The science behind widespread phone addiction with Hassan Aleem, PhD
In this episode of "The Adaptive Mind," we dive into the complexities of our relationship with smartphones and how they shape our behaviors. Join host Brady Dowling and behavioral scientist Hassan Aleem as they explore why our devices feel so irresistible and the psychological triggers that keep us scrolling.
From the allure of social media to the ethical considerations of app design, they discuss practical strategies for managing screen time and fostering healthier habits. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by your phone's presence or wondered how to regain control, this conversation offers insights that just might resonate with your own experiences. Tune in to discover ways to navigate the digital landscape with a more adaptive mindset.
Brady Dowling: We have today Hassan Aleem, who's a PhD and he's the co founder of Nuance Behavior, which is an agency dedicated to leveraging behavioral science to drive digital behavioral change. Hassan's research in neuro aesthetics has explored how aesthetic elements impact decision making, moods and identity. And currently he consults on usability, engagement and growth for digital products, helping companies integrate behavioral science into their product development for better user outcomes. Hasan, thanks so much for joining and being on the podcast.
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, thanks Brady. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, me too. I've been looking forward to this for a while. It's a very curious topic for me. So to start, I would say there's probably quite a lot that goes into becoming a behavioral scientist. And I'm curious what went into your decision to focus on digital products and behavioral change?
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, it's a great question because for me even the journey to behavioral science I think is a little bit different than others. I have a neuroscience background, but my interest was always in ultimately what people do and what are the models that internally in their mind that's shaping what they do. So that got me to become interested in the applied world and my exposure to that world was primarily through digital means. I think you can take two routes. One is very policy oriented and shaping healthcare outcomes within a workplace setting or organizational behavior. Or you can start to think about behavior at a scale that often leads you to the digital realm. And that's where I ended up being and that's because I just really, I mean I'm very, I would say interested in technology. I'm interested in behavioral science. So it was a nice introduction of like, well, how can I be impactful in this field where we can try to help people and shape digital interventions, digital apps, platforms that can help change behavior or just create better experiences for people? Because so much of our world is digital and so much of my world is digital. So I think it was sort of just a response to the surroundings that I'm in.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I know I personally have always been really into technology. I think probably everybody has some kind of draw to technology, but I feel like phones, especially smartphones are on a completely different level. Everybody has a smartphone and it's not quite like video games or other digital things in the past where the more nerdy people might be into them. Everybody has smartphones and most people love them. Why are we so attracted to smartphones? Why do our brains love smartphones so much?
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, I think it's true. I was just talking to my mother a couple days ago and she was like she normally would love to have a cup of tea at night, but now she has to have a cup of tea and Facebook and she feels like without both of them being able to scroll and watch reels, she just cannot actually relax. So what is it that. It's not just. It's everyone. When you say everyone, it's everyone. And I have a four year, soon to be four year old and I can just see the allure that she finds in technology and I'm sure we'll get to those topics, but I think fundamentally it's about novelty. Our brain is an information gathering machine and a sense making machine. A lot of the research that I did tried to look at that topic from the aesthetics world, like why do we find certain things beautiful? What does beauty mean? And it all really started coming back to information. Beauty is information. It's telling us something, it's salient. Oftentimes that's connected with novelty. Right? So what is new information? Thinking about this as, how can I update my model of what's happening in a way with incoming information? I think smartphones are so attractive because they are essentially magic, right? They are the source of endless information and most importantly, they're a source of social information which is very important to be able to get insights into the hive mind. What other people think, how other people feel, what are other people talking about? That is information that is not available elsewhere. You can read a newspaper and get information about current events, but you can't really figure out what your friend is up to unless you go on your phone and you go on social media. So it's not only information. Why are we all not just on YouTube becoming astronauts? Because information is there, right? It's not just information. It's information that we really care about and that's mostly social information. Aside from that, I think it's also a mechanism for. Because it's so pervasive. Smartphones are always there, so they are such a magnet for habitual behavior. It's sort of like the self reinforcing thing where if, imagine if there's something else that you carried around you and looked at just as much as you did your phone. I don't think you can. And I think if you did, your life would sort of revolve around. That makes a lot of sense because you start to associate automatic behaviors to it. The other reason that phones are so attractive is because of just their sheer presence and availability, they tend to get connected to a lot of internal states that we have. They end up making us happy when we're sad. They end up giving us a lift when we're bored. They'll end up being like a stress management mechanism, a way to cope with things. It's just our go to resource for many, many things. I think combined that's sort of the thing. It's just not just a novelty, not just one type of novelty, but just availability and access.
