John Burn-Murdoch

And this is where we could get into the weeds of what do we even mean by personality.

Now, for me, your personality is essentially the accumulation of your behaviours.

And so even if you're born a certain way, you can change your behavior.

I'm sure most people listening to this have done this in one area of their life.

And so there are some, there is in fact a wealth of evidence that specific training courses and other interventions can be used

to tweak one's innate self, to be a more conscientious or less neurotic version of yourself, for example.

Everyone's familiar with, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, which of course can help with neuroticism.

There are similar types of exercises for conscientiousness.

And the other thing here is a lot of this is about habit formation.

Someone could be innately slightly less conscientious, but if you build structures and habits into your life that take away the need to constantly be trying all the time to do something, if you instead turn that into a routine, that can help.

So I think part of that is just that there is go-to evidence that there are strategies here that do work.

The other thing I think about is that, again, if we believe that digital distraction is part of this,

then there are a wealth of strategies as well that people can use, right?

So everyone talks about putting your smartphone in another room when you go to bed.

So your sleep quality improves.

That simple act, better sleep, enables you to be better at delivering on your own goals.

If you put your phone more in do-not-disturb mode, something as simple as that, again, fewer distractions, you're more likely to deliver on your goals.

And I have this...

This at the moment is a column in waiting, as it were, when I can find the data, but wondering whether we might soon start to see screen time coming down, certainly for a section of society, because there's so much discourse at the moment about the harms it might be causing.

And I think if we saw that, again, to the extent that we think that's a key mechanism here, we could see simply through the reduction in distractions or reduction in displacement,