Instant Genius - The London Fatberg + Why you should break up with your phone

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

This month, we’re talking about how the Museum of London acquired a piece of the London Fatberg as their new exhibit, and asked them how they’ll keep it “fresh”. We also talk to author Catherine Price about the science that inspired her to break up with her phone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Saying that we should compare smartphones to heroin, but I think it's very interesting that you might have a reduction in one damaging behavior, but it might be because we're engaging in a different behavior that, while not as physically damaging perhaps, still is to me at least, a cause for concern. Hello, and welcome to the Science Focus podcast.

I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Focus magazine. In this episode, we talk to the head of conservation and collection care at the Museum of London about their new exhibit going on display this week, the infamous London Fatberg. And we chat to author Catherine Price about why the latest research compelled her to break up with her phone. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. First up, we need to talk about the Fatberg. Last September, Thameswater made a startling discovery. Lurking in the Suez Beneath Whitechapel was a monstrous fatberg, a 130-ton blob of raw sewage. Now, the Museum of London is putting it on display. So, naturally, we had to ask Sharon Robinson Culver,

head of conservation and collection care at the museum, about how they made it happen. Here she is describing a fatberg to James Lloyd. So a fatberg is a sort of congealed mass of fat and sewage. and the sorts of things that go into it are fats and oils and greasers from cooking, but also things that get put down the toilet, so nappies, wet wipes, sanitary products and condoms and anything else that finds its way into the sewer system that form this great big toxic mass, I think is how we're describing it.

So pretty unpleasant, really. So a few of these have been found, haven't they, over in recent years? Yeah, they have. But the Whitechapel one sort of really captured the public imagination, I think, because it was the biggest one that was ever found.

So it's quite common for these to be found in the sewage system and they are a big problem for the water companies because they cause blockages that are very difficult to remove. But the Whitechapel Fatberg is about 250 metres long and weighs about 130 tonnes.

So this was really the monster fatburg of all fatburg. So it's the biggest one, I think, that's been found. Uh-huh. And so why did the Museum of London decide that you wanted to display one of these fat books then, to put one in a museum? Well, many of the historic items that are actually in our collection have been discovered in cesspits. and those types of objects tell us a lot about how people once lived.

And in some respects, Fatbergs are no different. These man-made objects and they're created when of sort of modern rubbish meets the historic sewer system. And they're really a reflection of population expansion and changes in diet and the pressures that were putting on the sort of London Victorian infrastructure. So we tell the story of London and Londoners, and we're displaying it because we feel that this is an important London story, and it's reflecting the issues that Londoners face now and also in the past. So it's talking about how our cities are expanding and how our habits are changing. And it chimes with our city now, city future season as well, which is exploring some of the challenges that, urban living are creating.

And so are these fat bigs essentially a symptom then of the kind of increasing population in London, do you think, the sewer system's just not able to cope with the sheer amount of people and the sheer amount of waste now getting flushed down toilets? That's absolutely right. And Thameswater have done some research into this. And basically when the sewers were built in the 1850s, nobody could have envisaged just how big London was going to become and Thames Water estimate that even just over the next 10 to 15 years

about a million additional people will move to London so that's obviously putting even more pressure on the water supply and leading to even more problems and that they estimate that about 300,000 blockages a year, of course, by these monster fatbergs that essentially were creating ourselves. Presumably the fatbergs are only going to get bigger and bigger if there's more and more people arriving. What can we do or what can the residents of London do to stop these from growing and from becoming these monsters? Well, the message from Thames Water is that we don't put anything down the toilet or down the sewage into the sewage system that shouldn't be.

be there. So really the only thing that we're supposed to flush down the toilet is paper. It's been found recently that about 93% of, that wet wipes constitute about 93% of fatbergs. And so there's a message there that we should stop putting wet wipes and things like that down the toilet as well. So I think it's just about, and not putting fats and oils and grease down the sink, sort of being more aware that we shouldn't be put in anything really other than water and waste down, sewage waste down the drains and in the toilets.

