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

Steve Jobs was right: smartphones really are different. They’re different in a lot of good ways, obviously. But 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 behaviours that have traditionally been performed only by extremely annoying people.

And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Put this all together, and it makes sense that spending a lot of time on social media could be associated with depression and lower self-esteem. What doesn’t make sense is that we are deliberately choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school.

I reached for my phone to soothe myself, but I often crossed the line from feeling soothed to going numb.

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.

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.

Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship with it, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don’t.

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.

the explicit goal of getting us to spend as much time and attention as possible on our devices. In industry terms, this is called “user engagement.” Why do companies care so much about engagement? Because, as we’ll talk about in more detail in a bit, it’s how they make money.

The key is to keep asking yourself the same question, again and again and again: this is your life - what do you want to pay attention to?

Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. —John Lanchester

ONE OF THE MOST COMMON defenses 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.

In short, if ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to look at your phone.

The more you practice being mindful, the more it becomes obvious that your brain has a mind of its own. (I like to think of my mind as a good friend who also happens to be totally crazy.) The moment you recognize that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your life

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.

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

The irony, of course, is that most people’s feeds do not accurately represent the proportion of their lives they actually spend skiing/surfing/sitting in hot tubs with models. Also, many people with enormous social media followings are actually paid to glamorize their lives. If someone’s existence looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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.

Perhaps this is part of the reason that Jobs—the man who introduced the iPhone—restricted his own children’s access to his company’s products.

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.

Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.” I call them “the reason we date jerks.

I find it terrifying to think about all the ideas and insights that humanity is not having as a result of our being constantly distracted by our phones—the potential opportunity costs are enormous. But encouraging distraction isn’t the only way that our phones are affecting our memories and creativity; they’re also overloading us with information—which is a problem because creativity requires relaxation and mental space. It also is often sparked by boredom

In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, journalist Nicholas Carr wrote that “[if] you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet.” Today, I’d argue that we can take this even further: if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our brains, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, burned out, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our ability to focus, remember, and engage in deep thought, if you wanted to increase our rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-absorption, and self-harm, if you wanted to reduce empathy and creativity, encourage polarization and extremism, and damage our most important relationships, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.

Today, I’d argue that we can take this even further: if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our brains, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, burned out, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our ability to focus, remember, and engage in deep thought, if you wanted to increase our rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-absorption, and self-harm, if you wanted to reduce empathy and creativity, encourage polarization and extremism, and damage our most important relationships, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.

Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day.

our phones are like digital Trojan horses: innocuous-seeming accessories packed with manipulative tricks meant to get us to let down our guard. As soon as we do so, our attention is theirs for the taking.

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

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).