setting for hours
before they went to sleep in the sleep lab, and
even they didn't actually miss out on that much sleep.
It disrupted some of their sleep. But also, like, I
don't know, if I was looking at an iPad for
(39:01):
three hours at the brightest setting, like that would definitely
be a problem. Generally, what they're starting to find is
it's not the blue light, it's the habits that these
screens put us into. So, oh my god, we were
watching mad Men again last night, and how much did
we want to like, just keep watching the next episode.
That's what Netflix wants us to do. And so what
(39:23):
do we do. Let's just watch half of the next episode.
Oh wait, and then we watch the whole episode, and
there we are going to bed forty five minutes later. Oh,
we shouldn't have looked at a screen before bed. No,
you shouldn't have stayed up and watched another episode. Like,
let's be real. So really, like what they're saying is
it's not really the blue light. And frankly, that light
is not that strong. This does not apply to kids. Kids, definitely,
(39:47):
their eyes are in a different way. They are changing,
they are forming. The light needs to be low at night.
There are some people who are very sensitive to light,
in which case, you know, dimming the lights following the
sun is really useful sort of bringing your body down.
But at the end of the day, we have to
take a hard look at ourselves in our own habits
and not blame the blue light as much as the
(40:10):
sirens call of what is going on on those screens.
And also a lot of us are using our technology
to self soothe before we go to bed, right it
is harder to maybe try and do a muscle relaxation
or read a really boring book with a cup of
camra meal tea that just doesn't sound as interesting as
scrolling on Instagram and you know, mindlessly sort of trying
(40:33):
to zone out.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
The problem is also that we use our phones to
self soothe when we wake up in the middle of
the night. I know I am guilty of this. I
wake up in the middle of the night and I'm
feeling anxious and I'm like, oh, let me look at
my phone.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
And now I'm looking at my phone and that's going
to keep me up.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
So for the chronic insomniac like me who feels like
when they wake up in the middle of the night,
they need their phone to self soothe.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Their phone is.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Their only friend at three in the morning, when no
one's talking to them. Yeah, what's the first step to
breaking that feedback loop?
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Well, you've heard it before, right, don't keep your phone
in your bedroom, blah blah blah. Okay, I don't ascribe
to that. I have elderly parents and I have a
kid away at college. I keep my phone next to
my bed for emergencies, but I do have it set
so that only their calls can come through, so I
will not be woken up by spam. Okay, So I'm
going to let you in on my secret technique. So
(41:19):
I also would say, like, pretend you're in a float
right while you're lying there and you're awake. I pretend
that I'm on a first class airline flight and there's
no Wi Fi on the flight, and all I can
hear is the rush of the engines and there's nothing
I can do. And isn't it great that I upgraded
to this bed that lies out flat? I am so lucky.
I'm just going to lie here and just like bask
(41:41):
in the luxuriousness and wait for my destination. That is
my own sort of personal hack.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Mine when I'm doing the right kind of thing, is
a hack where I imagine that I'm in this one
hotel room I stayed at where I could hear the
ocean outside. It was this gorgeous hotel room in Puerto
Rico where you could hear the waves outside, and I'm
just imagining what the waves sound like. That when I'm
doing it right and not waking up in the middle
of night to look at Reddit works pretty well for
me too.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Oh that's nice. That's really nice.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
So we definitely need more sensory resets to support our
physical and mental health. But Manush says it's not just
about five minute breaks or even a full night of sleep.
We also need longer stretches of downtime time to reconnect
with ourselves and make better decisions. In her book, she
calls this kind of time the neutral zone.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I will say that phrase is not for me. It
is from a consultant actually a couple decades ago he's
no longer with us, who studied how corporations how did
they make it through big transitions. And what he found
was that the companies that survived big upheaval actually didn't
rush from like Okay, there's layoffs, we're reorguing, this is
what we're doing next. They actually went through this space
(42:54):
of sort of absorbing the shock of change, sitting with
it before deciding what to do next, sort of taking
the time. And in my personal life, I try to
think of it that way too, Like there might be
times in your life when you feel like you are
spending your wheel a little bit, and actually this really
important time because we need to give ourselves space to
(43:14):
think through what just happened, process it, start to imagine
what could be next. Maybe it's something that doesn't occur
to us straight away. Maybe you need some long, boring walks,
Maybe you need a couple months of, you know, just
not trying to strategize your way out of a situation,
just sort of allowing your brain to make sense of
(43:37):
the world you're in, the place you're going. We think
we can process as quickly as our technology can, and
we cannot. And you know, cloud and chat, GPT. They
might try to talk you into doing something and they
might sound really convincing, but at the end of the day,
that gut feeling, there's a reason why it's called the
gut feeling. The gut and the brain are connected. There
is a wholeness, a whole body sense that we need
(44:01):
to tap into in order to make sense of our
lives and figure out how we go forward.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Technology is just affecting our minds, it's also shaping our bodies.
The way we sit, scroll, stare, and listen can significantly.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Impact how we feel.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
But as we learned from Manuche today, small changes like
a boring walk or a quick sensory break can make
a meaningful difference in our physical health.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
And our well being.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
If you'd like to learn more about how to improve
your body's relationship with technology, be sure to check out
Manush's new book Body Electric, The Hidden health Costs of
the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your well Being,
which is out on May fifth. If you have thoughts
about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can
email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or
(44:49):
leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You
can also sign up to learn more about the science
of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
Doctor Lai Santos dot com. That's d r l a
u ri E s a n t os dot com.
