Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So we've been talking a lot about positive behaviors to engage in to improve our motivation, focused attention, and dopamine system, replenishing the baseline. There are also behaviors to avoid, as we touched on a little bit, and probably one of the biggest elephants in the room would be technology, our smart devices, our smartphones. You mentioned the brain loves visual information.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And also the fact that we're addicted to looking at our likes. When we get a lot of likes, we get a dopamine peak, and it's rewarding, right?

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Hugely rewarding. And sets the expectation for the next time. Right. And the algorithms are very clever, right? Every once in a while, a new account comes up. I know someone who recently started posting, posts, gets some feedback, posts, gets some feedback, and then boom, something takes off, gets a million and a half views. That will change their relationship to social media, maybe forever. It's just chasing that thing. And it's very clever. It's very clever. Not always diabolical, but very clever. Yeah.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So, I mean, what is that? There's a couple of questions. One is, what is that doing for our ability to live in everyday life that isn't like that, right? First of all, the visual information isn't there. It's not as moving rapidly and all those things. And also, you don't get that huge peak from a million and a half views. I mean, everyday life isn't usually like that. And then the second is, how can someone have a more healthy habit like, you and I? We have to use social media for our work. And a lot of people are like that. You know, there's like, what's the healthy balance? How can you find it? Have you found it?

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Have I found it? Most of the time, not all the time. I think two things. One is an observation, one is perhaps a suggestion to everyone. The observation is that disengaging from social media takes time, but it happens very readily every single time. So, for instance, get off work, you're still on your phone, you're still on your phone, you're with family, still on your phone. They're like, hey, want to engage? You put it away. Expect some agitation. Expect like something's been taken away from you. It's this kind of low-level malaise. Other things aren't as interesting. I mean, hopefully one's life is interesting and hopefully isn't just drawing us out of urgent demand, but it requires a little bit of time.

If you've ever gone camping or you don't have access to your phone. In fact, this coming weekend, I'm going to take three days away from my phone. And I'm sure getting back to the phone will feel a little bit oppressive. It'll feel like a little bit oppressive. But once the phone is away, expect, I don't know, 20 minutes to an hour during which you don't feel quite right. Maybe even some underlying anxiety, because it's that unconscious anticipation. So that's the observation. The suggestion I have for people to have a healthy relationship with social media is one, actually, that I learned from a professional poker player, which is play for time. If you're winning, don't stay there, right? If you're losing, don't. I mean, I guess I don't want to suggest people gamble, but this is all just translating to social media.

I don't want to suggest people gamble, but this is all just translating to social media. Play for time. Designate how much time you're going to spend on there in a given bout. So for me, getting a post up once every day or so, maybe four times a week, is kind of the goal. And I try and mix up the form of post, and I have rules for myself. Most specifically, I try and make sure that 90 percent of posts are so the audience can learn something useful, hopefully also interesting and actionable, et cetera. 10 percent are kind of, for my delight, I can't help it. Or where I'm curious about them, kind of pinging the audience for their thoughts, because I genuinely want to know.

I was walking up the Upper East Side with my girlfriend a few weeks ago and saw this sign outside a store and said, we have Ozempic and Mounjaro. And I took a picture of it and thought, that's kind of weird. It's normally you see, like we have lattes or something, and I just kept walking. Then when I got back to California, I posted that on social media and I thought, kind of curious, what do people think of Ozempic and Mounjaro? I know it's controversial. I'll just ask people. And it just… tons of engagement. I didn't even expect it. But I'm learning a lot from all those comments. So I have rules. But the main rule is I don't let myself, or I try to not let myself pick up the phone and just any, at any old time and go into social media. I really try.

I don't always succeed, but I really try. And if I'm going to be on there, I'm like, okay, I'm on here now for an hour, or I give myself an hour. That's the best thing I can do. I also know that, and if I answer a few comments, I'm kind of a runaway train when it comes to people pinging me with questions about science. I just, it's very hard for me not to reply. So I have to limit myself to, you know, five to 15 responses. And I'm like, and then I, and then I actually feel some anxiety as I go to do my life activities. I have to tell myself they'll be okay. It's just, it's just kind of like you ask a professor, at least this professor, a question about something. If I know the answer, like I'm going to try and tell you. So there's always that agitation.

But for me, so expect that agitation when you set it aside and play for time. Don't base it on any particular mode of engagement or whether or not it feels good or doesn't feel good. Play for time. So decide I'm gonna be on here for 30 minutes. And it's interesting because when I don't do that, what I start to notice is I'm scrolling, but I don't even know what I'm doing. Like what am I doing here? Like what the hell am I doing here? Like I don't even know that I care about this thing or that thing. It's nice to see people in their events. I love the baby pics and the animal pics and our friends in the podcast space. It's always great to see and to learn. I learn a lot from your posts, I genuinely do. I learn a lot from Layne Norton's posts. I genuinely do.

