BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health | Dr Anders Hansen #657

Summary

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BITESIZE | How Your Smartphone Is Changing Your Brain, Focus & Mental Health

Podcast: Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Host: Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Guest: Dr Anders Hansen (Psychiatrist & Author)
Episode: #657 (Clip from #381)
Date: May 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

This Bite-Sized episode features a powerful conversation between Dr Rangan Chatterjee and renowned psychiatrist Dr Anders Hansen, focusing on how modern technology—especially smartphones and social media—are radically transforming our attention, mental health, and social lives. Dr Hansen shares eye-opening insights into the addictive design of digital devices, the profound impact on our wellbeing, and practical strategies for reclaiming our focus and connection in an ultra-distracted world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Attention—The Most Valuable Commodity

• Dr Hansen argues that human attention, not traditional currencies, is now the world’s most coveted resource for tech companies.

  "The most valuable thing in today's society is not gold or yen or euros or pounds. It's human attention." (Anders Hansen, 01:58)

• Companies—especially those behind social media—spend billions refining systems to keep users hooked for longer.

2. The Double-Edged Sword of Technology

• Modern devices are engineered as "super stimuli"—unnaturally rewarding experiences our brains find irresistible.

  "Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok… You have a $10 billion artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out what should I show [you] so that [you] don’t turn off." (Anders Hansen, 04:06)

• The consequence is less sleep, less movement, and fewer meaningful in-person interactions. Each of these, Dr Hansen notes, is a core protective factor against depression and anxiety.

3. Eroding Mental & Social Health

• Technology’s greatest impact isn’t always what we do online, but “what we don’t do when we are online”:
  • Less face-to-face socializing
  • Reduced physical activity
  • Poorer sleep
• This erosion increases susceptibility to depression and anxiety.

4. The Loss of Presence and Authentic Connection

• Dr Chatterjee emphasizes that “everything good in life comes from presence”—whether that’s deep work, quality time with family, or genuine friendship. (05:08)

• The thoughtful exchange references Sherry Turkle’s book, Reclaiming Conversation, noting how digital communication can feel safer but comes at the cost of authentic, messy—and very human—conversation.

  "We're not wired for perfectly edited communications... That's the risk that we are running by having this real time conversation. But it's also something that is part of humanity." (Rangan Chatterjee, 06:16)

5. How Devices Undermine Focus (Even When Unused)

• Simply having a smartphone in your pocket or on the table reduces cognitive performance and quality of interaction—even if left untouched.

  "It turns out that the ones who have left the phone outside perform better, even if you don't pick it up... you must constantly think, 'I'm not going to pick up my phone.'" (Anders Hansen, 08:55)

6. Children, Teenagers & Comparison Culture

• Founders of tech companies, such as Steve Jobs, restricted their own children’s screen use—a telling signal of the risks.

  "Steve Jobs... was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads... And he himself was cautious." (Anders Hansen, 10:59)

• Adolescents are especially vulnerable:
  • Social media amplifies unhealthy comparison and fear of being left out.
  • In the past, one compared oneself with dozens; now it’s thousands or millions.
  • "For every photo on Instagram, there was a hundred photos that was discarded that you don’t see" (Anders Hansen, 12:00).
• Girls age 12-13 and boys 14-15 seem most at risk, especially around puberty, when peer acceptance is crucial (11:20-12:50).

7. Self-Understanding & Personal Strategies

• Rational understanding of these traps isn’t enough; subconscious comparison still impacts self-esteem.
  • Dr Chatterjee: "Knowing it makes no difference, because you can know it, but your subconscious... is still picking up this idea that their life is better." (13:48)
• Dr Hansen recommends practical, environment-oriented strategies:
  • Keep the phone in another room during deep work or meaningful interactions.

