Arthur Brooks

But the hard part was step three.

The hard part was actually being alone with myself, being awake with myself, being alive with myself is what it comes down to.

And that's probably even more extreme for people who are very, very online.

Because you're trying to break the doom loop of how technology is breaking your brain, not letting you find the meaning of your life, making you angry and depressed and anxious and lonely.

you're addicted which is why you keep doing these self-terrible self-destructive things to yourself you first you get pissed and second you got to quit and look i got the algorithms to help you do that but then man you need new friends like you know you need you need to live in a society you need to live you know in people who are alive in real life and you have to be able to sit behind

the wheel of your car at a red light with nothing to do in your thoughts right and be in a supermarket checkout line without your phone and and walk before dawn without a device and hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet and say that's the sound of my feet on the path and that takes work

It's absolutely possible.

I've seen it again and again and again and again.

I mean, look, this is not heroin that we're talking about here.

I mean, the process of detox, for example, you don't even have to give up your phone.

You just have to put it in proper boundaries and have some rules in your life, right?

And actually have some proper habits.

And, you know, our life is, if you have a fairly functional life, you've got good habits already, right?

I mean, you get up at a certain time, you work out every day, you exercise,

You eat something you don't eat like an 11 year old.

I mean, you have good habits and then you just put protocols around it.

It's like Huberman talks about protocols and which has kind of infected the culture.

It's a culture of protocols.

And I'm an absolute believer in that when it comes to your phone.

I mean, you wake up in the morning, if you can, don't look at it at all for the first hour for neurocognitive programming.