Next week, we'll continue our season on how to Spring
Clean your well Being with one of my favorite FIS
episodes from our Happiness Lab Archives. This time we'll look
(45:12):
at what happens when life gets too crowded. We'll share
some evidence based ideas for clearing out your busy schedule
and making room for what matters most. I just taught
two classes and had two hours of office hours.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
All I'm thinking about is when am I going to
drink water? When is my next nap? You're just literally
it feels like survival.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
That's all.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie
Santos
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
If you follow the research on the science of happiness,
you've probably heard a lot about the connection between screen
time and well being. It's a problem that I think
about a lot, and a topic that we talk about
on the show a lot. But lately I found myself wondering,
what if we're missing the bigger picture.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
We hear the mental health epidemic, growing rates of depression
and anxiety, has to do with the content that we
get right.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This is journalist Manush Zamarodi. Some of you may also
know Manush as the host of NPR's Ted Radio Hour.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
This idea that we are taking in outrage, headlines, violence,
also comparing ourselves to other people, that it is purely
sort of a psychological thing, that it's something going on
in our heads.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Manush says that give and all the focus on how
technology affects our minds, it's easy to overlook another important
part of the story.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
What we're not taking into account is what we actually
do with our bodies when we are spending all that
time taking in that content. We are sitting and looking
at a screen for long stretches of time, and we
now know that the average American adult spends twelve and
(01:36):
a half hours consuming media a day, and I mean
that's a lot of hours, Like it's a lot of ours.
That's incredible hours. Yeah, right, And I feel like for me,
like there was one day where I got into a
cab and there was a screen in front of me
on the back of the seat. I got out and
I went into an elevator and there was a screen
in the elevator. I got out of the elevator and
(01:58):
checked my phone and then check into the building on
another screen. And it just made me think, like my
entire life is now mediated by screens. I don't feel well, hurt,
I have a headache, I'm on my butt a lot
of the day. I do have a back ache. Is
that coincidence. I'm not really sure if that's coincidence. And
(02:18):
then after sitting all day, I go home and all
I really want to do is go lie on the
couch and look at my screen again, maybe two screens actually,
because maybe I'll watch a show while I'm looking at
my screen. And we've all heard like sitting is the
new smoking and all of those things, But this sort
of deep exhaustion that I think many of us are
(02:40):
feeling felt very like in my bones. You know, yes
I get exercise, but that didn't seem to be making
that much of a difference, And so that made me
want to understand how are my tech habits affecting my
physical health? And of course that has a lot to
(03:00):
do with your brain health as well, But I don't
think we think about it as a full system often enough.
These tools are very powerful and they really are having
a huge effect.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So in today's episode another in our series on spring
Cleaning your well Being, Minush will share some of my
favorite takeaways from her new book, Body Electric, The hidden
health costs of the Digital Age, and new science to
Reclaim your well Being.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I am not anti tech, by the way. I don't
know if that's come across. I love this stuff, but
too much of a good thing, right like that is
the problem. My biology was not built to be doing
this NonStop, as much as the tech is happy to comply.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Get ready to hear more about how you can enjoy
your tech without all the crappy side effects. Right after
these messages from the Happiness Lab sponsors. These days, I
(04:09):
think a lot about how screens affect mental health. But
podcaster and tech journalists Manuche Sammarodi argues that we may
be missing an even bigger piece of the puzzle, how
screens affect our physical health.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
It's estimated five hundred million people around the globe are
going to have chronic illness by the end of this decade.
It's going to cost governments twenty seven billion dollars a year.
We know we have higher rates of obesity, the rates
of diabetes and young people have doubled over the past
twenty years. We hear about colon cancer on the rise
and young people under fifty as well. We also hear
(04:43):
about people just feeling like they can't concentrate anymore, that
they are so tired and in this weird sort of
like sure, we can call it burnout, but I think
it's just a sense of all we want to do
is crawl under our desks and go to sleep a
lot of the time. And so I wanted, I want
to be like, why don't we feel so crappy, like
what is going on? And honestly, you know, for many
(05:06):
of us, like the pandemic, that was the moment for me,
and I think it was because everything went to a screen.
It wasn't just work on the screen, it wasn't just
our social lives. It was just everything, And all I
knew was that I was very lucky. I was in
a safe place, I had plenty of food, I was
with my family, and yet I felt like total crap
(05:29):
at the end of the day, and I just could
not understand what was going on in my body. And
then we saw it too, rising rates of anxiety, sleeplessness.
You know. Sure a lot of that had to do
with the headlines, but a lot of it was people
who felt like, how is this possible that I feel
so bad when all I'm doing is sitting in front
of a screen.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And so talk a little bit about why our bodies
are such a bad fit with this environment you've talked
about where we're sitting all day watching screens, like in
our office, we come home, we PLoP on the couch.
What's so different about what we were built for? Well,
it was interesting to go back into, like the literature.
So the book is named after the Walt Whitman poem
Body Electric, where he speaks of the body electric and
(06:08):
this idea that there's this vivaciousness and pleasure in the
human body when it is functioning.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
As it should. And then he and lots of other
writers at the time start to observe the clerk, you know,
the guy the scribe sitting at the desk, and this
idea that he walks home and he is of chalky
face and slight stature. And so we saw very early
on as labor went from being a very physical thing
(06:37):
to be more of a mental thing, that it started
to affect people's vitality, that it started to affect their
basic physical health. That's what I wanted to understand. I
was like, first of all, why is sitting so bad?
