Moment 180: Neuroscientist's Top 5 WORST Habits That Are Destroying Your Brain: Wendy Suzuki

**Steven Bartlett** (0:03)
What would I have to do to destroy my brain? So no sleep, I'm going to be sedentary, I'm going to have no friends, and smoking?

**Wendy Suzuki** (0:13)
Smoking is very bad for your health and your brain.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:16)
Okay. Alcohol?

**Wendy Suzuki** (0:19)
Alcohol, I mean, yes, long-term alcohol can cause significant and named brain diseases. Moderation, even moderation now, as studies have shown, is not very good. And the reason why it's not good is that alcohol disrupts your sleep. Even though people drink it to go to sleep faster, the sleep is much more superficial and is not deep, and it's not the healthy sleep. So, that is not good overall for sleep, depth and health, and therefore brain health.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:54)
I'm going to eat a processed diet to hurt my brain. And I'm not going to have a lifestyle that is novel, because we talked about learning. So, I'm not going to learn anything new. All of these things should shrink that little...

**Wendy Suzuki** (1:09)
You're not going to be mindful also.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:12)
Is there evidence that being mindful, which is like meditation and being in the moment, helps the brain?

**Wendy Suzuki** (1:18)
It does. There's beautiful studies showing brain plasticity in the areas that are important for focused attention. Meditation, the practice of meditation, is basically a practice of enriching the function of your prefrontal cortex. So, you can focus on that object, either the breath or loving kindness is a form of meditation. So, yes, there's been studies that brain changes occur in long-term meditators that are absolutely beneficial.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:50)
What if I'm on social media all the time? because isn't that good for me? because I'm going to be seeing lots of new things all the time and I'll be learning lots of new things. So, isn't if I sat on a screen for seven hours a day, is that good for my brain, social media?

**Wendy Suzuki** (2:04)
Does that take you away from real people and interacting with real people?

**Steven Bartlett** (2:09)
Yes.

**Wendy Suzuki** (2:09)
Okay, then it's modulated by that.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:12)
Is it not the same thing?

**Wendy Suzuki** (2:13)
There's a difference and I think your brain knows it. And look, there's enormous amounts of evidence showing that the increase in use of social media, especially in young kids, correlate with huge increases in depression and anxiety levels, particularly in young girls. So when kids started getting the smartphones and started to spend more and more, seven hours a day on social media, that's when the anxiety and depression went up. That's for young kids. I use social media as well as a tool for business. That is a little bit different. I'm not 13 years old and you're not 13 years old. So, you know, there's some warnings I think that need to go into that.
But let me be clear, no, it's not the same. Social media is not the same as social interactions face to face with people.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:09)
Are you concerned about what social media is doing to our brains?

**Wendy Suzuki** (3:12)
Yes.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:13)
because we hear those stats around, you know, young girls are struggling most with social media and we think to ourselves, well, that's because there's a lot of like comparison and all these kinds of things. And there's a lot of like toxic messaging and such. But if we think about the physiological consequences of social media, what it's actually doing to our brains at a chemical level, what would you as a neuroscientist guess is the physiological harm to the brain? Not the psychological, okay, oh my god, she's more this than me, but like the physiological harm.

**Wendy Suzuki** (3:46)
But the psychological harm causes stress. Stress releases stress hormone that goes into the brain that at too high and too constant a level can start to first damage connections and then kill cells. So it's intertwined there and that is part of what is happening. You can't pull one away from the other.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:10)
because our, where social media is designed to kind of, it's like pulling the slot machine handle. I pull down on the feed and I get ping, oh look, there's a nice picture and ping, there's notifications and comments, et cetera. It's that, you know, I think about the constant, they say there's constant dopamine hit. They refer to it. Is it a dopamine hit? Is that's what's happening when we're being stimulated by social media or a slot machine? Yes. And is there any harm in just a constant dopamine hit all day, every day?

**Wendy Suzuki** (4:36)