Shadowing Practice: Why we can't stop scrolling. - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
1
Why can't we stop scrolling?
2
We all struggle with it.
3
We're scrolling in bed or at work or when we're around our friends and family.
4
No matter where we are, we bring our phones with us, and when our phones are with us, eventually we end up scrolling.
5
In my case, I know that I do it sometimes without even thinking about it.
6
And many of us want to stop.
7
So why can't we stop even when we know it isn't good for us?
8
The internet is full of people who say that they have the answers, but I think it's actually more complicated than most of us want to admit, We need to start with the way that our devices actually exploit our anxiety.
9
Let's say that you receive a notification on your phone.
10
Before you look at your phone, all you know is that your phone is saying, hey, there's something you need to pay attention to.
11
It's at least important enough that you
12
or the designer of some app thought it was worth interrupting your day to tell you about it.
13
But you don't know if it's good or bad news.
14
It could be a notification from your bank saying that you just got paid, or it could be a message from your mom saying that your grandfather died.
15
you check, you just don't know.
16
What's happening here, I think, is that our phones are adding a little bit of uncertainty into our lives.
17
And the only way to get rid of
18
that uncertainty is to actually pick up your phone and see what the notification was about.
19
And when we encounter that kind of uncertainty, for many of us, the response is anxiety.
20
Then most of the time, you pick up your phone, you check it, and you realize it was nothing important.
21
Hopefully, you put your phone down and you move on with your day.
22
Now repeat that hundreds of times per day.
23
If you're not really careful about how you set up your notifications, this is what your life is like.
24
All throughout your day, you're getting notified, it adds a little bit of uncertainty, and it adds anxiety into your life.
25
And eventually, you start to preemptively check your phone.
26
You don't even have to wait to be notified.
27
So you refresh your email or your timeline, and what you're doing is just making sure that you didn't miss something.
28
So your phone is exploiting your anxiety to grab your attention, but there is mounting evidence that suggests that the longer you use your phone, the more anxious you become.
29
In her latest book, Generations, Jean Twenge actually outlines the evidence for the thesis that smartphones
30
and social media use are responsible for the degradation of mental health.
31
The percentage of young people who are dissatisfied with themselves or with the world around them has risen dramatically since 2012.
32
It's gone from about 12% to 22%.
33
That's nearly double.
34
The current younger generation is more likely to say
35
that they don't enjoy life and that they don't view themselves as useful to the world.
36
And by the way, most of the data that Twenge is citing is actually from before COVID-19.
37
So Twini puts forward the idea that it's actually the phones and social media that are causing this degradation in mental health.
38
It correlates really nicely.
39
Obviously, correlation is not causation.
40
And so she goes through alternative hypotheses and argues
41
that none of them are as strong of an explanation as the increase in phone and social media use.
42
If you want all of those details, I would suggest that you check out her book.
43
You should look for the chapter specifically on Gen Z.
44
The claim is not that social media is exclusively responsible for a rise in anxiety or other mental health conditions.
45
It's that it's playing a very strong causal role.
46
From my own experience, I know that I feel anxiety about not having my phone with me.
47
I feel anxiety about not checking my phone, especially when I'm waiting for some kind of news.
48
Despite the fact that checking your phone isn't going to make that email come any sooner, I still find myself grabbing it and checking it
49
if I'm not really careful and disciplined about where I put my phone or how I let myself use it.
50
This is why I take fairly drastic steps with my phone.
51
I don't have YouTube on my phone.
52
I don't have other forms of social media on my phone.
53
It's not because I hate all of those things.
54
After all, I am a YouTuber.
55
Instead, it's me recognizing that I'm so bad at regulating my own behavior that I have to remove the temptations completely.
56
Eventually I'd like to get to a point where I don't even have email on my phone, but I'm not there yet.
57
Now if what I'm saying is right, then we're actually going to get trapped into a vicious cycle.
58
Your phone exploits your anxiety to grab your attention throughout the day.
59
But then using your phone
60
and using social media more will actually lead to an increase your overall anxiety levels
61
so then when your phone sends you a notification and causes
62
that little spike of anxiety well you're already more prone to anxiety
63
and it's going to be harder for you to resist the temptation the anxious pool of social media
64
and your phones and notifications gets even stronger
65
but once we're on our phones we tend to just start mindlessly scrolling
66
and i think when people talk about their phone use or their worries about their attention spans
67
this is one of the things they most have in mind.
68
They're worried that they spend too much time scrolling and they don't get anything from it.
69
And the common explanation that's given, especially on the internet, is that this comes down to a dopamine addiction.
70
Many people like to say that we are addicted to our phones for two reasons.
71
One, checking your phone, checking social media provides you with a boost or a little hit of dopamine.
72
And two, we are actually addicted to dopamine.
73
This is all very vague, but that's That's basically the level of popular explanation that you'll find on places like YouTube.
74
Because our phones are such easy ways to get small amounts of dopamine, we keep returning to them over and over again.
