Phone Addiction Scientist: Doing This Gives You An Hour Back Every Day! | Dr Sahar Yousef | The Diary Of A CEO Transcript

Phone addiction scientist Dr Sahar Yousef explains the neuroscience of distraction and how to reclaim focus

Steven Bartlett interviews Dr Sahar Yousef, founder of the Becoming Superhuman Lab at UC Berkeley, on the neuroscience of productivity, phone addiction, and deep work.

Summary

Dr Sahar Yousef, a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of the Becoming Superhuman Lab at UC Berkeley, joins Steven Bartlett to share research on productivity, attention, and human performance. Dr. Yousef argues that technology platforms are deliberately engineered using the same psychological playbook as the processed food industry — increasing stimulation, decreasing friction, and reducing satiation — to maximise engagement at the direct expense of users' cognitive performance. She presents research from her lab showing that switching a phone to grayscale reduces daily phone use by an average of one hour. She also warns that the trajectory of digital dependence is creating what she has heard described in AI industry meetings as a "thinking class" — a shrinking subset of the population capable of independent critical thought — while the majority become increasingly passive and controllable. The conversation covers practical tools including focus sprints, chronotypes, MIT/LIT task prioritisation, and the neuroscience of creative insight.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and Dr. Yousef's Mission

Steven Bartlett: Dr Dr Sahar Yousef, what is the mission that you are on, if you had to try and capture it in a couple of sentences? And why does it matter to the people that are tuning in and listening right now?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: The mission I am on is, first and foremost, to bring science education to the world in a way that allows people to work more in line with how their brains and their bodies actually work best. This is my philosophy — that there are fundamental laws of how the brain and the body actually work. I always liken these things to the laws of physics. There are laws of physics. We don't question the laws. Gravity. I don't ever wake up one morning and go, you know what, I want to do away with it. And I know that there are fundamental laws of biology, but we blissfully ignore them. We don't teach kids when they're in school at an early age how their brains work so that they might be able to study a little bit easier, find flow, actually be able to manage things like stress, physiological stress. We don't teach people the fundamentals of sleep.

In my area of expertise, which is productivity, we focus so much on what. What's the deliverable? What's the long-term goal? What's the annual goal? What's the quarterly goal? What, what, what, what, what, what — but not the how. How should we go about getting these things done? What is the best way that a human being might sit down and have an innovative thought? Like, truly — what's the neuroscience of innovation? We're all obsessed. I'm from Silicon Valley. We're obsessed with innovation. But we're doing that with this. With our brains. This is a biological system. Isn't it a good idea to take a step back and learn how the system actually works? I just feel like there's so much friction with how we're working and living today. And I would say the number one thing that seems to be getting in the way of all of this is, at the moment, technology — which is such a shame because it's also the most amazing piece of modern human invention.

Steven Bartlett: You said innovation there. One of the things that innovators often think about is working backwards from the customer — understanding the customer problem and then reverse engineering a solution from there. So I present you with the same challenge with my audience today. Having been out there as a public communicator, you've received a lot of feedback from people as it relates to productivity, on what they're really struggling with and how they describe it in their own words. What are the words that in their heads they're using to describe the problem that your work solves?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I hear a lot about brain fog. That's a big one. I remember working with this female CEO. She said something that's always stuck with me. She said, "I can hear my own thoughts again." That's always stayed with me. I'm like, where were your thoughts before? And that's the heartbreaking truth. I think people aren't — we're not listening. We don't hear the inside of ourselves anymore. I think there's some sort of global discomfort with being with ourselves. And we've been distracted completely 24/7. Every little second and minute in between all of our tasks and to-dos and meetings and calls is filled in with technology and scrolling. We're just constantly consuming. And if you put yourself into that sort of setup and state, when is it that your mind is supposed to say, "Hey, what about this?"

I can't cure cancer. That's not my area. I can't do some of the amazing things that people right now are working on to make the world a better place. But in some small part, if I can help unblock people to go do the amazing things that they want to do in the world, if I can just bring the science of productivity and performance — of focus, energy management, attention, all of these things — back into our lives, then this is my small part. I can help people do all of the amazing things that they want to do, and still be happy.

Background and the Becoming Superhuman Lab

Steven Bartlett: What is the experience and the reference points that you draw from? Where did you study? What is it you run now? What studies have you done?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I'm the founder and managing director of the Becoming Superhuman Lab, which is a lab focused and obsessed with productivity and human performance. Our goal is to help people get the most done in the least amount of time with the least amount of stress. I've done my entire academic career at UC Berkeley. My area of expertise is cognitive neuroplasticity — how the brain actually changes and evolves. The keyword there is that root, plasticity. The brain is constantly changing and evolving and adapting. And I'd like to tap into that. If the brain is constantly changing, evolving, and adapting, that means it could be getting better, which is why my lab has colloquially been called the Becoming Superhuman Lab. My area of interest is increasing things like your attention span, your memory, your general fluid intelligence. These cognitive traits and skills — I want to increase the volume on all of those things. I want to make people better, faster, stronger. That's what I've always been obsessed with.

Steven Bartlett: Wait, you can make me superhuman?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I mean, yes. We have to define it though. I think you're probably already a fair bit there.

Steven Bartlett: No, no, no, no, no. There's room for improvement. Trust me.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Always. For myself as well, always. But I do practice quite a bit of what I preach. We are human at the end of the day. But I would like to be superhuman.

Steven Bartlett: You mentioned working with a female CEO there. What is the broad spectrum of people that you've worked with?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I've worked with a lot of executives. One of the first execs I worked with — and of course I can't say who, but it would be a Fortune 10 company — I used to do these observations. So let's say if I did this for you, you'd say, okay, for the next couple of days, I'm going to have this weird doctor lady, this neuroscientist, follow me around. She's just observing me. I would notice everything from what you're eating and drinking throughout the course of the day, whether you take breaks, how you work. I'd follow you to a bunch of your meetings. I'm just with you for a bit, observing, taking notes. And then we would do an overhaul, intervene, and say, all right, this is going to get changed up.

I have this very distinct memory because this was a huge point of transition for my work. I'm sitting there in his office. It's a modern space — glass everywhere. He's sitting in a glass box in the middle of a busy floor. He's the boss, so everybody can see him and he can see everyone. You've now put this extremely intelligent human being who controls billions of dollars in a glass box. He's also working on a deck for a board meeting. It's extremely important. He's pulling together data that different teams have sent him, looking at things, making pretty big decisions. And I see him — he's on his computer, but he has a second monitor, and the second monitor has his email open. Then he has two phones, personal and professional, both face up right next to him. And he had an Apple Watch on. So as he's sitting down to focus, it's just bzzz, bong, bing, boop, bop. And then people are walking by. At some point his chief of staff comes in and says, "Excuse me, don't forget this." He's like, "Uh-huh." I swear, he probably got 30 seconds. There was a study done — 47 seconds is the average amount of time a knowledge worker stays focused on one screen before another one distracts them.

If I told you I want to give you a billion dollars, and your goal is to cure cancer, and you can galvanize the best minds from all around the world — would you strap them up with an Apple Watch, a bunch of notifications, a Slack, and then litter their day with meetings and calls, and hope that in the next few years they cure this thing? Ideally, you want them to be in an environment that is not distracting, where they don't wake up in the morning and instead of thinking about the cancer problem, they have to jump onto a call and talk about this other thing. It's constant ping-ponging all day.

What's hysterical is I studied far more complex things than I find myself talking to people about. We just need to focus on cleaning this up. That's why I call it digital hygiene. There are obstacles in the way of productivity and performance and focus. Forget becoming superhuman. We just need to become human. Do we all understand collectively how this human system works, so that we can accept again those laws of biology?

The Foundation: Sleep and Your Relationship with Technology

Steven Bartlett: I want to now go through all of the solutions. You called it getting all this stuff out of our way, cleaning up our digital and physical environments. There is a box here. As someone that wants to be able to do the best work of my life — think clearly, interview well, build businesses, innovate, be creative — where's the first place to start? What's the first domino? If I mess up my sleep, is that the first thing? Do I have to meditate?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: There's one I have to begin with as the foundation, which you already mentioned yourself — sleep. The way that I talk about sleep, and I hope this visual stays in your mind: I've had the interesting and distinct pleasure of having many a CEO and executive who is haggard and tired, especially founders that are grinding, come to me and ask, "Okay, I want to become one person better." And I find out that they're averaging five hours of sleep a night. Can I paint a picture for you of what this feels like? It feels like you've taken your car to the mechanic. And as the mechanic, I'm looking at it and the thing is on fire. Literally on fire. And you're sitting there, unaware of the fact that it's on fire, going, "Can we soup up the engine?" I'm like, dude, let's put the fire out first. I don't even know where to begin to assess your baseline performance.

When you don't get enough sleep — and that's a minimum of seven hours a night — it's impacting your cognitive performance, your emotional regulation. You'll be irascible in the office and with other people. The system is messed up. So sleep is for sure the foundation. We've got to check that box.

The next biggest thing, and I will tell you right now this is a global issue impacting everyone from senior citizens to children, is your relationship with technology.

Steven Bartlett: What is that?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: This is a phone lockbox. So we would theoretically put your technology inside and lock it away from you. You want to do it?

