A 5-Step Approach to Ending Your Phone Addiction

Our phones make life easier in countless ways. They connect us, inform us, and keep our lives running. But they also creep into every quiet moment, stealing our focus and dulling the satisfaction we find in real experiences. In this episode of Office Hours, I talk about how our phones tap into the brain’s reward system and what we can do to reclaim control. I am not suggesting that you give up your devices entirely, since that is likely unrealistic for most people. Instead, I offer simple guardrails that help you enjoy the benefits of technology without letting it dominate your day. I share five practical strategies to create boundaries that help you stay focused, balanced, and fully present. — Brought to you by: • Expedia https://www.expedia.com/—Bundle and save on your next trip with Expedia https://www.expedia.com/ — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (04:22) An overview of dopamine and its role in learning, motivation, and reward (09:08) How addiction hijacks dopamine, and why some of us are more vulnerable than others (13:50) Who is most at risk for phone addiction and other dangers of phone use (17:48) The two paths to breaking addiction and when moderation simply doesn’t work (19:09) Why moderation is the right approach for phones and how much we’re overusing them (24:33) Strategy #1: Tech-free times (28:45) Strategy #2: Tech-free zones (30:45) Strategy #3: Device-free breaks (32:09) Strategy #4: Mindful consumption (36:21) Strategy #5: Turn off your notifications (39:33) Q&A: Handling anxiety when you put your phone down (41:00) Q&A: Breaking the morning phone habit (41:53) Q&A: Finding happiness as an introvert — Referenced: • How to Build a Life: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ • The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Files-Insights-Arthur-Brooks/dp/B0F4MFQ6VN • Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence: https://www.amazon.com/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence/dp/152474672X • Anhedonia: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/25155-anhedonia • How Cues Drive Our Behavior: https://neurosciencenews.com/behavior-cues-dopamine-9654 • Dopamine and Addiction: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103337 • Neurotransmitter Dopamine (DA) and its Role in the Development of Social Media Addiction: https://www.iomcworld.org/open-access/neurotransmitter-dopamine-da-and-its-role-in-the-development-of-social-media-addiction-59222.html • 2 Proven Strategies (and 1 Big Mistake) for Dealing with Anxiety: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/podcast/2-proven-strategies-and-1-big-mistake-for-dealing-with-anxiety • Are bored minds more likely to be addicted? The relationship between boredom proneness and problematic mobile phone use: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460319314364 • Depression, anxiety, and smartphone addiction in university students- A cross-sectional study: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/08/22/how-teens-and-parents-navigate-screen-time-and-device-distractions • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

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

• 0:00Arthur Brooks?

  You probably want to use your phone less. And you want to be more present for the people in your life. You want to really listen when your spouse and kids talk to you. You don't like the fact that you're always distracted. Why am I addicted to my phone? Why am I looking at it all day long? I'm having conflicts with other people. I don't want to live this way, but I keep coming back to it again and again and again and again. Now, today, the average person checks their phone 205 times a day. That's just all day long. If that's the case, and you're not ready to actually seek out one of these clinics and, you know, sign up for $1,000 a month GLP-1 drugs. There is a lot of research that shows that you can DIY this. And the way to do it is by doing five things.

• 0:48Arthur Brooks?

  Hey friends, Arthur Brooks here. Welcome to Office Hours. This is a show about happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to studying happiness. I want to spend my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And I want you to understand that science as well. That's what this show is about. I want you to be a happier person. And I want you to join me in the movement of teaching other people the secrets to living happier, better lives. That's why I want you to join me each week and learn some of the science that I'm talking about here. But most importantly, how you can use it, how you can bring it to other people as well. Today's show is about something that people have complained to me about an awful lot, which is how they're being governed by their phones.

• 1:33Arthur Brooks?

  How they feel like they're kind of living in a simulation, as it were. A lot of life doesn't feel real because it's so mediated by the ever-present phone. Why am I addicted to my phone? Why am I looking at it all day long? I'm having conflicts with other people. I don't want to live this way, but I keep coming back to it again and again and again and again. Today's episode is about how to break a phone addiction. And I'm going to be very specific today. I'm going to talk to you about how addiction works. I'm going to talk to you about how the technology affects your brain. And then I'm going to give you five things to do that are science-tested that will break this addiction. It'll make it so you can still use your technology, because what are you going to do? Move to a monastery? No, you have to live in the world. But doing these five things will really change your life.

• 2:18Arthur Brooks?

  And we know that because we have the research that tells us is so. As always, if you have questions or criticisms or comments or anything that's on your mind, please reach out. We love hearing from you. [email protected]. That's our email address. You can also leave a review on Spotify or Apple. And it really helps if you subscribe. If you subscribe, the algorithm gods actually do nice things for us. That may be superstitious, but one way or the other, do subscribe and like and everything else that you do. Subscribe to my newsletter as well. For those of you who are not subscribing to the newsletter, there's a lot of people doing that today. And it's free and it follows the themes from the podcast, but does so in a little bit more depth in certain ways and writes down and gives you some links to things that are useful to look at.

• 3:03Arthur Brooks?

