Your phone is killing you (how to stop your addiction)

okay so according to worldwide screen time statistics the average person spends 6 hours and 40 minutes in front of screens which is mostly their phone every single day that is 40% of our waking hours and so if you imagine yourself being alive for at least the next 50 years of the next 50 years you are spending 20 years looking at screens which is probably your phone I think it is fair to say that a lot of us are addicted to our phones and generally most of us probably don't want to be addicted to our phones so if you feel like your screen time is a little bit high and I'm hoping by watching this video you'll understand why phone addiction happens in the first place and why it's hard to deal with secondly why it's bad and why we should try to deal with it and thirdly I'm going to share seven actionable tips that I've personally found really helpful for breaking my own phone addiction and reducing my screen time so that I can use my time in a way that's generally healthier and happier and more productive and if you're new to the channel then hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm also the author of Feelgood productivity which is a book about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's actually enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable and I have done a a lot of digging into the signs of dopamine and how this phone addiction thing works because it is just such a Scourge in the modern world and I'm always interested in how do we find ways to combat this phone addiction that is so common amongst basically everyone part one why is your phone so addictive now I'm pretty sure we can all think of a time when we've unlocked our phones to quickly check something like Instagram or emails or whatever and then you end up spending 2 hours just absolutely glue to the screen now there is a guy called DrLarry Rosen who wanted to find out exactly how many times we fall into this trap now according to his website DrLarry Rosen is an expert expert in the psychology of technology and he's published a lot of studies on phone addiction now back in 2016 he got a bunch of students to download an app onto their phone for 8 weeks and that tracked two things firstly it tracked how many times they unlocked their phone and secondly how many minutes it stayed unlocked and what he found that these students unlocked their phone a lot more than you might think they unlocked their phone over 60 times a day and they were on their phones for over 3 and 1 half hours or 220 minutes specifically and yes of course our phones are useful and blah blah blah but the problem is that we are becoming more and more addicted to our phones and what's even scarier is that this is not entirely under our control there is this phenomenon that's often called brain hacking which is where technology is being purposefully designed to change the way that we think and to control the habits that we form which literally ends up changing how our brain functions and this is all part of what we call the attention economy now the economy part like economics is about how finite resources like food and money are made and shared and consumed but then the attention part comes in because our attention can be traded in exactly the same way because it is a limited resource in that when we pay attention to something we have to ignore something else and so in this attention economy that we've been in for many years now tech companies are all competing for our limited attention and this makes us the product rather than the customer so it's like this is you you pour soul and you've got your device or whatever the thing might be let's actually put this over here this is the device and you have all these different companies that are trying to advertise to you and the way they advertise to you is through the social media apps on your device and so the more time you spend on your phone essentially the more these companies can advertise to you and the more Revenue these different companies make because they make all this money from the advertising dollars and so the way that these incentives are structured these social media companies have armies of thousands of ridiculously smart Engineers who are all trying to work really hard to keep you on your phone and your brain your poor brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for an environment that is not the environment that we are in today and these companies do really clever things like for example if you're on any of these scrolling apps there's in infinite scroll like you can literally never run out of things to scroll and something that apps like Instagram even do is that they hold back the likes so that you get them when you're least exp in it and this is an idea called random intermittent reward which spikes our dopamine levels and I've actually got a video all about the sence of dopamine which you are very welcome to watch after this one that'll be link down below but essentially we release dopamine when we get some sort of unexpected reward and so if you want to design something to be very addictive you would try and add as many dopamine triggers as possible and that is exactly what's being done with your phone and with social media and then what is even worse is that literally everything we do is being tracked by these various companies so that they can then Target us with even more targeted ads with even more targeted content that releases even more dopamine and so the big takeaway from this is that if you feel like you are addicted to your phone don't worry it's not your fault uh you are fighting a losing battle in this attention economy because we literally cannot compete against the armies of Engineers who these companies have hired to take control of our attention but having said that even though it's not our fault that we're in the situation it is our responsibility to take control of the situation and to do the things that are under our control to help cure our phone addiction and if you want to become even more productive and waste even less time then you might like to check out grammarly who are the sponsor of today's video now me and my team members spend a lot of time writing and typing across dozens of different platforms like slack and Google Docs and email and notion and stuff and we like using grammarly to make sure that our writing is as effective and efficient as possible and