So I'm guessing in the museum you're not displaying the entire Fatberg. No, we're not. So I assume you're taking a sample. How did you go about getting a sample of the Fatburg then? So when we first heard that there was a monster Fatberg and Dwight Chapel and our curatorial teams quite quickly recognised that there was an important London story there

and went along on site and had a chat with the Thameswater team and they were starting to extract the Fatberg and we opened up a conversation with them about the potential to put it on display and they took some samples for us and of course we were very aware that this material is quite toxic. You know, we have to treat it as a biohazard. So we wanted to spend some time to do some scientific analysis on the samples

and to observe them and to talk to the industry experts to understand what the risks were associated with handling it and with displaying it as well. And so that's really where it started. So the Thameswater team took some samples for us and then we monitored the off-gassing from them because they off-gas carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide and small amounts of flammable gas.

We wanted to be certain that the pieces that we put on display weren't off-gassing at anything toxic or harmful or flammable. So we sort of kept them in in quarantine at the Thames Water Depot for about six weeks before Christmas. and then when we were satisfied that they were in a condition that we could bring to the museum, then we did that and we're just working on our display ideas now. So how big will the kind of sample fact book that you put on display B then compared to the original? We've got a sort of a series of samples that are about a shoebox size,

and we feel that really for sort of safety reasons, that's probably the maximum sort of volume that we've. can handle and display. I think the other thing to sort of say about the Fatberg is that the way that it has to be extracted by the team who excavated is that they sort of break it into lumps and they have to jet hose, pressure hose it into smaller pieces so that they can suck it up through a pipe and into a tanker. So it doesn't kind of come out of the sewer as a huge, great.

lump, it comes out in relatively small chunks, in relatively small pieces. And the majority of the Fatberg is actually going off to be, or it's gone off to be converted into biofuel. And so the samples that we are displaying represent the last remaining piece of the Whitechapel Fatberg. Did you come face to face with the original Fatberg yourself at all? No, I didn't come face to face with the original Fatberg. Our curatorial and press teams went down on site, but because of how dangerous this material actually is, nobody other than the team excavating it,

are actually allowed down into the sewers, either to sort of see it or to film it. Because there's a real sort of an genuine risk of contracting diseases, like Biles disease, bacterial infections from it. We've had to be very cautious in the decisions that we've made about handling and displaying it. This is another reason why it quite small. But I guess you've seen the chunks, have you? Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. So we went to visit the samples that we're displaying with Thameswater. We've talked to the team there about how best to preserve them, if you like, because this is quite unknown territory for us. We're treating it like we would any other object in the collection at the end of the day. So, you know, we're investigating its chemical stability, we're looking at its structural integrity, and we're doing scientific tests on it just this afternoon.

My colleague's taken a sample to a Fatberg Scientist, based at Cranfield University. As a Fatberg Scientist. Yeah, absolutely. This is such an issue for the industry and for modern cities that there is some very targeted research around this. And they're going to be doing some biochemical analysis and also some fatty and heavy metal and protein and carbohydrate analysis so that we get a better understanding of what the Fatberg is actually made up of. And so what kind of conclusion did you come to you? What's the best way that you found to kind of? you know, put it in a museum. How will you be making it safe for the public and making it stable? So we'll get our biochemical analytical results back in two weeks' time.

So we'll be able to tell you more about that later. The first thing that we did actually was x-ray the pieces because one of the biggest risks from this type of material is, of course, things like contaminated sharks or hypodermic needles that find their way into the sewers. So we x-rayed it, we eliminated that risk. And then in discussion with the Thameswater team and with some other fog oil and grease or Fatberg scientists,

we've sort of very slowly air-dried the sample that we've got so that it's not the sort of very sloppy, mushy type of fatberg that you'll see in images that are floating on the water. This is more akin to the sort of harder, more oxidised fatberg that you see sticking to the sort of side of the civil walls. And we've found that actually once it's off gasped and once it's dried, it becomes a bit more stable and it's a bit easier to handle as well. So it's in that sort of form, in that hard, more clay, concretey, almost form that we've, that we've, will be able to display it safely. And I guess it will be in some kind of protective case as well to stop people.

Because it'll be the thing that people will kind of want a prod, wants it. I imagine that they would. Yeah, yeah, we do. We need to protect people from the Fatberg. That's the main thing. And actually, you know, critically that includes our own staff as well. So we are in the process of producing a sort of display and handling pod. So we're going to encapsulate the Fatberg samples into a display pod.

