Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Today, you and I are talking with one of the top psychology experts and professors in the world, and he's going to reveal six things that are present in your day to day life that have a huge role in your success, happiness, and health. In fact, they might even be around you in the room that you're in right now. But because you don't know the research yet, you're not tapping into their power. For example, if you go on a first date and you want it to go well, what color should you wear? Well, based on the research, there's a correct answer. And did you know that a mirror not only reflects your appearance, but it impacts your behavior in very surprising and powerful ways? But the most shocking thing of all is one tiny change that will give you 20 years of your life back. Yep, you heard that right. Based on the research, one change, 20 years of your life back. Hey, it's your friend Mel. And today, you and I are talking with one of the top psychology experts and professors in the world, and he's going to reveal six specific things that play a huge role in your success, happiness, and health.

Now, these are things that you interact with in your day to day life that you probably don't think about at all. But after our conversation today, you're going to know what they are and more importantly, how to use them to your advantage. Doctor Adam Alter is here in our Boston studios today. He is a renowned researcher and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence faculty fellow. He received his PhD in psychology from Princeton University, where he also completed two fellowships, which means he's really smart and he's the author of three New York Times bestsellers, Irresistible, drunk tank Pink, and the brand new best selling book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Now, Doctor Alter is here today to break it all down, share his research with you about the unexpected forces that shape how you think, feel, and behave, including one change today that, based on the research, will give you 20 years of your life back. So please help me welcome Doctor Adam Alter to the Mel Robbins podcast. Thank you so much for making the trip to Boston.

Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

It's terrific to be with you. I'm so excited to learn from you today. And I wanted to start off by asking you if you could just speak directly to the person who's listening and tell them what they're about to learn and how their life could change if they really apply what you're going to teach them today.

Sure. So I think there are two things. The first thing is, I think we sail through life generally, not really understanding what's shaping, how we feel and behave and what's guiding us in the directions that we happen to be moving. So the first thing is, I think you're going to understand a number of the things that are guiding you that you don't recognize are there. But the second thing is, because you understand what those things are, you're able to act on them. You're able to use them to your benefit. Maybe the ones that are pushing in the wrong direction, you can kind of stave them off. So I think it's a combination of both of those things.

What made you want to research things like colors and these environmental. I don't know, like, things outside of us and within us that shape our experience of life.

Yeah. So, you know, I think, like a lot of people, I'm sort of fascinated by this idea that so much of what goes on is hidden from us, that essentially life is kind of like the iceberg, where there's a little bit above the surface of the water, but a lot of really interesting stuff is unconscious. It's hidden from us. And so I wanted to try to understand as much of what's going on under the surface of the water, and a lot of it is these things that are shaping us in ways we don't recognize. So a lot of my research has been about trying to uncover those and then figure out what we can do about them.

I love this. All right, so let's dive in. There is so much to learn. So much of your research focuses on the environment around us and how that can influence all different outcomes. Can you share some of that with us?

Yeah. So it's huge numbers of different factors, but around us all the time, there are colors. Sometimes we're in a built environment, like a room, and sometimes we're in a natural environment. And so a lot of my work focuses on how these different cues shape how we think, feel and behave, and our welfare, our well being. A lot of the focus for me recently because I've been very interested in the effect of spending huge amounts of time in front of screens, is what happens when you go as far from screens as possible to natural environments, which we all sort of have the, I think, general sense that that's good for us. It's good to be in a natural environment. But the effects there are among the most profound I've ever seen in any research that just spending a bit of time near a body of running water or hearing wind rustle through trees or spending 12 hours driving to the eclipse, which is what I did. It's a huge amount of energy that you put in, perhaps to get to those kind of environments, but they have a huge effect on your welfare and it's worth doing.

What effect does it have on your welfare?

So one thing about the way we live our lives today in the modern era, is that we are constantly sapped. Our attention is sapped. We're asked to pay huge amounts of very focused attention all the time, whether we're looking at screens, whether we're having extended work conversations, whether we're doing work. And so by the end of the day, you're kind of depleted. Depleted? Depleted. If you wear one of those watches that tracks your body battery, you see it just kind of goes down and down and down. And that's a good metaphor for the way we live our lives. It sums it up pretty well. The thing about nature is that apart from actually being asleep, being in a natural environment is replenishing. It basically turns that dial upside down, and so your energy starts to climb again. So it gives you back a lot of what is sapped by that very focused attention. Because when you're in a natural environment, your attention is still grabbed by things. You might hear a bird, you might hear the running water, you might look at trees, whatever it might be looking at the ocean. But that kind of less focused attention is really restorative.

And there's actually a whole body of research called attention restoration therapy that focuses on exactly this idea that being in natural environments is one of the best forms of medicine we have.

So let's unpack that. Yeah, because I could feel the person that is listening to us right now literally stop on the treadmill, or hopefully you're outside walking, or you just stopped loading the dishwasher and you're knowing that what Adam is saying is true. Yeah, but there were a bunch of things you talked about that I would love for you to dig in further. The first one was this idea of the. I think you said something about attention therapy.

Attention restoration therapy, what is that? Yeah. It's basically this idea that your attention is constantly being sapped, it's being taken away. And the kind of attention you have in a natural environment, which is not demanding, it's replenishing.

It's true.

It restores you. It brings you back. It gives you something that you don't have. I think the single most profound example of this for me was a study that was done at a hospital on people who were recovering from surgery, and they were randomly assigned to different rooms. And some of the rooms looked out at a natural environment, a beautiful green lawn, some trees. And some of the rooms just where they happened to be in the building did not have that view. They were looking at another part of the building, and they wanted to track how these people recovered from identical surgeries, depending on which room they happened to be assigned to, like, half as much pain medication, they spent three days fewer in hospital recovering. Just looking out at that natural environment was the best form of medicine there was. So it's true. I run maybe four or five days a week, and I try to do it outside when I can, and I know on some level it just feels good, but there's a huge amount of science behind that as well.

