House Calls Podcast

Can You Live Without Your Phone?

With guest Catherine Price,

Science Journalist and Author

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I'm Vivek Murthy and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I'd like to introduce you to Catherine Price, a science journalist who writes about our relationship with technology, for better or for worse. Today, we'll be talking about how to spend less time on our phones and more time living life. How do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to focus your attention? If your answer is that you want to spend months of every year, engaged with your cell phone, well then you are living in an age ripe for success. On the other hand, if you want to prioritize your family and friends, your work or school, or having fun, but you find it's too hard because your cell phone or other devices are so distracting, well, then you're experiencing a widespread modern-day challenge. My guest today is Catherine Price, an award winning science journalist and author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone.” She brings a new awareness to that reality so many of us are experiencing -- that when our phones buzz, we respond. When someone likes our post, we look for more likes. And then the scrolling begins. We're doing this and so are our kids for hours every day, and it's changing us. This conversation is not a rejection of technology. There's a lot of good that technology can enable, but we as humans are still learning how to live with it. Catherine and I talk about how we got here, whether we are ready to shift our dynamics with our phones and how we can actually do that. We also talk about how not all screen time and not all apps are the same and that some benefit us while others can hurt us. Lastly, Catherine has some great, practical ideas around how to create more balance in our relationship with technology. And she offers ideas of different things we can try to see what works, like taking a digital Sabbath and asking ourselves before we pick up our phones: For what? Why now? And what else? It turns out small tweaks in how we use our phones can make a big difference in our lives. Many of us feel alone with this challenge, but we're not. For me, this conversation has given me a lot to think about when it comes to my relationship with my phone and how it impacts connections to people around me. As always, the House Calls team would love to hear your feedback and ideas. Please be in touch through social media or email us at: HouseCalls@HHS.gov And then maybe, just maybe, turn off your notifications while listening to this episode of House Calls. Just a suggestion I heard recently. Catherine, thank you so much for joining me on House calls.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I'm really excited for our conversation. This is such an important topic, technology and our phones in particular. And I want to start by saying that I have had a number of times in my life where I feel like I'm in a bad relationship with my phone. It's like I can't break up. But somehow there are a lot of bad times and I don't know quite what to do. And I suspect that I'm not alone. And so what I wanted to ask you about to begin is let's put this in context. What is the state of our relationship with our phone right now?

Well, I mean, it depends what you're measuring it against, but I would say that most of us are spending multiple hours a day just on our phones. The best statistics I had before the pandemic was that the average person was spending upwards of 4 hours a day just on their phone, not on their television, not on their computer or tablet, which adds up to 60 full days a year, or a quarter of our waking lives if we're getting enough sleep. That's a lot of time and we're checking our phones dozens, if not hundreds in some cases, of times a day. So I personally think that that is a really big problem and that the way that we are interacting with our devices and the amount of time we're spending on them is having huge effects on nearly every aspect of our lives.

So let's talk about that a little bit more. You mentioned it's having huge effects. What kind of effects are you seeing that this level of phone usage has on our lives?

Oh, you could kind of like pick anything out of a hat and I could probably say that there's a way that it's affecting us. I mean, one of the primary effects that our interactions with our devices is having, I should also back up and say, I'm not anti technology. I'm not a Luddite. I'm not suggesting we all throw our phones into a river. I'm just suggesting that we take a step back and have a much more intentional relationship with them, and that we really, you think a lot more about what our priorities in our lives are and how technology is and is not contributing to us achieving and living up to those priorities. So with that, with that framework in mind, I would say there's a lot of different ways that the relationships and the interactions we have with our devices are affecting us. I think one of the primary reasons is the way that they fragment our attention. They encourage us to try to multitask. And as many people know by now, even though we refuse to internalize it, we can't actually multitask. Our brains can only pay attention to one thing at a time. And when we think we're multitasking, we're actually rapidly switching between tasks that is enormously consequential in a lot of different areas. For example, if you are with another person and you're trying to be connected with them, whether it's a friend or a colleague or your child, but your attention is partially on your phone or on your email or social media, you're not actually really present with them. That is going to have a huge impact on your relationship. It's also going to have an impact on what you actually experience from your own life. One of my biggest takeaways from the book for myself was that our lives are ultimately what we pay attention to. And so we need to be very, very conscious in every moment of where we're directing our attention, because that ultimately is going to define how we live our lives.

So Catherine, I really love that phrase you used in your book, that we are what we pay attention to. And I want to focus for a moment there on attention. I have lost track of the number of people who have told me that they feel like their attention span has dramatically shrunk over the years. And it's really over the last ten years that people talk about this, which I know does coincide with when many people started using phones and especially smartphones. But tell us a little bit about what you have learned about attention span and not just our attention while we're using technology, but how has tech use affected our attention span when we're trying to read a book or read a newspaper?