And then that will go into a display case. And what that means is that our in-house teams can sort of handle the Fatberg without having to touch it. And then we can put it on display for the public and it will be protected within its handling pod. And then it will be in a display case so that people can come and wonder at it. This is quite a gross question, but I was wondering, you might know have had this experience yourself, but I was wondering, what does a fat big smell like? Oh, that's an interesting question. So when my colleagues went on site and when the first pieces were coming out of the sewer

and they came back to talk to us about it, they said it smells like rotting meat, or they said it smells like a combination of rotting meat and rotting nappies, By the time I got to sort of experience it myself and smell it myself It didn't smell quite so bad Because it had been off gassing for a while And it had been sort of air drying And so it didn't have a particularly

unpleasant smell It just had maybe a bit of a sort of dirty toilet smell And it looks almost alive Doesn't it? It looks when you see pictures of it It almost look like it's kind of pulsating It does And that's one of the challenges of this sort of material

because when it's actually in the sewer, when it's in that sort of hot, almost sort of airless fetid environment, it is teeming with bacteria and it is changing and at a sort of microorganism level all the time. And so it is sort of almost morphing into other things. And it is difficult to pin down exactly what it is.

And that was one of the reasons. why we thought that the best way for us to manage it safely was to take a smaller sample of it and to air dry it into something which is a much more stable form so that we can display that. And by that time it will have stopped giving off gasses that are likely to be flammable or likely to be toxic, which of course we both cannot expose the public to or let loose in the museum environment. But equally, we can't just seal it in a box because it's going to be building up pressure if it is off-gassing anything.

So we have to be really careful that the samples that we were dealing with were of a size and of a nature that we're going to be safe for us to do something with. Okay, next up, phone addiction. Now, I admit, I spend too much time on my phone, about two hours a day, in fact. And that's after trying to cut back.

So if, like me, your phone is the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you reach for before you go to bed, then maybe it's time for a change. Focuses production editor Alice Lipskin Southwell, chats to Catherine Price, whose new book, How to Break Up with your phone, goes on sale this week. In it, Catherine looks at what the latest research says about how addictive these devices can be,

and how apps and social networks are designed to keep. keep you hooked. And if that gets you looking at a phone a little differently, then she has a digestible 30-day plan that'll help you identify bad habits, tidy up your apps to make them less addictive, and enable you to become more mindful of your phone. So just first of all, what inspired you to write the book in the first place? Well, I was inspired to write about the issue of phone addiction when I myself had a moment where I realized that I had a problem with it, which was when I had a baby and I was sitting in this darkened room feeding her and it was kind of this like, you know, beautiful poetic moment, mother, daughter, whatever. And then I realized that I had this

out of body experience where I realized she was gazing up at me with her, you know, little face, whatever. And I was looking down at my phone. And I just had this moment of realizing what that would look like from the outside and thought to myself, this is, this is not what I want my child to think when she sees her mother. So that was kind of the beginning of it. I mean, I don't mean to be judgmental about distracting yourself with a newborn at all. But it was kind of for me a really interesting moment. And then I just started to become more conscious of the way I was using my phone and my husband and I started talking more about it. And the more we looked around ourselves at other people, as well as ourselves, we realized, wow, this really actually does seem like

something that we should be thinking about and talking about more. So that was the moment that made me really start to think about it. And then it was an ongoing process. I also have a background in mindfulness, and I think that that was actually really helpful in the project and also helped to inspire it when I realized, okay, if I'm conscious of what I'm doing right now, I need to see if this is actually what I want to be doing with my time. And so it felt like a natural progression from doing mindfulness training to using that knowledge and skill set to begin to evaluate my relationship with my phone. What is it about the smartphones that makes them so addictive in the first place? Well, smartphones are particularly addictive because there are people on the other side of your smartphone who are trying to design it so that you'll spend as much time on it as possible. And that's really what makes it different from other technologies that had come before.

Because as we all know, there's been warning stories about television and radio and movies and the internet, all these things. Even the written word when written language was first developed was extremely controversial. But the difference here is that they are engineered to keep us on them. And then also we keep them in our pockets all the time. So we're always, we always have access to these technologies. I was really interested to learn just how many aspects of our smartphones are deliberately designed to keep us on them for as long as possible. Because once you start recognizing these things, you really notice that they're everywhere.

