Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 133: Catherine Price, Redefining Your Relationship with Your Phone

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

It was an "out of body moment," Catherine Price said, when she realized her newborn daughter had been looking up at her but she had been looking down on her phone, scrolling through antique door knobs on eBay. It led the "How To Break Up With Your Phone" author to redefine her connection to her device and she now offers her advice on how we can go from an "obsessive relationship" to a "friends with benefits" situation with our phones that's still enjoyable but establishes boundaries. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Hey people, on the show this week, how to break up with your phone.

A terrific interview with an incredibly smart reporter who has written a book about changing your relationship with your phone. That doesn't mean going off to live in a mountain and crushing your phone under your car tire. It's really about having a different relationship and more mindful relationship with your devices. So we'll get to Catherine Price in a second, but first your voice mails, here's number one.

Hi Dan, my name's Nick. I'm calling from Tokyo, currently walking around the Imperial Palace while I listen to the podcast. I thought I'd bring in the question and that is, do you think that you can become too dependent on guided meditation? What's the right balance between guided and unguarded meditation? And does guided meditation help you become better or worse at meditation? Thanks very much. Well, definitely hands down the coolest venue for a voicemail.

The Imperial Gardens, did he say? Awesome. I encourage listeners to call in from the strangest places you can think of. It's also a great question. And as usual, I just wanna issue my, sorry, by now this might be tiresome, but I feel it needs to say it every time a caveat, which is that I am not a meditation teacher,

not a mental health expert. I'm just answering these questions, which I have not heard until they're played to me on the show, to the best of my ability. So can you become too dependent on guided meditations? I suppose, but frankly, if that's the biggest problem you have in your meditation, it's not that big of a problem. In my view, I'm really thinking of this from the standpoint

of most people that I run across these days want to meditate but aren't doing the thing. And if guided meditations are what get you over the hump and you just feel like you don't want to do it any other way, then I would just be chalking that up as a win personally. Having said that, you know, in a perfect world, in my view, in my experience, really, I think it's about having a mix. I don't think guided meditations make you worse at meditation by any stretch. I think, in fact, they make you better because it is so easy to lose touch with the point

of meditation if you're doing it on your own. It starts to feel stupid after a while. Just like, why am I doing this? Sitting here, my eyes closed, just feeling my breath coming in and going out and I'm getting distracted all the time. It's so useful to hear a smart teacher

connect you back to the basics. It's okay to get distracted. In fact, it's inevitable. The win is to notice when you become distracted and to start again, why is that a win? Because when you see how crazy you are, you are less owned by the craziness. To hear about how the practice can be connected to practical aspects of our lives, our relationships, our health, our relationship to our phone,

for example, which we're going to be talking about on the show today. All of these things are super helpful. Obviously, I have some skin in the game because I'm the co-founder of a company that serves up guided meditations. But I really, I actually do believe, and this is based on my conversations with many experienced meditation teachers

that guided meditations are not for amateurs. They're really for everybody. I use them in my own practice. I do a lot of unguided as well, but so I think in an ideal world in my personal point of view and you can take or leave this that it's about having a mix and that's really up up to you what the mix is. In my personal practice, it's really the vast majority is unguided, but I do quite a bit of guided as well just because I enjoy it. And I do find that these are great reminders

of things that are very easy to forget. Again, why we do this practice. So bottom line is I actually think guided meditation makes you better over time. If you develop what you believe to be some sort of you know if you feel like you're dependent upon them, it might be a worth experimenting with unguided meditations, but I feel like there are much more serious problems that you should worry about. Enjoy Hong Kong Tokyo, where was he? Tokyo. Tokyo is amazing, by the way. So enjoy it and thank you very much for the call. Next one.

Hi, Dan. I'm Stevenson from Maine. I have a question I'm going to ask at kind of two ways. What would a meditation journal look like if you kept it or perhaps secondly asking this is keeping a meditation journal actually contrary to having a good practice. Well, Maine is less exotic than Tokyo. But having said that, I lived in Maine for eight years. I went to college there. But having said that, I lived in Maine for eight years. I went to college there in Waterville, Maine, and then I worked in TV stations in Bangor, in Portland. So thanks for the call. Appreciate that.

I want to else bear you in my main accent, because it's terrible. Meditation journal. I don't know much about meditation journals. Never, never, never occurred to me to keep one. Although I guess I kind of do, when I go on meditation retreats, I do jot down a lot of notes and then write about it. I wrote what I guess you could call a meditation journal type thing in 10% happier where

I talked about what it was like to be on a meditation retreat and kind of gave a blow by blow. I, you know, unless you're writing a book about your meditation experiences, I don't know what the value of keeping a journal is, like a super detailed journal, and I can see how it could become, I've experienced it becoming problematic for me when I'm on retreat or in meditation

and I get a bunch of ideas and I want to write them down and then I start a mentally wrestle with myself about whether I should write them down. And it's actually kind of a, it can be pretty distracting. That being said, if I wasn't distracted by that, would I be distracted by something else probably? But if you're keeping a meditation journal because you're working with a teacher and you want to be able to report back to your teacher various aspects of your practice to discuss, I think that makes sense, although I don't know how detailed that journal needs to be.

