okay, so according to worldwide screen time statistics, the average person spends 6 hours and 40 minutes in front of screens, which is mostly their phone, every single day. That is 40% of our waking hours. And so, if you imagine yourself being alive for at least the next 50 years, of the next 50 years, you are spending 20 years looking at screens, which is probably your phone. I think it is fair to say that a lot of us are addicted to our phones, and generally, most of us probably don't want to be addicted to our phones. So, if you feel like your screen time is a little bit high, and I'm hoping by watching this video, you'll understand why phone addiction happens in the first place and why it's hard to deal with. Secondly, why it's bad and why we should try to deal with it. And thirdly, I'm going to share seven actionable tips that I've personally found really helpful for breaking my own phone addiction and reducing my screen time so that I can

use my time in a way that's generally healthier and happier, and more productive. And if you're new to the channel, then hello, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and I'm also the author of Feelgood Productivity, which is a book about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's actually enjoyable, meaningful, and sustainable. And I have done a lot of digging into the science of dopamine and how this phone addiction thing works because it is just such a scourge in the modern world. And I'm always interested in how do we find ways to combat this phone addiction that is so common amongst basically everyone. Part one: why is your phone so addictive? Now I'm pretty sure we can all think of a time when we've unlocked our phones to quickly check something like Instagram or emails or whatever, and then you end up spending 2 hours just absolutely glued to the screen. Now there is a guy called Dr. Larry Rosen who wanted to find out exactly how many times we fall into this

trap now. According to his website, Dr. Larry Rosen is an expert in the psychology of technology, and he's published a lot of studies on phone addiction. Now, back in 2016, he got a bunch of students to download an app onto their phone for 8 weeks, and that tracked two things. Firstly, it tracked how many times they unlocked their phone, and secondly, how many minutes it stayed unlocked. What he found was that these students unlocked their phone a lot more than you might think. They unlocked their phone over 60 times a day, and they were on their phones for over 3 and a half hours, or 220 minutes specifically. And yes, of course, our phones are useful and blah blah blah, but the problem is that we are becoming more and more addicted to our phones. And what's even scarier is that this is not entirely under our control. There is this phenomenon that's often called brain hacking, which is where technology is being purposefully designed to change the way that we think and to control the habits that we form.

which literally ends up changing how our brain functions. And this is all part of what we call the attention economy. Now, the economy part, like economics, is about how finite resources like food and money are made and shared and consumed. But then the attention part comes in because our attention can be traded in exactly the same way because it is a limited resource in that when we pay attention to something, we have to ignore something else. And so in this attention economy that we've been in for many years now, tech companies are all competing for our limited attention. And this makes us the product rather than the customer. So it's like this is you, your poor soul, and you've got your device or whatever the thing might be. Let's actually put this over here. This is the device, and you have all these different companies that are trying to advertise to you. And the way they advertise to you is through the social media apps on your device. And so the more time you spend on your phone, essentially, the more these companies can advertise to you and the more revenue

these different companies make because they make all this money from the advertising dollars. And so, the way that these incentives are structured, these social media companies have armies of thousands of ridiculously smart engineers who are all trying to work really hard to keep you on your phone and your brain. Your poor brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for an environment that is not the environment that we are in today. And these companies do really clever things like, for example, if you're on any of these scrolling apps, there's an infinite scroll like you can literally never run out of things to scroll. And something that apps like Instagram even do is that they hold back the likes so that you get them when you're least expecting it. And this is an idea called random intermittent reward which spikes our dopamine levels. And I've actually got a video all about the science of dopamine which you are very welcome to watch after this one. That'll be linked down below. But essentially we release dopamine when we get some sort of

unexpected reward. And so, if you want to design something to be very addictive, you would try and add as many dopamine triggers as possible. And that is exactly what's being done with your phone and with social media. And then what is even worse is that literally everything we do is being tracked by these various companies so that they can then target us with even more targeted ads, with even more targeted content that releases even more dopamine. And so, the big takeaway from this is that if you feel like you are addicted to your phone, don't worry, it's not your fault. You are fighting a losing battle in this attention economy because we literally cannot compete against the armies of engineers who these companies have hired to take control of our attention. But having said that, even though it's not our fault that we're in the situation, it is our responsibility to take control of the situation and to do the things that are under our control to help cure our phone addiction. And if you want to become even more productive and waste even less time.