So the first thing to know is that when our brains encounter something that they find exciting, they release a chemical called dopamine, which teaches our brains to pair whatever that's, is with a reward. It's kind of like a rat pressing on a lever to get food. And once you start to associate particular actions with getting this dopamine reward, then it establishes a habit loop and can turn into an addiction. Dopamine is really important just for helping us notice things that are important in our environment. So it's obviously evolutionarily an extremely important cycle to have there, but you can really exploit it. So when you start looking at your smartphone and you notice things like, all right, well, your social media feeds, they're endless.

You can just keep scrolling forever. It took me a while to realize I would never finish Facebook. And if you think about it, that doesn't have to be that way. But it's a deliberate design choice because when you're scrolling, occasionally you're going to find something that's of interest. And when that happens, your brain's going to release a little bit of dopamine. And so you'll keep scrolling and scrolling in pursuit of the next reward. So if you have a feed that's endless, then it's going to facilitate, make it even easier to just keep going.

So that's one example of how the, you know, a feature that's in there not for our best interests. Another thing I thought was very interesting that hadn't occurred to me is that for a lot of these apps that are free, we're not actually the customer for these apps. They're being given to us because we're spending our attention on them. And that's what's being sold. So when you're asking yourself, why would they want me to spend so much time on social media? Well, it's because you're being shown advertisements. And the more time you spend on the site and the more information you give them about,

about yourself, the more you're going to see ads and the more targeted those ads will be. So for me, it was like a really interesting revelation to realize that, as one of the insiders from the tech world puts it, your eyeballs are what's being sold. So should we really ditch all the social media apps? Is that maybe the best thing we could do for our mental health and to try and get ourselves off phones? I think that deleting social media apps from your phone is an excellent idea. And that is not to say that social media is inherently evil or that you can't check social media. But the thing is that the apps are particularly well designed to keep you on them for as long as possible.

I've heard many people compare them to slot machines. So if you want to check social media, I would suggest deleting the apps, you can always reinstall them, and then just checking it from the browser version or from your desktop computer. And that way you're not denying yourself entirely, but you're protecting yourself from these truly addictive qualities that are built into the apps. Are children and teenagers particularly vulnerable to social media and smartphone use? Because these days you see a lot of quite small children and they'll have phones or they'll have tablets and they'll be swiping through and playing games.

Is that particularly damaging for them? So I would say a lot of people bring up the questions of whether smartphones and social media apps in particular are especially damaging to younger people. And I think that's, you know, it's a complicated question. And there's obviously the issue of younger brains still developing. And so that means that I mean, I think there should be a particular concern around kids. With that said, adults are also addicted. And it does seem that smartphones are changing our brains as well.

So I always like to start the conversation about kids by encouraging us all to take a step back and look at our own behaviors. Yeah, and there has been a lot of interesting research, sociological research done, especially by gene. twinge, I think that you pronounce her name differently, but that is how I think, Twengie, about the use of social media and anxiety and depression and loneliness and things like that. And it's so difficult to, you know, pull out a causal relationship in any of these things. But when you look at the graphs and charts that she has put together about the reports of these various emotional states, you certainly do see a trend of changes happening starting around 2007, which is when the first smartphone was introduced.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of research at the moment, isn't there, about this loneliness epidemic that so many people feel so lonely and it's not just elderly people who are traditionally thought of as lonely. It's younger people as well. And a lot of that could be because of phone use, people are sort of playing on their phones rather than going out and meeting people or they think they're missing out,

so they're always looking at the phones when in reality. I mean, I think it's fascinating that there have been some articles coming out about, for example, drug use among teenagers and how it's at a very low point right now. I don't know if it's the lowest ever, but it's very low. And there's hypotheses that that might in fact be because they're just all alone in their rooms on their smartphones. And again, if you think about what's going on in your brain when you're on your phone, which is to say you're getting these reward cycles going on with dopamine,

that is the same cycle that happens in addiction. So you're getting some of the same kind of pleasurable feelings that you would be getting on drugs. I mean, I'm not saying that we should compare smartphones to heroin, but I think it's very interesting that you might have a reduction in one damaging behavior, but it might be because we're engaging in a different behavior that while not as physically damaging, perhaps, still is, to me, at least a cause for concern. Yeah, and it's strange, isn't it? Because you think, you know, especially looking at something like Instagram, if you're just looking at nice recipes and cute puppies and things, you think, oh, that's harmless, you know, it's just a bit of fun. but then like you said, you can't ever get to the end of scrolling and you're just getting hooked on it every time.

