Shadowing Practice: Life is too short to be scrolling 860 hours a year - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

Every year, the average person spends 860 hours scrolling on social media.

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Every year, the average person spends 860 hours scrolling on social media.

For reference, that's equivalent to non-stop scrolling 24 seven for 36 days straight.

But that level of consumption doesn't just steal your time and your life,

it also rewires your brain,

shortening your attention span, and the saddest part,

making the rest of real life feel kind of boring and flat.

You sit at dinner with friends and feel kind of bored,

you go for a walk and your hand reaches for your phone automatically,

And you even bring your phone with you to scroll on the toilet because going without just feels too boring.

The hobbies that you used to love feel dull and unappealing.

And so you keep scrolling just a bit more just to feel something.

And this is the exact vicious cycle that we get stuck in

because the thing that we reach for to feel something is exactly the thing making us numb in the first place.

If you're new here, my name's Izzy.

I'm a mum, tech co-founder and Cambridge trained doctor.

In this video, we'll walk through the neuroscience of how scrolling on social media makes real life feel flat and a simple,

actionable, three-part framework that I've been using,

which I call the three Rs,

to retrain your brain to actually enjoy real life again.

As a companion for this video,

I've also put together a completely free guide linked in the description down below.

So without further ado, let's dive in.

So what exactly is digital anhedonia?

Digital anhedonia can be defined as the diminished ability to find pleasure and enjoyment in real-world experiences after prolonged digital saturation.

Essentially what that means is our brains have become so saturated and bombarded with hyper stimulating,

fun brain candy in the form of social media,

but then real life kind of just seems a bit mid compared to that.

There are three key symptoms of digital anhedonia.

I'll go through each of them and see if any of them might be showing up in your own life.

Firstly, you start to feel bored by in-person events or activities or hobbies that used to genuinely interest you.

Secondly, and this is sort of the flip side of number one,

whenever you're not in front of a screen scrolling on social media,

you feel kind of flat.

And number Number three, you start to avoid tasks that require more effort.

So these are things that take a bit of work that don't give you an immediate gratification reward.

They just start to feel even more unappealing.

And this is called mismatched neural expectation.

Your brain has essentially been recalibrated to crave rapid dopamine hits

instead of investing time into actually putting in the effort for something that then has a delayed reward.

And all of this is governed by a fundamental principle in human biology called homeostasis.

is the process through which the body maintains balance through feedback loops.

One direct analogy from our biology is to imagine yourself at a loud concert where there's really loud banging music,

the bass is booming, and when you first get there your ears actually kind of hurt a little bit.

But the more time you spend at the concert,

the more your ears begin to adjust,

and music that was loud the first time now sounds actually okay or even normal.

Then after the concert when you go home,

you notice that everything sounds a little bit quieter.

It's harder to hear people,

things sound more muted and this is because your ears

and your auditory nerves and your brain has adapted and recalibrated itself to a new set point.

Using social media has a similar effect on the brain where

your brain gets used to all these quick dopamine hits and

so what I've drawn here is essentially a graph showing the reward stimulus that we get in our brains,

different levels of that for different activities such as having a meal or conversation or going for a walk,

doing a hobby or scrolling on social media.

Social media is one of the most stimulating and so the bar is as the tallest.

The rest are varying heights there, depending on the person.

If you're somebody who doesn't really use social media,

then your set point will calibrate around the midpoint of what you spend your time doing.

And so most of the daily activities actually exceed the threshold for you feeling enjoyment and stimulated by it.

Maybe some of them will dip below,

but that's only natural because that's how you maintain that set point there and that homeostasis.

However, once you introduce a hyper-stimulating stimulus like social media,

that increases your set point because you spend more time at a high level of stimulation and dopamine and reward,

your brain recalibrates to expect that and to need that in order to feel something.

And so then your bar for feeling like you're enjoying something rises.

And all of these things that you used to be able to find enjoyment from,

essentially a balanced, healthy, real life, now feel dull.

