← Everything Is Energy with Cathy Heller
Everything Is Energy with Cathy Heller
Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation, Social Media, Smartphones & Helping Kids Reclaim Childhood
00:48:16
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- [00:00]
A
Here's something that people don't fully get about money. Money comes into your life instantly when your consciousness expands. Wealth is not something you have to build over time. It's something you become available for now because God is always giving. The supply is always here, the support is always here. So the question is not whether abundance exists. The question is whether you are open to receiving it. I wanna invite you to a special live call I'm doing this coming Tuesday, March 31st, all about wealth consciousness. And I'm gonna talk about how you can stop bracing and stop trying to push and force. Because the second you let yourself feel the expansion and perceive how supported you are, that's the second that you just decided there is more for you and things move very quickly. We're gonna also do some live coaching on the call. So come with your questions and an open heart. You can join us for free. Make sure that you save your spot@kathy heller.com wealthcall kathyheller.com wealthcall I'll see you there. Hey, it's Kathy Heller. Welcome back to Everything Is Energy. Before we jump into today's conversation with an awesome guest, I just want to share something with you. We just stepped into a new month. This is the month of Aries. And spiritually, this is such a powerful time. This is a season of liberation, of things breaking open, of miracles that don't come from pushing, but actually the biggest miracles in our life and they come into our life when we are open enough to receive them. There's an energy right now that supports huge shifts in your life. The kind of energy where something just clicks and life starts moving in a whole new way. We just entered spring and I taught this class to talk about the month of Aries. And I shared this on an episode we did this past Friday. And this is the kind of work that we do every single month. Every single month, I do a workshop on the energy of the month. We're not just talking about it, but we're actually living it so that we can understand what's the leverage that we get energetically every single month, what's happening and how can we align with that so that we can make real, amazing changes in our life. If you want to go deeper into all of this with me, you can watch the full workshop I did on Aries. It's called the Breakthrough of freedom. It's@kathyheller.com workshop. It's really a special class. I think you're going to love it and I'd love for you to dm me once you watch it and let me know what your biggest takeaway is. So today I'm really excited for this conversation because the amazing Jonathan Haidt is here. He's a social psychologist, he's a speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of a book many of you have heard of. It's called the Anxious Generation. If you're a parent or you have kids in your life, or you're simply a human living in this digital world, this episode is really going to open your eyes. We talk about what smartphones and social media are actually doing to our kids brains, the effects that are skyrocketing from all the screen time, and how these platforms were literally designed to keep us hooked. But what I love about Jonathan is that even though he knows the data better than anyone, he's incredibly hopeful about how we can turn this around. So if you've ever had concerns about your kids or if you've ever felt how hard it is to stay present in a world of constant notifications, I think this episode is going to feel really important and really empowering. Now, without further ado, please welcome the brilliant Jonathan Haidt.
- [03:20]
B
Jonathan, it's such a pleasure to have you here. I'm really honestly blown away that you are so generous because you've done so many of these interviews. And the fact that you still have so much passion and willingness to have this conversation, I just don't take that for granted. Truly, I'm grateful that you're here.
- [03:37]
C
Oh, well, thank you, Kathy. But you're giving me the opportunity to reach the most important group of people, which is mothers of children, especially children under, say, 13 or 14. Those are the ones where there's so much that we can do to give them a better life. And the amazing, I mean, the fact that the book blew up as soon as it came out in 2024 is because mothers grabbed it, read it, told each other, and then they jumped into action. So if I can talk to you and reach a large group of mothers, I'm here for it.
- [04:10]
B
Well, first of all, let me just say two things. Number one, unless you were living under a rock for the last few years, then you know all about Jonathan and his book because he really exposed some very sobering information about what's happening to our kids growing up in a digital world and how it's making a generation quite anxious. And we're going to dive into that, obviously. But what I also want to say is I'm always really struck by your positivity. Like you, you know, the Data better than anyone. And you're like, you have a smile in you, like, as soon as we get on. And whenever I see you speaking, you have this demeanor of positivity and such a hopeful outlook. And I want to start there because I think it's very daunting. And I. We as parents are so hard on ourselves, and we see our kids on screens and we know how much more stressful we feel as a society. So therefore, we just start getting into this place where we catastrophize. And I feel like in order for us to do better, we do need your outlook, which is to start with some optimism. So can you just tell me, because I am curious how you can be optimistic, see what's going on?
- [05:17]
C
Okay, well, okay. So part of my positivity is, is that I've done various, like, social change projects throughout my life. In college, I ran the Connecticut Committee for Handgun Control. And that was an utterly hopeless endeavor. We made no progress. And I've created democracy promotion, you know, all kinds of political science and social psychology to improve democracy. No progress. I've worked to reform universities. A little progress there. And then, you know, I see just how bad this problem is for kids. And the amazing thing is we're making progress beyond my wildest dreams. It's happening internationally, it's happening just around the world. Laws are changing, norms are changing. Parents are rising up and saying, I'm not going to just feed my kid into the machine anymore. So it's really, really fun to win. It's really, really fun to finally have an issue where I worked really hard to produce the book. The book came out and people are embracing it. So that's my personal story, why I'm so enthusiastic, more directly to your question. I am very worried about the future overall, and I think AI raises a lot of alarming questions, and we don't know the answers to those. But if we can win on kids in social media, we can win on kids and screens. If we can get changes in legislation and norms, then for the first time ever, we will have actually pushed back on big tech. That's never happened before. So if we can win on this issue, then it is really hopeful that we can when we can affect the harder issues that are coming in the next few years. But if we can't win on this, then it's pretty hopeless that we're going to win on the harder problem of AI So rescuing our kids from a childhood of addiction, that's an incredibly bipartisan issue. It's, in fact, it's Sometimes said to be the only bipartisan issue left in this country, because wherever you look around the world, it's always across the. It's left and right because everyone has kids, everyone cares about kids. Everyone can see what these devices are doing to their kids. So that's my optimism. Like, we're really. We're making unbelievable progress.