Because I figured like, oh, well, maybe it's because you're
not burning calories, you know, I wasn't really sure. And
what I ended up learning from a physiologist that I
(06:58):
reached out to, Keith Diaz, was that when we sit,
we actually this is an image that's going to stay
with you. LORI starry in advance when we basically kink
our bodies at our knees and at our waists like
a garden hose. Right, So imagine a garden hose, you
know that kink that there is, and then things get
backed up there. So that's what's happening in our bodies.
(07:19):
Blood and fluid are getting backed up, and we need
that constant stimulation of our leg muscles for numerous reasons.
One is that without that, we don't flush out the
fats and sugars that can build up in those leg muscles.
And so that's where you start to see rising rates
of diabetes, you start to see higher blood pressure. And
(07:42):
then I started to find out about another relatively new topic,
which is something called interroception. This is what one of
the neuroscientists I spoke to, he's also a psychiatrist, He'd Calso,
who's now at UCLA. He described it to me as
like your inner selfie essentially, like your body is sending
(08:02):
you signals all day long. Some of them you don't
even recognize, right, Like it might tell you to take
off your ja because you're sweating, or you're hungry, go
get a snack. And what happens when we don't listen
to those signals, right You get cranky because you forgot
to eat or all of these things. And so my
theory was being on screens all day. I would get
(08:25):
up and I'd be like, oh my god, I haven't
gone to the bathroom in five hours? What is wrong
with me? Why is my foot asleep? And I didn't
even notice the sense of being almost disconnected from our
physical selves because there's so much going on in our screens,
Like my senses are completely overwhelmed and taken by everything
that's coming in off the screen, no wonder, I can't
(08:47):
pay attention to the fact that, like, oh my god,
my back is killing me, or my arm should not
be in that position for that long. So this sort
of disconnect between what our bodies need in order to
function is completely mismatched with technology, which it can go
all day long, plug it back in, upgrade the operating system.
(09:08):
It's ready to go. Oh And as much as I
wish sometimes that I was as efficient as my technology,
I'm not. I'm just a human and I need breaks,
and breaks need to be part of the strategy, not
a reward.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And so this problem that you've talked about with interception
makes it hard for us to realize what we need
to do when we need this moment of rest, what's
the kind of fatigue we're experiencing now, And how do
we get it wrong when we try to solve for it.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
So I don't know about you, but for a long
time I just thought, well, I just got to get
it done, Like I just I mean, I'll just keep
working and you know, I'll put in four hours and
get that report finished. And that, I think leads us
to that sense of like I'm working really hard, but
(09:56):
why do I feel like I'm actually not getting anything done,
or that sense like I nailed it yesterday and then
you come back and you read something that you did
and you're like, this is a piece of crap. Actually
this is really bad. So this idea that productivity comes
with grinding through and just keeping at it and working
hard really speaks to me personally as a type a
(10:16):
good girl who wants to get the job done so
she can move on to the next thing on the list.
It was a really hard personal I'm still learning this
lesson Laurie that actually my best work and my happiness
to be honest and my sense of enjoying life on
a daily basis means that I need to build in
(10:39):
breaks and this idea of really sensory resets, and I've
just had to learn the hard way that often what
I need is a boring walk. It's just that simple,
and I always feel better and I always come up
with my best ideas and my back stops hurting and
I do my best work until the next time that
(10:59):
it's time to take a break. And that is painful
for me, and it's a lesson I teach myself every
single day. I just have to trust the process. I
know this works. I know from a scientific perspective it works.
I know from a personal perspective it works. It seems
silly when you say it out loud, you know, oh,
you gotta think breaks like, well, yeah, duh. But that's
(11:21):
not the world we've built around us, And so I
think of it as almost having to make sure we
get into that negative space that we have crowded out.
The screens around us are obviously not going anywhere anytime soon,
which is why Manush wants to understand how we can
live with them in a way that.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Doesn't make us feel absolutely terrible. Of course, sensory resets
can help, but in a culture that rewards constant productivity,
taking breaks can seem counterintuitive.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
So how do we actually build.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
In movement when we're expected to sit in front of
a laptop all day? This was the question Manush was
wrestling with when she came across the research of doctor
Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Medical Center.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Keith is obsessed with trying to understand what is the
least amount of movement that the body needs in order
to function well, in order to clear out the glucose
and the fats and keep your body and your mind
sort of functioning properly. But he's also like a realist.
He knows that a lot of us, for our jobs,
we have to spend a lot of time seated and
(12:26):
looking at a screen. So he made it his mission
to try and figure out what was the minimum amount
of movement we could do that our lives wouldn't kill
us at the end of the day, wouldn't lead to
diabetes and blood pressure and cardiovascular issues all those things.
And what he found in his lab was really interesting.