So what do you recommend for us to put into our lives? Because we've had neuroscientists, medical doctors, sleep experts come on the show and talk about the importance of getting natural light first thing in the morning. We've also had someone talk about if you're kind of burnt out and you are having one of those moments where you just feel your energy draining, even looking off at the distance out the window can help you restore your energy. What are some of the takeaways or the science backed things that people can implement in their lives to tap into this research?

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is I ran yesterday in a forest, and it was wonderful. And there was running water. There were all these ingredients, and it was incredibly restorative. But as a runner, my instinct is to just keep going, which is how we live our lives. Right. You're doing something and you want to keep going till it ends, till you finish doing it, till you can check it off. And I had to push myself to stop for five minutes to sit on a rock and just let the water go by. And that was by far the most restorative, wonderful part of the day. And I think there's something to that, this idea of purposely stopping yourself. So I would say whether you're in a big city or whether you're not in a big city, find a little patch of natural environment. And by the way, if you're in an apartment in a big urban environment and you don't have that option, even little trees, little plants that you have in the apartment, the sound of a little fountain that you have with running water, that stands in for that experience, too, is just spend, say, five minutes a day doing absolutely nothing but taking in drinking in that natural environment, even if it's a tiny one in your apartment, if you can get out, all the better.

But it's very important to do that, I think, as a sort of daily.

Practice and also, as your research shows, a countermeasure to the fact that modern life is requiring this intense focus that is just sapping your energy. You mentioned colors, and there is so much that you have uncovered that is fascinating about how colors influence so much in terms of our mood, our behaviors, our physical strength. Let's unpack that.

Yeah. So some of this is my research, some of it's other people's research. And I got interested in color because I can't see color very well. I'm colorblind.

Oh, you are?

I'm colorblind. So I'm sort of fascinated by, how.

Did you figure out that you're a color run?

It took a while. You know, when I was young, I would get colors right, because all the colors in little picture books are so bright and obvious. So that was never a problem. But as I got older, it seemed like I lost the ability to distinguish colors. I think my parents were a bit concerned. They were like, what's going on? There's something going on in Adam's brain. We need to figure this out. So I did a series of tests, and I identified that I had certain kinds of color blindness. And so it made total sense. But it's kind of subtle, so you can't pick it up. When kids are very young, sometimes it takes a little while to figure it out. But it made me really interested in color, and in particular in the question of whether the way I see the world is whether it's different from how you do. Do we all see the world the same way? And then assuming that there is some uniformity to that, is that exposure to color influencing us in any way that's predictable? And the answer is yes. There are all sorts of interesting effects.

Let me ask a question. So, given that you're colorblind and you are researching the impact that color has on our mood, our emotions, even things like physical strength, it also can influence the actions that you take. Is the color influencing all of us the same way? Even if you're colorblind and the color appears slightly duller or, you know, if you're color, you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, 100%. So there are two ways it could affect you. So one of them is just association. So I see, maybe I see the color yellow, and it makes me think of the sun and fire and I see green and I think of natural environments. It's just the association. It reminds me of other things that are green or yellow or blue or whatever the other one is. As you say, maybe it doesn't matter if you can actually see that it's green or yellow. Maybe it's something about the wavelength. It hits your eye, it hits your retina, and your brain is doing something with that information that whether or not you can see that it's yellow or green or red or whatever, you're responding the same way. I think most of it is association for us that there are certain things that have certain colors, and then that reminds us of those things. So a lot of us talk about blues and greens being more soothing, reds and yellows being more activating, which can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking for. I think if I didn't know that a color was red and I couldn't see it and it looked washed out to me, it would have less of an effect for me.

Got it. So what colors affect our moods?

Well, all colors have some effect. They have some effect not just on mood, but on all sorts of different outcomes for us. There's really interesting research looking at how the colors that competitors wear in sports affect how they play. So there's some work looking at Olympic athletes in combat sports, like judo and wrestling and type Kwondo. And in the Olympics, what they did a while ago is they decided that they were going to randomly assign each competitor to either wear blue or red before each bout as a way to just be fair. We're going to randomly pick red and blue, and you're going to get your color, and then you're going to go into the bout. One of the things the researchers discovered was when we wear red, we feel stronger, we feel more dominant. And when you see someone else wearing red, you perceive them as more dominant. And there are very lower order reasons for this. If you look at animals, the animals with more red are more dominant in general. Look at 100 birds from the same species. The ones with more red feathers or a redder face will be the alpha birds, and that's going to be true for apes and other animals as well.

So the color red has a really big effect, and it's associated with sort of how well your blood flows through your body and things like that. And it's a sort of signal that someone is strong and dominant. And what you actually find is in these Olympic bouts, when the competitors are evenly matched, if you are assigned to wear red, you win about two thirds of the time, despite being evenly matched.

Really?

It has a huge effect on these outcomes. Yeah.

Wow. So, Doctor Halter, does that mean if I'm going in for a. Like a negotiation for a job, I should be wearing red or an interview or a date?

Yes. With a caveat. Okay, so the yes is yes. It will do that. It'll make you seem more dominant. It also turns out to make people more attractive to others.

Really?

Which is interesting, too. Yeah. So there's research looking at dating profiles where you have the same picture. You just change every two months the color of the shirt you're wearing. People get much more attention online when they're wearing. It's the same picture, but when they're wearing red rather than any other color.

Wow.