Brady Dowling: Now you have me thinking what else can I carry? And look at 24 7. That would make me more interested in it and make me positively productive toward this thing. Thinking about a time during the day when I'm going to check my phone. What at a high level, what is happening in my mind, in my brain at that point when I'm having that almost an itch and sometimes even an urge if I feel like I'm being restricted.
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to call it an urge or impulse. I think if you're not saying that you're sort of lying to yourself at this point. What I think is happening at a high level is this loop of a trigger that's internal most of the times, and that's why most people are probably not aware of it. This might be boredom. You might just be like, okay, when I have to go wait for my order at a restaurant, I'm sitting and I'm bored. That's a trigger. I'm going to pull up my phone. It's not like you think, huh, I should pull out my phone. Boredom, pull up my phone. It could be that you got off a very stressful client call, or you just got out of a meeting or something and you're anxious, and the first thing you do is you pull out your phone and sort of vent. The trigger there is stress, and you're trying to cope with that. Stress could just be anxiety where anytime I think what I would say, the common theme is that there is a period where we are not occupied, and within that period, certain things like boredom and anxiety or other unwanted thoughts come up. Those are the triggers that then lead us to use our phones as a coping mechanism. That trigger, we pull out our phone and that alleviates the anxiety. At a high level, what's happening in your brain is you're getting a stress response or, you know, even boredom. You could consider a stress response, an anxiety response. You're using your phone and that's immediately bringing down that source response. I think it is very much an adaptive thing that your brain is trying to do, but most of the time people aren't aware of it. Adaptive in the sense that it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing to do. Maybe it's worthwhile to think about, well, why can't I deal with boredom? What is the underlying stress that I should actually address and not try to punt down the line? In the immediate short term, it is very adaptive. It is something that is going to fix the boredom and anxiety and everything. I think oftentimes people think of dopamine when it comes to that, but it's not necessarily so much dopamine. It's just more so a decrease in, you might have a high spike in cortisol or you might have a change in serotonin level. It's very much related to stress and how you're feeling at the moment. Endorphins or more like pleasure related things we can get to definitely get to dopamine later because it obviously plays a role. It's not so much that you're looking for that hit of dopamine, but more so you're looking for that release in whatever discomfort that you're feeling.
Brady Dowling: You mentioned your almost 4 year old and I'm just thinking about my 4 year old. I also have a 4 year old and sometimes he'll be crying so much and I'm trying to console him and he's like, I think if I watch Paw Patrol it'll be better. I'm like, no, it's already started. How do you understand, like he already gets that he's going to be relieved, and I know he can be manipulative sometimes, but I think he's genuinely thinking this will make me feel better. He's honestly right that, that it.
Hassan Aleem: Will be more insightful than we are as adults.
Brady Dowling: I'm thinking also about some people who have gone on this dumb phone kick. Some people use a dumb phone instead of a smartphone because they're like, this is a better way to do it. I feel like there's probably people in different camps and there's probably a spectrum of how smartphones can be used in the best way. Do you feel like we're better off without smartphones?