  Once a month, also, you'll get a personal update. You can find out what's going on in Arthur's life, if that's interesting to you. Some people think it is amazingly. One of the best ways for you to inflect your happiness upward is by developing more openness to new experiences. And one of the best ways to do that is by seeing new things that are away from home. That's why travel has been associated in so much research with higher levels of happiness. Travel leads to greater happiness. I know that for a fact. I've been traveling my whole life and I love to travel. That's why I'm so pleased that I get to talk about Expedia. Expedia is an all-in-one travel site. I love it. I use it constantly. We book flights, hotels, rental cars. You could do cruises, vacation packages, kind of anything that you need to do that's away from home,

• 3:47Arthur Brooks?

  you can do through Expedia to plan your next trip, make it easy to find the best deals and, you know, just have the best possible seamless, easy journey. So you can focus on what you really care about, which is getting out of the house and doing something cool. That's why I'm so pleased that Expedia is a sponsor of this podcast to make it easy and to find the best deals on every part of your wonderful journey toward greater happiness. I promise you, you're going to like what actually happens to your life. I certainly like what Expedia is doing for me. I'm a user myself and I recommend it to you. Start saving now at Expedia.com.

• 4:21Arthur Brooks?

  We're going to talk today, once again, phone addiction, how to quit, and five actionable steps that can improve your life. And let's start broadly by talking about addiction. How does addiction work? Addiction medicine has been revolutionized over the past 30 years because of neuroscience. People have become to have come to understand the biochemistry behind addiction. Almost all addictions are associated with a neurotransmitter that you all know about. You've been watching office hours. It's called dopamine. And there's been wonderful things written about it. The best book in recent times about addiction and dopamine is by Anna Lemke. She's a psychiatrist at Stanford. And she wrote a book called Dopamination. I strongly recommend it. I've read it. I've interviewed Anna. She's phenomenal. She's really great.

• 5:05Arthur Brooks?

  It's a great book, and it's kind of all you need to know. But let me tell you a little bit more about how dopamine gets you addicted to things. Now, to begin with, it's not a terrible unmitigated tyranny that we've got dopamine. People really regret that we have this. But if you didn't have dopamine, you'd be in big trouble. For example, clinical depression, major clinical depression, debilitating depression, is characterized largely by three phenomena. One is ruminative sadness, which is related to a neurotransmitter called serotonin. The other is what they call psychomotor retardation, which is to say that everything slows down, you slur your speech, your gait changes. That's from norepinephrine. And then the last is anhedonia. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure or to take pleasure in anything.

• 5:49Arthur Brooks?

  And that's related to dopamine. If you didn't have dopamine, your life would be just terrible, is the bottom line. You need it. Why was it evolved? The reason it was evolved, that neurochemical in your brain, was evolved so that you could learn things and live longer and prosper. That was the really important thing about dopamine. Dopamine is behind wanting, liking, and learning, which is the cycle of actually getting better at things that you need in your life to pass on your genes and to survive. Let me give you an example. Now, dopamine is spritzed into your brain in a little part of your brain called the locus ceruleus. And you get a little spritz when certain things happen. Let's go back 250,000 years ago to your Pleistocene ancestors. And they're living on the savanna someplace in Tanzania.

• 6:30Arthur Brooks?

  Let's say your ancestor goes out looking for food and says, I'm gonna go this way. I've never been over here before and finds a watering hole that he didn't know existed. Around that watering hole, he finds some gazelles. Lococerulias spits out a little bit of this, this dopamine. And what that dopamine is, is, is a reward. People say it's a pleasure chemical. It's really a reward chemical. It gives you a sense of, of winning. That's what it is. So it's not pleasure per se. It's not like, it's not like some sort of an endorphin. It just gives you this idea, I won, which is just great, which is, well, rewarding, right? And so you, you won by actually finding these gazelles. Okay, you go back to your campsite where you're living with all your other troglodyte friends.

• 7:15Arthur Brooks?

  You say, I found a bunch of gazelles around that watering hole. I found a new place to hunt. Next day, uh, 10:00 in the morning or something, it's time to go hunting. And you think about that watering hole and you get a little bit, a little tiny spritz of that, that dopamine. That gives you anticipation of reward and it, and it motivates you to go back to that watering hole and, and get yourself another gazelle. So you set out and you do that. You get to the watering hole and man, it turns out there's twice as many gazelles. And then you get just a big spritz of dopamine, which is even more of a reward for having won. That's scenario number one. Scenario number two, as you go back to that watering hole, no gazelles. In which case you don't just get no dopamine, your dopamine actually drops.

• 7:59Arthur Brooks?

  So you get a sense, not just not winning, of losing. And that's no fun at all. And that trains you again. So the more gazelles you find, the more you're trained to go back there and get gazelles. The fewer gazelles that you find, the more you're trained not to do that because you don't have the sense of losing. And this is how people, human beings, this is how Homo sapiens learned how to do stuff and to do stuff that was good for them. It was the training neurochemical wanting, learning, liking. You see how it works and see how you actually need it to prosper as a human being. We use this today, you know, you you find a new deli and you get a turkey sandwich at this deli. It's so delicious. Dopamine. The next day, you're 10 o'clock in the morning. Like your ancestor, you're thinking about lunch and you think, I'm gonna go to that deli and get the turkey sandwich.

• 8:43Arthur Brooks?

  Little tiny spurts of dopamine that motivates you. So that at noon time, you're gonna go out and do the work to get that turkey sandwich again. The deli is closed. That's gonna feel like you lost and you're gonna stop going to that deli. I don't wanna beat the dead horse, but I want you to understand that a lot of our behavior is motivated by the basic neuroscience. This is also not just about turkey sandwiches and gazelles. It's also about things that we don't, we're not super proud of, like abusing alcohol or pornography or anything that will capture your brain. Inappropriate internet use, junk food, whatever it happens to be. This is all part of the wanting, liking, learning cycle. These things that are really, really terrible for you.