Our use of technology in the way we interact with technology has had huge impacts on our ability to pay attention in all contexts of life, which makes sense if you think about it. I mean, the human brain is kind of designed to be distractible by nature, which makes sense evolutionarily, because anything that distracts us, you know, something that moves in the background might be a threat and you want to be able to quickly notice things, be distracted so that you can survive. Like if you were sitting under a tree reading a book and didn't notice a predator, that would be a very bad thing. So the human brain is already kind of primed to be distractible, which makes it actually makes it actually very impressive to think about how we're able to sustain our attention to do something like read a book that's actually an amazing mental feat, but it takes work. So when you have a device that's encouraging you to be distracted, it's not just bringing you back to a neutral state, it's actually helping your brain go where it automatically wants to be, which is a state of distraction. And if you think about what we're doing when we're on our phones, we're normally not spending our attention or paying attention to one thing for a long period of time. Even if you're within one app, it's normally a variety of different things. You're looking through different posts on social media. You're reading different news stories. You're going between apps. You're fragmenting your attention on the phone itself, and we're doing it for hours a day. And if you think about the fact that our brains are plastic, meaning that they actually change in response to various stimuli, you start to realize, Oh my goodness, we're actively training ourselves to be more distractible. It's like getting a personal trainer who instead of, you know, encouraging you to exercise, is actually encouraging you to do what you’d rather do anyway, which is like, sit on the couch, and eat potato chips. So when people say, Well, I really feel like I can't focus anymore, my attention span isn't what it used to be, which by the way, I hear all the time from people, I say, Yeah, you might want to chalk it up to age or stress or what have you, but I am willing to bet, in many cases, it is a direct result of the way that you were training your brain during the time that you're spending on your phone.

Yeah, I think this is so important. I remember as a child being a voracious reader, they when I was in sixth grade, I remember they asked us all to keep track of how many books we read each month. And there was one month I remember I read 42 books. I don't know why that stuck with me, that exercise. But that was…

that's a lot of books. That's probably why it stuck with you.

Maybe. But, you know, that's just that was life for me. I was constantly reading and I loved reading. And as I got older, that changed. Now I think back on it around the time that, you know, I, I got I got a phone. In fact, it's a smartphone, not just any phone. I had a flip phone for a while, etc.. But it was later on that I felt like something started shifting in my attention span and became much harder to read a book and sometimes even to read a longform article and it's it's, you know, I still do it, but it's more work than it was before. And I thought it was the only one dealing with that. But I realize that it's actually become quite common. I think the consequences you're talking about are really important, right? It's not just to our work, our ability to read things, but it's also it impacts our ability to have thoughtful conversations with other people, including friends and family members. But I do want to talk about one other cost that you alluded to, which is the impact on our sleep. So could you talk a little bit about how our relationships with our phone and the volume of usage may be impacting the rest that we get?

Sure, I mean, it's really, at its simplest, just a numbers game, right? Like, if you're spending hours a day on anything, then it's hours you're not spending on something else. And that's often what's happening with our phones and sleep because of the context in which we often use them. Many people check their phones right before bed or they get up in the middle of the night and they look at their phones, therefore interrupting their sleep even more. And many people, most people use their phones as their alarm clock, which is an interesting choice if you think about the fact that in order to silence an alarm, you actually need to touch it. So if your phone is your alarm clock, you're going to touch your phone first thing in the morning. So this is a problem on many levels. One of the most important is that sleep is absolutely essential to our short and long term health. And one of the things that a lack of sleep does, by the way, I should say that the definition of like not getting enough sleep is like less than 7 to 8 hours a day, which for many people sounds luxurious. So we need a lot of sleep. When you don't get enough, it affects many things in our bodies, one of which is the level of stress hormone known as cortisol, which is essential for responding to, and surviving, acute physical threats like being attacked because it does things like raise our blood pressure, you know, raise our our heart rate, increase our blood glucose. Great in the short term, if you're trying to escape, not great if it's over the long run. So anything that causes our cortisol levels to be chronically elevated over time is going to increase our risk for health conditions such as heart disease, stroke, type two, diabetes, obesity, the list goes on. So anything that interferes with sleep is potentially going to also raise our risk for those long term health conditions. That's something that phones or the way that we spend time on our screens is definitely doing. Another thing that has gotten a lot of attention, what's worth pointing out, is the type of light that's emitted by phones and screens is a blue light. Blue light is the same as daylight. So when you have your phone or some kind of screen in front of your face right before bed, you're actually telling your brain that it is daytime, which is going to result in the release of hormones in your body that tell you it's time to wake up so you’re essentially giving yourself jetlag. And that's another way that our phones are interrupting our sleep and therefore our health. But even if you wear, you know, like blue light filtering glasses, chances are you're not spending your time before bed watching videos of waves or something on YouTube. You're probably like reading work, email or watching a movie or doing something that is like emotionally stimulating in some way that's going to amp you up before you try to fall asleep, even if you've taken care of the light issue. So there are so many ways that our interactions with the devices are interfering with our sleep and that's a problem for adults. But it's also a huge problem for teenagers and for kids, really, for everybody.

