Why You Can't Pay Attention And Focus - Johann Hari

1. 0:00 – 0:33

   Intro

   1. JHJohann Hari0:00

      If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. "I wanna read this book." Or a bigger goal, "I wanna write a book. I wanna set up a business. I wanna be a good dad." Whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right? A society of people who a- are dawdling and can't pay attention won't be able to achieve collective goals either.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:25

      (wind blowing) Johann Hari, welcome to the show.

   3. JHJohann Hari0:27

      Hey, Chris. Good to be with you.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:29

      Really glad to have you back, man.

   5. JHJohann Hari0:30

      I'm very excited. Hooray.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:32

      Yes. Precisely.

2. 0:33 – 11:22

   Why Johann Studied Attention

   1. CWChris Williamson0:33

   2. JHJohann Hari0:33

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson0:33

      So you say that each book that you write is trying to solve or work out a different mystery. Why did you get interested in the mystery of attention?

   4. JHJohann Hari0:44

      Oh, God. You know, for so many years, I felt my own attention getting worse. I looked at so many of the people I knew, and I could see their attention was getting worse. But I was responding to that by saying... really by blaming myself, like everyone else I knew was blaming themselves, and thinking, "Oh, you know, you're just weak. You're not strong enough. You don't have enough willpower." Um, and then I, I was sort of... I also reassured myself by saying, "Well, every generation feels like this, right?" You can read letters from monks almost a thousand years ago, where one of them writes to the other one and says, "Ugh, my attention ain't what it used to be," right? It's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of what they said. And I thought, "Okay, so this is just, you know, you get older, your attention gets worse." But really, it was looking at the young people in my life and some young people I love that made me think, "You know what? This really does feel markedly different." And then I started looking at some of the studies of this. There's a small study, for example, of American college students that found that on average, they focus on any one task for 65 seconds, and the average office worker focuses on any one task for three minutes. And I thought, "Well, is something deeper going on here?" So I ended up going on this huge journey all over the world, fortunately pre-plague. Uh, I, I met, interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about focus, what causes it to boost, what causes it to deteriorate. I went from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, um, and I went to places that have been affected by this attention crisis in all sorts of different ways, from a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way, to an office in New Zealand, where they found an incredible way to boost attention. And, and what I concluded, having met the kind of leading experts in the world, is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can boost or, or, or degrade your attention. Loads of those factors have been really significantly increasing in recent times, and we are in a real and acute attention crisis, which is actually on course to get even worse unless we deal with these deep underlying causes of the crisis.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:53

      So, it is a modern phenomenon?

   6. JHJohann Hari2:56

      I, I'd say it's, it's the result of very specific things that are happening in the modern world. It's not just the modern world in itself. We could have m- the benefits of the modern world without most of this if we make the necessary adjustments. But it's definitely... There's, to some degree, there's, you know, this is a perennial human dilemma. But it's gotten much worse in response to specific things that are happening now.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:16

      What was the trip that you took where you sequestered yourself before the plague? You decided to take yourself away with a, uh, special needs, big, big button phone.

   8. JHJohann Hari3:28

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson3:28

      And, um, and throw yourself on an island. What happened there?

   10. JHJohann Hari3:32

       Well, it, it was a response to something else that happened actually, and that was really the reason why I wrote the book. So when, when he was nine years old, my godson developed this brief obsession with Elvis. I never understood how he found out about Elvis, but, um, he would start, like, obsessively singing Viva Las Vegas and Suspicious Minds. And it was particularly cute 'cause he didn't know that had become, like, a cheesy cliche, so he was doing it with this heart-catching sincerity. And he kept getting me to tell him the story of Elvis's life, and obviously I tried to skip over the bit where Elvis, you know, shits himself to death on the toilet. Um, but one night when I was tucking him in, he said to me very intensely, he said, "Johann, will you take me one day to Graceland?" And I said, "Yeah, sure," in the way that you tell nine-year-olds you'll do something knowing they'll forget it the next day. And he said, "No, do you really promise you'll take me to Graceland?" And I was like, "Yes, I absolutely promise." And I didn't think of it again until 10 years later when so many things had gone wrong. So when he was 15, he dropped out of school, um, and by the time he was 19, he was just constantly alternating between his iPad, his laptop, and his iPhone, and his life was just a blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn. And, and one day we were sitting, you can't see it, but the sofa just behind the laptop where we're talking, we were sitting there and I was trying to talk to him, and it was like he was whirring at the speed of Snapchat. It was like nothing still or serious could touch him, and it was really distressing. And, and it was distressing partly 'cause I could feel the same thing happening to me. It wasn't as extreme, but I could feel the same. I was sitting there looking at my own phone and I, and I suddenly remembered this moment from all those years before, and I said to him, "Hey, let's go to Graceland." And he was like, "What?" And he didn't even remember this thing that happened. And so I reminded him and I said, "Look, I'll take you to Graceland. We've got to break this numbing routine. But when we go there, you've got to leave your phone in the hotel while we're away. You can't just be taking it everywhere." And he said, "I promise I'll do that." So we... Two weeks later, we flew from, uh, Heathrow to New Orleans, which is where we went first.

   11. CWChris Williamson5:32

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JHJohann Hari5:32

       Anyway, a couple of weeks later we arrived at, at Graceland. And when you arrive at Graceland, even pre-COVID, there's no person to show you around. What happens is they, they give you an iPad and you put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around. So it says, "Go left, go right," and every room you're in, it tells you about that room. And there's a... In every room, there's a digital representation of that room on the iPad. So we're walking around Graceland, and I'm noticing that what happens is everyone just walks around Graceland staring at the iPad. I'm getting more and more tense. And we got to the Jungle Room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland, it's kind of loads of fake plants-... and there's this Canadian couple next to us, and the husband turned to the wife and he said, "Honey, this is amazing. Look. If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left, and if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle Room to the right." And I thought he was joking, so I lo- I looked at him and laughed. And then him and his wife just start swiping back and forward. And, and I turned to him and I said, "But sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It's called turning your head. Because look, w- we're actually in the Jungle Room, right? You don't have to look at a digital representation. We're literally there." And they clearly thought I was insane and sort of backed away, understandably. And I turned to my godson to laugh about it, and he was just standing in the corner looking at Snapchat, 'cause from the minute we landed, he was just constantly looking at it. He c- he couldn't keep his promise. And I just lost it. I shouted at him and I said, "You know, you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not being present at your own life." And I tried to grab his phone off him and he sort of stomped off. And I wandered around Graceland on my own, and then that night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel down the street where we were staying, where there's a, a swimming pool shaped like a guitar, and he was sitting by the swimming pool and he was just looking at his phone, and I apologized to him and he said, "Look, I know something is really wrong, but I don't know what it is." And that's when I thought, "Oh fuck, I need to look into this." And at first I thought, "Well, this is a personal, purely personal problem, right? He can't stop looking. I can't stop looking. The solution is to do something personal." I thought the problem lay in me and in my phone, so I did this very drastic thing. I just, I, I booked a little place in a beach house in Provincetown in Cape Cod, and I s- and I said to everyone I knew, "Look, I'm going completely offline for three months. I'm gonna have a phone that can't access the internet. I'm gonna have a laptop." My friend Imtiaz gave me his old broken laptop that couldn't get online. Um, I'm just, I'm just tired of being wired in this way. I'm, I'm, I'm out of it, right? And so I went to Provincetown for three months with no phone, and it was this kind of... it taught me a lot, um, both about the strengths of that approach and the weaknesses of it.

   13. CWChris Williamson8:16

       And what were they?

