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Why our screens make us less happy

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    So a few years ago I heard
    an interesting rumor.
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    Apparently, the head
    of a large pet food company
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    would into the annual shareholder's
    meeting with can of dog food,
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    and he would eat the can of dog food,
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    and this was his way of convincing them
    that if it was good enough for him,
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    it was good enough for their pets.
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    This strategy is now known as dogfooding,
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    and it's a common strategy
    in the business world.
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    It doesn't mean everyone
    goes in and eats dog food,
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    but business people
    will use their own products
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    to demonstrate that they feel --
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    that they're confident in them.
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    This is a widespread practice,
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    but I think what's really interesting
    is when you find exceptions to this rule.
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    When you find cases of businesses
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    or people in businesses
    who don't use their own products.
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    Turns out there's one industry where
    this happens in a common way --
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    in a pretty regular way --
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    and that is the screen-based
    tech industry.
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    So, in 2010,
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    Steve Jobs,
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    when he was releasing the iPad,
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    described the iPad as a device
    that was "extraordinary."
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    "The best browsing experience
    you've ever had;
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    way better than a laptop,
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    way better than a smartphone ...
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    It's an incredible experience."
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    A couple of months later,
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    he was approached by a journalist
    from The New York Times,
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    and they had a long phone call.
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    At the end of the call,
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    the journalist threw in a question
    that seemed like a sort of softball.
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    He said to him, "Your kids
    must love the iPad."
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    There's an obvious answer to this,
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    but what Jobs said really
    staggered the journalist.
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    He was very surpsrised,
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    because he said, "They haven't used it.
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    We limit how much technology
    our kids use at home."
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    This is a very common thing
    in the tech world.
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    In fact there's a school
    quite near Silicon Valley
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    called the Waldorf School
    of the Peninsula,
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    and they don't introduce screens
    until the eighth grade.
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    What's really interesting
    about the school
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    is that 75 percent
    of the kids who go there
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    have parents who are high-level
    Silicon Valley tech execs.
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    So when I heard about this,
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    I thought it was interesting
    and surprising,
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    and it pushed me to consider
    what screens were doing to me
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    and to my family and the people I loved,
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    and to people at large.
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    So for the last five years,
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    as a professor of business and psychology,
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    I've been studying the effect
    of screens on our lives.
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    I want to start by just focusing
    on how much time they take from us,
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    and then we can talk about
    what that time looks like.
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    What I'm showing you here
    is the average 24-hour workday
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    at three different points in history:
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    2007 --
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    10 years ago --
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    2015,
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    and then data that I collected
    actually only last week.
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    And a lot of things haven't
    changed all that much.
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    We sleep roughly seven and a half
    to eight hours a day,
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    some people say that's declined slightly,
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    but it hasn't changed much.
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    We work eight and a half
    to nine hours a day.
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    We engage in survival activities --
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    these are things like eating
    and bathing and looking after kids --
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    about three hours a day.
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    That leaves this white space.
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    That's our personal time.
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    That space is incredibly important to us.
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    That's the space where we do things
    that make us individuals.
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    That's where hobbies happen,
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    where we have close relationships,
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    where we really think about our lives,
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    where we get creative,
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    where we zoom back
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    and try to work out whether
    our lives have been meaningful.
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    We get some of that from work as well,
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    but when people look back on their lives
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    and they wonder what
    their lives have been like
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    at the end of their lives,
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    you look at the last things they say --
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    they are talking about those moments
    that happen in that white personal space.
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    So it's sacred;
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    it's important to us.
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    Now what I'm going to do is show you
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    how much of that space
    is taken up by screens across time.
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    In 2007,
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    this much.
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    That was the year that Apple
    introduced the first iPhone.
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    Eight years later,
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    this much.
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    Now, this much.
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    That's how much time we spend
    of that free time in front of our screens.
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    This yellow area,
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    this thin sliver,
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    is where the magic happens.
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    That's where your humanity lives.
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    And right now it's in a very small box.
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    So what do we do about this?
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    Well, the first question is,
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    what does that red space look like?
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    Of course screens are miraculous
    in a lot of ways.
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    I live in New York,
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    a lot of my family lives in Australia,
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    and I have a one-year-old son.
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    The way I've been able to introduce
    them to him is with screens.
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    I couldn't have done that 15
    or 20 years ago in quite the same way.
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    So there's a lot of good
    that comes from them.
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    One thing you can do is
    you can ask yourself,
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    what goes on during that time?
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    How enriching are the apps
    that we're using?
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    And some are enriching.
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    If you stop people while
    they're using them and say,
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    "Tell us how do you feel right now,"
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    they say they feel pretty good
    about these apps.
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    Those that focus on relaxation,
    exercise, weather, reading,
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    education and health.
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    They spend an average of nine
    minutes a day on each of these.
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    These apps make them much less happy.
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    About half the people,
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    when you interrupt them
    and say, "How do you feel?"
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    say they don't feel good about using them.
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    What's interesting about these --
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    dating, social networking, gaming,
    entertainment, news,
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    web browsing --