And it's actually kind of worrying how visible these effects are on brain scans,

because people who use social media often end up having reduced activation in two specific parts of the brain,

the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex,

which are both involved in reward and pleasure.

And so when these study participants were doing anything non-digital,

their brains were just less responsive and the internal wiring had actually changed.

And I just wanted to add one thing here because anhedonia is actually one of the symptoms of clinical depression.

And so if you feel like you resonate with anhedonia,

but it's not just in the digital context,

and you also have other symptoms of depression,

such as low mood or sleep disturbance,

that kind of thing, then please do get proper help.

And all of this was born out of essentially during postpartum,

I found that I was becoming addicted to social media.

In between waking up every three hours and feeding the baby and doing all of that kind of thing,

I found myself just reaching for the lowest hanging fruit dopamine hit,

which was social media.

And if I actually had wanted to spend my time like that,

that would have been great, fantastic.

But deep down, I actually knew that that isn't aligned with the life that I really want to live.

And so since then, I've been trying to figure out how actually can I live well with social media

and use it in a way that makes my life better rather than worse.

And one thing I found reassuring is that if you find yourself mindlessly scrolling like I was,

it's almost certainly not about you.

It's actually about the system.

Because mindless scrolling is actually the result of how our neurobiology has been extensively studied to engineer algorithms

that can push all of our reward systems buttons perfectly.

But once we recognize this,

the good news is that we can actively reverse this engineering ourselves.

So let's talk about exactly how we can do that.

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There are three R's, reduce, replace, and reframe.

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And so the first R is reduce.

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And here are six concrete tactics that you can apply from today.

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You don't necessarily need to do all of them,

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just pick the ones that feel actually achievable for where you are right now.

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The first one is to turn off all your non-essential notifications.

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Literally go through your phone,

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turn off any app notifications that are just not useful.

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I've turned off all my notifications for all my social media platforms

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because those constant pings are part of this variable reward schedule that's actually keeping your brain on edge.

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Just like how a casino slot machine is so addictive,

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number two is to turn off autoplay if that option's available

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because that feature is literally designed to continue to just feed you content to try to hook you in.

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Number Number three is schedule the times that you actually check social media.

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So maybe set two or three times a day that you actually sit down and you use social media.

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This also means that you don't just let yourself check it throughout the day.

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Maybe you just set a few times in,

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let's say your lunchtime or your evening,

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where you actually check social media and keep the rest of your day social media free.

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Number four, and this one's been a game changer for me,

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is set up some device-free zones.

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For example, the bedroom or the dinner table or like the first hour of your day.

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Maybe just pick one of them to start with.

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And so one thing

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that really changed the game for me was actually moving my phone charger out of my bedroom into my study.

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And so then I would literally have this ritual of putting my phone to bed

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and saying goodnight to my phone and then going to bed.

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And this improved my sleep massively and prevented that scrolling first thing in the morning and also last thing at night.

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Number five is to put your phone display on grayscale mode.

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Because our neurobiology is designed to find color more enticing and interesting and stimulating.

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And so by stripping all of that back and turning it into a black and white phone,

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you maintain all the functionality,

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but it makes it much less appealing and reduces the dopamine hit that you get.

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And number six is a slightly more intense version,

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which is dumb phone mode.

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So apps like Freedom let you cut down your smartphone to simply just calls and texts for a chosen window of time,

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essentially keeping the basic core functionality, but removing everything else.

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Now there's one trap that I want to flag,

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which is that it's easy to assume that reduce means just digital detoxing,

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where they completely disconnect from their devices or social media for a set period of time.

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And there is actually evidence that these digital detoxes make you less dependent on your phone and social media.

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But the same research also highlights that as soon as you return to using social media,

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you can fall right back into the same old pattern.

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So essentially the detox just gives you a little breather from that pattern.

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But as soon as you go back into your old environment without changing anything about your system

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or the way that you approach it,

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everything just snaps back into place and the social media dependence and digital anhedonia resumes.

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Because you're left with this sort of void where you used to scroll on social media,

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You used to find enjoyment from it and now you kind of have nothing.