then you might like to check out Grammarly, who are the sponsor of today's video. Now, me and my team members spend a lot of time writing and typing across dozens of different platforms like Slack, Google Docs, email, and Notion, and stuff. And we like using Grammarly to make sure that our writing is as effective and efficient as possible. And we've really found that better writing in these messages leads to fewer meetings. Grammarly is an AI writing partner that helps professionals like you and me write better and faster, and you can always use it in line within your apps so you can use the suggestions and make changes quickly. Also, their AI features are completely free to use, and one thing that sets Grammarly apart from other AI tools is that it works seamlessly across over 500,000 apps and websites so you can use it at all times on basically any software that you're using. And plus, it can adapt to my audience and to my tone to make sure that I don't sound like a robot or sound too professional.

depending on what you're trying to go for Grammarly has 14 years of best-in-class communication AI, and it's used and trusted by tens of millions of professionals. So it's a bit of a no-brainer for your writing needs. If any of that sounds good, you can sign up and download Grammarly for free using the link grammarly.com. Al abdal, which is also in the video description. So thank you so much, Grammarly, for sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it. Part two, what is the problem with phone addiction? Okay, so one of the big problems with phone addiction is that we often don't realize that we are addicted until we lose our phones or we don't have our phones. Like you've probably been in that situation where you think, Oh crap, I haven't got my phone. You check your pockets, you check your bags, it's not there, and you feel this acute anxiety response at the thought that you don't have your phone with you. Now, this is actually a phenomenon called

nomophobia, which is the fear of not being able to use your smartphone. And there are actually some interesting research studies that look at what happens to our bodies when we can't check our phones. So firstly, there was this really cool paper published in 2021 that randomly split a bunch of people into two groups. Groups one group called The text group had their phones taken away from them, and they were told to leave their notifications on so they could hear their phone, but they couldn't see their phone. And then in the other group, The no text group, the phones were kept on them, but they were turned on silent. The researchers then hooked up everyone in both groups to monitors on their fingers that measured firstly their heart rate and secondly changes in their skin conductance like sweating, which tells us about anxiety. And they monitored these metrics as the students were watching a 10-minute lecture that they were going to be tested on afterwards. Now the really sneaky thing was that during this 10-minute video, they sent four texts to each of the

people in the groups. What the results found was that for people in the text group I, for the people that did not have their phones with them but could hear the phones buzzing, there was actually a significant increase in their skin activity, which tells us that the nomophobia increased their levels of anxiety. And then another really interesting study found that young people who overuse their phone and experience a lot of withdrawal symptoms have increased cortisol levels. Cortisol is your body's main stress hormone, and we basically become so addicted to checking our phones that when we can't access them, our bodies respond in the same way as if we were being chased by an animal in the wild - the fight or flight response. And when we experience this nomophobia, the only way to feel less anxious is to check our phone, and so we get trapped in this addictive cycle. Now, alongside nomophobia, there are a few other interesting phrases that people have come up with. There is ringxiety when you always check your phone because you have

feeling that you've got a text or I had to call and texti. Which is that anxious feeling that you get when you feel like you always have to reply to messages as soon as you get them. And basically more and more research points to this correlation between phone addiction and mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression and paranoia. Oh, and by the way, if you're enjoying this video and you find yourself a little bit addicted to your phone, you might like to check out my completely free 7-Day Focus crash course. This is a 7-Day email course where I'll send you an email every day that sort of breaks down some principles, strategies, and tools you can use to improve your ability to focus. It's completely free, you can unsubscribe whenever you want, and you can go to focus crashcourse tocom or click the link down below and you can check that out if you like. Now there's this guy called Jonathan height who is a psychologist and the author of a really good book called The anxious generation.