we' really found that better writing in these messages leads to fewer meetings Gramm is an AI writing partner that helps professionals like you and me write better and faster and you can always use it in line within your apps so you can use the suggestions and make changes quickly also their AI features are completely free to use and one thing that sets grammarly apart from other AI tools is that it works seamlessly across over 500,000 apps and websites so you can use it at all times on basically any software that you're using and plus it can adapt to my audience and to my tone to make sure that I don't sound like a robot or sound too professional depending on what you're trying to go for grammarly has 14 years of best-in-class communication Ai and it's used and trusted by tens of millions of professionals so it's a bit of a no-brainer for your writing needs if any of that sounds good you can sign up and download grammarly for free using the link grammarly. com Al abdal which is also in the video description so thank you so much gramly for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it part two what is the problem with phone addiction okay so one of the big problems with phone addiction is that we often don't realize that we are addicted until we lose our phones or we don't have our phones like you've probably been in that situation where you think oh crap I haven't got my phone you check your pockets you check your bags it's not there and you feel this like acute anxiety response at the thought that you don't have your phone with you now this is actually a phenomenon called nomophobia which is the fear of not being able to use your smartphone and there are actually some interesting research studies that look at what happens to our bodies when we can't check our phones so firstly there was this really cool paper published in 2021 that randomly split a bunch of people into two groups groups one group called The text group had their phones taken away from them and they were told to leave their notifications on so they could hear their phone but they couldn't see their phone and then in the other group The no text group the phones were kept on them but they were turned on silent the researchers then hooked up everyone in both groups to monitors on their fingers that measured firstly their heart rate and secondly changes in their skin conductance like sweating which tells us about anxiety and they monitored these metrics as the students were watching a 10-minute lecture that they were going to be tested on afterwards now the really sneaky thing was that during this 10-minute video they sent four texts to each of the people in the groups and what the results found was that for people in the text group I for the people that did not have their phones with them but could hear the phones buzzing there was actually a significant increase in their skin activity which tells us that the nomophobia increased their levels of anxiety and then another really interesting study found that young people who overuse their phone and experien a lot of withdrawal symptoms have increased cortisol levels and cortisol is your body's main stress hormone and we basically become so addicted to checking our phones that when we can't access them our bodies respond in the same way as if we were being chased by animal in the wild the fight or flight response and when we experience this nomophobia the only way to feel less anxious is to check our phone and so we get trapped in this addictive cycle now alongside nomophobia there are a few other interesting phrases that people have come up with there is ring xiety when you always check your phone because you have a feeling that you've got a text or I had to call and texti which is that anxious feeling that you get when you feel like you always have to reply to messages as soon as you get them and basically more and more research points to this correlation between phone addiction and mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression and paranoia oh and by the way if if you're enjoying this video and you find yourself a little bit addicted to your phone you might like to check out my completely free 7-Day Focus crash course this is a 7-Day email course where I'll send you an email every day that sort of breaks down some principles strategies and tools you can use to improve your ability to focus it's completely free you can unsubscribe whenever you want and you can go to focus crashcourse tocom or click the link down below and you can check that out if you like now there's this guy called Jonathan height who is a psychologist and the author of a really good book called The anxious generation and his whole case in the book and he argues this quite commin I think is that the reason why J Z have way higher incidence of mental health problems like depression and anxiety and other other things is that between 2010 to 2015 when genz people were sort of going through puberty which is a sensitive area for human development that was when we had this massive surge in the use of smartphones and social media we're not talking 10 or 20% increases here for most things we're talking close to a doubling especially for the younger girls now at this point you might be thinking yeah but that's just because jenz are more open about talking about mental health and this is what Jonathan hey says in response a lot of people say oh you know it's just self or um you know just genz they're really they're really um positive about mental health and they're willing to talk about it's a good thing but the fact that we see the exact same curves the very sharp uptick for girls um in Hospital admissions for self harm psychiatric emergency department visits and we see this in the US Canada Australia New Zealand uh the UK um the Scandinavian countries so something happened across the developed World um around 20 2012 and so how do we explain this pattern that we're seeing here well here is Jonathan height again from his interview with Andrew hubman if you want to understand why one person is depressed there are going to be many stories but if you want to understand why depression rates Rose for girls faster than boys all over the developed World unless someone confined like some hormone disrupting chemical that was suddenly sprayed over northern Europe and and the South Pacific and the US and Canada around 2012 there is no there is no alternative explanation so we've tolded about how