It was five minutes of very gentle movement every half
(12:47):
hour of sitting, largely offset the harms of those long
stretches of sedentary time.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
That's kind of a surprising result because it's actually not
that much time. But it's also surprising in a different way,
which is probably more frequent than I think a lot
of us think. I always had the sense of like, oh,
I need to take this super long walk one time
in the day, and then I'll spend ten hours doing
podcasting on my chair. That will be okay, Well, let's
talk about that.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So essentially what he said is if you work out
or you take that one long walk, that's basically like
four percent of your day, and that means that there
are still very long periods where you are not moving,
you are sedentary, you are looking at a screen. If
you then go on to sit for the rest of
the day, it doesn't matter. They have found in study
(13:33):
after study after study that even if you work out
in the morning or you do a workout late at night,
if you don't break up those long periods of sedentary
screen time, then you are putting yourself at risk for
serious health harms. And then I was like, oh, but
what about standing desks? Keith, He's like, yeah, sorry, Actually,
(13:55):
studies are now showing that, like, if you stand for
two hours a day, if that's a way to get
yourself moving, great, but standing alone can actually be shown
to have problems in terms of cardiovascular health and ferroicos veins,
so it's actually might be worse. I was like, oh, great,
I know it's so annoying, Okay, but here's the good news.
(14:16):
When he was talking about gentle movement. I'm talking gentle movement.
So I went to his lab and joined the study
just to see what it was like. So I had
one day where it was like kind of a typical
day where I sat at my laptop and I worked
for eight hours straight and I had a lunch break
at my desk. Sadly it used to be true. And
I had some bathroom breaks and that was pretty much
(14:38):
the end of it. And I literally fell asleep twice
during the day and crawled onto the subway and went
home and went to bedterly, and I was hooked up
to like glucose monitors and oxygenation monitors and all of
these things. And then another day someone would tap me
on the shoulder every half hour and I would go
and walk on the treadmill two miles per hour, Laurie,
(15:01):
so like a stroll. Like not I'm not talking about
breathless here, I'm talking about like walking walking. Yes, yeah,
I could have just marched in place. And at first
I was annoyed. I was like, well, this is very disruptive,
but I did feel better, stayed awake all day. I
didn't need the sweater that I had packed to deal
with the AC that was blasting, And actually I didn't
(15:23):
get as much work done, but the work I did,
the quality was so much better. I didn't need to
go back the next day and revise it. I didn't
need to remind myself what I had achieved. It was
just like on point, you know what I'm saying. Oh,
and I should mention my blood sugar dropped by forty
percent compared to the other day. Wow, my blood pressure
(15:45):
was down five percent. My fatigue levels and my moon
levels and concentration levels they fell off the charts on
the day I sat all day. They stayed incredibly level
throughout the day on the day that I took the breaks.
So I had the data, I saw it, and I
felt it. So when that happened, I was like, dude,
I am bought in. This clearly works, but are people
(16:07):
actually going to do it? And Keith was like, yeah,
I know. That's the problem with these lab studies is
like we can figure out the best, but if no
one can do it, then like what does it even matter? Right?
So I was like, well, let's find out maybe.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
People can do this, But what happens when you try
to take a break every thirty minutes in the real world,
filled with real bosses and offices and deadlines, is the
kind of routine Manush is describing actually sustainable in real life.
We'll tackle that question when the Happiness Lab returns. From
this quick break, podcaster and journalist Manuch Sammaroni argues that
(17:02):
we need to spring clean our body's relationship with technology.
Before the break, we were talking about Minusha's lab, based
with physiologists Keith Diaz, which found that we can counteract
the physical effects of sitting in front of screens by
taking a five minute movement break every half hour. But
does that intervention work for real people working real jobs
(17:22):
in the real world. Fortunately, Minusha's role as a radio
host gave her access to a huge group of willing participants.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So we put out the call to public radio listeners
and he did it properly, this time, a proper clinical
trial with twenty three thousand people enrolled. They had to
shut it off after that it was too many people
be We're like, please help me, I need to feel better.
We had three cohorts, so you could try to go
for the gold standard, which was five minutes every half hour.
(17:52):
You could go for five minutes every hour or you
could even do five minutes every two hours. And we
weren't able to obviously monitor everybody's glucose levels or their
blood pressure, et cetera. And although we couldn't mimic the
exact conditions as in the lab, we had surveys that
went out constantly all through the day. But it was amazing.
(18:15):
We had uber drivers, sign up teachers, we had nurses, lawyers,
you name it across the board, you know, because screens
don't discriminate. So physically moving throughout the day made people
on average between twenty one to twenty eight percent less tired,
fatigue levels dropped in terms of mood and happiness. Again
(18:38):
that stability. In terms of productivity, it actually didn't get worse.
It even went up a little bit. Four percent on
average went up, so, you know, maybe not huge, but
this sense of all those interruptions it didn't take.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I think that's what we're all worried about. We think, like,
oh my gosh, I'm gonna have like a whole less
episode done at the end of the week because I'm
taking these breaks.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
But that's not what you were seeing.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, exactly, the fear of you're like, well, if I'm
interrupted all the time, How am I going to get
any work done? And actually that wasn't the case. People
would say they'd come back from one of the these
breaks and they knew exactly what they needed to get done.
They were focused, they were more efficient, and I think
that's really interesting to me that you can spend less
time on your screen and simply be more efficient. And
(19:21):
they said things like just lifting my legs, I would
start to feel my mood improve. They would say things like,
you know, how did they get people to do it?
In their office? They'd be like, I'm in this weird
clinical trial. You want to try it with me? And
that sort of gave people permission to have a walking
meeting or be standing on a zoom call and shuffling
(19:42):
side to side while they talk to each other. You know,
it's for science, LORI right, or like one woman was like,
it was our busiest time of the year and I
was pulling like fifteen hour days. Was like the final
sales push. She had her best sales quarter ever, like
a proof was in the pudding. And then of course
a lot of young people who said I don't have
(20:03):
a choice, like there are some professors at college who
make sure we get breaks during our three hour electu
but there are others who don't. And they said, I
see the difference in how I learn during the ones
where I get to take breaks codify the knowledge that
I have taken in. And actually, you know, we stuff
(20:23):
our brains full of information. But these breaks also help
people think, like what did we talk about in that meeting?
