How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions | Dr. Jonathan Haidt

The opening of this stretch frames the discussion around the book The Anxious Generation, which Huberman names as the main subject while stressing that the conversation is not purely pessimistic and that Haidt offers several clear solutions to the mental health crisis created through smartphone use, in particular in kids entering and transitioning through puberty. He sets out the intended scope: so-called critical or sensitive periods for social development, for developing an understanding about competition and violence, about sex, how boys and girls are impacted differently by smartphone use, and specific solutions that can place boys and girls as well as young adults back on the trajectory of mental health. He broadens the relevance beyond youth, noting that most everybody nowadays is challenged in some way by smartphones, both for their utility and for the ways they can diminish social and family interactions, academic performance, and more. The stated aim is to bring together neurobiology, psychology, social psychology, and technology in service of the most critical members of our species, meaning our youth.

Asked how we are doing as a species, Haidt separates biological survival from civilizational health. As a species, he says, humans will be pretty hard to kill off (like cockroaches) and are inventive in that way; but as a civilization there are peaks and valleys and cycles in history, and we may be at one of those turning points, with what happens over the next five or 10 years pretty unclear. His answer is deliberately hedged with may and might well, and he closes by declining to elaborate, saying he will leave it at that.

It's a very interesting time to be a social scientist.

Huberman anchors the novelty of smartphones in neuroplasticity, citing a colleague at Harvard, Jeff Lichtman, described as world-famous for neuroplasticity, who observed a few years back that this is probably the first time in human history that humans have written with their thumbs, implying the brain representation of the thumbs is probably very different in all of us. Huberman's point is that the brain is an adaptive map of our experience in many ways, so this is a somewhat innocuous example of the changes that have occurred; he uses it to move toward the question of when everything changed.

This is probably the first time in human history that humans have written with their thumbs

The dating question is posed explicitly: was the decisive moment the day that most everyone had and has a smartphone, somewhere around 2010, 2011, 2012, or did all this start prior? Huberman also signals that solutions will be discussed and that they are things everyone listening and watching can participate in, and not just by restriction, but asks first where we are at now and when the trend toward diminished mental health began, in particular in girls. This framing matters because the batch closes before those solutions are actually delivered.

Haidt answers the dating question by giving the history rather than a single date, with the short answer being 2010 to 2015. His framing is pointedly defensive about technology in general: changes that connect people more (roads, telephones, the internet) lead to massive gains in knowledge and productivity, and while there are sometimes disruptions, in the history of humanity they have been great. He recalls the first web browser as miraculous (you just type in a question and get the answer, no library, free email) and says we were all very optimistic about the internet in the 1990s. He insists the discussion is absolutely not about the internet being bad.

The causal claim is narrowed specifically to social media, not to screens or connectivity as such. Haidt states the internet is absolutely amazing and that smartphones or the iPhone are absolutely amazing, although there are some things about it that are problematic; it is really especially social media which has changed things.

The core evidence is a before-and-after snapshot of a teenager in January 2010 versus 2015. In 2010 there is no Instagram and no front-facing camera; the iPhone came out in 2007 but most teenagers do not mostly have them, and they use flip phones as a tool to call each other, text each other, and meet up. By 2015 the great majority of Americans, certainly teens, have a smartphone with a front-facing camera; girls are mostly on Instagram, which Haidt identifies as the first social media platform that you had to be on a smartphone for (everything else was web-based); high-speed internet and unlimited texting make it possible to spend 10 or 15 hours a day on your phone, which nobody could do with a flip phone.

So when technology helps us achieve our goals, that's good.

the Great Rewiring of Childhood

Haidt points to that five-year period, 2010 to 2015, which he has called the Great Rewiring of Childhood because it affects everything, everything about what children and teenagers are doing. Huberman offers a corroborating personal memory: getting his first smartphone while visiting friends in New York City in 2010 and being up at 1:30 in the morning scrolling on it, thinking it was unbelievably addicting.

A genuine, understated disagreement runs through this exchange. Huberman proposes that smartphone use, and social media use in particular, is less an addiction than an OCD of sorts; he carefully clarifies he is not talking about clinically diagnosed OCD, but notes that in OCD the compulsions, the behaviors, do not serve to reduce the obsessions but rather exacerbate or reinforce them, and concludes that smartphone use is an obsessive-compulsive loop, not just a habit and not just an addiction.

It's not just a habit, it's not just an addiction, it's an obsessive-compulsive loop.

Haidt does not directly endorse the clinical framing. He agrees it is already a struggle to pay attention, that ancient traditions taught techniques to improve focus, and that we are easily distracted, and he confesses that even working at his computer he checks his email probably 40 or 50 times a day, which he knows is terrible. But when he asks whether it is a compulsion where he feels pulled and has to check it or something bad will happen, his answer is no.

is it a compulsion where I feel pulled, I have to check it or something bad will happen? No.

Haidt's alternative account is situational rather than compulsive. He asks listeners to imagine trying to be a kid in school with a television set, a record player, a walkie-talkie, a guitar, and a painting set all arrayed on the desk while the teacher is telling you about geometry: what are you going to do? Probably one of these things. The device does not have to compel anyone; the ready availability of more attractive options is enough. The distinction he draws is between the flip phone, a tool you pull out when you want to talk to someone and then put away, and the smartphone, for which there is no reason to ever put it away.