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And that brings us to the second R, which is replace.

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And actually during my time studying medicine and then working as a doctor,

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one of the things that we really focused on was helping patients to either manage addictions

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or create health forming habits that were beneficial for them and their wellbeing.

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And one similar example is patients who were,

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let's say trying to quit alcohol and drinking.

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Often one of the hardest things for someone who was trying

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to reduce how much they were drinking is going out to dinner with friends and seeing all their friends having drinks.

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And obviously seeing all your friends drinking,

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enjoying themselves, you kind of want to drink as well.

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That's so tempting, but you know that for you,

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you're on a mission to actually reduce how much alcohol you're having,

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whether that's for an actual health condition you have,

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or just you want to have the health benefits of not drinking.

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It can often end up really tempting to just slip back into old habits.

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Because by removing drinking, you've almost left a void where let's say you're at dinner,

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you're getting some food with friends,

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everyone's going, cheers, and you have nothing.

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And so one thing that we would advise here is to think of something that can fill the void.

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And so instead of maybe ordering a gin and tonic,

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they could maybe order a sparkling water with lime

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and make a point of actively ordering something that is non-alcoholic for themselves to enjoy.

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This means that instead of just blocking that activity,

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blocking that energy, you're redirecting it into something else,

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which is a lot easier and smoother than just trying to live with the void.

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And so the same applies here.

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And let's dive into ways that we can actually replace social media and actually fill that void for social media with slower,

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more sustainable ways of enjoying ourselves and finding fun and meaning.

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Before we get into what to fill that space with,

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I quickly want to share about something that's been quite a game changer for creators who want to make money

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and earn online.

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Because when using social media,

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we're in a consumption mode.

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But one of the best things

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that we can do is flip from just consuming to also creating and to create as much as we consume.

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So what if instead the same attention

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that has gone into passively consuming social media instead went into actively creating and building something of your own?

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And that's the foundation of what a creative business is.

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And you probably already have the knowledge to do it,

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even if you don't know it yet.

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For me, the biggest barrier was friction because I had all these separate tools for various online courses,

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my newsletter, my community, but none of them were really designed to connect to each other.

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And that's where Stan comes in,

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who are very kindly sponsoring today's video.

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Stan's store is essentially an all-in-one creator storefront with courses,

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digital products, coaching calls, bookings,

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newsletter, communities, social links, all within one customizable link in bio.

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The setup process is intuitive and straightforward,

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so it cuts out a lot of the faff on your end.

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And I can honestly say this is exactly what I wish that I had at the start of my creator journey.

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This didn't exist at the time,

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and honestly would have saved me a ton of time and energy.

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And if you've already got things set up elsewhere,

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so let's say through Beehive or ConvertKit,

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Stan connects to those too so you're not starting from scratch.

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And with Stan's store, your storefront can pretty much go live in as little as five minutes.

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You can try it completely for free for 14 days using my link in the description down below.

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Now let's get back into the video.

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Our ancestors were primarily hunter-gatherers and they spent literally hours every single day walking,

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gathering food, sitting around fires,

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talking in conversation, making things with their hands.

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And so our reward systems over hundreds of thousands of years have naturally and automatically learned to regulate with that rhythm.

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And so in step two,

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replace, the four capacities

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that I'm about to walk you through are what those activities were actually doing for the brain and for the nervous system.

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And through it all, I'll share a bit about how this links into one of my hobbies I picked up in lockdown,

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which was organic vegetable gardening.

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Skill number one is what I'm calling weight.

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And this is the capacity for delayed gratification.

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You've probably heard of the marshmallow test.

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It's that famous Stanford experiment from the 1970s where kids were made an offer.

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They were offered either one marshmallow right now or they could be given two if they could wait just 15 minutes.

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Scientists kept track of these children over the years as they grew up

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and they found that the ones who were able to wait for

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that second marshmallow were more cognitively and socially competent as teenagers.

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They got better grades and also coped better when it came to frustrating and stressful situations.

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And the skill that that test was measuring,

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which is being able to delay gratification,

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is one of the first skills to be affected when everything is delivered instantly.