I'm glad you underscored sleep because it is so critical to our overall health, physical health and mental health. You know, a lot of people may push back and say, This is just modern life. We're not going to get rid of our phones or this is just the new normal. How do you respond to those kind of assertions?

I mean, I guess so. You could accept that. You could say it's the new normal and you could just go along with the flow and then spend all of your, you know, time posting things on Instagram and not being present in your life and then one day die. So I guess that's an option. I mean, truly. But I would say I don't want to live that way. And I think that it I don't think we should just go with the status quo. I think we should actually ask how do we want to live our lives? How do we want to spend our limited time on earth? What kind of relationships do we want to have? And is our relationship with technology helping us or hindering us? I would also say there's big differences between the technologies that exist today and those that existed before. So a frequent thing people will say is well, everybody freaked out about television when televisions were developed. In fact, people freaked out about the written word when that was first developed. Okay, so we've a long history of like freaking out about technological advancements, but there are some differences between the apps on our devices and technologies that have come before. And one of the most important is the way that they are actually able to interact with us and take feedback from our interactions with them and then adjust themselves to be even more compelling. So in other words, it's a two way street. There's a man named Tristan Harris, who used to be a product philosopher at Google, now runs the Center for Humane Technology, and he points out that your landline telephone didn't have a thousand engineers on the other side of it trying to figure out ways to hijack your attention. You know, you just hung up the phone and unless a friend called, your phone wasn't going to do anything as opposed to all of the notifications on your on your phone or the ways that algorithms have been developed to predict what you are going to like and what you're going to spend attention on. Right, so it's very different. I really would push back on that.

Yeah, I do think it is different. And one thing that you're making me also ponder is that we have to ask, is technology serving us? Is it delivering what we really want? And I suspect that most of us want to be healthy. We want to be happy, we want to have strong relationships, we want to be informed. We'd like to have some efficiencies in our life. And I think our devices sometimes deliver some of that. And it's a question of is how often is it delivering for us? And is the cost really worth it, you know, in the end, and I think for a lot of people, the answer may not be yes.

Well, I want to say

Yeah, go ahead.

I think the answer may not be yes in certain circumstances, certain apps on your phone and then it may be yes in other circumstances. So one thing I always like to caution people against is to think that all screen time is the same or to think that all apps on their phones are the same. It's just like food. You know, if you open my refrigerator, you wouldn't just be like food. You'd be like, Oh, okay, well, there's some dairy, there's some vegetables, there's some some like processed meats in there. If we're being honest, like, you know, there's a different variety of foods in there, some of which are better for my health or more delicious than others. We shouldn't lump it all together. The same is true for screen time. I'm not particularly worried about the long term effect on my mental health of like my MyChart app that tells me my cholesterol levels, though I will say I have found myself checking my cholesterol levels in the same manner that other people check social media. But that's a personal commentary we can explore if you would like to. They're very good. I have type one diabetes. So I have to take pride in health where I can. But anyway, my point is that, you know, there are certain apps and certain aspects of technology that of course are amazing, that are enjoyable or useful or help us with efficiency or productivity in some way. And I think it's great to keep those. But we should take a much more critical look at what each app is doing for us and then decide which ones are actually benefiting us and which ones are getting in the way of what actually is important to us.

So just stay on that point for a moment and I agree with you that there are some uses of our phones that really help us and others that harm us. If that is the case, why do you think it's so difficult for so many of us to choose the applications that help us and to say no to those that don't?

