0:00 Something really bad happens to your brain when you watch short form content. And no, I'm not talking about your attention span and your ability to focus. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that scrolling through 5 to 10 second videos is going to scramble your brain and make it so that you're unable to focus on anything that's longer than 5 to 10 seconds. And I'm also not talking about the whole comparison thing where you're scrolling through, you know, the mo the most extreme versions of body image or money. And you know, we've all heard the quote before that comparison is the feat of joy. And we've all heard the cliche that the average human has an attention span of the same length of a goldfish, right? These are pretty common pieces of knowledge that have swept through modern society that we understand. What I'm about to tell you is way deeper than that and way more sinister. And when I
0:47 figured this thing out a few years ago I haven't looked back or watch short form content since. Because if you if you understand this thing, it will it will petrify you and it will scare you to your core, which should in turn stop you from actually doing the thing. So in order for us to understand how short form content basically destroys your brain and ruins your life, we need to understand a few things about mental health, about attention, about emotion and about what short form content actually is. Depression and anxiety and other mental health disorders like ADHD OD, all these things are rampant. And it's no surprise or should come as no surprise to you that we are basically in a mental health crisis. Um and you know pretty much worldwide any modern society has a massive issue with mental health problems. And there's lots of reasons for this. You know we could argue it's oh it's because of the modern diet or
1:32 it's because of the microplastics or it's the pollution. There's all sorts of reasons but social media is a big one. Um but specifically short form content. And what I'm about to tell you is something that no one considers. like what you're about to learn something brand new that you've probably never thought about before that will completely shift your perspective on on how you deal with short form content. So what is attention and what is short form content? Well, short form content is basically a short video that you're well aware of. And at first principle, what it basically is is a collection of frames strung together that elapse before your eyes. And it basically is like a component of reality of something that's happened in the past captured on video that you see. And when you watch short form content, when you watch these little frames that have been put
2:18 together and you scroll through them and you scroll through these pixels, what happens is you only watch content that goes viral. And so 99% of the short form videos that you see in your feed whether this is on Instagram, YouTube or Tik Tok, or wherever else people watch short form content these days you're seeing viral content. And what you need to understand is that in order for something to go viral, it has to produce an emotion. And so what this means is that the bulk majority of short form videos that you see invoke an emotional response in you because our emotions dictate our attention. And the reason that short form content is so damn addictive. And the reason why you can just scroll for hours and hours and hours without even noticing that time's going by, there's probably not much else
3:04 on the planet that you can do for hours and hours and hours without noticing time's going by. Bloody hell. Try and just sit and watch a movie for 2 and 1/2 hours. You can't. You're just checking your phone or trying to do things or eat snacks. Like it's very hard. But for some reason, Instagram reals or Tik Tok whatever, you can just you can scroll through that thing. And it's incredibly addictive. And the reason is because what it does is it invokes emotion. Now our emotions by their very nature dictate our attentive mechanism that in other words they determine where our focus and attention goes, where our eyeballs, our ears and where our sensory mechanisms what they lock what they lock on to. And this is really dangerous. And here's the rub because in order for a piece of short form content to go viral it has to invoke an emotion. Because what is virality? What does viral mean?