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, go for it. Let me just make sure it's off. Okay, turn that upside down. There we go.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: You don't necessarily need to get a lockbox, but the point of something like this is for you as a human being, and your brain as a focus machine — as a monotasking machine — to actually be able to focus. Focus and attention are so fundamental to all things, personal and professional. Any kind of distraction that is diminishing your focus is impacting your memory. Another word for memory is learning. Attention and memory — it's impossible to divorce those concepts from one another. The way they're connected is this: you cannot remember anything that you do not attend to. It is only things that come into your aperture of attention that you're aware of in the first place. So we cannot learn anything, we cannot remember anything, unless we're paying attention. And attention spans — our ability to sustain attention — has been linearly decreasing since the advent of this thing.

And I don't want people to think it's just phones necessarily. It's notifications in general. If you're monitoring your inbox all day and it's constantly available to you, what's your plan for having deep thoughts?

Steven Bartlett: The rebuttal that comes to mind — and I don't even believe it, but this is the rebuttal I think a lot of my listeners will be thinking right now — is: yes, but what if something happens? I have my email open because maybe a big email comes in, or I have my WhatsApp right there because maybe my fiancée is going to tell me I need to let her in the house. Something's going to happen.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Totally. Fires. We call them fires, urgencies. I get it. I'm a caretaker for both of my — I get it. I call these VIPs. These are VIP notifications and messages. Can I paint a picture for you? We figured this out for mail. If you have an extremely important package coming to your house, how do we deal with this in the mail system? Somebody knocks. It needs a signature. We're not leaving this outside. Somebody needs to be home. Knock, knock, knock. I'm going to come and get your attention. To me, that knock, knock, knock — you need to sign for this — is a notification. That's the fire. And everything else just gets shoved in the mailbox or left by the door. This is what I advocate for.

We are all smart enough — we should respect ourselves enough, truly — to demand better than the default settings that our apps, our email, our phones come with. The default settings of all of our technology are designed by people like me. These are cognitive neuroscientists, behavioural neuroscientists that work at these companies to get you hooked. Because what's the bottom line for even Microsoft Outlook? Forget TikTok and all of that. Just leave that aside for a second. The boring stuff that runs the world — email, for those of us adults. What do you think the bottom line is when you have a company that has an annual contract with another company that installs things like Slack, things like communication software? How do you make sure that you re-up that contract? You show engagement. At the end of the year, you go, "Look at these engagement numbers. Everyone is using this, constantly talking to each other 24/7. You can't do what you do without us." So the way these softwares and products are designed is for them to be as engaging as humanly possible. The default setting that your phone comes with, the default setting of every single app that you download, the default setting of email, of any messaging software — the default setting is there to maximise engagement, not to make your company more productive. These companies don't give a damn about your productivity. That's not their problem. That's your problem. You need to figure that part out.

I'm a big advocate for thinking about this in terms of default settings, because I have a sweet tooth. Think of a candy company. What's their bottom line? Their goal is to sell as much of their product as humanly possible. Is it their business or responsibility to think about whether or not I get diabetes or have trouble with overconsumption? Not really. Well, the same is true for email. The same is true for any kind of platform. Engagement is the currency.

Everything from the sound that your email client makes when you send an email off — that's been tested. Tested for what will feel the best and sound the best to the human. Everything from the vibrate functionality that you feel in your phone has been highly optimised by people like me to keep you obsessed with the thing and addicted to the thing, to increase your engagement on the platform. So my big push, in the goal of productivity, is that the first thing we ought to really focus on is getting rid of the drains of our productivity first.

Steven Bartlett: It sounds obvious, but it's totally not obvious that a productivity tool's incentive actually isn't your own productivity — it is your engagement with the tool. Because you're totally right. When these companies report to investors, they have to show how much you used it. And it's almost antithetical to the mission of the tool for them to be removing your distraction, because engagement and distraction are like opposites. In the way you described them, Slack is distracting me under the premise that it's making me better at my work.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Absolutely. Which is why I scoff when I hear some of these products and tools call themselves productivity software. I'm not suggesting we don't need to communicate with each other. I have team members in different time zones. We obviously need — we've never as a human species been able to communicate and collaborate at this scale. Technology is amazing. I'm not a Luddite. What I advocate for is people telling themselves this mantra: "I deserve better than the default settings. I am better than the default settings." The default settings are not there to help you.

VIP Notifications and Protecting Your Focus

Steven Bartlett: So what do you suggest then for someone like me who probably spends 10 hours a day on their phone, according to my screen time?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: My number one suggestion — especially because you yourself brought up the fear around missing important things, the fires, the urgencies — is to set up what I call VIP notifications in both your phone, your inbox, and every single different communication software. What that means is you come up with your VIP list. This is your partner, your boss, your boss's boss, if you're client-facing your top 15 clients. These are your VIPs. If these numbers call me or text me, it pushes through the filter. There are no defences. I need to get that immediately.

I have three keywords set up in my email inbox. My first name — I'm a little lucky, I have a more rare first name. So if somebody says Sahar, I'm like, okay, you've got something. Because otherwise, what's our reality? We're CC'd on email chains with seven other people and they're just talking to each other. I do not need to get a ping every single time Stacey and Steven are chatting with each other about something. They're solving their own problem. I need to focus on leading. I need to be kept abreast of what's going on, but I don't need to be interrupted. My train of thought doesn't need to be interrupted when I'm finally sitting down to focus.

Steven Bartlett: A lot of people don't want to be rude, and there's so much social pressure to respond quickly, to say yes, to take the meeting, to do the thing. The question I was going to ask you is: who is the most focused person you've ever met in this regard? And my sub-question was — I bet they're often seen as rude. I bet they have to develop a muscle against people-pleasing.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Probably the first person that came to my mind is my husband, who's a faculty member. His default is no. Everyone has a default. I'm a default yes person. And he's a default no person. We run a company together, which — two people at the helm, one default no and one default yes — I think makes a really good balance, because we debate everything out. I'm like, "Oh, this is a great opportunity, we should totally do this." And he's like, "This is not the objective. Stay on the objective." He protects his resources, and his most precious resource is his time and his attention. He'll say, "Yeah, maybe it's disappointing to some that I did not make it to that meeting, but I think people will find over time that my unique contribution to that meeting would not have been relevant. They were just fine without me. And the fact that I did not attend that meeting allowed me to sit down and finish this thing and come up with this idea, which is helping the entire ecosystem of work."

Steven Bartlett: I sat and interviewed Kevin O'Leary and he said something to me which has stayed with me ever since — and I know it's also stayed with my listeners because they say it back to me out in the world. He talked about his experience working with Steve Jobs and also Elon Musk, and he talked about this concept of signal versus noise. He said Steve Jobs had the most remarkable ability to focus on the signal versus the noise. He described it as 80/20. Signal is the most important thing I should be doing today. Noise is everything else. He said the thing about Steve Jobs is it was always like, "Why are we talking about this? This is the most important thing."

And then I saw Jony Ive being interviewed, and Jony Ive was describing Steve Jobs and said, "The most remarkable thing about Steve is his focus." And he said focus isn't doing one thing instead of another — focus is waking up in the morning and thinking something is a brilliant idea, and with every bone in your body knowing that thing is brilliant and wanting to do it, and saying no to it anyway. He said Steve was the most remarkably focused person he had ever met, and he would often go up to Jony Ive and ask him what he had said no to. And Jony said he would have these sacrificial things that he wasn't remotely interested in, and Steve would know that and push him even harder — what have you said no to that with every bone in your body you knew was a brilliant idea, but you said no to it because we are focused on this?

And the last part of that story is Kevin O'Leary said that Elon is the only person he's ever encountered who is more focused than Steve Jobs.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Wow.

Steven Bartlett: And this is part of the reason why I'm so excited to speak to you, because I want to be more like that. I want to get to 80/20.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: You're well on your way, because you've already given me your phone. And I'm not even kidding — this is the noise. You can either increase the signal or you can decrease the noise. What do you think is easier?

Steven Bartlett: Decreasing the noise, for sure, as a first step.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: As a first step, of course. I think that's actually what they did when they discovered the radio — the job was to reduce the noise. They never mentioned increasing the signal because it's rather difficult. It's possible, it's there. But literally, get the noise out of your life.

The Myth of Multitasking

Steven Bartlett: We now think that multitasking or context switching is a skill. You mentioned a term earlier — monotasking. You said the brain is a monotasker.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's a monotasking machine. Yes, it is. This entire system is designed for survival. Human beings — I always joke and say we're not quite competitive in the animal kingdom. I mean, I work out, but I can't fight off an actual predator. My nails and teeth aren't that sharp. We are kind of puny. But where we're not puny is this — the brain. It is in my ability to strategise, think, and focus where I can outsmart predators. That's how human beings have survived. That's how we're running the world.

Do you know that about a third of the human brain — the cortical real estate across the human cortex — is dedicated just to looking and listening? Just eavesdropping, loud sounds, anything that might come into view. So we're designed to be hypervigilant to anything that might come into our environment. Think of an open office. Think of a typical setup where people are working — like the example I gave of that executive, literally sitting in a glass box with all the people he works with walking by constantly, and he's trying to find the signal and tap into it. I want our species to keep advancing as fast as humanly possible. And I know we can. But all the brilliance of humanity is currently being sucked away by these distractions.