• 9:24Arthur Brooks?

  You learn that it gives you some sort of neurochemical reward and that starts the cycle of dopamine. And then when you think about it, the craving that you feel for something that you're using, some behavior that you're engaged in, that you're ashamed of. That's because the dopamine, the dopamine in your brain goes, go get it.

• 9:41Arthur Brooks?

  Go get it. It motivates you to do it. It also means that for you to get more and more dopamine, you need to escalate your use, which is why people drink more and more and more or spend more and more and more time online or gamble all night long because they're looking for a more dopamine, more dopamine. In much the same way, if you were trying to hunt successfully, you'd want the rewards to escalate. In screen time, this is really abundantly clear. When you first got your cellphone, you didn't check it all that often. When you first got your smartphone, you checked it a lot more. It was more addictive. It gave you more dopamine. Now, today, the average person checks their phone 205 times a day. That's just all they log. Why?

• 10:23Arthur Brooks?

  Because you think about it, something crosses your mind, a little bit of dopamine says, go look at your phone. Now, if you look at your phone, there's nothing on it, like nobody texted me, nobody emailed me, whatever. There's no notifications on my social media. It's kind of like, that's a bummer. That's because your dopamine dipped. If there's more there than you thought, then you get a bump again. And it trains you, it trains your brain. And then you get more apps so that you there's more possibility that you're going to get the stimulus. And that's how escalation works. Now, this is also exacerbated by loneliness and boredom. You find that when people are lonely and bored, they're they're more exposed to the perils and the the risks of of of addiction is what we find. Um, that's certainly the case with alcohol.

• 11:04Arthur Brooks?

  The lonelier and more bored you are, the more likely you are to do something that will distract you, that will neurochemically distract you. Lonely bored people drink alcohol. By the way, the people who are most likely to get addicted to alcohol. As a side note, important side note, are people who are above average in income. And the reason for that is that they're not using it to quell their boredom and loneliness. They're using it to to to get rid of their anxiety. And alcohol is really, really effective at cutting the connection between the amygdala, which makes you feel fear. And anxiety is unfocused fear. Remember, we'll put in the links. Um, my episode on how anxiety works. It cuts the link between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So even though you're feeling anxiety, you don't know it. And so that's that's really helpful.

• 11:49Arthur Brooks?

  That's why if you're really, really stressed out, two drinks works. That's why it is. On the other side of it, anxiety is not the problem. Boredom and loneliness is you're more likely to drink in those circumstances as well. The problem with that is that the more you drink. The more lonely and bored you feel, and the more lonely and bored you feel, the more you drink. And it goes on and on and on. And that's the kind of this, the same kind of addiction that we'll actually see with screeds. So this is working the same way. On the same circuits with the same mechanisms as any sort of addiction. If you're addicted to social media, you're addicted to your screens. You're addicted to the apps, you're addicted to the tech. It's just the same thing as if you were addicted to, you know, gambling in Vegas or drinking booze or any other drug or behavior of addiction.

• 12:34Arthur Brooks?

  Thing is, we hate it. This is the funny thing. Things that we get addicted to are different than things that we we do with dopamine that are healthy. You know, your ancestors like, you know what? I can't stop going to that watering hole looking for gazelles, but I hate it. I hate myself for wondering if there are gazelles around that watering hole. Said no one ever, and that's because that's the way dopamine is supposed to be used. But we, in our ingenuity as human beings, have figured out a way to supercharge that process so that we get suprophysiological amounts of dopamine from particular behaviors or chemicals, and those are the things that we really hate. When we are doing things that are outside of the physiological balance that we're supposed to do, we know it and we don't like it.

• 13:17Arthur Brooks?

  So, for example, methamphetamine will supercharge your dopamine by a factor of 10. That's a thousand percent. Nobody ever said, "You know the secret to happiness? Meth." No. People who use meth hate it, and they wish they didn't. The problem is they can't stop because the locus ceruleus is spraying the dopamine around in their head and making them pathologically oriented toward the pursuit of the high, is how that comes about. And that's how people become prisoners, and that's subjugation. It's not great. Now, meth isn't the internet. The internet is a breakable kind of addiction in ways that are much, much easier than many drugs of abuse. But it doesn't mean it's easy, and it certainly does not mean that screen addiction is innocuous because it isn't.

• 14:02Arthur Brooks?

  There's a lot of research out there. A really interesting article from 2017 in PLOS One, the great science journal. Depression, Anxiety, and Smartphone Addiction in University Students. What they find is a comorbidity between clinical depression and anxiety and inappropriately heavy use of smartphones. That's just the way it is, what we find. Now, why is it? Is it because depressed people use their smartphones more? Or inappropriate smartphone use, overuse of smartphones leads to depression and anxiety? Probably yes. Probably the answer is yes, because this is always a cycle of dependence. The drugs lead to depression, the depression leads to the drugs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down. They're implicated in each other in a reinforcing cycle. That's almost certainly the case from what we see. There's more research coming, but that's probably the best assumption that we've got

• 14:47Arthur Brooks?

