Welcome to episode 318 of Live Happy Now. Today's technology-driven world allows us to connect with

others and stay informed like never before. But it's no secret that living in the information age

is also keeping us distracted and drained. I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Dr. Charles Chafin, a researcher, educator,

and author of NUMM, how the information age dulls our senses and how we can get them back.

Charles' research looks at the attention economy and how we're affected by everything from

social media and cable news to dating apps and pornography.

This week, he's here to talk about what all these distractions are doing to our mental health

and how we can better manage our attention in such a noisy world.

Charles, welcome to Live Happy Now.

Well, thanks for having me.

You have written such a fascinating book, and it's on the information age and everything that it's doing to us.

And to start things off, I want to know what made you decide to dig into this topic because it's a huge topic.

Yeah, you know, my research was attention.

So my attention is kind of the, how our attentional

resources are allocated throughout our days is always kind of the underlying element of kind of how I think

and how I work. And, you know, where this really spawned was actually relative to compassion. I started

thinking about sensationalism in the news. I started

thinking about how social media is constantly bombarding us with the suffering of others.

And so where this started was, you know, we're watching these, you know, horrible things that seem to happen all the

time and the 15 minutes of fame that each of them have. And I started wondering about, well,

how does it affect our own compassion when it comes to the people around us? You know, if I'm

watching the news or if I'm reading on social media, of all these terrible things that happen,

...