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    people spend 27 minutes a day
    on each of these.
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    We're spending three times longer
    on the apps that don't make us happy.
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    That doesn't seem very wise.
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    One of the reasons we spend so much
    time on these apps that make us unhappy
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    is that they rob us of stopping cues.
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    Stopping cues were everywhere
    in the 20th century.
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    They were baked into everything we did.
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    A stopping cue is basically a signal
    that it's time to move on,
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    to do something new,
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    to do something different.
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    Think about newspapers,
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    eventually you get to the end,
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    you fold the newspaper away,
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    you put it aside.
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    The same with magazines,
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    books, you get to the end of a chapter,
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    prompts you to consider whether
    you want to continue.
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    You watched a show on TV,
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    eventually the show would end
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    and then you'd have a week
    until the next one came.
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    There were stopping cues everywhere.
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    But the way we consume media today
    is such that there are no stopping cues.
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    The newsfeed just rolls on,
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    and everything's bottomless:
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    Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
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    email, text messaging, the news.
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    And when you do check all sorts
    of other sources,
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    you can just keep going
    on and on and on.
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    So we can get a cue about what to do
    from Western Europe,
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    where they seem to have a number
    of pretty good ideas in the workplace.
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    Here's one example.
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    This is a Dutch design firm.
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    And what they've done is they've
    rigged the desks to the ceiling.
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    At 6pm every day,
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    it doesn't matter who you're
    emailing or what you're doing,
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    the desks rise to the ceiling.
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    (Laughter)
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    (Applause)
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    Four days a week the space
    turns into a yoga studio.
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    One day a week,
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    into a dance club.
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    It's really up to you which ones
    you stick around for.
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    But this is a great stopping rule,
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    because it means at the end of the day,
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    everything stops.
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    There's no way to work.
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    At Daimler,
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    the German car company,
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    they've got another great strategy.
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    When you go on vacation,
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    instead of saying, "This
    person's on vacation,
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    they'll get back to you eventually,"
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    they say, "This person's on vacation,
    so we've deleted your email."
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    "This person will never see
    the email you just sent."
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    (Laughter)
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    "You can email back in a couple of weeks,
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    or you can email someone else."
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    (Laughter)
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    (Applause)
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    You can imagine what that's like.
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    You go on vacation and you're
    actually on vacation.
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    The people who work
    at this company feel
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    that they actually get a break from work.
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    But of course that doesn't tell us much
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    about what we should do
    at home in our own lives,
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    and so I want to make some suggestions.
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    It's easy to say between say 5 and 6pm,
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    I'm going to not use my phone.
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    The problem is 5 and 6pm
    looks different on different days.
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    I think a far better strategy is to say
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    I do certain things every day,
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    there are certain occasions
    that happen every day,
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    like eating dinner.
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    Sometimes I'll be alone,
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    sometimes with other people,
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    sometimes in a restaurant,
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    sometimes at home,
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    but the rule that I've adopted is
    I will never use my phone at the table.
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    It's far away.
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    As a far a way as possible.
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    Because we're really bad
    at resisting temptation,
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    but when you have a stopping cue
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    that every time dinner begins,
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    my phone goes far away,
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    you avoid temptation all together.
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    At first it hurts.
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    I had massive FOMO.
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    (Laughter)
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    I struggled.
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    But what happens is you get used to it.
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    You overcome the withdrawl the same
    way you would from a drug,
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    and what happens is life
    becomes more colorful,
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    richer,
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    more interesting --
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    you have better conversations.
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    You really connect with the people
    who are there with you.
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    I think it's a fantastic strategy,
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    and we know it works,
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    because when people do this,
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    and I've tracked a whole lot of people
    who have tried this,
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    it expands.
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    They feel so good about it
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    that they start doing it for the first
    hour of the day in the morning.
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    They start putting their phones
    on airplane mode on the weekend.
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    That way your phone remains a camera,
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    but it's no longer a phone.
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    It's a really powerful idea,
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    and we know people feel much better
    about their lives when they do this.
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    So what's the take-home here?
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    Screens are miraculous.
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    I've already said that,
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    and I feel that it's true.
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    But the way we use them is a lot like
    driving down a really fast, long road,
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    and you're in a car where the accelerator
    is mashed to the floor,
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    it's kind of hard
    to reach the brake pedal.
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    You've got a choice.
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    You can either glide by,
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    past the beautiful ocean scenes
    and take snaps out the window --
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    and that's the easy thing to do --
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    or you can go out of your way
    to move the car to the side of the road,
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    to push that brake pedal,
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    to get out,
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    take off your shoes and socks,
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    take a couple of steps onto the sand,
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    feel what the sand feels like
    under your feet,
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    walk to the ocean
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    and let the ocean lap at your ankles.
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    Your life will be richer
    and more meaningful
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    because you breathe in that experience,
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    and because you've
    left your phone in the car.
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    Thank you.
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    (Applause)
Title:
Why our screens make us less happy
Speaker:
Adam Alter
Description:

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
09:29

English subtitles

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