Meryl Horn
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The reason I wanted to do this episode was because I'd find myself just staring at my phone for way longer than I kind of meant to, especially at the end of the day.
Like, I would often feel, like, worse about my life or just crappy in general, and yet I'd spend all this time, you know, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
Well, first off, the research does find that scrolling itself is especially bad compared to other things we do on our phones.
So, like, one study asked people, like, how they felt after doing different things on their phones, and the researchers could spy on them to see, like, exactly what they were using their phones for.
And they found that, yeah, it was like the scrolling that people said they regretted the most compared to stuff like communicating with their friends or like getting information.
You could also see this in how much they regretted going on certain apps.
Like after they went on Instagram, they would say that I regretted that like 42% of the time, where when they went on a messaging app, they only regretted it 18% of the time.
Another study backed this up, finding something really similar, but this one looked at meaninglessness instead, which, you know, again, found that people said their experience was more meaningless if they had just spent that time scrolling compared to this other stuff, which helped me understand, like, why it feels so bad.
But then why do we keep doing it, do you think?
Because it's like, it does give us some kind of like short-term happiness a lot of the time to scroll.
The whole reason we do it is because we're probably getting some kind of, you know, dopamine hits or, you know, those, the parts of our brain that light up when we're doing something rewarding or do light up when we like see social media.