Wendy Zukerman

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Faces.

This is the show that pits facts against phones.

Today on the show, how do we stop scrolling?

Scrolling.

Just last week, in a landmark case, Meta, which owns Instagram and Google, owner of YouTube, were found negligent for basically creating addictive products that harmed a young woman's mental health.

The tech giants have been ordered to pay her $6 million.

They're appealing.

But this case has reignited a huge conversation over how these apps can just suck us in.

The young woman's lawyer said during closing arguments that these apps are, quote, Trojan horses.

They look wonderful and great, but you invite them in and they take over.

Which, away from this case, is exactly the way that a lot of our listeners have been feeling about these apps.

It just feels like I'm constantly consuming something off of a screen.

Surveys find that over half of adults in the U.S.

want to spend less time on their phones.

My mental health is just better when I'm off social media, and it's hard to get out of the scrolling.

So the question we have for this episode is this.

Given that so many of us feel hooked,

Is there any way to unhook ourselves, to stop scrolling?

Rather ironically, online, you can find tons of people claiming that they've found the answer.

So how do you slay that dragon?