I think those are really simple answer to that one, thankfully, in an area where there's not many simple answers. The apps that caused the most problems for people are the ones that are part of what's known as the attention economy, which is a term that refers to making money off of people's attention. So there's an expression that's pretty well known by this point that, you know, if you're like, we are not actually the customers of an app like Facebook or Instagram, if you're not paying for the product, then you're not actually the customer, you're the product being sold. And more specifically, it’s our attention that is being sold to advertisers. So I've gotten survey data from thousands of people all around the world by this point since the publication of how to break up with your phone. And I can tell you when I ask people what are your most problematic apps, honestly, no one but me is saying My Chart, right? Like it's all social media or it's email or it's the news or it's something where there's a financial incentive to keep our eyes and our attention glued to the app for as long as possible. And the people behind these apps are extremely sophisticated in their techniques. Many of the most problematic apps are actually deliberately designed to mimic slot machines, which is really important for people to recognize because slot machines are widely considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented. And the way that slot machines do that is they hijack our biochemistry. More specifically, they actually are designed to trigger the release of a chemical called dopamine, which a lot of people associate with pleasure. But more precisely, it actually is a motivation and a salience indicator. So if you encounter something and it triggers the release of dopamine in your brain, it's going to tell you that that was worth doing again and that you continue to seek it out. So like the example I always give is if you're walking in the woods and you see a bush of raspberries and you know, they're bright red against a green background, bright colors are a dopamine trigger, and you eat one and it tastes good, which also will be a dopamine trigger and doesn't kill you. Your brain is going to record the idea, Oh, that's worth doing again, I should seek out those raspberries and do that again. Now that's great if it's raspberries. So it's also great if there's something that encourages you to continue the species. Right. So reproduction, big thing with dopamine. But our dopamine systems are non-judgmental. They just respond to triggers. So anything that is a dopamine trigger is going to be interpreted by your brain as something that's worth doing again. And this is very important to recognize because the more you learn about dopamine triggers, the more you begin to realize and notice how they're baked into nearly every aspect of our phones in ways, again, that deliberately are there to mimic slot machines. So, for example, I just mentioned bright colors. That's a huge dopamine trigger. You can feel this yourself if you go to your phone settings and turn it to black and white and then notice how you feel when you look at the screen. It is remarkable. Novelty is a huge dopamine trigger. So any time you're going to get a piece of new information, which obviously we're going to or we can any time we look at our phone, because there's going to be some app that can give you something new. Rewards are huge dopamine triggers, whether it's actually, you know, in the case of a slot machine, it's obviously a financial reward. But in the case of our phones, it might be, again, the piece of new information or it might be social affirmation in the form of like a like on social media. So there are just so many little dopamine triggers built into our phones. And what's really nefarious about this is at the same time that we've got all of these triggers that are there to reinforce the idea that checking our phones is worth doing repeatedly, we also have gotten to a stage where we actually feel anxious when we are not checking our phones. Right. We experience what's known as FOMO, the fear of missing out. And I believe that that anxiety actually probably is a reflection of, again, a shift in our cortisol levels. We're getting stressed out about what we might miss. That anxiety obviously feels uncomfortable. And so what do we do to alleviate that anxiety? Well, we turn to our phones to check the phone so that we don't miss out on anything. And then what do we encounter on the phone? A dopamine trigger. And that reinforces the idea that checking the phone was worth doing. So once you start to understand the biochemistry behind this and some of the tricks that are being used, frankly, to manipulate us, it becomes much clearer why it's so hard to stop using or to cut back on some of these apps, even though we know that we don't want to be spending that much time on them.

Yeah, and I think understanding exactly what you said about the way these are designed to maximize our attention I think is so helpful because I think I found myself and I know this has happened to others getting really down, you know, on on ourselves thinking, gosh, we just don't have enough willpower. You know, we don't have enough strength to just say no and put it away. And maybe sometimes it's about that, but it really makes you realize that this is a bit of an unfair fight. You know, we're stacking up ourselves as individuals, and worst of all, our kids up against some of the best product designers in the world. That's certainly not a fair fight. Yeah, but I think for many of us, this starts in our personal experience. I shared with you a little bit about some of my my experiences having a bad relationship with my phone. But I'm curious, what led you to think about phones and social media the way that you do? Like was there a personal experience that informed that.

