News Reporter: Future Coach: How to protect your brain from your phone

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By Michael J. Coren

Welcome to Future Coach.

This week I’m writing about how to balance the costs and benefits of using a smartphone.

((iStock))

Many of the apps and algorithms in your pocket are designed to steal you away from the rest of your life. The typical American spends six hours per day on their phone, according to a peer-reviewed study of 10,000 U.S. adults. That’s roughly 15 years of continuous screen time over a lifetime.

Is this tech useful? Absolutely. I’d struggle to navigate modern life without it, figuratively and literally. But at what cost?

Half of Americans with a smartphone worry that they use their device too much. For those under 30, that figure rises to 80 percent. Years of evidence suggest that excessive phone use alienates us from each other and the natural world. I suspect one source of our age’s ennui lives in our back pocket.

Over the years, I’ve devised ways to protect what’s important to me from my phone and everything that comes from behind the screen. While trillions of dollars are being spent to separate you from your attention, reclaiming it costs far less.

You don’t need a vow of silence, a digital shaman, an $8,000 detox camp or a Faraday cage over your bed.

Just a little friction.

An unfair fight

The most powerful data centers in the world are pointed at your brain with a singular goal: capturing your attention. Tech companies have learned how to activate the brain’s reward pathways with exquisite precision.

“We know that Meta and Google and Apple are very good at designing a technology in a way that will make you use it as much as possible because that’s their business model,” says Michael Sobolev, a behavioral scientist at Cornell University’s Digital Life Initiative who studies how technology affects our lives. “We are fighting against that.”

And we’re losing. The average smartphone user checks their phone 50 to 80 times per day. While two-thirds of smartphone users in the United States report that their device has made their life at least “a little” better, Gallup found in 2022, the share of Americans who say they use their phone too much, sometimes describing it as an “addiction,” keeps rising.

You wouldn’t carry around a slot machine or sleep next to a box of doughnuts. Putting physical and psychological distance between you and your phone is the first step to reclaiming your attention — and the rest of your life.

What works

In a "digital detox" class at Loyola University Maryland, a student points to a graphic that shows the brain before and after using a cellphone. (The Washington Post)

Researchers debate whether smartphone use is an addiction comparable to nicotine or gambling. But experiments show it has two hallmarks of one: habit formation, and people finding it hard to quit even as it takes over their lives.

The reason, says Shreya Hessler, a psychologist who teaches digital wellness to patients, is the dopamine hit our devices deliver to our brain. This, some researchers argue, acts on our reward pathways the way food pellets condition rats. “The impact of dopamine is really at the core of why we have difficulties with our devices in various ways,” she said. “The absence of that just makes us feel dysregulated.”

That is why you find yourself unconsciously, endlessly checking your phone dozens or hundreds of times per day without wanting to or even realizing it. To regain control over “involuntary attention capture,” you have to cut the interruptions, redesign your environment, then rebuild your habits.

Think of it as intentional tech.

Here are the best evidence-backed measures I could find to break up with your phone, amicably. These steps are what I do. You’ll have to find what works for you.

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