And I really enjoy the podcasters, the public facing health folks. But I know also, and I remind myself that for me, the real raw materials for the podcast, unless it's a post from you, to be honest, I'm not just saying that, the real raw materials tend to come from PubMed. They come from books, they come from papers that I'm reading, thoughts that I'm going to have, like, conversations I'm going to have. And so those are the raw materials for my work. And that social media is more of a mode of consumption and occasionally broadcast. X and Twitter, totally different picture, because I now go on X and Twitter, and I know they're going to try and get me through a, let's just call it a psychosocial dynamic. You're on there to see how people are going to engage.

It is a little bit more combative. It also can be really supportive because of the immediate retweet function. You see something you like, it can get out to a lot of people. You can link out to things, but it's more of the center of the town square where everybody's interacting. So I have very clear cognitive pictures of, like, Instagram feels pretty benevolent to me. You know, people have to generally show their face, right? X feels like, okay, do I really want to engage in this very intense dynamic? So I go on X far less, and I've had much more polarized responses to things that I put up there. I've had things clipped out of context. I've had attacks, and I just don't enjoy being angry. I don't enjoy feeling that friction.

It just sucks for me, and I don't like seeing other people suffer. So on X, I see just a lot more of that, and I've got nothing against it. And I think they've done great things with the platform, but I just. I have to just be really protective of myself to not go there terribly much.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Is there studies that have shown that there's a maximum amount of time that, like adults, maybe children versus adults, should spend with their smart devices to prevent these huge amplitude and peaks in dopamine, where they're just getting really rewarding things, or even, just, like you were saying, negative things that can be, in a way, it's very. You're getting that engagement and that it's…

Dr. Andrew Huberman: The clapback, if you get a good clap back on somebody. There's a neuroscientist up at University of Washington, Sam Golden, who's shown that animals will work for the opportunity to fight. They'll work for it. We never understood this until recently. I mean, you could say we always understood that, but no, humans, probably too, engaging in those kind of high-intensity ways can be rewarding for some folks, even for people who don't like that, unless they're really conflict averse, it has a certain level of… Arousal itself can become rewarding. Just the engagement. When I say arousal, like the level of cognitive engagement, especially if the rest of life feels kind of passive and uninteresting, there have not been clear studies that I'm aware of.

But at the same time, if I think of something like virtual reality, like my colleague at Stanford, Jeremy Bailenson, has done, he's one of the early pioneers of virtual reality. And as virtual reality came to be, they established, and I'll get the numbers wrong here, so forgive me, Jeremy, I have to look this up, but limits of kids should only be in the VR goggles for x number of minutes per day. And it was minutes. Otherwise, there's rewiring of the visual system and vestibular system, the balance system, in ways that might not be healthy. They had real clear limits and guidelines with social media, sort of like as much as you want.

And then of course, there's the intrusion of social media and tablet use and phone use into sleep, where then you're depleting the replenishment, where you're undermining the restoration of the dopamine reserve. Right? So then there's all that contextual stuff. I think an hour a day on Instagram, if you think about it, that's a pretty significant investment. And with X, I can't even make a recommendation. I do go on there and post. I have kind of a bittersweet relation to it right now. Lex Fridman, my buddy, our buddy has a far more kind of symbiotic relationship with X. It just sort of works for him, whereas I feel that more on an Instagram platform and it's different cultures and maybe I need to adjust my follows and so on, but I think an hour a day to me just seems like, okay, that's plenty and is enough.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: What role do you think that going to things like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, this context switching where you're working, but then you're checking Twitter and then what role is that playing in our ability to focus and attention, ADHD-like symptoms? I mean, there was like a, I read last night, like one in nine children has ADHD now. I don't know, like what that actually means, but, yeah, wow. Exactly.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: So, yeah, I think that because I grew up and spend still a fair amount of time in the Bay Area, although I'm in Los Angeles far more now. An interesting question is always to ask the heads of these companies or the CEOs how long they let their kids be on social media and you'll often find that it's a very, very small number. And that tells you something right there. Okay, so I think the task switching, the context switching no doubt is impairing adults' ability to engage and stay engaged in one thing. Reading a book, unless it's extremely engaging, is going to be less attention harnessing than social media. Social media is moving while you're scrolling. I mean, the brain has never seen this kind of thing before.

Even if you have 300 channels on your television and you're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling at short distance with the feedback of people you recognize, which isn't true for most people watching television, and feedback and likes and comments and clapbacks and attacks and reward. I mean, it's incredible. I think… I'm a content consumer, but I'm a content creator, as you are, of course. And I like to think in terms of are we consuming content or are we creating content and just being very judicious about consumption of content. I mean, I think it's great fun and I encourage people to put stuff out on the social media. In fact, recently a clip was cut. There was like a math gaffe that I did and I came out and apologized for the error.