Hassan Aleem: I became very close to becoming one of those people and I'm still grappling with if I can do that, but I think it's challenging because especially when you have a kid having access to a smartphone to know where the nearest thing is. Dumb phones right now having. I think part of it is that we don't have the ideal dumb phone. I think it's either just so dumb that it doesn't do some of the things that you should be able to do, which is take a picture of a funny thing that your kid is doing to be able to share that or to look at it. But at the same time, yes, I do think it's nice to be able to separate at least those different sources of information. I personally tried to do that in a way where it's not necessarily that I've. I would say what's. Let's say I've given my smartphone a lobotomy because I've removed all social media apps, which I think is a common practice of people that are really trying to think about their smartphone usage. I think that is maybe the right balance where you can one, remove all social media and only access it on the desktop. Not saying remove social media from your life, that's up to you. I think there's benefits to having social media, especially in the type of world that we live in, where if you remove that, you're essentially just never seeing people you know, so it's just unfortunate reality. We need social media. That's where I grapple with the need for a smartphone is not that I think the things that are on it are things that we probably do need, especially the world that we live in, which is to be able to listen to others, to see what your friends are doing, to be able to stay in touch with them. But we can still do that through all these services, have their desktop and web apps, so we can still do that. It's not like you have to cut yourself off from that. I do think also that there's ways around it where we can sort of, funnily enough, instead of using a dumb phone, I sort of use multiple layers of technology to sort of help me not have to always pull up my phone, which is using an Apple watch, using Ray Ban meta glasses, because those will just give me while I'm walking, like the notification, I can reply and I don't have to pull up my phone. Going back to why are what. It's this gravity that phones, smartphones have because they can do so much more than the tasks that you open them for. One way is to just use a dumb phone, but another way is to just make it so that you only use it when you really need it and then try to partition out the things that make smartphones not so useful and perhaps even harmful.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, it sounds like a continuation of our conversation, right? Not using this single device as the cure all for all negative emotions that we have, but also not using it as the cure all for all electronic needs that we have. Taking those things into account, what would you say are some of the best things I can do for my brain and my mind with regards to technology?
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, I think, sort of building on that, I think what we sort of ended on is thinking about dedicated platforms. If you have to still, you know, if you still like to read, then Kindle is a dedicated device. Just reading, it's still an electric device or digital device. If you do have to rely on those things and dealing with smartphones, you can try to partition that out. I do struggle with recommending the sort of built in digital well being that both Android and iOS has partly because if you don't do some of the other things, if you still have Instagram on your phone, it's just incredibly easy to just go through that. What you actually end up doing is adding a little bit of effort to the reward. Humans actually enjoy effortful rewards. You're actually making it like, okay, this was totally worth it. I went through this and I ended up finding out that yes, I did have a like from somebody or a friend request or something. I found that it can actually hurt. What you can do is use that in a broad sense to add structure to your day so, focus time or do not disturb time. A shortcut on iOS to triple click the power button and then turn it all into black and white to really reduce the salience of things. Those are sort of general mechanisms, right? Because those are not trying to add a barrier, but they're trying to just shape the way you think about your phone. I think you have to think beyond like, I think once you've picked up your phone, it's almost like it's a little bit too late already. If you're trying to add mechanisms there, if you haven't made changes within your phone, if everything is there, it's just too attractive enough force and eventually I think you're going to break. I'm speaking from my own experience where I've tried all these things and I'm sure there's other people that have different experiences, but I've found what's helped me is to think about technology as a tool. Right. What is the reason to have my phone right now? What is the reason to like even, even like, you know, if you're working, there's studies that show that just having the phone within eyesight is something that's distracting, right? Just speaking to the gravity of things. Yes, you could have all the digital well being tools on your phone, but if even its presence is distracting, then maybe you need to think about having it in a different room when you actually shouldn't be using it or just having set hours when you're using your phone. I don't want to adopt a position where I do think it's adaptive and sometimes necessary to rely on your phone for just mindless scrolling. It's more so just monitoring that. Self awareness around what are you actually doing I think is a good way because I think most people, most of us are not self aware and most of us are not working at a level of environmental, our environmental behavioral change. I would say like, you know, high enough to shape that change. We might want to. I think it's, you know, I haven't used any of those products where you can lock your phone, but I'm curious about those. You have experience with that, but I can see that being sort of on the edge of those things.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, I have considered things like that. I haven't gone into that. I've worried that, like you said, adding some kind of friction and overcoming that friction sometimes is reinforcing and seems like a reward. I'd be curious to just have you talk about a little bit more about the dopamine loop that you referenced earlier and how that plays into that particular scenario. One thing I wanted to comment on before we get into that is you talked about how smartphones just being around can be distracting and cause some kind of cognitive load and keep our minds aloof a little bit. Not to make this all about our four year olds, but I noticed that when I put my 4 year old down to bed, we got in this routine of doing a meditation together. I would have my phone with me so that we could do a meditation from my phone in preparation for that. I noticed that it was just like even when we were going through other parts of his bedtime routine, I was distracted just because my phone was in my pocket and I always had that access. I could, if I had a thought that I thought was important, I could note it down or do whatever. After a while I was just like, we can do some other kind of meditation just ourselves or we can read a book, but I have to put the phone away because it is, like you said, it just causes my mind to go elsewhere.