Steven Bartlett: There seem to be two ways that distractions find us. The first is the notification comes to us — the thing pings, the Apple Watch vibrates. The other is we're in the middle of work and we stumble across something which is a little bit difficult or tricky or uncomfortable, and we go seeking out the distraction. We might be in the middle of an essay, it's a little bit tricky, and so we reach for a WhatsApp and we're chatting in a group chat about the weekend. Is that an accurate reflection of how humans behave? Because I was just thinking about my own behaviour. Sometimes, yes, ping — but I don't have most notifications on, and I still find myself reaching for the phone every minute.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It is. The human brain is a problem-solving machine. It's important to keep this in mind. I'll stack a few biological laws here that bring us to understanding why we all have a tendency towards what I would consider to be avoidance of discomfort. Now, discomfort — let's list out some uncomfortable feelings: overwhelm, stress, anxiety, confusion. Feeling a little depressed? A little FOMO? Lonely? Anger, frustration. Your brain also, by the way, is your friend. If you don't want to feel those things, your brain doesn't want to feel them either. Your brain is designed to help you and problem-solve. So it goes, "We're overwhelmed. How do I avoid this?" It's going to try to solve the problem. Now there are two ways to solve what you're overwhelmed about — you could either deal with it head-on, which sounds like a lot of work, or you could avoid it. Emotional avoidance. And what's the fastest and easiest way in the modern world to avoid what's going on inside of us? TikTok. Shake Shack. Pornography. We immediately go numb.

I think normalising that is the first step. Because what our phones have done for us is created an exit. A very fast, cheap exit from reality. I know you would have heard about those studies where they put people in a room and give them the opportunity to electrocute themselves. Essentially, people get electrocuted before the study starts, and then they're put in a room on their own with a button that would electrocute them again. They describe before the study starts, on average, being willing to pay to not be electrocuted again. But once they're put alone with this electrocution button, many people continue to shock themselves over and over again. Men shock themselves more than women. One particular man in the study electrocuted himself hundreds of times when left alone and asked to sit and do nothing. And the conclusion from the study is that we'd rather electrocute ourselves than sit alone in silence these days.

And in a way, that's kind of what we're doing with our phones.

Steven Bartlett: When my phone dies, it's like a mild feeling of anxiety. And I'm most certainly addicted to my phone. I spend an unbelievable amount of hours with that thing. I probably pick it up 200 times a day just to check.

How Big Tech Hijacked the Brain — The Food Industry Playbook

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: So we're going to remove the phone when we're doing deep work. We're going to turn off notifications. As it relates to the phone, anything else?

Yes. I liken what big tech has essentially done to really hijack the brain and make it addicted to what the food industry did to get us addicted to sugar and processed food. My humble belief is that it's the exact same three-part framework, and the playbook was copied nearly identically.

We have a fundamental need to eat. If you look at the food industry, how might you hijack biology and the brain to get it addicted to sugar and processed food if you know there's a fundamental need there? Well, you increase the stimulation of the food, and you do that by injecting sugar wherever you can. Here in the United States, look on the back label of pretty much any loaf of bread you want to buy, and there's sugar in it. You don't need sugar to make a loaf of bread. But lo and behold, there it is. So we're injecting all of this sugar and increasing the stimulation of the food. Why would humans be already naturally inclined toward sugar? Because food used to be scarce. So we're naturally going to be inclined toward things that are indicators of jackpots — salt, fat, sugar. It's how you make food really delicious. And we're all naturally inclined to desire those things. So you inject those yummy things. You're increasing the stimulation of the food.

Then you decrease the friction. You make everything adorably packaged and portioned out, easy and fast — fast food, right there, always accessible. You no longer need to make yourself something. Then you decrease the satiation. You decrease the satiation by removing the parts of food that make food satiating. Because this is a fundamental need — I'm hungry, I want to eat something. What makes us full? Protein, fiber. Candy? Nope, there's no protein, there's no fiber. So the food industry figured this out.

Technology has done the exact same thing. They followed the exact same playbook. They increased the stimulation by increasing the colour saturation of the icons and the light emitted from the screen so that your technology looks more visually stimulating. A huge part of your cortex is your visual cortex, your occipital lobe. So it's super stimulated by all of that colour saturation. Think of a casino — you've never been to a casino and thought, "Oh, they went with neutrals." It's all the colours, all the lights, all the things. So it's stimulating and you keep looking at it.

The other way they've increased the stimulation with technology is short-form reels. Short-form content. Super fast, TikTok style, uber stimulating, and you can't look away. And there's an entire field — intermittent variable rewards. You get these jackpots once in a while. What's fascinating about the algorithm is it knows you really, really well. It knows what content you're going to love that day. So it's got all this saved up content for you. You get on to one of these apps and start scrolling — it's not going to show you the stuff it knows you're going to love. Not in the beginning. That's bad business. You just came into the store. You have all the energy in the world. You obviously have nothing better to do. So in the beginning, it can show you meh content. It knows how long it can serve you medium to low entertaining content before you say to yourself, "I'm done, this is boring, I'm going to get off." It knows the moment you're about to do that. And right before you do that, it hits you with the jackpot. Boom.

Steven Bartlett: Diary of a CEO clip. Exactly. Like that. Bang. And people are watching this reel right now, thinking this was the one they were just about to bounce on.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: And there's science behind this. Humans, believe it or not, do not love consistent reward. We become more addicted when it's in fact intermittent and somewhat variable — when we don't know when it's coming, but we know it's coming. I have a whole theory on people who are in toxic relationships. Think about love bombing. I'm an asshole, I'm an asshole, I'm ghosting you, and then bam — I hit you with a bunch of love. And people become addicted to these toxic relationships. Similar concepts.

So the algorithm works exactly the same way. If it showed you every single thing that you wanted to see — only Diary of a CEO clips, the whole feed for five hours straight — believe it or not, you'd be less likely to get addicted. We're addicted to the uncertainty. This is how casinos work. This is how slot machines work. Slot machines are programmed — it's a computer program, it's all math. They want you to lose a bunch of money, be in the red, and then have you make up $1.50 and be like, "Oh, I'm back in." This is the human game. So the algorithm works exactly the same.

Then they also decreased the friction, just like food. Here you have the infinite scroll. We literally removed the backstops. Do you remember the early days of YouTube and Instagram? You only saw the things you followed, the things you subscribed to. The subscription model allows you to curate your feed a little more and say, this is what I want to see. But when people don't subscribe, the algorithm will just be like, how about this? How about this other thing? And most importantly, we've removed the backstop. Now we have the infinite scroll. The infinite scroll is like going to a buffet and just opening your mouth, and there's just an assembly line of food and candy going straight in. There's no backstop. It just keeps going. It used to be pagination — page one, page two, page three. In the early internet. Now it's just infinite. There's no end. You're not going to reach the end of TikTok.

I don't know if you remember this, but there was an end. I remember when Instagram first came out, you would literally run out of things to see and just be like, that's it. That's all for today. Come back tomorrow for maybe one more picture of your friend's sandwich. There's no longer an end.

Then they also decreased the satiation. This is extremely important. Going back to that fundamental need for human connection — we have a fundamental need, like the same need we have for food, to be connected to one another, to be social, to feel a sense of belonging. What social media has done is create the illusion of social connection. Because we have the data to support this: the longer you spend on these apps and platforms, the lonelier you are. So you're lonely, you're disconnected, you have a sense of loneliness and FOMO, and you're seeking connection. You want to meet this fundamental need. So what do you do? Well, the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way is to grab your phone. You get on and you think that you're meeting that need. It's like candy.

Let's say you're hungry for dinner. Your body is craving things that actually make you full — nutrients that you need. But if I gave you a bag of Skittles, you might think, well, it's calories. Aren't calories calories? It tastes good. It's going to meet that need. Well, what's going to happen when you eat candy when you're hungry?

Steven Bartlett: I want to eat more Skittles later.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Okay, there we go. That's the problem. If I have those empty calories, then in six hours' time, I'm back looking for more junk calories. It shoots up, then everything crashes down. Another law of biology — what goes up must come down.

So what does this look like when we're scrolling? I seek a sense of belonging. I'm also seeking stimulation. We have a fundamental need for novelty and learning — because again, survival. This new piece of information might be a huge unlock for me to thrive even more in this world. This is the hijack of social media and short-form content: you think you're getting that, but just like with the Skittles, you end up getting off and you don't remember anything you just watched. Test it. Seriously. Do the quick short-form for a while, and in the moment you're like, "Oh my gosh, I just learned a fun fact." You think you're learning. It's an illusion.

What I believe we're up for right now is that the world is waking up to this. And this is going to be the new big Reverse Uno, as I call it. They used neuroscience to get us hooked. And I think we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing.

Practical Solutions: Grayscale, Long-Form Content, and Portion Control

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: If they increased the stimulation, as we talked about before, you reduce it. And the ways in which you reduce the stimulation — one, put your phone in gray. Literally going into grayscale makes the phone less neurologically stimulating, so it's a lot easier for you to actually get off your phone. You do this in settings. And again, this is a beautiful example of the default settings not being here to help you. The default settings are here to help them make money off your attention and your time. So you are better than the default settings. Push back against the default settings and put your phone in gray.

When you do that, your phone immediately looks dead to you. It's way easier to not go from app to app to app. And then you stop doing that thing where you mindlessly scroll, especially late at night when your willpower is low. And then you're like, "I'm just going to check for a second," and you find yourself gorging on content.

Steven Bartlett: Have they ever tested engagement with devices when they are in grayscale or a different colour saturation? Or is it just generally what the neuroscience points to?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I've tested it. In my lab, we took a large sample of healthy working professionals and all I did was turn their phones into gray and ask them to stay in gray for three weeks. That's it. And we saw on average, people spent one hour less on their phones every single day. That's seven hours a week. When you go around and talk to these busy people, they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm trying to do this, I want to read that book, I want to listen to your podcast, but I just don't have the time." Well, just making this one tiny change will give you an hour back a day. That's seven hours a week. Think about what you could do with that time.

