Earlier this week, I caught this podcast from Arthur Brooks on how to quit being addicted to your phone. It brought me back to 2017, when I had to noodle up a fake business to run on HubSpot's software as part of my new hire training. I took a good idea, turning your phone off for a day a week, and made it into one of those vague personal coaching outfits: theoretically, you could've paid me to tell you to turn your phone off. Spoiler alert! A digital sabbath, like my old "one day disconnect" idea, is one Brooks's five tips to curing your phone addiction. His others include phone-free mornings, evenings, bedrooms, mealtimes, and a few weekends throughout the year. While he lards it up with neuroscience and social science "studies," the core insight is commonsensical: if you stop using your phone all the time, then you won't feel the need to use your phone all the time.
And we all know that our phones, handy as they are, what with MBTA train tickets, music, and pics of our kids, are incredibly distractive from what really matters in life. Who would rather be on social media than really be social with people? Who would rather surf the apps than read a book? Who has emerged from a two hour Internet time hole and felt good about it? I think we all know the hacks: fewer apps, no notifications, charging our phones as far away from the bedroom and living room as possible. But it's hard to resist the tug when the phone is always on, a few steps away (at most), and when we're habituated to using it to, more or less usefully, fill any available time. That's where Brooks's other approaches are both more useful and more challenging. Moving up from the everyday basics, phone free days and retreats are chances to put something positive in the phone habit's place.
I've been more or less on a phone-free Sunday kick since about when I made the fake anti-phone consulting business. I typically turn the phone off around sundown on Saturdays. Which is 4pm this time of year in Massachusetts. The idea is that the phone stays off until the same time on Sunday, or even Monday morning. Who am I kidding: fantasy football, life-with-kids logistics, home improvement projects, forgetting if I'm volunteering on Sunday morning, and any number of other excuses often have me turning the thing back before the full day has passed. As much as a fail at the habit, a Saturday night of books and a Sunday of heading to mass, reading the newspaper, and doing the crossword at the back of the magazine give me non-phone pastimes. But you're still itching to switch on the TV or turn the phone on and check for what's new by the end of the 24 hours.
A device-free retreat comes next. While Brooks heads to a monastery for a silent retreat a few times a year, I think we could tone the bougieness down just a bit and think about a personal-device free vacation. I've talked about this before in the setting of summers on lakes in Maine (highly recommend; use offer code Yellis at the York toll plaza), but maybe I've been missing the prime time for this: Thanksgiving. It's a holiday all about being in a place with people and feasting. Sure, there's a fair amount of TV in the American celebration. But, unlike the original Thanksgiving feasters, we don't have to be Puritans: surfing the socials on your phone is about the exact opposite of watching Charlie Brown Thanksgiving with your kids. All the better if your turkey day includes tossing a football around in the yard or napping in front of the fireplace. None of this needs a phone.
So, when your travels end or when the people arrive at your house, put your phone in a drawer.
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