3:49 Well, it means that it's captured the attention of lots of people. And it's important to understand that where your attention goes is where your emotion lies. And if something makes you feel something, then you're likely to pay attention to it. And that's the whole point. And here's the kicker. When you scroll through short form content, you you think you're scrolling through videos and these these videos, what you're scrolling through is emotions. And every time that you pull that lever, every time that little, you know, that refresh or every time you scroll up, that slot machine mechanism you're invoking a a brand new emotion. And so, think about this with me for a second here because, you know, one minute you're watching a video of like um some child's birthday and then he gets his head put in the cake and it's
4:35 funny. And then the next video is like you know, it's it's it's some political you know, um thing that just rage baits you and makes you a little bit angry. and then you're scrolling through something about a kid that got over cancer and you you feel happy or a little bit inspired and then you're watching some dude like drive a Ferrari and you feel a bit jealous, you know whether it's sadness, anger, anxiety depression, um focus, like inspiration motivation, determination, like there loneliness, grief, joy that there's dozens and dozens and dozens of emotions that your brain has the ability to produce. And when you watch a piece of viral short form content, it will almost always trigger an emotion. And that's why you pay so much attention to these things. And that's why it's so damn
5:20 addictive because your brain, it likes to produce emotion because what emotion does is it informs action by its nature. It's called emotion. Motion is Latin for movement, right? And so what emotions do is they create impulse for us to address things in our environment. And so, you know, for example, if you if someone close to you dies and passes away you're you're going to receive that information from your sensory environment through your, you know through your through your five senses and you're going to register that happening on an emotional level, and it's going to produce grief or sadness or, you know, some anxiety or some depression, right? And that's perfectly healthy and normal. But the problem is with short form content is it's it's emotional spectacle gone mad because what you're doing is you're scrolling
6:07 through all this stuff and you're basically scrolling through emotional states. If you really think about it that first principle, that is why you are sat here like on your bed like this just scrolling and scrolling. You're you're scrolling through emotions and it's incredibly addictive and it feels great to do this. But the problem with this is it completely completely your brain and it your emotional intelligence, your EQ, your emotional quotient, which is the measurement of your emotional intelligence. This was defined by Daniel Gleman. Um he kind of wrote the book on emotional intelligence. And when we talk about emotional intelligence, most people think it's about empathy and it's about your ability to understand and relate to people and talk to them and you know your social skills. And that is a large proponent of EQ and of emotional
6:53 intelligence. But the other component of EQ and emotional intelligence is to do with your ability to control your impulses and your ability to become aware of your emotions and control them and manage them. And when you scroll through short form content for hours on end, you're you're your brain because in order for your brain to produce an emotion, this this thing doesn't come out of thin air. It happens on a chemical level. It happens with neurotransmitters like norepinephrine dopamine serotonin acetylcholine noradrenaline, all these hormones and you know neurotransmitters um that are firing around your brain. For example, in order for your brain to produce anger and for you to register a stimuli in your environment as that makes me angry, your brain has to produce norepinephrine. has to produce acetylcholine and these things build up
7:39 and build up and then your brain it triggers like this emotion in your brain and then you feel angry and then you know you usually do something with that anger that you probably would regret and that's what emotion is. It's it's a it's a it's a shift in our neurochemistry. And for a normal healthy human, the way that our brain is designed to work is emotions are perfectly normal and perfectly healthy because, you know, if I'm walking down the street and someone steals my phone, um which could well happen though I live in London, then that should register as on an angry level because, you know, that person has stolen from me and that's going to trigger, you know, that event. my brain will just quickly like register that as anger, which is perfectly healthy and perfectly normal. But the issue with short form content is you can't really do anything with the emotions you're feeling. Have you ever scrolled for a
8:26 couple of hours before only afterwards to feel apathetic or depressed or like just completely emotionally haywire? Like you you can't really it's just you just feel really weird and really strange. What that basically is is your brain's almost got like an emotional hangover. So if you if you drink too much alcohol, you get you get a hangover, right? Where your body's breaking down the chemicals in the alcohol, i.e. the ethanol and the the process of breaking that down doesn't feel very nice in your body. Your brain has to do the same thing when you overstimulate it with too much emotion. And all of these chemicals, they build up and build up and build up. And you kind of, as your brain breaks these down, and as your brain has to deal with this onslaught of chemicals that you've just given it after your mindless scroll because you've been scrolling through emotions, it leaves you with this