your phone addiction is potentially increasing your anxiety and your depression but it's also contributing to procrastination so there's research for example that's found that the more you use your smartphone the less self-control you have through a mechanism called delay discounting so for example you've got this sort of instant gratification thing where playing on your PlayStation right now feels better than doing that work thing that work assignment or that school assignment or whatever the thing might be and so you're always going to prioritize the short-term thing which leads to procrastination which generally leads you to feel worse about your life and then perhaps I Al Point number four is that phone addiction can actually contribute to things like loneliness as well so for example this study from 2018 found that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant Improvement in well-being and in the study they essentially found that students who were limiting the smartphone use to just 30 minutes had decreases in loneliness and also depression compared to a group of students who was just using their smartphones as normal now so far we've only touched on a handful of the negative impacts of phone addiction there's loads of other stuff like reduced sleep and reduced cognitive performance and reduced ability to learn and so much more but now let's move on to part three which is that okay cool we know that phones are addictive we know that we probably struggle with that what can we actually do about it okay so there's a bunch of strategies that we can use to help take control of our phone addiction so that we're in control of it rather than it being in control of us my personal favorite is using apps to block other apps so there is a really good app called opal I have no affiliation with them it is a paid app it's very good I use that but also you can set screen time limits on your phones and what this does is that it either enforces an upper limit on how much time you you can spend on a particular app which is a good thing or it blocks those apps completely between certain times so in my case for example I have opal set to block all social media apps from 9:00 p. m.

through to 9:00 a. m. in the morning which means I'm never scrolling at night and I'm also never scrolling first thing in the morning cuz I literally can't because the app is just blocking me from doing that this is often the first thing I prescribe uh when I speak to friends and team members and when people ask me questions and stuff related to phone addiction it's like do you have a app blocking app downloaded on your phone if not do it it's free or cheap and it's really easy to do and immediately frees up way more time and it's just a very Roi positive way to buy back more of your time secondly the thing that I find really useful is to set automatic Focus modes on my phone so essentially I live my entire life through my calendar I have all my work stuff in my calendar I also have social events in my calendar and so when my phone detects that there is an event in my calendar it automatically turns on Focus mode which means I never see notifications and there's only a handful of contacts like my girlfriend and my brother and my mom and grandma and stuff whose calls and texts can actually come through so I still see important notifications but I don't see all of the random group chats and all the slack messages and the emails and all of the other stuff that will take me away from the thing that I'm actually trying to do which might be work but it might just also be having dinner with friends for example thirdly as a really simple hack to improve your sleep try having your phone not on your bedside table but either have it on charge across the room from you so you have to get out of bed to access your phone or in an absolutely Ideal World have your phone charging overnight in a different room and the thing I recommend is that you have a Kindle on your bedside table because it's light is very Dam and it means you can read bed and it means if you wake wake up in the middle of the night and you find yourself unable to sleep you can just read a book which will then hopefully put you to sleep rather than scrolling on your phone tip number four is to rearrange the apps on your phone something that I do is that I don't have any social media apps actually on any of my home screens if I want to access into to Instagram I have to swipe down I have to type in Instagram and I have to click on it and only then can I open Instagram that's kind of nice it works a lot of the time but another thing you can do is you can install an app called one sec I used to use one sec quite a lot I've now replaced it with opal because I just prefer the way opal does it but what one sec does is that you download the app and then every time you open Instagram or YouTube or Tik Tok or whatever the thing might be it creates this artificial loading screen that says you know you've got to wait 5 seconds before opening the app it encourages you to take a breath it puts links to other apps like Kindle and audible which you might want to access instead and then if you decide after those 5 Seconds that you want to access Instagram you can access Instagram it's not a problem but usually in those 5 Seconds when you've taken that breath it allows us to have that gap between stimulus and response it allows us to choose our response and to decide do I really want to go on Instagram right now or am I just going on it because it just you know my muscle memory just happens to press on it tip number six is to turn your phone to grayscale mode this is not something that I've tried personally but about half of my team seems to have their phone on grayscale all the time and I was speaking to Angus my general manager about this earlier and he absolutely swears by this he said that his screen time dropped by 50% because it just makes your phone way less addictive and way less interesting to use which means you would still use it for like messages and important stuff and phone calls dare I say but suddenly browsing Instagram or Tik Tok or YouTube becomes a lot less appetizing when you know that it's in grayscale mode rather than in full color mode and then tip number seven and this is something I find really really helpful is that where possible I try not to reply to messages from my phone I have all of my messaging apps on my computer I use an app called texts.