    "When I do my most important work… that’s when I am really in a deep focus mode. And I want to protect that... then I have the phone outside, that’s not going to disturb me." (Anders Hansen, 16:12)

  • Avoid phones in the bedroom or at the table during conversation.
  • Recognize our evolutionary "Achilles heel"—we’re wired to seek group belonging and are easily distracted.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dr Hansen (01:58):

  "You are not the customer of Facebook, you are the product. Every second that we spend on our screens is money for them."

• Dr Chatterjee (05:08):

  "Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work… me chatting to my wife… my children… my buddies. All those things require attention and presence if you’re gonna get the true value off them."

• Dr Hansen (07:06):

  "Loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food."

• Dr Hansen (10:59):

  "The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that if you’re looking at the screen more than you are looking at someone’s eyes, you’re doing something wrong."

• Dr Chatterjee (13:48):

  "We know we’re comparing, you know, the highlight reel of someone else’s life to the mundane reality of our day-to-day life... but I still don’t think knowing it makes a jot of difference."

• Dr Hansen (15:16):

  "You let someone who you have never met, who you will never meet, make you feel inadequate because they had a better looking toilet or a more expensive vacation... that’s insane."

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Practical Takeaways & Tips

• Distance—not discipline—is key:
  Make your environment work for you by keeping devices out of reach during focused work, study, and important social time. (16:12, 17:33)
• Establish clear rules at home and with family:
  Tech industry leaders strongly limit their children’s screen time.
• Acknowledge our evolved vulnerabilities:
  Understand that our brains are not designed for the 24/7 artificial social exposure of modern technology.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:58] Attention as a commodity & the business of distraction
• [04:06] Technology as “super stimuli” and societal naivety
• [05:08] Importance of presence and relationships
• [06:14] Loss of authentic conversation and connection
• [07:06] Human social instincts & loneliness
• [08:55] Phone proximity undermining focus
• [10:59] Tech leaders limiting their own children’s device use
• [12:00–13:48] Social media, comparison, and adolescent mental health
• [16:12–17:33] Personal boundaries to protect focus

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Summary

This episode distills urgent truths about our digital age: Your attention is lucrative. Technology is engineered to capture it—and your wellbeing can become collateral damage. But by understanding both the forces at play and our innate psychological vulnerabilities, we can consciously reclaim our minds, our relationships, and our satisfaction with real life.

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For the full conversation and more practical tips on living a healthier, more present life, listen to the complete episode or visit Dr Chatterjee’s website.

Transcript

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

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[Dr. Anders Hansen]

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, 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.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

I think many of us intuitively know that we feel better when we have not spent hours looking at our phones or scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. And I appreciate everyone has a different relationship with things like Instagram. Some people use it to follow inspirational accounts or catch up with family. I understand all that. But as a society, it is very clear that these things are having. For all their potential benefits, there are also some very, very worrying negatives. But I think most people intuitively know that phone use or excessive phone use is a problem. Yet despite us talking about it, despite them hearing about it, a lot of people just aren't able to change what

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

they do because it's so difficult. Smartphones, they are super stimuli. There is nothing that is so rewarding in nature as TikTok. For instance, every time you turn TikTok on, you have a 10 billion dollar artificial intelligence directed towards you to figure out what should I show Wrangham so that he doesn't turn off? Because every second of his time on this platform is money for us. And so I think personally that we have been very naive in implementing these incredibly powerful technologies, especially directed to children and teenagers, without any regulation. And we feel bad and guilty because we constantly return to our phones. I do that as well. And I've just realized that it's not just about characters. These are very powerful stimuli. And the only way to fix that is to create distance to them. Don't have them around all the time. They are great tools for some things, but don't have them around all the time because they will be too, too attractive.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

This modern epidemic of distraction is so harmful because anything good in life comes from presence. Everything good in life comes from presence. Deep focus at work. Me and you interacting now with no phones here, just me and you sitting across a table, Me chatting to my wife about something important. Me chatting to my children, right? Me hanging out with my buddies and having a laugh. All those things require attention and presence if you're gonna get the true value off them. All of those experiences get diminished when we can't focus, when we cannot maintain our attention. So I guess what I'm trying to get to Anders is how do we change things? What do we do? If we look at the addiction with smartphones, if I look at what's happening with children now, you can have quite a negative view about the future of humanity. You think, well, actually, where does this go in five years, in 10 years? Where do we end up in 20 years? There's a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which is brilliant.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