  so far. Lonely people are more likely. Why? Because they're actually looking for... They're looking for stimulus. They're looking for company, is what it comes down to. There's a important metaphor I want you to think about about why you might binge on social media. When you're super hungry, you're physically hungry and you pass a fast food joint, your stomach growls. And that's because you saw it, there was a stimulus inside you that said, "Stop, get a burger." Your brain said, "Don't do it. It's not good for you. The ratio of calories to nutrients isn't right." You stop anyway. You're super hungry. Yeah, it's because you're weak and the reason that you're weak is because dopamine went. You stop and you've got the burger. Okay, now the problem with that is

• 15:30Arthur Brooks?

  that the nutrient levels that your body needs is too low, the calories are too high. And that means you'll be hungry pretty soon after, even though you shouldn't be hungry because you've got a lot of calories. It's not just about energy balance, it's about your body's needs. That's one of the reasons that you could actually become obese and malnourished simultaneously if you have the wrong kind of diet. Because you're searching for the nutrients and you're putting up with the calories and you're storing the calories. Now, this is a metaphor, obviously. You binge on junk food because you need the nutrients that you're not getting from the food. You binge on social media because you're starving for the company. You're actually starving for the neuropeptide oxytocin, AKA the love molecule. That's what your brain really wants. It wants human connection.

• 16:15Arthur Brooks?

  But on a smartphone, virtually, through texts, even through FaceTime, there's not much oxytocin. Lots of research shows that it's a trickle of oxytocin. And so to get more oxytocin, you spend more time. And you spend more time and you get lonelier and want more oxytocin. So you spend more time and that's the same cycle as eating the junk food or drinking the booze. That's why you binge on it. Social media and screen time, that's the junk food of love. The junk food of the social life that you actually crave, that your brain and your heart need. And that's why lonely people are the ones most likely to get addicted. That's why they're most victimized by this kind of addiction. Now, there's another thing that's worth keeping in mind. There's other kinds of threats as well.

• 17:00Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, some really obvious ones. For example, distraction. 26% of car accidents in the United States today are due to the use of smartphones while driving. So, you know, maybe it's annoying to you when you see that in the state of California, I think it's 1,500 bucks if you're texting while driving. You gotta do something, man, because this is as dangerous. Texting while driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving. Sleepy driving. I mean, this is, this is a really dangerous thing. I mean, a quarter of car accidents is because somebody's like, "I wonder what's on Twitter." Yeah, it's not great. Okay, so let's talk about the solutions to this. Obviously, this is very grave and a really, really big problem. People are unhappy as a result of this. This is, this is a part and parcel with the explosion of clinical depression and anxiety that we see is this addiction to

• 17:42Arthur Brooks?

  devices, the inappropriate overuse of technology in our lives. What do we do? There's two ways to break an addiction. Number one is to stop, the other is to moderate. I know many people, so do you, who have gotten addicted to drugs and alcohol. And abstinence is almost always the right approach to that. I know a lot of modern cessation programs for alcohol abuse are claiming that you can drink moderately after you've been drinking abusively. There's, I've never seen it. I mean, I'm sure it exists, but no. The prudent thing to do with alcohol is if you wonder if you have a problem or you have a big problem in your family, is to not drink at all. That's what it is. And by the way, alcohol is neurotoxic.

• 18:25Arthur Brooks?

  Anything that's, as a general rule, anything that's euphoric is neurotoxic. That doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do it if you're not addicted. It just means you need to do it prudently and make the decision, to be sure. And if there's a problem or you suspect there's a problem, just get rid of the neurotoxin. That's what it comes down to. I strongly recommend abstinence. Now, easier said than done if you're alcohol dependent, to be sure. Sometimes you need help, you need to go to the doctor, you need to go to AA, you need to go to a rehab program. I get it. But you gotta stop, is what it comes down to. The other approach to addictions, other kinds of addictions, is, is, is learning moderate behavior. That would be the case, for example, if you came to me not in saying, "Arthur, I'm drinking all the time." Well, stop. There are different ways to stop, completely. But if you said, "I eat too much junk food. I stop at the burger place every day.

• 19:10Arthur Brooks?

  I don't want to do that. Bad for my health. Doctor says I gotta quit doing that because, you know, really bad for my lipid profile and it's... My blood pressure and my weight, my hemoglobin A1C, all the stuff that we talk about on the show. I wouldn't say stop eating. That would be the wrong advice. That would be, that would be very short-term thinking, to be sure. I would talk about how to eat in a better way and probably in a future episode, I will talk about that. I will talk about happiness and wellbeing and, and, and food. And a lot of people have written in and asked about, you know, what do I eat? As a matter of fact, I'll be happy to talk about that because I keep a pretty strict diet, as I've already mentioned. I would talk about moderating use and that's what we need to talk about with technology.

• 19:51Arthur Brooks?

  Why? Because you're not going to enter a monastery and throw your phone in the ocean. You're not going to do that. Um, you need to get into your bank account, for example. You need to make a reservation and pull up a boarding pass. You, the, the ship has sailed, man. I mean, you're going to use your smartphone. You're going to use, or whatever incarnation of that sort of technology is in the coming years, you're going to need to use it. Almost certainly. Look, if you can live in the monastery and that's your bag, you know, more power to you. All I can say is that probably you're not listening to office hours if you're, you know, from inside our Corfusian monastery on a cliff someplace in Greece. So let's just assume that you're going to use your device. And that means that we're not going to go cold turkey. We're going to go to moderation. So let's talk about how to moderate your device use.