So I don't know that I'm giving you a super satisfactory answer here. I don't think it's a huge problem. I think, again, I'm going to go back to what I said to, in response to our caller from Tokyo, which is that if you're meditating at all, that's a win. We get so hung up on our, I'm speaking personally here, I know this for myself and for everybody I know who meditates that I've ever had a conversation with, we all get so hung up on these little aspects of our practice because that's kind of what the mind does. If you find that overall, it's useful for you

to keep in meditation journal. I say go for it, but if you're starting to become aware that it's really just kind of becoming distracting to you while you're meditating, and I would go back and reexamine that it's really just kind of becoming distracting to you while you're meditating. And I would go back and re-examine why do you want to do it in the first place. And really just, you know, you hear this talked about in Buddha's and all the time because it was

a big slogan of the Buddha, which is the middle path. So I don't know that it's a yes or no answer. It's just about doing it with some skillfulness. Okay, thank you for the call from Maine. Appreciate that. Let's get to Catherine Price. She's written a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, which is a great title. And she's a really just a great interviewee with her own personal story about how she came to this and how she came to this understanding that we have this often noxious relationship with our technology. And as a previous guest

on this show has said, we are conducting this society-wide, unregulated science experiment with our minds by just flooding the population with all these devices, just walk around the streets and watch in New York City and just see how many people are just staring into their devices. I'm one of them, by the way, so no judgment here. We don't know what this is going to do to our minds over time. And so what we do know is that I think if you take stock of what your phone is doing you on a day-to-day basis, that it is often making you more frazzled, more distracted, you're suffering from often, many of us are suffering from social media induced FOMO or feelings of insufficiency or envy. So, Catherine Price has really dived, she's an experienced journalist, she's really taken a deep dive here to look at what we know about what these devices are doing to us and how we can have a say in our relationship

with our technology. She is not some sort of purist saying, you need to ditch your phone. She's saying, no, actually there are ways to create a healthier relationship with it. So here we go, Catherine Price. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. All right, well thanks for coming in.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. The question I always start with is how did you start meditating? I started meditating actually because of a writing assignment. I was interested in the subject, but then at some point I got an assignment from the O magazine, the Oprah magazine, to do something about mindfulness. And so I got to interview John Kabat-Zinn and got started through that. He's sometimes known as the father of mindfulness.

He's been on this podcast. Exactly. And it was funny because I remember asking John Kabat-Zinn. I was like, okay, well, what should I start with, what type of meditation should I start with? And he suggested in his heavy Brooklyn accent that I suggest with like a guided meditation about a lake or a mountain. And I remember trying to do this meditation and realizing that I actually am horrible at visualizing anything. That's not a meditation that works for me. And I was trying to do this mountain meditation. I was literally sitting in front of a mountain, and I couldn't imagine what I'm,

I just kept seeing the Evian bottle in my head, and that's when I realized, I like the idea of this, but I need to find a focus that works better for me. As a result of that article, my husband was already interested in meditating too, and we ended up taking a mindfulness-based stress reduction course and trying to incorporate mindfulness and meditation more into our daily lives.

How long ago was this? The article was about eight years ago. So you were ahead of the curve. A while ago. It was a while ago. Yeah, or the editors said, oh, we're ahead of the curve. Well. And I jumped on that.

But yes, and it really was helpful. I thought that the mindfulness-based stress reduction course, it has helped me in so many ways. I mean, in terms of certainly being more present with my experience, but also dealing with a lot of self-hatred issues that I hadn't really figured out what to do with and just cultivating a lot more compassion and kindness towards myself. It's made a really profound difference in my life. What were you beating yourself up over?

I mean, as a writer, I know there are endless things to beat yourself up over. I don't even know if it was like a specific thing. I've thought about this and I think it might have to do with just a general perfectionist personality, but there was this one particular, I mean, we're going to get in there right now. There was this one thing they had us do during a day-long meditation retreat as part of this course and you were supposed to imagine yourself as a child. And I suppose, I guess the idea was to be compassionate and kind toward this child. And instead I just was imagining kicking this little girl and like punching her. Yeah, I don't know.

I couldn't really identify why, but it was a very strong visceral response and image. And I told my husband that and he was horrified. I mean, he was like, this is so upsetting to me. This is the person I love the most, like talking about wanting to hurt at version of herself. And it was a really powerful moment because I realized I don't want to feel that way. And I don't know why I would be that, I would not be that cruel to any creature. So why was I imagining doing that to myself? And I think that that was really a turning point for me. And now I'm really happy to say that when I tell that story,

it feels very foreign. Like I don't feel that way anymore. How did the meditation shave that down? What's the mechanism? I think it's hard to identify exactly what it was, but I think the process of cultivating compassion towards yourself and non-judgment was really useful to me. I think also the recognition that our minds are not ourselves and that our minds are crazy.

And the way I like to think about it is that my mind, and my mind is like a very good friend who's also totally nuts. And so I keep it around, like I'm going to engage with these thoughts that I have, but I don't always need to actually go with them. I think the realization that thoughts are really invitations was very powerful to me, where your mind is constantly thinking, and it's constantly presenting you with ideas,

and that you don't have to follow all those ideas, because a lot of them are really bad. And the idea that you can always choose what direction you want to take, I think, was very powerful to me. So that if you're in a situation that's stressful or upsetting, that you can actually say, okay, well, I could continue down this path and just get even more pissed off about the traffic jam or whatever, or I could take a step back and try to reframe this. So for me, that was a really powerful kind of life, life tool and coping mechanism. What does your practice look like these days my practice these days is not what I want it to be because I have a three-year-old and I feel like I

Get up and immediately Running around I used to be trying to do girl a girl It used to be doing 20 minutes of just mindfulness based meditation a day not a mountain really breath coming in Yeah, I distracted start again. Yeah, which of course happens every the space meditation a day, not a mountain. Like, really the breath coming in, I just distracted, start again. Yeah, which of course happens every time you take a breath. Of course. And then also, that means you're doing it right.

