How to re-wire your brain to get off your phone
Phone addiction is rife, comparison culture BIG, and attention spans short. Here's how to take back your energy and time.
When I was 19, I travelled the world with two of my friends, the latter part of it spent bikini clad on Pacific Islands, living off papaya and the local chicken’s eggs. Landing in Los Angeles at the end of the trip was a shock to my island life system to say the very least. Dark skin, covered in shell necklaces, henna tattoos, hair braided so I didn’t have to brush it, my wardrobe consisting of a collection of ‘Fiji beer’ t-shirts, daisy dukes and a pair of Haviana flip flops. I was quite happy avoiding Hollywood like the plague and taking up residence on Venice beach for a while, where I fit right in with the locals that sold hair wraps and fruit cups for a living.
The year was 2007, the blissful days before social media was a thing, and the biggest distraction to reality was playing a game of Snake on your Nokia 3210. The only way of contacting home was with a ‘world card’ that got me all of about 30 seconds speaking to my Mum before it cut out, costing me about $5. I missed my family, my friends, my boyfriend so much. But it was a different kind of missing. It felt like every fibre of my being ached for them, so I carried physical photos of the people I loved in my diary a diary that I wrote in every night without fail, journaling on everything I’d seen, done and felt. This manifested in me becoming a travel journalist down the line.
Life was simpler, but brighter. What I mean by that is the colour was never sapped from anything because we weren’t distracted all the time by bright screens that had totally re-wired the circuitry in our brains. Today, actual Venice beach in the summer can’t compete with Venice beach in the summer on Instagram.
Think about that for a minute. In the last 10-15 years, the circuitry in our brains have been totally re-wired to train us in distraction. Something very, very weird has happened, and yet we’re all walking around like it’s very normal to have a device in our pockets that keeps us connected but disconnected and drives comparison culture by virtue of the fact it’s trying to play on your inadequacies, so that you part with more and more money.
Even writing this now, I have to have moved my body, I have to be in a coffee shop so the white noise hums in the background and my phone has to be totally out of sight because my attention span is evidentially shorter than it used to be. There’s a girl on the table just next to me in her early twenties who’s made about five different video calls to random friends in the last 30 minutes.
Perhaps more importantly, I don’t miss people like I used to. I’ve never ached for someone geographically far away because I can simply just face-time them. As lovely as that is, are we desensitised? Are we losing our single pointed focus when it comes to the people we love, our careers, our hobbies, everything? We’ve produced a culture that’s addicted to the dopamine cycle and its showing up everywhere we look.
Back to 2007 in LA. One day, myself Emily and May the girls I travelled with wondered into Santa Monica because we heard rumours of a Cold Stone Creamery (if you know, you know) …. When we arrived, we couldn’t move for people. Crowds of humans filling the streets, a real buzz in the air. It was the launch of the I Phone. I look back now, and I think if you could tell all of those people standing in line that this product would give you your I pod, You Tube, email, text, calls, the internet and a camera, all in one place, but at the same time rob you of your time, I think they’d quite rightly look at you like you had two heads. ‘No no no, these are going to save us SO much time.’ Nope. Our time, our energy, finite resources are being drained on these devices. New research has shown that they take 20 years of our lives. Yup, you heard correctly. 20 DAMN YEARS.
Great, if you’re using them to read something good and educate yourself -like getting a cup of tea and reading this Substack for example ;) Good on you, keep going. But can you stand in line at the supermarket, or bank without picking up your phone and scrolling? Can you watch TV without flicking through your phone? Can you even control what you see on your phone? NO!
Here’s why I’m passionate about this. I’m not writing about this like some sage on the stage who’s managed to tackle Silicon Valley’s tech nerds that drive profit driven ‘attention economy.’ I fell HARD into this trap, like most of us. I noticed the colour being drained from a relatively hedonistic life I had created for myself in my twenties.
There’s always going to be someone that scores more points than you in the buffet of life, and suddenly having access to filtered versions of everything made me feel totally inadequate. I was juggling life as a 26-year-old magazine editor, whilst training to teach yoga in my spare time, so I dove deep on the research with the connections I had through the work I did. Turns out, we shorten our breaths when we use social media. Sometimes we even hold our breath putting us straight into the stress response.
We also have what I refer to as a dopamine fuel tank. We wake up each day with a fresh batch, and throughout the day it gets drained. Looking at social media is like slamming on the accelerator, draining your fuel. Meaning that your actual life, you know, the real-life kind involving simple pleasures, material world magic like the light hitting your window, energetic experiences like the feeling when you hug a friend, they all get sapped of their flavour.
There’s a mode in the brain called default mode, and it’s always trying to garner certainty based on what its known from the past. It’s always trying to prevent and predict so that we feel safe. To do that it’s attempting to look for answers in a world where we cannot under any circumstances predict what life will throw at us. It hates the present moment because it feels unsafe so its searching for information (hence you can’t stand in line without looking at your phone)
Aside from comparison culture being rife, anxiety on the rise and your dopamine tank being drained from the get-go, decision fatigue is REAL! We make over 35,000 decision each day. Some big, some small, and let’s face it some damn right annoying. It means our precious thinking caps and cognitive fuel gets drained VERY quickly in these technological times, and quite simply, our ancient devices called our brains just aren’t wired for it, and research shows that our capacity to make well thought out decisions is finite, so we have to get serious about mitigating the trivial ones and the habits we have with our phones.
I make this point because it’s SO important in these times. We can use our phones to create magic, and not move through our days distracted by trivia.
Ever noticed how your willpower is at its weakest at the end of a working day? Netflix binge, why not? One bite of Tony’s turns into the whole thing being devoured? Doom Scroll on social media? So, either we make bad decisions, or if you’re anything like me from time to time, you get paralysed and unable to choose.
This is how I rally against our the modern matrix. I write morning pages and mediate daily, I plan what to wear before I go to bed, OR you can get very Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg about it and wear the same thing EVERY DAMN DAY. The ex-stylist in me is wincing at the idea, but these guys happen to be some serious power players that have somehow controlled our brains. I meal prep simple nutrient dense meals. Every Sunday evening, I plan out my week pen to paper because it’s been scientifically proven to cement in your brain more easily this way and I even use gel pens sometimes (90s kid.) You’re 40% more likely to achieve something if you get pen to paper.
I use the 51% rule. Now when it comes to the bigger decisions, good old Obama says that we only need to be 51% sure about something we go in pursuit of. Most of us look for 100% certainty and the irony is, the ONLY thing that will give us 100% certainty on a decision is hindsight. You have to know that given your upbringing, with your DNA, with the information and tools you had at any given time, you made the right decision for yourself. Wanting a different outcome from a past decisions is like wishing we lived in an entirely different universe to the one we’re currently living in. So, let yourself off the hook, and be at peace with 51% certainty in the pursuit of getting yourself on an upward trajectory.
I grey scale my phone. They don’t make it easy for you, but no one wants to hang out on a Microsoft word document all day, that’s what it feels like. Keep your phone away from where you sleep and I move my body and get out in nature as much as possible. I turn all notifications on my phone off, apart from calls. It’s my decision when I reply or check in to my phone, not my phone’s.
If you can’t put candy crush saga down long enough to watch a sunset, it’s not your fault, however it is on you to make a change, and these steps should help you. Humans don’t tend to go by what they know, knowledge isn’t always power in that sense. They go by what they feel. So, I really hope these words helped you feel the way you need to feel to make the changes that give you back your precious energy and time.