   14. JHJohann Hari8:18

       Well, the, the first few weeks were like a haze of decompression and this incredible sense of relief, and it's a very funny place, Provincetown, for people who don't know it. It's a little kind of gay resort town. It's a place where more than one person makes a full-time living dressing as Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid, and singing songs about cunnilingus, so gives you some sense of what it's like. So I was in this sort of haze of decompression, thinking, "Oh, this is, this is, this is so good. Thank God." It was like... and then about two weeks in, I had this really bitter crash. I was walking down the beach, and Provincetown, like Graceland, like every place you'll ever go now, was just full of people who were using... Provincetown's one of the most beautiful places in the world. We're just using Provincetown as a backdrop for their selfies. You're, you're seeing these people, it was particularly painful to see with parents with children doing this, who were just never looking around them, who were just constantly looking at their phones. But instead of thinking, "Oh, you, you don't know how to be present," I st- started thinking, "Give me that phone. I fucking want it," right? And I felt this tremendous craving, and I, and I realized that for so many years, you know, I had been exposed throughout the day to the kind of thin, insistent signals of the internet, of the web, of the current apps that we use. Um, and when those were gone, this is a very pretentious way of saying it, but Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher, said that when she became an atheist, it was like the world had gone silent, and that's how it felt. It felt like the world had gone silent, like I... l- l- like crucial signals that I needed were gone. And even if you're getting on well with people, and I was getting on well with people in Provincetown, they're not... you know. People don't flood you with hearts the minute they meet you, right? Um, so, so I realized after that, actually, I, I had created a vacuum where previously the signals of the internet were, and it wasn't enough to just separate my... it's necess- it was necessary for a period to separate myself from that, but then what I needed to do was fill that vacuum with something, and I started to learn a lot. I, I had already learned a lot, and I started to read more, and later met the leading scientist who learned about flow states, which I can talk about in a minute. Um, but I was amazed at once I, once I got through that, the haze of decompression and then the dip, what amazed me was how much my attention came back. I thought, you know, I'm 42. I thought, I thought, "Well, surely my brain has atrophied a bit." You know, actually, my attention was as good as it was when I was 17. I was lying there reading books for like eight hours, not feeling, not... my attention not atrophying, um, and I, I remember towards the end of those three months thinking, "This is amazing. I never want to go back to that, to that way of being." Um, and then within a couple of weeks of getting back to Boston and getting my phone back, my attention was as bad as it had ever been, and I had to really explore, "Okay, well, what's happening here? Why is it so hard to sustain those lessons in our normal lives, and how can we begin to do it?"

3. 11:22 – 15:33

   Parable of the TikTokkers

   1. JHJohann Hari11:22

   2. CWChris Williamson11:22

      The interesting thing you say about your godson and that sort of frenetic, very sort of, um, anxious, bouncy attention that he had, I read a... I, I wanna say it was a Washington Post huge op-ed piece from a, a psychology high school teacher or university teacher that went to go and live with some of the most famous TikTokers in a clout house.

   3. JHJohann Hari11:47

      Oh, fascinating.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:48

      So he goes and lives with them, and he tells this story about how they, uh, o- one of the evenings they were going to go and play basketball, and they were saying, "Right, let's go and play a game of basketball. Let's organize it." And th- it's all, everything's a bit kind of hyper, and it's like everyone's on E numbers and too much caffeine anyway, um, but these people have ridiculous numbers of followers, you know, they're some of the most followed TikTok accounts on the planet, and then they spend time organizing people into groups and picking who the teams are going to be, and then just as they're about to play the game-... someone walks off the pitch, walks off the basketball court, and then slowly everybody else walks off as well. And he turns to one of the guys and he says, "Hang on, you guys just made all of this time picking teams and saying that we're going to play a game of basketball. And now one person's walked off and a bunch of other people have walked off, and now it's not gonna happen." He says, "Oh, yeah, this happens all the time."

   5. JHJohann Hari12:37

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson12:37

      "People just start something and then they can't even hold their attention on the thing that they just began to do, and they get distracted and walk off." And there's something... W- we all-

   7. JHJohann Hari12:46

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:46

      ... experience the degradation of our attention inside of our brains, right? But what I find so strange is when it manifests physically. You know, when you see someone locomote themselves from one location to another because they simply couldn't hold on to, "I'm supposed to be doing this physical thing," it feels like when it manifests physically, it feels like another degree of, uh, like insanity.

   9. JHJohann Hari13:12

      Yeah. I love that story 'cause it's like a parable about what I think is the worst aspect to this attention crisis, which i- uh, which has two levels. Um, so if you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals about anything, right? So a personal level, anything you want to achieve, from a- a small thing, "I wanna go to the shop and buy some Diet Coke," or a bigger thing, "I wanna read this book," or a bigger goal, "I wanna write a book. I wanna set up a business. I wanna be a good dad," whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right? A society of people who are addled and can't pay attention won't be able to achieve collective goals either. So I think you're absolutely right, that- that's the chilling thing. And- and you're also right that when it manifests physically, it's more disturbing because of the 12 causes that I learned about, a lot of them are in relation to the body, um, w- which surprised me. Um, the- the- sleep, you know, we- we sleep 20% less than we did 100 years ago. That is a physical process we desperately physically need. And even if that was the only thing that had changed, Dr. Charles Czeisler, the leading expert in the world on sleep at Harvard Medical School, said to me, "Even if nothing else had changed, that alone would be causing a huge crisis in attention." Children sleep 80 minutes less than they did 100 years ago. That- that alone would be causing a huge crisis in children's attention. There's loads of evidence that the way we eat, um, i- i- the kind of standard Western diet has a catastrophic effect on people's ability to focus and pay attention. There's a whole range of these which are physical bo- I mean, the fact that we are the first human society ever in the last 100 years who think it is either possible or sensible to get small children to sit still for eight hours a day, when all the scientific evidence shows children's attention grows when they can run around and exercise. So, you see, again, the- these may seem like "no shit, Sherlock" insights, but we don't live in- in- in- in, uh... We're not acting on these insights. We have a society that's radically disconnected from these insights. So you- I think there's so many things in that parable that you've just said about... (laughs) The parable of the TikTokers, the, um... Yeah, I love that.

4. 15:33 – 20:08

   What is Attention & How Does it Work?

   1. JHJohann Hari15:33

   2. CWChris Williamson15:33

      How have you come to understand how attention works then? After all of this research, how do you frame, like, what attention is and- and how it works?

   3. JHJohann Hari15:42

      So there's so many ways of thinking about it, and it- and it... I was surprised by how complex a phenomenon attention is, and it req- it's a physical process, like we just said, requiring all these things. If you disturb yourself physically, to use one example, by eating foods that cause energy spikes and energy crashes, which I do, uh, that's gonna fuck your attention. There's... So there's a- this physical process. There's many layers of attention. There's a wonderful guy who really helped me to think about this called Dr. James Williams, who was a Google designer for many years, very senior at Google, became profoundly disenchanted with what they were doing to the world's intention- attention, quit, and is now, I think, the most important philosopher of attention in the world. I interviewed him in Moscow. He was living- living there 'cause his wife works with the World Health Organization. And James has created this kind of a typology of attention that I think is really helpful. He says there are three layers of attention. I would actually suggest a fourth as well, which I think he would agree- I know he would agree with. So the first level of attention is what we call the spotlight, right? This is- this is the dominant way we think about attention. So your spotlight is... So I'm in a room now where in the corner over there, there's my television. My phone is somewhere in this room. I've hidden it so I don't- can't see it while I'm talking to you. Um, there's noise in this room. You know, I can see people out my window. But I have- I've... Filtering all of that out and I'm narrowing my spotlight onto you, right? And I'm looking at your face and thinking, "What did Chris just ask me?" So the spotlight is your ability to attend to immediate short-term tasks by filtering out all the shit around you, right? Um, and we all know how that works. That's actually generally most of the debate about attention when we think, "Oh, I can't pay attention," we think of being distracted in that sense, right? "I- I sat there to read a book, but my phone rang. I was trying to spend time with my kids, but, you know, s- uh, but my boss emailed me." So we think about that immediate form of disruption of spotlight. So Dr. Williams suggests there's a- a second layer, which is what he calls your starlight, and your starlight is your medium to long-term goals, right? So it's not, "I wanna, you know, read this book or answer this email," it's, "I wanna set up a business. I wanna be a good dad. I wanna write a book." It's your medium to long-term goals. Um, the third ca- it's called the starlight because when you're lost in the desert, uh, you look to the stars and you figure out where you're going, right? The third layer is what he calls your daylight, and your daylight is how you even know what your long-term goals are. How do you know that you wanna...... set up a business? How do you know what kind of business you wanna set up? How do you know you wanna write a book? How do you know what it means to be a good parent, right? To have... it's called daylight because you can only see clearly when the room is flooded with daylight, right? How, how do you know these things if you are const- if your life is dissolved into 65-second and 3-minute pellets like a hailstorm is constantly going on around your attention? How do you know who you are if you never get time to think and contemplate away from being constantly disrupted and- and- and- and fucked with, right? And- and he argues that we're not just being disrupted at the level of the spotlight, which is what we think about, but our ability to achieve longer-term goals is being profoundly disrupted, and our ability to even know what our longer-term goals should be is being profoundly disrupted. I would argue there's a fourth layer which I would call our stadium lights, which is how we see each other. As a society, how can we achieve sustained goals, right? There's all sorts of crises facing our society, but if- if- if we can't focus, it's not just that you can't achieve your goals, we together can't achieve our goals. It fucks us at every level. So I think at the moment, all four of those forms of attention are being profoundly disruptive for us and for our children. But we ca- The reason I'm most optimistic about this is 'cause I- I think there are ways back from this.