- [07:17]
B
That's amazing. I love how you. I mean, I. I'm frustrated on your behalf that other things were not as successful, but I do love the comparison that you feel there are wins being made. And that is such an amazing thing, truly, that people are taking such action and seeing the seriousness in it and actually making change. And we just moved to Florida from Los Angeles, but my kids, schools, like, my daughter went to a school called Milken. Like, they completely took the phones away. And this is now happening now in my kids, Florida schools. Like, they're taking the phones away. And I love seeing that.
- [07:52]
C
Yeah, tell me about it. What have you heard? What did your children say? What have you heard from the school? What's happening when they take the phones away in school?
- [07:59]
B
Well, first there was a lot of anxiety, right? The kids and the parents were like, well, what if I need to text the kid? Or, you know, I need to. They need their lunch being sent home, whatever it was. And my kids have said what a blessing it is. And, you know, my daughter goes to sleepaway camp in the summer. She goes to Camp Vermont, Ojai. And in the. In the letter she sends me home, the thing she always says to me, and I'm not just saying this to make you feel good, she'll say to me, I love not having my phone. I don't want my phone. When I get out off the bus, don't give me back my phone. And then, of course, within three days, she says, give me my phone. And I think it's so. It's fascinating, isn't it? So I'd love to ask you just to set the table for us, because I think all of us are speculating, but we don't really know an inch of what, you know, what is the problem when you say addiction, what does the actual science suggest? What is the addiction that's happening? What are our kids experiencing? What's being taken from them in their childhood? What is the issue when they are living a digital life?
- [09:01]
C
Yeah. So the addiction takes two forms, and it's important to understand the way that they're different. The way that people commonly think about it is through dopamine, which is always the case when there's an addiction, it always is. Because some stimulus becomes associated with pleasure, progress, something that we want, and then when we see the trigger of it, we get a little pulse of dopamine. When a kid sees their phone, if their phone has rewarded them a lot before they see the phone, they want it. And so your daughter, when she's away, she's not addicted. Her brain has reset. She says, I don't want it. But then she comes back, she sees the phone, and it, you know, like. Like an addict who sees his needles. Like, it triggers a little bit of dopamine associated with password. I want it, I want it, I want it. Because dopamine, people think it's the pleasure neurotransmitter, it is pleasurable, but it's real. The central function of dopamine is motivation. Dopamine makes you want something. So I can look at potato chips and I can think, yeah, that might be nice. And then I eat one. I eat one, and I can't stop because that triggers dopamine, which isn't like, oh, that feels good. It's like, oh, I want more. That feels good. I want more, more, more. All right, so television, when you and I were young, television, you know, they said we watched too much tv. Maybe we did. But television, you sit there and you watch a story which usually goes on 20 minutes with the commercial interruptions or 30 minutes with commercial interruptions, or maybe a movie. There's not a lot of dopamine. Television presents stories, and you get into the story, you lose yourself. If it's well told, that's very, very healthy. So, listeners, you should not be afraid of movies. Like, if you can pick a high quality movie, let your kid watch. That's great. Not a movie a day, but if you want to do movie night once a week, or let your kid, if you have two or three kids, let them watch together socially. So this is not about screens, per se. This is about dopamine. Because here's what you need to understand. Touchscreen. When you hand your kid a touchscreen. And we all did it. I did it, you know, because your kid's crying, you're busy, you have to make dinner, you have a call, whatever. And we've all discovered, hand them this, and they're quiet. Okay, so we all did it. But here's what happens. You have your kid now sitting alone with a small screen in their hand close to their face. And the key thing is that the stimulus is presented. And then that calls for behavior. So they'll watch, and then they'll decide Nah, that's not interesting enough. They swipe. And then if they get rewarded on a variable ratio schedule, that is. Some of the short videos are great. That is the most powerful way to addict a brain, to take control of a brain. And so it's the swiping. The worst of the worst is TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels. My advice is zero. Like, nobody, even adults, none of us should be watching this crap because this is the most addictive garbage. You don't learn. I mean, yeah, maybe you learn some trivial things, but people spend hours and hours and you say, well, what did you learn and what did you expect? They can't even remember what they saw. So the short videos and the touchscreen device creates a dopamine loop, just like gambling, just like every drug that all goes through dopamine. So that's the major kind of addiction which is at issue in the court cases now going on in Los Angeles. These companies, they designed it to do that. A lot of them took a course at Stanford called Persuasive Design. How do you design computer programs that will hook people? That was literally the goal. And we have a lot of their internal