• 20:34Arthur Brooks?

  And this is going to lead me to being really, really practical, being very practical. Now, how much do you need to moderate? This is an interesting research question. I'll put this in the show notes because there's a study of 2,000 Americans. This was undertaken by both industry and academia. There are researchers at Microsoft, Stanford, New York University, and the National Bureau for Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I work, um, that asked how much of smartphone use is above what people wish they were doing? It's kind of a nice proxy for what's the overuse factor. And what they did was they, they interviewed a lot of people and they, they looked at their smartphone use. And they had some pretty sophisticated techniques for actually doing this. What they found is that 31% of device time is spent only because of addiction, not because of choice. That's the addictive factor.

• 21:18Arthur Brooks?

  So if you're doing it only by choice, it would be about two-thirds of what you currently do. Now, I think. It's a lot more. Thirty, thirty-one percent is a good place to start. By the way, that, that's an NBER working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. I'll put that in the show notes. I think it's a good place to start, like, cutting down your, your device use by a third, but I think you should probably do more. Most people I know, it would be more like seventy-five, eighty percent. They should cut down very, very profitably for better well-being and more equilibrated life patterns, including their relationships. So let's say a third is the bottom, bottom estimate is the floor. I would like the ceiling to be closer to the big majority of your time that you're doing that.

• 22:01Arthur Brooks?

  The actionable steps for cutting back are, you know, some people have actually turned to do that, and, and there's new, there's more and more clinical activity to help people cut down that is based on therapy and medication for internet use. Of course, you know, I mean, don't you love capitalism? Let's open an internet and gaming clinic or something. And, and a lot of people have where there, there are, you know, ways that medication will help that. Interestingly, some people are talking about the use of GLP-1 drugs, Ozempic, for example, that help you lose weight because initially they thought that it would make you eat less because of, it would make stomach emptying slower. But a lot of it is what we're finding, especially with the, the second and third generation GLP-1

• 22:44Arthur Brooks?

  agonists, that they, they interrupt the reward cycle from food. You know what I'm talking about? Dopamine, you know? If they interrupt that reward cycle, that means that anything that's treated addictively might, might actually have some beneficial effects from the GLP-1 drugs. And sure enough, there's some, you know, early research suggesting that people don't want to smoke as much, they don't want to look at their phone as much, they don't want to do these addictive things as much. And so there's probably, in the future, some really useful applications of these revolutionary drugs, dopamine interrupting drugs, that will help. And, and some people are already trying to do that, starting to try to do that. But also just cognitive behavioral therapy, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe you don't want to go do that. Maybe you want to cut down on your internet use.

• 23:29Arthur Brooks?

  If you're still watching, you probably want to use your phone less, and you want to be more present for the people in your life. You want to really listen when your spouse and kids talk to you. You don't like the fact that you're always distracted. You're still watching this podcast for a reason, for Pete's sake. If that's the case, and you're not ready to actually seek out one of these clinics and, you know, sign up for a thousand dollar a month GLP-1 drugs. There is a lot of research that shows that you can DIY this. And the way to do it is by doing five things. I've read a lot of research, so you don't have to. I'm going to give you all the papers on this as well. Um, but here are the five things to do. And if you do these things, I promise you, you're going to have really beneficial effects. Probably this will take care of the problem.

• 24:14Arthur Brooks?

  But one word of warning, you gotta do them, right? It's not enough to say, oh, good idea. You gotta actually commit to this. So we're going to write these things down one by one. They're going to be in the show notes. We'll make sure that there's a newsletter that goes over these things as well. I'm so committed to this that I want to make sure that you get every nuance of these five points. These are the five things to do to beat device abuse. Number one, ban your tech at certain times of the day. It doesn't mean all day. It doesn't mean between 10:00 in the morning and 10:00 at night. No. Here's the way to do it. First hour, last hour mealtime. That's the rule. In the first hour that you wake up, you want to wake up well and you want to think clearly.

• 24:55Arthur Brooks?

  And the way to do that is making sure that you're in real life for the first hour. That you don't step into the simulation in your first hour. Very important. The matrix awaits, but you have the choice of not being in the matrix until more than an hour after you get up. And that first hour is critical. Now, you know, some of my students will say, yeah, but it's my alarm clock. My phone is my alarm clock. It'll say, yeah, I've got this new technology. It's called a mechanical alarm clock you can get for five bucks on Amazon. You don't need your phone for that. I never use my phone as an alarm clock, never, never. I mean, I, I carry an alarm clock with me and I have one by the side of my bed for that exact reason. More about that in a second, but the first hour without devices is critically important.

• 25:40Arthur Brooks?

  At first it's real hard, but then it gets easier and after that you like it. If it's especially hard for you, go back to the morning protocol that I talked about. Um, this is a very popular episode of the podcast a few weeks ago. And, and, and get up before dawn, because you know you're supposed to do that. The brahmanamahorta, if you remember that episode, the brahmanamahorta. Go walking without your devices. Use the first hour to go walking without devices. This kind of mixes two of the morning protocols. One is exercise and the other is spirituality. And when you do two of these things at the same time without devices, and you're just really present, you can do a form of kind of ambulation, walking, mindfulness, meditation. Start before dawn and be outside when the sun comes up. Really, really important. Half an hour before dawn, half an hour after dawn, no devices. That's the first hour.

• 26:26Arthur Brooks?

