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

by Catherine Price

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.

We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We’ve never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. We’ve never stopped to think about what spending so many hours engaged with our devices might be doing to our brains, or whether a device billed as a way to connect us to other people might actually be driving us apart. “Breaking up” with your phone means giving yourself a chance to stop and think.

the more I used my phone to navigate my life, the less capable I felt of navigating life without my phone.

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.

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. Most of these techniques involve a brain chemical called dopamine. 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 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.

On a certain level, we know that what we’re doing is making us feel gross. But instead of stopping, our brains decide the solution is to seek out more dopamine. We check our phones again. And again. And again.

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. It’s easy to spend hours on your phone without using the same app twice – or staying focused for more than a few seconds at a time. It’s worth pointing out that dopamine-induced excitement is not the same thing as actual happiness. But try telling that to our brains.

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.

Our phones are packed with subtle positive reinforcements that trigger dopamine spritzes that keep us coming back for more. Touch a link, and a webpage appears. Send a text message and you’ll hear a satisfying “whoosh”. Cumulatively, these reinforcements give us a pleasant feeling of control – which in turn makes us want to constantly be on our phones.

Once that link has been established, 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. Want to know another device that uses intermittent rewards to drive compulsive behaviour? Slot machines.

The non-technical term for this anxiety is FOMO: fear of missing out (not to be confused with its underappreciated counterpart, JOMO: the joy of missing out). 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. Infected by FOMO, we keep checking and touching and swiping and scrolling, trying to relieve our anxiety by doing something that, by reinforcing our habit loop, actually only increases it.

We post photos and comments to show others that we’re lovable, that we’re popular and, on a more existential level, that we matter, and then we check our phones obsessively to see if other people – or at least their online profiles – agree. (And even though we know that we’re curating our own feeds to make our lives look as exciting and fun as possible, we forget that everyone else is doing the same thing.)

As we’ve talked about, the flip side of wanting to feel pleasure is the desire to avoid feeling bad – ideally with as little effort as possible. That’s why, instead of getting to the root of our negative feelings, we turn to alcohol or drugs . . . or our phones.

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.

“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.”

Engagement is sometimes referred to as “the currency of the attention economy”, and advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money for it. Global ad spending on social media in 2016 was $31 billion, almost double what it was just two years before.

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.

Most people sign up for social media accounts out of a desire to feel connected – but numerous studies suggest that the more we use social media, the less happy we will be.

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.”

mind cannot have two thoughts at once. See if you can think two thoughts at exactly the same time. Well? Is it possible?

When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching”.

Yes, we can do the dishes while we listen to the news. But that’s not “multitasking” in the true sense of the word, because one activity is not cognitively demanding.

Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books . . . the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.

If you spend two hours a day doing anything, you’re going to get pretty good at it. If I spent two hours a day practising the piano, I’d be able to accomplish my long-standing goal of learning to sight-read music within a couple of months. If I spent two hours a day studying Spanish, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be able to have a basic conversation.

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.

In many ways, the prefrontal cortex is what makes us human. If we didn’t have control over our attention, we couldn’t think abstract and complicated thoughts. But just like a muscle, 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.

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.

Here’s the first problem: our working memory can’t hold on to many things at once. A famous 1956 study on working memory was titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (suggesting that we’re able to hold between five and nine items in our working memory) – but more recent estimates put the capacity closer to two to four.

your brain is busy trying to hold too much information in its working memory – if its cognitive load is too great – it won’t have the ability to store that information, let alone process it in a way that makes it useful, or to create the proteins necessary to transfer the memory into long-term storage. It’s like trying to organise your wallet while juggling: you can’t.

And that brings us to our phones: everything about smartphones overloads our working memories. The apps, the emails, the news feeds, the headlines, even the home screen itself – a smartphone is a virtual avalanche of information. The result, short term, is mental fatigue and difficulty concentrating. The long-term consequences are even scarier. As we’ve talked about, when we train our attention on our phones, we miss out on everything else going on around us – and if you don’t have an experience to begin with, then it goes without saying that you’re not going to remember it later. What’s more, when we overload our working memories, we make it harder for our brains to transfer new information to our long-term memories. This in turn makes it less likely that we’ll remember the experiences (and information) that we did manage to pay attention to.

Not only does this reduce the likelihood of those memories becoming permanent, but the weaker our schemas become, the less likely we are to have insights and ideas. We lose our capacity for deep thought.

In their quest for happiness, people mistake excitement of the mind for real happiness.

Every night, two to three hours before your bedtime, a tiny gland in your brain begins to release a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin tells your body that it’s nighttime and makes you sleepy. When daylight, which is a blue light, hits the back of your eyes in the morning, your brain stops producing melatonin. You feel awake and ready to start your day. When blue light fades (and is replaced by darkness or the yellow glow of incandescent bulbs), melatonin begins to be released again. Guess what else radiates blue light? Screens.

When you’re in flow, you’re so present in the moment that you feel as if you’re outside of time. The line between your experience and your mind gets erased. You’re un-self-conscious. You’re entirely absorbed. You’re in the zone. Flow leads to the sorts of moments and memories that make life seem rich. If you’re distracted, you can’t immerse yourself in an experience – which means that you can’t, by definition, get into flow.