Exactly, exactly, because you noticed, right? Yes. And then I found for me, body scans are work well, and then also scanning the environment for sounds, that was something that really worked well. So I would say right now, my formal practice is definitely laps lapsed but what I've realized is that my daughter is actually my meditation practice now because when I'm with her I make a conscious point not to be on my phone and try not to I don't even turn the radio on actually I don't listen to the news while

I'm with her because I want to be fully present with her and I want to use her interest in the world as a away from my from me to enjoy my experience like for example we got this light that chain was like a night like that change colors and she spent like 10 minutes just going pink green and I was sitting there on the futon just watching her do this and feeling so lucky to be experiencing this joy because I know that I knew that in a day she wouldn't be that excited about it and it was just a wonderful moment to be present in so she's she's my meditation now. So I have a three-year-old boy and one of the things I struggle with is that I try to be

present for all the stuff and some of the moments like the futon moment you described is that you pretty those are pretty easy to be present for but a lot of the time it's incredibly boring you know 87 run-throughs of him lining up his dime store isn't a very it you know in a specific way and then singing the same song while he's doing it like it's cute to watch for a little while but I after a while I find myself checking my phone or turning on the radio. How do you avoid that? Well, I don't think you can avoid the desire to seek a distraction. So I think there's a lot of direct comparisons between that experience and the experience of meditating, where maybe for a breath or two you're like totally in it and then your mind's like, yeah, but

we could do so many more things right now and check out. So for me, I try to use those cravings as a reminder to take a step back and say, well, what's what's boring? What does that even mean? Cause she's not bored. She's fascinated by whatever's happening. So maybe the issue is me and that I have lost the ability to find wonder and enjoyment out of singing the alphabet song 37 times in a row. But I think that's the challenge. And for me, my phone actually was the trigger for wanting to, or my daughter rather was the trigger for wanting to re-evaluate my relationship with my phone because it was because of her that I realized I was so often finding in my hand and not even knowing why it was there and just disengaging from my present experience to do something

totally mindless. Yeah, so the title of the book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, great title. Thanks. Just give me the backstory. You shared just a little of it seconds ago, but say more about why you wanted to do this now. Well, I'm a health and science reporter by training, and then I also have done a lot of stuff

with mindfulness and behavior change, and I used to be a teacher. So I think all those things came together to produce this book, and there was one moment in particular that catalyzed or inspired me to pursue this, and that was that I was sitting with my daughter one night and when she was a baby, and she was looking up at me. You know, in her eyes were like,

perfectly developed to see her mother's face, and no further, and I was looking up at me. You know, when her eyes were like, perfectly developed to see her mother's face and no further and I was looking down on my phone and I was searching for antique door knobs on eBay. Which I really liked and they truly bring me joy. But I realized I had this kind of out of body moment where I saw that scene from the outside and it was like her looking at me, me looking at the phone and my heart sank and I realized

I don't want this to be her impression of a human relationship. And I've since realized that there actually really is a profound effect that you can have on babies if you did something called the still-faced experiment where researchers basically had parents go totally still-faced when interacting with their babies just for a minute and see what to see what would happen and the baby's freak out. It's very dramatic and very upsetting and I realized that I was still facing my daughter in that moment. And then I started to notice the world around me and the way all of us are interacting

with our phones and realize we're doing that to everyone. We're checking out our interactions with people and just staring at our phones. So anyway, it was an ongoing process. A lot of conversations with my husband, a lot of just awareness of looking around and noticing how I and other people were interacting with their phones. And at some point, I realized this is not just me that struggling with this issue, everyone is constantly on their phones. And I would like to try to come up with a solution for that.

Is there a solution? I think there is. I mean, I think it takes work, but it is basically taking the step back to try to reconnect with what's actually important to you in life or connect with that for the first time and then decide what role your phone can play in that. So it's not about dumping your phone.

It's about going from what's currently the success of romantic relationship where we're sleeping with our phones and we're craving them when we're not with them. We get twitchy when we're apart to going to be friends, or as I say, friends with benefits, where it's like you use your phone for when it's useful or truly enjoyable,

but you have boundaries with it. And I think that that takes work. It's not something that's going to be achieved just by turning your screen to grayscale or plugging it in someplace else. I'm just interrupting on that because it's so just to make sure because some people may not have heard of this. But one of the techniques that's sometimes thrown out there as a way to make the phone less alluring is to make it's the term of the term of art is turn it to grayscale.

But it basically takes all the color out of the screen. It's not a game of thrones. It's a thing for your phone. Yeah. Yes. That's right. Is that phones. It's a thing for your phone. Yes. That's right. Is that what they call it? I believe so. I was. So it's not to make everything on the, it's, it's, the idea is to take all the color out

of the phone and there's some science that suggests that you'll be less likely to check it because it's less alluring. But you're saying that that's not enough. It's not enough. I mean, it is a useful thing to do, and we can talk more about why that's true, but it's not enough because you don't actually have any, you haven't figured out what your goal is.