and his whole case in the book. And he argues this quite commonly, I think, is that the reason why Gen Z have way higher incidence of mental health problems like depression and anxiety and other other things is that between 2010 to 2015 when Gen Z people were sort of going through puberty, which is a sensitive area for human development. That was when we had this massive surge in the use of smartphones and social media. We're not talking 10 or 20% increases here for most things. We're talking close to a doubling, especially for the younger girls. Now at this point, you might be thinking, yeah, but that's just because Gen Z are more open about talking about mental health. And this is what Jonathan hey says in response. A lot of people say, oh, you know, it's just self or um, you know, just Gen Z, they're really, they're really um, positive about mental health and they're willing to talk about it's a good thing. But the fact that we see the

exact same curves. The very sharp uptick for girls um in Hospital admissions for self-harm, psychiatric emergency department visits, and we see this in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, uh, the UK, um, the Scandinavian countries so something happened across the developed World um around 2012 and so how do we explain this pattern that we're seeing here well here is Jonathan height again from his interview with Andrew hubman if you want to understand why one person is depressed there are going to be many stories but if you want to understand why depression rates Rose for girls faster than boys all over the developed World unless someone confined like some hormone disrupting chemical that was suddenly sprayed over northern Europe and and the South Pacific and the US and Canada around 2012 there is no there is no alternative explanation so we've tolded about how your phone addiction is potentially increasing your anxiety and your depression but it's also contributing to procrastination so there's research for example that's found that the more you use your

smartphone. The less self-control you have through a mechanism called delay discounting. So, for example, you've got this sort of instant gratification thing where playing on your PlayStation right now feels better than doing that work thing, that work assignment, or that school assignment, or whatever the thing might be. And so, you're always going to prioritize the short-term thing, which leads to procrastination, which generally leads you to feel worse about your life. And then, perhaps, I'll point number four is that phone addiction can actually contribute to things like loneliness as well. So, for example, this study from 2018 found that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being. And in the study, they essentially found that students who were limiting the smartphone use to just 30 minutes had decreases in loneliness and also depression compared to a group of students who were just using their smartphones as normal. Now, so far, we've only touched on a handful of the negative impacts of phone addiction. There's loads of other stuff like

reduced sleep and reduced cognitive performance, and reduced ability to learn, and so much more. But now let's move on to part three, which is that okay, cool, we know that phones are addictive, we know that we probably struggle with that. What can we actually do about it? Okay, so there's a bunch of strategies that we can use to help take control of our phone addiction so that we're in control of it rather than it being in control of us. My personal favorite is using apps to block other apps. So there is a really good app called AppBlock. I have no affiliation with them. It is a paid app. It's very good. I use that. But also you can set screen time limits on your phones. And what this does is that it either enforces an upper limit on how much time you can spend on a particular app, which is a good thing, or it blocks those apps completely between certain times. So in my case, for example, I have AppBlock set to block all social media apps from 9:00 p.m. through to

9:00 a.m. in the morning, which means I'm never scrolling at night. And I'm also never scrolling first thing in the morning 'cause I literally can't. Because the app is just blocking me from doing that. This is often the first thing I prescribe when I speak to friends and team members and when people ask me questions and stuff related to phone addiction. It's like, do you have an app blocking app downloaded on your phone? If not, do it. It's free or cheap and it's really easy to do and immediately frees up way more time. And it's just a very Roi positive way to buy back more of your time. Secondly, the thing that I find really useful is to set automatic Focus modes on my phone. So essentially, I live my entire life through my calendar. I have all my work stuff in my calendar. I also have social events in my calendar. And so when my phone detects that there is an event in my calendar, it automatically turns on Focus mode, which means I never see notifications.