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That muscle of being able to wait and delay gratification just kind of atrophies

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and withers away because nothing is asking us to wait anymore.

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We can literally get Deliveroo in five minutes.

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We can instantly get social media dopamine hits.

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All of this is at the tap of a finger.

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So the activities that really help to restore this are the ones where you have to wait before you get a reward.

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Things like reading novels where there's a buildup to the end.

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Things like cooking where you have to plan out a meal,

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get the groceries, prepare everything until you finally get the finished piece.

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And this was something I experienced firsthand in lockdown when I picked up this organic vegetable gardening habit.

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I remember going to the store,

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selecting different packets of seeds,

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going home and preparing the seed trays,

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putting the seeds in them,

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putting them in the right conditions,

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watching them grow, preparing the soil outside to finally have organic vegetables and fruits come from all of this.

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The second skill is a work or what neuroscientists actually call effort proportional reward.

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What happens here is that when you're doing something with your hands and your engagement is sustained over a stretch of time,

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your brain releases dopamine in a kind of slow and steady drip.

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This is a completely different release pattern from the spikes that a social media feed produces.

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And this essentially means that when you're actually doing something that takes some effort,

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you should get a proportional reward to it.

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And so our brains learn that in order to feel a sense of reward,

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we need to put in some work,

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we need to be ready to overcome some level of faff and put in some effort.

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The problem with social media is that it short circuits this whole thing.

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When reward becomes completely effortless,

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all it takes is picking up our phone,

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tapping on an app, and then it sometimes even scrolls for you.

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We don't need to put in any effort for reward.

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And so then our brain loses this ability,

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this skill of actually knowing that,

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okay, we're ready to put in some effort to feel a reward.

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And so activities here to heal this are all about hands-on making,

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things that take effort maybe things like pottery,

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calligraphy, embroidery, and again, linking to the gardening hobby.

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I literally spent days digging up the earth,

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preparing everything to only then feel a sense of reward.

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Skill number three is grow.

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And this is the capacity for what's called effort-based mastery.

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Heavy screen use and social media specifically underuses a region of your brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

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And so the part of your brain

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that is designed to pursue working on skills that are hard to acquire kind of wastes away over time.

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And so the activities that really restore this skill are anything

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that has a learning curve that you can feel across the sessions.

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So things like learning an instrument or learning a language.

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And so to bring it back to the gardening example,

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every single week I was learning more about how the seasons work,

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how soil chemistry and the whole soil microbiome works.

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And so try thinking of some activities that really stretch you to actually engage your brain or learn some kind of skill.

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And number four is move.

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And this is essentially making the most of your body's exercise neurochemistry.

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This one actually works through a completely different mechanism from the other first three.

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But essentially when you exert yourself physically,

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your brain releases something called BDNF,

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which stands for brain derived neurotrophic factor.

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This sounds like a scary long word,

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but essentially what it means is a chemical that encourages new nerve connections

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and new nerves to grow and it's in the brain.

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So kind of like a fertilizer for your brain because it kind of makes it grow.

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And so the activities here that you could bring in is anything that gets you moving.

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For me, I personally love yoga and I'm obsessed with yoga,

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swimming, that kind of thing.

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But you could do running,

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cycling, hiking, brisk walks, strength training.

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You could do martial arts, rowing.

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You could even just go for what the internet loves to call a hot girl walk or maybe dancing,

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salsa, hip hop.

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And again, to bring back the gardening example,

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here I would be outside carrying pots,

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carrying soil, digging the ground,

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getting active, sometimes getting sweaty.

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And so I'd almost always feel really good at the end of it.

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These four things aren't actually fixed to specific activities.

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They're actually about the way that you engage with an activity.

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And so I love this framework for thinking about how we can incorporate activities in our lives

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that actually help our brain rot and our brains to heal and recalibrate.

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And so trying to make sure

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that we have a good balance across all four quadrants is

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very helpful for actually rewiring our brain again to be able to enjoy real life.

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And so that brings us to the third R, which is reframe.