9:11 emotional hangover. And the problem is is most people spend their entire lives completely overeotional. And what happens when you train your brain to produce emotional chemicals, it gets really good at it. And this is how you become sensitive. So, you know if you let's say that you scroll through short form content a couple of hours a day, what you're doing is you're scrolling through emotions for a couple of hours a day and you're you're spiking chemicals in your brain and you're basically just like bringing things up and bringing and you're just you're just you're just artificially stimulating um feeling. And what that does is it makes you highly sensitive to these things. In the same way that if you um if you ate loads of crap food for a long time and got really sick and you know you you
9:56 built up food intolerances, if you ate a piece of that food again, then your your intolerance is so high that your body will just like shut down. Um and this is really bad for you. Like really really really bad for you. And the reason that so many people these days struggle with depression, anger issues, ODD, ADD, um anxiety, and all these other acronyms that terrify me. There's so many acronyms these days for mental health. It's actually quite scary. It's because people can't control their emotions because their emotions control them because they produce so many. It's not normal and it's not healthy. And you know when you talk to someone that's just completely like scattered and fried like it's the short form content thing man. It's really really bad for
10:42 you. When you drive a car you have gears. So if you're driving stick or manual as Americans will call it stick. If you're driving manual as we say in the UK you have maybe like five or six gears in your cup and you know you shift through the gears and you try and find the highest gear for optimal fuel burning and driving efficiency. Watching short form content is like driving a car but trying to shift this gear stick every 5 to 10 seconds. You're changing the state of the car and the mode in which it drives. And that's what you're doing in your brain as you scroll through these things is you're you're scrolling your one minute something makes you feel happy and then it makes you feel sad. Then you feel a bit anxious, then you feel a bit lonely then you feel inspired and motivated and motivated and motivated and then you feel a bit angry and joyful and then confused and envious. And your brain, it can't deal with this level of
11:28 stimulation. And so what it does is it gives you these weird disorders that that make you the basically it's kind of its way of like it's like a signal. And I'll leave you with this in closing. If you have mental health problems or if you have depression or anxiety, it's worth considering that an emotional state doesn't just come out of nowhere. You're not just born with depression and you're not just born with anxiety. You might be born with um neurochemical proclivities towards those diseases, but the emotional state of feeling that way I believe you're you're not you're not born with. A lot of people disagree with me, but that's just my opinion. There is science to back whatever you get my point, right? I'm not being binary here. But your emotional state is an output. It is a production. And as Newton said
12:14 for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. So we can imagine that our emotional state is effectively a reaction which means that something had to happen for that to happen. Things don't you don't just produce emotions for no for no reason. Now you might do if you've got like chronic schizophrenia or you know you've got some real problems but you probably don't have those issues. And it's worth considering that the output of your brain which is your emotional state is the result of an input which is the the only input that our brain has to produce outputs is information from our environment. sensory information that our senses, you know, like it projects into our senses. We digest that in our brain and our brain produces these outputs and our behavior. And your behavior is dictated by your emotions as well, which is a whole another thing. And so, just think
13:00 about this for a second. Has it ever occurred to you that the reason that you're so emotionally is because of what you're consuming? It's like, you know, it doesn't take much of a genius. go and go and binge watch like a really really sad emotional TV series for a day and see what happens to your brain. Like you get you can temporarily contract like depression and like become chronically sad if you watch too much sad stuff. Of course, how the hell of course it makes sense. Like, you know if you if you spend your entire day um watching content about, you know, um the Holocaust and you know, every tragedy under the sun, then you're going to end that day feeling very, very sad and you're going to have an a depression hangover, basically. And this is it should become as no surprise to you, but
13:46 the reason short form content is so deadly is because it forces your brain to deal with multiple emotions at once. And it forces your brain to break down these chemicals and deal with different things and and that's how you become ill and that's how you become sensitive. And you know how easy people are to trigger these days where it doesn't you can just it's just like you can almost just poke them in the axiom and what by axium I mean like a belief system like a oh like you know any any just insert a political statement here people will just fly off a handle. That's not normal. It's not. And the same thing with how some people these days like you know the the slightest smallest thing can set them off into tears or the slightest smallest thing can just give them a panic attack. Like this is not normal. Like your brain
14:32 is pretty emotionally robust and it's it's not built to, you know, have these issues. Some people do by default, sure but you're probably not one of those people. And so if you are sensitive to emotions and you're highly sensitive to emotional turbulence, all these mental health disorders, then remove short form content because it's not doing you any good. And if you keep scrolling through it, then as far as I'm concerned, you're just an idiot. And I don't want to judge you, but a lot of people, what the hell? How the hell what do you expect to happen? Right? Anyway, that's it. Together.