there's only a handful of contacts like my girlfriend, my brother, my mom, and grandma, and stuff, whose calls and texts can actually come through. So I still see important notifications, but I don't see all of the random group chats, and all the slack messages, and the emails, and all of the other stuff that will take me away from the thing that I'm actually trying to do, which might be work, but it might just also be having dinner with friends, for example. Thirdly, as a really simple hack to improve your sleep, try having your phone not on your bedside table, but either have it on charge across the room from you so you have to get out of bed to access your phone, or in an absolutely ideal world, have your phone charging overnight in a different room. And the thing I recommend is that you have a Kindle on your bedside table because its light is very dim, and it means you can read in bed, and it means if you wake up in the middle of the night and you find yourself unable to sleep, you can just read a book.

which will then hopefully put you to sleep, rather than scrolling on your phone. Tip number four is to rearrange the apps on your phone. Something that I do is that I don't have any social media apps actually on any of my home screens. If I want to access Instagram, I have to swipe down, I have to type in Instagram, and I have to click on it, and only then can I open Instagram. That's kind of nice. It works a lot of the time. But another thing you can do is you can install an app called One Second. I used to use One Second quite a lot. I've now replaced it with Opal because I just prefer the way Opal does it. But what One Second does is that you download the app, and then every time you open Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or whatever the thing might be, it creates this artificial loading screen that says, you know, you've got to wait 5 seconds before opening the app. It encourages you to take a breath. It puts links to other apps like Kindle and Audible, which you

might want to access instead. And then, if you decide after those 5 seconds that you want to access Instagram, you can access Instagram. It's not a problem, but usually in those 5 seconds when you've taken that breath, it allows us to have that gap between stimulus and response. It allows us to choose our response and to decide, do I really want to go on Instagram right now, or am I just going on it because it just, you know, my muscle memory just happens to press on it. Tip number six is to turn your phone to grayscale mode. This is not something that I've tried personally, but about half of my team seems to have their phone on grayscale all the time. And I was speaking to Angus, my general manager, about this earlier, and he absolutely swears by this. He said that his screen time dropped by 50% because it just makes your phone way less addictive and way less interesting to use, which means you would still use it for like messages and important stuff and phone calls, dare I say, but suddenly browsing Instagram or

Tik Tok or YouTube becomes a lot less appetizing when you know that it's in grayscale mode, rather than in full color mode. And then tip number seven, and this is something I find really, really helpful, is that where possible, I try not to reply to messages from my phone. I have all of my messaging apps on my computer. I use an app called texts.com, which sort of brings together WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, Twitter DMS, and stuff. And so, whenever I need to respond to people, I do it from my computer or my laptop, rather than from my phone. Now, this is good because I can type faster on my computer, and therefore, I can get back to people in a way more efficient fashion. But it also means that I'm not spending all day just trying to reply to whatsapps and keeping on top of things, 'cause when you reply to something, you just get another response instead. And then it sort of, it can become a full-time job just keeping on top of replying to friends, family, and work.

colleagues, and all that kind of stuff. I much prefer to batch my time for replying to people. You know, I'll do it for a few minutes in the morning after I've done some deep work. I'll do it for a few minutes after lunch. I'll do it for a few minutes after work. And that means that I can be way more efficient in my replies to people, and I'm not spending all day, you know, with this texting where I'm like, Oh my God, I have to reply to people in such a timely fashion. You know, people are always worried about like, Oh, what if there's an emergency? What if someone needs a response straight away? And it's like, usually there aren't that many emergencies. And if you have certain contacts like your kids or your parents or whatever who might genuinely reach out to you in the event of an emergency, you can always add them to your focus group exceptions. Which means that, for example, with my mom, whenever she texts me or calls me, I always see the notification on my

computer and on my phone. Even when I've got a focus mode active, those were just a few of the different strategies that you can use to take control of your phone, rather than have your phone addiction control you. And I'd love to hear in the comments if you've gotten to this point in the video. What is one strategy that you found helpful to help combat this addiction inertia that we all have towards our phones? And if you're looking for something to do instead of scrolling on your phone, you might like to check out this video over here, which is five productive things to do in your spare time instead of mindless scrolling. And I guarantee if you do any of these things, it will be a way better use of your time, and you'll enjoy yourself way more than if you just continued scrolling on your phone. So thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye.

Your phone is killing you (how to stop your addiction)

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