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And this is all about reframing

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and redesigning our relationship with how we integrate social media

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and digital stimulation into our lives so that it turns into something

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that helps us to honestly just live a life that we love.

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The first part of this is actually falling in love with being bored.

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Because fundamentally at the heart of all of this is us escaping boredom by going to social media or the digital world.

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And the reason why boredom is so crucial is because it allows our default mode network in our brain to activate.

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When we're bored and not getting any external stimulation or doing something,

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our brain is actually processing and incubating all the ideas

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and thoughts that it's had and trying to connect them in new and interesting ways.

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This is why our thoughts kind of wander.

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This is the default mode network winding its way through all the things

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that have come up in our day and our lives and trying to make sense of it all.

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And this is part of the reason why so many scientific discoveries or moments of creative breakthrough happen during being bored.

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Even JK Rowling apparently came up with the idea for Harry

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Potter during a four hour train ride where she had nothing to do and was just sitting there with her imagination.

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And so to embody this first step,

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next time you feel bored,

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don't necessarily view that as a problem,

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actually view it as a gift.

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Lean into actually embracing the boredom,

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allowing yourself to feel bored and not trying to fix it immediately.

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This might mean going for a walk without headphones and without your phone,

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or even just going to the bathroom without your phone and just sitting and thinking about life for a moment.

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The next thing is to curate for eudaimonia.

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And essentially eudaimonia is this ancient Greek concept of thriving,

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living a life well lived.

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And this doesn't mean joy in the sense of hedonic dopamine hits.

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It's actually deeper than that,

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a sense of holistic thriving, holistic flourishing in life.

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And so what I'd recommend you do here is actually audit your social media.

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One thing I like to put everything on my feed through is almost this good mental nutrition filter,

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where I basically ask myself,

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is this good food for my mind?

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Is this actually what I want to be feeding my mind?

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Is this actually helping me to live a better life?

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So if there's anything that reliably makes you feel worse afterwards,

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so like unnecessary comparison, urgency,

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shame, feeling bad about yourself, that immediately goes.

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There's no space for that here.

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Hit unfollow, mute them, or click not interested,

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and do not engage with it,

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don't like it, don't leave a comment, just leave it be.

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Because if you engage with it,

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that tells the algorithm that you want to engage with more of that kind of content.

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On the flip side, anything that produces real learning,

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connection, inspiration, that actually flows into action in your real life, that stays.

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And by doing this over time and curating the garden of your social media,

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this helps to turn it into a place that actually nourishes you and helps you to actually live your best life.

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And the third step is to use social media as a bridge, not a destination.

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And what I mean by this is to use it to connect you to activities

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or ideas or real life in-person connections rather than using it as a one-stop destination.

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So use your DMs to schedule actual meetups with people,

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not necessarily using them as the conversation in itself.

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Maybe reply to a friend's story with,

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let's actually meet up when are you free,

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instead of just replying with an emoji.

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Join groups or communities through social media and then actually go in person.

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So now that we've gone through the neuroscience of digital anhedonia

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and the three Rs to retrain your brain to enjoy real life again,

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I'd like you to choose two action points that you'll commit to this week.

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Write it down on a sticky note,

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pop it in your notes app,

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WhatsApp it to a friend,

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write it in the comments below.

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The most important thing is that you actually write down your action points and you take action.

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If you enjoyed this video,

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I think you'll like this one over here where I share ways

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that you can romanticize your precious 50,000 hours after work instead of scrolling on your phone.

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Feel free to hit subscribe for more self-development videos every single week.

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And as always, thank you so much for watching.

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Take care of yourselves.

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And remember that the journey is the destination.

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I'll see you in the next video.

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Bye.

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Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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Shadowing Practice: Life is too short to be scrolling 860 hours a year - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Why practice speaking with this video?

Grammar & Expressions in Context

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing Practice: Life is too short to be scrolling 860 hours a year - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Why practice speaking with this video?

Grammar & Expressions in Context

Common Pronunciation Traps

What is the Shadowing Technique?