Have you ever watched people on their phones—entranced, totally disconnected from what is around them, their thoughts and feelings being shaped by what’s on the screen?
Have you felt yourself being shaped by screen time? Do your eyes focus differently after looking at screens? Does your body feel stiff? Are you tired because you were on your device past bedtime?
After you put down the screen, are you still thinking about what you saw or dealing with feelings? Do you find yourself on your phone more than you would like? Unconsciously reaching for it to keep boredom at bay?
You are not alone.
Around half of Americans report feeling addicted to their phones, with adults averaging upwards of five hours per day on their screens.
And those hours add up. At five hours a day, in one week you will spend about a day and a half looking at your phone. In one year, you will spend 76 days looking at it. If you own a phone for 40 years, you will have spent more than 8 years on it.
Tech addiction is the opium of our times, an epidemic that is quietly eroding our lives, weakening our health and relationships.
It is something all of us with a smartphone, iPad, or laptop must contend with.
Many of us want to use our phones less. The good news is that phone addiction can be conquered and you can regain control of your life.
Why We’re Addicted
Screens, apps, and other digital platforms are addictive because they are designed to be so. The attention economy is now worth more than $800 billion dollars globally. Our eyeballs online are big business, so there is great incentive to keep us hooked.
“The technology itself is addictive, with its flashing lights, musical fanfare, bottomless bowls and promise, with ongoing engagement, of ever-greater rewards,” wrote Anna Lembke in her book “Dopamine Nation.”
Lembke is a psychiatrist and medical director of Stanford’s addiction medicine program.
Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and formerly a design ethicist at Google, pointed out that companies go to a lot of effort to make phones something you cannot put down.
“Your telephone in the 1970s didn’t have a thousand engineers … updating the way your telephone worked every day to be more and more persuasive,” Harris said in a 2017 interview on CBS.
He said cellphones are a lot like slot machines; the intermittent gratification we get from using them keeps us coming back for more. The down swipe and scroll motion also mimics the lever pull of older slot machines.
Different apps and platforms use different techniques, such as leveraging your likes and dislikes. Things you enjoy give you dopamine hits, and rage bait articles also keep you engaged.
On my Facebook feed, I’ve seen bait articles on topics dear to the hearts of people on the political left and right. The content shocks people into sharing. And this is getting easier to do with the growth of AI.
As author Catherine Price pointed out in the book “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” we are going to get good at anything we do four hours a day, and it’s going to change the myelin pathways in our brains.
“In order to maximize the amount of time we spend on our devices, designers manipulate our brain chemistry in ways that are known to trigger compulsive behaviors,” she wrote.
Your Brain on Tech
The comparison of tech to opium, an addictive drug, is not an idle one. Brain scans show that your brain on tech starts to look like a brain on drugs.
Multiple studies have shown that screens decrease grey matter and atrophy the frontal lobe in developing brains. These areas are responsible for executive functioning, among other things.
“We have research from several recent brain-imaging studies that show us that tech exposure can also alter brain structure and myelination in exactly the same way drugs can,” wrote Nicholas Kardaras in his book “Glow Kids.”
Kardaras is one of the foremost experts on children and screen addiction.
Myelin is the whitish-colored substance that, like the plastic coating on electrical wires, forms protective sheaths in the brain that allow electrical signals to pass more quickly between neurons, thereby making our brains more efficient.
Without myelin, our brains would be slow, much like dial-up internet connections. Myelin is vulnerable to environmental stressors such as overstimulation, which screens can cause.
“What problems can develop as a result of this myelin-destroying overstimulation? Our ability to pay attention and focus, our ability to feel empathy and our ability to discern reality can all be adversely affected by overstimulation during key developmental windows,” Kardaras wrote.
Anytime my younger children get screen time (which I try to keep rare), it looks like I’ve given them a sedative drug—immediately they become still and quiet, completely entranced, which is not at all their natural state of being. And, like little addicts coming down from a high, removal from screens can cause tantrums and hyperactivity as children try to reorient themselves to the world around them.
In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a cognitive neuroscientist and former teacher, said that children today are less cognitively capable than their parents due to screens in and outside the classroom.
“Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform [their parents] on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention, to memory, to literacy, to numeracy, to executive functioning, to even general IQ; even though they go to more school than we did,” he said.
He said cross-country studies indicate that when technology is adopted in the classroom, school performance drops.
Screens also affect adult brains. Researchers at a Canadian university reviewed over 40 studies across a dozen countries and found that excessive screen time is linked to thinning of the cerebral cortex in brains of young adults; they also found that chronic digital exposure increases risk of premature cognitive decline and early-onset dementia.
How to Break Free
It is possible to break free from screen addiction, to be in control of the way you use your phone or any device.
A good place to start is by reflecting honestly about what screen issues you need to address. What other areas in your life are being harmed by your screen? And on a more positive note, what are some things you’ve been wanting to do that you don’t currently have time for?
In “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” Price suggested starting this process with a breakup letter where you state your feelings and intentions for your new relationship with your phone.
“What starts out as a playful exercise often ends up becoming quite poignant and vulnerable,” she wrote.
Next, create some boundaries and barriers that make it harder or less fun to use your phone. Barriers include turning off all notifications that are not absolutely necessary, deleting problem apps, or putting a rubber band around your phone screen so you have to move it to use the phone—the slight inconvenience can give you time to ask yourself if you really want to be using your phone at the moment. Some people also find timed lock-boxes helpful.
Boundaries are things like setting times to check email and important chats and to shop, and creating no-phone zones or times.
The first boundary I set for myself was not to use my phone in the bathroom, because I don’t want my children to have that image of me. No screen time during family meals is another good boundary.
It’s also important to guard your rest time, as fatigue makes it much more difficult to resist the lure of the screen. Get an alarm clock and keep your phone and other screen devices outside your bedroom. Create a bedtime routine that relaxes and uplifts you: Read, stretch, journal, listen to an audiobook, pray, meditate.
And don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning. I put my meditation music on my old phone without internet so I can focus on inner calm before I allow potential distractions to arise.
Another way to create a better relationship with your technology is to habit-stack good habits onto your regular use. For example, I trained myself to correct my posture whenever I connect my phone to my home speakers. When I have on-screen work to do at night, I gently stretch while I do it.
Mindfulness, as Price points out, is at the core of a healthy relationship with your devices. We can become conscious of what we want our screentime to look like and pay attention to what impedes or distracts us from our goals. Price also recommends incorporating body-mind awareness, as many people find their screen use makes them feel mentally or physically unwell and this can be a great motivation to change.
And, ultimately, taking a digital sabbath can offer a great opportunity to connect with life around you, as well as giving you time to rest and reset from digital overstimulation.
“How to Break Up With Your Phone” has a 30-day phone reset challenge that walks you gently through a transformation in your phone or screen use, with simple tasks and mindfulness exercises to learn each day. With her step-by-step approach, you also have time to focus on things you enjoy and fill your newly released time with what makes you truly happy.
And as you change your screen habits, your brain will change too.
In “Dopamine Nation,” Lembke explained that when you engage in highly stimulating, pleasurable activities that release a lot of dopamine, your brain compensates by upping the bar, so you continually need more stimulation for the same dopamine release and pleasurable feeling. At the same time, you lose the ability to take pleasure from less stimulating activities.
So, as you use screens less, like a drug addict going through withdrawal, you may not feel good or happy for a period of time, but as your brain lowers the bar, pleasure in other things returns.
Breaking free from screen addiction is a journey. You will take steps forward and back, but persist, and you will find a new, stronger, happier self.
And please comment below, what has helped you most to overcome screen addiction?