Yeah, and I think there's a difference between looking at a couple of puppy photos on Instagram because you have made a decision that right now at this point in your day, what would really make you happy would be to look at puppy photos on Instagram. I mean, if that's the case, then more power to you, puppy away. But the issue, as we all know, is that what starts as most of the time, an impulse, I would say most of us are not like I really want to look at puppy photos on Instagram. It's just like, oh, something reminds you of a puppy or you touch one picture and then all of a sudden you're like in this spiral. So the issue is just this, the tendency to

do this, I call them zombie checks where you pick up your phone, you're not even really sure why, and then you look up 30 minutes later wondering where the past 30 minutes of your life just went. Now, I did find it useful when I was reading through your book and a couple of the things you said about was to make a speed bump. So whenever you go to pick your phone up, you have to sort of make it little bit harder for yourself. One thing I'm already doing, I've put all my apps into folders. So you have to go through your folders a little more. And then I really like the one you suggested of putting a hairband or an elastic band or something onto your phone. So you sort of touch that. And then you think, oh, I'm touching my phone. And it gives you that sort of slight pause.

So you don't go and just get into those holes. Have you found that to be useful in the couple days? Oh, good. Okay. It's just been a couple of days. And because you just don't go in, you just don't go in there anymore, which is, which I thought was really useful. And obviously, I took the phone out of the bedroom now. So the bedroom is now a phone-free zone, which is good. Oh, that's great. Yes.

And the bedroom is such an interesting one because I feel like everyone kind of knows if you've thought at all about phone stuff or read about it. It's not a good idea to charge your phone in your bedroom because then you're more likely to use your phone when you're in your bedroom. But so many of us use our phones as alarm clocks that we feel like we're stuck. So when I was researching this book, I actually had to give the people who'd volunteered to help me with this plan, like specific. instructions like five days ahead of time go by or find an alarm clock so if you think about it you

have to touch an alarm clock to get it to shut off so if your phone's your alarm clock you're guaranteeing that the first thing you touch in the morning and interact with is going to be your phone and i do think that that actually is really helpful for people the speed bump idea i really believe strongly in as you were saying the idea of putting a hair bounder on your phone or for me i put a lock screen image that said what do you want to pay attention to um i actually created those for the book's website that people can download these free lock screen images just to kind of help prompt themselves when they pick up their phone and they're about to go bypass the lock screen to say, wait a second, do I really want to be doing this right now? And I think that really

gets to one of the core messages of the book, which is that phones are not inherently bad. They're incredibly useful tools and they are really fun to use. So I think that when we just try to arbitrarily cut back on them for the sake of cutting back, it tends not to work because it feels like self-denial or like you're not letting yourself have pleasure. And that's not the point. The point is just to make sure that when you use your phone, you're aware of yourself using your phone and you actually want to be using your phone in that moment. And I think that that's an important distinction for people to make in addition to the idea that when you're on your phone, you're just experiencing your phone. And your life is what you pay attention to. That was a saying that I kept coming back to as I wrote this book. So if you're paying attention to your phone, then your phone is your life for that time. There's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of people probably wouldn't want to look back at their lives and say, man, I wish I'd spend more time on my phone. And so when you think about it that way, it goes from feeling like self-denial, like keeping yourself away from something pleasurable,

to a different perspective, which is that your phone is actually keeping you away from other things in your life that you might enjoy more than your phone. So it goes from kind of self-denial to actually a way to make yourself happier by not being on your phone, if that makes sense. And I think it's a useful philosophical kind of adjustment for people to make that makes it easier to change your behavior. So did you manage to convince your friends and family to break up with their phones after researching this book? Have they taken any tips from you or anything? My friends and family have been really into the idea and it actually has been a fascinating process. I've never written a book like this. My last book was about the history of vitamins.

It took three years. And this one was incredibly fast. And the way I, I, I researched it in addition to doing the scientific research. But the way I made this 30-day plan was I wrote an email to friends and family and said, I'm working on this book. I'm looking for some guinea pigs to help me just try out some of my ideas so I can see what to include in this plan. It was one email. I got about 70 responses from this one email, which was like, oh, my goodness, I was not expecting so many random people from my life to want to actually do this.

