How to Successfully Delete Social Media | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Chapters
0:0 The Social Media Detox Experiment0:17 The Challenge of Returning to Social Media
0:41 Understanding the Impact of Social Media on Focus and Productivity
1:22 Exploring the Void Social Media Fills
2:1 The 30-Day Social Media Detox Challenge
2:53 Success Stories and Strategies for a Social Media-Free Life
4:45 Filling the Void: Building a Meaningful Life Beyond Social Media
00:00:00.000 | - Recently, my podcast team was in Australia
00:00:04.880 | and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore,
00:00:09.880 | instructed all of us to get rid of social media
00:00:12.800 | on our phones, except one guy
00:00:14.340 | who would post our weekly episodes announcements.
00:00:17.520 | And it was pretty brutal at first.
00:00:21.000 | And then coming back to social media
00:00:22.800 | has actually turned out to be more challenging.
00:00:25.920 | You really experienced the friction coming back
00:00:27.600 | the other way, and then one experiences the lack of friction
00:00:31.640 | and that's where it gets scary.
00:00:32.680 | It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt
00:00:37.200 | the friction, leaving something behind,
00:00:40.400 | the friction coming back to it.
00:00:41.960 | And I think for people listening to this,
00:00:44.920 | I raise this because I think, of course,
00:00:47.580 | many people listening are, you know,
00:00:49.440 | have work that they really need to focus on.
00:00:51.960 | They may be having issues with productivity
00:00:54.400 | and burnout, et cetera.
00:00:55.800 | I think a lot of people use the phone and social media
00:00:58.160 | because it fills their life.
00:01:00.000 | You know, it provides some enrichment
00:01:01.760 | and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects.
00:01:04.520 | But I guess through the lens of the,
00:01:06.840 | let's just call it the Cal Newportian lens,
00:01:09.080 | one might argue that those people
00:01:11.560 | almost certainly have untapped creativity,
00:01:13.760 | untapped resources within them that they don't yet know about
00:01:18.760 | because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.
00:01:22.760 | - Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people,
00:01:24.600 | it's papering over the void, right?
00:01:26.560 | You have this void in your life
00:01:28.560 | because there's a unmet potential, unmet interest,
00:01:33.560 | living in misalignment with the things you care about,
00:01:36.160 | right?
00:01:37.000 | I mean, a lot of people,
00:01:37.820 | this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life, right?
00:01:40.580 | Social media, and there's, before this,
00:01:42.040 | it was other things, right?
00:01:43.040 | There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions.
00:01:46.120 | It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen
00:01:49.980 | over that like gaping void.
00:01:51.920 | And it like just makes it bearable enough
00:01:54.600 | that you can kind of go on with life.
00:01:56.800 | And so it is true.
00:01:57.640 | If you just rip it out, you see the void.
00:02:00.080 | And that's really difficult, right?
00:02:01.320 | I mean, 'cause I did this experiment for one of my books.
00:02:04.540 | I ran an experiment with 1600 people
00:02:07.400 | and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days.
00:02:10.680 | - 30 days? - 30 days, right?
00:02:12.000 | - These are young people, old people?
00:02:13.400 | - A whole mix, a whole mix, right?
00:02:15.120 | - They're not just university students.
00:02:16.280 | - I recruited them from my newsletter readership.
00:02:18.840 | So they weren't university students.
00:02:20.000 | And it wasn't formal research.
00:02:21.060 | It was, you know, I put out the call, right?
00:02:22.960 | So this is not randomly sampled, right?
00:02:24.480 | But I put out the call and I said,
00:02:25.320 | "Here, I'm gonna walk you through this."
00:02:27.460 | And then I got a lot of information back.
00:02:28.960 | So people reported back how it went.
00:02:31.160 | And this was like the number one thing I heard
00:02:33.680 | was it's really hard at first, right?
00:02:35.960 | And so who were the people that succeeded for 30 days
00:02:38.760 | versus those who didn't?
00:02:39.920 | The ones who didn't succeed
00:02:41.720 | tended to just try to white knuckle it.
00:02:43.820 | Just be like, "I don't like how much I'm using social media.
00:02:46.280 | "I'm just gonna stop because it's bad
00:02:47.920 | "and I don't wanna do a bad thing.
00:02:49.000 | "I'm just gonna like, you know,
00:02:50.000 | "hold on to the table with white knuckles."
