It was 3.30 in the morning when I realized I needed to break up with my phone. I was holding my baby in my arms as I scrolled through eBay, feeling a bit delusional with fatigue, when I had a brief out-of-body experience in which I saw the scene as if I were an outsider.
There was my baby, gazing up at me. And there was me, looking down at my phone.
I was horrified. This was not the impression I wanted my child to have of a human relationship, and it also wasn’t how I wanted to be living my own life. I decided in that moment that I needed to “break up” with my phone and create a new relationship with better boundaries.
It was 2016, and I couldn’t find a book that examined why our phones are so compelling and what effects they have on us, let alone one that offered a solution. So I decided to write it myself. What I learned changed my life – and I hope it might do the same for you.
There are many reasons that we’re tethered to our phones, but the one that I find the most infuriating is that our most time-sucking apps are deliberately designed to hook us – because that’s how their creators make money. These apps are part of what’s known as the “attention economy”, in which it’s our attention (and data about what we are likely to pay attention to) – rather than goods or services – that’s being sold.
In this economy, we are not the customers of these apps; advertisers are. We are, essentially, the product, manipulated into giving our most valuable asset – our attention – away for free.
The reason that this is important is that ultimately, our lives are what we pay attention to. We only experience what we pay attention to; we only remember what we pay attention to. Sure, there are many reasons we might want – or need – to pay attention to what’s on our phone. But it’s also essential to remember that, like time, our attention is a zero-sum equation: every minute we spend mindlessly scrolling is a minute we didn’t spend on something else, something we might actually care about. That’s a big deal, because these minutes, when repeated over hours and days and weeks and months, add up to our lives.
Want to feel the implications of this for yourself? Look up your own daily screen time, and do the math to figure out how many days it adds up to in a year. For example, four hours a day of phone use – which is pretty typical – adds up to just more than 60 full days every year.
App makers hook us by mimicking techniques used by slot machines, which are widely considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever to be invented. This is because slot machines are designed to trigger the release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that (among other things) helps our brains record when a behavior is worth repeating – and then motivates us to repeat it.
Dopamine is essential for our species’ survival, since it ensures that we continue to do things like eat and reproduce. But the tricky thing about our dopamine systems is that they are nondiscriminatory: if a behavior triggers the release of dopamine, we’re going to be motivated to repeat that behavior, regardless of whether it’s good for us, like exercise, or harmful, like doing drugs or wasting an hour on TikTok. And the more often a particular behavior triggers the release of dopamine, the more likely it is for that behavior to become a habit (and, in extreme cases, an addiction).
This means that if you want to create a product (or algorithm) that hooks people, it’s quite simple: you incorporate as many dopamine triggers as you can into your product’s design. And that’s exactly what tech designers have done.
In fact, our phones and apps are packed with so many dopamine triggers that experts such as Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, refer to phones as slot machines that we keep in our pockets. For example, bright colors are dopamine triggers. So are novelty, unpredictability and anticipation – all of which we experience nearly every time we check our phones. Rewards are also huge triggers. In the case of slot machines, the potential reward is obviously money; on our phones, some of the most common rewards come in the form of social affirmation, such as a like or a comment on a post. This is why apps such as social media, the news, email, games and shopping are so easy to lose time on: they’re the ones with the most dopamine triggers.
If we don’t recognize what is happening – and don’t consciously fight back – we can become so conditioned to seek out dopamine hits from our devices that, like lab rats trained to press a lever to get food, we click or tap on anything that promises to deliver one, regardless of whether it has importance or value to us.
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The consequences, from a global level, are shocking. As Harris writes: “Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act and live our lives.”
What’s more, we’ve become so conditioned, thanks to dopamine, to believe that checking our phones is a behavior worth repeating that when we can’t check our phones, we often feel anxious, and start to experience Fomo, the “fear of missing out”. Anxiety is, of course, unpleasant, and so what do we do to alleviate it? We check our phones. And when we do, we encounter a dopamine trigger, which reinforces the idea that checking phones is a behavior worth repeating. And the cycle continues.
Until, that is, we break it.
One of my first steps in my own phone breakup process was to minimize my exposure to dopamine triggers by turning off most of my notifications, hiding or deleting my most time-sucking apps (for me it was email and the news), and turning my phone’s screen to black and white. I also created physical boundaries with my phone by banning it from my bedroom and the dining room table, and charging it in a closet at night. (I keep a book or my journal on my bedside table where my phone used to be.)
I also asked myself what I actually wanted to do with my free time, and made those activities as accessible as possible, so that when I felt tempted to reach for my phone, I would encounter an easy – and more rewarding – alternative. For example, I wanted to get better at guitar, so I used some of the time I’d reclaimed from my phone to sign up for a group class, and began to leave my guitar out of its case at home – a simple change that greatly increased the chances of me winding down at the end of the day by practicing instead of mindlessly scrolling. I began to waste less time on my phone, and as the result of taking the in-person class, I met a community of like-minded adults and made some unexpected new friends.
My relationship with my phone still isn’t perfect – no relationship ever is. But it has improved in ways I never would have anticipated when I first decided to break up with it. I notice more. I’m more present. I feel calmer and more connected – to my family, my friends and myself. Life seems more colorful. And these days, instead of allowing my phone to be a time-wasting temptation, I try to use it as a reminder to ask a question that I encourage you to ask yourself:
This is your life. What do you want to pay attention to?
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Catherine Price is the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone and the How to Feel Alive newsletter, dedicated to helping people scroll less and live more.