   4. CWChris Williamson19:42

      The problem is that there's a trickle-down effect, right? That if you fracture and fragment the spotlight, that means that you don't ever make progress towards your meaningful long-term goals. And as you start to do that, the cohesive narrative that you make around, "Who am I? What are my values? Why am I here?" That begins to get fractured and fragmented so much.

   5. JHJohann Hari20:01

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson20:01

      And then over time, as you spread that out across a bunch of individuals that cohese together to make themselves into a society, they don't get to do it.

5. 20:08 – 30:37

   How Detrimental is Constant Task-Switching?

   1. CWChris Williamson20:08

      There's a line in, uh, it's either Digital Minimalism or Deep Work where Cal Newport says, he's talking about Twitter specifically, and he says, "Twitter fractures our days into slivers so small that we can't get anything meaningful done." Because we're just constantly task-switching from one form to another, and we'll- we'll get onto task-switching. In fact, that's, let's talk about that. What- what's the issue with speed and switching and filtering?

   2. JHJohann Hari20:33

      Yeah, there's... This is one of the first interviews I did for the book, and it was so big. (laughs) Actually, almost the very first interview I did with the book really fucking sobered me. Just before I get to switching, you just made me think of it. There's a guy called Professor Roy Baumeister, who's a professor at the University of Queensland.

   3. CWChris Williamson20:47

      He's a legend.

   4. JHJohann Hari20:48

      One- one of the most distinguished psychologists ever, but people have heard of the marshmallow test. He's the guy who invented the marshmallow test. So he's the lead- by far the leading expert in the world on willpower. He wrote a book called Willpower, right? So I go and interview him, and I say, "Oh, you know, Professor Baumeister, I'm thinking of writing a book about whether people are struggling to pay attention." And he said, "Do you know," it's, uh, these are not his exact words, they're in the book, he said, "You know, it's interesting you say that 'cause I've just found I can't really pay attention a lot of the time now. I just play video games on my phone all the time." And I'm sort of sitting there, and I'm like, "Wait, didn't you write a book called Willpower?" (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson21:22

      This is the godfather of willpower, and he's struggling.

   6. JHJohann Hari21:25

      I was like, "Fuck me, if you can't pay attention, this is really happening to everyone." So it was really... So I remember walking that interview, walking out that interview feeling a bit dazed, right? I was like, it's like you go to Yoda and Yoda just goes, "I don't know," right?

   7. CWChris Williamson21:39

      Yeah, I'm just playing Clash of Cl- Clash of Clans over here on my phone, sorry.

   8. JHJohann Hari21:43

      (laughs) It was really dispiriting, but then one of the moments it started to fall into place for me, so this- this cause that you're talking about, um, I went to interview a guy called Dr.- Professor Earl Miller, who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. He's at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Professor Miller said to me, "You gotta understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else: you can only think about one thing at a time." That's it. Consciously, right? That's it. This is a fundamental aspect of the structure of the human brain. The human brain has not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It ain't gonna change on any timetable any of us are gonna see. Um, you can only think about one thing at a time. But he said we have fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. But what happens is when Professor Miller's, uh, colleagues get people into labs and they test them, they say, "Okay," they get them to do, think they're doing lots of things at the same time. What they always discover is that, in fact, when you think you're doing more than one thing at a time, you're juggling, you're very quickly alternating between tasks, right? Your consciousness papers over it, it gives a seamless impression that you're just doing one thing, but actually, um, you're juggling. And this comes with a really significant cost. It's called the switch-cost effect, and it turns out when you are juggling, it degrades, profoundly degrades your ability to do any of the things you're doing. And there's lots of forms of home we can talk about, but I'll just look at, there's two studies I think that really, two small studies that help me to think about this. Hewlett-Packard, the printer company, uh, commissioned a scientist to do a study where they got a group of their workers and they split them into two groups. First group was told, "Just do whatever your task is for- for- for the day, uh, and we won't interrupt you." Second group was told, "Do your task for the day and you're gonna have to respond to a lot of emails and phone calls." And then they tested the IQ of both groups. The group who was not distracted, not interrupted, scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that wasn't. To give you a sense of how big that is, if you and me smoked a fat spliff now together and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points. So just being chronically interrupted had twice as bad an effect on your IQ as getting stoned. You would be better off in the short term, there's a debate about the longer-term effect of cannabis on IQ, but in the short term, you'll be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned, and doing one thing at a time than sitting at your desk not getting stoned and being bombarded with emails and phone calls. There's, oh, just to quickly say another study, the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Lab did a really interesting study. They got 138 students, they split them into two groups, they got them, all of them to do the same exam, but one group was told, "Just do it in normal exam conditions," and the other group was told...... um, you can, you can have your phone on and you can re- send and receive texts. Now, instinctively, you would expect the second group to do better 'cause they could've cheated, right? In fact, the second group, on average, did 20% worse because being interrupted ruins your ability to think. Uh, Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are interrupted, it takes you, on average, 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before. But most people never get 23 minutes of uninterrupted time at work, right?

   9. CWChris Williamson25:04

      You said that it was, on average, three minutes and 30 seconds-

   10. JHJohann Hari25:07

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson25:07

       ... for people that are in a workplace environment, or 65 seconds for a uni student.