75
And when you add uncertainty into the mix and a bit of randomness, it makes the pull even stronger.
76
Since in general we don't like to be bored, whenever we feel just a little bit of boredom,
77
we feel that temptation to pick up our phone and start scrolling because maybe we'll find something fun on the screen.
78
It's often true that you will find something that you'd like to give your attention to,
79
Because we live in these perfectly tailored algorithmic environments where really complex systems are specialized in giving you the content
80
that you want to see.
81
If you continue this line of thought, they say that because we're addicted to dopamine, our phones are going to take up more and more of our time.
82
Our screen time is going to continue to go up.
83
If you think that dopamine addiction is part of the problem, well, you might be interested in something like dopamine fasting.
84
The idea is that we need to reset our dopamine levels.
85
If we reset our dopamine levels, people say we'll be able to resist the temptation of easy pleasures like our phone.
86
The dopamine fasting trend is everywhere, while I do think it's starting to die off, it was all over YouTube for a very long time,
87
and there were even a lot of people in Silicon Valley who were heavily invested in the idea.
88
In the most extreme versions, practitioners of dopamine fasting go beyond turning off their phones, they'll avoid busy streets because that's a source of stimulation, or they won't even eat delicious food.
89
They're doing anything that provides them pleasure or mental stimulation.
90
But one Silicon Valley psychiatrist and startup investor, Cameron Seppa, uses dopamine fasting in his practice with many tech workers and entrepreneurs.
91
There's one major problem with all of this though, and that's that dopamine fasting is fake.
92
A dopamine fast does not actually reset your dopamine levels.
93
I think what we have here is a pseudo-scientific explanation for a real problem.
94
Seppa actually admits this in an interview with the New York Times.
95
He says that a better name for this would just be a stimulation fast.
96
If you understand it that way, it makes a little bit more sense.
97
The idea that you can be habituated to do certain things and that in order to break that habit, you need to abstain from those things isn't a new idea.
98
In fact, you can find it all the way back in ancient Greek philosophy, like in Aristotle.
99
If you read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, one of the key points that he makes about pleasure is
100
that what we take pleasure in is actually a matter of habit.
101
You can actually train yourself to like certain things.
102
This means that when you repeat certain behaviors, you are training yourself to take pleasure from it, and you'll be more likely to do those things in the future.
103
By using our phones over and over again, by turning them into our default sources of entertainment, we are training ourselves to take more and more pleasure from using our phones.
104
And while none of that amounts to us being addicted to our phones, it at least helps us make sense of why we keep going back to our phones all the time.
105
And one thing that I think gets left out of all of the explanations
106
when we're talking about infinite scrolling or smartphone addiction
107
or whatever buzzword we want to choose is that using your phone is actually fun.
108
Watching YouTube videos or chatting with your friends
109
or just checking out what people are doing on TikTok is a kind of pleasure.
110
And people like to do stuff that's fun.
111
I think that has to be part of the explanation.
112
We can't stop scrolling because, well, we enjoy it.
113
This explanation I think makes more sense and doesn't have to appeal to anything like dopamine levels or dopamine addiction.
114
It's just that we like to do things that feel good, scrolling on our phones at least most of the time feels good.
115
And so we keep doing it.
116
Dopamine doesn't even have to factor into the explanation.
117
But I think there's at least one more piece of the puzzle.
118
Because many of us don't spend all of our time just consuming content that makes us happy.
119
We spend our time being mad online.
120
In 2017, Facebook made a major change to their algorithm.
121
They had added these emotional reactions to posts instead of just a generic like,
122
and they decided that they were going to prioritize those emotional reactions over just liking something.
123
At one point, I think they were weighting it about five times as heavily as a like.
124
This included the angry reaction.
125
Part of their hypothesis was that content that made users angry would actually keep them on the platform longer.
126
And they were right.
127
were actually engaging more with content that was making them angry.
128
Later on, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland found
129
that posts that had a strong negative valence were significantly more likely to be shared on Facebook than posts
130
that were positive or even neutral.
131
Because of algorithmic tweaks and some basic facts about human psychology, Facebook became a much angrier place, and they are not the only platform that does this.
132
If you watch content that is making you angry on YouTube, pretty soon all of your recommendations will be content that is designed to make you angry.
133
Pretty sure the same could be said for Twitter and for TikTok.
134
I know as someone who makes YouTube videos that if I have a slightly or even very negative title, the video will just automatically do a lot better.
135
Every writer, YouTuber, content creator on the internet knows that this is true.
136
Anger generates clicks, and clicks generate dollars.
137
This tells us something important about what we want.
138
Not what we say we want, but what our behavior reveals about our actual preferences.
139
What we want is to be angry.
140
We like being angry.
141
The Roman philosopher Seneca actually compares anger to a kind of madness.
142
He says that it distorts our thinking, it seriously undermines our self-control, and all we want to do when we're angry is make someone feel the pain that we feel.
