How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan

by Catherine Price

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. There’s actually no such thing as multitasking (that is, simultaneously processing two or more attention-demanding tasks), because our brains can’t do two cognitively demanding things at once.* When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching.” Like cars making sharp turns, our brains need to slow down and switch gears every time we stop thinking about one thing and engage with another—a process that has been estimated to take twenty-five minutes every time you do it.

“We worry that [heavy multitasking] may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”

distraction is our default.

If you’re distracted, you can’t immerse yourself in an experience—which means that you can’t, by definition, get into flow. And since our phones are tools of distraction, this means that the more we spend on our phones, the less likely we are to experience it.