I mean, just saying I want to spend less time on my phone feels like a diet, but it doesn't have any purpose, and it's not joyful. So the way I think about it is it's not about spending less time on your phone, it's about spending more time on your life. And in order to do that, you need to redefine your relationship with your phone, and then you also need to think more critically

about what you want your life to be. And again, I mean, I at least personally found that to be surprisingly challenging, but that has made it all the more rewarding to do. So what I'm hearing and correcting me if I'm wrong is that you're not throwing out a bunch of hacks, although it sounds like you have some hacks, but you're saying before we get into any of that, actually we need to step all the way back and have a big sort of philosophical discussion with

ourselves about what do we want here? Yes, that's exactly the point. The guiding quote that I kept coming back to in the book is our lives are what we pay attention to Meaning that you only experience what you pay attention to and you're only going to remember what you pay attention to And so every time you make a decision in the moment about what to pay attention to you're really making a broader decision about how you're spending your life And that's um, that's true It's not judgmental if you decide I really want to be spending my life on Instagram That's your call

But in many cases we haven't really been asking ourselves that question. And so I think that in order to truly change our relationship with our phones and to create these boundaries, and what's more, to use our phones to help make our lives happier in broader sense. You can't just have hacks. And that's something I really didn't want to have. Like whenever I read anything about phones, it would be a litany of bad effects of phone time.

And then it would be like two tricks for what to do about it. Turn it to grayscale. Yeah, exactly. And charge it outside of your bedroom. Right. And unless you know why you're doing that and what you want to do instead, you're doomed to failure. Well, guide us through how we would have this discussion with ourselves.

Well, the first thing to do is to get in the practice of noticing how you feel in the moment. So again, this has a lot to do with mindfulness, which I was surprised, but it was like suddenly the phones became this very philosophical very quickly. And that basically is like noticing what you feel like when you're using your phone, because once you notice what you feel like, then you give yourself the option of whether or not you want to continue. And once you start to associate your phone with actually feeling a particular way, then

when you feel you're about to reach for your phone, you can say, do I actually want to feel that way right now? I mean, I think my phone is this Pandora's Box of Emotions. It's going to provoke an emotional response. Then normally it's not going to be that great of a response. And that awareness is very helpful in making it possible for me to cut off that craving before I then automatically reach for the phone. So the first thing is cultivating awareness and you know as we were talking about earlier

that one way to do that is to create speed bumps for yourself where you actually put obstacles in your way that force you to slow down and actually decide what you want to do instead of doing things automatically. So you can change the lock screen and it's on your phone. I mentioned I've got lock screen downloads at phonebreakup.com. You can also just like put a rubber band around your phone so that when you reach for your phone, then you feel something strange. You have this momentary like, why do I have a rubber band around my phone moment? And then you're like, oh, it's to make sure that I actually want to be doing this

right now. So there's things you can do to begin to get in the habit of cultivating this awareness of what you're doing and how it's making you feel. And when you think about it, that's a tool that's useful, not just with our phones, but with anything we're doing in our lives, is to it's very useful to think, oh, I'm about to engage in this automatic behavior. How does that actually make me feel? And if you want to continue in the path, it's fine, but you've given yourself a chance to change direction. So let me just walk through this. It's great to host a podcast if you want to continue on the path, it's fine, but you've given yourself a chance to change direction. So let me just walk through this. It's great to host a podcast if you're a narcissist because you can make everything about

yourself. So, for me, I notice a couple of things. One is that I check when I'm bored. And when I get deep into email, I start to feel this kind of rushing, racing, tension, stress around whatever the content of the various emails are, and also the fact that I have somebody to answer, and that I also have a million other work things that I need to get done, and it never feels like it's over. And if I'm not checking it, I also feel like, well, there's just a bunch of things

piling up that I do need to get to, et cetera, et cetera. So that's just, I'm just trying to walk through the, use myself as the guinea pit of walking through this process. So once I've identified that, so what, what do I do with that data? Well, first of all, congratulations, because that's like a level of awareness that most people haven't really gotten to yet, is to immediately say, oh, why am I checking my phone and then how does it make me feel? Well, you know, I don't know if I mentioned you,

but I'm enlightened, so. Oh, right, I was gonna say, I think narcissists like to be complimented, so I wanted to be sure to do that too. But, no, but you actually touched upon one of the exercises I recommend people get in the habit of, which is, WWW, which is what for why now what else? So what for is like what are you actually picking up your phone to do? Why now that could be situational like I'm in an elevator and I always reach for my

phone in the elevator or I'm forward like you're saying and then what else? So what else could you do to achieve the same results or what else could you do that something else entirely? Like maybe just look at the elevator door for six floors. So in terms of what to do with your revelations, I think that you have given yourself already the tools to begin to make more conscious decisions about whether you want to engage in those behaviors.

And you also seem to be tuning into the actual physiological responses that we have when we reach for our phones, which is something I think is really powerful, which is to say, well, two main categories. One is dopamine, which is a brain chemical that our brains release when we engage in an activity that our brains decide is worth repeating. So dopamine is released, for example, in response to sex or eating, but it also is released in behaviors that become addictions like drugs or gambling or our phones. Our phones are packed with dopamine triggers because the more often you get a dopamine

release, the more you're going to associate that behavior with something that's worthwhile, the more you're going to do it again and again and again. So I noticed that I'm sorry, you're in the middle of a thought, but I'm just going to pick up on that. I noticed that there are like, I'm always looking around at my phone for the apps where I know I can get a dose of newness. So in the morning, I know I can get, I love this website, PitchFork,

where they do music reviews and I'm a big music fan. So every morning they have four or five new music reviews. So that's a big dope mean hit. Every morning on our Slack channel for 10% happier, I find out how many people subscribed overnight. So that's a huge one. Email's obviously a huge one. Texts, Instagram.

So there's all these little spots where I know I'll get something new. And then we reach five, six o'clock, seven o'clock, PM, and I've worn out all of my dopamine hits. And yet I'm still going for the phone. Right, right. I mean, that's the thing that once the cycle starts, it's very, very hard to break.

