Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice
5/11/202643 min
A new research study reveals that a surprisingly simple intervention into your digital life can yield massive benefits in only two weeks. In this episode, Cal takes a deep dive into this paper, detailing: the intervention, why it works, and tips for increasing your chances of success. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Do I need a digital intervention? (27:06) AI and academic research (33:56) Reversing brain rot with cognitive fitness (37:08) Leaving your phone in the kitchen (40:07) What Cal is reading Books: How Society Should Deal with Inequality (Frank Newport) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/8016017 https://orgsci.substack.com/p/more-versus-better-part-i Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is sponsored by Better Help: https://www.betterhelp.com/deepquestions https://www.larridin.com https://www.calderalab.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsCal Newport· Host0:00
Imagine if I could offer you a pill that gave you the following benefits. One, your symptoms of anxiety and depression would significantly reduce. Two, your overall sense of moment-to-moment life satisfaction would improve. And three, you would gain substantially more ability to concentrate. Now, to make this even more enticing, let's say this pill would deliver you those benefits in only two weeks. If such a drug existed, it would be a blockbuster. Now, the bad news is, there is no such pill that can do this. The good news, however, is that according to a major new research paper, there's a simple intervention for your digital habits that can deliver all of those promises. I'm talking about something that's free and that you can put in place with minimal preparation, something that you could start implementing today. Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, and clearly this is a perfect type of topic to dive deeply into. So here's what we're gonna do. I have the paper here. We're gonna go through it. I'll start by describing the intervention they studied and quantify the exact benefits that they measured. Then we'll look closer at the mechanisms that the researchers believe explain why this intervention works so well, and then we'll end with three pieces of advice of my own for how to maximize the chances that you will succeed with this