Phone Addiction Scientist: Doing This Gives You An Hour Back Every Day! | Dr Sahar Yousef

Sahar Yousef (0:00)

Every single time you switch your attention, you pay for it.

Steven Bartlett (0:02)

So multitasking is a myth.

Sahar Yousef (0:03)

Yeah. So what we're going to do is get a sense of the amount of time and energy that you essentially waste every single time you switch your attention.

Steven Bartlett (0:10)

Okay, let's do this.

Sahar Yousef (0:11)

All right. Are you ready?

Steven Bartlett (0:12)

Yeah.

Sahar Yousef (0:12)

Get ready.

Steven Bartlett (0:13)

Go. Oh my gosh, this is a shit shot.

Sahar Yousef (0:16)

Done.

Steven Bartlett (0:17)

So on a daily basis, theoretically, I'm losing 60 percent of my productivity just by switching between two different types of tasks at once.

Sahar Yousef (0:23)

Yeah. And over two hours a day is the average now of how much time is being wasted. So we're losing 50 percent of our productivity just by switching between screens and different tasks. If we stay this distracted, we will live a life that we don't like living.

Steven Bartlett (0:35)

So what is in this box?

Sahar Yousef (0:37)

We're going to go through the box. I'm going to teach you all the science for productivity and human performance because I know that the default settings of all of our technology are designed by people like me to maximize engagement. For example, the infinite scroll is like going to a buffet and just opening your mouth and there's just an assembly line of food and candy just going straight in. There's no backstop. But we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing.

Steven Bartlett (1:00)

Where's the first place to stop?

Sahar Yousef (1:02)

First, put your phone in gray. Research from my lab shows gray scale makes the phone less neurologically stimulating and we saw on average people spent one hour less on their phones every single day. That's seven hours a week. Next is choosing long form over short form content. If we have too much short form, your attention span is shot, you literally feel shittier and your brain operates at a lower level.

Steven Bartlett (1:23)

I can see in your Productivity Toolkit, there is a clock.

Sahar Yousef (1:26)

Yeah, this is a huge, huge game changer in terms of productivity, but also there was a Focus Sprint to help people to do up to two times as much as they would otherwise do. We can talk about biological chronotypes that dictate the ideal time you should be doing your Focus Sprints. But also I have another amazing thing to strengthen your mind and make you better at focusing. I'm going to teach you all this stuff.

Steven Bartlett (1:48)

Okay, so let's get into it.

Sahar Yousef (1:49)

The first thing we ought to really focus in on is.

Steven Bartlett (1:52)

Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

Dr. Sahar Yousef, what is the mission that you are on if you had to try and capture it in a couple of sentences? And why does it matter to the people that are tuning in and listening right now?

Sahar Yousef (2:40)

The mission I am on is to first and foremost bring science education to the world in a way that allows people to work more in line with how their brains and their bodies actually work best.

This is my philosophy, that there are fundamental laws of how the brain and the body actually work. And I always liken these things to the laws of physics. There are laws of physics. We don't question the laws.

Gravity. I don't ever wake up one morning and go, you know what, I want to do away with it. And I know that there are fundamental laws of biology, but we blissfully ignore these laws of biology. We don't teach kids when they're in school at an early age, how their brains work, so that they might be able to study a little bit easier, find flow, actually be able to manage things like stress, physiological stress. We don't teach people the fundamentals of sleep. In my area of expertise is productivity. We focus so much on what? What's the deliverable? What's the long-term goal? What's the annual goal? What's the quarterly goal? What? But not the how.