Next is choosing long-form over short-form.

Steven Bartlett: Did you hear that? She's from Berkeley. That's an amazing university. She's a doctor. No, it's true though.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's really not made up. Short-form content has even been shown in some cases to decrease attention span. Long-form content, like a good film, has been shown to increase empathy in young people. Just think about that. So the message is not, "Oh my God, technology is bad, all screen time is evil." No, no, no. I'm a huge fan of your content diet. If you want to sit down and watch a movie, sit down and watch a movie. Get into your pajamas, make a bowl of popcorn, romanticise it, turn the lights down. But everyone's also got the phone out. So they're doing two things at once. This has just become accepted — that you no longer have people's undivided attention. So the way in which we're making content now assumes that someone is looking at something else as well. This is so sad. And if this is how bad our attention spans have gotten, how are kids supposed to learn in school? How are you supposed to experience the full potential of your own mind if you can't even pay attention to a film anymore?

Steven Bartlett: Do you know what's funny? I was watching a complicated old movie last night — one of those ones where if you miss a word, the next three hours you're lost. And I was having to pay so much attention to this movie. I remember this from my childhood. I used to just sit there on the sofa with my family and look at the screen. But it was like I was resisting an urge now in 2026, watching this very complicated old movie, as if there's now a mismatch between the media I'm used to versus the way that I — and many of us — live our lives. I remember trying to stay focused on this movie last night, making sure I understood every single word. But I never did that when I was younger. You would just sit there and watch.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: There might be some people thinking, "Yeah, but I love short-form. I love it." I love candy too. If we have too much short-form, we already know this — you're more depressed, you're more anxious, your attention span is shot. You literally feel worse and your brain operates at a lower level, cognitively speaking, if you over-consume this stuff. And it's your choice. I'm not here to tell people how to live their lives, but I want people to wake up and realise: the fundamental needs are there, so my goal is for you to meet those needs. And the way that you do that, to increase the satiation, is you actually go learn something new. You actually spend time in real life with real human beings. Hold people, touch people, talk to people, have dinner parties, have conversations, hang out with your friends and family. Actually meet that fundamental need for social connection. And if you do that, you will notice that you're full, and you will magically actually like short-form less. You are far less likely to lose yourself scrolling until two o'clock in the morning and then feeling like rubbish the next day because you didn't get enough sleep.

Steven Bartlett: I think that feeling like rubbish the next day is a good way to navigate life. I heard Jack Dorsey a couple of years ago, when he was still at Twitter, talk about one of their new metrics being reducing regrettable minutes. This idea of regrettable minutes — with Skittles, they would feel good in a moment, but I'd probably regret a massive bag of them in a couple of hours, probably the next day. And with platforms like TikTok, when you look at the data, they found that 60% of active TikTok users experience negative welfare and would rather live in a world where the platform didn't exist. It ranks as number one in terms of regret in this regard, because people report that their time was distorted — they opened the app and lost an hour or two hours, and they walk away from it without clarity on what they gained.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I'm telling you, we're waking up. People are waking up. Young people are waking up. That's the coolest thing.

Steven Bartlett: I saw the graphs from the Financial Times which showed time spent online had started to plateau since 2022 for young people first.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Thank God. But listen, it's still a push. The stats are less than half of graduating high school seniors have ever been on a date, compared to what was, I believe, something like 80 or 90% in our generation. That's crazy. Something like a third of UK nightclubs — engagement in the nightclub scene has gone down to a third. Dinner parties — there's this recent piece in The Atlantic that just came out about the death of dinner parties. So people are spending increasingly more time alone and not with others. So they're hungry. Unfortunately, these platforms are taking advantage of that perpetual hunger and keeping us locked into the cycle of distraction.

And now it's socially appropriate for us to always hold our phones. It's always in our pocket. So one of the best things you can do is actually introduce portion control back into how you are consuming content. So you increase the friction. You do things like that phone parking lot — put your phone out of sight, out of mind. Turn the notifications off. Turning the notifications off would be decreasing the stimulation. But increasing the friction is: if I'm telling you this stuff is addictive and you want to do less of it, don't have it right there. It's like sitting down with someone who is freshly trying to become sober as an alcoholic and just going, "You don't mind if I just put this beer down in front of you, do you?" Just as you're working and going about your day.

Steven Bartlett: The Skittles analogy is pretty good. I wouldn't walk around with Skittles in my pocket because if I did, I'd eat them every time I was stressed or bored.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Totally. This process is what I advocate. I think every young person in the entire world should learn this and know this. I speak mostly to older adults, to parents, and they're tired of being the bad cop at home. They're constantly like, "Get off your phone, get off this, get off that." So I think this ought to be taught in schools.

The Five-Step Focus Sprint

Steven Bartlett: What I really want, quite selfishly, is advice on how to do deep work better. Because deep work is something that all of my team has to do — they have to edit code, write. We're doing a lot more writing than ever before, in part because of AI. So we're trying to push against that. But in a world that is so distracted, what advice would you give me for doing deep work predictably well?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: What we call in our lab deep work is a focus sprint. A focus sprint is a method of working that, according to our research, has allowed people to do up to two times as much as they would otherwise do, while also reducing the number of mistakes. And you feel better, because again, you're working in line with your brain and your body. You don't have that sense of friction where it's like, "Oh my gosh, I'm exhausted after doing one of these sprints." It feels good to do that kind of deep work. So focus sprint is the method.

Steven Bartlett: How many steps are there in a focus sprint?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Five. There are five steps. These five steps will make you up to 200% more productive.

First, set aside time in your calendar in advance to block the time off. You benefit from anticipatory networks in the brain and body. So if you know, for example, that you have a speech you need to give, a presentation — what's the feeling you get before some big event or a big speech? Butterflies. You get this increasing cortisol and adrenaline. Think about how amazing our biology is. I am sitting at rest. Even though I am sitting at rest, because I am anticipating that I'm about to get up and do some public speaking, my brain is going to help me by giving me an extra boost in cortisol and adrenaline so that I'm a little bit more focused and high energy and can deal with the thing. So if you know a focus sprint is coming, you're going to get a little boost. I'm a huge fan of setting it up, knowing it's coming. The other beautiful thing about this from a team perspective is if your team can see your calendar, they can all see that you're sitting down to do a focus sprint. So it also deals with that social guilt people feel — that feeling that they need to stay responsive to all the things.

Then you go to step two: identify what you're going to do and define it. You need to break it down in clear, simple terms. So instead of saying, "I'm going to sit down and work on X," unless you're going to finish X, that's not going to feel good. This has everything to do with dopamine. Dopamine is the brain's primary motivation molecule. It's going to get us not only excited and motivated to do a task, but it's also going to reward us if we do more than we even expected.

So you've got your massive to-do list. You're going to shop from that to-do list and say, in this focus sprint, I'm going to take out this one piece. Just this one. And then you're going to take that one and break it down into small manageable pieces. You're going to time-block every piece. You're going to say, "Instead of saying I'm going to work on this deck, I'm going to work on slide three for about seven minutes. Then I need to send a follow-up email to John for the data I need for slide 17. Then I'm going to work on this table." I want to see in granular detail what the execution list is. And this increases your dopamine for getting this work done. If you're not going to finish it, how is that motivating? So the goal becomes an output, not the input.

Steven Bartlett: That's an interesting one, because I think a lot of us do create a goal which is an input — like I'm going to work on this thing, or I'm going to think about this, or I'm going to strategise this — not the output, which is the thing that's going to be measurable and come out of this work.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's the outcome with a breakdown. I want to see an execution list. Here's the problem — people start something, and the moment they get done with step one B and they don't immediately know what step one C is, and it's not clearly outlined and it's not just execution mode, they go, "What's the next step?" That's when you lose people and that's when you lose your focus. In deciding what the next step is, this is a sprint. I don't want you to figure out how to play the game when you're in the middle of the game. We need to outline what the game is. And then you go into it and sprint.

So you block the time, you've communicated to the people on your team, they know what's happening, you're benefiting from all of those amazing hormones and those anticipatory networks. Then step two, you set the goal. The goal is an output, it's specific, and it's broken down into sub-goals.

MITs and LITs: Prioritising Your Day

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I want you to treat your to-do list — your massive task list — like your refrigerator. Do you have urgent items on your to-do list? Like, did you defrost chicken? Because that's a ticking time bomb that needs to get used. So every single day you wake up in the morning and you're about to choose what I call in our lab MITs — your most important tasks. Your MITs are the one, two, maximum three things on any given day that you would want to accomplish if you want your day to be a success.

Every single day, I want you to open up the refrigerator, the pantry, the freezer, and ask yourself: first, how much time do I have available today? Three hours. That's a good day. Now you open up the fridge, the pantry, and the freezer, and you ask yourself: with this three hours, what are my MITs? What are the most important tasks that if I were to do them today would make my day a success? Another phrasing for this that we've done research on is: what will your future self thank you for? It's an interesting question because we often reach for the easiest things. And there's the thing that we're not quite ready to do yet because we don't have the information, and maybe it's a little bit out of our area of competence. We don't like finance, we don't like investing, we don't like operations. So we avoid that and we reach for the thing we know we love.