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, I agree. I think I've definitely come into the same situation where even your child can sort of be like, oh, that's the same device that you can. I think if they're picking up on it, that's the same device that sometimes we watch something on or can take pictures or do funny Snapchat filters. The barrier to entry is so low, and it's designed to be so low. One thing I do would add to that is exactly what you're saying is thinking about analog ways to ground yourself. I know there's a huge, deep reading movement now, which I am trying to practice myself as well, is just the fact. The idea that we've been conditioned to use our phones. We aren't conditioned to spend a lot of time on one screen in a phone. We constantly want to be scrolling, and a lot of reading apps are scrolling apps, so they almost force you not to immerse yourself. There are other aspects about books where the ability to flip back and forth and have a physical mental model of where one thought piece was and where another was and think about, okay, I read this this long ago. All of that sort of disappears, and it's just one infinite scroll. It really shapes how you interact with the world. I do like the idea of grounding yourself by perhaps doing a meditation that's on a piece of paper or something that just only does meditation. The inverse of that, if you imagine somebody trying to sell you a book, it's a physical book, but it can also take pictures. You'd be like, why would you add a camera to my book? Your smartphone is that. It is a Kindle, but it's also a camera, and somebody was like, whoa, wait, in your book. I can also add Instagram. It's like, no, don't do that. I just want to read a book. It's like we're trying to do that with our phones too. It's funny because we're okay with it because it's just the way to access anything.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, that's true. It's like our panacea for really anything that's not food. Sometimes it's even the panacea for that.
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, great. I know you asked about the hitting on the dopamine loop. I think that's a super interesting topic to talk about because I would say the most commonly used word when we talk about the intersection of neuroscience and phone dependency. I think it's obviously there. What the recent dialogue, discourse on this has shown is reflecting on what we've known from neuroscience research at least all along is that dopamine initially, very initially was thought about like, okay, it seems to be spiking when there's reward. We started to learn quickly there's actually a learning and prediction signal. It's telling you, and then it's also a saliency signal. It's telling you where you can expect rewards, right? You can learn that one area is going to give me rewards. That becomes salient. There are experiments that you can do where you can just associate rewards with a random shape and ask people to do a different task. You can see that they cannot help but look in eye tracking studies at that shape because their eyes are just like, I'm going to get something here. Even though the actual reward is going to come from them completing the task, it becomes like a force of its own. I see dopamine as this one learning signal, but broadly a saliency signal. This wanting term in neuroscience is incentive salience. This idea of where can I expect rewards from? Once you get that reward, how can I update my model so that I get as much reward as I expect? Am I getting too little? Am I getting too much? Where I feel like this plays in with smartphone usage and our digital usage in general is it's that internal loop of saliency, right? You're essentially taking so many different things like we're talking about, if we were to sort of blast out all the things that we can fit into a phone, which is almost anything, and all the salience is attached with it. Now you're putting all of that in one thing. It's like this super salient device and it's a device that has this incredible variance in what you can learn. There is this constant updating of like, well, I could learn like it just who knows what I'll learn next time? Who knows not only, you can imagine like a gambling setting. Who knows what I'll learn in this vertical of winning money, but here it's like, who knows what I'll learn in one of these possible things or multiple things where I might get an email that's about a job that I applied to or I might get a like on a post that I made or I might get a message from somebody that I have a crush on or something. It's so many different ways to get rewards and so many things to learn from. I think it would be very, very silly for our brains not to prioritize this device because it's like an immense source for learning. It's an immense source for navigating the world, for information. That's exactly what dopamine is designed to do. I like to come from this aesthetics world where I like to think of aesthetics also as a source of information and salience. I like to imagine that a newborn baby has these priors that they know that mom's face is important and we know that from where they look. There's this pay special attention. Essentially as you, from nature and from the nurture, you're actually learning how to turn this essentially black and white or grayscale picture in the world to things that sort of start to glow a little bit more. I think dopamine is what's helping you do that. Your phone is like that attractive force. It sort of beckons you, I think is. I would put it.