And then I did a second round of guinea pigs. And a woman I don't even know posted a single message on Facebook. And as a result, I had a total of almost 150 people go through this program. So it was really very interesting to see how enthusiastic people were about participating. And it was really cool for me because any time I mentioned that I was writing a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, like people interrupt me and say, I need that or my husband needs that or, you know. So anyway, so my friends and family were really enthusiastic supporters. of it. And I do feel that from the feedback I've gotten, it really has helped them. And to me,

that's just so cool. I think so because it's in the consciousness at the moment, isn't it? If you go out for a meal with someone and if they keep looking at their phone or they're always taking pitch to their food or you're having a conversation with someone, they suddenly get the phone out and start texting. And it feels horrible when it happens to you. But yet we all do it to each other, don't we? Yes. There's a new word fubbing short for phone snubbing, which is used to describe the experience we have all had where someone just like starts texting the middle of a conversation or we do that to someone else. And I think it's really interesting to see how once you give a name to something and once you become more conscious of it, you start to notice it everywhere. And then if

you kind of de-contextualize it and actually think about what's happening, you're like, this is kind of nuts. Like if you were, if you had to check social media from your desktop computer, you would never have a situation where you're in an intimate conversation with your friend and they just walked away in the middle of the sentence, went to another room and just logged out to their desktop computer to text with the stranger. You know, like that just wouldn't happen, but it happens all the time when we have our phones. But you don't think we should all be going back to sort of Nokia 3310s and those dumb phones or anything like that? I think that the, I think that your relationship with your smartphone, like all relationships, is personal and that each of us has to

just think more consciously about it. Because the thing is that they've, smartphones are barely it's like 11 years this January since the first iPhone was announced. And they've just been so appealing and they've spread so quickly that most of us haven't really thought about our relationships with them at all. So my hope is that we will begin to think about those relationships more. And then you can decide. I mean, I actually do know people who have quote unquote dumb phones, you know, flip phones because they feel like that protects them from themselves and that's really what they want a phone to do, like text and call. And then you've got other people who, say, you know what, I really do want to be spending a lot of time on my phone. I love it. It's a really important part of my work and family life or whatever. You know, so it's not like there's one answer to this issue. It's really just a matter of thinking about it critically for yourself and then choosing what's best for you. Yeah, and I suppose with the smartphones, they do have the handy tools, don't they? You've got maps on there. So if you get completely lost, you can still find your way out of it or something like that. Or, you know, if you need to look something up, you can. But it's

just about getting that better relationship. Exactly. And it does remind me of my friends who still have flip phones. We spent the weekend together, and they had printed out instructions to get home. It was 16 pages of instructions, but they had lost some of the middle pages. And that was a moment where I was like, I am very grateful for Google Maps. So if you try to reduce your phone use and you've got that craving, you're like, I want to look at Facebook or something, what do you think is about? best thing you should do. Should you just accept that craving and go and grab your phone? Or is there

another way that you can sort of calm yourself down and not have that craving anymore? One of the worst ways to deal with the craving is to fight actively against it. It's kind of like telling yourself that old thing about don't think about an elephant. And then all you can do is think about an elephant. So I think that's one of the reasons we fail so often when we try to change your habits is you start craving something and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, which just makes you want it more. So one technique to deal with those cravings is, again, to just be conscious of them when they occur. So if you have, say, a rubber band around your phone,

that's this prompt to notice that you're about to reach for your phone. That's a really good way to realize you're having a craving. A lot of times we don't even realize that craving's happening. The phone ends up on our hands, and we don't even know how it got there. So once you notice that you're reaching for your phone, and clearly your brain is like wanting you to reach for the phone, one way to deal with that is not to fight against it,

but just to be like, huh, look at that. Wow, I just totally wanted to reach for my phone right now. And then don't do anything about it. Just kind of notice, what does that feel like in my brain? Like, what does it feel like in my body? What does it feel like if I don't turn the phone on right now? And in other words, I've heard of this referred to as surfing your craving. You're just kind of like riding this wave and watching it without trying to stop it.

And what is very interesting about this technique is that in many cases, I mean, nothing's permanent, right? Like a craving will go away on its own even if you don't indulge it. but it will go away quicker if you're not trying to actively fight against it. This idea is based off of a mindfulness technique that I actually read about being used for smokers, for a smoker cessation study where this researcher, Judson Brewer, used mindfulness training with a group of people trying to quit smoking, where they basically were just taught how to notice when they were craving a cigarette, notice what it smelled like and tasted like and felt like when they actually did have the cigarette.