communications. They designed it for that dopamine addiction. But there's another kind of addiction that I don't think people are talking about enough, which is the social addiction. And what I mean by that is, okay, so for the boys, it's overwhelmingly about dopamine, because it's not just the. So it's the video games, it's the porn, it's the gambling. So just keep your boys away from all of this crap. Do not give them a smartphone until they're at least 14. Never let them have a screen in the bedroom. But for girls and all that applies not necessarily quite as much on the dopamine side. But for girls especially, the social addiction is incredibly powerful. What that means is all the kids are trying to manage their status. You know, when our kids are little, they don't care about their status and they're sweet and they're innocent, but once they hit like 9, 10, 11, especially middle school, all of a sudden they are immersed in a brutal ranking system. And the girls, it's all about their looks, their prettiness, their sexiness. And the boys. It used to all, when I was a kid, it was all about your athletic ab. It actually also involves like having a six pack or an eight pack or what, you know, I mean, the boys are exposed to all this nonsense on social media too. But the thing is, once your entire prestige depends on you keeping up a stream of posts, you managing your brand. All our kids have been forced to become brand managers 24, 7 for their own personal online brand. Now, if you say. If you say, Janet, you didn't clean up your room, so I'm taking away your phone. I'm taking away your phone for a day. What you're going to get isn't just a dopamine panic. What you're going to get is a social death panic. Because you're basically saying that engaging world where everyone's fighting for the reputation or trying to impress people with their posts or whatever, you can't play for a day. And that's why we sometimes have cases when girls are heavily addicted to social media and they're compulsively using it and they're on all the time. If you take the phone away for a week, they're going to think about killing themselves. And sometimes they do. So that's not pure dopamine. That is, you're basically saying social death. And we don't understand that as adults because we don't understand what it is like to have your entire social life be on Instagram or something like that. So these products are incredibly addictive in those two ways. And what do we do with addictive products in our society? We either ban them in the case of heroin or some drugs that are so addictive that they really ruin a lot of lives. Or we say, you know what, you're an adult. You can decide to gamble. It's addictive. You might ruin your family, but that's your choice. But you have to be 21 to gamble. It's only with social media that we say you're going to see all kinds of horrible things. But you know what? As long as you say you're 13, we're all good. That's the way it's been since the early 2000s. No limits, no guidelines, no age verification and no accountability for the companies. They have never been held accountable. Thousands of kids are dead because of things that happened to them online. Some of those kids would have died anyway. Some of the drug overdoses would have happened anyway. A lot of the deaths are suicide from cyberbullying or sextortion. I don't want to go over the top here because obviously suicide is thankfully still rare. But this is the savage world that our kids are growing up in. And what my movement, we've been trying to do at Anxious Generation, what we've tried to do is really show people like, this is insane. This is not close. This is not hard. This is not a. Well, there's pluses. This is, this is a hellscape to raise kids in and it is damaging their mental health. It's decimating their ability to pay attention. As soon as you give it to them, they will stop reading books, they will spend less time with their friends, they will get less exercise, they will get less sunshine, they will get less sleep. I mean this is not close. So we have to all rise up and say no, no more and let's sue the bastards. Let's hold them responsible. They did to a whole generation globally. It's not just America. They did this globally and they've never paid the price until now.
- [16:05]
A
It's really, really upsetting to say the least.
- [16:09]
B
And the truth of the matter is I didn't even know half of that. All I know is just the generalized anxiety that my kids have from looking at things too long. Whether even if it's just people chewing food. Right, like that's right. You know, it's just gets to the point because thankfully I don't think that my kids have seen some of those things or had some of those experiences.
- [16:34]
C
They will eventually.
- [16:35]
B
But I do think that generally it's still creating a way in which I know that my 14 year old's like, I need melatonin, I can't fall asleep. I'm like, well you can't fall asleep because you're looking at your phone and it's overly stimulating you. So even just things like that are so serious and so significant. And she says, I feel so much less anxious when I'm at camp because I'm not on my phone. So I think even without going to the whole extent of the truth, which you just shared with us, which at some point you have to be responsible and know what's going on, all of it, even if you don't want to hear it. But even just the day to day stuff that all the kids are experiencing. What would be your dream scenario, like if we could right the ship? What is a healthy or appropriate or what would be a good use of them having a digital life? Like what would that look like if it was done well?