   12. JHJohann Hari25:12

       And this goes right to the top. The average CEO of a Fortune 500 company only gets 26 uninterrupted minutes a day, right? So at every level of the economy, at every level of the society... Well, the way Professor Miller put it to me is we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of this constant interruption. (clears throat) And again, I remember leaving that interview feeling pretty fucking sobered, thinking, "It's one thing to have this suspicion, 'Oh, something's happening here,'" but when you go and you keep interviewing, like, the leading scientists in the world on these questions and they're saying, "No, this is really bad," right? Uh, uh, I remember interviewing Professor Barbara Demaney, who's one of the leading scientists in France. Uh, she won the Légion d'honneur, which is the biggest civilian award you can get in France. Um, and her just saying, "Well, there's no way you can have a normal brain today." And thinking, "Fuck, this is..." you know. But, so that can feel when you hear it, and was to me when I first learned it, very overwhelming. But the reason why I feel, uh, why I think there's reason to be optimistic is because there are solutions to these problems, and I think they have to happen at two levels. So one level is the personal, there are personal solutions we can pursue in our, as isolated individuals in our own lives, and, uh, we can talk about lots of them. I'll just give you one example. You can't see it from here, Chris, but in the corner of the room over there I've got, uh, it's called a kSafe. This company should start fucking paying me commission 'cause I'm saying this in every podcast, but they're not, sadly. (laughs) Uh, so kSafe is a plastic safe. You take the lid off, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top, and it will shut your phone away for anything between five minutes and a week. And you lock it and you can't get your phone. I mean, if there was a fire or something, you could just smash it, but then you'd have to buy another kSafe. Um, so I do, I use that for four hours a day. I would not have been able to write my books if I didn't do that. Also, on the laptop I'm speaking to you on, I have an app called Freedom which can cut you off either from the specific websites you tell it to, if you were addicted to, say, Twitter, or just the entire internet, and I use that for the same four hours, um, every day. So there's lots of personal things we can all do in our lives to defend ourselves and our children against this systematic invasion of our, of our attention. But I wanna be honest with people, the evidence shows that that can improve your attention, but it will only get you so far. Because at the moment, it's like we're living in an environment where someone is... And by the way, tech is, of the 12 causes, not the biggest, which surprised me. Um, we are living in an environment that is constantly pouring itching powder on us. And it's a bit like, at the moment, the person pouring itching powder on us is going, "Do you know what, mate? Um, you might wanna learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much." And, well, yeah, I'm in favor of meditation, but fuck you, we need to stop you pouring itching powder on us, right? Um, so we've got to have another level of response at which, together, we are taking on these forces that are fucking with our ability to pay attention. I know that can sound a bit abstract, so can I give, very quickly, a specific example of a place that did that? So France, in 2018, was having a big crisis of what they called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government, under pressure from the trade unions, s- uh, got a guy called Bruno Mettling, who was the head of Orange, one of their biggest telecoms companies, to figure out what the fuck was going on. And he found, he did loads of research, and he discovered that 35% of French people felt they could never turn off their phones or stop checking their emails when they were awake 'cause their boss could message them at any time of the day or night, and if they didn't reply, you know, they were in trouble. So you can give those people all the sweet self-help lectures you want in the world about, "Oh, you'd be much better off. Buy a kSafe." They can't do it, right? I remember thinking when I learned that figure... You know, we're not, you're younger than me, Chris, but I remember when, when I was a kid, the only people who were on call were the prime minister and doctors, and even doctors weren't on call all the time, right? Now 35% of the economy is just on call all the time, and many people are m- uh, burdened by this, many more people are burdened by this. Um, so Bruno Mettling proposed a very simple solution which the French government then introduced into law. It's called the right to disconnect. It just says two things. You have a legal right to have your work hours defined in your contract, and you have a legal right to not have to check your phone or email outside those work hours. That's it. So I went to Paris to interview people about this. Uh, just before I was there, Rentokil, the pest control company, got fined 70,000 euros 'cause they tried to get one of their workers... They told off one of their workers for not responding to an email an hour after his work hours ended. Now, you can see how that's a collective thing. Companies are never gonna do that unless we make them do it. I mean, some might do it as a benefit, but that's... You know, they're gonna get a few benevolent bosses, but most are not. That's something where you can't do that on your own. You can go to your boss and say, "I want the right to disconnect," and they'll go like, "Pfft. (laughs) Fuck off," right? But we can do that collectively by banding together and fighting for that to be introduced. So that's one of many things we need to do collectively. So we've got to... All these problems have to be tackled at both levels. The individual things we can do which will get us to a certain level, and then the collective things we can do which will make it possible for many more of us to do those individual things. Does that ring true to you, Chris?

6. 30:37 – 43:32

   Should there be Systemic Changes to Improve Attention?

   1. JHJohann Hari30:37

   2. CWChris Williamson30:37

      Yeah, it does. So we had this discussion when we talked about Lost Connections, your last book, on depression, and I think that this, um, uh, belies a, like, a bias that I have where...... such... I- I- I'm an only child, right? So, radical personal responsibility and never ever looking to anything else outside of me for a solution. It al- it always surprises me when you, uh, talk about how sort of systemic changes can influence the individual, because that- that's a solution that doesn't often come very true to me.

   3. JHJohann Hari31:10

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson31:10

      One of the things that... and not that I'm concerned about, but one of the things that I think it would need to be... a- a- and you put it across well in the book, it needs to be, uh, laid at people's feet. Like, look, you need to do everything that you can personally to be able to try and sort your attention out, and then we can band together to try and make these changes occur long term, because they're not going to happen straight away. One of the concerns that I would have is that it's potentially easy for people to fall into a victim mentality where, "Look, Johann's book said... Look at this environment that I'm living in. I'm being forced. There's itching powder being poured on me. Look, I can never get out of- of this suboptimal a- attentional environment," right? Um, and I think that it's important that people realize, yes, there are challenges that you have in the environment. You need to do the things that you can, and over time, we can try and make the environment become better. And I think that the blend between the two is correct, but it always surprises me how many, uh, solutions are actually out there that can be done that are going to assist people with what they can do personally because almost all of the solutions that I look to immediately are, right, well, I- I'll- I'll try and fix it. I'll try and come up with some sort of a solution. But I mean, to- to try and run through some of the ridiculous ways that I sort my attention out, I sleep with my phone outside of my bedroom. I have two separate phones. One has social media on, and the other one-

   5. JHJohann Hari32:30

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson32:31

      ... is for- for messaging. The one that has social media on has no SIM card, so that one's always attached to the wifi in my house. I have intermittent fasting for my phone. I don't use it before a certain time. I don't use it after a certain time. I have an app called Cold Turkey on my laptop, which locks me out of my laptop after a particular time at night, and I can't get out of that. Th- there's an option on that called Frozen Turkey which literally just shuts your laptop down and there's nothing that you can do to stop it. Now, I've gone away on a holiday and not enabled data roaming so that I don't ever use my phone as soon as I leave the apartment. Like, just pick your endless number. The notifications have been turned off. Gone grayscale mode on the phone. And there's an awful lot of tricks and- and tips and stuff that I've put together to try and constrain how much my attention can be distracted, and yet for the fact that I didn't realize maybe there is something systemic out there, I- I think it was almost like... Do you know what it was? It was almost like learned helplessness, I think. It was almost like, I don't think that we can enact change. These big tech companies are going to be so powerful, and they have so much influence and they make so much money, there is no way that we're gonna be able to actually do anything to impact them, so i- it's all on me. Like, I'll carry the boat, David Goggins style, right? And I think that that was kind of... that was where I got to and, um, yeah, it- it- it... you know, I really do hope that we can try and make a better attentional environment because it worries me how nerfed the- the human species growth has been due to the fact that in the space of 10 years, 10 years ago, around about 2011, 2012, I think we had the optimal amount of information available on the internet.

   7. JHJohann Hari34:12

      (laughs) Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson34:12

      Briefly for a two-month period in, like, the autumn of 2011 or something, we had the right amount of information available, and then very quickly we went from a world where information was a scarcity that you wanted to get more of because it would help you survive, it would make you more competitive, it would make you more attractive, it would mean that you had better life, very quickly went from wanting more to needing to filter less. The best people on the planet, the smartest people on the planet now are not the ones that can forage for information, they're the ones that can sort signal from noise. They're the ones that can discriminate between what they don't need in the wealth of information that's hitting them in the face and what they do need, and that skill is just not one that we've got. I'm sure that you've heard about information foraging, that that's... I think it's the same neuroscientist that you spoke to earlier on that talks about that, the fact that we're constantly on the lookout for information because it was so scarce and so important and so useful to us in our past, and, um, yeah man, some systemic changes would also be pretty nice.

   9. JHJohann Hari35:13

      Well, it's about... I love what you just said. I think that's so interesting and I just want to think through a few of the things you've said, Chris, because, um, I'm just processing them, and I think what you're saying is- is really important because I had a similar sort of dialogue with myself, um, where... So I was going into... I'll give you an example, a guy called Professor Joel Nigg who is the, um, l- the leading expert on children's attention problems in the US and, um, he said to me that- that we're living in what he call... he thinks we might be now living in what he calls an attentional pathogenic environment, which is where, for everyone, forms of deep focus like reading a book are- are getting more and more like running up a down escalator, and, um, one of the worries about that is that it's not like we will even remain at the current level of invasiveness of our attention. Many of the factors invading our attention are going to get much worse. Paul Graham, one of the leading Silicon Valley, um-

   10. CWChris Williamson36:14

       Unbelievable blogger.

