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you treat me with respect. If you don't, then you lose it. And I think it's important to have open conversations about the dangers of social media, the unrealistic expectations it can create, and the impact it can have on mental health. Encourage your kids to talk about their experiences online and to come to you if they encounter anything that makes them uncomfortable.
It's also crucial to model healthy device usage yourself. If you're constantly on your phone, your kids will see that behavior and think it's acceptable. Set boundaries for yourself and your family regarding screen time, and prioritize face-to-face interactions.
Ultimately, the goal is to create an environment where your children feel safe discussing their feelings and experiences, both online and offline. By fostering open communication and setting clear expectations, you can help them navigate the challenges of growing up in a digital world.
I have access to it, so I think it's really important to have supervision. You have to be their frontal lobes until theirs develop because there are dangerous things out on the web. You get it as long as it's not a problem, like those kids who play video games and have a fit when you tell them to stop. The video game needs to go away. I mean it; it needs to go away because you're the parent—that's your role. I've sent way too many children to video game addiction programs. I don't like that. And they're like, "Oh, but his friends are doing it." It's like, you can do it as long as it's not creating a problem. I think you should limit it because the vices of social media and video games dump dopamine. They were purposefully created to addict you. They use the same principles that Las Vegas uses to win money in gambling, which is intermittent reinforcement. We're not going to reinforce you all the time; we're going to do it every so often, and it dumps dopamine.
So what does that mean? You have two pleasure centers in your brain; they're called the nucleus accumbens, part of the basal ganglia. When you get excited about something, it produces a little bit of dopamine and pushes on the pleasure center. But the more you push on it, the harder you push on it. Think about these violent video games. Pretty soon, the nucleus accumbens becomes numb, and you need more and more to get the same effect. So you have an addiction, right? You struggled with an addiction. Toward the end of the addiction, you were not getting the high that you did in the beginning, right? Because your pleasure centers had been worn out. We're wearing them out earlier than ever before, and I think that's one of the big reasons for the escalating incidents of depression.
Well, the social media sites are similarly designed. They're scientifically devised to addict in the same way that a slot machine or a video game is designed. And mind share—that's what they want. That becomes tricky when you have a 16-year-old or an 18-year-old, and part of being a member of their cohort or their tribe is being conversant on these platforms and being in communication on these devices. So it's not as easy as saying, "I'm taking your phone away," because that's the same as saying, "You're being kicked out of your community."
Yeah, but you have to be careful. I mean, you have to be willing to do that in order to show love, which is supervision. If a parent is seeing their child sink into a depressive state, what is the advice that you would give? Well, the first thing is do not put them on an antidepressant. That's not the first thing to do. Now, it may be the seventh or eighth thing to do, but the first thing is to sort of evaluate their lifestyle. Too often, children are taking their devices to bed, and they're not sleeping. So I think it's a really good family habit for everybody, including the parents, to put their devices away or for you to take your kids' devices away. I had one patient recently who got a new phone and an iPad and was up till 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 AM, and he wasn't doing well in school. It's like, yeah, sleep-deprived people don't do well in school.
So supervising technology, I think, is critical. I teach a high school course called "Thrive by 25." We've done it for 15 years; it's been in like seven different countries and all 50 states. We teach kids to love and care for their brains. What I found is the going idea about teenagers is that parents have lost influence and their friends are more important, and they won't listen. That is wrong. If you are bonded to them, they listen. You have to explain it to them and give them reasons why these companies use neuroscientists to addict your brains and steal your mind. These vaping companies are making money off of your early death. So you have to educate them and get them angry at what I call the "evil ruler."
If I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness, what would I do? I'd create vaping devices and say, "This is a healthy form of smoking," or I'd make them think marijuana's innocuous—clearly, it isn't—or I'd give them a device that's clearly addictive and has all sorts of side effects and say, "Well, have fun with this, and other people of your age are doing it, so it's probably okay." When you educate them, like my 20-year-old, she knows the time of day that she's on her social media sites, and she limits it. Now she's doing this thing: "How much sleep can I get?" Right? And she finds she does better with seven and a half hours than she does with eight hours. I was like, well, how smart is that that she's tracking it, right?