I occasionally make errors in podcasts, put them in the captions, but anyway, put something out there. But the caption to that post was, I would hate for anyone to resist posting their creative thoughts, their creative outlet for fear of attack or making mistakes. I think we need to. I sound kind of like it's a party line now, but to foster a community of people, like encouraging people to create stuff and put it online. But that's different than just passive consumption all the time. I think there's so much good to be had with social media, but I think an hour a day on Instagram, maybe 30 minutes a day on X and you're good. And even there, 90 minutes out of your waking day? And then what part of your day? This is important.

You know, when I look at my day, I know that when I wake up in the morning, I'm a little groggy. But then I've got three or four hours that if I can get, if I'm going to get really quality work done, it's in that three or four hours, or the three or four hours right after lunch, and that's it. I'm not the kind of person that's doing quality work now between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight. It's just not happening anymore. It happened years ago, but it's not happening anymore. So where that 60 to 90 minutes falls is also key. Maybe it should be for an hour or so before bedtime, provided it's not too stimulating. Maybe it should be over your lunch break and you just handle it then.

But when it's first thing in the morning, then several times throughout the morning, and then later in the afternoon and then in the evening, I think what I'm describing is not unusual and not unusual, not just for kids. Jonathan Haidt's work that's being discussed so much now about social media consumption and the challenges and concerns with that, but also in adults. I mean, since when? I'm 48 years old, and it's kind of remarkable. I mean, I see people from my high school class and, like, I'm one of them, so I can only laugh at myself here. But it's like we're grown adults, like, posting what we did and, like, showing it off to the world. There's a kind of teenage element to it. It's kind of like silly. If I really step back from it, I go, wait, are the adults behaving like kids? And the kids are behaving like adults? Like, what's going on here? And again, there's use of sharing science and other creative crafts.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Aren't they chasing the dopamine like?

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it just shows that adults are just as prone to it. But it's sort of, if we step back and look to ourselves like an experiment, we'd say, wow. You know, like the people in the 35- to 60-year-old range of this species that we call human are kind of like doing the same stuff that the kids are doing. And maybe you just say, well, duh. But it's interesting. I mean, you say, well, like, how good or poor of one's life is that? And so I think about this stuff a lot, but I'm on there and I teach and I enjoy it and I learn and, you know, and I'll continue. But I think one has to be really discerning and set constraints.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Absolutely. I mean, if it's tapping into your dopamine system and you're, I mean, if it's, if it's kind of like that substance, right? It's technology, it's not methamphetamine, it's not cocaine, but it sure as heck is affecting your dopamine system, and so…

Dr. Andrew Huberman: It absolutely is. And it also has the potential for a lot of problems. You know, this isn't a domain that, you know, I have expertise in, or that is covered on the podcast. But, you know, there's this guy who's done some podcasts with Lex Fridman, and he's been on a few others. James Sexton. He's a divorce lawyer in New York. And he talks about how the advent of social media has created this huge surge in, I don't know if overall divorce rates. But then he talks about the trajectory of the failures of a lot of marriages. And actually, people have talked about Instagram as one of the main dating apps. It's not sold as a dating app. It's not offered as a dating app. But this is where a lot of people meet. They see people they used to know, hey, how's it going?

And then the conversation converts. I mean, this is, you know, I'm not passing judgment. I'm just saying, you know, there's a lot in the landscape of social media that lends itself to too much ease in certain types of human interaction, and that inhibits our ability to do things that are really functional for our relationships and for our professional lives and for family. I mean, you know, just presence, just like being there. Not to get sentimental here, but that graduate advisor I was talking about before, unfortunately passed away young. She had the BRCA mutation, died at 50. Her name was Barbara Chapman. Had two lovely daughters, actually, the second one just finished university in neurosciences. So I was super happy for her.

And I'll never forget at her, it wasn't her funeral, but it was a kind of, like, celebration of life thing after she ended her life, her daughters, maybe it was one or both, talked about how one of the best things about their mom and their memories of their mom was unstructured time with her, where she would just, like, sit with them and hang out, and they would just, like, do stuff. And she wasn't a heavy user of the phone, so that was 2014. She passed away. So phones were kind of really beginning to pick up in terms of their use – smartphones. But that rung in my mind because I was thinking, wow, of all the things for children to remember about their deceased mom, it was the unstructured time.

It wasn't the Giants game, although they probably remember that they were big Giants fans or other things. But it's the unstructured time that we spend with people where they are giving us their full presence, and we're giving them our full presence. And then you look around at dinner tables now, in restaurants, you look around, and everyone's on their phones anyway, I'm saying what everyone already knows, and I'm guilty of it, too, but I think the world is due for an adjustment.