143
And he says that the best way to master anger is to not let yourself get angry in the first place.
144
become angry, you've already lost.
145
And that just sounds a lot like what we do on the Internet.
146
Just like looking at our phones all the time makes us more anxious.
147
Looking at content that makes us angry, makes us angrier people.
148
And as we grow angrier, we lose self-control.
149
The internet thrives on drama.
150
You can become famous by picking a fight with someone who's more famous than you.
151
When you create a controversy, you're actually able to gain two audiences at once.
152
You're able to find people who like you and agree with you and think that the other side is evil, but you're also going to get viewed by a lot of people who hate you.
153
Think about how many people watch Ben Shapiro.
154
I have a suspicion that about 50% of the views on a Ben Shapiro video are from people who hate Ben Shapiro.
155
But guess what?
156
Advertisers don't care if you are watching something or hate watching it.
157
They just care that you're watching it.
158
So when you make content that makes people angry, you make a lot of money.
159
So maybe it's an addiction to stimulation or this weird looping effect about anxiety, or just the fact that we like to be angry and anger keeps us glued to our screen.
160
All of that is part of the explanation, and what this leads to is a kind of complacency.
161
As I was writing the script for this video, I ended up stumbling on this video from Technology Connections about algorithms and how they've changed the way that we think.
162
In that video, he coined the term algorithmic complacency, which I think is such a great term for what's going on.
163
It's a good video.
164
You should go watch it.
165
You see, increasingly, we are offloading our responsibility onto machines.
166
We've come to be reliant on a variety of technologies, and one of the things that happens when we become reliant is that we let certain skills atrophy.
167
Some of those skills have to do with how we problem solve, that was the focus of the technology connections video, but some of those also have to do with how we have fun.
168
We've come to view our phones as the place we go to in order to be entertained.
169
Our phone is essentially a kind of entertainment tool.
170
And tools are great.
171
Human beings have been using tools for centuries.
172
Millennia?
173
I think millennia is a better way to put that.
174
And to say that we should stop using tools in general or to never use phones again, I think would be way too extreme.
175
But we have to keep in mind that when we start using a tool, we don't just gain something, we also lose something.
176
If you grew up using a calculator, you were probably able to get your math homework done a lot quicker.
177
But it's also true that you probably didn't develop the skills of doing multiplication, even addition or subtraction, division in your head.
178
You became reliant on your calculator
179
and thus it might be a little bit harder for you to calculate change when you're at the supermarket.
180
We clearly benefit from using calculators, but we also lose something, the ability to do quick and simple math.
181
The same could be said for our phones.
182
Phones are these low effort tools that provide us with quick
183
and easy access to information and quick and easy access to entertainment.
184
A designer of a phone or an app on your phone is trying to make it effortless, frictionless.
185
They want it to be easy to use so that you never have to think twice.
186
But But the risk is that our phones are too frictionless.
187
We never have to think too hard about using them, and so sometimes we don't think at all.
188
The result is that we become complacent.
189
We're giving up our responsibility and our agency to our phones.
190
Another way of putting it is that we have become dependent on our phones.
191
We're dependent on them for pleasure and for entertainment, but also for access to information and for problem solving.
192
really we are dependent on them for maybe the majority of our daily activities.
193
And if we're so dependent on this piece of technology for so many activities in our lives, then it's not really a surprise that we can't stop scrolling.
📺 Same Channel
✨ Recommend Video
B212
24 sentences
How Cell Phones Impact Our Relationships
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
99 sentences
how to make every day SO fun you don’t even have time to scroll
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
175 sentences
The Real Reason You Always Imagine the Worst
American Accent, en-USUniversity Students+3
B21
206 sentences
This is wrecking my brain and it feels amazing
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
227 sentences
You’re Not Obsessed—You’re Avoiding Your Life
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B2146 sentences
How to Stop Wasting Time on Your Phone | Practical Tips to Beat Phone Addiction and Stay Focused
University StudentsBusiness English+2
![[B2] Smartphone Addiction Conversation | English Listening & Speaking Practice](https://img.youtube.com/vi/DRhbklTkLM0/mqdefault.jpg)
B2446
60 sentences
[B2] Smartphone Addiction Conversation | English Listening & Speaking Practice
High School StudentsUniversity Students+3
B22
32 sentences
How Is Your Phone Changing You?
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
151 sentences
This Texting Method Makes People Addicted To You
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B22
561 sentences
How to Stop Scrolling, Overcome Procrastination & Build Self-Discipline
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
75 sentences
6 Little Habits To Reduce Anxiety
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
111 sentences
These 7 Habits Will Rewire Your Brain for Happiness
University StudentsBusiness English+2
About This Lesson
You're practicing English with "Why we can't stop scrolling." using the Shadowing technique — a method originally developed for professional interpreter training.
Focus on sounding like the speaker — not just repeating words. With 15–30 minutes of daily practice, you'll build real-world speaking confidence.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
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.