And what I would say in response to the list you just gave me is that first of all, great. So you're aware of the newness component because that is one of the biggest triggers for dopamine is something that's new and unexpected, something that's unpredictable. You don't know how many people liked you overnight. But once you recognize that's new and unexpected, something that's unpredictable. You don't know how many people like to, like, you overnight. But once you recognize that's happening, you can then ask, well, which of these activities are things that I genuinely enjoy, that genuinely are worth repeating? And from

the list you just gave me, it seems like perhaps the pitchfork one is something you actually do drive true pleasure from. Yes. Because you love music. And so when you check that, yeah, sure, you're in a habit of checking it for the newness, but that's because for you, that actually is a behavior worth repeating versus maybe obsessively checking to see how many likes you get or just finding yourself an Instagram for no reason. For me, at least those would be less fulfilling and less in line with my actual priorities in my life. So those might be the ones to try to minimize, but then you can keep the ones that actually truly bring you pleasure.

Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderies Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul, Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So how would I proceed from...you were probably starting to answer this when I cut you off, but how would I proceed from the realizations I've already had about my phone, how it makes me feel

when I check it, the power of newness, how would I proceed from that to a saner relationship with this thing? Because I'd be honest, I don't think I have one right now, the same relationship. Okay, well this is good, we're going to work through it. This is what we're gonna achieve. Okay, well first, so we just started on the most important first step as we talked about, which is this bigger picture awareness. The only other thing I was gonna say in terms of that awareness is that we also get stress hormones released when we don't have our phones and it makes us nervous and kind of twitchy.

So just starting to be aware of what you feel like when you're about to reach for your phone and recognize that's because you actually are releasing stress hormones that are and you're calming yourself down by picking up the phone but that becomes its own cycle. Yeah, I know as my zombie arm is going toward my suit pocket work on my phone. I call those zombie checks where you're like, I don't even know how my phone got in my hand right now. Yes, all the time. Yeah, yeah, we all do it. So, anyway, so you've done the kind of awareness work. So then that's where the hacks come in. And the idea here is that once you know what you're doing, how it's making you feel, and

you've kind of zeroed in on which parts of your relationship you like, and then which parts you don't like, and therefore what you want to keep and what you want to minimize, then you can start making changes to your environment both on and off your phone to make it easier to change your behavior. There's a great book, The Power of Habit by Charles DuHig, and he talks about how you can't break a habit once you get these dopamine cycles established, but you can change a habit,

you can replace one behavior with another. So that's when you start doing things like, okay, well, I know that Instagram is a problem for me, so get Instagram off your phone. You can always re-install it, and you can get it off your phone. That's when you start doing things like, okay, well, I know that Instagram is a problem for me. So get Instagram off your phone. You can always re-install it. Get it off your phone. Get it off your phone.

He's looking at me with concern right now. And that doesn't mean you can't use Instagram, and that's a key point. It's not about restricting yourself. It's about making it a little bit harder. So you could look at it from your desktop browser. Note that it doesn't have all the same features, and that's very deliberate because the makers of Instagram want you to look at it on the phone. They also have the scroll be endless just like there's no clocks and casinos so that you don't have any trigger

to recognize how much time is passing. So you can protect yourself by if you don't want to delete it, although I do recommend that moving it to an interior page of your phone and in a folder that says something like, watch out or something that makes it so that you actually have to scroll over and actively do it. And then your home screen, I mean, it should be tools, not temptations, this is what I tell people. So you don't want anything on your home screen or your phone that's going to be an invitation to get sucked into or that's going to look up at you with this colorful little icon when you

When you randomly pick up your phone without thinking so like my home screen. It's like Google maps or Uber It's very hard to get sucked into Uber. It's just yeah utilities. It's just not that interesting So do you not have Instagram on there? Right now I do only because I had to do it. this is so ironic. An Instagram takeover this week for book promotion, the only time I've ever bought an Instagram, but I'm taking it off because it's just too tempting. I mean, the whole point is to tempt you. Just get it off. What about your email, though, because for me, the primary driver's email. Email is tricky. So, good evening back to this idea of removing triggers for behaviors you want to change

and then replacing them with something else. Email is definitely my biggest issue too because it's a quintessential, like people compare our phones to slot machines and emails very much like a slot machine, you check it and you don't know what's going to happen and sometimes there's something great waiting for you and most of the time there's not, but you still keep checking it and checking it. So one thing to do, both for email and everything else is to turn off notifications. A lot of people have tuned into the fact that you should turn off the audible notifications on your phone.

But often don't recognize that the little bubbles, the little red bubbles with the numbers, those are notifications. And on your browser, the little, I use Gmail, the number that says how many messages there are that's in the browser tab, that's a notification. And anytime your brain gets a notification, you end up like Pavlov's dogs, where you're, you know, you're in that famous experiment, he trained dogs to drool when they heard a bell because he taught them to associate the ringing of a bell with the eating food. We associate the sight or sound of a notification with getting something new. And so whenever we get a notification,

it activates that dopamine system in our brain. And so whenever we get a notification, it activates that dopamine system in our brain. And once that gets activated, it's just really hard to step aside. So take all the notifications off. I recommend actually going through your apps and deactivating all notifications, except for the ones that you definitely want to have on. For me, that's phone calls, text messages, and like a navigation,

and then maybe the calendar, because those are just practical tools or contact with a real person in real time who actually wants to speak to me. But for- Not news alerts. Not- oh my god, no, I took the news off my phone. I mean, obviously, this might not be a possibility for you. Not for me, it's not a possibility. But I realized what I was doing is I was just compulsively reading every single article in the app and that that was not making me feel good when I actually thought, how do you feel when you're reading all of these news stories and it wasn't good.