So she uses devices to track it, and it's because she understands it. Rather than do this, "Don't do that," that's not helpful. It's relationship. And then this is your brain: how can you take care of your brain? That's what we do with "Thrive by 25." It's very clever, creating this narrative where there's sort of an evil overlord. You know, kind of connect emotionally with healthy habits because, you know, young people—and I would put myself in this category when I was young—there is a sense of invincibility. Like, I can just do whatever I want. And you can; you can get away with things when you're young. So it's harder to do that math, especially when the brain isn't as developed.
Like, I want to eat what I want to eat, and I want to satisfy my urges when they crop up. It doesn't matter if my parents tell me otherwise; I'm still going to do it. There's a process of learning for themselves, like, well, over time, it's like, well, this isn't working anymore. Sometimes that takes longer for certain habits than for other habits. But I think that idea of connecting with them on a story level, where it's like, "Oh, I understand; we're in a competition, and there's a battle against these people that want to keep me down," is a really interesting, cool way.
Actually, Florida used that strategy. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to help kids stop smoking, and none of it worked until they used that strategy. Let me tell you how the tobacco companies are making money off of making you sick and getting them angry. So activating the rage, which I thought was brilliant. When I wrote my book, "The End of Mental Illness," I was like, here are 62 evil ruler strategies. You can just see, like Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies. I mean, the big evil ruler strategy there was one girl in San Diego who set up outside a pot dispensary and sold like 300 boxes in three hours. More people had like a marketing genius.
But, you know, giving these very unhealthy, sugar-laden things that increase the risk of diabetes, right? But selling it to people who are high and have the munchies too is like not a bad idea from an entrepreneurship perspective. We got to kind of wind this down, but maybe you can leave us with a few more thoughts on not just the importance of caring for our brains, but a few more practices to think about that we could incorporate into our lives.
So I worked with BJ Fogg for his "Tiny Habits." He and I work together, and here are some of the tiny habits for brain health: Start every day with, "Today is going to be a great day." Push your brain to look for what's right rather than what's wrong as you go through the day. This is our big mother tiny habit: "Is this good for your brain or bad for it?" I used to do that with Chloe. We played a game; we called it Chloe's game. I'm like, "Blueberries: good for your brain or bad for it?" Two thumbs up. "Avocados: two thumbs up." "Hitting a soccer ball with your head: oh no, thumbs down." Your brain is soft; your skull is hard. Play the game with them: whatever they're going to do, is it good for your brain or bad for it?
I mean, ask yourself, "Is this good for my brain or bad for it?" You just have to know the science. My favorite tiny habit—it's actually not so tiny, but it's so good—when you go to bed at night, I say a prayer, and then I go, "What went well today?" It's not like just writing down three things you're grateful for. I go hour by hour, looking for what I liked about the day, what made me happy—even the tiniest things. Like, we have this health challenge at home with my mother-in-law; it's public knowledge. Just walking up the stairs, I grabbed my wife's hand, and that made the highlight reel because it was just this really tender moment in a hard time.
If you do that, the research shows your level of happiness will increase in just three weeks. And when you go to pick something to eat or drink, ask yourself, "Do I love it, and does it love me back?" You're in a relationship with food and with the things you consume. Do I? It's like, "Oh, but I love wine." But does it love you back? We didn't talk about alcohol, but it doesn't love you back, right? It damages the microbiome in your mouth and in your gut. It'd be a bad thing.
Beautiful! I love that practice. It's similar to a gratitude practice, but paying attention to the little things that happen every day and those little things then becoming the big things that drive happiness. I did that the night my dad died three and a half years ago—one of the worst days of my life. I'm like, "Really? We're going to do this tonight?" But this is a very important point: your brain is lazy. What you do, what you teach it to do, is what it's just going to do automatically.