Yeah, there was. So I'm a science journalist by background, but I also have done a lot of stuff with mindfulness, which I know you do as well, and I've done like mindfulness based stress reduction training and written a lot of articles and even a guided journal about mindfulness. So I like to think that I'm a relatively self-aware person between that and all the therapy I've done over the years, but but in 2015 I had my daughter and, you know, I just I had these moments where I would be upstairs feeding her in the middle of the night, kind of sleep deprived and just have this vision of what was happening in the room, almost like an out-of-body experience. And what I saw was this tiny baby looking up at her mother and her mother looking down at her phone, and that just devastated me. So maybe the mindfulness did kick in because I did notice it, you know, and I basically realized, like, I'm not the only person doing this, but it's not how I want my daughter to experience a human relationship like let alone with her mom. And it's not how I want to be living my own life. At that point, that point was probably sometime in 2016, you know, there were books kind of starting to sound a bit of alarm about how the internet technology was effect were affecting us, like Nicholas Carr has a great book called “The Shallows” What the Internet… my goodness. “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” I think is the subtitle. And but there wasn't like a how to guide, like what to do about the problem. And so that's what I decided I wanted to create. And it was really a big wake up call for me. I mean, if you want to get a little bit deeper into that, the two things that it really brought to mind in my background as a science journalist, one was that baby's eyes can only focus, you know, eight, ten or so inches in front of their face. Their vision is not fully developed. And the thought is that part of the reason for that focal length is so that they can bond with the person who is closest to them, namely their parent. So what does it mean to have that person not returning their eye contact? And that also reminded me of an experiment I'd come across at some point. You know, my years of journalism, which is called the still face experiment. And if anyone wants to take a break from the podcast and cry for a couple of minutes, you can just Google still face experiment. And one of the first hits that's going to come up is a two minute or so video of I think from Harvard showing this and the video shows, the basic idea is that a parent in this case, it's a mother, but a parent interacts normally with their baby for roughly a minute or two, you know, cooing and gurgling and babbling all that back and forth. And then for about a minute, the person, the parent goes totally still faced, no emotional reaction, maintains eye contact, does not respond. And then after that intervention, they go back to normal. That minute is nearly impossible to watch without having an emotional response because the baby is so confused. It starts with confusion, moves on to distress. By the end of the video, the baby is shrieking in this very animalistic way and writhing and trying to get out of the restraints of her carseat. It's so difficult to watch. And this this study has been replicated using smartphones. There's been really interesting research having parents interact normally in these cases with their toddlers for a couple of minutes, playing with Legos, in the experiment that I saw, and then do the same thing, just start to scroll through their phones, as we all do for one or two minutes. And there was a camera recording the children's responses. And that also is just gut wrenching to watch because the kids immediately notice that their parents attention is not on them and they start to respond. In many cases, they vocally try to demand their parents attention, like pay attention to me. They're like, Hey, mom. Sometimes they just, you know, they try to physically insert themselves between the parent and the phone. There's one kid who climbs on to their parent's lap between their hand and just gets in their face. And I think the saddest one is a little girl who just notices that her mom's on the phone, just sits down in a chair, folds her hands in her lap and just waits silently. So it's devastating. And so what I realized in that moment with my daughter is, oh, my goodness, I'm still facing my own daughter, you know? And then it made me think we're all still facing each other. I know that you're personally very interested in connection and and its counterpart loneliness. And I just thought, oh, my goodness, if you walk around and you look at people out there in the world right now, like, who's making eye contact, where are those little social interactions? Are we all still facing each other? And if that can have such a devastating effect on a baby after just a minute, what is it doing to us as a society.

That is really chilling to hear. And I can relate to what you're saying. I had my son in 2016, our first child, and there was a moment where I remember coming home from work and putting him to bed with my wife. And we were, you know, going through the routine. He was very young at the time. We were changing his diaper, giving him a bath, get him in his pajamas, reading him a story. We were going through our whole routine. And at one point my wife turned around and looked at me and I was scrolling through my phone, through my work email. I had no reason to. It wasn't some urgent message I was waiting for. There was some wasn't the thing blowing up at the office that day. I was scrolling just because I could, because I was looking for the next novel thing, an email in my inbox. And she just looked at me and as she so often does just kindly but firmly said, Do you really need to be doing that right now? And I felt so terrible because, you know, these moments with your children are so precious, especially at that age. And when you're working like you really you, you know, you treasure those moments in the morning, in the evening where you can just be with your child. And what was I doing? I was actually on my phone for no good reason. And it just made me realize that if I don't do something different, like in my own life, that my phone is going to steal away the precious time that I want to have with my family, with my friends, with people I love. And I'm so glad you you wrote this book because I think there are many people in that situation who are worried that they are not in a healthy relationship with their phone and are trying to figure out how to change it and that's one of the things I wanted to to move to and to talk about with you is you call this the breakup, in a sense, and you've written, you know, beautifully about how to breakup with your phone. So let me ask you this, for people listening out there who are wondering, do I need to break up with my phone? Has it gotten to the point where I need to take drastic action? How would you help people recognize when they need to take steps to do something differently with their phone?