And what was amazing is as people got better and better actually being present in their experience of smoking, they were able to quit at a rate that was higher than the people who were the control group, which was being trained in the American Lung Association's gold standard program. So mindfulness and this kind of cultivation of awareness of your own experience in the moment actually is an incredibly powerful tool for behavior change. It's just kind of underutilized. So if you can quit smoking by paying attention now with cigarette, taste, then I think that it can be extremely powerful when it's used in the context of a smartphone. If you notice that you're craving your phone, you're already aware of your actions in that moment.

If you then do open up your phone and you do go to Facebook or whatever, the trick is to keep that awareness in your mind so that instead of then eating the entire chocolate bar and then wondering 10 minutes later what happened, you're able to say, okay, well, I went on Facebook. Okay, is this actually making me feel good? Was this craving actually resulting in a good feeling? when is that feeling crossing the line from good and fun to oh my god what am i doing with my life and if you're able to learn how to recognize that line then that means you can use social media safely and healthily because you'll be able to recognize at what point it crosses that line from from being fun and rewarding to actually sucking away time from your from your life that you don't

want to give up to it and like you say in the book isn't it if you once you sort of stop looking at social media so much and experiencing your life you might do those things things that you enjoy, like playing a guitar or reading more books and your attention span will improve as well? Yes, taking a break from your phone and becoming better about creating distance between you're and your phone, I've found it to really have profound impacts on my life and also trigger a lot of deeper philosophical questions, which I totally was not expecting. But the thing is, if you spend less time on your phone, you're going to have more time in your day. And so one thing I also like to talk about is that you need to figure out what you want to

use that time for. Otherwise, you're just going to get existentially depressed. or you're going to reach for your phone again. And I had one afternoon where I had this happen. My husband and I had turned off our phones for 24 hours over the weekend, which was a ritual that we like to do. And I was sitting on a couch and I realized I was just waiting for dinner time. It was like two in the afternoon. I'm like up four hours till dinner.

And then I thought, oh my goodness, I need to actually figure out what I want to do with my time. And that's what triggered me to sign up for guitar classes, which I always said I wanted to do, and join an adult choir and actually do some of these things that I'd forgotten I even wanted to do. So I think, yeah, it's important to have in mind some things that you want to do at the time that you're going to reclaim from your phone. Because that's all the concern, isn't it? You sort of suddenly start playing with your phone and then you're going to sit on the set here. You go, am I actually a really boring person? I can't remember what I like doing.

Oh, it was totally like that. I was like, what does bring me joy? And I like to tell people, I mean, one way, another trick for being. behavior change is also to, once you figure out some of the things you want to, as I put it, spend your attention on, then set up your environment to have more triggers that make it easier to do those things. For example, if you say you want to read more books, you should put a book you want to read on your bedside table and then remove the trigger of the phone from your bedroom. So you're removing the phone trigger and you're replacing it with a positive trigger of something

you actively want to do. You know, if you say you want to cook more, pull out a cookbook and get like write down a recipe so that you have a shopping list for it. And then actually, I I mean, use your phone to invite some friends for dinner. So you have like you've made a commitment and you have to do it. And that brings up the point that there's nothing wrong with using your phone. I mean, if you're using it especially to create a real life interaction with people you care about, like more power to you, that's the beauty of communication. So what is this one take-home message that people should take for your book and your 30-day plan, do you think?

I think the one message I want people to come away with is that we only have a finite amount of time in our lives. And every moment when we make a decision about how to spend our attention, we were making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives. And that's a personal choice. You can do what you want with it. But it's important to keep that question in mind. And I think it actually can be really powerful to start using your phone as a trigger to ask that question in other areas of your life. There is one more thing I wanted to say. when I say breaking up with your phone, a lot of people freak out with the terminology because

they think I mean that they should throw their phone away and go back to a flip phone. And so just to clarify, if you break up with a person, it probably doesn't mean that you're never going to date a human being again. And the same thing's true for your phone. It's not saying you can't have a phone or use your phone again. The point is just to take a step back from it so that you can actually actively seek out and create a healthy relationship with your phone. Catherine Price there on The Science of Phone Addiction.

Thanks for listening to The Science Focus podcast. In our March issue, which is on sale now, we look at the science that makes us feel good about the future, explore how hallucinogens reset depressed minds, and we look at how we might replace animal testing in the future. And of course, there's much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

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