- [17:32]
C
Yeah. So the four norms that I propose in the anxious generation are the guide to reclaiming childhood in the real world. We are mammals, we are primates. We need to play. If anyone's had a puppy or a kitten, they need to play, play, play. And that's what you have to do to wire up your brain. Video games don't. I mean they're a little bit Playful, but they don't count. You need to run around, you need to chase, you need to play predator prey games, you need to cooperate, you need to imagine eventually you need risk, physical risk. You need all those things, a lot of it. And now that our kids are raised on screens and from, you know, we've all seen the baby carriages with an iPad holder that, you know, the kid just can watch a screen all day long, all that is gone. Gen Alpha, those who are born 2010 or 2011 and later gen Alpha may be worse off even than Gen Z because Gen Alpha was raised from toddlerhood with screens. Gen Z, the problem begins with at puberty they get smartphones and social media. But Gen Alpha, I think we're going to see more serious damage from the iPads in their face and because they raised with TikTok and short video, which is even worse than Instagram. So we have to get rid of all of this. And so the four norms that I propose in the book are collective action solutions. It's very hard to do this on your own if you're the only family doing it right. Your kid is isolated. But if we all do it together, then our kids have a fun childhood like we did. So here they are. No smartphone before high school, just give your kid a flip phone or phone watch and, you know, a second, third, fourth grader, they don't need. Oh, you know what, second, third, fourth grade, get them a landline, get them a tin can. There's all these new landlines. They actually use wifi, so you don't need to pay for a separate, you know, phone number. But the kids love the tin can, the landline. They can call grandma, they call their friends. And then at that point, if you can get a few kids in your neighborhood to all have this landline, then they say, you know, hey, Billy, what are you doing today after school? Oh, nothing. Oh, hey, should we meet up at the basketball? Like, it's amazing what happens. So elementary school, they should have a landline. They don't need anything else. Okay. If you're going to let them roam the neighborhood, which you should, then you might want them to have a phone watch or a simple phone that can make phone calls. That's all good. Second, Norm, no social media till 16. Really, it should be 18. This should be an adult activity like gambling, drinking. But I said, let's go for 16 because I think we can get that widely and it's working. We're getting that around the world. The whole world is going to 16. So no smartphone. But no social media until 16. Again, really should be 18, but let's just focus on 16 as a norm. The third norm is phone free schools, which again, we're getting all over the country. 40 states have taken action. Only 20 states did it right. That is phone free for the whole day, bell to bell. So if your kid can text you between classes or at lunch, your state did it wrong and your kid is not going to get the benefit. And your kid's social life is not going to improve. Because when you just take the phone away during class, which is what 20 states did, take it away during class, what happens between classes? You just had addicts, you take away their drug for 50 minutes, they think about the drug for 50 minutes and then they get the drug back. So of course they're all on their phones. So that was a mistake. My group, we tried to push states to go the whole day, but only 20 did it successfully. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Because the goal isn't just, hey kids, get off your screens and then just read books and play guitar. The point of it is, here's two visions of childhood. One is what kids have been doing for 15 years now, which is you get a device, an iPad and then a phone, and that's it, that's what you do for the rest of your life. And the other is like what you saw in the movies, because all of our kids have seen movies where kids in the 90s or 80s had adventures. Disney movies have always had kids or baby animals having adventures. So kids know that this is possible. And if you offer that to them. And that is the point, that is the point of the book that Katherine Price wrote and I wrote called the Amazing Generation. It's a guide to kids for how to be a rebel, how to reject the deformed childhood that many or most of Gen Z had, and how to reclaim a childhood in the real world. And it's working. Kids read the book and then they say, mom, I don't want a smartphone when I go to middle school. Just give me a flip phone. That's enough. I don't want social media. So you ask me, what does it look like if we succeed? The answer is we begin seeing kids from the age of 8 riding bicycles or walking to friends houses. We see groups of kids 8 to 12. Like right now, kids don't really go out until they're like 11 or 12. At that age we let them. But, but especially, you know, 8 to 11 with these really Crucial period, this crucial period for learning, independence, developing a self image that I can do things, I can talk to somebody if I have to, if I get lost, I can find my way back. Like all those things, you have to do it over and over and over again. So in a few years from now, my vision is where it's going to be normal to see 8, 9, 10 year old kids coming into a store, buying things, laughing together, going out, coming up with a pickup soccer game. And when kids get to do those things, their levels of anxiety and depression will go way down because their level of competence rises so high. They know that they can do things. And right now we've taught our kids, you can't do anything. You're fragile, I have to protect you. If I ever take my eyes off you, you'll be kidnapped. Which is nonsense. So that's my vision.
- [22:46]
B
It made me cry when you talked about kids riding bikes and stuff. Just because I just the other day, I mean, we moved from LA to Florida and we live in this. All these like housing complexes are gated neighborhoods so it's super safe for the kids to go out. And my daughter said, because I have three daughters, 9, 12 and 14. And my mom said to her, well, there's so many kids that live in those neighborhoods and because there's like, let's say 700 homes here and they're all about our families. And my daughter said to my mom, nobody's out. Like no one's out. And I said, mom, they're all inside on a screen, isolated. And when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, we were all outside and my daughter was like, what does that mean? I'm like, there was nothing to watch during the day. I didn't have a computer and I didn't have a phone and kids TV was only Saturday mornings. There wasn't even a television show until the evening if it was a sitcom, like who's the Boss or something. And so I said, so we all just met outside, we threw our backpacks down and went outside. And it's so painful. It really, really is. It's so painful. When my daughter, my middle daughter last year, she graduated from sixth grade and she went to the school, a Jewish day school called Stephen S. Wise. And the rabbi said something that made everybody tear up. He said, I'm going to say something as my final address to you, which is going to sound strange, but I mean it. And it's that I hope you're lonely because right now you're spending all this time Thinking you're connecting, but you're not. You're alone. And I want you to feel that so that you'll realize that those texts and those chats are not connection and that you feel the difference when you're sitting across from someone and their body language changes because you're in the same room or together, you're doing something. And we were all like, it was the best farewell speech. It was really amazing. Rabbi Woznica Stevens Wise. It was amazing. And I walked out of there and I was like, what have we done? Like, you're right. When you said sue the bastards, I laughed because it's like, this is insane. Like, it's actually crazy that we've just allowed this to actually take away our children's childhood. I want to ask you something else, because I remember hearing, a few years ago, I went to hear Wayne Gretzky speak, and he was talking with the late Sir Ken Robinson about genius and creativity. And I've heard you touch on something similar. So this is why I want to ask you this. And. And they were talking about how when Wayne was growing up, his parents would say, don't come back home until you see the streetlights go on. And so we spent the entire day. That's it. Go outside. So he's like, I played every sport, not just hockey, played everything. We had adventures in the backyard. And it was inevitable that I was going to probably do something like this because my parents insisted on me being outdoors and outside. So I learned every possible sport. And I think about how boredom is, like, that's where your best ideas come from. And I've heard you talk about how we are taking from our kids the opportunity for them to awaken within them what is genius about being a human. And so I just wanted you to touch on that. What. What do you mean by that? Tell us more.