Brady Dowling: You talking about babies and being drawn to shapes makes me think of this book that I found several years ago called Experimenting on Babies. I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but it basically lists out all these different experiments. Essentially what you were saying, if you put a triangle and this shape and this shape near a baby who's, I don't know, it says the age range, then they're going to pick this shape. A lot of very interesting thought experiments that are probably kind of the basis of what you're saying there. We're kind of just hardwired to do certain things and be drawn to visually aesthetic things. A lot of times our smartphones kind of play off of that.
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, I think this is not like some hidden secret or I think since the Apple Store, apps started becoming a thing, what is. Some of the most brilliant people in the world have been trying to figure out how can we shorten the distance and really get people to like. These are psychologists, these are all people that are game designers that are very aware of developmental psychologists that are aware of these things. I think that's sort of what we're up against. I think it's very much like, well, you know, the behavioral design that's been put in and the energy that's been put into creating these UIs and this atmosphere. The digital world is not like, you know, it's been thought out. The least we can do is go into it with our own sense of self awareness that I am going to a place that has been designed to manipulate me in some way and that's okay, but I should be aware of when it's manipulating me in a way that I am not okay with. I just wanted to put a finer point on that because I think it sort of really makes you think about what we're up against.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, absolutely. This is probably a conversation for another time, but what we're up against makes me think a lot about the changes in AI and kind of the advancements there and what kind of role that's going to have in really the future of the world. How our relationship is with technology, how our relationship is with AI. We won't get into that too much, but definitely would be a very interesting topic of conversation. To close, I would ask you this question about your work, which is are you ever worried that your work specifically is feeding into these kind of things or maybe are there things that you do to be aware and cautious of that?
Hassan Aleem: Yeah, and I think I very much am. The way that, not just me but everybody else in Nuance thinks about this is thankfully we're aligned on this. That's not always the case with people that are in the industry because clearly there's quick ways and easy ways to get people essentially hooked on something. The way we like to think of it is those are what we like to think of as little E engagement and big E engagement, which is things that people actually came and use your app for. We like to work out holistic ways where we know fundamentally that we do have to engage people. Just having a product that is useful and has been proven to work, if you were to do it, is not enough. We know how digital tools work and how behavior works. To get people to engage, you have to give them some sort of quick wins, some sort of feedback, some sort of enjoyment. There's nothing wrong with that. I think you find that everywhere where people are trying to get you to do something, there's associated rewards with it. It's just that when we're in the digital world, you're competing with a ton of other people for your same attention. To do that, you sometimes have to do some, you see a lot of dark patterns or things like that become forces of their own. In my work specifically, we try to be aware first of all of that and work with organizations that we feel like are aligned with that philosophy as well. I think that's probably the first line of defense is that we're not going to be working with an organization that only cares about the number of clicks. We try to immediately get them towards what is your, not just your KPI, but what's your key behavior that you're after and how are we making sure that this is actually feeding into that and then how are you making sure that there's an off ramp? Let's say you do have to do some of these immediate engagement mechanisms to get people's attention, to get them on the platform. Can we think about how that doesn't become a force of its own or maybe an off ramp eventually and allow for growth? I think just taking that philosophy and being a little bit selective about, or quite selective about who we work with and what their philosophies are. Frankly, I think that's not as hard of a topic because.
Brady Dowling: I.
