PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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What happens when we replace sky-gazing with screen-scrolling? Discover how digital life impacts happiness and what Gen Z can teach us about reclaiming control over our well-being.

Summary: Smartphones have become our constant companions, but at what cost? This episode of The Science of Happiness explores how our digital lives are reshaping how we think, feel, and connect. From social media’s pull to the decline of face-to-face connection, we look at what we lose—and what we can regain—by stepping away from screens and into nature, quiet, and deeper connections.

Ways To Do A Digital Detox: 

1. Turn off your phone before bed to improve sleep and create space from screens.
2. Wait to turn it on in the morning, noticing how you feel and stretching that screen-free time.
3. Do meaningful work before going online to protect your focus and creativity.
4. Keep notifications silenced unless you're expecting something urgent.
5. Turn off WiFi and browsers when you need to concentrate deeply.
6. Take regular breaks from screens to let ideas simmer and rest your mind.
7. Practice reading books again and notice your attention span strengthen over time.
8. Pause when you crave scrolling, and consider reaching out to a friend instead.
9. Create your own digital detox plan or adapt one that works for you. Be sure to clearly write out your specific intentions, including how and when you'll follow through.

Today’s Guests:

ADAM BECKER is an astrophysicist and author of the book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade To Control The Fate Of Humanity.

Learn more about Adam Becker here: http://freelanceastrophysicist.com/

JEAN TWENGE is a psychologist and best-selling author. She’s spent years studying how the digital world shapes our minds and bodies, and the way different generations experience life.

Learn more about Jean Twenge here: https://www.jeantwenge.com/

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

​​Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher (Encore): https://tinyurl.com/aj34s585

How Exploring New Places Can Make You Feel Happier: https://tinyurl.com/4ufn2tpn

Why We Should Look up at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/mpn9vj2t

Related Happiness Breaks:

How To Ground Yourself in Nature: https://tinyurl.com/25ftdxpm

Tap into the Joy That Surrounds You: https://tinyurl.com/2pb8ye9x

Pause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3

Tell us about your experience with taking a break from technology. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

ADAM BECKER: How many times do you go hang out with a friend and you find that your friend, or you yourself, are stuck looking at your phone while you're with them? It would have been considered incredibly rude not that long ago. It's not even so much that it's rude as it is that it's bad for us, I think that one of the things that's so pernicious about phones, social media, the tech ecosphere, it makes it difficult to remember what the heck it was that you were doing in the first place when you picked up your phone. I wear an analog wristwatch, because I found that when I was looking at my phone to find out what time it was, I would frequently fail. I would pick up the phone, see that I had three new texts and three emails, respond to two of them, save the others for later, put the phone back and still not know what time it was.

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. These days, we spend upwards of 40% of our waking life online. Our thoughts, feelings and relationships have been moved into digital spaces in theorist Anton Barbara Kay's words, the digital media are a functional medium of consciousness itself and a new way of imagining ourselves in connection to others, and if we look closely, maybe it's also shaping the way we think about ourselves.

ADAM BECKER: One of the biggest changes I noticed, I thought that I was reading more slowly and reading fewer books because I was getting older, and then when we started turning off my photo, I started reading books a lot more.

DACHER KELTNER: That's author and astrophysicist Adam Becker, who we'll be hearing from today. 

ADAM BECKER: It was like exercise. It was similar to the way that you get stronger when you exercise. 

DACHER KELTNER: Later, we'll hear from psychologist and best selling author Jean Twenge. She spent years studying how the digital world is shaping our minds and bodies and the way different generations experience life. 

JEAN TWENGE: It definitely influenced some of my parenting decisions. I literally pushed my chair back from the desk, got up, took my kids Kindle Fire tablets and shoved them in the back of a dresser.

DACHER KELTNER: All that coming up after this break.

Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. Today, we're speaking with author and astrophysicist Adam Becker. From tiny particles to planets, he's examined the cosmos for years, but more recently, he's taken on something we're all thinking about, the tech revolution and how the rise of AI is shaping our future. He wrote about it in his new and timely book, more everything forever, AI overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. Adam will explain why and how we can detox from our increasingly digital lives. Adam, thanks so much for being on our show. 

ADAM BECKER: Oh, thanks for having me, Dacher. It's my pleasure to be here. 

DACHER KELTNER: I think a lot of us are grappling with what is the meaning of being online? I think it's really changed in the past 10 years. 

ADAM BECKER: Yeah.