So I deleted all the apps. I call it Breaking Up with the News, no offense. But I do get plenty of news because I check it for my desktop or I subscribe to the Sunday paper. And so I find that even though I nominally have broken up with the news, I actually am perfectly well informed without having to be driven crazy by it. Not drowning in it. Not drowning.

But for email, I do things like I installed a plugin called InboxWinReady for Chrome. And that hides the number of new messages that you have and it hides your inbox. Those sound like really, I don't know, simple things that wouldn't really do very much, but I could not have written this book without it because I had the whole process of writing the book. It was one year from finding out they were interested to publication date. It was like insane.

Yeah. I did that. I did that in the last recent, most recent book, one year from conception to publication and it was just awful. Right, right. And so for me, I had such an issue with email. I realized I had a tick where I would just finish that sentence and then check my email. So it was inbox when ready, you go to your email and you actually have to click on a button

that says show inbox. So again, that's a speed bump. You actually have to do something proactive to see your inbox. And you can search for email and you can compose email in it without seeing your inbox. And I could not believe the difference that made in allowing me to use email when I proactively wanted to, but not to just get sucked into the spiral because I do the same thing that you do. It's just like, that's where I get lost.

Yeah. Email is the big time suck for me. And even when you check it, when you're ready though, there's so many things to respond to. And the more you respond, the more you have to respond again, you get into these discussions. I don't actually know what the way out of it is and the other thing is that I find that so I'm pretty good at really Not letting the email like pile up But then I have like 10 emails in my queue at all times are the rock bottom

Remainters that I don't want to respond to because they're like actually like tricky So I don't get any dopamine from looking at them. I only get guilt tricky. So I don't get any dopamine from looking at them, I only get guilt. Right. Just just stress hormones. I do the same thing. Recently, what I've started to do is to try to get things out of my inbox and actually identify what the task is that is associated with those things and then put that on a to-do list. I mean, that's not my idea that's I've gotten that from elsewhere, but to create action steps from that so that you know that your email inbox is calm and that you have everything else that you're supposed to respond to, taking into account somewhere else.

And so that way you know, that was just reading this book, getting things done, the famous book about productivity, but the idea being that if you have an unresolved thing in your mind, like an email that you need to answer. Some part of your brain is going to constantly be looping on that email. So the idea is to take that thing and put it someplace so you know it's captured so you can stop, you can free your brain up. And I found that to be actually really useful. So to say, okay, well then make a list of what I actually need to do as a result of these emails, get them out of my inbox, don't use the inbox as a holding pen. And I've also found it very useful to use apps to protect me from myself. People tend to say that's ironic, but I actually think it's just very practical.

So for example, there's one called Freedom that works very well for Apple products, and you can block particular apps and websites that certain times of day instead of schedule for yourself. So you can say, for example, I'm always three minutes late for the gym. I'm always at least three minutes late because I will be on my computer checking email and then just not stop. So I've used freedom to block my access 10 minutes before I know I need to leave the house. And so then I'll go to be the gym on time. That was a class. It's a class. It's like a cross training class. Yeah. But it's like embarrassing. Like how consistently

I'm always the exact same amount of time late. And what was so funny about the most recent time when I first set this up is I just kept clicking like refresh because freedom will just, it just doesn't work anymore. And I actually convinced myself that there had been a worldwide attack on the internet. And that must be some issue with like, yeah, it was a global crisis. When in fact, I had just set up my system so that I couldn't check my email during that time. But anyway, little hacks like that,

once you have a broader goal in place are really helpful. It's just they don't work if they're in isolation. Well, you may have covered this, but what are, are there hacks for the sort of, and maybe it's the WWW thing you talked about before, but there are just times where like, it's Sunday night, my wife and I are watching TV, and my phone's the WWW thing you talked about before, but there are just times where it's Sunday night, my wife and I are watching TV and my phone's there, and everyone's in a while in the middle of Homeland,

I'm watching, I'm picking up my phone and checking it for no good reason, where there hacks around the sort of checking for no good reason. Yeah, definitely, and also just as a side note, if you're feeling bored during Homeland, that's really, I don't know, saying in something. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, at this either. She's perfect in every other way, if you're listening. But we both have our phones right there.

Well, that's dumb. Exactly. That's where you start to say, okay, well, I want to spend, I want to check my phone less during homeland. Why? Why do you want to check it less during homeland? Because it doesn't do anything for me. It's not making me happier in any way.

And I enjoy homeland or billions or whatever it is that we're watching. I enjoy those shows. So that I should just be there hanging out in my wife watching TV. Why do I need the extra, the second screen experience? Right. Okay. So now we have established that you would like to get the phone.

You'd like to not check your phone during homeland because you actually like homeland and it's not adding to your enjoyment at the moment. So then you could say, okay, well, how could I change the situation to make that less likely? The most obvious thing is don't have your phone on the room when you're watching a home land. And then give yourself something else to do instead of, I don't know, get yourself a cup of tea, give yourself something to do with your hands so that when you go to reach for

your phone, you have an alternative that also reminds you of the habit you're trying to change. I mean, I personally, I charge my phone in a closet overnight. I actually created a little bed for it, which sounds ridiculous, but it's actually very psychologically effective. And I tuck my phone in at night and close the door. And if I want to check my phone, I try to do it around dinner time. Wow. But you can also see there's all these little hacks that once you have this broader goal in place, you can start to make changes to make it easier.

So I turn normally my phones on silent, but I can turn the volume up when I put it to bed at dinner time so that if someone actually calls me, which I think is a perfectly good use of my phone, it will ring. It becomes a landline so that I don't miss a call if someone is actually trying to, I mean, who calls anyone anymore, but if someone were to try to call me, I wouldn't miss it. But then also, if I want to go check my phone at any point in the evening, I can do that. It's just I have to go over to the closet and use my phone there. And I try to make a point of checking my phone with it still plugged in.