So there is all sorts of good reason to surround yourself with red. It's true. Even if you have a border around your picture and it happens to be a red border rather than blue or green or another color. But red also has other meaning, too. Right. It's not a color that we don't notice. So you're signaling something beyond just I'm dominant and making yourself look more attractive. It's a conscious choice. And so if people are seeing that and making other. Drawing other inferences from the fact that you've chosen red, then maybe it's something you don't want to do. If it's very unusual in that context, for example. But beyond that, as long as that's not an issue, there is very good reason to wear it. Wow.

And what colors calm us down?

The most calming colors are generally blues and greens. And I think a lot of that is the association we have with nature, which we discussed. So natural environments are very calming. Water, the sky, trees, leaves, things like that. And so I think a lot of that comes from just the sort of calmness you get with the association with those colors.

So one of your international bestsellers, drunk tank pink, very interesting name. And there's very interesting research about that sort of bubble gum pepto Bismo pink color. Can you explain that?

Yeah. So the name is drunk tang. Pink is a name that was given to this very bright, bubblegummy pink color. It was used for a while. Inside, they were called drunk tanks, where you put people who are kind of aggressive, often drunk, you're trying to calm them down. And researchers found that if these drunk tanks were painted pink, in their words, you could calm these people down much more quickly. Within 15 minutes, they'd be calm.

And did it work?

There's some evidence that it worked. I think the research is a little bit shaky, but there was some evidence that this pink color did calm people down. It got a huge amount of attention. In the eighties, there was a 60 minutes episode about it. Wow. It really got a lot of attention. And so I thought it was just a sort of fascinating emblem of the kinds of effects you might see from cues that you might think would have a smaller effect on us. But by being surrounded by those colors, there are huge effects. In fact, the visiting locker room at the University of Iowa is painted drunk tank pink in an attempt to calm down the opposition when they spend time in that locker room. So it's been used in a lot of different contexts more recently.

Yeah, well, and I think where my mind goes is both to the Miami soccer team, but they're a little bit more bright, and also to the beautiful trend of athletes wearing pink for breast cancer awareness, which obviously is signaling something else. I think that's fascinating if you're put in a bubblegum pink room, that it just sort of dulls your mood a little bit. If you're a bit aggressive.

Yeah. Regarding into Miami, there are people who, when they box, they only wear pink boxing trunks because they think it'll make their opposition a little bit less strong. And so there's. I don't think that's why into Miami is pink, and they have that pink uniform, but that's one of the theories.

Wow, this is so fascinating. I cannot wait to keep learning more about the research, but, doctor alter, this is a great place to take a quick pause and hear a word from our amazing sponsors. And when we come back, I want to ask you more about the research on other things that you can hack in your environment to cue certain behaviors, including the most impactful one at all. So stay with us. We'll be waiting for you after a short break. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And you and I are here today with Doctor Adam Alter, professor from NYU Stern School of Business and an expert in how our environment impacts behavior. So, doctor Alter, can you talk about mirrors and how you can use them to change your behavior?

Yeah, there's a lot of research looking at what happens when we see a human face. So one of the things that happens when you see a face, particularly eyes, is you feel that you're being watched. And when you're being watched, it changes your behavior in certain predictable ways. So if you think about a store that has a lot of shoplifting, one of the things these stores do, if they can't afford constant surveillance, is they put up more mirrors, because we are less likely to behave badly when we have to look at ourselves doing it.

Really?

Yeah.

Why?

Because it basically forces you, not just metaphorically, but to look into your own eyes, literally. And you have to decide, is this the right way to behave? It makes us much more introspective and thoughtful about what we're doing. So there are these really interesting experiments where you say to people privately, you can toss a coin, and if you get heads, you get a delicious jelly bean, and if you get tails, you have to eat something. That's not very nice. And if you let people do that without a mirror, they all report, oh, yeah, I got heads. There are a lot of people who report getting heads. More than 50%, which you would expect. So people are kind of fudging the numbers a little bit when you get them to do that same task in front of a mirror where they're looking at themselves, 50 50, so they become honest again.

Really?

Yeah. You know, there are some, I think, interesting implications. One of them that's that I've always found quite, quite useful is if you. A lot of people might have, like, a cupboard in their home somewhere, maybe in the pantry where they keep their chocolates and things that they want to eat. Only occasionally.

Mine's in a drawer.

Right. Or a drawer. And when you open that cupboard or when you go into the pantry, one thing a lot of people do now is they'll put up a little mirror.

What?

So what happens is you're like, I'm reaching for the chocolate. I have to look at myself in my eyes. I have to scrutinize this decision. And sometimes it's fine, but other times, maybe I look at myself, and I'm like, okay, fine. I'll leave that chocolate sitting there for a little bit longer. So it basically forces you to be a little bit more thoughtful about your decisions.

Well, I could see how that would happen. Cause, you know, if you think about opening up a fridge, if there was a giant mirror in there, I'd be like, oh, you again? Okay, shut the thing. So I might actually have to try this. Putting a mirror in the bottom of the drawer.

Yeah, there you go.

Where I have all of our snacks. We call it the snack drawer. So could you use a mirror to kind of cue yourself when it comes to bad habits? Is that, like, an environmental trigger that can be effective in making you stop and think?

Yeah, I think so. So I think what the mirror does is it makes you think more deeply, and it especially makes you think more deeply about doing the wrong thing where it's something that's contrary to what you think you should be doing, because you have to do it in your own presence. It's like you're watching yourself. And so it's a very powerful cue in all those cases.

I love that. Yeah, that's a real. I can think of a lot of implications for that. Like if you're somebody who's trying to cut down on drinking, having a mirror, sitting there when you open up the cabinet where the. Okay, I see you. Not so fast today. I understand there's some interesting research about how simply looking at money can change you.

