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Americans check their phones about 144 times per day.
Eighty-nine percent of Americans check their phones within ten minutes of waking.
Forty-one percent of U.S. adults (including 62 percent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine) report that they are online “almost constantly.”
can’t imagine my life without my smartphone.” Eighty-one percent of U.S. adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine think they’re using their phone “too much.”
Multiple studies have associated the heavy use of smartphones (especially when used for social media) with negative effects on neuroticism, self-esteem, impulsivity, empathy, self-identity, and self-image, as well as sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression.
the act of reading itself—as in books, not listicles—can change the brain in ways that encourage deep thought.
The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle. —Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation
Rationally, we know that spending hours on our phones can make us feel gross, but the possibility of rewards keeps us scrolling.
dopamine-induced excitement is not the same thing as actual happiness, connection, joy, or satisfaction.
what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something good could be waiting for us—but not knowing for sure.
“Human beings seem to exhibit an innate drive to forage for information in much the same way that other animals are driven to forage for food,” write Gazzaley and Rosen. “This ‘hunger’ is now fed to an extreme degree by modern technological advances that deliver highly accessible information.”
gambling is the first behavior that the American Psychiatric Association ever officially classified as an addiction.
every minute we spend on a social media app is a minute spent making money for someone else.[*1]
Engagement is sometimes referred to as “the currency of the attention economy,”
the health risks of loneliness and isolation are comparable to those of smoking fifteen (yes, fifteen!) cigarettes per day.
“when people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves.”
40 percent of high school students reported experiencing “persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness”
one in five high school students report seriously considering attempting suicide (compared to 13 percent ten years earlier).
the more we read online, the more we teach our brains to skim.
[heavy multitasking] may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”
weakening our attention spans and encouraging us to try to multitask, our phones are damaging our memories, too.
Whereas short-term memories are generally formed by strengthening the connections between neural circuits, long-term memories require our brains to create new proteins.
This means that the more often we allow our attention to be stolen or scattered, the fewer long-term memories our brains will be able to record—not just because we weren’t fully present in the initial experience but because our brains weren’t able to manufacture the proteins necessary for storing it.
But schemas cannot be formed without long-term memories, and long-term memories cannot be created when our brains are distracted and overloaded.
I find it terrifying to think about all the ideas and insights that humanity is not having as a result of our being constantly distracted by our phones—the potential opportunity costs are enormous.
In their quest for happiness, people mistake excitement of the mind for real happiness.
Screen time, particularly in the hour before bedtime, both makes it more difficult for us to fall asleep and harms the quality of our sleep once we do eventually nod off.
one sleepless night can impair performance as much as a blood alcohol level of 0.10 percent
the more time we spend on our phones—and the more we allow them to intrude into our lives—the less likely we are to experience flow.
“junk flow,” which is a state of hypnosis rather than of active engagement—in fact, he described it as the feeling that results when you are “becoming addicted to a superficial experience.”
“what might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”
algorithms aren’t just being used to sell us things. They’re also being used to influence our non-purchasing behaviors, values, and beliefs—and, in so doing, to influence who we are.
humanity is spending more than 1.3 million years’ worth of attention on social media platforms every single day.
We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch of [our cravings]. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives.
most addictions stem from a desire to feel better and/or to make a bad feeling go away. If you try to cut back on your phone use without first figuring out what you’re trying to achieve or avoid, you’re dooming yourself to failure. Either you’re going to relapse or you’re going to find another, potentially more destructive habit that achieves the same effect.
What do you want to pay attention to? In other words, what is important to you? What do you want to experience or accomplish in your one, precious life?
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