What are the next steps I want to take? How
do I make the most of the information that I
took in? And that is is a full body experience, right.
I think this is so critical because I think this
is just another domain where our minds lie to us.
(20:44):
I'm picturing myself trying to do the experiment that you
were talking about and having a person come tap you
on your shoulder and be like, all right, it's time
to go now.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Or if I sit a little alarm on my phone of.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Like five minutes take a break, my sense is like
I'll be in flow doing some work for something, and
I'll be annoyed. I'll be like no, I want to
keep working and my brain just cannot compute. They're like, no, no,
take a break, walk around. You'll get back to it
faster and do it better than if you didn't take
the break, And so how do we convince to ourselves, like.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Our slave driving minds, that we need these little breaks.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Yeah, so that was really interesting. What people found was
they started. The number one way they started was using
a timer right to remind themselves because they wouldn't remember
to take the break. You'd forget, you'd just forget exactly.
But what ended up happening is their bodies started reminding them.
After a certain amount of time, they started to build
(21:35):
that sense of interception. I just was talking to some
researchers who are studying how circadian rhythms can affect motivation.
So your body literally will create a clock in you
to be like you who time to get up and move.
You can't concentrate anymore. I love that that, Like, even
if our monkey brain is like I don't want to
(21:56):
get up and move, your body will be like I'm
compelling you right now because I need this and we
can start to hear it. But also I think there's
something to be said, like, if you're in flow, fine,
so skip a break. This is like it's going me.
One break's not gonna make that big a difference. And
the people who actually succeeded and saw benefits. Did four
(22:16):
breaks a day, five breaks a day. It wasn't like
sixteen breaks a day. And I think to me, like,
we can look at clinical data, we can talk about
gold standards and science, but honestly, the best movement is
the one you take right. So, like, if you take
one break in the middle of the day, amazing. Start there.
If you take eight and that works for you, awesome.
(22:39):
We are setting the bar pretty low here, and it
has outsize effects. That's what for. Once something that is free,
that's easy to do, that doesn't take that long, actually
has a huge impact and is good for you and
makes you feel good. That seems unbelievably surprising to me
(22:59):
and exciting.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And so as we take this exciting news and engineer
more movement back into our days, we also have to
address the specific sensory organs and the parts of our
bodies that are under digital assault. Were you kind of
surprised when you started to learn the work about how
much digital life is reshaping all our sensory organs?
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yes, I think I subconsciously and many of us subconsciously
knew that something was happening, but we always think like, oh, well,
it's just me. I'm the weirdo, and it's not. I mean,
we now know that, for example, one out of three
children are nearsighted, meaning they can see close but can't
(23:39):
see far. And you think like, huh, we must be
genetically passing that on to our kids. No, that's not why.
It's because of our technological habits. So I reached out
to people who are studying things like this, like doctor
Maria lu at Berkeley, who literally has been studying what
happens to the shape of our eyeball when we spend
(24:01):
lots of time looking at a screen doing near work,
and the eyeball your body wants to help you. That's
what I've learned. We go along. If you're like I
need to look at things that are really close to
me all day, your eyeballs will be like I got you,
and they'll form a shape that helps you do that
all day long. Trouble is, when you're back in class,
(24:24):
or you go to drive a car, or you go
to the movie theater, you will not be able to
see very far because your eyes are like, well, we
don't do that anymore. So that is fascinating to me,
and you hear like the twenty twenty twenty rule like
for every twenty minutes of sitting twenty feet into the
distance for twenty seconds. She's like, I'm so sorry to
(24:45):
tell you this, but that is simply not enough. So
she says, what you really need to do is get
if you can. All comes back to every half hour, Laurie. Honestly,
every single person I talk to about every part of
the body, it's every half hour. She ideally would like
you to go outside every half hour and look in
the distance at a horizon. I was like, can I
(25:07):
look out the window? She said no, because your peripheral
vision will know that there are walls. Like you need
to get the full Uh, yes, you need the full distance. Also,
when you go outside, even on a cloudy day, you
get sunlight. Right. They don't quite know exactly what it
is about sunlight, whether it's the vitamin D, whether it
activates serotonin, the happiness hormone in animals. They have seen
(25:29):
different kinds of retinal cells that actually produce serotonin when
they're exposed to sunlight. So the bad news is, if
you're an adult and you're already in your sided, hello,
that's me. Sorry, too bad. But the good news is
your eyeballs are still growing and forming even into your thirties,
(25:50):
So if you are a young person, you can still
take breaks, you can still stop the myopia from happening
to you. They did a study in China where they
made kids go outside for two hours a day instead
of the usual half hour for their recess, and they
saw a drop in your sidedness in kids. So going
outside and playing isn't just to get your yayas out.