But the smartphone, there's no reason to ever put it away.

Huberman asks for the scary statistics, saying there is just no way around this, while reiterating that solutions will come. Haidt grounds the answer in US annual or biannual surveys, three or four big ones that allow us to see what has happened since the 70s. He asks listeners to imagine lines for boys and girls showing the percentage that suffer from anxiety, depression, or that have self-harm (three measures he says really go together); these lines move around a little but are actually pretty stable from the 1990s all the way through 2010, even 2011, with no sign of a problem, and on some measures they get a little bit better.

When Huberman asks whether that means stable and low, Haidt resists the word low: if around, say, 12 or 15 percent of girls qualify as having had a major depression, that is much higher than we would like and a problem, but it is nothing compared to what it is today. The lines are pretty flat until around 2012, and then all of a sudden the lines for girls go up like a hockey stick; it is not a subtle thing, there is an elbow. He qualifies this as the American data and says internationally you see very similar things, though it is not necessarily 2012 in other countries.

the lines for girls go up like a hockey stick

It's like somebody turned on a light switch in 2012.

On magnitude, Haidt says boys are also up on depression and anxiety, also way up; depending on the measure, everything is in the ballpark of 50 to 150 percent, almost all the numbers in that range, not 10 or 20 percent increases, with most things close to a doubling, especially for the younger girls. A clue he flags for later is that boys' curves are smoother: boys are more depressed and anxious, but it is not 2012, it often begins more like 2009 or 2010 and then keeps going up gradually.

Depending on the measure, everything is in the ballpark of 50% to 150%.

Haidt anticipates and rebuts the self-report objection, attributed to a lot of people who say it is just self-report, that Gen Z is really positive about mental health and willing to talk about it, and that this is a good thing. Against it he points to the exact same curves and the very sharp uptick for girls in hospital admissions for self-harm and psychiatric emergency department visits, seen in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the Scandinavian countries. He concludes that something happened across the developed world around 2012, credits Jean Twenge as the first to really raise the alarm, and says he and Twenge keep saying they cannot find another candidate because nothing else fits the pattern. He adds that there is not just correlational data but experimental data too, but the segment is truncated at the point where he begins to qualify that claim.

Nothing else fits the pattern.

there's experimental data, too

Huberman resists treating smartphone use as one thing and proposes pooling a set of distinct variables into a basket labeled smartphone use, then pulling each out one by one as the conversation goes forward. He asks for the 2012 numbers on time spent, with an age range, and whether teens got the smartphone and immediately were spending six to eight hours a day on it, or whether it has been gradual, starting with the time variable.

Huberman's proposed decomposition of the single label smartphone use: - time spent on the phone; - the specific content being viewed (which he calls a vast discussion to get into); - the social dynamics associated with being on a phone as opposed to in-person interactions; - as a neuroscientist trained in the biology of the visual system, the effect of looking at something about 8 to 12 inches away for much of the day, as opposed to navigating an environment the way we had for hundreds of thousands of years prior; - the disruption in sleep; - additional blue light exposure.

Haidt endorses the framing and expands it into a causal diagram: on one side a whole bunch of harmful changes (getting less sleep, blue light at night, not going out in nature, being sedentary, and being contacted by strange men around the world who want to have sex with you, which is not good for 11- and 12-year-old girls), about 15 different things; on the other side many potential effects (depression, anxiety, self-harm, doing worse in school, becoming more shallow, conflicts); and between them the causal connections to be examined. Crucially, he doubts that sheer time is the main driver: if we could quantify the degree to which just spending five hours a day makes you more anxious automatically, well, maybe a little, but that is probably not the main effect.

Well, maybe a little, but that's probably not the main effect.

So there's a gigantic multi-causal network of effects.

On quantities, Haidt credits Pew in particular with tracking changes since the 2000s and says that from both Pew and Gallup, young people in America are now spending about five hours a day just on social media. When Huberman guesses mostly Instagram, Haidt corrects him: the huge time suck is the videos, with TikTok and YouTube counted in this analysis as social media (YouTube only marginally so, more a general information source). The mechanism he emphasizes is that especially the short videos are really, really addictive because the time between action and reinforcement is so quick, which, as he notes, in behaviorism is the key: the quick reinforcement.

young people in America are now spending about five hours a day just on social media

the time between action and reinforcement is so quick

The totals escalate from there. Five hours a day, a little more for girls and a little less for boys, just on social media becomes thirty-five hours a week of strange stuff coming in from random weirdos on the internet; adding video games and everything else done on a smartphone brings it to seven to 10 hours in that range a day, not counting school, where for a lot of kids two or three hours of a six-hour day is screen time as well. Haidt's summary contrast is that kids used to have a play-based childhood and since 2010 or 2012 have a phone-based childhood, which he considers incompatible with healthy human development.

Thirty-five hours a week of strange stuff coming in from random weirdos on the internet.

Play is the basic thing mammals do.

It's just incompatible with healthy human development.