Yeah, there's sort of interesting evidence that it can do lots of different things. So one thing it seems to do is it makes you a little bit more independent, makes you feel a little bit stronger and reminds you of resources and having more of things. The other thing it can do is, though, it makes you a little bit less helpful towards other people. Makes you a little bit less generous. Makes you a little bit more independent. Yeah. So there's some research where if you show people money or you show them, you know, dollar bills or things like that, and then you have a task where they have to be helpful. They're going to be a little bit less helpful if they've just seen money than if they haven't. And I think that's because one thing you get from money is you can stand alone a little bit more. You don't need other people quite as much. That's at least the theory. And so it makes you more independent and less communal minded, and it might make you a little bit less generous.

Well, doctor alter, maybe that's why I'm such a generous person, because I never have cash in my.

There you go. It's all about credit cards.

So, do you have favorite tweaks, based on the research that you either recommend or use in your own life that help cue you to be your best or to make behavior change stick?

Yeah, I've talked about the one, the biggest one. Six years ago, I left New York City with my wife and two kids, and we moved to a town where it was natural and beautiful. And we could go less than a mile in any direction, and we would have either a beach or we would have a forest, or we'd have something.

Where is this Shangri La? Still work in New York?

This Shangri La's in Connecticut, just outside. Wow. It's beautiful. And it means that on any day, I can drive for ten minutes or even walk for ten minutes and be somewhere that does all of this restoring. So I think being around nature for me, is a huge one. Different people have different things that matter to them. That was very important to me. It also drew me back to my childhood because growing up in first South Africa and then Australia, natural environments, and especially the beach in Australia, was a big part of what I was used to, and I missed that. And so being near a beach, the sand and the water was really important to me. So I think picking the location that that does the best for you most of the time is really important, that it's worth some time sacrificing other things for. And that's something that I've always, I've always followed.

You know, that makes a lot of sense. I remember this was decades ago, but when I had just graduated from law school and I moved to New York City, I basically spent all of my puny income so I could live walking distance to Central park and so that I could also get to the west side highway, because just being able in the big city to get to some green space was critical. And you said that thing about it also has a sort of nostalgia thing of being able to be outside. Anything about your inside environment, like the way that you think about your workspace or you might think about the kitchen or places where people want to be primed or prompted to be their best.

Yeah. We mentioned earlier, especially if you're in a big city, it's useful to have something natural inside that environment. It could be, hopefully, a real plant, but if it's not real, a fake plant, anything that gives you the sense of that greenery and that nature, maybe even like a little fountain feature, just a little thing that you plug in and maybe has a light and a little bit of running water. Even the sound of running water reminds you of all these things. And I had the same experience in New York. I was always in Central park or running on the west side. And so to the extent that you can bring these features into your home, theres a huge amount of benefit to that. I think, for me personally, and this varies, but I think the lack of clutter that you create in a place is really an important source of wellbeing. So for me, trying my best and this doesnt always happen, but trying to remove clutter from an environment, especially where Im trying to think, is really important, I think thats a really good way to think about doing your best work in general, that having blankness in front of you and just moving forward and pouring out your ideas is the best way to go without being infringed upon by other things that are in the environment around you.

Why does lots of stuff around the environment where you're trying to work or focus impact your ability to do your best? Thinking?

Every single thing, even if it's in a small way, is distracting. Everything draws you out of the here and now. Some things more than others. A smartphone, massively distracting for all sorts of reasons that are obvious, even other objects. Like if you have a memento that's in view, that's really nice. A picture of a loved one, that's really nice. But of course, if you stare at it, it's going to take you out of the here and now. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have photos of loved ones on your desk, but you should at least recognize that if there are a thousand different nice mementos around you, the clutter of that, while it's lovely and it brings back good memories, that's probably not the time and place to do it. So having clarity in front of you as you work, I think, is a really important driver of good ideas and creativity in general.

I'm sitting here thinking about my workspace at my home, and it is knickknack attack, like, everywhere. Like, little stuff that I really love and means a lot to me. And I can tell you this is probably an indication of just how distracted I am, because I could look at my computer, and I've got like, four little mason jars with all, like, the pens in one and sharpies in another, and pencils. And then I got a photo of my mom and my grandmother, and then I've got a little compass my parents sent me, and then I've got a mug that Chris gave me. And then, I mean, it just. It's like a little zoo of objects.

If it makes you feel great, though.

I don't know that it does. I just feel like, holy cow. Even though I'm not staring at all this stuff, you're saying that subconsciously, your mind is still pulling it in. To some extent.

To some extent. It's processing things around you constantly. So to the extent there are things around you all the time, you might ignore them consciously, but they're always there. The clutter is always there. And on some level, even if it's on a small level, each little thing is pulling you away in some small sense. And that's the opposite of what you need. Especially in the world that we live in now, where everything is so distracting, we're actually getting ten minutes of good, hard, quality work is vanishingly impossible.

That's it. Ten minutes.

I mean, it's very, very hard for a lot of people to work. If you track them across the day, to get 1015, 20 minutes bursts of good, hard work, it's tough for a lot of us, especially if your phone is nearby, if your computer's dinging you with emails and things like that. It's really hard to do the same task for 20 minutes in a row.

Well, Doctor Alta, you are one of the most renowned and respected researchers when it comes to the impact of screens on our brains, on our health. And so let's talk about it. You have written a huge book on this. You are somebody that people look to for expert advice on this, and we've talked a lot about nature, but nature is combating what has become the reality for all of us, which is we spend most of our waking hours staring at a screen.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So the way I think about it is when you sit in today's age and you look out at whatever you're looking at almost all the time, you can tell that it's this year, it's 2024, or roughly 2024. You see screens, you see all sorts of signs that we live in this particular modern age that we live in. I think one really useful thing and why nature is so great is because it's timeless. That I think one way to measure how well you're living is are you spending at least some of your day in an environment that is timeless, that is not attached and tethered to the here and now? That is not about the latest screen, the latest device, the latest tech, the latest gadget. So when you are sitting in a forest, you could have been doing that a thousand years ago and seeing exactly the same thing. And I think there's some value to living at least part of our lives every day in an environment that is timeless.