(26:12):
This is so you can see. Because higher rates of
near sidedness or myopia has been linked to blindness, It's
been linked to glaucoma later in life. These are serious
issues that we don't like to think about what happens
decades down, But we're living longer and we want to
live well, right, so we need to protect basic sensory organs.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I love this recommendation to get sunlight, but I'm sure
there are people listening right now who work in some
huge office and are thinking like, Okay, yeah, I would
love to get sunlight, but like, I'm not gonna head
down in my big elevator and my huge SIAS scraper
every thirty minutes. I think there's also this worry that
if you're getting up to leave all the time, either
to go outside or just to get your legs moving
that your boss or your coworkers are going to be
(26:54):
looking at you like what is wrong with this person?
So any advice for wanting to take these breaks?
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we
used to say like, oh, I'm just going to pop
outside for a smoke. That used to be completely normal
and no one would bat an eye if you were
like I'm just gonna go out and grab a cigarette.
I know that might be shocking to some people now,
but that really was normal. So what if you instead
of going to get a smoke break, you were going
to get a move break. I'm just gonna go take
(27:19):
a quick move break. Cool, Okay, see you in five minutes.
That would be great. But also we need to start
at the top, right Like bosses, you need to know
that the research is there that when it comes to productivity,
quality of work, worker engagement, and satisfaction, people are not
happy right now. There's so much talk of burnout. This
is something simple you can do that is not a
(27:41):
gift to your workers. It is actually a gift to
your bottom line because what you will see is higher
employee retention, better work, and just a happier office from
what we understand, Like, maybe there's a meeting and you
kick off the meeting with walking around the conference table
and sort of giving an update, or maybe sixty minute
meetings are now fifty five minute meetings. You can have
(28:02):
that setting in Google calendar where you build in a
buffer of five extra minutes. Or maybe it's okay and
you're on a zoom to turn off your screens and
shuffle side to side if you are not expected to
present something on camera. It's these really small changes to
cultural norms that we're going to need to have in
(28:22):
order to make sure that we bring a little more movement,
some more breaks, and optimize the way that we work.
Because it's not working now that is very clear. It's
time for a quick break.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
But when we return, Minusia and I will explore what
screen time is doing to the rest of our bodies,
from our ears, to our spines to even our lungs,
and she'll share some simple practical ways to counteract those
effects so that we can feel both physically and mentally
a little healthier.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
As I was the most horrified by the session in
your book on our Ears, how is our technology negatively
affecting our ears?
Speaker 3 (29:17):
While it is really interesting? So Rick knightsl at the
University of Michigan has been partnering with Apple to do
the largest study of how people are listening these days essentially,
so you can actually join the study on your phone
if you want to, and it's not going to come
as any surprise to you that we are listening longer
(29:37):
and more loudly, essentially.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And it seems like in a different way where we
have this thing in our ear in a way that
we might not have before. Interestingly, they didn't find any
difference between air pods or earbuds and headphones. There hasn't
been any of that. But I know people who wear
them all day long. So there are some people who
are wearing them because they're blocking out the world, because
they need to concentrate, or you know how many people
(30:02):
do I see walking the dog and we're all listening
to something or going to the grocery store. It's this
sort of ambient music podcast, news, phone calls, zooms, all
the rest of it. We take sound with us wherever
we go, which is cool.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
A lot of the time. However, a couple problems here.
One is that when we're outside we raise the volume
because there's construction or a loud car or whatever else,
and we're listening at volumes that are much too loud
for us. Whereas when I was in my twenties, you know,
you'd leave a club and you couldn't hear for a
couple hours. People are having more of that like all
(30:37):
the time, and they're not even noticing. And if there's
good news and there's bad news when it comes to
your ears, the good news is if you take a
break and give yourself breaks from sound, your ears will recover.
You have a little sillia, those little hairs in your ears,
they get flattened, essentially, if you have some quiet time,
they will come back to life. However, if they're constantly assaulted,
(31:03):
they will die and they will never grow back. Ever,
you don't get more sillia. So there is a concern,
you know, will there be rising rates of hearing disorders essentially,
And what we know is that when you have trouble hearing,
that makes you more susceptible to dementia, to falling. You're
also just missing out on conversation in life, on hearing
(31:26):
the birds, all those other things. So once again it
comes back to giving your body breaks.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And so those are our sensory systems. But beyond our
sensory systems, we also need to address what technology is
doing to our posture, which you've argued has two big
physiological effects. One is on our spine and the other
is on our lungs. So let's start with our spine.
How is our technology hurting what our spine needs to
feel healthy.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
There's some really interesting new work being done to understand
the connection between how we hold ourselves and various organs.
So this is Peter Strick at the University of Pittsburgh
who has found that actually are a drenal glide. Those
are sitting right on our sides of our stomach, right,
and these are the glands that squeeze out cortisole like
(32:14):
when we're nervous, when we're excited, we're like that anxiety right, squitch,
squis squish. It turns out that there is a system
that is linked between your abdominal muscles, the adrenal glands,
and a section in your brain. So essentially we're talking about,
you know, why do people feel more relaxed after they
(32:34):
do pilates or yoga. This is the science as to
why there is this connection between our organs, our muscles,
and our brain. They are all hardwired and talking to
each other in ways that we are just starting to learn,
which is fascinating to me. So his whole thing is
if you don't use your core, and what do you
(32:54):
do when you're slumped in front of a screen.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
You're not using your core. Your spine is you're almost
in this cashew shape, kind of slumped over. Yeah, exactly,
you're compressed in some way. Then there's also the fact
that when you're seated like this, you compress your diaphragm.