DACHER KELTNER: And in reading your book, I was struck. It was almost like this uncovering of the deep ideology underlying all the stuff that we do online. So I'm gonna ask you some questions and just kind of illuminate us.

ADAM BECKER: Sure 

DACHER KELTNER:  What is technological salvation?

ADAM BECKER: It's this ideology that underpins so much of what's coming out of Silicon Valley. And I don't just mean the products. I don't just mean where the money is going and the investments that they're making, both, you know, venture capital investments, and investments in the wider world. It's also where a lot of the ideas, and for lack of a better word, propaganda coming out of Silicon Valley comes from it's this idea that technology is the solution to all of the world's ills, yeah, and that all of the problems in the world, every problem in the universe, can be boiled down to a sufficiently clever application of technology, usually computer technology, all of these guys, they talk about an infinite future for humanity in space, right, with just limitless access to anything we could possibly want forever, and so capitalism can just continue forever, and consumer culture can just continue forever, and there's no reason to change any of the fundamental power structures in society, because everything is as it is except we should give the tech barons more power, which is happening, which is happening, yeah, because when we give them more power, clearly that means that they're going to unleash these radical, endless possibilities of technology. You can find a way to justify anything that you want if you believe that with the application of the right technology, you can save the world.

DACHER KELTNER: One of the striking things about reading your book, and wow, do people under appreciate this is just the environmental impact of AI. And, you know, sending texts and writing documents with chat GPT.

ADAM BECKER: Oh, my god, yeah. 

DACHER KELTNER: It's not free, is it? 

ADAM BECKER: No.

DACHER KELTNER: Tell us about it. 

ADAM BECKER: The carbon footprint of training, you know, large language model, the kind of machine learning system that underpins something like chatgpt. It's way more than plane flight across the country.

DACHER KELTNER: And you refer to this in the books. A lot of the promises about making the world better, making people happier, are just wrong, dead wrong. You know, Jonathan Haidt became famous for this in his book The Age of anxiety. But there are more data, like a lot of immersion in the social media makes us more anxious, more depressed. It hurts our creativity, it hurts our cognitive function. We don't look at faces in the same way. I mean, it's bad news, right? This is why our Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, said we need warning labels on this stuff so you know, in your mission, and then you think about this broader social science, and we'll get to digital detoxing in a second, like, how does this help the citizen right to know about these problems of tech and what's your thinking there?

ADAM BECKER: I think that ultimately, these ideas about the future that these tech billionaires are playing with. They are taking them away more literally than they should. They watch Star Trek and think it's about warp drive rather than about people. The idea of, you know, going to space with robots and trying to live forever in this maximalist future, this is an old and culturally powerful idea. And I think it's important to remind, to inform the public, that many of the components of these futures simply don't work. Some of them seemed like they might be plausible, and then further scientific advances made it clear that they wouldn't work. And even more importantly than that, that other futures are possible, and just the way we think about the future can determine so much about the way we live our everyday lives, right? You know, if we think that the future is in space, then that can cause us to treat this planet, not as well as we should. But if there's no planet B, as the saying goes, then that changes the decisions that we make about how this world should work absolutely

DACHER KELTNER: Well, I want to turn to digital detox and what are some of the practices you engage in, and tell us about how it affects your mental states and your consciousness. 

ADAM BECKER: I started out turning off my phone at night because it was interfering with my sleep. I was having trouble sleeping because I was spending too much time looking at a screen too late at night. And then I noticed that in the morning, before I turned the phone on, I felt better, and so I started seeing how long I could go without turning the phone on, and I also noticed that it was making it a lot easier to work. And so I said, Okay, well, you know what? I need to get this amount of writing done today. Let me get that done before I turn my phone on. I always keep sound notifications off on my phone 100% of the time, unless I'm expecting a call. And the other thing is, I, when I'm writing, I will turn off the internet on my computer so it's just me and the word processor. And part of the process is also stepping away from screens entirely and letting everything sort of cook. One of the biggest changes I noticed, I thought that I was reading more slowly and reading fewer books because I was getting older, and then when I started turning off my phone, I started reading books a lot more, and it got easier. It was like exercise. Keeping the phone off was sort of strengthening my mind in a way that, you know, was similar to the way that you get stronger when you exercise.

DACHER KELTNER: You know, a lot of people turn to the technologies when feeling complicated emotions or hard emotions. We cope with our emotions by scrolling and so forth. Has that been problematic for you? And have you found other ways to cope with the complexities of our times.

