BSB Ep 76
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and if you are a Gen X or an X-ennial, then this episode, it's for you. I kind of think it's almost like my little love letter to Gen X and X-ennials because I think we have a big role to play in the next 10 to 15 years, and here's why. I recently polled my email list and asked them this question. I've been noticing a return to long form content, which are things like blogs, longer podcasts, newsletters, longer emails, or articles versus short form content, which you would find like YouTube shorts, reels, these little quickie blurbs, carousel, short form, bite size.[00:01:00]
So I asked my audience two things. Number one. What generation are you? Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z, and number two, which do you prefer? Short form content or long form content? I had the audience weigh in and here are the results. It was split right down the middle between long form and short form, but everybody liked a podcast, so here we are.
Yay me. But everyone who answered this poll was either Gen X or X-ennial, which were early millennials. The Generation X time period I think is about 1960 to 1980. So if you were born between like 80 to 82 or some people stretch it out to 84, then you get a separate sub bracket called X-ennial because you grew up in both the digital and had a little bit of [00:02:00] analog experience.
Now with the rise of AI doing so many different things and the internet taking off, it's literally changed the way our brain perceives the world. When I went to medical school, it was 2007. That was the first year that I had a laptop. That was the first year I did Facebook. I was still on MySpace. Y'all, I love MySpace.
You got to design your background. You got to put your own music on there. You got to rank your top five friends, and you were always checking your friend's profile to see if you made the top five. So, hey, if your friends weren't acting right. You can bump 'em down the list, you know, check yourself before you wreck yourself friends.
But it was great because you got to combine a little bit of the internet with your own creativity and it was fabulous. And MySpace just wasn't really a thing, you [00:03:00] know, at my school. So it in med school, my fellow classmates who were a bit younger than me, introduced me to Facebook.
Later on that year, the first iPhone came out. You guys, I had a flip phone, Nokia like dumb phone, right? It's where we had to press multiple keys to get the right letter. But those dumb phones and those experiences. I also did not even have a laptop until I went to med school and I put it on there. That was in the intake paperwork.
It's laptops are required because everybody in my undergrad, we all took notes by hand. I think maybe there were less than five people in any given class that actually had a laptop. Everybody else was doing things by hand and your brain likes that because it exercises your brain. Gen X and X-ennials, we got our dopamine in a long [00:04:00] form content kind of way. So for example, your favorite show is gonna come on Friday evening, and there were no, reruns. T here was no streaming on demand. You either sat your butt in front of that TV on Friday, or you missed your show and you had to go to school on Monday with agonizing regret because your friends were gonna be talking about your favorite show.
It created this anticipation. And when it comes to our dopamine in a long form content kind of way, you have a cue, a habit, and a reward. The dopamine gets pumped out in anticipation of the reward and when the actual reward is given. So for that TV example, the cue is, it's Friday and then, the habit is I'm gonna watch Magnum PI or Air Wolf or A Team, or any of those super cool shows we had on [00:05:00] Friday evening, and then I'm gonna feel good watching it.
Not only that because there was no replay. If you needed to go to the bathroom or get snacks, you either did that before the show or you hurried to do it during the break, and your siblings were gonna be yelling at you the show's back on so that you would finish up whatever you're doing and rush back in because you couldn't miss it.
There was no rewind, no replay. I mean, sure we had VCRs. But in the beginning they were really expensive and a lot of people couldn't afford them. I think my parents, when we finally got our first VCR years after they came out, it was something like $600, $800 for like a VCR. I mean, it was a major investment to get VCR.
So more often than not, if you were the typical Gen X kid, you were either there on time or you missed it. And long form content Dopamine is also that way. Handwriting, turning in your [00:06:00] assignment, having to wait to see what your grade was. We didn't have instant gratification. So fast forward to the internet and smartphones and whoever designed smartphones and the internet and all of these apps they really knew their neuroscience. Because they designed a system based to trigger that cue, habit reward in you. For example, Duolingo is a master at this. You hear the chime of Duolingo reminding you to do your lesson. The chime reminds you of the habit of doing your lesson and the repeated chimes, the little birdie flying around the "great jobs".
That's the dopamine reward. And social media was designed the same way because our brains secrete dopamine for novelty. So your feed, your social media feed, it's got different [00:07:00] information and you don't wanna miss it. The likes, you wanna check who liked what information is there. It's constantly changing.
It retrains your brain for short dopamine bursts. For example, that cue, habit, reward system is no longer a long reward system. It is micro. And this is why you lose large amounts of time on social media, scrolling. Casinos have played into the neuroscience the same way.
That's why the slot machines make all of these little sounds. They flash the lights because they've hacked into your brain's reward system, and they use it for their advantage. I think Gen X and X-ennials have a real opportunity in the next 10 to 15 years is to lead the analog revolution. Because AI is changing the [00:08:00] game, people are getting overstimulated with the social media.
Where in these echo chambers, where there are so many studies that are being done right now that will show you the mental health of Gen Z, Gen Alpha is at an all time low. And I recently read a study about kids that get exposure to the short dopamine cycle when they're young through tablets and screen time.
They don't develop the long dopamine cycle, and so if you try to take their device away, they go through like a form of dopamine withdrawal, and then you see the tantrums, the anger. A lot of parents can't take that. So what do you do? You give 'em their tablet back. Which feeds that short burst addiction.