I think if you've made it this far, in this podcast, you probably might want to try it. But you know, I do want to I do want to clarify that by breaking up. Again, as I alluded to earlier, I don't mean throwing your phone out. What I mean is, is much more akin truly to a human breakup. If you break up with a person, you're not saying, I'm never going to date again. You know,I never want to talk to another human being. You're just saying, okay, something about that was not right for me. That relationship was not working. And I want to take a step back from it. Hopefully your next step is to reflect on what you actually want in a relationship and go out and seek a new and healthier relationship. So that's the goal. It's to start afresh, and actually create a relationship, as you were alluding to, that you have control over rather than the other way around. Because right now a lot of us have just adopted technology into our lives without really thinking about how we want to be interacting with it or how it's affecting us. And I do think a lot of us are starting to realize that there are really big effects and we want to do something about it, which leads to the next step, which is that, I mean, what you were just saying as well, please don't beat yourself up over this, guys. Like if you're feeling bad about your interaction with your phone, treat, please try to let go of that because there's very powerful forces working against you. And if you've realized that you want to make a change, you are in a sense, already succeeding. So instead of beating yourself up over the moments that you have lost or the things you wish you'd done differently, please give yourself credit for realizing that you want to make a change. I would then say the next step is actually not to jump straight to the tips and tricks that you often hear or see and you know, magazine listicles about smartphones and digital detoxes and stuff. There are some useful ideas in there that we can talk about, but I think the most important first step is actually to take a step back and ask yourself what is important to you in life? What do you want to pay attention to? And then ask yourself, in what ways is your phone helping and in what ways is it hurting? And then use that to determine what do you love or at least enjoy or find useful about your phone and what to keep and what is detracting from your experience of your life? Because that's the stuff you want to change. There's no reason to beat yourself up over, you know, Google Maps. I mean, again, I don't you're going to get to a lot more. That's funny. It doesn't say you're not going to get lost in Google Maps, which I guess we can interpret a multiple of different ways. But, you know, in other words, be more specific. Then I also think the important next step has to do with just training ourselves to notice when we interact with our phones to begin with. Because as you just pointed out in your story about scrolling through work email with your child a lot of times our phones end up in our hands without us even knowing how they got there. We've all had that experience. Why is your phone in your hand when you get off an elevator after three, you know, three stories? Like what happened? What were you possibly doing? And it's because we have been conditioned to reach for our phones on autopilot, ny time we encounter any moment of stillness or anxiety or loneliness, it's a self-soothing tool. I mean, we use them in ways, honestly that are very similar to the ways that we reach for substances like alcohol or drugs. But that's if we can get that more. But one thing I suggest that people do is to teach yourself to notice your own behaviors by doing something as simple as like putting a rubber band around your phone or a hair tie for a couple of days. The reason being that when you pick up your phone and there's a spare tire rubber band around it, you're going have a split second to being like, Why the heck is there a rubber band on my phone? And then that will prompt you to notice that you picked up your phone, right? It's just a little what I think of as a speed bump that makes you slow down and notice what you are doing and what you're about to do so that you have a chance to ask yourself if you want to continue. The next step that I recommend people do is to do an exercise that I developed called What for? Why now? And what else? So it’s WWW for short. And how it works is this when you notice you picked up your phone you ask yourself what for you know what did you pick up your phone to do? Did you have a concrete reason? Did you need to send that email? Did you need to call someone, you know? Did you need to buy something, buy something in that moment? Did you even have a reason? Next is why now? So you might have a time related reason that you had to do that. Like there's a pressing email you really do need to answer in that moment. But in many, if not most cases, you'll probably find that there's an emotional reason behind it, such as the ones I just mentioned. So you're feeling a little bit anxious. You want to calm yourself down a little bit. You know, you got a moment like you're going up in the elevator and oh, God forbid you have like 7 seconds of doing nothing. So you turn to your phone.You're feeling lonely, so you look to social media, which ironically and I'd be happy to talk more about this, often results in just feeling more lonely than we did before. But what's the emotional reward that your brain is after? Because if you can identify that emotional reward, then you'll be well equipped to move to the third step of the exercise, which is the what else? And that is exactly what it sounds like. What else could you do in that moment to achieve the same result? If you're feeling lonely, could you actually use the phone to call someone? It works, by the way, does work for that, still, just for a couple of minutes to say hi, instead of going to social media, you know, could you take a little walk instead of just scrolling through social? Well, so I keep coming down on social media, but say the news or your email if you need a break from work, do something that gets you actually out of the mental space you were in. You can come up with alternatives. You might also decide that you just want to do nothing for a bit, which is totally an underappreciated way to spend our time, is just to have some stillness. That's when you're going to have creative thoughts. We need to give our times or we need to give our brains a chance to decompress from the firehose of information that we're constantly spraying at them. And, you know, you might end up at the end of that exercise and realizing that your ‘what else’ is that there is no what else. You really do want to be on your phone right now, even if there's not really a specific purpose. And that's totally fine. The point of the exercise is just to make sure that when we do spend our time on our phone, it's the result of an intentional choice. So I would start with that philosophical framework and kind of that mindful based approach to noticing your phone habits and then becoming curious about them. I think curiosity is a very powerful word to employ here because it doesn't come with judgment. You're trying to understand your phone habits and learn about them and then do experiments to change them. After you get through that stage of the goal setting and kind of noticing, that's when you can move on to doing things such as reducing your notifications. I think of those as interruptions because they really are just interrupting your life. So like, what do you want to be interrupted for? What's worth it? Or deleting apps that are problems for you? I mean, if Tick Tock or Instagram's a problem for you, like get it off your phone, check it from a different device, or install it when you want to use it and then delete it afterwards. You actually will continue to live and breathe as a human being if you get even work, email off your phone. I don't have email in my phone and I still managed to meet with you today. You know, you can experiment. People will have a lot of pushback and you'll feel a lot of emotional resistance. And the more emotional resistance you have to getting rid of an app, probably the more useful it would be to experiment with taking a break from it. And I just like in that too, the idea of trying to quit something like smoking. You know, if you were trying to quit smoking, it would be pretty dumb to keep a pack of cigarets in your pocket. So if you're having trouble with social media, why are you going to keep it on your phone so that it the Instagram icon is staring at you every time you go to, you know, check your cholesterol results. So I can go on, but there's changes you can make to the phone itself and then also to your physical environment so that you can create better boundaries with your devices. And actually just again, be much more intentional about when you are and are not interacting with them.