I read it, I love it.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

And this whole idea that we're losing the art of conversation, this is one of the things that makes us human. And many kids and teenagers apparently, according to Sherry and her research, prefer to communicate electronically because it's more predictable. I've never forgot that since I read it. Where you can edit a text message, you can check it over a few times, get it perfect before you send it. But in real life now, me and you, we have to risk saying something wrong, getting our words jumbled right, maybe trying to tell a story and forgetting it halfway through. That's the risk that we are running by having this real time conversation. But it's also something that is part of humanity. It's part of who we are, right? We're not wired for these perfectly edited communications, are we?

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

Absolutely. That's a good point. And I think loneliness is something for us that's boring. But historically, loneliness was death. To be excluded from the group, then you were gone. To be part of a group was as important as having food. That's why we have so strong instincts to create bonds to other people. We read one another, we're very good at that. And we try to create bonds, social bonds. And we want to belong to a group at all costs. Now those social needs, they were created during millions and millions and millions of years where we met physically. And now all of a sudden we meet like this and we can replace some of that with a screen, but we can't replace all of it. It's not just what your face expression on the screen, you know, it's so many more signals that we are constantly registering. And if we all felt that during COVID when we spent so much time on our screens, that they were good for helping us during a difficult period. But most of us felt very lonely and isolated. And that shows, I think, that there's a purely physical dimension to our incredible strong social need. And when that need is being eroded by these incredibly powerful super stimuli, we spend six hours on this. The brain thinks that we're lonely. And if we're lonely, well then we will die. That's mortal danger. And then we feel crappy. Of course

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

we have to intentionally create some rules for ourself because if we don't, we'll end up allowing Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to distract us and untrain our focus.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

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 it turns 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 one so have left the phone outside perform better, even if it's. 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. 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, 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, 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 their 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.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

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.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

Exactly. There was a journalist that came home to Steve Jobs and he thought that there would be iPads everywhere and, you know, the screens in every room. And there weren't. He was very restrictive on how much his kids could use iPads. And we remember Steve Job is one of the persons who had the biggest insights on how technology affects us ever. And he himself was cautious about using it to mush. That says something. The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, has said that in 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 lives 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. But there is a big caveat to this, and that is over usage 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 time around puberty. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think that part of your lives, 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. I am 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, you know, 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. And what that signal sends to you is that I'm not good enough. The thing is, it feels 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.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

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, you know, 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 you're subconscious, when you're scrolling, you're still picking up 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, Rongan, 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.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

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 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 present it in different ways, then you start to see 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.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

And so what's your approach to deal with smartphone addiction and a lack of focus? I mean, how do you.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

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. Is there 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 gonna disturb me.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

So you've taken preemptive action. You keep the phone in a different room when you're trying to do deep thinking. James Clear, the author, talks about the same thing. He says even if his phone is in the next room. So maybe just three seconds to get up, walk there and get it. Even just having it in the next room means he's significantly less likely to look at it.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

Exactly. It's like candy. And therefore I can't have it around all the time. So I don't have it in the bedroom, I don't have it when I work, and so on. And I tried to be aware of this Achilles heels in my psychology, which are in reality defense mechanisms or survival mechanisms that have become Achilles heels in our modern society. And everyone must find their own way of sort of working through this. But it's incredibly fascinating to learn more about it because you understand yourself better.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

Yeah.

[Dr. Anders Hansen]

And if you understand yourself better, well, then you could work around what's, what's difficult for you. It's a constant uphill battle. But I mean, if we want to feel as good as possible, then we have to do this.

[Dr. Rangan Chatterjee]

Hope you enjoyed that Bite Sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday five and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of [e-mail] Friday 5 Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.