00:02:51.640 | They wouldn't make it 30 days.
00:02:53.220 | The people who did succeed followed my advice
00:02:55.960 | to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives
00:02:59.480 | in those 30 days.
00:03:00.400 | So it's like, go learn new hobbies, join things right away.
00:03:03.040 | Get like really structured about your day.
00:03:05.560 | Get into exercise again, learn how to knit again.
00:03:07.920 | A lot of people said, "Oh, I learned about,
00:03:10.160 | "I forgot how fun libraries were."
00:03:12.200 | Like, you can go into this building
00:03:13.400 | and like all the books are free
00:03:14.600 | and you could just grab whatever
00:03:16.280 | and it's okay if you don't like the book
00:03:17.600 | because you didn't have to pay for it.
00:03:19.400 | I'm going out with friends again.
00:03:21.420 | Okay, every week I'm gonna have, you know,
00:03:23.560 | we're gonna have drinks with this person
00:03:25.160 | and every Thursday morning
00:03:26.440 | I'm gonna go running with this person.
00:03:28.100 | The people who aggressively tried to put in place
00:03:30.560 | a more positive alternative
00:03:32.880 | through self-reflection experimentation,
00:03:34.160 | they lasted the 30 days and beyond, right?
00:03:36.740 | And so then I came to realize like,
00:03:38.040 | "Oh, I see what's happening here
00:03:39.280 | "is you have these unmet needs."
00:03:41.560 | These tools can give you sort of a simulacrum
00:03:44.560 | of meeting them.
00:03:45.400 | I need, I'm a social being.
00:03:46.600 | I need to be connected to people.
00:03:47.760 | Well, I'm texting and like doing comments on social media.
00:03:51.360 | It's sort of touches that a little bit,
00:03:53.480 | just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely,
00:03:55.380 | but it's not really fulfilling that.
00:03:57.200 | I have a need to like see my intentions
00:03:59.280 | made manifest concretely in the world.
00:04:00.800 | Humans wanna do this.
00:04:01.940 | Well, I'm, you know, posting these things
00:04:04.000 | and people are responding.
00:04:05.080 | It's sort of this simulacrum of real creation.
00:04:07.920 | So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough
00:04:10.680 | that it's not just intolerable, right?
00:04:13.400 | And so what happens is if you remove that,
00:04:15.700 | you have to actually fill those things the right way.
00:04:17.880 | So now I'm not socializing on social media,
00:04:20.480 | but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention
00:04:22.920 | on behalf of other people.
00:04:24.320 | I'm feeling the social void in the right way.
00:04:26.640 | Now I don't really feel like I need to go back.
00:04:28.680 | I'm actually build, making my intentions manifest.
00:04:32.000 | I'm learning skills and building things.
00:04:33.520 | Now the sort of pseudo construction
00:04:36.000 | and collective attention economy of social media,
00:04:38.160 | I'll post this and you'll like it, I'll like this.
00:04:41.080 | I don't need that anymore to fill that void.
00:04:42.960 | So it's like, you have to fill the void first.
00:04:45.940 | So, you know, five years ago I wrote a book
00:04:47.780 | that was about reforming this part of your life.
00:04:51.060 | And a lot of the book had nothing to do with technology,
00:04:53.860 | but about how to actually just rebuild parts of your life.
00:04:57.720 | And on my podcast, honestly,
00:04:59.420 | like one of the big topics we talk about,
00:05:01.040 | which is crazy that I'm a technologist
00:05:02.820 | and I write about trying to find focus
00:05:05.180 | in a distracted world,
00:05:06.340 | is this thing we call the deep life,
00:05:08.340 | which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101.
00:05:12.340 | And it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it.
00:05:14.880 | But on the other hand, it's not
00:05:15.920 | because my is the podcast people go to
00:05:17.540 | when they're fed up with the digital world.
00:05:19.000 | And it turns out if you don't get the analog world
00:05:22.260 | working right for you,
00:05:23.840 | you need something to avoid staring into that void.
00:05:26.260 | And the digital world will do that well enough.
00:05:28.240 | It's like just good enough to keep life tolerable.
00:05:30.920 | - Thank you for tuning in
00:05:31.780 | to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.
00:05:33.600 | If you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed,
00:05:35.720 | please check out the full length episode by clicking here.
00:05:38.780 | [BLANK_AUDIO]