  And if this is a way that you're trying to cut back, this is a really, really good protocol to do every day for a month and then reassess. One way or the other, first hour. Second, last hour. The last hour before you go to bed is a lot of work on blue light and how blue light interrupts the pineal gland in the production of melatonin, how it enhances the continuing production of cortisol from the cortex of the adrenal glands, about your kidneys. You need your, your cortisol to fall and your melatonin to rise so that you can go to sleep. And looking at blue light interrupts both of those cycles in a way that makes it so that you're still awake. You don't know that. And so people say, oh, look at my cellphone, but I'll use blue blocker glasses. No, just don't look at your phone. Read a book, have a conversation, whatever it happens to be.

• 27:10Arthur Brooks?

  It's really important for me to do this, not to be goofing around on my phone before I go to sleep. What I really like to do, Mrs. B and I like to do this. We read to each other at night. Oh, man, it's like, and my wife's got this. We're gonna have her on the show. I mean, because we do a lot of talks together in public about marriage and love. And we're gonna do that on the show. But you'll see, her voice is like, it's like music, man. It's like, has a narcotic effect on me. And I'm not gonna say that I have a narcotic effect on her, but I will say that when I read the Psalms to my wife, she falls asleep spontaneously. So there are good things to do if you're not alone. You figure that one out. And the third is mealtimes. Mealtimes, some research suggests

• 27:53Arthur Brooks?

  that having the phone on the table during mealtimes, even pointed down, even face down, will interrupt the neurochemistry that you need to bond over meals. Almost apians. Are made to eat together while making eye contact, which gives you a lot of this love molecule, oxytocin. But you won't get it if you're looking at your phone, thinking about your phone. You interrupt these connections that you actually need. So nothing during mealtimes, which is really important. Those are the three times to do that. So those are the three, you know? First hour, last hour, mealtimes. This is the most important step. You do this, things are going to start to change for you. It's going to be hard at first, but it's not going to be hard after two weeks. After two weeks, you're not going to miss it. I promise, but you gotta stick with it and it's easy to backslide. That was tech free times.

• 28:37Arthur Brooks?

  Second, tech free zones. Number one is the bedroom. I talked about that before. You shouldn't have your phone in the bedroom. Don't look at it at night. It'll wake you up. It'll stress you out and it's not good for you in many ways. You actually need clean sleep. Think about, I want clean sleep tonight. The way that you mess up your sleep, the dirty sleep actually comes from phone use. Uh, my friend Cal Newport, who teaches computer science at Georgetown, he has his phone foyer method, uh, that I recommend. That's actually in his, he's got a, it's, I'll, I'll put the, the book that he writes about this in the show notes, where he comes in the house, he plugs in his phone in the foyer to his house. And if he wants to check his phone, he has to go out to the foyer. I plugged my phone in, in a closet on the first floor of my house and I sleep on the second floor of my house. I, I never see my phone during the night. It's great.

• 29:22Arthur Brooks?

  The second is the classroom and you know, I'm an educator and you know, my view is real simple. There shouldn't be a single cellphone, I should say, mobile phone, at any level of education from kindergarten through PhD at any school in the world. They shouldn't, and I get it. I mean, there's a lot of things that we do to enhance learning with cell phones, et cetera, et cetera. We don't have to do that. At the Harvard Business School where I teach, there's no mobile phones in the classrooms. They, it's like they take notes, old school, man. And they understand and they engage and they enjoy it a lot more. By about, you know, three weeks into their MBAs, they don't want the phones in the classes. They don't want it. And the, and the truth is a lot of research on this shows that people are afraid to do this.

• 30:05Arthur Brooks?

  Superintendents and principals of schools are afraid to do this because the parents freak out. And the parents freak out because the kids freak out. And and parents are such helicopter parents right now. I mean, if it had been my parents when I was a kid, they say suck it up, buttercup, but apparently not anymore. And so they call the principal, the principal calls the superintendent, they fold. Today, I think it's 27 states, they don't have any restrictions on cellphone use. In schools, it's insane. It's insane. It shouldn't be that way. Bad for kids, bad for learning, bad for society. And every governor should make an executive order and ban device use, personal device use, not all device use. Obviously, you need they need computers in schools. Personal device use in class. That's it. That's it. Third is device-free breaks each year.

• 30:49Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, now, this can be hard for certain people, but let me tell you how I do it. I take a spiritual retreat for four days, a silent retreat, usually in December every year. When things are slow, I'm not out on the road as much. What it means is on Thursday, I go on retreat and I come back on Sunday and I'm not looking at my phone the whole time. And I'm not talking either. It's completely silent. It's a it's a Catholic thing because I'm Catholic. But there's lots of them. There's Buddhist retreats, there's yoga retreats, there's silent retreats that are completely secular. You can find one because this is all the rage these days. The whole point is a four-day break from your devices. The first day, there's like children screaming in your head, where's my phone? The second day, you feel calmer.

• 31:34Arthur Brooks?

  The third day, you feel peace. And the fourth day, you wish it were a 48-day retreat. I promise you. And this is a really good thing to do. If you can do two weeks, good for you. It means you live in Spain or something. It is August. I don't know. I can't do that, but you can your own way. I recommend four days every year. Fourth, and again, there's a lot of research on this and you know it's true. And you're probably craving it right now. The right hemisphere, the dark consciousness of your brain is saying, I want that. I don't know why. This is why, because you know intuitively that this is something you deeply need. The fourth is to consume mindfully. Now, we're not getting rid of our devices. But when we look at our devices, we should do so on purpose.

