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.

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.

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

Dopamine has many roles, but for our purposes the most important thing to know is that, by activating pleasure-related receptors in our brains, it teaches us to associate certain behaviours with rewards (think of a rat that gets a pellet every time it presses a lever). 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.

According to Larry Rosen, a psychologist at California State University, Dominquez Hills, 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.

have you ever wondered why social media apps are all free? It’s not because their creators are driven by a philanthropic urge to help the world share selfies. It’s because we are not actually the customers, and the social media platform itself is not the product. Instead, the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.

In the words of Dopamine Labs founder Ramsay Brown, “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.”

This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.

As the authors described their results in the Harvard Business Review, “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.”

ONE OF THE MOST COMMON defences of phones is the idea that they’re making us better at multitasking and, in so doing, more efficient. 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.

the prefrontal cortex can become tired if we ask it to make too many decisions – a condition known as “decision fatigue”. When our prefrontal cortex becomes tired, our focus wavers and our minds wander. We lose our ability to distinguish between what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not. The more information we’re presented with, the more of a problem this becomes.