Those are LITs — least important tasks. Like an email, a DocuSign, ordering something from Amazon. The little tiny things that will take five minutes, a couple of minutes, but make me feel like I can cross something off. These are the easy things to do that make me feel a sense of progress. We consider these fast dopamine. And my humble opinion is most of the things that push our businesses forward, the things that push our lives forward, are typically the slow dopamine bits — the MITs. I'm not suggesting you don't do LITs. My suggestion is you identify one, two, or a maximum of three MITs that are actually going to push you towards your long-term goals, the things that actually matter. And I assure you the LITs will fill in all of the other nooks and crannies of your day. If you've got an uninterrupted hour, that's when you attack one of these MITs. And if you've got 15 minutes between meetings and calls, you shove the LITs in there.

Steven Bartlett: Are we assuming that people will know what the MIT is? Like I look at this list of 69 things on my to-do list — how do I know which one is the most important?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: If you don't know, then that would urge us to take an even further step back and do a bit of awareness training on what your long-term goals are. Where do you want to be both personally and professionally, let's say in five years? What is your Everest? If you have a sense of what your Everest is, you then ought to have a sense of what your next step is. If Everest is that way, you're not going to go this way.

And I will say this — I'm a huge fan of talking about death because I find that it puts everything into perspective. My humble opinion is that the best framing is to really think about yourself on your deathbed. Take yourself onto your deathbed and think to yourself — let's say you're the tender age of 110 with all of the modern technology and longevity medicine that's going to come out. What, looking back on your life, do you need to have experienced, accomplished, done in order for you to leave with a smile on your face and just say, "It's been real. I did good. I had an amazing life. I did what I wanted to do here and I'm ready to go."

What's your answer to that?

Steven Bartlett: I want to have loved. Deeply. And I'm a firm believer in servant leadership. I think I've been put on the planet to help in whatever ways that I can. So my job is to serve and to make this world a better place with what I do and what I can bring to the table. And that's my obsession. And it's come at a great cost of not doing a lot of other things and not having a lot of what maybe other people see as fun, or personal sacrifices. But it seems to be the flavour of my mind — I'm squarely focused on building better systems for humanity.

It was very clarifying when you asked me to do that as well, because when I closed my eyes and started thinking about my deathbed, I was in a room and what I noticed was first and foremost who was there. And then my second thing was, what do they think of me? I imagined my romantic interest being there. And then I imagined all of my kids being around the bed and I imagined what they thought of their dying father. And there were really three things I wanted them to think. I wanted them to think that I achieved things that they can too — to be evidence of that. The second one was around having made the world a better place, so they were clear on the philanthropic impact that their father had had. And the third was around family and having a big family, being a good role model to them. But it was really clarifying because of all the things, there are really three things that matter.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: So that gives you your direction. If you wake up every single morning now with that level of clarity, you can go — the Skittles are not going to bring me closer. Who on their deathbed is sitting around going, "Damn, I wish I watched more Netflix"? Who's sitting around going, "Damn, I wish I spent more time scrolling and less time with my kids or less time on my mission"? Nobody.

Bronnie Ware is a hospice nurse. She sat with many, many dying individuals. She asked these people what their regrets were and kept a log of the answers. And the number one regret across all of the people she asked this question to, who were dying, was: "I wish I lived a life more true to myself, cared less about what others thought."

So for you, Steven, it sounds like all that matters to you at the end of the day is what your family thought of your accomplishments and how you spent your time. And it's not even them, because you'll never really know what the other person thinks. We come into this world alone and we do die alone, no matter how much we love each other. This is one of the paradoxes I find of love and human connection — from that first cry that a newborn screams out when they're born, they're crying out for connection. They're scared and they're saying, "I feel disconnection in this moment. I was connected before and now I feel disconnected." And they're seeking connection. I think humans are seeking this connection and this belonging for the rest of our lives. But the paradox of it is we'll never fully get it. We die alone. I will never understand your mind. You have your consciousness, I have mine. And even moment to moment, my consciousness now in this moment is different than it was the last moment. The same moment never repeats itself, which means the same self never repeats itself.

Steven Bartlett: I completely agree and accept what you're saying. But there are these moments when you just feel like your consciousness is doing the tango with someone else's. It is intertwined. Everyone can think of those moments when you look at someone and go, "I don't know what it is, but at some deep level, me and this person — our consciousness is dancing." And that's a very real thing. I experience it a lot on this podcast. I sit here with someone for three hours, talk about their childhood, their trauma, whatever. You feel a deep, deep sense of connection to this other human being. Sometimes it can be a spiritual experience in a weird but enjoyable way.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think it's spiritual. I think it's energetic. I think when we feel that experience of what feels like flow — I felt it even when we were just doing that bit about the deathbed and talking about consciousness. I felt your eyes just all of a sudden zoom in. What is necessary for two humans to have that flow together, that energetic dance together, is a loss of the sense of self. I think the self must die in those moments. I think when we are stuck in our own self and identity, then I am aware of another. I am aware of your perception of me, and you will be aware of my perception of you. But those moments where it feels just magic and we've completely blended — I'm no longer thinking of you as an other and I as I. You and I have become this energetic we.

Steven Bartlett: But it perfectly dovetails into work, because we can all think of flow states where we dropped into work and three hours passed and we had no idea that time was passing. We were so in it. And to some degree it feels the same as those moments. When I'm really into my work, time does stop. And when you have really great conversations, you walk out and go, "What? Four hours? What the hell happened?"

Steps Three, Four, and Five of the Focus Sprint

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Okay. So you've set your goal, you have your execution list. You've taken your MIT, you've broken it down. You've made it as easy and simple as a list of LITs. Another way to describe this: an MIT, slow dopamine, is like a rat going through a maze with a big hunk of cheese at the end — a long, arduous journey. Whereas fast dopamine and LITs are like little bits of cheese right there. The goal is to make your MITs as easy as your list of LITs. And how you do that is you take that big hunk of cheese and you sprinkle it throughout the maze. You make your big Everest seem like a series of one step to the next step to the next step. Lao Tzu said it best — a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

My husband just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he came back, he said the mantra of the amazing Sherpas that take you up and down was: pole pole. Slowly, slowly. It's the only way up to the top. If all you focus on is the Everest, you will not get there if you don't focus on taking the step every day, a little closer, a little closer, a little closer.

Steven Bartlett: I was thinking of Sir Dave Brailsford, who's the guy quoted in the first chapter of Atomic Habits, turning the British cycling team around — marginal gains. He's a good friend of mine on and off camera. And everyone knows about the marginal gains idea, focus on the smallest things. He said to me on air that he banned his team from thinking about the podium. He really got them focused on today's work. So this phrase emerged that I say to my team — pedals over podiums. What that means is really focus on the pedals today. He said that when he had Chris Hoy, when Chris Hoy was thinking about the world record or the podium, his time would get worse. And when he got Chris Hoy to drop into a meditative state and ban him from thinking about that, not only would his time get better around the velodrome, but Chris would get off the bike and say he couldn't remember the cycle — which I think is this flow state.

And the other remarkable thing he said to me off camera was: "Steven, when we started focusing on the small things and broke goals down into really, really small goals, people stopped leaving at 5:00 PM and started staying till 1:00 AM in the morning because we felt like we were going somewhere." And this is what I refer to as the progress principle — the feeling of progress. There's this incredible Harvard Business Review study where they asked people what their favourite day at work was, and it was when they had a small feeling of progress. So it really resonated with me when you said turn the MITs into LITs. Because the reason I like the LITs is because I get the progress principle. The MITs, it's hard to get that feeling unless you do what you just said, which is breaking them down.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Which brings us to step three, beautifully. The best way to increase the signal, or to get to X, whatever it may be, is to remove obstacles as opposed to adding. Remove the obstacles, turn down the noise. And you turn down the noise by cutting distractions. So now you've got your Everest. Pole pole, you know the next step. Cut out the distractions. Hygiene, hygiene, hygiene. Phone out of sight, out of mind, notifications off. If you're in a noisy environment or if you benefit from listening to music, put on headphones.

Steven Bartlett: What is your opinion on listening to music to do work and putting headphones on? What does the science say?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: People are different, of course. Some people seem to be distracted by it and prefer silence. And if you cannot be in a silent environment, you may benefit from noise-cancelling headphones. I don't recommend listening to noise-cancelling headphones for more than three or four hours a day because you start to become overstimulated by the real sounds of the world around you — it changes your baseline of what the world ought to sound like. Your brain starts to adjust and think, "Wow, this is the world. You can hear a pin drop." No, the world is much noisier than that. So then the moment you don't have the noise-cancelling on, you become anxious and overstimulated. Also, your auditory system starts to actually adapt to the noise-cancelling. So I would say use it for focus sprints only. If you told me you've got three hours a day, that hits your three hours.

If you're going to listen to music, ideally music with no lyrics at all, or lyrics in a language that you don't understand. You can also benefit from having one particular playlist that you invest in — your brain will over time associate it with focus. So you can have a focus mode playlist, an email sprint playlist, very different from what you might listen to to wind down after work or to sleep. You should have different playlists for different brain states.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. So you've set yourself up for success. Then?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Step four: set a timer. Human beings, and most mammals, are highly influenced by what are called markers of progress. If we see time ticking by, we will just work faster.

Steven Bartlett: Do you mean time ticking down or time ticking up? Is it going from 60 minutes down or from zero to 60?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: We're keenly interested in any sense of progress, so progress bars. Having said that, from a productivity standpoint, you will get a lot of interesting benefits from seeing the time ticking down — it creates urgency and keeps you focused.