• 32:16Arthur Brooks?

  This is a lot of how nutritionists, for example, will talk about how you eat. A biggest a biggest problem that people often have is that they eat mindlessly. You know, they come in, it's kind of grazed, and they have a lot of snacks at home, and they come in to take handfuls of potato chips or whatever the thing is, whether you're salty or sweet, and you just kind of jam it into your mouth. You don't think about it. Well, the truth is, That you can eat some junk food, but you should be all about eating the junk food. You should take a little bowl and put the potato chips in the bowl and sit at a table and not be reading. You can talk to somebody, but basically your job for the next seven minutes is to eat those potato chips and enjoy them. Now, here's the point.

• 32:56Arthur Brooks?

  You won't want seven bowls of potato chips if you do that because you're looking for the experience that you're actually getting from that. And you'll enjoy them in a mindful way. You'll be eating on purpose. It's a very, very, very insightful understanding of how we feed ourselves. The same thing is true with your internet use, even your social media use. You know, whatever it happens to be, you need to do so very mindfully. Eighty-six percent of Americans, now actually this is an Australian study from 2018, excuse me. They admit that they use their smartphones automatically, right? Okay, so eighty-six percent use their smartphones without even thinking about it. Two hundred and five times out of your pocket, looking at your smartphone. I'm sorry, that's not on purpose.

• 33:38Arthur Brooks?

  That's just completely automatic to alleviate boredom. And it's working through, as we talked about before in a previous episode, the nucleus accumbens of the ventral striatum and limbic system of your brain, which is what's actually governing your habitual behavior. So you need to do it on purpose. Set aside times. I'm going to look at my social media and I recommend all social media total each day, not more than thirty to forty-five minutes. Okay, and I recommend setting aside one or two periods just to look at your social media. Okay, now get rid of the apps and look at it in the most inconvenient way possible. Because if you're looking at it for fifty straight minutes, it doesn't really matter. And if you're only looking during that particular time, it shouldn't be too convenient. There's lots of ways to do that.

• 34:21Arthur Brooks?

  But one of the things that I recommend is that you have a certain time during the day when you're going to look at your social media and keep up with your friends. By the way, you're going to curate your social media so vigorously because you're not going to clog up your feed with a bunch of dross and nonsense. You're going to want to know what your team is doing and the best jokes and your friends or whatever it is. You're going to be looking at neuroscience if that's your thing. Because you're not going to want to waste the time because you only have a certain amount of time. But more importantly, you're going to be mindful about your use. Let me quote. The Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. And Thich Nhat Hanh's book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, is on this. Here's in the first chapter, quote, "While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes."

• 35:02Arthur Brooks?

  Which means that while washing the dishes, one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. Unquote. That might sound like really bad writing, but it isn't. It's beautiful writing. Because what he's talking about is that you're fully alive when you're washing the dishes. And it's not, it's not a tyranny, it's not a bother. And you don't need to be distracted. You need to be fully alive, doing a thing. Maybe you don't enjoy it, but that's okay too, is what it comes down to. Well, your social media or your screen use should be washing the dishes. And maybe even more pleasant than washing the dishes. You should be fully present when you're doing that. Really, really important. Mindfulness is effective in treating addictions, very effective in treating addictions. I talked about eating, but it's also really, really effective in other kinds of addictions as well.

• 35:47Arthur Brooks?

  Interesting article on this from 2015. "Mindfulness-Based Interventions for the Treatment of Smoking: A Systematic Literature Review." In which smokers actually stopped smoking, not by just completely stopping, but rather by paying attention when they actually were smoking. They had to be fully aware and fully alive and doing nothing else but smoking that particular cigarette. They smoked way less. And finally, a lot of them quit. Mindfulness works. Okay, fifth. That's four. Number five. Turn off your notifications. Don't let your smartphone find you, right? Is the important thing, right? Because a lot of people are getting chased all day long by a smartphone. And what that does is that little ding or that little, you know, back in the old days, the BlackBerry would start blinking.

• 36:32Arthur Brooks?

  Thank God they haven't done that on the smartphone. But it will, when the notifications come through, I mean, I can set my, my, my device, my wearable, they're like, when there's a text. And what that does is when, you know, there's nothing interesting coming in across text, but it will give me a little spritz of dopamine that we talked about before. The locus ceruleus will give me a few drips and it'll be like, check it, check it, check it, right? That's what happens. And that's how they set it up, man. That's how they actually create the technology so that your locus ceruleus will give you a spritz of dopamine so that you will spend more time in app. That's the language that they actually use. That's you being productized, friend. And how do you make that not happen? You turn off your notifications, among other things. Get rid of the gaming.

• 37:16Arthur Brooks?

  Get rid of the productization of you where your smartphone is alerting you as opposed to you thinking of it spontaneously, which is bad enough. Turn off all notifications, except the ones that you need to stay employed and the ringer for when it's your mother or your spouse. All right, now another way that you can actually do this, there's pretty interesting new research on how beguiling what you're looking at is. And I saw one study that showed that when you turn your screen to black and white, you check your phone way less often. Interesting, right? And my son does this. My son is actually, my oldest son has, he's got a smartphone like every human. His screen has been in black and white since he was in college and he's remarkably equilibrated in his use of the smartphone.