It's a really vicious cycle, and not only that, cursive handwritings, it's not taught in schools. A lot of people don't read books [00:09:00] anymore. I read the statistic the other day that I think it was something like 46% of Americans have not read a book in the last year. And then when was the last time you did any significant amount of handwriting?
My one-to-one clients know that I hand write my notes. So I get a lot of handwriting practice every week. And then I have been learning Italian for the last three years and I just started taking chess lessons because if you don't use it, you lose it is kind of a real thing for your brain and a lot of people right now who may be struggling with memory and focus and stress.
You have these changes that are going on in your brain right now, and brain training is a way to help that. So here's what I would recommend to you. Learn a new language. Learn a new skill. Read a book because your brain secretes dopamine [00:10:00] with novelty. And long form content is gonna keep you off the screens, but you may have to deal with the addiction of reaching for your screen. Even I still struggle with this sometimes. I will read for like an hour and then I'll get this almost like a compulsion that I need to check social media for like five, 10 minutes, sometimes half an hour. I get caught in that cycle too because we've been trained that way since the first smartphone came out.
And everybody got laptops right, but I am seeing this exciting new resurgence among Gen Z is that they realize that they are losing their ability to relate to one another. This is why dating is really hard because you live in this echo chamber. The dating apps are a lot like social media. You're just getting fed this information that may not be actually true, but the algorithms [00:11:00] trick you into believing that these things are true. Gen Z is realizing that they're caught in this short dopamine cycle and that they're losing their ability to relate. Some college campuses have started these movements where they are game nights, physical game nights with board games, or people hang out and they discuss a theme like the old salons in Paris and nobody brings a smartphone.
It's like not allowed. And some Gen Z are trying to wean themself off the smartphone. So they're getting the old flip phones again, the dumb phones. But they're a little half in, half out, because back in the day, we would Map Quest and print directions if we really didn't know where we were going, but we had an expanded memory capacity.
We had to learn how to read a real map and we had to learn to [00:12:00] pay attention to where we were going. So we used our memories in a long form content kind of way. Think about it guys. We used to remember phone numbers, all the phone numbers of our friends.
We had it memorized. How many people do you know right now that have even one phone number memorized? Like even if they got into a jam, they don't know who to call. T his is a thing and we're losing our capacity because we're not brain training enough and we're not doing enough long form, slow, content. We've had a little too much short form content and you can improve your focus. So it's interesting, the people, I had reply that said, I love short form content. I knew several of them personally, and I know they've been diagnosed with ADHD. The focus of a neurodiverse brain is different, but even a neurodiverse [00:13:00] brain shows changes when they don't work it out.
And they've definitely done studies that the short term bursts is still not great for a neurodiverse brain. And Neurodiverse brains have differences in their biochemistry to begin with. So everybody's brain is trainable, neurodiverse, or neurotypical, but you wanna use it so you don't lose it. And right now, if you're struggling with focus, which is what happens naturally when you've undergone chronic stress, digital detox is what I would recommend for you, my friend.
Decrease the screen time as much as possible, at least social media. And you may have to set yourself a timer of like five minutes so that you don't get caught in that churn of the dopamine cycle where you just lose track of [00:14:00] time. So that's what I would recommend. Try to switch back as much as you can to long form content.
Hand write something. Make it an intention to read an actual book and it's up to you. A lot of people are even saying that reading an actual printed book in a coffee shop without their phones, that's the new flex. That's the new luxury. Analog is the new luxury, but unless you're Gen X or X-ennial, you may not know how to do it.
Just that fact makes it seem scary. And also the addictive cycle of the internet and social media is real. Gen X, and X-ennials, you have an amazing opportunity right now to step up and lead the way, the analog revolution, if you will, to get [00:15:00] us back to where we're talking to each other, where we can leave the house without your phone.
Because nowadays somebody's got one. And if you go to the extra mile to memorize somebody's number. So if you did get in a jam, you can call them. We don't have to drive looking for payphones anymore. Everybody's got a phone now, so you're covered on that or kick it old school. Print the directions off hand, write them even better before you go to a place.
I just wanted to share that with you. The digital versus analog world, long form versus short form content, but you just need to figure out what works for you. But I do recommend doing some long form stuff, weaning off a dependence on social media.
And I saw this headline. I did not read the article because you can just tell it was like a clickbait headline, but it said [00:16:00] Gen Z parents are not reading as much to their own children because they find it boring. So is that true or not? I don't know. But if you are Gen Z parent listening to this, I've read another study that said the overstimulation of the cartoons that we have today.
Cartoons today are not like cartoons that we had in the eighties. It was slow moving action. Not as many lights, not as many colors, not as many characters. And trust me, the illustrators, the producers, they have tapped into that cue, habit, reward, dopamine system. Same way. So the study, these Gen Z parents actually started showing their kids cartoons from the nineties, and they said their kids' behavior changed dramatically that they weren't as angry or irritable, and they ended up decreasing [00:17:00] screen time on their own.
They went more for the long form content, the long and slow content of the nineties cartoons versus the fast paced lights action, a billion different colors of cartoons today. So it's something to think about if you are Gen Z parent listening to this. Reading shapes the brain in a way that's very complimentary.
So if you don't read to your kids, I recommend it. And if you don't read for yourself, no matter what generation you are, please do it. Your brain will thank you now and later. Okay, Gen X, X-ennials, you've got a job to do. Gen Z, we see you. We love you. We hear you. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next week.
Goodbye.
