December Book Club Pick: How To Break Up With Your Phone

Here are some of the takeaways we found most impactful from Price’s book:

1. Smartphone and app designers use “brain hacking” to manipulate our dopamine response and make it difficult to stop using their products. It’s not just you—smartphones are literally addictive to the human brain.
2. Heavy phone use decreases your creativity, impairs your ability to create short term memories, harms your ability to focus on tasks, hinders your sleep, and even impedes your ability to think deeply (!!). These very real consequences can have wide-reaching implications for your overall health over time.
3. The good news: the damage is reversible!
4. Practicing mindfulness is one effective way to break your phone addiction. Instead of trying to fight your impulse to mindlessly check your apps, pause and without judgement, ask yourself questions like—what am I feeling right now? What am I hoping to discover on my phone? Am I avoiding something by seeking this distraction? What else could I do instead? You might decide that 30 minutes of phone time is exactly what you need in that moment, or, you might decide that grabbing a festive latte with a friend is a better bet.
5. A powerful truth: your life is made up of what you pay attention to. You (and only you) can decide what you would like that to be. Do you want to pay attention to the same 5 apps on your phone each day, or do you want to pay attention to a beautiful sunrise out your window, to your family and friends around the dinner table, to that long-abandoned passion project you talk about but never get around to finishing?

The overarching message of Price’s book is that you don’t need to go off the grid to have a healthy relationship with your devices. With a few behavioral tweaks and a little bit of mindfulness, you can decide to spend less time on your phone, so you have more time to enjoy all the amazing things that surround you IRL. Now that’s optimism.