ADAM BECKER: Yeah, I have found that generally, when I find myself with the impulse to do that, it usually means that what I want is human connection. Then, you know, the next step is, oh, I'm never gonna get that from an app. And so sometimes I'll turn to. My phone, but I'll turn to my phone to text a friend. Or my favorite, which, you know, I think reveals my age, a phone call, an actual phone call, yeah, exactly, yeah.

DACHER KELTNER: Do you notice when you go on your digital detoxes, does it seem to shift how you look at the social world, or how you interact with other people?

ADAM BECKER: Yeah, yeah. I think it does feel like it makes me a better person. It makes me more patient, thoughtful, considerate, because there's this constant need for novelty that is sort of superficially fed by the social media streams and by interacting with a phone and screens, and that makes it hard to be patient. And I think that patience is sort of a key social virtue, right? When you've got another person in front of you, you want them to actually be listening to you, actually listening to what someone else is saying, and taking whatever it was that you had planned to say, especially if you're a valuable person like me, that takes patience. And it's hard to cultivate that kind of patience if you're constantly looking at phones, and it's much easier to be patient and present and like with whoever it is that you want to be with

DACHER KELTNER: And see them. 

ADAM BECKER: Yeah, yeah. 

DACHER KELTNER: I love the recommendations you're giving us, and we know them to be grounded in just basic science, like, don't let these technologies get near your bed. It's going to disrupt your sleep. Don't put it in interactions. It'll disrupt your social life. Watch out for too much use in terms of cognitive function. Why do these tech Titans that you profile? Why aren't they paying attention to these data? Yeah, do they hear about this? I know some whistleblowers have brought it to their attention, like, this is tough on teenagers. 

ADAM BECKER: I remember seeing at one point that some of them were trying to make sure that their own kids weren't using phones too early, which is kind of revealing, yeah, and I think that's the idea, if you get the customer addicted to a product, and if you take away their ability to use their own time for the things that are important to them, that's a great way of not only ensuring a captive customer base, but a great way to diminish other people's ability to build political power. Yeah, you know, was that the original intent when the phones were first developed? Probably not. You know, I'm not positing a grand conspiracy. I'm just saying they're not too broken up about it.

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, interesting form of boycotting too to think about getting off the phones. We know that's just a robust truth in the science of happiness that get off the phone, go do other things. What does Adam Becker do to find happiness? What are some of the alternatives?

ADAM BECKER: I love a good telescope. I love looking at the night sky, star gazing, for sure. I think the sky is very beautiful, and looking at the sky day or night, hiking, camping, getting out into nature, being in the mountains, being near the ocean. This is the natural world, being out in the world and appreciating it. Appreciating This is how good the sky  is. This is how good this tree is. There's this hike that I take, usually a couple times a week or more, very near where I live, that is short and steep and a great workout. And the view from the top is incredible. And there's a tree near the top, a very good live oak, coast Live Oak, and I just like looking at it.

DACHER KELTNER: Adam, I so enjoyed reading More Everything Forever. It just was this awakening to this deep, pervasive social problem that we have found ourselves in. And thank you for writing it. Thank you for being here. And it's always great to talk with you. 

ADAM BECKER: It's great to talk with you too, Dacher, and it's a pleasure to be here on the show. Thanks for having me.

DACHER KELTNER: Up next we hear from Dr. Jean Twenge, the leading scientist studying how technology has shaped different generations.

JEAN TWENGE: So things like spending time on social media or texting or watching videos or so on, all were linked to more unhappiness, and it was really stark.

DACHER KELTNER: More on Jean’s startling research after the break.

Hi everybody. This is Dacher. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. A lot of us joke about being addicted to our phones, but there's some truth to that. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that teenagers spend an average of almost five hours a day on social media.

JEAN TWENGE: They spend a lot more time on phones and online and on social media, so with screens, usually alone, and they spend less time sleeping and less time hanging out with each other in person with their friends. So. So you put those three together, and that's a pretty terrible formula for mental health. 

DACHER KELTNER: That's Dr Jean Twenge. She analyzes large national surveys over time, tracking how technology impacts us, especially the younger generations. 

JEAN TWENGE: Teen depression. So like major depressive episodes doubled between 2011 and 2019 loneliness started to spike. That was around the time that smartphones became common and social media moved from optional to almost mandatory among that age group.

DACHER KELTNER: It's not just the symptoms of poor sleep and loneliness that's got Jean so worried. It's the behaviors that can be objectively measured as a result, particularly among teen girls.

