8 Stoic Tips For Spending Less Time On Your Phone

On today’s episode, Ryan talks about what Stoicism can teach you about managing your phone use. If Marcus Aurelius was alive today, he would use a phone too. But he would be thinking about how to get the benefits from the technology without all the downsides. Try these strategies out if you're trying to spend less time on your phone. Some of them are easy. Others are tougher, and you’ll probably think some of them are nuts. Maybe they are. But they work. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You are almost certainly listening to this on your phone or you're in the car, which is just your phone plugged in to turn your car into a giant phone, or you've got it on like a Sono speaker. And again, somehow that connects back to the phone. And it feels like so much of our lives connect back to the phone in some way or another. And there's no question this has improved our lives in countless ways. It makes my whole business possible. You may have found me on some social app on your phone. So I'm not knocking phones, but I also don't know any person, successful or unsuccessful, I don't know any person who's like, you know what I'm going to try to do this year?

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to try to spend more time on my devices. Now, we all know that these devices are a bit too addicting, that we spend too much time on them. And you might not think the Stoics have much to say about, you know, screen time, because screens didn't exist. But Seneca does talk about being really wary of anything that makes you a slave to it. And I think if we're honest, a lot of us are slaves to these devices. And as I, as I talk about in today's episode, you know, I want to use the phone. I don't want to be used by the phone. And I think that, that is the good line. You know, a healthy amount of screen time is when You are using it productively to get something accomplished. You need to get accomplished. And it's when you are turning into the product that the phone is selling to Facebook

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  or Instagram or whatever, that's when it starts to be a problem, when you are powerless over the phone. And so in today's episode, we have Stoic tips for spending less time on your phone. And I think, look, if Marcus was alive today, he would use a phone, but he'd be thinking about how to get benefits from that technology without the downsides. So try some of these strategies out and talk about controlling your inputs, deciding how to be reachable, where you should sleep with your phone. I don't think it should be in your room. We're talking about phone-free mornings, which is a big part of my routine, some extra technological fixes that make stuff better, and of course, what not to do with your phone. I think you'll like this one.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  Here's how to use your phone less according to the Stoics.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  I remember the first BlackBerry I got, this would have been in 2007, maybe 2006. I remember being so excited about the idea of having a phone with email on it. That meant I was like a real business person. There was something, I think, that tickled my ego about that. It was amazing how quickly the blessing became a curse. You become addicted to the phone. The phone becomes the center of your life. Even now, I'm getting a spam call in the middle of me talking to you. Whatever the opposite of philosophy is, that's what this device is. The question is, are you using the phone or is the phone using you?

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  Over the years, as someone who travels a lot, has a lot of obligations, a lot of incoming stuff, a lot of stuff to manage, I've thought a lot about how Stoicism can help us manage our screen time. So the first thing I think about is controlling our inputs. Napoleon, famously, I tell this story, and stillness is the key. Napoleon would not check his mail sometimes for up to three weeks. He said, "I want things to resolve themselves without me." And his point was, if he's always checking, people are always going to come to him. If he steps back a little bit, things will resolve themselves for him. That's a critical question. Now, Marcus really says, "Is this essential?" He says, "Ask yourself that with everything you do and say and think."

• 4:36Ryan Holiday?

  And so what I've had to try to manage with my phone is really asking, you know, do I need to know all this stuff? Is it actually making me better? Does it need me? Am I a critical variable in this? Another decision I made similar to that point about Napoleon is I want to decide how I'm going to be reachable. So, you know, the problem is every app or service you join creates a new inbox and different people contact you through those different inboxes. And then you're a slave to like a billion inboxes. And that's, like, that's no way to live. I limit myself basically to three. You can text me, email me, or call me. And if you're not my friend, don't text me. Right? Email's sort of the central inbox that I try to do. And then I even have two different inboxes.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  I have like my inbox for real human beings that I'm interacting with, including like fans and stuff. And then I have like my sign up for things inbox. I don't want my phone to tell me that Amazon has a, has a promotion running. I don't care about that. I don't want to be checking 20 inboxes 50 times a day. Right? And the, and the point, knowing that if the inbox exists, you will try to check it. Another decision that I've made that's been huge for the phone is don't sleep with your phone in your room. As Marcus says, most of the things that are going to interrupt you are not essential. People go, but what if you get an emergency call? Do you know how many emergency calls I've gotten in my entire life? Like zero. And, and if, if it really is an emergency, people will find a way to get ahold of you.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  So I don't, I don't sleep with my phone in my room and I don't use my phone as an alarm clock in my room. That's just an excuse to check it at night. Obviously for the Stokes, it's about having willpower, but don't put yourself in a position where your willpower is being needlessly tested. So when I go to bed at, you know, I usually go to bed around 10 o'clock. That's the last time I'm touching my phone for the night. And then another rule, I've talked about this before. I, I, I set a rule up a few years ago. I don't check my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake, right? So I get up, I do my journaling, I go for a walk with my family, I read, I'll do any number of things, but I don't check my phone when I first wake up. So that means if I get eight hours sleep, and then, like this morning, I woke up at

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  a little bit before six, I spent time with my son, we went on a walk, I spent time with my wife, I showered, I got ready to go write. I didn't touch my phone for the first time until about 8:15, 8:30. So it's two and a half hours that I didn't have my phone in the morning. You add that into when I went to bed, now I'm 10, 10 and a half hours phone free. So it's almost like intermittent fasting for your phone. Weirdly, I think the smartwatch has been a big part of me not using my phone as much. It vibrates when I have, you know, a calendar thing that I have to take care of, but that's about it. And I don't think this is un-Stoic. If you find yourself, you know, slipping in a way over and over again, like Epictetus says, you know, "Sometimes if you're having trouble with a habit, try the opposite habit."

