Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health | Dr Anders Hansen #657
14 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 381 of the podcast with psychiatrist and author Dr. Anders Hansen.
In this clip, he explains how our attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in today's world, why our devices are designed to keep us hooked, and he shares some simple ways we can begin to take back control and reconnect with what really matters.
The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention. And a number of companies have been incredibly good at grabbing that attention. If you try to find the customer service on Facebook, you realize that it's very hard. And that's because you are not the customer of Facebook. You are the product.
Every second that we spend on our screens is money for them. And they had just gotten better and better and better at doing that. And as a consequence, we spend more and more and more time on our screens. And today for adults, it's somewhere between four to five hours. For teenagers, it's five, perhaps even six hours. These things are difficult to measure because it increases so fast.
And what's the consequence of that? Well, that is that when we spend so much time on this, we don't sleep as much, we don't move as much, and we don't meet as much in real life. And all of these things, exercise, sleep, and meeting in real life are protecting us against depressions.
So in modern life, we become more susceptible to depressions and anxiety because protective factors are being eroded by modern technology. It's not what we do online that is most important. It's what we don't do when we are online.
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Chapter 2: What impact do smartphones have on our attention spans?
We have to intentionally create some rules for ourselves, because if we don't, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus.
Exactly. And there's actually been experiments made where you have students doing tests for focus and for memory, and half of them bring their phone into the testing room. The other half leave their phone outside. And the ones that bring the phones with them don't pick it up. They just have it in the pocket. And it turns out that the ones who have left the phone outside perform better.
Even if you don't pick it up. So it's just by being in the same room it distracts you. And the reason is probably that it's providing you with so much stimulation that you must constantly think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone. And then you get distracted. And that doesn't matter if you're doing something very ordinary.
But if you have to be focused at your work or in school, you're studying for exam, leave the phone outside. There's also been experience made where you have two people talking to a stranger. They sit in front of one another and there's a table in between. And they talk for 10 minutes about the subject. And on half of these tables, there is a notebook, paper and pen.
Chapter 3: Why is human attention considered a valuable commodity?
And on the other half of the tables, there's a phone. And they don't pick up the phone. But it turns out that the pairs who have a phone on their table, they find the discussion less interesting. They even find the person they're talking to less reliable. And that's probably because they have to think, I'm not going to pick up my phone. I'm not going to pick up my phone.
I'm not going to pick up my phone. So it steals some of your mental bandwidth just by being around. And we feel guilty for this. We feel, you know, I have a bad character because I can't help myself picking up all the time. But we shouldn't because these are incredibly powerful stimuli. And again, someone is making money from that.
Yeah. You also write in the Attention Fix about low-tech parents and you reference, I think, Steve Jobs and how, you know, we've heard this before, but I think it's worth reiterating that a lot of the creators of these products did not allow their children on them.
Exactly. There was a journalist that came home to Steve Jobs and he thought that there would be iPads everywhere and all the screens in every room and there weren't. He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads. And remember, Steve Jobs is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us ever. And he himself was cautious about using it too much.
That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that if you are looking at the screen more than you are looking at someone's eyes, you're doing something wrong. So the CEO of the company that makes the most money from screens says, don't use our products too much. That says something on how incredibly addictive these things are and how naive we have been in implementing them so widely.
And again, especially toward children. And as I said before, I think the main impact of digital life on our well-being is not what we do online, but what we don't do when we are online. We don't sleep as much, we don't exercise as much, and we don't meet online. But there is a big caveat to this, and that is overusage of social media seems to be dangerous for teenagers.
For girls in the age 12 to 13, boys 14 to 15. That's probably because this is a time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think that part of your life, you really desperately want to belong to a group. And we have compared ourselves to a small group during all of human history. You know, there were 50, 100 people who you met during your entire life. That was your tribe or your band.
And you compared yourselves to perhaps 20 or 30 of them who were around your age. And now you compare yourself to the entire planet. And there's always someone who is smarter and better looking and more successful and richer than you are. And you feel that you are worthless. Yeah. I'm not good enough. And you get this signal from your screens five or six hours every day.
And you have your friends' photos. And for every photo on Instagram, there was a hundred photos that was discarded that you don't see. And if that wasn't enough, you have a whole... you have a whole army of Instagrammers and influencers who get paid to show their perfect life.
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Chapter 4: How do smartphones affect our mental health?
And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough. And then you feel lonely. And then you feel like you're being pushed out of the group. And that is registered in the brain as something that is extremely dangerous. And that's why you feel so bad about it.
You know, the problem is, Anders, the way I see it is that... We can know this with our rational brains. We know we're comparing the highlight reel of someone else's life to the mundane reality of our day-to-day life. We know that, we hear it. You've said it, I've said it, but I still don't think knowing it makes a jot of difference because you can know it,
But your subconscious, when you're scrolling, is still picking on this idea that their life is better, their life is better, their life is better. One morning, this is about, I don't know, a few months ago, I broke one of my rules. I was on Instagram very early. I don't know why, but you know, we're all human. We're all seduced by these devices.
And I saw something, I can't remember what it was, but I started to feel bad afterwards. And then I was making a hot drink in the kitchen. I thought, wow.
Chapter 5: What are the negative consequences of excessive screen time?
Rogan, nothing has happened, right? Literally nothing has happened. You're still here in your house. Your wife and kids are still sleeping. The birds are singing in the garden, right? Nothing has happened apart from the fact I went on Instagram for a few minutes. So nothing in the real world changed, yet my mental state changed from scrolling. And I was like, this is utter madness.
Yeah. And if you take a step back, you let someone who you have never met, who you will never meet, make you feel inadequate.
Yeah.
Because they had a better looking toilet or more expensive vacation or a nicer car or what have you. I mean, that's insane. Of course, it happens to me all the time as well. But the more you think about these things, when you read about it and you have to hear it many times, you have to hear it from many sort of different angles and presented in different ways.
then you start to seeing it being played out in yourself. And that's why we have to create distance to it. I'm not going to let any big American company steal my focus because they're making money from my eyeballs staring at the screen.
So what's your approach to deal with smartphone addiction and a lack of focus?
I mean, how do you as a busy professional... I'm incredibly cautious about my focus. Focus is something that is very, very vulnerable. If you've lectured, you probably noticed that you could have a couple of hundred individuals listening to, and then one comes late, and everyone is looking at the person who's coming late. What does it matter if one person is late?
Well, that's because we are not... The brain didn't evolve to be focused. It evolved to constantly scan your surrounding for danger. It says something there, there, there, there, there. So we are incredibly easily distracted. And focus, which is so valuable in today's society, is something that is very, very, that's hard for us.
And when I do my most important work, when I think the stuff that I really think is valuable, that's when I am really in a deep focus mode. And I want to protect that, preserve that, and then I have the phone outside. That's not going to disturb me.
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