The next time you find yourself tempted to look at your phone, pause instead. Take a breath and just notice the craving. Don’t give in to it, but don’t try to make it go away. Observe it. See what happens.

WEEK 1: TECHNOLOGY TRIAGE Day 1 (Monday): Download a Tracking App Day 2 (Tuesday): Assess Your Current Relationship Day 3 (Wednesday): Start Paying Attention Day 4 (Thursday): Take Stock and Take Action Day 5 (Friday): Delete Social Media Apps Day 6 (Saturday): Come Back to (Real) Life Day 7 (Sunday): Get Physical WEEK 2: CHANGING YOUR HABITS Day 8 (Monday): Say “No” to Notifications Day 9 (Tuesday): The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Apps Day 10 (Wednesday): Change Where You Charge It Day 11 (Thursday): Set Yourself Up for Success Day 12 (Friday): Download an App-Blocker Day 13 (Saturday): Set Boundaries (No-Phone Zones and Wake-Up Times) Day 14 (Sunday): Stop Phubbing WEEK 3: RECLAIMING YOUR BRAIN Day 15 (Monday): Stop, Breathe, and Be Day 16 (Tuesday): Practise Pausing Day 17 (Wednesday): Exercise Your Attention Span Day 18 (Thursday): Meditate Day 19 (Friday): Prepare for Your Trial Separation Days 20–21 (The Weekend): Your Trial Separation WEEK 4 (AND BEYOND): YOUR NEW RELATIONSHIP Day 22 (Monday): Trial Separation Recap Day 23 (Tuesday): Phast Day 24 (Wednesday): Manage Your Invitations Day 25 (Thursday): Clean Up the Rest of Your Digital Life Day 26 (Friday): Check Your Checking Day 27 (Saturday): Digital Sabbath Life Hacks Day 28 (Sunday): The Seven Phone Habits of Highly Effective People Day 29 (Monday): Keep Yourself on Track Day 30 (Tuesday): Congratulations!

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.

What do you want to pay attention to? I encourage you to continue to come back to this question throughout the course of our 30 days together (and beyond). Use it to ground yourself any time you feel yourself reaching for your phone – or any other moment when you feel as if you’ve lost your way.

What do you love about your phone? • What don’t you love about your phone? • What changes do you notice in yourself – positive or negative – when you spend a lot of time on your phone?

Next, imagine yourself a month from now, at the end of your break-up. What would you like your new relationship with your phone to look like? What would you like to have done or accomplished with your extra time? What would you like someone to say if you asked them to describe how you’d changed? Write your future self a brief note or email describing what success would look like, and/or congratulating yourself for achieving

Over the next twenty-four hours, try to notice: • Situations in which you nearly always find yourself using your phone. (For example, waiting in a queue, in the lift, in the car.) Also note the first time in the morning and the last time in the evening that you typically look at your phone. • How your posture changes when using your phone. • Your emotional state right before you reach for your phone. (For example: bored, curious, anxious, happy, lonely, excited, sad, loving, and so on.) • Your emotional state right after you use your phone (Do you feel better? Worse? Did your phone satisfy whatever emotional need caused you to reach for it?) • How, and how often, your phone grabs your attention (via notifications, texts, and the like). • How you feel while you are using your phone – as well as how you feel when you realise that you don’t have your phone. The point here is to start to become aware of when and how your phone triggers your brain to release dopamine and cortisol – and what you feel like when that happens. (Very generally speaking, cravings are a desire for dopamine, dopamine itself feels exciting, and cortisol feels like anxiety.)

I’d also like you to pay attention to: • Moments – either on or off your phone – when you feel some combination of engaged, energised, joyful, effective, and purposeful. When that happens, notice what you were doing, whom you were with, and whether your phone was involved. • How and when other people use their phones – and how it makes you feel.

Lastly, I’d like you to choose several moments in your day when you are mostly likely to pick up your phone, and see if you can identify a consistent...

First, notice how you feel right now. How is your breathing? Your posture? Your sense of focus? Your general emotional state? Now take out your phone and hold it in your hand without unlocking the screen. Notice any changes in your breathing, posture, focus and emotional state. Next, actually unlock the screen and open one of the apps you use the most frequently (for example, email, social media or the news). Spend a few moments scrolling through the feed. If you’re looking at email, answer a message. Then scan yourself again for any changes. Lastly, turn off the phone and put it away, out of sight. How do you feel? Is anything different?

To help you notice when you reach for your phone, put a rubber band or hair tie around your phone or a piece of tape or a sticker on the back. That way, any time you reach for your phone, you’ll feel the prompt and be reminded to pay attention. You’ll probably need the reminder for only a few days; after a while, the noticing will become more automatic. You can also do something visual, such as changing the image on your lock screen to a picture of a piece of paper that says “Notice!” or “Why did you pick me

What did you notice about how you felt physically and emotionally before, during, and after you used your phone, and during times when you were separated from it? For example, did you feel relaxed, tense, excited, anxious, or some other emotion? What did you pick up on about how your phone affects your levels of dopamine and cortisol?

What did you notice about the moments when you felt you were in a state of “flow” (that is, some combination of engaged, energised, joyful, effective and purposeful)? What were you doing? Whom you were with? Was your phone involved?

How did you feel when you saw other people on their phones?