How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

by Catherine Price

Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we’re beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective. Connected but lonely. The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash – and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who’s actually in control. The result is a paralysing tension: we love our phones, but we often hate the way they make us feel. And no one seems to know what to do about it.

The problem isn’t smartphones themselves. The problem is our relationships with them.

it took me a long time to realise that something felt off about my interactions with my phone. I began to notice that I often picked up my phone “just to check”, only to resurface an hour later wondering where the time had gone. I’d respond to a text and then get caught in a thirty-minute back-and-forth that felt more demanding than an in-person conversation and yet left me feeling less fulfilled. I’d open an app with a sense of anticipation, and then be disappointed when it didn’t provide the satisfaction that I sought.

There wasn’t anything inherently wrong about the things I was doing; what made me feel weird was how often I initiated them without thinking, how many real-life experiences they were supplanting, and how crappy they made me feel. I reached for my phone to soothe myself, but I often crossed the line from feeling soothed to going numb.

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail: the more I used my phone to navigate my life, the less capable I felt of navigating life without my phone.

what is known so far suggests that spending extended time on them has the power to change both the structure and the function of our brains – including our abilities to form new memories, think deeply, focus, and absorb and remember what we read.

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.

“much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones”.

The deeper I got, the more I began to see my phone as my partner in a dysfunctional relationship: someone (or, rather, something) with the power both to make me feel bad about myself and to keep me coming back for more.

Simply telling ourselves to spend less time on our phones is the equivalent of telling ourselves to stop being attracted to people who are bad for us: it’s easier said than done, and is probably going to require a good therapist – or at the very least, an extremely well-considered plan.

Without our phones to distract us, time seemed to slow down. We went on walks. We read books. We talked more. I felt healthier and more grounded, as if I were getting back in touch with a part of myself that I hadn’t even realised had gone missing. Interestingly, the effects of the Sabbath seemed to linger for several days afterward – a sort of digital hangover that actually felt good.

I wanted a new relationship with my phone, one in which I used my phone when it was helpful or fun, but didn’t get sucked into spirals of mindless swiping.

I’d come to three conclusions. The first was that this problem is widespread: many people worry that they’re addicted to their phones. The second was that despite the claims of naysayers, we have the power to break this addiction. And the third was that breaking up with your phone doesn’t just have the potential to change your relationship with your devices. It can also change your life.

breaking up with your phone definitely has its challenges. It requires self-reflection and the determination to wrest your life back from a device that has been specifically designed to make it difficult to do so.

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.

And addictions exist on a spectrum; it’s possible to be addicted to something without it destroying your life.

many of the same feel-good brain chemicals and reward loops that drive addictions are also released and activated when we check our phones.

The point is also that revolutionary technologies don’t just “come along,” as Jobs put it; they’re designed. Not only are phone and app companies aware of their products’ neurological effects, but they pack their products with features that will trigger them

the features that make smartphones potentially problematic are the same features that make them easy to use and fun. Take away the possibility of getting hooked, and you’d take away all the reasons we like smartphones to begin with.

IN ORDER TO MAXIMISE THE amount of time we spend on our devices, designers manipulate our brain chemistry in ways that are known to trigger addictive behaviours.

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.

Sometimes we reach for our phones out of hope/anticipation that there’ll be something good waiting for us. But just as often, we reach for our phones to help us avoid something unpleasant, such as boredom or anxiety. It doesn’t matter. Once our brains have learned to associate checking our phones with getting a reward, we are going to really, really, really want to check our phones. We become like the lab rats, constantly pressing the lever to get food.