What are some examples of how I can step into a timeless environment if I can't get out into the forest today?

Yeah. So closing your eyes is really good for that. Right? Because you can then think of anything you like, and people have been able to do that forever. That's what makes us human, is our ability to imagine outside of the here and now. The other thing is, I think, just having a conversation with a loved one, which is, again, screens make that more and more difficult. We spend so much time in front of them that we spend less time with people we really connect to. But having a face to face conversation with someone that's also timeless, that was going on thousands of years ago as well. Our species has been doing that forever. We do it less now than we ever have before. So I think timelessness doesn't have to be about nature or even the environment you're in. It can be the activity that you're doing. And so anything where you're connecting with another human being is timeless as well.

This is so important because so many of us, and I'm going to include myself, are searching for deeper meaning in life, searching for purpose, searching for a sense of being connected to self and connected to something beyond just that sort of day to day autopilot mode onto the next headline, onto the next deadline, onto the next thing on your to do list. And I love how you phrase this as, how do you take a break from modern life that is always going to pull you to the next thing and step back into these things that you have described that escape a sense of what decade you're in and what age you are and that have always been around. And so nature conversations with somebody else, closing your eyes and escaping into your thoughts to remind you that there is something so much more important than the here and now. And is there anything else that you would recommend?

Yeah, I think physical activity is a big one, right. Because a lot of the time we spend in front of screens is sedentary. We're not moving. We're sitting. Maybe we're standing if you're at a standing desk, but it's very tethered to a particular place. It doesn't involve a lot of activity. So I think there's a timelessness to physical activity. Our ancestors had to do much more of it just to stay alive. And so they had to find food and they had to negotiate different landscapes. We don't have to do that anymore. It's easy for us to get by and not move. So I think exercise, picking up heavy things, moving our bodies for certain periods of time every day, all of that is also consistent with this timelessness that I think is important. And I just think it's a good rule of thumb. I've realized this over time, that when you're trying to figure out, am I living the way I'd like to live? A lot of it is those timeless activities that go back to things that we were doing a long time ago that were very good for us as a species, that brought us to where we are today.

It's a lot of the things that are incredibly new and different. I love technology. I think it's wonderful in many ways, but a lot of the aspects of it that we've kind of put as a gloss over our lives today, I think leave us impoverished in some sense.

Very much so. And disconnected and distracted and not feeling like you're doing something that's actually meaningful to you. Right, Doctor Alter, you are so right. And this is the perfect time to take a quick break, hear a word from our sponsors, who allow me to bring Doctor Alter and all this amazing research to you at zero cost. Please share this with anybody that you know could use this information, which is basically everybody in your life. And when we come back, I want to go more into distraction and specifically screens. And wait till you hear about the groundbreaking research that Doctor Alter has done in this area. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And you and I are spending time today learning from the amazing Doctor Adam Alter. So, Doctor Alter, let's talk about the thing that you say impacts us more than anything else in the environment, and that's screens. So you've done extensive research on screens, on digital distraction and also just kind of this constant need to be occupied. It's almost like the state of distraction that we've gotten used to. What's some of the most shocking things that you have come across in your research?

Yeah. So I've spoken to I don't know how many, dozens, hundreds of audiences of the kids themselves who use screens. The parents of those kids, teachers in schools, school district heads, people in policy, in government, people in all sorts of different areas about the effects of screens. And the most striking thing to me is that when you speak to the kids in particular, so, especially teenagers, you get this incredible difference between how much they feel they have to use these devices and how much they enjoy it, how much it is good for them. So when you eat candy, you might say to yourself, that's delicious. I kind of know it's not great for me, but I'm going to do it anyway. With screens, it's like a different tone. It's this tone of, I wish I and all my friends stopped doing this thing. I wish we didn't keep returning to the same social media platforms because I know it's not good for any of us. But if we don't, if I'm the only one who says I'm going to draw back, then I'm isolated. And so it's this very collective problem where unless you can get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time, it's not going to be easy to solve.

And you hear this from a lot of kids, they say, if only I could get everyone else in my class, or at least a certain number of people not to do this, I'd feel better. And the parents say the same thing. They say, I wish I could be the parent who says, we're going to be much more careful about exposing our kids to these devices and social media and so on, but we can't be the only ones because then our kids are just. That's a different problem. They're the only ones.

Right.

So a lot of the work that I'm doing now is on trying to push not just individuals to change how they behave, but to work with, say, entire classrooms or entire schools or entire school districts so that the entire district pushes parents and the kids of those parents to delay how long it takes them to use these devices.

Well, you know, it's interesting. I remember reading a big write up of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, who, you probably know, have this new policy heads up, which is no phones on campus, period. Like, they can be in your locker, they can be in your backpack, but they are not on your person.

Yeah. So there's a movement called okay to delay, for example. And there are some others as well that are trying to deal with this at that collective level for exactly the reason you mentioned. There are very few benefits to having phones at school. Maybe a flip phone so you can get in touch with someone in an emergency.

They can call the front office. Like, I'm personally one of these people. It's like, get the fricking phones out of the schools. Parents can call the front office if there is an emergency. It's a huge problem. There is no need to have a phone on your person when you're supposed to be at school. I mean, that's just my opinion. And I think it's fascinating that a lot of parents who can afford to love sending their kids to summer camp because why? They take their phones away. And they love giving their kids that break, and the kids love it. But I do think it's interesting that the shocking piece of research that's come out of it is we all know we need to do something. We all know it's bad for us, and we all wish there was an alternative. And yet my entire social life is on this thing.