Using a very childlike example: cleanup songs. Little kids are highly distractible creatures. If you ask them to put their toys away in a classroom, by the third thing they pick up, they're off, looking at something else and playing. Here comes the science of cleanup songs. Teachers teach kids to have a cleanup song in class. There is a clear beginning and a clear end to what they're trying to do. It keeps them focused, keeps them on task, and they know the song is going to end. Because the time is ticking by and the song is going to end, they all of a sudden start getting very goal-oriented and focused and start putting the toys away, especially near the end of the song.

Parkinson's Law states that work will expand to fill the time that you give it. So if you give yourself an hour to get the deck done, it'll probably take an hour. If you give yourself five, it'll take five. So time yourself. By the way, time yourself with everything. You need to clean your house, you have some errands to run — time yourself, you will just work faster.

Steven Bartlett: This idea got stuck in my head about five years ago. I read this thing and it said, "The centre point of your influence on this planet is the allocation of your time." And I really tried to interrogate that. Is that really it? Is the game of my life really, first and foremost, how I allocate my time? Everything I described on my deathbed — having great relationships with my fiancée, having great relationships with my family, achievement, the age at which I get to the deathbed, my health — all of it really is downstream from the allocation of my time. And I think that's a really important point. Because when we talk about saving time and treating time in such a precious way, one of the rebuttals is, "Oh, this is stressful, this is a lot of pressure." But time really is the currency. I think it is for all of us.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I think about how unintentional the average day is these days. You're just pulled around like a plastic bag in the wind by LITs. And all of this is in pursuit of just giving people more of their own time back. The way in which we're working with all of these distractions around us, according to the progress principle, makes people feel terrible. They're not happy. People want to get good, high-quality work done. People want to make an impact. They want those things. And from when we were all little, we were told, "Good job." We love that progress. We want to get the gold star. So if we've trained an entire generation of human beings to want to get the gold star, and now you're surrounded by all these people and you're like, "Hey, by the way, I know you have this massive to-do list, but you're not going to get anything done. Instead, you just have to answer all these messages and go to all these meetings and calls, and then feel terrible at the end of the day because your to-do list is still there and you didn't make progress on anything." It doesn't feel good. And then all that work is still left. And then they end up working evenings and weekends to catch up. And that takes time away from your family. And then your deathbed self is like, "This is terrible."

So the timer will help you condense the work. You gamify it. You make use of the dopamine. You make use of all those amazing hormones that get you excited to get the work done so that you can actually take a break and do other things.

Step Five: The Brain Break and the Neuroscience of Innovation

Steven Bartlett: At the very start, you were talking about innovation and creativity. Rick Rubin was sat here a couple of weeks ago and I've done a lot of research around Steve Jobs to figure out how he was able to see the future. There's a great video of him stood at a developer conference and a developer stands up and basically berates him — "Why are you doing this again? You're removing this particular software that every developer needs." Steve Jobs removed Flash from our devices so we could stream video better, removed the stylus from phones, the keyboard. And he was right in hindsight. But my question is, how did he see the future so clearly? Rick Rubin and he seem to share a practice, which is boredom. As productivity people, we're always like, "Work, work, work, work." But then I study these greats, these visionaries, and they had like a boredom practice where they just stood away from the picture. So when you said brain break, I was thinking — is this what you're talking about, or is it something else?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: This is tactical. A brain break is just defined as a short period of time where you're not processing information. And this brings me to attacking how most humans seem to be taking breaks these days. People will take a break from work and go, "I'm just going to take a break." And what is the most common way to take a break? TikTok. Or some other distraction.

There was a 2024 Nature paper that actually measured everybody's fatigue levels before they started working, then had them work, then measured their fatigue levels after, and then had them take a break. They put them into four different groups. One group was no break at all — you just keep going. And lo and behold, of course, no break is not great. But the other options were TikTok-style scrolling, looking at nature, or just staring ahead of yourself. It turns out the best kind of break is, no surprise, being exposed to nature. Humans come from nature. There is a visceral calm that comes when humans spend time in nature. So that's the best kind of break. But shortly thereafter, it's just doing nothing at all. And the worst break was TikTok-style scrolling. You are just consuming more information. That's not a brain break. Your brain is not taking a break at all.

Do you weight lift? If you're lifting a weight and your muscles are working very hard, what do we do after a set of weightlifting? Rest. What would you say if instead of actually resting, you start lifting low-grade weights? That's not a rest. So that's what scrolling is. And it's not even just scrolling — reading the news is not resting this muscle. Reading, writing, arithmetic. The point is to rest this thing. How? Do nothing at all.

Steven Bartlett: I almost don't know how to do nothing. Everything I thought of was a thing.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's hard in the beginning, but I have an idea for you. Do something that is cognitively challenging enough such that you can't think of all of your other worries and things. This is my barometer for a really high-quality break.

Steven Bartlett: My DJing. I'm learning to DJ. That's where all the decks are out there. I've been learning for four years. But that's my break.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Awesome skill. And it's immersive. You're totally focused because the song's about to end and you have to mix it.

Steven Bartlett: It's the most locked in I am all day, other than this.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: So that's perfect. Even for a simple brain break though, my humble recommendation — to get yourself to not scroll, check the news, get on LinkedIn, whatever it may be — do something with your hands. I'm a firm believer in systems. Don't have grab-and-go snacks anymore. Force yourself to make things. Instead of one of those tiny little cheeses that come pre-packaged, get the big hunk and take it out of the bag and cut it. Put yourself in a system where you are forced to use both of your hands in order to get yourself hydrated, caffeinated, or get yourself a snack, so that you can't scroll and do the thing at the same time. Rehydrate, have another snack. Ideally, go expose yourself to some natural light, get some fresh air, move, go on a little walk.

Steven Bartlett: Is there anything else on this point of when you're thinking about how to have your greatest, most innovative, most creative ideas? If I wanted to solve a very complex problem, come up with my best ideas, is there anything else you'd recommend?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: The science behind innovation and creative insight is the process of truly understanding and thinking about the problem. Loading up all of the data related to the problem you're trying to solve. It should be top of mind — those neural networks related to thinking about the problem should be activated. Now, this is one of my favourite quotes, attributed I think to Albert Einstein, though who knows if he actually said it. "No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness or the same mindset that created it." So when you're sitting there thinking about a problem, I think about it like a traffic gridlock. You're sitting there going, "Well, okay, this, this, and this," and you don't know the solution. You're in the problem state. That is the brain state where you, Steven, are thinking about the problem. Is this the solution state? No — by definition, this is the problem state. There you are in a gridlock of certain neural networks where you're thinking about the problem.

The next step? Walk away. Walk away and go do something else. Walk the dog. Wash the dishes. You're introducing another stimulus. New environment. These neural networks begin to loosen. New neural networks are becoming activated. And all of a sudden, that might allow one idea to cross paths with another. Ideas are like two neural networks crossing paths and you go — insight. The light bulb. And then you get that magic and you go, "Wait a minute, there it was right in front of me the whole time." So you have those amazing insights typically when you loosen and you walk away.

Rumination and Redirecting Negative Thinking

Steven Bartlett: Does this apply to negative thinking and rumination?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I find that in the modern world, we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle where we've made it okay to continue to rehash and exhaustively talk about and think about our traumas. When you do that, you're just deepening those neural networks.

Steven Bartlett: Really?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Think about it. If I'm sad about something — I'm not saying don't acknowledge your feelings, feel your feelings. But if the goal is, let's say, you've gotten yourself into a rut of rumination about something, or worry — rumination is the same thought over and over and over again. The only way out is to break the cycle. You do not make your feelings and the thoughts that you end up ruminating on go away by talking about them over and over again in the exact same way. If you keep doing that, you're just deepening and deepening that neural network so it's even more robust and strong. If you repeatedly — think about how habits are formed, it's that repetition. So if you keep telling yourself, "This trauma happened to me, I was a victim, and that's why I am this way that I am, I am this way that I am..." At some point it might become your identity. Pretty quickly, in fact.

So the only way out is to stop that. You have to redirect your attention. My solve for things like rumination is: acknowledge why it's happening in the first place, and then quite quickly after that, redirect your attention when it's happening. Any time you're in that, "Oh, it's starting again" — redirect, and put your attention somewhere else. What's your Everest? What's a different version of the story? What's the narrative that you want to feed? Because this electrical system — think of yourself as the gardener or the architect of this thing. You're designing it. It's a muscle like anything else. If you think of the mind and truly the brain from a neural perspective as different neural networks that you're either deepening, strengthening, and feeding with your thoughts, your time, your attention — be careful which ones you feed, because whichever one you feed will in fact become stronger and louder.

Chronotypes: The Science of When to Work

Steven Bartlett: I can see in your productivity toolkit there is a clock. Why is there a clock?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: The clock represents everything. The power and the science of when. Let me explain. If we said that the MITs and the LITs represent the what — I have my Everest, I have my MITs, what am I doing today to move incrementally closer to my Everest goal? That's the what. Focus sprints are the how — how am I going to attack that one MIT or that litter of LITs? The science of chronotypes will tell you the science of when.

Human beings do not share one circadian rhythm. We all have circadian rhythms — animals do as well. But we don't all share one as a human species. We don't all go to sleep around the same time. These different circadian rhythms are in fact called chronotypes. Your chronotype is your genetic biological ideal time. It's essentially a profile of the hormones and your energy levels throughout the course of the day. And there are three chronotypes.