In 2017, 60 Minutes aired a fascinating interview between Anderson Cooper and Ramsay Brown, founder of a start-up called Dopamine Labs that creates brain-hacking code for app companies. The goal is to keep people glued to an app by figuring out exactly when the app should do something to “make you feel a little extra awesome,” explained Brown, who has a background in neuroscience (and who, for the record, comes across as a thoughtful and un-evil kind of guy). Brown offered the example of Instagram, which he says has created code that deliberately holds back on showing users new “likes” so that it can deliver a bunch of them in a sudden rush at the most effective moment possible – meaning the moment at which seeing new likes will discourage you from closing the app. And when he says “you”, Brown means you. As he explained to Anderson Cooper, “There’s an algorithm somewhere that predicted, hey, for this user right now who is experimental subject 79B3 in experiment 231, we think we can see an improvement in his behaviour if you give it to him in this burst instead of that burst. . . . You’re part of a set of controlled experiments that are happening in real time across you and millions of other people.” “We’re guinea pigs?” asked Cooper. “You’re guinea pigs,” said Brown. “You’re guinea pigs in the box pushing the button and sometimes getting the likes. And they’re doing this to keep you in there.” Interestingly, Brown – who is one of the few technology insiders who agreed to ...

Isso é insano.

Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in San Francisco, aged 25–35) working at three companies had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention. —Tristan Harris, ex–Google employee and design ethicist

That’s the work of dopamine, too – it’s released any time we experience something new. But once the novelty wears off, less dopamine is released.

phones (and apps) are designed to provide us with constant novelty – and as a result, constant hits of dopamine.

Anyone who’s spent time with a two-year-old knows that toddlers are fascinated by cause and effect. Flip a switch on the wall, and a light goes on. Press a button and a doorbell rings. Express even the slightest interest in an electrical outlet and an adult will come running. It’s a trait we never outgrow: no matter what age we are, we really love getting reactions to things that we do. In psychology, these reactions are called “reinforcements”, and the more reinforcements we get when we do something, the more likely we are to do it again. (Oddly, the reaction doesn’t have to be positive. You might think that scolding a toddler for putting playdough in her mouth might discourage her from doing it again, but trust me: it does not.)

reinforcements give us a pleasant feeling of control – which in turn makes us want to constantly be on our phones.

But 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.

it doesn’t matter if we’re rewarded only one time out of every fifty. Thanks to dopamine, our brains remember that one time. And instead of dissuading us, the fact that we can’t predict which of our fifty checks is going to be rewarding makes us check our phones even more.

“When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got,”

our phones deliberately incite anxiety by providing new information and emotional triggers every time we pick them up. This makes us worry that any time we put them down, even for a second, we might miss something.

Human beings have always suffered from FOMO. But we were protected from developing a full-blown infection by the fact that, until smartphones, there was no easy way to find out about all the things we were missing out on.

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. We feel better for a moment; we put them down – and we feel anxious again.

Whether it’s ratings on Uber or “likes” on social media, many of today’s most popular apps actively encourage users to judge one another. Those features aren’t there by accident. 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.

What’s particularly weird is that we don’t just care about other people’s judgments; we ask for them.

“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.”

If our smartphones excel at one thing, it’s making sure we never, ever have to be alone with ourselves.

the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.

“You don’t pay for Facebook. Advertisers pay for Facebook. You get to use it for free because your eyeballs are what’s being sold there.”

The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. It’s attention that we didn’t spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back.

“We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.”

today’s teens may be physically safer than their predecessors (less likely to drive drunk, for example). But that is likely because they are “on their phone, in their room, alone, and often distressed”. Depression among teenagers is way up. Suicide rates are, too.

What most of us don’t realise is that Facebook doesn’t just know everything you do and share on Facebook. Thanks to Facebook buttons and cookies (small files left behind on your computer that make it possible for companies to track your activities across sites), Facebook also knows many of the websites you’ve visited, apps you’ve used, and links you’ve clicked on.

it knows countless details about your offline life, too, including (but not limited to!) your income and basically every purchase you’ve ever made with a card.

the more we risk creating a society in which we no longer have a shared definition of the “truth”.

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.

You might think that you’re able to simultaneously listen to your friend and respond to that text. But you can’t. In fact, we’re often shifting the focus of our attention so rapidly that we never give ourselves enough time to get in gear to begin with.

Not only is this making us unproductive, but it’s also affecting our ability to think and problem solve. It’s also mentally exhausting.

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