JEAN TWENGE: So things like emergency room admissions for self harm quintupled among 10 to 14 year old girls and doubled among 15 to 19 year old girls. Generally speaking, the longer someone spends on social media, the more likely it is that they're unhappy or depressed or have low life satisfaction, and that link is fairly big. So for depression, for example, one of the best studies done in the UK of 15 and 16 year olds among girls, among the heavy users of social media, they were three times more likely to fit clinical criteria for depression than the non users, and among boys, it was the heavy users were twice as likely, so that's one of the bigger effect sizes, but it's pretty common for that difference to be somewhere between 50% more and 200% more who are depressed among the heavy users versus the light users or the non users. Meta's own research dug into the problem of body image among teen girls and young adult women on Instagram in terms of the images of all of the perfect bodies and the content around thinspo and even pro anorexia content.

DACHER KELTNER: And of course, the more time we spend online, the more money tech companies make.

JEAN TWENGE: There's just the basic fact that the apps have poured billions into making their products as attractive as possible. They call it engagement, which is this very positive sounding term, which really means, often, a 12 or 13 year old spending five, six hours a day on social media, and thus then having their data collected because they are the product, and then having those advertising dollars.

DACHER KELTNER: Last year, meta alone made $164 billion in revenue, the majority coming from advertising dollars, while tech executives make huge profits from our time and attention. What responsibility do you think they have to the public?

JEAN TWENGE: I could list a number of ways in which I think they have responsibility, but we could start with the law, which is that children who are 12 and under who are not yet 13, are not supposed to be on social media platforms, yet they are on a regular basis. They can just check a box or lie but their birthday and they're on and there's really good reasons why children that age should not be on social media, given their vulnerabilities, given the prefrontal cortex not being as developed even 13, 14, 15, probably too young. That age of 13 as the minimum for Internet adulthood was a compromise with the tech companies back in 1998 before modern social media existed, before social media really existed at all. I think we have to rethink what the right age is for teens to start using social media, because I think you'd be hard pressed to find any educator or developmental psychologist or parent who would say 13 right at the beginning of puberty that is the best time to introduce social media. No one would say that there's a lot of maturity that happens between, for example, 13 and 16. A lot of adults struggle with that too. I mean, we have to be fair that it's not just a Gen Z thing. I mean, technology has had an impact on all of us. It's had the biggest impact on Gen Z. I mean, as an example, that decline in getting together with people in person shows up across all ages, but it's much more pronounced among teens and young adults compared to older people, but there's arguably a lot of older adults who are probably on Facebook way too many hours a day as well. So there's some research suggesting that the feedback people get on social media lights up the dopamine pathway, which is not that surprising, because we are social animals, and getting that kind of hit from feedback from other people is really essential, and it's especially true for adolescents. 

DACHER KELTNER: There's no denying that technology can make our lives easier, but everything comes with a trade off. 

JEAN TWENGE: The trade off of technology is we have more time. We don't have to spend as much time doing laundry. We don't have to spend as much time typing things. So we have more time. It's just that time has gotten filled up by social media, short videos, all of these platforms, this gift that we've been given of time, you have to ask, what are we actually doing with it? For the most part, nothing good. There is also very interesting social psycho research that shows that talking to people in just little short bits, like to the grocery cashier, to the person you see on the train, people think they're gonna hate those conversations, and then afterward, it actually helps with happiness.

DACHER KELTNER: But Gen Z has a different relationship with technology than generations before. Many are rejecting it, finding nostalgia in the past and putting away their smartphones. And Jean says they have words of wisdom for us all.

JEAN TWENGE: One way to summarize it is a Gen Z phrase, which I love this, because the generation has grown up with these technologies, and they see what needs to be done, and their advice for the chronically online, go touch grass, which I think is fantastic advice.

DACHER KELTNER: You heard it, go touch grass. And tune in next week to continue connecting with all things green. Dr. Suzanne Simard joins us to share the wisdom of the forest, how trees not only nurture us, but are a whole network of cooperation and life. 

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD: These big old trees are the hubs of what we call neurological networks. As we experimented with what these networks do, we found that they link to all the other trees, and they convey information and resources and even to seedlings that are regenerating around these old trees. They nurture these seedlings through the networks, and so that's what led us to calling them mother trees.

DACHER KELTNER: Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our producers are Truc Nguyen, our associate producers are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni, sound designer Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. I hope you find ways to disconnect from the demands of our digital world and find joy around you in things big and small. Have a great day.