That's where you want to fill it up with lots
of air so you can oxygenate your brain.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
When you don't take in enough oxygen, you don't feed
your brain, and there starts to actually be a build
up of CO two, which is when you start to
lose focus, You get tired, you get foggy, can't concentrate,
feel exhausted, anxious. Any of that sound familiar after a
couple hours on a screen.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
So familiar.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And one of the things I was so struck by
in your work is just this connection between like what
we're doing with our spines and our breath and our
mental health. You know, we talk so much on this podcast,
and I talk so much with my students about increasing
anxiety and young people, and we often think that, again,
that's because of the content of what we're seeing on
our screens. We're seeing all this anxiety provoking stuff, But
it might just be the way that we're sitting when
(33:53):
we are looking at our phones, where we're hunched over.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
That's kind of not allowing us to activate our core muscles.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
That's literally causing us to secrete stress hormones, literally causing
our brains to reinterpret how we're breathing as anxiety. It
almost made me think, like, I wonder how much of
the anxiety crisis we are seeing in young people we
could alleviate if we just got them to sit upright
and activate their core muscles one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
I mean, that to me is what is so frustrating
and exciting about what you're talking about. If that is
one simple thing that we can do at a time
when we feel so overloaded. You know, between the headlines
and the economics and AI, there's a lot to be
stressed out about. But if we can feel just the
(34:38):
tiniest bit better. And really all it is is getting
up for five minutes and moving around and giving your
ears a break from sound, and giving your eyes a
break from looking at a screen, and really taking some
full breaths and making sure we're moving our limbs a
little bit more. And if that can give us a
reset to get on with our day and maybe feel
(35:01):
a little more in ourselves, happier, joyful, like we can concentrate,
like we can make better decisions. To me, I like
to call that the mind body tech connection. And you know,
we hear mind body spirit and we accept that this
is a holistic thing. But technology is as much a
part of our lives as anything else. It is our lives, right,
(35:22):
So how do we manage that sort of cycle that
we put ourselves through. We have to be more intentional.
It's that simple and that hard.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
But it also means that we can also be agentive, right,
And I think this is the thing we forget. I
think sometimes when we think about our body's relationship with technology,
it's like, well, I got to get rid.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Of my phone.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
But this book is really suggesting there are forms of
stress management that just take five minutes every hour or so.
One of the things you talk about in your book
is this idea of we can think about posture as
stress management, that like, if you're feeling stressed out, just
have this moment of like, h let me get up
and walk around. When I sit back down, let me
make sure I'm not hunched over like a cashew the
whole time. This is powerful stuff because it's giving us
(36:01):
a way to fight back that we can actually control.
You know, I can't control what's happening in the international news.
I can't control the spread of AI. I can't control
the bad things happening in the world. But I can
definitely control whether I'm hunched over. I can definitely control
whether I hop up from the desk five minutes every
half hour to kind of get a little movement in.
These are things that are within our control to stop
(36:21):
the stress cycle.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
I am smiling right now because how nice is it
to think that there is something that you can do?
Because I think what you've just talked about is this
sort of prevailing sense right now, is that like what
am I supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
How am I.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Supposed to be a person in the world functioning? And
I want to be careful though that we don't say
you know, this is on you individual, because it feels
like much of the responsibility is we want our structural
changes act. But just knowing that I can do something
to make a difference in my own body, or just
knowing that I'm not making it worse inadvertently through my
(36:56):
choices that I'm not paying attention to, just remembering that
I can have interceptive awareness that feels really powerful to me. Yeah.
I found it so interesting. So that neuroscientist doctor SOYBCLSA
has been studying the effect of FLOWA. Those are those
like saline baths where you you know, pay forty five
bucks and then you lie there naked, and the idea
is like no sensory input whatsoever to sort of reset
(37:19):
your nervous system. And he's like, you can do this
at home, like go into your bedroom, put down the shades,
put your phone out of the room, don't listen to anything,
don't try to meditate, just try to literally take everything
away and just let your muscles relax and breathe and
(37:39):
let everything just sort of be. I was like what
for five minutes he was like, actually, no, try to
go for forty five minutes once a week. He said,
that's a nice goal for you. I was like, okay,
but he was like, we're going and taking in so
much all the time. What if you just don't do
anything like for forty five minutes a week. I was like,
(38:02):
that's what's really nice.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
So that's not doing anything for forty five minutes. But
of course we all have this time in the day
where we are giving our body the natural reset of
not doing anything, which is the domain of sleep. We've
all kind of heard that blue light is really bad,
but you've argued that the culprit might be something else.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
What do you mean? Yeah, so I sort of got
deep into the data to try to understand. I thought
that blue light was the problem too. I was like, okay,
so what is it about blue light that does this
to us? And actually, the thinking has changed a lot
in the sleep research world. So this idea of blue
light being like you know, espresso for your body before
(38:39):
you go to sleep came from one particular small Harvard
study where it was a group of undergrads who were
looking at iPads at the highest brightest setting for hours
before they went to sleep in the sleep lab, and
even they didn't actually miss out on that much sleep.
It disrupted some of their sleep. But also, like, I
don't know, if I was looking at an iPad for
(39:01):
three hours at the brightest setting, like that would definitely
be a problem. Generally, what they're starting to find is
it's not the blue light, it's the habits that these
screens put us into. So, oh my god, we were
watching mad Men again last night, and how much did
we want to like, just keep watching the next episode.
That's what Netflix wants us to do. And so what
(39:23):
do we do. Let's just watch half of the next episode.