   11. JHJohann Hari36:15

       ... investors... Yeah, yeah, and- and a hugely prominent figure in Silicon Valley said that the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years compared to the last 40 years, um, if we don't regulate the way this stuff works. That's me adding the clause if we don't regulate, not him. Um, so I thought a lot about this because when you hear that, initially it can feel... exactly what you said, the last thing I ever want to do with anyone in what... my writing about addiction, depression or, um, or- or attention...... is to inculcate a v- victim mentality. The l- if people read my book and thought, "Well, I'm fucked then," then I have failed completely, because you're genuinely not fucked. And I think part of the problem is... how would I put this? That people feel like... It's about, it's about... The question is about asking people where your power lies, right? So if you think about... people feel like... understand, very understandably, feel like, "I have power over my immediate behavior to some degree, but if something is bigger than me, I have no power over that." Right? And a big part of what I want to communicate to people, because, uh, I think the evidence is very clear that it's true, is that you have power at many levels. Now, you have power at the level of your individual behavior, and even people in the most horrendous environment, if you are in solitary confinement for the rest of your life, you still have some power over what you do, right? Uh, Viktor Frankl wrote about how he exercised agency in the concentration camps. You... uh, when he was imprisoned there by the Nazis and his family were murdered, you always have some agency, um, but also at the individual level, but you also have power at a collective level when you band together with other people. And I wanna just give a very practical example, and I would really urge people to think about their own families in relation to this as well. I think a lot about my grandmothers, partly 'cause I was raised by my Scottish grandmother, 'cause m- my mother was ill when I was a kid and my dad was in a different country. So my grandmothers... I'm 42. My grandmothers were 42 in 1963. One of my grandmothers was a working class Scottish woman living in a Scottish tenement, and my other grandmother was living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain in Switzerland. And in 1963, neither of them was allowed to have a bank account 'cause they were married women. Neither of them, uh, was allowed... well, both of them could be legally raped by their husbands. Um, in practice, their husbands could beat the shit out of them because the police never did anything about domestic violence. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. Um, both of them had left school when they were 13, even though the men in their families carried on going to school l- later 'cause no one gave a shit about girls being able to learn anything. My, my Sw- my Swiss grandmother, she loved to paint and draw, but they were like, "Fucking why are you doing that? Fucking shut up, get into the kitchen." Um, so I think about their lives, right? When they were... they were the age I am now. I knew them, I loved them.

   12. CWChris Williamson39:16

       60 years ago, yeah.

   13. JHJohann Hari39:17

       This is very recently, right? And then I look at my niece, who's 17, who loves to draw and paint. She never knew my grandmother, sadly. Um, loves to draw and paint, and when she w- draws and paints, we're like, "You should go to art school. This is brilliant." Right? Um, and even... l- like, no one... you would be regarded as a deranged maniac if you said, "Eh... my niece should not be allowed to have a bank account. It should be legal for her to be raped. You know, she shouldn't be allowed to vote." I mean, it'd be unthinkable, right? No one would ever s- literally no one says that, right? Or perhaps the craziest, farthest fringe, but, like, w- almost nobody. Um, how did that change happen, right? At the level of my grandmothers in 1963, I can well imagine them saying, "Fuck me, we're never gonna take this on." Right? How is this ever gonna change? In 1963, every single country, company, police force, all of them were controlled by men and had been ever since those things were invented thousands of years before, right? Except for a few hereditary queens every now and then, right? Um, at the level of the ind- isolated individual, you could say to my grandmother, "Look, you have some agency." Yeah, I mean, she could've... there were certain things, adjustments they can make in their behavior, but the truth is that th- the margin for them to make changes in that society were very limited. So how did we get to the change where my, my niece does have lots of margins? My niece just... uh, she was going out with a boy, he didn't treat her well, she told him to fuck off. Uh, all the boys around sided with her. A complete transformation. It would be unthinkable to my grandmothers, right? Um, how, how did we get that? It didn't happen because lots of women made isolated individual changes. It happened 'cause lots of women banded together and s- and plenty of sympathetic men as well, and said, "We're not gonna fucking take this anymore." Right? "No." Uh, and I would argue, um... so I think that's really important about people knowing where their power lies. I stress very strongly, and I know this is your, your instinct as well, we, we have power as isolated individuals, but we also have power when we band together. And in a way, I, I don't think of those things... you can overdo the separation between those things, right? So you can think there's, there's... "I have power or the collective has power," but the collective is you. It's you banding together with everyone else. That's how changes happen, and we're all the beneficiaries of those changes, right? Think about something as... that we used to take for granted and was in place for a long time, the weekend. The weekend isn't some natural thing that just appeared. The week... we have a weekend because workers who used to be made to work seven days a week fought for fucking 40 years and got shot and fucking fired and beaten up by the police until they achieved the weekend, right? Now the weekend is being eroded again. We can talk about that if you want. But, so we are all the beneficiaries of, of these big collective struggles and there's no, there's no trade-off between those two things. The more you gain control of yourself personally, the better able you are to participate in a collective struggle, and the more the collective struggle succeeds, the better... the more we can set people free to do the things that will empower their attention anyway. Do you see what I mean? Does that... I know that it might seem... uh, viscerally it's not, doesn't match with your gut instinct, but does it... can you see that there's a truth in that, Chris? I feel like you can.

   14. CWChris Williamson42:39

       Oh yeah, absolutely, man. I mean, you know, you are a part of the whole. There's a, uh, emergence and a synthesis that goes on between what you can do as an individual and the environment that you're in. And then as you get more agency as an individual and become more aware, you can contribute to the people around you. You know, m- my friends make me a better person.... why? Well, because they do a thing, they gain some agency, they learn about something, and then they influence me. Just scale that up across a, a country, or a nation, or a, a world, right? A species. So yeah, I am... I agree, man, I just, it's, uh, that's something that maybe me, uh, uh, and also a lot of the people I think that listen to podcasts probably need to be conscious of, that personal responsibility is something which is, um, spoken about so much that it can actually be, not to a detriment, but it can blind you to some other solutions that could be useful, you know, collective solutions. And, um, yeah, it's

7. 43:32 – 1:02:52

   Flow States for Wellbeing

   1. CWChris Williamson43:32

      an interesting one. What about, what about, um, the relationship between attention and, and well-being, and how we actually feel? Does it have a relationship to how we feel about ourselves?

   2. JHJohann Hari43:43

      Oh, totally. So, and, and it goes both ways. Think about something like anxiety, right? Um, so as your ability to pay attention degrades, you're less able to achieve your goals, you have less of a sense of what's called an internal locus of control. And funny enough, this relates very strongly to what you were just saying. So there's a, uh, a locus of control is your ability to feel you can change things in your world, right? Your immediate world, or the wider world. Uh, and there's lots of evidence... So if you have an internal locus of control, you're someone who feels, "I can make things happen," right? And, and the- and if you have a- what's called an external locus of control, that's where you feel, "Look, whatever I do, nothing will ever change. I can't make things happen," right? And there's a, um, as you, as your attention gets worse, your, your locus of control begins to break down, because you're not s- eh, eh, think about your TikTokers who couldn't even play a, a basketball game, right? What can they make happen? Okay, they can make their followership rack up on TikTok, um, which probably does give th- wh- I'm sure does give them a sense of agency. But they can't make things happen outside that realm. You're gonna feel incompetent, and there's actually lots of ways, particularly with young people, that our environment makes people feel incompetent. The way our school system works makes boys particularly feel incompetent, uh, and, and is really damaging their attention, their sense of having a locus of control.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:03