Hassan Aleem: Think more and more the sort of things we're talking about is just everybody is aware of that and clients that we have say, well, I just don't want another app. I think we've reached that point of saturation where I think we're all aware that everybody's trying to get our attention all the time, and people don't want to play that game anymore, so how can they step outside the game? That's not an easy challenge, but that's sort of the challenge that we try to meet.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, that's cool. It does seem like there is certainly a heightened awareness from a lot of people and heightened interest in kind of having this approach that you mentioned that, okay, let's not just spend our whole lives on our smartphones, and let's not try to get other people to do that as well, because people get it. They get it that the smartphones are drawing them in, and they don't always want to be drawn in like that. That's awesome that you take that stance in that approach. Is there anything else that you think would be helpful to cover or things that you wanted to mention before we close?
Hassan Aleem: I think most people are, like you said, are dealing with some sort of phone dependency. Awareness is a great first step. Understanding the triggers that are causing it and then figuring out ways to circumvent it by trying to think of, okay, how can I ground myself? Have I had enough time away from screens? One of the things to leave it off on a practical note is things that I found helpful, of course, like if you can go for a walk. I think that's probably one of the best things, go for a walk without any technology on you and the whole idea of rewilding your attention. I've also been thinking about how when you go to a perfume store and you sort of have to reset your palette? I think when we're using digital tools all day, we're just switching from big laptop to little screen to bigger screen. It's like just different things. I think we do. There's a sense of derealization and depersonalization that I'm sure we'll start to find. I think it's already been found in VR where kids that are exposed to VR for even a short period of time start to feel this sense of detachment to themselves. I'm sure at some level, we're all feeling that. What is the analog of smelling coffee between perfumes? A walk is one way to do that. What I've landed on personally, and I'd be curious to see if the listeners try this out and feel like it's useful to them, is cooking is actually one of those things. It's something I think cooking or playing sports, I think both of those things. You have to do something where it would be too much of a risk not to use your phone. It's too involved where if you didn't, if you got distracted, it would just, if you're cooking, you could, yes, you can still be on your phone, but it just takes away from the process and you probably won't do it. If you do cooking right, and if you want to cook well, you kind of have to pay attention if you're playing sports, you can't be on your phone while your teammate's trying to pass you a basketball. It just forces you out of that. There's no way you can be on your phone. I think how can you put yourself in that position? It's hard to do because if you think about it, theoretically, you would think while driving a car should be one of those things. We know of all those distracted driving statistics, nobody's saying another person reading a book today got in a car crash because the book was just so enthralling. We're implicitly putting our lives at risk. Finding activities where you just cannot. There's no way that you could use your phone in it. I found that playing sports like tennis, basketball, that's what I do. There's no way I could use my phone while doing those things. I think it's forced detachment from my phone and cooking. Not quite forced attachment because you could still do it, but it's one of those things where I feel like it's so visceral where you're cutting something, you're putting something, you're going to eat it later. You can't just do it halfway if you're serious about it. I don't know, just some tips in terms of how to. We're not going to just deal with a smartphone problem. It's only going to get probably more pervasive, like you said with AI but how can we ground ourselves is probably maybe worth mentioning.
Brady Dowling: Yeah, that's amazing. I totally can connect with that. I've played basketball and I started to learn to surf several years ago and I was like, really? Actually before I started learning that, I was very stressed out about something and consuming my thoughts and then it just completely, it was like I could not think about anything else besides trying to surf and just getting knocked over. I totally can connect with that. Thank you so much. I think a lot of this has been very insightful and really interesting for me and I think that listeners will find it to be the same. Before we go, where can people find you?
Hassan Aleem: On digital platforms? Unfortunately, that's where our lives are. If you do want to write me a letter, I'd be happy to read it. On LinkedIn is the easiest way. You can email me. Hassan@nuancebehavior.com I feel like maybe that might be the closest we can get to the analog version of things. You can visit our website nuancedbehavior.com as well.
Brady Dowling: Okay, great. Awesome. We'll include that in the show notes. Thank you again, Hasan. This is great.
Hassan Aleem: Thank you, Brittany. I appreciate it.
Brady Dowling: Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Adaptive Mind, brought to you by Nurture, the research based app for overcoming unwanted or addictive behaviors. I hope you found our conversation insightful and inspiring. If you did, please subscribe, rate and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing these learnings to people that need them. Remember that you have an adaptive mind that does incredible things every day and it's capable of even more. We'll see you in the next episode.
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