• 38:01Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, so much so that he's like transgressive in his behaviors. He, you know, got married at 23 and they had their first child at 24. I guess when you're not looking at your smartphone, you do other stuff. That's what it comes down to. Bottom line. Black and white screen, more kids. Cause and effect. Case closed. Those are the five ideas. Let me go through the five ideas one more time. I just want to sum this up. Number one is tech-free times. First thing in the morning. Last hour before bed, meal times. Step two is tech-free zones. Most importantly, the bedroom and the classroom. Step three is device-free breaks during the year, at least four days a year.

• 38:45Arthur Brooks?

  Number four is mindful consumption. You're fully engaged and using your devices on purpose. And number five is turning off your notifications so that it doesn't have a death grip on your, on your dopamine system. Do these five things, you're going to see your life change. Do these five things, you can be free. You absolutely can have a device and you can be free of the addiction to this advice if you take this advice. Now, it's important that you remember the science behind it, but more important that you actually change your behavior and the way that you can be responsible for changing your behavior beyond just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, Arthur, good advice, is teach this to other people. Okay, so get the newsletter, look at the show notes and go explain this. Give a version of this podcast to somebody else in your voice and I promise you this whole thing will get easier.

• 39:30Arthur Brooks?

  Let's take a few questions before we finish. Anonymous, this is an anonymous question. I've noticed days when I put down my phone, it's inappropriate to this, anxiety takes over. In these cases, I can get to the point where I can't even sleep. Do you have any tips for when that happens? This is just like anything that's getting in the way of your dopamine system. What will happen is that you're starving yourself of something and the cravings will stress you out. The cravings, which is the dopamine, dopamine, go get it, go get it, go get it. That's actually making you incredibly anxious. It's amping you up is actually the cravings. And that's just because of your neurochemistry. This is, remember, psychology is biology, especially in these types of cases. Understanding the biology will actually help you a lot.

• 40:16Arthur Brooks?

  This will calm down, that anxiety cycle will calm down because your dopamine system will give up. It'll say, no mas, it'll wave the white flag. But you gotta win, and the way that you win is by being actually persistent. It's only a couple of days is what it comes down to, a couple of bad days. What I recommend is during those particular times that you're going through it with somebody else. It's like if you're, you know, you're abstaining from alcohol, it's good to have a partner who's actually not drinking as well. And when you want to have a drink, you call your partner. And this is why Alcoholics Anonymous has sponsors for something like this. Go through it with somebody else and have a conversation and that will reprogram your nucleus accumbens and interrupt the cycle of dopamine. And it really works. So that's what I recommend.

• 40:59Arthur Brooks?

  Claire Willemsa, beautiful name, who wrote in on our email, [email protected]. I saw your Facebook post about no phone in the morning. How do I achieve this? I have so much FOMO, I'm obsessed with email newsletters and I waste so much time. Again, make it not negative. I can't look at my email. I can't look at my phone. Make it positive. I'm gonna go work out and walk and meditate and pray and I don't have time for my phone for that first hour. Crowded out with something beautiful as opposed to neglecting yourself or negating your ability to do this. Always, always, always crowd out something that you want to stop doing with the positive as opposed to denying yourself. The negative approach almost never works.

• 41:44Arthur Brooks?

  The positive approach almost always does. There's something more beautiful that's destined for you to use your time doing. And last but not least today, Jason Toomes writes in on Spotify. Do you believe highly introverted people can find happiness? I love this. I don't believe that in order to have enjoyment, it must be a shared experience. Sometimes people ruin my enjoyment of certain things. Yeah, of course. You know, different people need different amounts of stimulation from others. For sure. Here's the key thing to remember. Solitude is not the same thing as isolation. Isolation is bad for everybody. That leads to loneliness. Solitude is the company of yourself and can be incredibly beneficial. And introverts need more solitude than extroverts do.

• 42:26Arthur Brooks?

  The key is understanding yourself, making sure you're never isolated, but you have a proper amount of solitude. And that means usually having fewer and deeper relationships. That means consolidating your relationships around the people who really matter. So that people who don't as much in your life are not driving you crazy, but you also don't have isolation while still building in the solitude that you need. That's the secret. And I hope that helps. All right. We're done. I hope that helped. And I know, I know some of you are thinking, I just watched this whole podcast on my, on my, on my smartphone. Is that okay? That's okay. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. Remember, learning and interest are positive, basic emotions. That's what smartphones are really good for. Get rid of the distraction. Get more into the interest. Life gets better.

• 43:11Arthur Brooks?

  Let me know your thoughts. Write to me at [email protected]. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it. Feedback on a lot of them. This really helps us a lot. Make sure that you subscribe to my newsletter. I talked about that a little bit earlier. Go to my website, arthurworks.com/newsletter. Get on the list and every Monday morning I'll be sending you my very latest. Follow me on all the, all the social media platforms so that in your half an hour of total social media time that I'm one of the things that's actually showing up. I'm trying to do something that's good for you. That's Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you look at social media. And order the happiness files, my newest book. It's back there. That's 33 essays that were, that were popular in my column, The Atlantic.

• 43:54Arthur Brooks?

  And you can read one when you're not looking at your smartphone at night. You can read one essay before you go to bed to your beloved. And everybody will have sweet dreams. Anyway, thanks again for joining me. I really, really value you and I appreciate the fact that you're watching Office Hours. Please share it with your friends who actually might need it. And I look forward to seeing you next week.

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• 44:32Arthur Brooks?

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