And that means that I have to stand in a closet when I want to look at my phone with it's still plugged in. And that means that I have to stand in a closet when I want to look at my phone. And that's kind of an awkward place to be, which means that I don't then get into this spiral of looking at eBay for door knobs or checking my email because I'm constantly reminded I'm standing in a closet, you know, tethered to my phone. So little things like that, I mean, I also recommend,

I mean, I definitely recommend people have a place that their phone goes to bed at night and that it's consistent. Because if you're constantly making decisions, you're much less likely to stick with the habit. You wanna have it be an automatically made decision that my phone sleeps here every night. And so does your wife.

So when I watch Homeland, my phone is in the other room. And if you feel the need to check it, you're going to check it during commercial breaks or during a break. Like, you're going to have a time when you're consciously going to get up and check it. So you're trying to make sure it doesn't feel like restrictions on yourself, because that's like the surest way to fail. But more like you're creating changes so that you can spend more time on this stuff, you actually want to be spending time on and not let your phone take away from the experience of your life.

If I understand correctly in the book, you have like a four week plan, can you just sort of walk me through that? Sure, yeah, so the book is structured, it's broken into two parts. The first is the wake up and the second is the break up. And the wake up is this, using my background as a science journalist to look into some of the effects that spending a lot of time on phones is having on our brains and our sleep and our stress levels and our relationships. In other words, trying to freak people out to give you a motivation to change. Is there a reason to be freaked out? There it is.

Yeah, we could talk more about that too. But the average person spending four hours a day on their phone, just with the screen on these days, that's based on this tracking app that is 4.8 million users. And that's a lot of the quarter of our waking lives, or just a sixth of our life. So it's a huge amount of time. That's the first half of the book. The second half is meant to actually give people a way to change. Because I didn't want to just freak them out and then leave them hanging.

So that's the four-week plan. You could do it in less time than that, but the point was you can't do it in just an afternoon because it takes time to change behaviors. So the first week is just what we were talking about initially, which is to take a step back and start paying attention to how you feel when you're on your phone. Try to get back and touch with the things that you actually love and bring you joy, which is kind of a hard question that I found hard to answer. Like, what do I actually want to be doing with my free time? Because if you spend less time on your phone, you're going to end up with more free time and you have to have something to do with it.

Once you've established that more philosophical framework, the second week is about making practical changes to your phone and environment. So that's where the hacks come in, but they're no longer really hacks because they're more like techniques because you now have a goal. And then the third week is about rebuilding your muscle of attention. So we can talk more about the effect of our phones. Phone time on our attention spans, but they are having an effect and it takes time to build your attention span back up. And that's where suggestions such as meditation come into play. Or just mindfulness practices, attention-building practices,

like just reading a book for 10 minutes without your phone. I mean, that's where we are. That's actually really hard for a lot of us. And then the last week is about putting this all together and creating, basically evaluating what you've done and seeing what you've learned and then creating kind of a description of your new relationship and a written down record of your new habits so that you can keep them for the long term. And between the week three and four, there's also a 24 hour break from your phone where you just do a full on 24 hour, you know, put your phone away. And that is a very, very challenging at first,

but then rewarding experience for people that often ends up being easier than they thought. Okay, so that was a good walk through the breakup. Let's go back to the wake up for a second. Like so how is a woman who has sat in your chair previously, who has been guest on this podcast previously, Manusha Emeroti, who's post of note to self, a great podcast. I believe she used the term that we are conducting a global, unmonadored, unrestricted science experiment on our minds with these mobile devices, and we don't know what the outcome is going to be. Yes, yes, we are in the middle of a giant society wide uncontrolled experiment. But with that said, we have some indications of what some of the effects are or could be and those are not good.

So just to talk about attention and focus as an example, the human brain does not actually want to be able to concentrate on just one thing. Because if you think about it, it makes no evolutionary sense to be too focused on one thing, because you could have threats in your environment that could kill you. So if you're like totally lost in a book, and then there's a rustle in the grass, and there's a lion, you'd want to be aware of that. So our brains naturally want to be distractable. That means that the act of concentration is actually an amazing feat. Reading a book is an amazing, amazing feat. It does not come naturally to us at all. And that is both because well for many reasons, you have to decipher random symbols, right? You have to

choose what to concentrate on. But more importantly, you have to ignore everything else. You have to train your brain to ignore every other stimulus in your environment, which even right now, like as we're talking, like I can feel the chair under me or like I could, you know, I can, there's all sorts of different things to pay attention to in this room, but I'm focusing on our conversation. And that's, that, if I may say myself, is an amazing feat that we can do this. Um, when you're on your phone, you're constantly, constantly exposing yourself to distractions, whether it's different items in your social media feed or if you're reading an article on their links, every time you encounter a link, your brain has to make a split second

decision about whether to follow the link. And you actually cannot absorb what you're reading and make a decision at the same time. So if you feel exhausted when you read online, you're not, yeah, you're not crazy. You're exhausting your brain. I feel exhausted all the time. All the time. Yes, because it is. It tires out a part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive control center of our brains. It's then one of the newest areas of our brains. And when it gets tired, it just like checks out. It's like, see you later and lets us go back to more primitive parts of our brain that really want to be distracted.

So my point being that our phones are a full of distractions. They're little distraction machines. And so when you spend lots of time on your phone, I mean, think about it, how often are you actually getting lost in a long form piece of journalism on your phone as opposed to either looking at different things in one app or flipping between apps.