- [25:59]
C
Certainly. Yeah, yeah. So actually, let me return. Let me start with what your rabbi said. That is such a beautiful story. And that is what an example of wisdom to say those words at that time. And I also want to comment on you choking up when I was talking. I thought I saw that. I thought I saw your eyes change. And then I actually felt. Because I do that, too. Whenever I talk about, like, what kids have been love, like, I chunk up, too. So let me make it clear. You can actually bring that back, and it's much easier than you think. Here's how you do it. Go to letgrow.org this is an organization that I co founded with Lenore Skenazy. She wrote A book called Free Range Kids about the importance of letting your kids be independent. Let them face obstacles, let them get lost, let them find their way back. So Lenore and I founded this organization in order to give Lenore a bigger platform, because I think her book is so important. Free Range Kids and letgrow.org, we have two simple programs, the main offerings. One is called Play Club, which is where most Americans are afraid to let their kids out, but the one place they trust is the school playground. So go to your school and try to get them to open the playground 30 to 60 minutes before class and keep it open in the afternoons. Or maybe it's just one day a week. And then parents, they can sign up. So anyone can drop off their kids half an hour before. And this is especially good for the boys because the boys are going to run around, run around, run around, and then first period starts and they're ready to learn. So it does amazing. It's good for everyone. Girls need a lot of play, too, but boys really need that. So play Club. Open the playground early. Keep it open in the afternoons as an activity instead of piano lessons or Hebrew school or whatever else you're going to send your kids to. Even it's just one day a week. Let's say it's Fridays. You have Play Club on Fridays, and it's just totally unsupervised play. That's it. Kids show up. There's one adult nearby, maybe in a corner, maybe inside. But totally unsupervised play. It works wonders. Everyone has a great time, kids. Because our kids don't actually know how to play. It's within them if they get a chance, but they're not put in a place where they have to decide what to do. They're always told, here's what you're doing. So Play Club is super duper easy. And then you can also do it in your neighborhood. And that's called a playborhood. And all it is is, so, Kathy, do you know three other families within a half mile of your house in your development? Do you know three other families where there are kids your kids age? Okay, so here's what you do. You go, well, I'd say you bring them a copy of the Amazing Generation or the Anxious Generation. Either one. Doesn't matter. Okay? So all you do is you just go to the parents and you say, how about we five families form a playborhood? And what that means is that maybe it's every day, or maybe it's just Fridays. Friday's the best day. Because then it often then they have so much fun together that they say, hey, what are you doing? Oh, tomorrow let's meet up at the creek or whatever. So. And all it is the five families that. Or 10, however many it is. Everyone. The kids all exchange their phone numbers, ideally a landline, or maybe you have to go through the parents, but it's best if you set up so you don't have to go through the parents. The kids, they call each other or they text if they're a little older. And they say, okay, let's. Tomorrow we're going to start at Tommy's house because he's got badminton in the backyard. Let's start with badminton, then we'll see. We might decide to go over to Jerry's house and do something else. Or if there's a public place, if there's a basketball court or a baseball field, we'll go there. We'll meet there. So before this electronic age, that's what kids did. We went out and play is the most fun thing there is. So we went out and we found play. It's much harder. As you said, it's not there for the taking. So adults have to be more intentional about it. But what I just described, like, could you do that? Could you do that next week? Like, find five families?
- [29:37]
B
I mean, I think our kids would all be better for it.
- [29:40]
C
Yeah, they would. And what do you think would happen? Suppose those five families start meeting up and the kids are riding bicycles, they're doing things. What's going to happen next?
- [29:49]
B
Yeah, it's amazing. I just gave a talk. A friend of mine, she's Orthodox, she's more religious than we are, and she invited me over on a Saturday night, and I came to her little neighborhood, and I saw all these kids outside. And by accepting.
- [30:03]
C
That's right, the Jewish kids do that. They do that on a Shabbat.
- [30:06]
B
Yeah, because they don't have their phones and they all live together. And I was like, okay, that is the one reason you could convince me to do that, because I looked at it. I was like, you're so rich. Like, this is richness. She's like, oh, it's the best thing ever. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't even believe that this happens. Like, it's like an underground society where kids actually play and talk to each other because they don't have their phones for one day and could all do that. Like, that doesn't have to be a religious mandate. Like, you can choose. That's what you're saying, like you can choose to give that to your kids. And I just want you to comment though on what happens when kids don't have the tolerance to be bored. What are we missing? What do they miss when, you know, I remember reading that Steve Jobs, before he created Apple was a Zen monk. He used to meditate and, you know, having the capacity to slow down and to be at your own walls and pond even for five minutes or 20 minutes. I feel like it's in the downtime that we learn how to, I don't know, regulate our nervous system. We learn how my, my daughter comes to me, she's nine, she's like, I can't be bored, I can't be bored. She says it to me every single day. She's like, I'm so worried about being bored. I'm like, that's so interesting. And I wish I could take that away from you because when I was a kid, we weren't born, we were just inventing things. Like using our imagination was what we had.
