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I found myself glancing at my phone in the middle of conversations (a habit that’s so common that it’s coined a neologism: phubbing, short for phone snubbing), conveniently forgetting how annoyed I felt when other people phubbed me.
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 with sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression.
Breaking up with your phone will allow you to reconnect with a part of you that knows that life doesn’t happen on a screen. And the faster you can get in touch with it, the better.
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. —Steve Jobs, introducing the first iPhone in 2007
Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on the New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. —Aziz Ansari
smartphones also talk back at us. They nag us. They disturb us when we’re working. They demand our attention and reward us when we give it to them. Smartphones engage in disruptive behaviors that have traditionally been performed only by extremely annoying people.
addictions exist on a spectrum; it’s possible to be addicted to something without it destroying your life.
“Addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.”
The point is that many of the same feel-good brain chemicals and reward loops that drive addictions are also released and activated when we check our phones.
Nonetheless, the fact that so many tech executives limit their own kids’ exposure suggests that they don’t think the benefits always outweigh the risks—to the point that they feel the need to protect their families from the devices that they create. It’s the Silicon Valley version of the drug dealer’s adage: “Never get high on your own supply.”
Dopamine makes us feel excited—and we like feeling excited. Any experience that triggers the release of dopamine is therefore something that we’ll want to experience again. But that’s not all. If an experience consistently triggers the release of dopamine, our brains remember the cause and effect. Eventually, they will release dopamine any time they’re reminded of the experience. They’ll release it, in other words, in anticipation.
When this happens, we tend to blame our binges on a lack of willpower—another way of saying that we blame ourselves. What we don’t realize is that technology designers deliberately manipulate our dopamine responses to make it extremely difficult for us to stop using their products. Known as “brain hacking,” this is essentially behavioral design based on brain chemistry—and once you know how to recognize its signs, you’ll see it all over your phone.
Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention. —Tristan Harris, ex–Google employee and design ethicist
Feeling bored or anxious? Check your email. Nothing there? Check social media. Not satisfied? Check a different social media account. And then maybe another one. Like a couple of posts. Follow some new people. Check to see if those people followed you back. Maybe go look at your email again, just in case.
Our phones are packed with subtle positive reinforcements that trigger dopamine spritzes that keep us coming back for more.
what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something could happen—but not knowing when or if that something will occur.
Harris frequently compares smartphones to slot machines that we keep in our pockets.
Harris’s observations are particularly disturbing when you realize that slot machines, which are specifically designed to deliver rewards in a way that drives compulsive behavior, are one of the most addictive devices ever to have been invented.
We become convinced that the only way to protect ourselves is to constantly check our phones to make sure that we’re not missing something. But instead of helping alleviate our phone-induced FOMO, this actually increases it, to the point where our adrenal glands release a squirt of cortisol—a stress hormone that plays a large role in fight-or-flight responses—every time we put down our phones. Cortisol makes us feel anxious. We don’t like to feel anxious. So, in order to relieve our anxiety, we reach for our phones.
Designers know that humans have an intrinsic desire for affirmation, and that the more ways there are for us to be judged, the more compulsively we’ll monitor our score.
Tristan Harris. “The closer we pay attention to the options we’re given,” he writes, “the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.”
Today, I’d argue that we can take this even further: if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.
“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.”
IF YOU’VE NOTICED THAT READING a book or printed newspaper doesn’t feel the same as reading the same material on your phone or computer, you’re not crazy. It’s not the same.
The result is that, the more we read online, the more we teach our brains to skim. This can be a useful skill to hone, especially when we’re constantly faced with such information overload. But it becomes a problem if skimming becomes our default—because the better we become at skimming, the worse we get at reading and thinking more deeply. And the harder it is for us to focus on just one thing.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORSE OUR FOCUS gets, the more valuable we become. Just as social media companies make money by stealing (and then selling) your attention, informational websites make money by distracting you. Even subscription-based sites, such as newspapers, depend on page views and click-throughs for revenue. That’s why online articles contain so many links and why slideshows are so common. Focus isn’t profitable. Distraction is.
the more nuanced and detailed your schemas are, the greater your capacity for complex thought. But schemas take time—and mental space—to build. When our brains are overloaded, our ability to create schemas suffers. And guess what overloads our brain?
IN THE PAST, if a person described herself as feeling happy, sad, excited, anxious, curious, frustrated, ignored, important, lonely, joyful, and existentially depressed within the space of five minutes, she likely would have received a diagnosis. But give me five minutes on my phone, and I can accomplish this and more. Our phones are like Pandora’s boxes of emotions—and every time we check them, we open ourselves up to an unpleasant surprise.
Most of the things we do on our phones—reading the news, playing games—are stimulating activities. Imagine how difficult it would be to doze off if all of the people you follow on social media were in the room with you, the television was blaring in the background, and several friends were having a political debate. That’s essentially what you’re doing when you bring your phone into bed with you.
according to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, even short-term sleep deprivation “can affect judgment, mood, ability to learn and retain information, and may increase the risk of serious accidents and injury.”
Even just a week and a half’s worth of sleeping six hours a night (instead of seven to nine) can, according to the Division of Sleep Medicine, “result in the same level of impairment on the tenth day as being awake for the previous 24 hours straight”—which is to say that it can induce “impairments in performance equivalent to those induced by a blood-alcohol level of 0.10 percent, beyond the legal limit for alcohol intoxication in the United States.”
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.
Creativity—that is, the process of coming up with new ideas—also requires relaxation and mental space, both of which are hard to come by when we’re on our phones. Creativity requires you to be well rested—as Judith Owens, director of Sleep Medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has said, “Sleep deprivation can affect memory, creativity, verbal creativity, and even things like judgment and motivation.” And creativity is often sparked by boredom, which is another mental state that our phones are great at helping us avoid.
“Mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly”—including ourselves.
“[W]e must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.” —Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
There is no judgment in this breakup. Not by you, and certainly not by me. Our job is simply to observe, to ask questions, and to experiment. If you conclude that sending 150 WhatsApp messages a day is how you want to be spending your time, that is entirely your call.
There is nothing wrong with mindless distraction. There are times when zoning out on your phone is exactly what you want to do. What is problematic—and what we’re trying to avoid—is letting a state of mindless distraction become our default.
The all-or-nothing approach to smartphones also totally ignores the fact that, as we’ve discussed before, there are many good things about our phones. The point of breaking up with our phones isn’t to deprive ourselves of the benefits of modern technology. It’s to set boundaries so that we can enjoy the good parts of our phones while also protecting ourselves from the bad.