There is AM-shifted individuals. These are essentially the science behind morning birds. People that like doing stuff early. And it's genetic and it's hormonal. These individuals naturally have their cortisol levels spike really, really early in the morning. Some people are the four o'clock in the morning people, the five o'clock, the six o'clock. They are naturally AM-shifted. How do you know you're truly AM-shifted? If I keep you up until 2 o'clock in the morning, and you no longer have young children that are going to wake you up, no meetings, nothing at all — I've put you in the best hotel in the world with the most comfortable bed, fully blackout, you can sleep as long as you want — that pituitary gland is very strong. Your body knows when it's 5 o'clock in the morning. It doesn't even need to see light. It naturally will wake you up. So now you're sleep-deprived, but you have no choice. These are people that naturally wake up at early hours of the day, regardless of when they went to bed the night before. That is about 25% of the human population. It's not the majority. My humble opinion is the world seems to be oriented around these people.

Steven Bartlett: Early bird gets the worm. Everything starts — school started at 9 AM, so you had to be up at 7. That's part of the reason I hated school so much.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Oh, totally. I liked staying up really late.

Steven Bartlett: Same.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Then you are likely the minority of the human population, like me — PM-shifted. Anthropologically, the only reason we imagine why people like you and me exist — because otherwise it's somewhat dysfunctional, no? It would be strange to have different sleep schedules. But think about it this way. If you and I were in the same tribe, and everybody went to bed at 10 PM and woke up at 6 AM, what would happen in the middle of the night when a competing tribe comes to slaughter all of us? The night is the most dangerous time. So you need some people that are awake. You need to stagger in a tribe the time in which people are highly functional. You need a 24/7 team. You need to make sure someone's always awake.

You and I belong to a tiny subset of the human population. According to research from my lab, we're at 16% from what we've gathered around the world. So 16% of the human population is PM-shifted, meaning genetically we tend to be able to stay up quite late and we can sleep in. Our energy levels rise as opposed to shooting up early in the morning and then linearly decreasing as the day progresses. AM-shifted people usually do their best focus, their best thinking, straight away early in the day. And they just seem to lose steam as the day progresses. There's no real second wind for them.

If I wanted to test your intelligence, your attention span, memory, all of it — when would you schedule that test? For AM-shifted people, they're like, "Are you free at seven?" Because they're the best in the morning. For PM-shifted people like you and I, honestly, the afternoon. In my younger years, the evening. I do my best work like 9 PM on. It's my clearest thinking, the most energised, the most clear-headed, up until the wee hours in the morning. But it's not super functional. It's genetic, and you can make use of it. PM-shifted people also have a tendency to be the most artistic and creative.

Steven Bartlett: Can you say that again? Look at the camera and say that again.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Most artistic and creative.

Steven Bartlett: I seem to get those. Whatever.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Then you have the vast majority of the human population, and those are people who are biphasic. Biphasic stands for the Latin two phases or two peaks. These individuals wake up a little groggy, but within about 45 minutes to an hour, they're ramped up and off to the races. Biphasic — two phases or two peaks — so they peak once in the morning, come down for the biggest afternoon dip comparatively to all three types, and then come back up for a second wind if they play their cards right. So those are the three chronotypes.

My humble opinion is you should know which one you are because it will dictate the ideal time you should be doing your focus sprints. I am a big bag of blood, guts, and chemicals. I'm not a machine. There are biological laws. I'm not the same at 8 AM versus 2 PM versus 8 PM. I am a different version of self with different abilities and skills, and my attention span is not a constant. Our cognitive abilities are different throughout the course of the day, which means when we do certain things does matter, at least in some small part.

And I'm not suggesting we can architect our days completely, because you and I are actually prime examples of this. As PM-shifted people, the world doesn't give a damn about us. The world is more AM-shifted. We have to do a great deal of adjustment. It's not like I can schedule meetings with people at 10 tonight.

Steven Bartlett: So true. I woke up this morning and did a 7:00 AM meeting because it was very important. And obviously I'm in LA, so I'm working to other people's schedules. And I was terrible. I was like, gosh, that's a terrible version of me that I've just portrayed in such an important meeting. I bent my schedule to do it, but actually because it was important, I should have pushed it as late as I possibly could have in hindsight. Even with the podcast, one of the things we set as a rule is I never ever do podcasts before 11:00 AM. So this is why this starts at 11:00 AM today. Because I tried it and the brain wasn't on. I think people are looking for big steps forward in life, but some of these things that seem small and marginal can have such a profound compounding impact over the long term.

The Thinking Class: A Warning About Digital Dependence and AI

Steven Bartlett: What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? For the people at home who are struggling — they've got the customer problems we've described, they're brain-fogged, they've got these priorities, they're distracted all the time and they feel the sense of guilt around that distraction. They know they could be doing more, but the noisy external tempting world is constantly winning. What else can we give them as a tool?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's about the way the world is going. I'm at risk of sounding a bit doom and gloom for a second, but I do hope that there's a light at the end of this tunnel that I hope will give people more agency and will inspire them. Because of my job and because of where I live, I have access to sitting and being invited into meetings and rooms with a lot of amazing human beings that are creating the future.

There is an email there that we didn't touch on, but maybe this is a good time to reference it.

Steven Bartlett: You don't like referencing it. It's a bit depressing. But I think it's important because you live in San Francisco and you did make the case that those big companies are coming to people like you to figure out how to hijack attention.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: My area of expertise is how the brain changes and evolves, how you train it. An area of this that I know quite well — because it's extremely important in the pursuit of actual cognitive training — is something that we call strategic automaticity. Strategic automaticity is just getting people to do stuff without meaning to do stuff. When a habit — this is also James Clear's Atomic Habits, phenomenal book on habit formation — you want, ideally, a behaviour or habit to happen without thinking. Automatic. Think about something that you do without a great deal of thought or deliberation. For me, it's brushing my teeth at night. I could be passed out, I could literally fall asleep somewhere on the couch while I'm doing something, and lo and behold at some point I will stir awake and still, before I get to bed, I will brush my teeth. Children don't do this naturally — they're forced into brushing their teeth at an early age, but it becomes a habit over time, a habit that I do without deliberation. That's the goal for any habit.

I have studied addiction, I study habit formation, and I do cognitive training research, which means I'm trying to get people to do stuff automatically. That's my goal. People like me have been hired hand over fist by tech companies around the world. And this is historical — this was 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14. I myself have been attempted to be recruited more times than I can count to bring everything that I know and have studied and done research on into certain tech companies that I've been legally told I'm not allowed to name.

Just slide me this little thing here. An email I received, just to paraphrase, says: "Hi Sahar, we came across your work on strategic automaticity at UC Berkeley, and we'd love to connect. We're looking to increase engagement and make our product more sticky. Would you be open to a quick call, research collaboration opportunity?"

Steven Bartlett: Lots of people in your field get these invitations because if they can retain people on their platforms more, it's billion-dollar outcomes.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: What I will say is that I don't think anyone is inherently evil or bad. These are just work opportunities. And the promise for scientists like myself is, "You can keep doing what you're doing. We love what you're doing. We just want you to do it in-house so that we can also implement a lot of these things." I am allowed to say this — I'm not allowed to name the companies, but I am allowed to say that that particular email came with an attachment of the job description and, of course, the compensation. The compensation for that particular role was four times my annual salary doing public research at that time. These were tempting offers.

I would say that digital dependence is going to be the Everest for our species. And I really mean that. It has the potential, if leveraged properly, to give us amazing advances in everything from medicine to economics. Technology is amazing, especially artificial intelligence. However, it comes with a great number of downsides if used improperly. Our relationship with technology is fundamentally critical for whether or not our species continues to thrive on this planet.

Steven Bartlett: What's your fear?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: My fear is actually something that I have somewhat disturbingly heard about. This is a real story from real meetings that I have sat in with leaders in the AI space. What we are currently up against — what is likely to happen at this point unless we truly turn the wheels and try to do something differently — is that we are creating a future where there will be a thinking class. There will be a very small subset of the human population that is educated, that has the attention span and the ability to focus such that they can think critically on their own. They can question things, they can come up with ideas. And this small subset of the human population — in a creepy way, I've heard it called the thinking class — they will run the world. And the rest of the world will not be expected to think. Instead, their job will be to just do as they're told. And it is far easier to control a populace when they are distracted and not thinking. They're not awake.

And this is my fear. And this is what is motivating me on a daily basis — this is my Everest at this point. To illuminate what is a healthy relationship, an intentional relationship between minds and machines, such that we don't lose our meaning. I'm obsessed with giving agency back to people and trying to wake them up and get them to realise that if we stay this distracted, we will live a life unintentionally that we don't like living. You will end up on your deathbed with more regrets than you can count. And at a social and global level, we are going to have a drastic change from this last century.

This last century has been absolutely amazing as it relates to education for people. We have been educating more human beings. Think of girls and how much progress we've made in the pursuit of equity and equality for women. How many women are now extremely highly educated and doing amazing things where we would not have had that luxury a few generations ago — one generation ago, in fact. We've made such amazing strides to expand the thinking class. The thinking class used to be small. And I'm telling you now that it is shrinking again. Because of algorithms and AI. AI is taking a lot of the thinking away from us. And I'm using my words quite carefully there — it's taking it away from us because we're also letting it.