- [31:26]
C
That's right. And so let's go back to when kids are 2, 3, 4 years old and you take them to a restaurant, let's say a three or four year old, you take them to a restaurant and you look around and most other 2, 3, 4 year old kids have a screen. They're sitting there on a device at the time.
- [31:41]
B
Oh, I hate it.
- [31:42]
C
Now, in a sense those kids have to do that because that's what they've done in the past. And so they don't know how to sit and do something else. They don't know how to do that. But if you were to raise your kids without that and you just brought pencil and paper and, or if there's two of them, they sit next to each other, they can talk or so kids can learn. And in France they don't do. In France, the kids are much better behaved. They sit at the table like the French. They didn't give the kids the devices early on. So what happens is they learn to self regulate, they learn to find interest in other things. And if we're always providing them with an entertainment machine, then they never learn to be bored. And what really sort of freaked me out. So just to step back a bit in the anxious generation, I focused on the mental health damage, which is gigantic, unbelievable crime of the century. What these companies did to teen mental health, especially to girls with depression, anxiety and addiction for everybody. But since the book came out, I've discovered that I vastly understated the damage because the mental health is not the biggest damage. The biggest damage, I believe is the loss of the human ability to pay attention, to be present, to look, think, imagine. Because we've given kids an entertainment machine, we have stuffed their lives, their consciousness is stuffed entirely full of entertainment, which means there's no room for fun. So Katherine Price, my co author on the amazing generation, she has a great book called the Power of Fun. Fun is playful, connected flow. You're doing it with someone, you're together in an imaginative world and it just go. Fun is what kids need. They don't need entertainment. But what we've done is, we said here, how about you can always be entertained, there's always content coming in and if this isn't super duper entertaining, just swipe, you'll get a 30 second video that's more entertaining. So we've destroyed their ability to just sit and be. And what that means is that to sit in a classroom, it's very hard for them to sit in a classroom because if, you know, nowadays classroom is largely on screen anyway. Everyone's got a computer on their desk, that's the next thing we have to get rid of. But if a third of the day is gamified and screen based, that means the dopamine levels, your brain adapts to that high level of stimulation, which means you downregulate the dopamine neurons. Then as soon as you close the computer and you have to sit and listen to the teacher or talk to somebody, that is so boring, it's painfully boring compared to what you were just doing. So it's hard for them to do one of the most disturbing things. I mean, if you want to get even more disturbing, we've known for a long time that kids have stopped reading books. As soon as you give your kid a smartphone and especially smartphone and video games or smartphone and social media, they're going to stop reading books. Because of book isn't nearly as dopamine rich or as quick dopamine as the screen. But now in the last year or two, we're hearing increasingly stories and evidence that kids can't watch movies anymore. It's too hard. They can't just sit and watch a movie for 90 minutes. They have to multitask. They have to look at what's going on on the screen. They have to check their social media feed. So what's being lost is the ability to be present. What's being lost is the ability to be a human who sometimes has thoughts. What's being created is just an entertainment consumer that's it. Some of my students at NYU now these are elite students. These are not the ones who are on for 12 hours a day. These are the ones who are on social media for usually two to six hours a day, which is insane, but two to six hours a day, that takes up most of your free time. And it was when I realized how their consciousness differs from mine, how some of them cannot go to sleep at night without stuff coming in. One student had to listen to rap music, rap music in order to go to sleep because he needs that quick dopamine so badly. He has to. If he's not taking in high stimulus stuff, his brain is in a state of withdrawal. So these devices have changed consciousness and they destroy creativity. This is why Gen Z has done very little. It's very hard for anyone to name a member of Gen Z who's actually done something to the point where they're known. Now obviously there's some very success. I'm not saying the whole gen. I'm just saying in terms of creating something great, starting a company, writing a famous novel, you know, like achieving some level of fame outside of social media. Obviously within social media there's lots of influencers, but outside that closed world, Gen Z's creativity is non existent. Nothing's coming out. And so you ask what is lost? I'd say almost everything.
- [35:48]
B
I remember hearing that Jimi Hendrix died and he was only like, I don't know, like late 20s or something, that he had already become Jimi Hendrix in like his 20s. Something crazy like that. Yeah, I want to also, before we start to wrap up, talk about us as adults because yes, let's do that. It's easy to focus on the ways in which this is just a problem that our kids are having because first of all, that's good that you did that because it's what makes adults care about the topic. But what about what it's doing to you? I mean I meet people every single day who tell me why they don't have time and I understand they're moms or that, but then I look at, I'm like, let me see your screen time and it's amazing. Like what you said about six hours a day, that's nothing. People are spending nine hours a day. And so we must all be more and more anxious, obviously. And I've made a point now where it's like I literally have curated what I look at. For me personally, like after October 7th, I could not look at social. I was like, I am not going to make it. I'm not going to make it. So I basically now look at, like, the only thing I can see is, like, cooking videos, interior design, my family and friends. I can't look. It's just too upsetting. Everything all the time. And it's become for everybody. It's just become a nonstop, like, news, this, that. So what can we do for ourselves as adults to get more oxygen?