And that last point in particular about the physical boundaries I know you've spoken and written about simple but powerful tweaks that people can make, for example, setting spaces in your house that are tech free spaces. Maybe that's your bedroom so your phone doesn't invade your sleep time. Having designated times of the day, right whether dinner time, like where you and the people you're having dinner with are not using your phone. So I do think that's very powerful to have times and places where tech is is not allowed, you know, or where you give yourself the ability to to be tech free. There is a point, the word stillness that you used that I find intriguing. I have wondered and I'm curious what you think about this, if people are scared to be bored these days.

Yes.

I have these distinct memories of growing up and coming home from school and just wandering in the yard and in the neighborhood and throwing a football around and riding my bike and sometimes just being bored, you know, reading books here and there, chatting with friends. But I remember experiencing boredom when I didn't know quite what to do. My thoughts would wander. But somebody asked me the other day, when was the last time you were bored? And I couldn't think of it because I feel like all the whitespace in my life has been filled and often filled with information that's coming to me through my phone since it's constantly accessible. But I'm curious if if you think that we are actively avoiding boredom or somehow if that us uncomfortable now.

I think it makes us very uncomfortable. I think that's always been true, but I think that is one of the main reasons we reach for our phones is that, I don't know, I mean, I'm pretty existential by nature, but if you give me like empty space, I'm going to start to ruminate. And that feels very uncomfortable and it's much more enjoyable or certainly easier to just seek out quick dopamine hits. I mean, not just to avoid boredom, but to avoid anything that might require a more concentrated effort. It's just much easier to do something like check your email or check social media or the news or distract you. But I think there's enormous value in, quote, boredom or just stillness. I don't think those are synonymous. I think that boredom could be reinterpreted as an opportunity for stillness and something that's a wonderful thing to experience, just to open yourself up to the world around you, to actually maybe have a passing interaction with another human being, to look at the sky. I have actually had at least two rideshare drivers ask if I was okay because I was looking out the window at the sky.

Huh?

Yeah.

How interesting.