Yeah. I mean, the way I opened this book was talking about how years before the rest of us were aware of this. Steve jobs with his own kids. He wouldn't bring the iPad into his house. And then you look at other tech titans. There's a school in the Bay area that doesn't let kids near phones or use phones or use screens until about 9th grade, until they learn to code.

Yep.

That school, 75% of the kids there are the kids of Silicon Valley tech execs. So they are sending their kids, the people who know the most about what this tech is doing are keeping their kids as far away from these products as possible, especially in the school environment.

I mean, it makes perfect sense. So do you think we're all addicted to the screen?

Yeah. So this term addiction is. I use it in the book as a sort of shorthand to describe a lot of what I think is going on in this case, because the definition that I use is it's something that you want to do over and over again. You want to return to your screen, you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you're not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you. One balance and that it has negative effects in the long run for your social well being. You know, your relationships are degraded for it. It means you're more sedentary, so it's not good for you physically. It exposes a lot of us to bullying, anxiety, aggression, loneliness, other negative psychological consequences. It's also a way to overspend. A lot of people spend too much money.

I feel like instagram has turned into the home shopping network.

Exactly. Yeah. It's a very powerful way to sell products.

Wow. You said earlier this interesting metaphor that, for example, we all know candy's delicious, but if you just pound a gigantic, like, five pound chocolate bar. I love Tony's chocolate, and I also love Mister beast's new line, like, oh, I just love chocolate and Halloween. Go out trick or treating. I'd fill that pillowcase up, man. I would come home, sort all the candy, and I would just start munching. But then I would have a huge stomach ache, and I wouldn't want to look at Candy again for another month. And it's almost as if that Halloween candy hangover is what's happening every single day. Where we wake up, we know we don't want to spend 9 hours. What is the average amount of time that people are spending on their phones?

It's hard to get really good, definitive data, but it's many hours a day. I had a high school class that I was teaching at NYU for a while over summers. I'm not doing it at the moment, but I did it for several years. And at the beginning of that six week class, I would ask the students to download an app that would track their usage which now most phones do anyway. And the numbers I was getting were absolutely staggering. Some of the students were on their phones like 1012 hours a day. The average was something like six or seven or 8 hours a day and this was a number of years ago. I think its only gone up since then. Ive heard three, four, 5 hours described as the average for adults as well. So its a huge amount of time. One of the things its doing is its changing your tolerance for spending a long time doing something that involves hard deep work and thinking.

What does that mean? What do you mean?

So what it means is if you're getting 2000 messages a day, each one lasting maybe a second or 2 seconds, that's how your brain starts to process information in these bite sized chunks. And they're all also chosen to be maximally enjoyable, interesting. They bombard you with interesting content and so what happens is you assume the rest of the world is going to be like that. You know, we get into an elevator for 5 seconds and that's too much, that's hard. So we pull out our phones to be entertained in that moment and that's how the rest of the world becomes. So if I say to a seven year old kid who's on a screen all day, it's time to learn to read. The amount of energy and intense concentration you're asking for there is so different from what that kid is used to. If it's been about sort of scrolling through videos that that's deeply problematic. You can't expect people to just suddenly turn on this muscle that they haven't been using. So it makes us less used to having to try really hard. And so that's I think one big problem. The other thing is if you look at how many hours a day we're doing this for, there's a huge amount of other stuff.

The opportunity cost there is so great that we're leaving this other stuff behind. So I could be spending that time having a conversation with a loved one or a friend, I could be spending that time in a natural environment or I could be exercising, I could be doing lots of different things. But I don't do any of that stuff because I'm spending time mindlessly scrolling. So there's a huge amount there.

Can you explain the mindlessly part? Like why do we doom scroll? There's so many of us, Adam, that come home from work, you cook dinner, you've got kids, you're married, you know, you're doing all the stuff, you're packing up the backpacks, you're cleaning up the dishes, you're letting the dog out, you're hopefully like having a moment of quiet yourself and you say to yourself I'm gonna go to bed early tonight or I'm gonna work on that project and next thing you know 2 hours have gone by and you've just wasted your evening doom scrolling. Why do we do that?

Yeah there's this interesting theory about gambling that I think a lot of people have this naive idea that when people are gambling they're just like, this is amazing and this is so much fun. And I'm getting all this feedback.

Yes.

And then I hit a jackpot. People don't gamble because that's true. They gamble because they get into this kind of trance. Like there's something about sitting in front of a slot machine that is deeply soothing and numbing and that's what the screen does. At the end of a hard day. What you don't want is to be massively excited. Most of the time you're exhausted. You just want to have this kind of comfort, this lull. It's like taking a bath in the screen and it brings this sense of comfort and reliability and nothing is being asked of me. I don't have to do anything, I just move my finger and that's all I have to do.

It sounds so lovely.

It sounds lovely. Right. And what else gives us that sort of really uncomplicated dose of calm at the end of a long day? Very little alcohol. That's the other option. And so there aren't that many options. It's substances or it's screens and many of us just turn to screens. So that's, I think what's happening for most of us.

I hate that you put it like that.

Yeah, I don't love that. It's true. But I think that's what's going on.

How do you stop?

It's very difficult. I mean I think the biggest thing when we try to stop doing something is we don't replace it with something else. So the first thing to think about is if I want to stop doing this thing, whatever this thing is, whether it's drinking, using a substance, scrolling through TikTok, whatever it is, when you would have done that thing, there needs to be something else there and preferably something else that you enjoy that's not bad for you, something that you feel better about doing. And that's going to be different for everyone. You've got to cultivate that habit. That changes. And so just saying I'm going to not do this thing and I'm going to use my willpower. No one has that much willpower.

Right.

That's exhausting. You can't expect yourself to be superhuman, but figure out what else you could be doing that's more enriching. But that also makes you feel good and do that other thing, plaster over that gap.