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JHJohann Hari45:03

      There's a whole range of things we can think about in relation to that. So there, so there's one level at which, okay, you can't achieve your goals, you become more anxious, because you're just not as effective a person in the world. There's also another direction, whereas as you become more anxious, anxiety itself undermines attention. Stress undermines attention. I think a lot of this is happening at the moment with, with COVID, where, without getting into the debate about COVID, 'cause it'll, fucking hell, I can't bear that. The, um, if you think about something that I think is happening to all of us, whatever you think about the response to COVID, um, there's a woman called Nadine Burke Harris, amazing woman, she's now the surgeon general of California, the leading medical officer in the state. And she explained this thing to me, it's helped me to think about why so many people haven't been able to focus during COVID. I remember at the start, lots of people were going, "Oh, I'm gonna finally read that 900-page book I've been meaning to read." And no fucker I know read the 900-page book (laughs) during COVID, right? Um, uh, and Nadine said to me once, um... It was not that long before COVID, although we didn't know it. She said to me, "Okay, imagine one day you're attacked by a bear. You're just going about your business and you're attacked by a bear. In the weeks and months that follow, involuntarily, something will happen to your attention. It will flip. Uh, it will scan the horizon for potential risks and dangers," right? Just 'cause this is just an actual thing. You- some things hit you out of the blue, so you're gonna be on the lookout for other things that might come out of the blue. So it'll be harder for you to focus on, like, a book, say, 'cause a little bit of your brain, or a big bit of your brain is going, "What the fuck is going on?" Right? "Is there another danger around the corner?" Okay, now imagine you're attacked by a bear again. Then you might flip into what's called a st- you'll likely flip into a state called hyper vigilance, where immediate, uh, focus on tasks like reading a book will be really hard, 'cause you're just like, "Fucking hell, I don't know what's going on here. I n- I need to scan for risks," right? Um, there was a great child psychiatrist I interviewed in Adelaide in Australia called Dr. John Geradini, who said to me, "You know, deep focus is a really good tactic when you are safe," right? "It will make you, it will help you grow, it will help you develop your mind, you'll become a better person. But it's a fucking stupid strategy if you're in danger," right? "If you're in- you'd be a fool to sit at the Battle of the Somme and read War and Peace," right? "You're gonna get shot in the head," right? So, um, atten- deep attention is something we can provide when we feel safe. And the kind of weird instability of COVID, um, I think has put a lot of people into a state of vigilance and hyper vigilance, partly about the virus itself, partly about their work, partly just about, "What the fuck's happening? What, where, where are we?" Right? Um, so I think... I forgot what your question was, Chris. What was the... How did I get onto this? And-

   5. CWChris Williamson47:52

      Well, just looking, looking at how it is that f- focus and attention relate to our sense of well-being-

   6. JHJohann Hari47:58

      Oh.

   7. CWChris Williamson47:58

      But what you've identified there is that it's reversed. It's that our sense of well-being can influence our ability to focus, which makes sense. Like, think about any time that you've had a, an impending awkward conversation, and you're trying to do something to assuage the feelings of, of anxiety about the upcoming terrible discussion with your boss or girlfriend or whatever, mate. And, uh, yeah, it's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. And you talk about flow states as well, right?

   8. JHJohann Hari48:25

      Yeah. I think you're right, that it goes in both directions. And flow states are a really interesting example of a form of attention that we know massively boosts mental well-being. So a flow state, everyone listening will have experienced a flow state. A flow state is when you're doing something and you r- that's meaningful to you, and you really get into it. And your sense of time falls away, and your sense of ego falls away. And your attention just comes so easily, you're not even thinking about paying attention. One rock climber said, uh, "Flow is like when you, you feel like you are the rock you're climbing," right? Um-And flow states are the most deep and precious form of attention human beings can provide, and it's a particularly important form of attention because it's not an effortful form of attention. When you get into flow, it's not like when you're trying to learn something for an exam, and you're like, "Oh, fucking hell. Okay, this happened then, and how do I memorize that?" It's completely effortless. So obviously, I was thinking a lot about, how do we get into flow, right? How do we get into states of flow? How do we... I- if this is like a gusher of attention that we all have within us, how do we, where do we drill to get that, that gusher, right? So I went to interview Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was the... You have no idea how long it took me to memorize saying that name. Uh, who was the, he's a, an inc- uh, I think I did the last interview he ever did. He was, um, he sadly died not long afterwards. Incredible man. So he was a Hungarian psychologist who discovered, coined the phrase "flow states" and spent 50 years investigating them. And he discovered lots of things. He discovered, crucially for your question about well-being, the more flow states you experience, the better you feel about yourself. And interestingly, although in the state of flow, you have no sense of ego, um, afterwards, you have a healthier sense of self. So people who, there are some people, about 15% of people ex- ex- very rarely experience flow states, and that correlates very highly with things like depression, anxiety. Uh, and the more flow states you experience, the happier you are. And the more full-... Or, more importantly than being happy, the more fulfilled you are. And so I was talking to him a lot about, you know, "What, what's going on here? How can we get flow states?" And he had discovered an enormous number of things about this, but I think for the purposes of listeners who wanna maximize their flow states, there's three things I would recommend from his, that he learned in his incredible 50-year body of research on this. The first is, there's three things you need to do to get into a flow state. The first is, you have to choose one clear goal, right? If you're trying to do more than one thing, you'll never get into flow, right? So I can't say, "I'm gonna read this book and I'm gonna watch the latest episode of whatever." The one will undermine the other. You'll, I mean, tick, watching, you know. Anyway, you get the idea. Um, so interruption, distraction, or multiple goals fuck flow. The second is, the goal has to be meaningful to you, right? Uh, and this is very important. You can't flow into something that doesn't matter to you. So, you could say to me, "Johann, paint this canvas," or, "Play this guitar," or, "Climb this rock," and I would never get into flow with that, right? I would, the guitar would sound like I was killing an animal, and the r- well, I would just fall off the rock and die, so there'd be a flow state 'cause the blood would flow out of my body, but that would not be great, right? Uh, so it's gotta be something that matters to you, and a lot of the times when people struggle to pay attention at work, it's often because their work is not meaningful to them, and we can talk more about how you can build meaning into work if you like. The third, and this is the one that most helped me, is if you wanna maximize your chances of getting into flow, choose something that's at the edge of your abilities. So if you're a medium-talent rock climber, you don't wanna clamber over a garden wall. You're not gonna get into flow over that, but equally, you don't wanna suddenly try and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. You're gonna just be overwhelmed. You wanna choose a rock that's slightly higher and harder than the last one you climbed. So, clear goal, meaningful goal, edge of your ability. There's one person who said, "Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone," and I think flow states begin at the edge of your comfort zone. When you do that, you maximize your chance of flow. But I would argue, and I argue in the book, that we're living with a, uh, a crisis of flow states. Given what Mihaly said, that, and, and scientifically proved, that to get into flow, you have to be able to do one thing and not be distracted, and given that we know the enormous quantity of interruption that we're all exposed to, I think we experience a crippling of flow states, which is one of the reasons why, it's not the only one by any means, but it's one of the reasons why we've got high levels of anxiety and depression and a lot of these other problems. So they sort of feed... What, what gets you into flow, Chris? What's your...

   9. CWChris Williamson53:04

      Uh, podcasting is probably the closest I get to it. When it's a really good conversation and everything just gets forgotten about and it's, you're just here. Uh, I've found it's easier for me with physical practices than mental ones.

   10. JHJohann Hari53:16

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson53:16

       That reading a book, reading a good book is, I can get there, but it ha- it's usually fiction. I struggle to get into a flow state with a non-fiction book.

   12. JHJohann Hari53:24

       Oh, it's so true.

   13. CWChris Williamson53:25

       I find a na- a narrative, and you can imagine the landscape of whatever's going on inside of your mind. But, you know, I- I played pickleball, for instance, for the first time, which is kind of like, like miniature tennis with paddles and a big ball. And I played th-

   14. JHJohann Hari53:40

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson53:40

       ... played that for the first time in Austin while I was out there, and we went for three hours. And that, for me, I can drop into flow state in a physical practice super easily. I learned wake surfing while I was out there. I went shooting, uh, like, um, tactic- tactical shooting at targets. That, all of those things, I can drop into very easily. For me, it's much harder to do mentally.

   16. JHJohann Hari53:59

       (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson54:00

       Um, but I had Steven Kotler on from the Flow Research Collective. So he looks at the biology of flow, and he said exactly the same thing that you have. If you task switch, you're looking at sort of between 15 and 20 minutes, 23 minutes for you to be able to get back into that. But he also said that any type of emotion, emotional response, will knock you out of flow very quickly.