- [37:10]
C
Yeah, no, thanks for raising that because this is. As I said, I understated the damage in the book because I focused on kids and mental health. But the larger damage is that we're all losing the ability to pay attention. We're all losing the ability to focus on, to read books. I'm a professor, and I haven't read a whole book in I don't know how many years now. Audiobooks are great. I have listened to full audiobooks. But the sticktuitiveness. To be reading a book knowing that I have to check all these other things is very hard for me. And so I am increasingly hearing adults are saying to me, yeah, yeah, the kids. But you know what? It's me too. There's a wonderful book by Johann Hari called Stolen Focus. And he goes to Provincetown, Cape Cod for a summer with no devices, and he goes through withdrawal. But the general lesson is that because we all went through puberty in a normal world where we develop some executive function, we're overwhelmed now. We're fragmented. But if we can clean it up, if we can move away, if we can detox, we can regain our focus. We can regain our ability to pay attention. I'll tell you the top tips that I've developed. In my class at nyu, I teach a class called Flourishing. There's a version for undergrads who are all about 19. There's a version for MBA students who are, you know, late 20s mostly. And here are the top tips. Number one, you must shut off most notifications. Most people think that they don't want to miss anything, so they leave notifications on. They install a new app. It pushes you to turn notifications on, and so go. But you need to turn almost everything off because you have to see your. Your attention is so precious. If an Uber is coming, you want to be alert. You want that to interrupt you and say, your Uber is here. Like that. You want to know. But if there's some breaking news, you do not want to be notified. You know, if there's a nuclear war about to start, believe me, everyone around you is going to be freaking out. You'll find out. But if it's just like, you know, major event in the Middle east or divorce in Hollywood. Like, no, you never want to be interrupted. You've got to see your attention. Your focus is so precious. Don't be interrupted. I have my students read a great book called Deep Work by Cal Newport. So you've got to regain your ability to do deep work. And you've got to shut out most notifications. And here's the biggest single thing you can do. This works wonders for about half my students. If you are on social media for more than 45 minutes a day, and most people are, if you're on any of them, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, anything. If you're on any of them for more than 45 minutes a day, move at least one of those apps. Move the main app. Just move it off your phone. You can still check it on a computer or if you have an old iPad that you keep in a drawer, you know, maybe just on Sundays or. But the point is that here's the key thing. You've got to turn your smartphone into a Swiss army knife instead of a slot machine. What that means is any program that you compulsively check, even if it's the weather. But if you're compulsively checking it, and usually that means social media or video games, if you're compulsively checking it, then it is addicting you through that dopamine process. It is giving you rewards on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Take all of those off your phone, because your phone's always with you. Turn it into a Swiss army knife. If anybody remembers what the first iPhone, before there was an app store, before there were push notifications in 2007, 2008, this was an amazing Swiss army knife. You know, it has maps, it has music, it even has a flashlight. So you pull it out when you need something. That's the key. You want to make your phone into a tool that you pull out when you want something, not a command center that governs your life. Almost all of my students, I ask them, what's the first thing you do in the morning when you open your eyes? Do you get a drink of water? Do you go to the bathroom? No. You pick up your phone, you check for notifications. What's the last thing you do before you close your eyes at night? Do you meditate? Do you take a warm bath? The last thing. Check your notifications. What do you do in between? Mostly check your notifications. So you've got to get control of your attention. You've got to get Your morning and evening routines improved. You've got to take the, the addictive apps off your phone, ideally delete them entirely. Nobody should be on TikTok. Nobody should be watching short videos. YouTube. Not the YouTube shorts, but YouTube. I'm not saying avoid that. There's so much. We need YouTube for a lot of things. There's a lot of important stuff on YouTube. But the short videos, get them out of your life and for God's sake, get them out of your kids lives. And let me just share two other tips. I think parents will especially appreciate this. So here are the two things I wish I had done with my kids. My kids are now 16 and 19 and they're mentally healthy. I kept them off social media, but like during COVID especially, I didn't do a good job on the computer and you know, even their phones. And so I really regret that. So here's the number one rule I wish I had done. No screens in the bedroom ever. Especially if your kids are young. You can do this. And this is the way I was raised. Maybe you like no kid has a television in their bedroom. That'd be insane. Like if you haven't, if a kid is a tv, they're going to watch it all the time. Like nobody would allow that, but we've allowed that. So no screens in the bedroom ever. And you can have a TV in the living room, you can do family, whatever. So you can have a tv, you can have a computer, ideally a desktop computer in a public space. They can use the computer, but you never want them to have access to the Internet in their bedroom at night. So no screens in the bedroom ever. Now look, in middle school or high school they might have so much homework that you'll say, okay, you can take your laptop in for an hour or two, but otherwise it lives outside. So that's. And then here's the other one that I wish I had done. And it is I wish that I had celebrated or honored Shabbat. And what I mean by that is I'm Jewish, but I'm very secular and I listened to an Ezra Klein episode. If you just look up Ezra Klein Shabbat, he has this great discussion with a woman, I forget her name, who wrote a book on Shabbat. In any case, Ezra notes that what comes out of it is to really do Shabbat you need a community. It's very hard if you don't have a community. But I wish as a secular Jew I had done this, which is especially when my kids were born. I wish I Had said, okay, Saturday all day is Shabbat. I don't do my academic work. It's family time. And I would be very lenient with myself. I would say I can read books related to my work, but it has to be a paper book. I can read books. I can clean the garage. I can do all the things that recharge, regenerate, prepare you for the next week. Because if you don't do that, like, my life has been just work almost. It moves into everything because it can, because it's always with us. So I wish that I had blocked off that time. And especially when the kids are little, they really want to be with you. And then, of course, suddenly you realize when your kid's 14, they don't want to be with you anymore. And you. Oh, God, I miss those days. So I really wish. And you know, you don't have to be Jewish to do this. Obviously, Christians often have. Sabbath is Sunday, but structure your week. This is what I learned. Oh, there's that book on Shabbat by Abraham. Joshua Heschel, I think is his name.