Oh wait, and then we watch the whole episode, and
there we are going to bed forty five minutes later. Oh,
we shouldn't have looked at a screen before bed. No,
you shouldn't have stayed up and watched another episode. Like,
let's be real. So really, like what they're saying is
it's not really the blue light. And frankly, that light
is not that strong. This does not apply to kids. Kids, definitely,
(39:47):
their eyes are in a different way. They are changing,
they are forming. The light needs to be low at night.
There are some people who are very sensitive to light,
in which case, you know, dimming the lights following the
sun is really useful sort of bringing your body down.
But at the end of the day, we have to
take a hard look at ourselves in our own habits
and not blame the blue light as much as the
(40:10):
sirens call of what is going on on those screens.
And also a lot of us are using our technology
to self soothe before we go to bed, right it
is harder to maybe try and do a muscle relaxation
or read a really boring book with a cup of
camra meal tea that just doesn't sound as interesting as
scrolling on Instagram and you know, mindlessly sort of trying
(40:33):
to zone out.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
The problem is also that we use our phones to
self soothe when we wake up in the middle of
the night. I know I am guilty of this. I
wake up in the middle of the night and I'm
feeling anxious and I'm like, oh, let me look at
my phone.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
And now I'm looking at my phone and that's going
to keep me up.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
So for the chronic insomniac like me who feels like
when they wake up in the middle of the night,
they need their phone to self soothe.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Their phone is.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Their only friend at three in the morning, when no
one's talking to them. Yeah, what's the first step to
breaking that feedback loop?
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Well, you've heard it before, right, don't keep your phone
in your bedroom, blah blah blah. Okay, I don't ascribe
to that. I have elderly parents and I have a
kid away at college. I keep my phone next to
my bed for emergencies, but I do have it set
so that only their calls can come through, so I
will not be woken up by spam. Okay, So I'm
going to let you in on my secret technique. So
(41:19):
I also would say, like, pretend you're in a float
right while you're lying there and you're awake. I pretend
that I'm on a first class airline flight and there's
no Wi Fi on the flight, and all I can
hear is the rush of the engines and there's nothing
I can do. And isn't it great that I upgraded
to this bed that lies out flat? I am so lucky.
I'm just going to lie here and just like bask
(41:41):
in the luxuriousness and wait for my destination. That is
my own sort of personal hack.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Mine when I'm doing the right kind of thing, is
a hack where I imagine that I'm in this one
hotel room I stayed at where I could hear the
ocean outside. It was this gorgeous hotel room in Puerto
Rico where you could hear the waves outside, and I'm
just imagining what the waves sound like. That when I'm
doing it right and not waking up in the middle
of night to look at Reddit works pretty well for
me too.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Oh that's nice. That's really nice.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
So we definitely need more sensory resets to support our
physical and mental health. But Manush says it's not just
about five minute breaks or even a full night of sleep.
We also need longer stretches of downtime time to reconnect
with ourselves and make better decisions. In her book, she
calls this kind of time the neutral zone.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I will say that phrase is not for me. It
is from a consultant actually a couple decades ago he's
no longer with us, who studied how corporations how did
they make it through big transitions. And what he found
was that the companies that survived big upheaval actually didn't
rush from like Okay, there's layoffs, we're reorguing, this is
what we're doing next. They actually went through this space
(42:54):
of sort of absorbing the shock of change, sitting with
it before deciding what to do next, sort of taking
the time. And in my personal life, I try to
think of it that way too, Like there might be
times in your life when you feel like you are
spending your wheel a little bit, and actually this really
important time because we need to give ourselves space to
(43:14):
think through what just happened, process it, start to imagine
what could be next. Maybe it's something that doesn't occur
to us straight away. Maybe you need some long, boring walks,
Maybe you need a couple months of, you know, just
not trying to strategize your way out of a situation,
just sort of allowing your brain to make sense of
(43:37):
the world you're in, the place you're going. We think
we can process as quickly as our technology can, and
we cannot. And you know, cloud and chat, GPT. They
might try to talk you into doing something and they
might sound really convincing, but at the end of the day,
that gut feeling, there's a reason why it's called the
gut feeling. The gut and the brain are connected. There
is a wholeness, a whole body sense that we need
(44:01):
to tap into in order to make sense of our
lives and figure out how we go forward.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Technology is just affecting our minds, it's also shaping our bodies.
The way we sit, scroll, stare, and listen can significantly.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Impact how we feel.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
But as we learned from Manuche today, small changes like
a boring walk or a quick sensory break can make
a meaningful difference in our physical health.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
And our well being.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
If you'd like to learn more about how to improve
your body's relationship with technology, be sure to check out
Manush's new book Body Electric, The Hidden health Costs of
the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your well Being,
which is out on May fifth. If you have thoughts
about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can
email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or
(44:49):
leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You
can also sign up to learn more about the science
of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website,
Doctor Lai Santos dot com. That's d r l a
u ri E s a n t os dot com.
Next week, we'll continue our season on how to Spring
Clean your well Being with one of my favorite FIS
episodes from our Happiness Lab Archives. This time we'll look
(45:12):
at what happens when life gets too crowded. We'll share
some evidence based ideas for clearing out your busy schedule
and making room for what matters most. I just taught
two classes and had two hours of office hours.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
All I'm thinking about is when am I going to
drink water? When is my next nap? You're just literally
it feels like survival.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
That's all.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie
Santos
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