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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 go into the annual
    shareholder's meeting
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    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 businesspeople
    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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    Now, this is a widespread practice,
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    but I think what's really interesting
    is when you find exceptions
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    to this rule,
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    when you find cases of businesses
    or people in businesses
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    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, Steve Jobs,
    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,
    way better than a smartphone.
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    It's an incredible experience."
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    A couple of months later,
    he was approached by a journalist
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    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 surprised,
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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, 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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    And 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 -- 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
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    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,
    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,
    where we have close relationships,
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    where we really think about our lives,
    where we get creative,
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    where we zoom back and try to work out
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    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 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; 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, this thin sliver,
    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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    Now, of course, screens are miraculous
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    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
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    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 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 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, 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,
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    entertainment, news, 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
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    that make us unhappy
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    is 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,
    to do something different.
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    And -- think about newspapers;
    eventually you get to the end,
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    you fold the newspaper away,
    you put it aside.
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    The same with magazines, 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,
    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 news feed just rolls on,
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    and everything's bottomless:
    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.
    This is a Dutch design firm.
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    And what they've done
    is rigged the desks to the ceiling.
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    And 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, 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, there's no way to work.
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    At Daimler, the German car company,
    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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    And so --
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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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    so I want to make some suggestions.
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    It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm,
    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 far away 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
    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 withdrawal
    the same way you would from a drug,
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    and what happens is, life becomes
    more colorful, 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,
    because when people do this --
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    and I've tracked a 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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    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,
    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;
    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, past,
    say, the beautiful ocean scenes
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    and take snaps out the window --
    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:

What are our screens and devices doing to us? Psychologist Adam Alter has spent the last five years studying screens and their effects on our lives, specifically how much time they steal from us and how they're getting away with it. He shares why all that time you spend staring at your smartphone, tablet or computer might be making you miserable -- and what you can do about it.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
09:29

English subtitles

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