This is a pathetic question, given that you are the renowned guy that is doing the research on this. Do you have some suggestions? Because even my first thought was, well, I've been loving this fantasy audiobook, court of Thorn and roses. I am living in a different land, and it's on my phone. I think about, oh, okay, well, I could just slump on the couch and watch something on tv. There's another screen.

Yeah.

So in the research, are there things that have come up that could offer just a spark of a suggestion for those of us that would really like to not have this be a habit and not be lulled every night into giving our evenings away to our phone?

Yeah. So I'll say one thing. I think this is a good moment to say that screens are not one thing. Right. It's not like looking at a screen is automatically a bad thing.

Right.

You could be reading a really enriching book on the screen, and that's great. It makes you feel good. Or you could be watching a show or a documentary or whatever. It doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with spending hours in front of the tv at the end of the night, if that's mindfully what you want to be doing with your time. There's also nothing wrong with briefly scrolling through a social media platform. The problem is, none of us have the willpower to just do it for two minutes. I don't think you have to find something that's not screen based. You just have to find something that's not making you feel hollow and unhappy. That doesn't make you feel like you've been robbed of your self control and your agency, if that means you're going to watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix, and then you're going to go and read five chapters of your favorite book, and then you're going to have a conversation, and then you're going to try a new recipe that you wanted to cook. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter what it is. It just should be something that doesn't leave you feeling hollow.

That's the only thing to ask yourself, do I feel better, happier, like my life is more meaningful after this? Or do I feel worse off? Like I'm empty and that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling. They feel kind of empty. So just find something else. Even if it's on a screen that doesn't leave you feeling that way.

It's true. I do feel empty.

Yeah.

And it then makes you feel stupid for wasting that much time. And if you add it up cumulatively over the years, it's a large part of your life.

20 years.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

20 years of your life is spent just scrolling on your phone, looking at your phone.

It'll be about for most of us, 20 years on average, something like that. 15 to 20 years we'll be doing this. Just looking at 22nd videos. Yeah.

Doctor Alter, I mean, as a researcher, what do you think when you hear that figure?

Well, I think one thing to think is imagine it's the end of your life. You've hopefully lived a very fulfilling, long life. You get to that point and then someone says, would you like 20 extra years? And the answer is no. I'd rather have spent 20 years scrolling mindlessly. No one's going to say that. So I think if the first step to fixing this problem is having people say I really want to change this, that to me is a good place to begin. That idea that you are shortening your life effectively by 20 years or 15 years or however long it ends up being because you spend all this time consuming sort of eye candy, mental candy by scrolling. I think almost everyone would say when you zoom back, assuming you have the self control, I think there are better things I could be doing with that time. Maybe I'll save a year or two for the scrolling. But then that leaves me still 1518 years to do other things.

You just basically dropped a grenade on any excuse that somebody would have that they don't have time or it's too late or I couldn't possibly fit this thing in because you have all this found time. Is there a difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on the television in terms of the impact to your brain?

Yeah. So? Well, the way you interact with those screens is very different. Right. So when you watch tv content, it's just something that's kind of being visited upon you, you're not interacting with it.

Yep.

So there are good and bad parts to interacting with a screen. If you're learning a language, you're going to learn it less well on a tv than on a phone because you can interact with the phone. If you are using a social media platform, no one uses that social media on a screen like a tv, because you can't have that bi directional relationship where you act on the thing and then it acts back on you.

Right.

That's critical. That's what goes on on phones that make it so immersive, so a tv screen is less kind of weaponized to draw our time and attention away from us. It gives us a little bit more agency. That doesn't mean it's perfect. If you're watching a show, there's a cliffhanger and someone says to you, just sit here for 10 seconds, the next episode will begin. That's where binge viewing comes from, and we almost all do that. But what we do with our screens when we're on phones is, I think, much more difficult for us to resist.

I think it just got something that I'd never thought about before, Doctor Alter, which is that your brain is getting so many fast signals and messages, from the ads to the pop ups to the notifications to you yourself, switching between the texting and the email and search. And what is getting fused together is a brain that now is constantly expecting this. Go, go, go. And I had not thought about the fact that because if you're using your phone and you can interact with it, so now you've also got your hands involved and there's that whole body of research around neurobics and marrying the physical movement, and particularly movements of your hands with new thought patterns and how that fires and wires your brain quicker. That, to me, makes so much sense that because you're actually typing and you're interacting with it, you're programming your brain faster, almost to expect short form. I hear people also talking anecdotally, like there's a rise in ADHD, but it's actually a rise in your brain getting trained to be distracted.

Yeah. So I think what's happened is we live in an age of time contraction. Everything happens in really brief chunks. Everything's 5 seconds long, 10 seconds long. Time is contracted. If you go on a vacation to a beach and you spend a week doing nothing, you get time dilation. Time suddenly works on a different scale. You think of five minutes as no time at all. Whereas in the way we live our lives, many of us, most of the time, five minutes, you could do 100 things. You could look at 100 videos, there are a million things you could do in five minutes. And that creates a sense of massive urgency. For what purpose, I don't know. Probably not a good one for most of us most of the time. So I think there's some value in changing the scale of things in going for a four hour drive. I drove 12 hours there and back to see the eclipse.

Where'd you go?

I went to northern Vermont and it was incredible. I drove 6 hours with a friend. We got out of the car for five minutes, watched the eclipse, got back in and drove home. So it was 12 hours of driving for three minutes of magic. It changed how I feel about time. Theres a hangover period where im like a few hours. No problem. Not a problem at all. I can focus on things for a few hours. I did it for 12 hours the other day. When do we ever do one thing for 12 hours? Its just very rare. So I think doing things that are extended and protracted is really valuable because it resets what you think of as a kind of meaningful chunk of time.