Steven Bartlett: Earlier on I said we're writing more than ever. And the reason I said that was because I'm actively trying to resist the temptation of allowing AI to think for me. I had a conversation actually yesterday with one of my colleagues who reports to me, and the feedback was, "I no longer can hear your thinking. I can't hear your voice." But actually I said to this person in real life, "Your reasoning is so much stronger than when you send me things that are written." And that is because that's not you. You're actually better than AI because you have more context. You have more real-world context. And I think it's a really interesting moment for people to resist the temptation to let an LLM think for them. But gosh, it's going to be so bloody tempting.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It goes back to those damn biological laws. The human brain is wired for shortcuts. If there is a shortcut to food and calories, we're going to take it. We're supposed to, because food used to be scarce. We'd be idiotic not to. Remember, survival. This whole system is there for survival. We are designed to take shortcuts.

Now, I will give some props to Daniel Kahneman. Danny Kahneman — Go Bears, UC Berkeley professor. May he rest in peace. Also the first and only, if I'm not mistaken, psychologist to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Dan Kahneman is quite famous not only for writing the world-famous book Thinking Fast and Slow, but as a researcher, in my world, more famous for illuminating cognitive biases. And these are not necessarily bad — it's not a disease model here. These are the shortcuts we're talking about. The human brain is trying to figure out very, very quickly: can I trust you? Do I like you? Do I like what's happening? What do I want to do? What am I attracted to? What am I motivated to go get? It's just trying to decrease the amount of energy it takes to make all of the decisions. Otherwise, the world is far too stimulating and full of way too much data and information. It would overwhelm us. So the brain is designed to parse all this information and make shortcuts.

One of my favourite quotes of Daniel Kahneman's: "Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they would prefer not to." Cats can swim. They don't like it. So thinking is the same way. It's against our survival instincts of energy conservation, relaxing, preserving — especially in a world where calories weren't abundant. Even doing this conversation now requires a lot of thinking. It's burning a lot of calories.

So that's an interesting thing — we don't actually want to think. It's important not to have shame around it. This is also connected to the scrolling and our relationship with our technology. There's no shame if you find yourself dependent on scrolling, addicted somewhat, and you're not happy with your relationship with technology. It's okay. Please don't feel shame or guilt around it. It's natural. Congratulations — you have literally hundreds of experts that have designed these tools to be as addictive as they are. Lo and behold, you have a brain that we understand, and your brain became addicted. So there's no shame in it. It's just, what do we do next?

My humble opinion is: first, assess. Get like a blood test — get data on how bad the situation is, where are the bleeds, where is it worse, where is it okay. And then go implement some of the tactics that we talked about.

Live Demonstration: The Switch Cost of Multitasking

Steven Bartlett: One of the things I'm terrible at is multitasking. I've always believed it is a thing, a more productive solution. I consider myself to be a very proud context switcher. But then I heard about this exercise that you do to prove to people that multitasking is a myth. I have my iPad here and it's recording the screen. What is this thought experiment or task that highlights the myth?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: It's so simple. What you're going to do is draw two lines on that piece of paper. What we are going to attempt to do is, using the most ridiculously oversimplified task — this is insanely easy for you — get a sense of what we call your switch cost. Your switch cost is the amount of time and energy that you essentially waste every single time you switch your attention from A to B, B to C, and so on. Biological law — another one. There's no free lunch. Every single time you do something with your biological being, you pay for it.

Okay. Whenever you're ready, you're going to draw two lines for me and I'm going to time you, so don't start yet. What you're going to write on the top line is "I'm a great multitasker." And on the bottom line, you're going to write the numbers 1 through 20. You will do this as fast as you possibly can and I will time you.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. Are you ready? Yeah. Get ready. Get set. Go.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Done?

Steven Bartlett: Done. Yeah.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: 31 seconds. Beautiful. I want you to do this one more time. This time, the way in which you will arrive will be a little different. You're going to alternate. So you're going to start at the top line and write the letter I. Drop down to the bottom line, number one. Back up to the top line, letter A. Down to the bottom line, number two. Back up to the top line, letter M. Down to the bottom line, number three, and so on and so forth until you finish both lines. I'm going to give you one other option — if you're thinking this hand is a NASCAR and you're going to lose time going back and forth between two lines, fine, you can do it all on one line but you still have to alternate. So it still needs to be I, 1, A, 2, M, 3, and so on. It needs to alternate all in one line.

Steven Bartlett: Do you know what? If I get to 31 seconds, just tell me and I'll stop.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Okay. Get ready. Get set. Go.

Steven Bartlett: Fuck, I forgot how to count. Oh my gosh. This is a shit show. Where was I? I think I cheated. I'm sorry.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: We're at 30. How far did you get?

Steven Bartlett: I got to number eight.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Okay. So that is 40% of the speed. 60% slower when you were multitasking between numbers and letters.

Steven Bartlett: So on a daily basis, theoretically, I'm losing potentially 60% of my productivity just by switching between two different types of tasks at once. And it was way less enjoyable. It was painful. Do you know the other thing? It really did remind me of how I've been working, because every time I went from one line to the other — from the letters to the numbers — I had to remind myself again of where I was with the numbers. And then when I went back to the letters, I was like, "Where are we again with the letters?" There was a little gap there in me trying to figure out what came after the letter I, for example. It's really fascinating.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: By the way, there's a name for that concept you were just feeling. It's called attentional residue. I call it attentional baggage, because I find the visual that creates better — meaning you carry into the next task all the baggage from the previous task, unless you close out. I say get cognitive closure. Close out the tab, so to speak, on your computer. Clean up shop, get cognitive closure, close the box, and don't carry it from one thing into the next thing. Try to, as much as possible, get cognitive closure.

When you multitask, one, you're barely onboarding to the next task, you're carrying baggage from the last one, and it's taking you longer to actually finish anything. Over two hours a day is the estimated average now for the average knowledge worker just bouncing between screens and different tasks.

How to Get Lucky: Priming the Mind for Opportunity

Steven Bartlett: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is: how can the audience become more lucky?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I love this question and I have an answer. The way to become more lucky is to prime the mind, to train it, to look for luck. Your luck. Because lucky for you, I'm assuming, is very different than my luck and the next person's luck. You have to know what your Everest is again. You need to go to that deathbed, figure out what a good life for you is, figure out what your intentions are and your goals. What is it that you're looking for? Because if you don't know, then there's nothing for you to look for. We don't even know what you want to get lucky at. So one, you have to get crystal clear on what it is that you want. Once you're crystal clear on what you want, you need to ask yourself and remind yourself on a daily basis what that Everest is. And then — pedals over podiums, right? What is the one thing I can do today that is going to make me incrementally closer to that long-term goal?

If you prime the mind with what is your goal, what is your Everest, what are your objectives, what you're hoping to get lucky about — then if it's on your mind, instead of all the noise that we fill the mind with, this is turning the signal up. All of this conversation has been about turning the noise down. And when we talk about your ultimate why, your Everest, your long-term goals, that deathbed self — and then we talk about the MITs, which is the pedal, how can I drive my day, what can I do today that's going to make me incrementally closer to that long-term goal — that's the what, so to speak.

In order to get more lucky, the mind — bit spooky — it will look for data and evidence to support its beliefs. Either way. So if you ruminate, if you stay in that victim mindset, if you stay in that "I'm so far away from that Everest" — guess what you will notice? Closed doors. You will notice all of your shortcomings and focus on them. This thing is designed to look for the evidence and find the evidence that confirms its beliefs. It's constantly scanning. So if you prime this thing, you'll find your luck. Because your luck is right there. The opportunities are there. The world is not full of brick walls the way that it may seem. Those brick walls are doors. They have handles.

Steven Bartlett: I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I feel like that's manifestation. I want to push you further.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: If people are into that, great, positive thinking. But what are you trying to achieve? Do you have a guest that you're trying to bring on that you've not been able to find? Wake up every single day and just be like, "I will find my way to you." You will be thinking about that. That is one of your goals. I promise you, you're going to see opportunities. You're going to end up meeting one of his former chiefs of staff at a random event. It's just going to happen because it's top of mind for you. And your brain is designed to look for the evidence and the data to support its beliefs. So if you truly believe Barack Obama will be on this podcast, he'll find his way to this chair.

Steven Bartlett: I mean, I just love your work for so many reasons. I think sometimes the complicated can stay complicated until it finds someone like you who has the ability to simplify and have the empathy to understand those that they're simplifying it for. Is there anywhere people should go to get your work or to understand more about you or to follow you?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: I want to help people gain control over their lives and live a life of intention of their choosing, whatever it is that they want to do. My humble recommendation is to gain some data on yourself. Actually assess your digital dependence. Assess your attention span. Have you ever taken a test of your attention?

Steven Bartlett: No.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Do you know where it falls? Maybe it's not so bad. Maybe you're off the charts amazing. I'm a firm believer that the same way we go to the doctor once a year and have this annual physical — how am I doing, I get a blood test, you check all the things — why is it that we're not checking our minds? We just wait for it to go to hell. And then we do something about it. We wait for the car to be on fire and then we're like, "Oh, oops." No, we should have things that we're doing along the way. But how do we know what to do? The data. If we collect data and we actually have assessments available to people — I'm extremely passionate about making scientific assessments available to the general public. I think science should be for people, not profits.

Steven Bartlett: Where do I find the assessment?

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: You go to mminstitute.org. Mind, Machine and Meaning Institute. Free assessments.

Steven Bartlett: I'll link that below and put it really big on the screen here. Thank you so much for being here. Please keep doing the work that you're doing. You're a star. And sometimes once in a while I meet stars, and you're suddenly a star. So I'm excited to watch your career unfold from here on outwards.

Dr Dr Sahar Yousef: Thank you, Steven.