So because I've done that for a decade, even on an awful day, I found these three moments that were just so tender and beautiful that put me to sleep. It didn't mean I didn't grieve; I still do. But it means I'm managing my mind rather than letting it manage itself. Do you think that a fundamentally negative or pessimistic person can transform themselves into an optimist?
I don't know about an optimist, but they certainly can transform themselves to be more of a realist, which is why I love Byron Katie's work. I don't know if you ever had her on; she's awesome. I'm familiar with her work; she's great. It's about what's true. Too many people have the negative side of what's true and completely ignore the positive side of what's true. Like, "My wife never listens to me." I've had that thought. Write it down and then go, "Is that true? Is it absolutely true? How does that thought make me feel?" Awful. "How would I be without the thought?" I'd be just fine.
Then take the original thought and turn it to the opposite: "She does listen to me." In fact, she does not all the time, but if I'm focused on what's wrong, I'm going to feel wrong. If I'm focused on what's right, I'm going to be so much happier. This thing got like 12 million views on Instagram. I have the rule of 12, which is if I'm going to do something important—film a public television special, write a book, go on a trip—stuff is going to go wrong. Just own it. I don't get mad until the 13th thing has gone wrong because a mentally strong person can roll with things—not roll over, but they can roll with whatever comes your way.
Not roll over because I don't want people taking advantage of you, but learning that mental flexibility comes with practice. Part of it is not self-identifying with your thoughts and understanding that just because you're thinking something doesn't mean it has to be part and parcel of your identity, nor that you need to act on it. One of the strategies I love is to give your mind a name. I named my mind after my pet raccoon when I was 16. I literally had a pet raccoon; I loved her, she loved me, but she was a troublemaker. She'd eat all the fish out of my sister's aquarium, tip my mom's bathroom, leave raccoon poo in my shoes—raccoon in the house, claws and all, and rabies and all that kind of stuff. I loved her, but she was a troublemaker. That's my mind. But that's what raccoons are; that's what they do. They have 200 different sounds. I mean, it's just like my mind.
Now, when my mind is bothering me, I'm like, "I should put you in the cage." Or what I do now—because initially, I would just metaphorically put my mind in the cage and ignore her. Now what I do is I flip her over because I used to do that and tickle her. Raccoons have 200 different sounds, and I'm like, "Oh, I bet I can get you to purr." Just so I can separate from my mind and be in control. It's not the thoughts you have that make you suffer; it's the thoughts you attach to, right? It's the attachment and the attachment to expectations and outcomes. But if you can uncouple that, it allows more space to respond rather than to react and to be in a more neutral frame of mind about whatever is happening.
I have to treat me like I would want other people to treat me. So many of my patients, when I first see them, if they treated their friends the way they treated themselves, they would have no friends. They're so mean. But sort of like a good coach, am I noticing what's right, and am I learning? I treat public knowledge Alicia Newman, who I dearly love. She's a Canadian pole vaulter; she's going to be in her second Olympics. Last year, she was the world indoor champion, and she's so hard on herself. When we first met, we've come to, "We win or we learn." We win or we learn, and that's what I want all my patients to do. They have a good day; you win. If not, we learn.
I think that's a good place to land the plane for today. Thank you for coming and sharing with me today. I appreciate it, and I look forward to visiting your clinic and having my brain looked at. We'll see, yeah, add or not—who knows? Who knows what it is? I am a little scared, though.
No, don't be scared. So many people go, "Oh, I'm scared," and I'm like, whatever we see is good news because you have what you have, and if it's awesome, because you've done so many awesome things, we celebrate. And if it's not, we rehabilitate. Now is the time. How old are you?
57.
Yeah, now's the time to get the party started. It's not when you're 77 and you're dropping names and forgetting appointments and people are trying to take your keys from you. The most loving thing you can do for your children is to work on having a healthy brain. Cheers to that!
Thank you.
You're welcome.
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Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books "Finding Ultra," "Voicing Change," and "The Plant Power Way," as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.
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Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo, with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg; graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS. Thank you, Georgia Wy, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Patt, Traer Patt, and Harry Matis.
Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace, plants, namaste.
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