Your social media addiction isn't a lack of willpower, it's your brain working exactly as it was designed to.

Professor Guy Leschziner is one of the UK's leading neurologists, Professor of Neurology and Sleep Medicine at King's College London, and head of one of Europe's largest Sleep Disorders Centres at Guy's Hospital. His latest book, Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human, was named an FT Best Book of 2024 and argues that our deepest impulses, gluttony, envy, pride, wrath, lust, greed, and sloth, aren't moral failings. They're biological realities hardwired by millions of years of evolution.

In this episode, Abi takes that framework somewhere Guy hasn't been taken before: social media.

- GLUTTONY: The infinite scroll hijacks the same brain circuitry that evolved to survive scarcity, the reason you can't stop, even when you want to, has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with dopamine

- ENVY: Your brain was designed to monitor a tribe of 150 people. Social media forces it to run a threat-assessment on the entire world simultaneously, driving anxiety, eroding self-worth, and keeping cortisol chronically elevated

- PRIDE: When self-worth is pegged to a number that refreshes every few minutes, the neurological pathway to genuine internal confidence starts to break down.

- WRATH: Anger is the fastest-spreading emotion online because platforms algorithmically reward it. What happens to a brain when an ancient survival circuit fires thirty times a day at strangers, with no resolution and no outlet?

- LUST: Social media is the most sophisticated novelty-delivery system ever built. The dopamine hits may be conditioning your brain to find real life chronically under-stimulating.

- GREED: Who is really doing the hoarding, the user chasing followers, or the platform extracting human attention as a commodity?

- SLOTH: The most dangerous sin of all. Is social media outsourcing human cognition to an algorithm, and what does a brain that stops being challenged actually lose?

A raw, unfiltered conversation about neuroscience, performance, and what it takes to protect your brain in the modern attention economy.

GUY'S BOOKS (Available on Amazon and Independant retailers)

Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human (2024)
The Man Who Tasted Words (2022)
The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep (2019)

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON GUY'S WORK?

Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett https://open.spotify.com/episode/7gbhE80VKLz00uLAnYopkU
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee https://open.spotify.com/episode/4srfYQq3CNmQlX9bO97JwQ

Website: www.guyleschziner.com