   18. JHJohann Hari54:20

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   19. CWChris Williamson54:21

       Uh, and this is why, uh, turning off notifications is so important, or if you're doing something where you're trying to get into flow, having a, a constrained environment where just you don't get external stimuli. Someone sends you an email. Even if the email is basically neutral in terms of what it means to you, the fact that it's popped up will probably give you a small sense of annoyance. You notice it, or maybe there's an excitement or there's annoyance or whatever, and that emotion is enough to kick you out of flow. So that's the same as a task switch. You know, you just, your attention goes up. You notice something, maybe it annoys you, maybe it makes you happy, maybe it doesn't, uh, do anything, but there's just a little bit of something, and then (fingers snap) you're out. And to get yourself back into that biologically optimal state for flow, it takes too long. And yeah, it's this, our days become fractured into segments so small that we can't get anything meaningful done, but we also can't get into a state that makes us feel meaningful. We can't get into a state that makes us feel good. So-Yeah, it's um-

   20. JHJohann Hari55:15

       I think that's such a good way of putting it, Chris. I'm just thinking about that because I- I think you've put that better than I did in the- I'm just thinking about there's so many aspects of that. It also... So part of what's going is d- what's happening is that we're... exactly what you just said, that- that process where we're so broken up we can't find meaning. Also, we're plugged into a machinery that diverts us into a form of meaning that is mostly bullshit, right? So you think about, um, the craving for likes and retweets, which everyone who's on Instagram and Twitter will experience, right? And you feel good when you've got them and you... And it was really interesting, I had this... I've had periods in my life where I've been sort of successful on those metrics and it n- and- and it gave me a sort of rush, but it never made me feel good the way a flow state does. And when I was in Provincetown and I had those three months off the internet, I was really able to think about that. And I sort of had this- this kind of, um, slightly wanky epiphany where I was thinking a lot about... Because when I was away- you know, I was away for this for as long as I'd b- since they were invented, right? And I was trying to think, "Why do I feel so much better when I'm, for me, reading a book or the, different people have different flow states, whether it's playing the guitar or surfing or whatever it might be. Why do I feel so much better when I'm doing those things than when I'm, even when I'm sort of winning at social media," right? And- and I had this, I started thinking about th- this Canadian philosopher, um, called Marshall McLuhan, who in the 60s said this famous thing that I had never understood. And he said, "The medium is the message," right? Which I'd, obviously I'd heard, but I- I'd n- I'd never really knew what he meant. And, um, what he... and I started reading while I was out there and, uh, I mean, he's been dead for many years. And M- McLuhan said that basically... he was talking about television. When a new medium, a new way of humans communicating is invented, like television, there's obviously the specific TV show that might have a message in it, right? You can watch The Wire, that's got one message. You can watch Wheel of Fortune, that's got a different message, right? But whether you watch The Wire or Wheel of Fortune, the medium itself has a message in it. If you watch a ti- television, you begin to see the world as being like television. Even think about something as simple as, like, how we think about our own memories as like flashbacks in a TV show, right? Like when you think about your childhood, you picture it... I picture it as like a flashback in a TV show. People didn't think about memory that way before television was invented. They obviously had memories and they... but they processed them in different ways, right? So when a medium comes along, it changes how you see the world. It's like putting on a new set of goggles and you start to see the world through that medium. I think that's what he was saying. I could be misunderstanding him. But I started thinking about that in relation to, say, Twitter or Instagram, right? Um, because what is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? It doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge. When you tweet, you are buying into an implicit set of messages. The first is, the world can and should be described in 280 characters. That is a useful, valuable way of predominantly thinking about the world, right? Um, and the second is that what matters is whether people immediately agree with your 280 character- characterization of the world, right? Or think about Instagram, where the message is, what matters is how you look and whether people immediately like how you look. And I was thinking about it. And I mean, I mean, I like looking at people who look good, but with Twitter... So I thought, I- one of the reasons I don't feel good even when I'm winning in that game is because I don't think that's true. I think that underlying message is really wrong, actually. I- I don't think many things that are useful can be said in 280 characters. In fact, almost nothing. Maybe if you're a fucking Japanese haiku artist, all right. But I don't see many of them on Twitter. Um, and- and actually, whether people immediately agree with you is a very bad metric for measuring the value of what you think and say, right? Actually, almost everyone I admire, the first time they started saying what they said, people didn't agree with them. If everyone immediately agrees with you, it probably didn't need to be said, actually. Everyone already knew it, right? Um, and- and the same with Instagram. There- there's a value in people looking good. Um, but if that becomes... You know, essentially after I wrote my book about depression, Lost Connections, I cannot tell you how many messages I got on Instagram from people with enormous Instagram followings. These, like, stunningly beautiful, you know, porn stars, sadly all women. Uh, if the male porn stars want to get in touch, they're very welcome to. Um, the... who just feel like shit. And yet, and- and if you look to their Instagram, they're the ones that are winning in the game, right? Because this is a very bad metric to dominate your life. It's a perfectly good metric some of the time. Uh, in a way that I don't think Twitter is ever a good metric. I think looking good is good. Um, but these- these messages are not good. And then I thought, well, when I read books, I feel very... physical books, I feel quite different. And I was trying to think, well, what's the message in a book? Irrespective of, you know, the specific words of that particular book, the message is, firstly, slow down, right? Just slow down. Think about one thing for like... you know, a book, it'll take you seven, 10 hours, whatever it is. It's worth thinking about just one thing for 10 hours. That's a pretty fucking radical message in the world we live in, right? Um, secondly, um, you might want to think, it's really interesting what you said about fiction. One of the messages is think about other people's internal lives. Stop and think about this... you might read a novel about someone who's really different to you. Um, but they've got an internal life just like you. You realize that we're, in fact, incredibly similar. I just read a book about, like, a Chinese peasant and you go like, "Oh." You know, you sort of see- written by somebody who had been a Chinese peasant. Like, oh, right, we're... you know, you start to see the similarities, the differences. Um, to me, the message is about slowness and depth.Those are things that are actually worth having. Now, people can get them in different ways, doesn't have to be a physical book. Um, but slowness and depth are things that are worth having. If everyone listening, if you think about something you've achieved in your life, it will be because you slowed down, you focused deeply, you paid attention. It will not be because you thought in quick, rapid fucking bursts and loads of people gave you hearts. That's not... Th- y- you... I- i- if you are happy when... I- that... If you think that's your greatest achievement, then you- you're gonna have quite an unhappy life, right? Does that, does that ring true to you, Chris?

   21. CWChris Williamson1:01:47

       Yeah, man. There's a quote from Naval that says, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." What he means is-

   22. JHJohann Hari1:01:52

       Oh, I love that. Who said that?

   23. CWChris Williamson1:01:54

       What's... Naval Ravikant. He's a, an investor from Silicon Valley and i- just one of the smartest guys on the planet. Uh, and play stupid games, win stupid prizes. What is the prize that you get-

   24. JHJohann Hari1:02:02

       Oh.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:02:02

       ... for winning at the game that you're currently playing? What's the prize that you get for always keeping your Instagram DM requests folder at zero? What's the prize that you get for always being the person that replies the quickest in the WhatsApp chat? What's the prize that you get for being the person that gets retweets on Twitter? Y- y- okay. Like, you know, i- if you're trying to grow your company's fucking Instagram account because you think that you're going to be able to change the world and clean up the seas because that's what it does, maybe, uh, you know, that's a, a good way to do it. But most people don't realize what the prize is for winning the game that they're playing. And if you looked at it, you wouldn't want to win that prize anyway. What's the prize for texting while you drive because you want to be the first person to respond in the group chat to that shit meme that you've seen before, like with a, a fucking emoji? Like, we have to question around what it is that we're trying to do and why we're playing

8. 1:02:52 – 1:12:51

   How Sleep Relates to Focus

   1. CWChris Williamson1:02:52

      those games. You, you mentioned earlier on, actually, about sleep. What's... How does sleep relate to focus?