Well, and this goes back to something that you also talked about, which is I guarantee that those five minutes that you probably spent at Burke Mountain. Right. You know, up in that area.

Yeah, exactly.

That. There was something about those five minutes that felt like 5 hours.

Yeah.

And you use the word time dilation, which means that you're stretching your own perception of being in the moment. And you gave us a list of things like being in nature, having plants or some sort of water element in your house. Meditation, a conversation with somebody where you're really in the moment is a way for you to actually slow down time and get important time back.

Right.

So you also have this research. It's very interesting. It's this concept called stopping cues. What does that mean?

Yeah. So stopping cues, if you think about how we consumed information in the 20th century and the early 21st, everything had a natural endpoint to it. These are known as stopping cues. So you'd read a book and you'd get to the end of a chapter or the whole book, you'd watch a tv show, the credits would roll. These were all gentle signals that you probably wanted to do something different, move on to the next thing. And they were built into everything we did. So those are called stopping cues. Now, the thing about a lot of the tech we use is that tech companies have systematically eradicated those stopping cues. They've removed them, they've weeded them out. So the bottomless feed that you get on social media platforms, that is a good example of the absence of stopping cues. So because we are humans who are creatures of inertia, we just keep doing the same thing over and over until something pushes us to the next thing. In the absence of a cue that says, hey, maybe you want to move on to the next thing, we just keep going. And that's a lot of why.

Once we start using a social media platform, there's no cue to move on. The same way when you're on a slot machine, there's no cue to move on. So we just keep going.

Wow.

Yeah.

So some of my favorite cookies are pepperidge farmed, and they come in these stacks and these trays. And when I clean out a whole tray, the empty trays are stopped not to keep going. What is kind of your biggest takeaway after researching so much about how distracted we've become by our phones?

Yeah. So I think the biggest one is that the simplest solution to this problem is actually an analog one, which is to cultivate habits where there are certain parts of the day that are sacred and free of screens. I think that's very important, and it's different for different people. So it could be every day, dinner time, no screens. We all put our phones in a cookie jar. We put a timer on. We're not allowed to go into that jar for 30 minutes. Maybe that's one example.

It seems kind of psycho that we have to do this.

It's totally ridiculous that we are in this position as consumers of this tech to have to do it. But we do.

But, and it's because, though, and I think this is a really important piece of the research that you're explaining to us, this isn't because you're weak. It's because this technology is designed to keep you going. That sort of emptiness that you described when somebody's sitting in front of the slot machine, where you're just sort of lulled into this state, that that's why you have to have these stopping cues and you have to have these boundaries. You know, one of the things I'm curious about, because you've researched this, and you're also a father of two and you're married and you're teaching, and so you're seeing students of different ages, and you've seen these platforms change since you have been writing all of these books and doing this research. Doctor Alter, what does your morning routine look like?

So one thing I try very hard to do, and I'm better at this some mornings than others, is to spend as much time after I wake up not looking at a screen as possible. It's really useful to kind of ease your way into the day by not immediately picking up the phone and looking at whatever's on the screen. So that's one important thing. There are different days where I'm doing different things, but usually the very beginning part of the day is with my kids and often my wife. And so that's obviously a deeply connected time where you're discussing what we're going to have for breakfast. And there are little conversations that happen. They themselves are not necessarily full of meaning and philosophy and richness, but there's a richness just to the kind of routine of. Of connecting over that period of the day. And I think that's really useful if you live with someone else. That is a time when some of us need a little bit of time to wake up and a coffee. But once you get past that, to connect, I think, is really important. And I try to do that as much as possible in the morning.

Got it. So if you could speak directly to the person who's been listening to this, who's now panic stricken.

Yes.

That they're going to lose 20 years of their life looking at their phone and they're thinking about stopping cues and they're thinking about all of the amazing things that you've made us think about and want to try. What do you think? The one action, if you had to say, there's one thing I really want you to do.

Yeah?

What would it be?

So I think the easiest thing you can do that will give you back years of your life is to take your device for an hour a day. You pick the hour. It could be in the morning, could be in the afternoon, could be in the evening. Put it in a drawer or a cookie jar, put it somewhere. Make sure it's roughly the same time every day. So it's a habit. And if you do that for enough days, you will literally give yourself back years of your life where you would have spent that time mindlessly scrolling. You're going to be doing something more enriching. Just do that one small thing to start. It'll have a massive effect on your well being.

Wow. Doctor Adam Alter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us.

Thank you for having me.

You heard him. I want you to get 20 years of your life back. And I want you to use that time to create a more meaningful life for yourself because you deserve that. And in case no one else tells you today, let me be the one to say, I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to change your life and to use all of these amazing things that you learned today to help you do that. Alrighty, I'll see you in a few days. I don't know what the hell happens here. You guys can go ahead and count it on. I'll just make sure this is okay. You got it. Three, two, one. Audio recording. One, two. Here we go.

Start.

Awesome. And Mel? Yes. You're on action shay all day.

My name, Alta, for some reason, is often pronounced atler. Wait, I know.

Hold on. Did you just call it Ulta?

Yeah, because that's my accent.

So Alta is how I'm supposed to say it, doctor Alta Alter.

You can say alter. Yeah, I know that's how you pronounce.

Into the US accent.

I had to. I had to because.

No, you don't. Adam Alter. I see. Now I'm panicking about your name. See, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety that I'm going to mispronounce your name. Alta, right? Am I alter?

I'm back home. Okay?

You're back home. Now, nature is an anecdote. Or not. And I don't even know what the hell. See, I can't pronounce anything. We don't have any fun here.

I see that.

Doctor alter. Not at all.

Tough. Tough crowds, tough working environment.

It's terrible. Absolutely terrible. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. Stitcher.