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  I kept finding that I was reaching into my pocket to check the time. I want to know what time it is, and the phone is the only thing that I carry that told me the time. So by getting a watch, a smartwatch, in this case, I'm checking my phone less, and that was really important. AirPods have been a big part of that, too. I like to do my calls while I'm walking. If I'm on the phone, I'm almost always walking, but I slip the phone in my pocket, I put on the AirPods, and then I'm not also checking things at the same time.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  Don't have social apps on your phone. A big breakthrough I had was, look, I have to use Instagram for my job. I mean, we have a million Instagram followers at @dailystoic, @dailyphilosopher's got 250, I have 200. This has been a great way to reach millions of people all over the world about Stoicism, and my friends are on there, and there's value. I enjoy the creativity of those platforms. But I don't want them on my phone, right? So they're on my wife's phone. Drama, the founder of Young and Reckless, he was telling me he has like a fun phone and a work phone, and he leaves his fun phone in the car when he goes in to work. I don't really use my phone for entertainment like at all. I don't watch movies on it, I don't watch TV on it.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  When I get on a plane, although it's been a while, when I get on a plane, I don't pull up my phone and watch stuff, I read books. My phone is not a portable television, a portable entertainment device. I don't have games. Look, really smart people have worked really hard to make these technologies as addictive as possible. You've got to cut that out. The term we're using for this now is doom scrolling, right? Where we pull up social media and we just get sucked into the negativity. We pull up the news and we just get sucked into reading one story after another. You know, Epictetus says, "If you wish to be improved, be content to be seen as ignorant or foolish about things." Marx to be realist is, "Stop being bounced around by gossip."

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  You know, some, creating a bubble of kind of selective ignorance. Like, look, I think it's essential to be an informed citizen. There's no evidence that reading the news obsessively on your phone makes you an informed citizen. There's actually a lot of evidence to the contrary that shows this makes you, you know, a contributing member of society. In fact, I think part of the reason we are so radicalized and divided is because of our obsessions with the news and the phones and just how much time we spend on these devices. I think one of the reasons we are so addicted to these things is there a way of disconnecting and numbing ourselves from what we should be thinking about and wrestling with and feeling.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca talks about looking at the things in your life that you're a slave to and looking at those things quite critically and eliminating those dependencies as much as possible. When you're dependent on something, you're not free. Epictetus talked to me, he's like, "Look, there's physical slavery and that's really, really bad." He said, "But there's plenty of rich, successful people who think they are free, who are a slave to so many different things, who are not even remotely free." And I think that's a great example of what these devices have become. They're, it's an incredible bit of technology. It's changed the world in so many positive ways. But it's hard to deny there's also been a real negative change, which is that we're dependent on them.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  To me, stillness is the key through which creativity comes, happiness comes, presence comes. When Blaise Pascal said, "All of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone." This thing is what makes sitting quietly in a room really, really hard. Even as I've been talking to you for 10 minutes, my phone, even with the strategies that I'm talking about, is not my friend. It's trying to hack away at just the few minutes that I'm concentrating on doing this thing. And realizing that the phone has technology and it has intention behind it that's designed to attack that peace of mind is, I think, a really important breakthrough. You can be philosophical and have a phone. If Marcus Aurelius lived in the time of an iPhone,

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  would he use one? Of course, because it allows you to do all sorts of things that would have been inconceivable to the Romans a really long time ago. But that doesn't mean that we have to be a slave to them now. Deep work matters. Focus, dedicated, creative time, presence, philosophical time. It's essential, right? And when I said earlier that the phone is the opposite of philosophy, what is philosophy? It's the ability to concentrate, to see the big picture, to not be rattled by things that don't matter, to be control of oneself, right? To be autonomous. If you're spending hours and hours a day in front of a tiny screen, if the screen can make you do this, like this, like this, if you're like a rat in a cage responding to a bell, you are not being philosophical,

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  you are not being free, and you are not being the person you were put here to be. The key thing for the Stoics, for all things, is to be the one in control, not the one being controlled. You want to make sure you're using the phone, not the phone is using you. And that's how a philosopher, that's how a Stoic, that's their relationship with their devices.

• 12:51Ryan Holiday?

  If you're looking for ways to keep these Stoic lessons with you, check out our Daily Stoic store. These are all items that were designed to embody Stoicism, to help you carry the Stoic practice with you. We wanted to make things that we would actually use ourselves. That's why we don't make t-shirts, or stickers, or wristbands. We make things of super high quality that we stand behind, that we think are awesome, that embody Stoicism. We have our Memento Mori medallion, our Morfati medallion. We have prints with Marcus Aurelius quotes and so much more. You can check out dailystoic.com/store for more. Thanks for listening, and see you soon.