   2. JHJohann Hari1:02:58

      Well, I spent a lot of time interviewing some of the leading experts in the world on this, and it's fucking chilling. Um, the guy I mentioned before, Dr. Charles Czeisler, who's at Harvard Medical School, amazing man, he did this experiment that really haunted me. He combined two bits of technology that had not been combined to look at sleep before. One is, there's a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at, and there's another kind of technology that can s- obviously scan your brain. And he put them together and he put in people, uh, into this machinery who were t- tired. Not completely fucking knackered. They'd, they'd been awake for 19 hours. And what he found was really chilling. So basically, you can appear to be awake. You're looking around you, you're talking just as surely as we're talking now. But what the brain scan showed is that significant parts of their brain were literally asleep. So he discovered this phenomenon, it's called local sleep. It's called local 'cause it's local to one part of the brain. Um, so y-... And this has all sorts of catastrophic effects on attention. So if you have been awake for 19 hours, your attention is as impaired as if you were legally drunk. This is why drowsy driving is, is one of the biggest causes of death. If you, if you factor in drowsy driving and distracted driving, they're just enormous causes of death. Um, and, and I... So I wanted to speak to people about, well, why is it, right? 'Cause the evidence is overwhelming, two things. A, if you don't sleep, your attention will be fucked. Even if you just sleep six hours a night for a week, your attention gets to the point it is if you're legally drunk. And B, we sleep much less than we did in the past. So I was thinking about, okay, well, what, what can that, you know... Uh, w- w- why, why is, why is that happening, right? A person who really helped me to understand this is an amazing woman called Profe- Professor Roxanne Prichard, who's at the University of Minneapolis, where I interviewed her. And she said, she explained to me, um, it used to be thought that sleep was a passive process, right? So I'm not using my arm muscles right now. They're inert, right? Uh, as you can see, I don't ever use them (laughs) , um, apart from occasionally to lift books or Big Macs. But it used to be thought that when you were asleep, your brain was sort of like that. It was inert, it was passive, it's not doing much, right? It's why sleep wasn't studied scientifically for a long time. Then it was discovered, when various new technologies came along that made it possible to do this, that sleep is an incredibly active process. Lots of things are happening when you are asleep. Your brain is repairing. It's healing itself. It's clearing out the metabolic waste that builds up during the day, and it takes it down to your, to your liver and flushes it out. All sorts of absolutely necessary physical processes happen during sleep. There's one expert who said, um, (laughs) "It's a bit like having a house party." You can either have, uh, the guests in your house or you can clean the house, but you can't do both at the same time. For whatever reason, your brain can't repair itself while you're awake and doing all the work you need to do while you're awake, right? Um, so what we've done is we've radically cut back on the amount of time we allow our brains to rest and repair. And as Roxanne explained to me, Professor Prichard explained to me, you know, y- your brain, y- you can live and do that, right? Of course, we wouldn't have survived hurricanes or been able to raise babies if we couldn't go without sleep. But she said when you go without sleep, your body interprets that as an emergency. It's like, "Oh, well, I must be fleeing a hurricane. I must be tending to a sick child," whatever it is. And it goes into all sorts of emergency modes. It will make you crave more sugar and more fatty food to give you more quick release energy. It will raise your heartbeat, it will raise your blood pressure. Um, it will cut back on all the kind of longer term forms of thinking, like creativity, free association. All sorts of things that we need to be people who can think deeply, right?

   3. CWChris Williamson1:06:46

      'Cause if you've got an imminent threat, you don't want to be thinking about your 10-year goals. You need to presumably be hiding from the tiger that's outside of the cave.

   4. JHJohann Hari1:06:53

      Exactly. When a tiger's chasing you, you're not worried about how you're gonna pay the rent, right? It, it's cutting back on all of those worries. Um, but what's happening is many of us are living in that bodily emergency, right? We're living... You know, I mean, Roxanne was really struck by her students. She's an incredibly engaging, brilliant lecturer. But her students, she noticed how many of them would just fall asleep. And she was talking to her colleagues, and like, it was happening in all their classes. And she, she then studied these students and discovered that the average college student slept as much as the average parent of a newborn baby or the average active duty soldier. And when she began trying to explain to them what they were doing, uh-... she realized that they had just been raised in an environment where sleep deprivation is the norm, right?

   5. CWChris Williamson1:07:39

      What were the sort of numbers on that, do you know?

   6. JHJohann Hari1:07:41

      I know the figures generally are- are, I can't remember for college students, but the figures are staggering for Britain. 23% of British people sleep five hours a night, right? That is devastating for their ability to think, to pay attention. Um, and again, that's related to lots of things that are going on. Some of that is related to stress, work stress, the inability to unplug, anxiety. There's a whole range of things that are going on there. Some of it's related to poor slig- sleep hygiene, you know. Uh, and, uh, Dr. Czeisler at Harvard did a lot of research on this that I thought was really interesting. So basically, um, he ke- he's the person who identified what's called the second surge of energy. So imagine if you were, um, well, our ancestors, but imagine you... Uh, and now just s- the situation to a situation our ancestors found ourselves in. So imagine you go camping, and it starts to get dark. Just as it starts to get dark, uh, you get a fresh surge of energy in your, in your, your body as it starts to get dark because, you know, that means you can... Uh, and obviously that means you can put up your tent, right? And you can see how that would have been very useful for our ancestors, "Oh, it's started to get dark. Let's give them a surge of energy so they can get back to their camp."

   7. CWChris Williamson1:08:52

      Yeah, "They're still five miles away from wherever the rest of the camp is. We need to run back. Okay, so we'll give them an extra kick. That'll get them over this little hump. As things are getting darker and more dangerous, they get back home, they can fall asleep."

   8. JHJohann Hari1:09:05

      Exactly. There's a very good evolved reason for that to, for that to happen, which exactly as you describe.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:09:10

      What- Sorry, do you know what the, um, surge is of? Do you know what is being released at that time?

   10. JHJohann Hari1:09:18

       I think it's all the things that give you energy. I'm sure he did tell me, but it's (laughs) five years-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:09:22

       Okay.

   12. JHJohann Hari1:09:22

       ... since I met him, or four years since I met him. I can't remember, but, uh, all the things that normally give human beings energy. I assume adrenaline, but I, I would wanna double-check that. Um, and obviously for almost all of human existence, we, we had no say over when it got dark, right? That was just a fact of nature. We could light fires, but that was it. But obviously with the rise of electronic light, now we decide when the sunset happens, right? There's obviously the, the physical sunset, but then there's when we turn out the lights. And the difficulty is if you're sitting there staring at your phone or your laptop or your television until midnight, and then you turn out the lights and it goes dark, what happens is you experience that second surge of energy. You're lying there and suddenly your body's like, "Oh, it just got dark. We need to help him get back to the camp, right?" But you're already in your camp. You're in your bed, right? So this is why... Uh, and it's one reason, one of the reasons our control over electronic light is having such a negative effect on our sleep. As, as Dr. Czeisler said, "Human beings are as sensitive to light as algae." You know, we, we, w- l- uh, l- pol- light profoundly alters our bodily processes, and our control over light is obviously a great gift for all sorts of blindingly obvious reasons. Um, but it, it's having this, this effect. So one of the things we need to do is have a... um, have different forms of hygiene around this. So, you know, I know that everyone gets recommended this, but it really does help. Don't look at blue shining light, the light from your laptop or phone for two hours before you go to bed 'cause it will wake you up, and it will also mean that when you do sleep, your sleep is less good quality. It... Or there's plenty of other things that are going on with sleep. I went to... In Montreal I interviewed Professor Tore Nielsen, who runs the Dream Lab at the University of Montreal, which I always thought was a great just description of a job. Like, "I'm the head of the Dream Lab." But, um... And he discovered that another thing that's, um, really bad for us is, um, uh, about this decline in sleep, is there's lots of evidence that dreaming helps you to process emotional events. You can f- you, you experience something without being flooded with stress hormones, and just b- you make connections when you're dreaming. And the most intense stage of dreaming, REM sleep, tends to happen in the seventh and eighth hours of sleep, so from seven hours on. But of course, most of us are now not experiencing that. And I remember sitting there with him and thinking, "God, what does it mean that we've become a society where we literally don't give ourselves time to dream?" Right? And that has all sorts of knock-on effects, uh, for anxiety, which causes attention problems, but across the board. Uh, and it was interesting. At some level, people know this. Like, I commissioned the fir- YouGov to do the first-ever opinion poll o- of why people think... if and why people think their attention is getting worse. And we identified people who think their attention is getting worse and asked them, "Why do you think that is?" And we gave them 10 options. And interestingly, the decline of sleep was by f- was number one. It was 48% of people. It was tied. 48% of people said sleep, and 48% of people said a change in life events like having a baby or getting older. The, but the... Interestingly, tech, our relationship with tech was fourth, which I thought was really interesting. The third one was stress, uh, and-

Episode duration: 1:53:08