And whenever we do that, we're actually training our brains to go back towards our default state of distraction. So when people say, like, I feel like my concentration's not what it used to be, or my attention span is waning, you're not crazy. Like you actually are training your brain to do that.

It's like the opposite of meditation. It is, and you're unmeditating. We are unmeditating. And that actually, this is great, because you'll look, I never get to go into this much depth about this But I think this is really interesting people always ask me like where are the brain scans showing what happens when your phone on your phone for Hours a day like we want brain scans and I'm like well, we don't really have those because we launched into this experiment without

Realizing it was an experiment. So now there's no control group and once you recognize that that an intervention might have negative consequences, you can't then randomize people to that group. You can't- Because we use the Bushmen of the Kalahari or whatever, some group that I don't know if the Bushmen have iPhones, but maybe they don't. Something like that. Yeah, you'd have to find a group that didn't have the phone. But we have studied the opposite, which is the effect of meditation on people's brains, when people train themselves to maintain focus. And so you can look at that mind state and compare that to what happens when you're on your phone. And there's a very interesting researcher, Judson Brewer.

I know he's a friend of mine. He's been on his podcast twice. Yeah, so I mean, he does fascinating work with allowing people meditating to actually see their own thoughts in a real time and seeing when distractions arise. And anyway, it's just, I think it's really fascinating. That's the fact that meditation is the antiphon. And but you can use your phone to help you meditate.

That's another weird thing. It's like there's a lot of great apps. Yes. Yes. I'm partial to one called 10% happier. I guess I have two questions before I let you go. Maybe your answers will inspire other questions. One is about your child.

Do you ever let her have screen time? I'm very, very careful about screen time with her. The only things I let her do on the phone are talk to her grandparents on FaceTime and sometimes look at photos. But never like hand or YouTube. No, I never do that. I never do that. And I feel very strongly about that. And I also try to minimize the amount of time she sees me using on my phone and To announce what I'm doing if I'm doing something on my phone. I'm bad at all of this No judgment But I mean I think the issue is that You've probably experienced this too like I mean these are

God I guess what I was gonna say before that that our brains are plastic right they change all the time That's why we can learn stuff so anytime you're doing something In the case of our phones four hours a day, you're changing your brain and it would make sense to ask whether or not you want those changes to be made. And in the cases of children, obviously, their brains are developing for the first time, making them particularly vulnerable, and therefore, in my view, something that parents should be very protective of. And I think the danger with something that parents should be very protective of. And I think the danger with phone, I mean, there's many things to be aware of and think about. But one issue is that they're so stimulating that after you get used to watching

constant videos or playing games on the phone, a book is not going to have the same appeal. And as adults, we can kind of like have a more meta conversation with ourselves of, no, I want to read the book. But as a kid, you're like, why would i look at the book that's so poor and there's a disturbing video on on youtube it's like a little kid trying to swipe a magazine's page and the thing the caption is like a magazine is an ipad that doesn't work i've heard of um little kids trying to swipe their parents when they're saying things they don't want to hear yeah i have your kid is swiping you, then that's a concern.

So I guess my final question is, you've now done this thing. You wrote this book. You've done all this research. Would you say you have a perfectly healthy relationship with your phone now? No, definitely not. There's no relationship is ever perfect, and you always have to be working on them and phones in particular designed to encourage unhealthy relationships. So I feel that I have a much healthier relationship that I did and most of the time it is healthy but there's certainly moments where I catch myself doing things I don't want to be doing on the phone. But I guess the point is I catch myself. And I've also really put a lot of work into trying to

use the awareness I've cultivated toward my phone in other areas of my life as well. So, I would say that it's actually become an interesting tool. Like my phone has gone from a constant temptation to still be in a temptation but also being this constant invitation to check back in with myself about how I actually want to be spending my time and attention. And so it's had really a profound impact on my life in ways I definitely wouldn't have anticipated when I first started working on this book. Even a great guest. And by doing what I call it the plug zone. So like, let's just plug everything. Work we find you in social media. Again, with the name of the book,

all your other books, like everything you can plug. Everything I can plug. All right, let's see. I hate social media, but you could find me on Twitter at at Catherine underscore price. You can find with a C, with a C. You can find out more about the book at phonebreakup.com. And that also has a lot of useful resources and tools that put together like free lock screen downloads. People can use to check in with themselves before they check their phones.

There's a 30 day online challenge that I've created at phonebreakup.com, which is a timed series of emails meant to accompany the book that start when you sign up so that you get daily reminders to keep you on track. And that's a great thing to do with friends and family. I've created a collection of resources that teachers and educators and book clubs can use to turn the phone break up into a group experience.

I think that actually is a really fun thing to do together and will definitely help keep you motivated. I have written a number of other books. My last book was called Vitamania, How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way we Think About Food, which is a totally different subject, the history of vitamins, but interestingly, it also had a philosophical bent to it

where I started looking at vitamins and then realized that these substances that keep us alive, they actually have this much more profound philosophical meaning the vitamins themselves and the word vitamin has changed the way that we think about food and nutrition. I've written a number of guided journals including the mindfulness, a guided journal to mindfulness and a gratitude journal. And I've also written a parody travel guide called 101 places not to see before you die.

And the Big Sur bakery cookbook. And then my general author website is Catherine with the C hyphen price at no just dot com Catherine heaven price dot com and that hyphen kills me. But there's an acupuncture is to check Catherine priceys.com. Uh, excellent, a great job, really appreciate it. I really enjoy the conversation, thank you. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast, if you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us.

Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Wednesday. Do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com

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