- [43:49]
B
Oh, my God, I love that book.
- [43:51]
C
Right. It's about how Shabbat, or how the Jewish calendar is like a cathedral in time. It's about the structure not of space, but of time. That's right. So I wish I had done that, Structured our family life with around, like a day, which is different from all other days. And anyone can do that.
- [44:06]
B
It's so beautiful. I love that you just said that. I didn't. I mean, really, both of those things are so important. And for me, I grew up totally secular. When I was in college at Hillel, I started, like, doing Shabbat dinners. And my audience knows this because I've talked about it. And our audience is, you know, like, the world. There's a dot of Jews. Everybody else is everybody else. And everybody loves these concepts, and we need to bring them back. Because humanity thrives in the blue zones. Look at the blue zones. You know, these people of all different kinds of backgrounds are in community. And for me, so my kids, we've always done Shabbat dinners. We've always had people over, and they love it. They look forward to that time. And right now that they're getting older, I realize, like, how precious that is that they look forward to Friday nights and they know we're going to have people over and we're going to all slow down together. And isn't there some study about how, like, the most Rhodes scholars ever, it's because of, like, having dinners with families without your phones, like, having real conversations. I thought there was, like, some connection to, like, say, research in front of you, but I thought there was some connection to, like, people. The better you're doing in life has a lot to do with your presence with other people in deep conversations. And I love that you mentioned the fun. That fun is flow and collaboration and connection and attention. It's so lost, and this is so important. And I'm so grateful not only to you and your kindness and humility and your passion for this, but I'm so grateful that the world has embraced so much of all of this and that you're coming together with such incredible people and helping to make it different. You should go to bed feeling so good about what you're doing. Your parents, your grandparents. There's a lot of noughts for you and everything that you're giving. No, really, it's like, this is not a small thing. This is a major thing. And it's so easy to go unnoticed because I think adults don't want to call themselves on it. And so it's, someone's got to do it. Someone's got to take us off our addictions.
- [46:01]
C
Right. Well, thank you, Kathy. And to go back to the beginning about my optimism. The world really is changing because we're changing it, because parents are changing it. And now with the amazing generation, kids are changing it. So I really think we're going to win. We're going to reclaim. You know, we may not get all the way back to the 80s and 90s, but I think we're going to get a lot of the way back. And that's going to be just a restoration of humanity for children. Listeners, if you want more information, Everything is at anxiousgeneration.com we have all kinds of information for parents, for teachers, for legislators. We can win and we're going to win.
- [46:37]
B
I 100% agree. And you also gave us like, three more great books to read. And that's so humble and nice of you to have talked about your friends books. And I'm. All of the books that you said. I'll make sure that we put them in the show notes because they all. And even, even the two that you said you have your students read sound amazing. Deep Focus, I think, was one of them. And anyway, Deep work.
- [46:56]
C
Yeah. Deep Work by Cal Newport. Stolen Focus by Johan.
- [47:00]
B
Stolen Focus.
- [47:01]
C
Yeah.
- [47:01]
B
I want to read them both. So thank you for this. Thank you for everything. And thank you for. I said at the beginning, I'm amazed at how you continue to show up every time as if it's the first time you've done this and you've done it thousands of times. And it's really so generous of you. So thank you for coming.
- [47:18]
C
Thank you, Kathy.
- [47:19]
A
Jonathan is amazing. Here are the takeaways. Number one, Let your kids be independent. Let them face obstacles. Let them get lost. Let them find their way back. Number two, Kids don't need entertainment. They need fun and play. It's within them if they get the chance, and it works wonders. Number three, Turn your phone into a tool that you pull out when you want something, not a command center that governs your life. Number four, your attention is so precious. If we're mindful about our routines, if we can detox, then we can regain our focus and regain our ability to pay attention. Number five, structure your week. Block off time to celebrate and honor your own Shabbat. Number six. The world really is changing because we're changing it. Parents are changing it, and kids are changing it. We can reclaim and restore our humanity. Thank you so much for being here. I know that there's always so much going on in all of our lives. So it really is a gift that you're here and you listen to the show. And if you want more of this, please make sure you follow along on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. And if you're loving the show, let us know by leaving a review. Here's one that we got last week. It says, wow.
- [48:27]
B
Just wow.
- [48:28]
A
Notice the permissions given in this episode to be authentic, to share our feelings, to do it anyway from the mess, to be able to share and be witness in our grief in all the stages of life and exhale through it. Thank you to everyone in this episode. Kathy, this iteration of you seems purer than ever. And this is the tone that literally resets my nervous system every time I listen to you. I've been in your ecosystem for years. You're magnetic and magnificent. Tracy, that's so kind. Thank you so much for this beautiful review. I love these. I love reading them. So please leave a review if you haven't already and you might just hear me read it on a future episode. Finally, one last reminder. If you want the full replay of the master class that I did on Aries, you can do a pay what you want. You can see the entire recording. Just go to kathyheller.comworkshop. i think that you're going to love it. You can DM me on Instagram and let me know what your favorite takeaway was. I always love hearing from you. I hope you have an amazing rest of the week, and I'll talk to you again soon.