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

by Catherine Price

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.