Yeah, I was like, I’m just looking at the clouds. But I also think that, you know, it's funny because I hate to start to quantify things by, well, make you more productive because I feel like that's such a cultural thing we all do is we have to have these quantifiable outcomes to any use of our time in order to justify it. So I, in that sense, don't like what I'm about to say, but I do think there's something to be said for the fact that many of our most creative ideas come when we are in a moment of stillness, you know, when we're in the shower where most of us don't have our phones, or when you're on a walk before podcasts, podcasts and just distraction became so easy to access when we were out moving. But you know, going for a walk without your phone can be a really nourishing thing to do and actually gives your brain a chance to wander. And that's where your brain will start to process everything you've experienced in your life, whether it's factual stuff or emotional things. And it will just make connections that you would never have arrived at if you had been trying forcibly to make it, you know, have an insight, if you’re like I'm going to have an insight now. Right. That's not going to work. That's going to happen when you're yeah, when you're staring at the clouds out of the Uber window or when you're talking with a friend with no real purpose. I think we need that stillness. Right now, we're just being deluged by constant stimulation and constant information, and it is affecting in so many ways. And I think you can really feel that for yourself by just taking a break. So I encourage people to experiment with the practice of taking a digital Sabbath, which basically is a 24 hour break from technology. I normally do it from Friday to Saturday, Saturday night when I practice it because it's just a natural time that is relatively easy, and just has already, you know, lots of historical precedent for being a time to take a Sabbath. But basically what I've heard from other people who have done this is that you start off feeling pretty anxious and jumpy and twitchy because your brain is like, what? I can't check now. Suddenly I need to buy everything off of Amazon, like all at once. I need to look up these 50 things. But the next day you feel this sense of relaxation and a feeling that time is slowing down, which I think is very interesting. And some of the experts I've spoken to in this area have talked about how when you interacting with screens and the type of stimulation that they're providing us, there actually is a dissociation that happens and there is a sense that time is speeding up, which is crazy to think about. But the converse is also true. If you take away the screens, if you take away that stimulation, you're likely going to feel time slow down. I routinely cannot believe that it's only 11:00 in the morning on those days and that I've done so much already. It's very relaxing. So I really encourage people to try that for themselves. I always recommend this to people who come to me and say some variation of I know that I want to spend less time on my phone, but my boyfriend or my partner or my spouse or my best friend, they don't think they have a problem and I don't know how to convince them. I say, Well, why don't you invite them to try this with you and say it's because you're investigating your own relationship with your phone and then use it as a conversation starter. Because the experience that most people have, including myself, is that when you first turn off your phone in particular, your brain goes haywire because again, we've been conditioned to just want to have this constant stimulation from our phones. So when you take that away, there is a sense of withdrawal. But there also often is this sense of physical calm that people report when they just take a 24 hour break from the internet and in particular from all the notifications and all of the text messages and all of the demands on our attention that we are being subjected to all the time. But we don't really recognize as being as incessant as they are until we take a break. And I don't know for sure that any study has been done on this, but my personal hypothesis is that the feeling of relaxation that people experience must relate to some actual change in their hormonal balance or their level of stress hormones. Right? Because that is what causes our moods and our levels of anxiety. And so I personally am fascinated by the potential opposite effect. I'm fascinated by what the effect might be on our physical health from being so constantly tethered to our devices. We were talking earlier about cortisol, in terms of sleep. I'm also really interested in learning or having someone to research whether or not constantly being on call to our devices is actually having a physiological effect on our bodies that might actually be having negative health effects. I actually did a story for the New York Times about just this for which I interviewed a lot of leading neuro endocrinologists, and I straight up asked, Is this hypothesis crazy? This is my own insecurity speaking. I often ask people if they think I'm crazy, and every single one of them said no. And actually one of them said, Just this conversation is going to change the way I interact with my own device. So yeah.

Well, that is so powerful. And I think you're right that how we use our devices likely have an impact both on our physical and our mental health. You know, you've laid out so many great suggestions for how people can reflect on their phone usage, how they can approach with curiosity. How they can actually take concrete steps to reduce the usage of certain apps or create spaces in their lives, in their homes that are tech free. I'm curious the plan that you've worked on that you shared. Is this something that can work for people of all ages?

I think it can. I mean, I wrote the book in a kind of a playful tone, even though I think this actually is an extremely serious subject. So I've heard from a I've actually had great feedback from kids. I think one of the nicest moments of feedback I got as a writer was I was doing some talk at a school and there was this 13 year old boy who leaned over this couch and essentially was like, Hey, I liked your book. That was like, Wow, you know, take that New York Times. I don't care what you say. Like, this is connecting with the people who I really I really want to connect with. But I also hear from I really do hear from people of all ages and from all around the world, which is really rewarding as a writer. But I think it also speaks to the fact that this is a universal problem. It's not going away. More people are becoming aware that it's a problem and more people are raising the alarm, yourself included, which I'm hugely grateful for. But there's a reason it's not just the writing of the book itself that's making it appeal to a wide audience. It's because there's a need for it. You know, there actually really is a need for help.

And Catherine, what would you say to people who say, You know what, that sounds great, but my work or my life require me to have my devices near me all the time and you know, I'm guilty of in some ways telling myself this story. And in the following way, I for years have had my phone next to me when I go to sleep. And part of the reason I do that is, you know, very close with my parents and with my sister, but I don't live in the same place as them. And if there was ever an emergency, particularly a health emergency, I would want them to be able to reach me right away and I'd want to be able to hear the phone. And I don't have a landline. So I have sort of told myself, okay, I need to have my phone next to me. But that means that when I get up in the middle of the night or if I get up in the morning, I'm reaching over the first thing and I'm checking that phone because it's right there. So I'm just curious what you would say to folks who who feel like, Hey, I'm traveling all the time, I need to be in contact with my family, etc. I'm working from remote or I'm a gig worker who's working odd hours. I need to have my device on me all the time. Like, how should they approach this process of rethinking their relationship with their phone?

Well, I'll start my answer by asking you two questions. And the first is how many years do you think you've been doing that?

I'm embarrassed to say, but since you asked me the question, I think probably ever since I got a phone.

Which was like…?

Which I oh, this is very interesting. I should say, not ever since I got a phone. Ever since I got a phone and got rid of my landline, which is probably in 2000, somewhere around 2006. 2007.

Oh, wow. Okay. So we're talking like sixteen years or so. So how many times have you actually received that emergency phone call in the middle of the night?

Once.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I'm not good enough with multiplication to do the math on 16 times 365 to do our, you know, fraction of what percentage of times it actually was relevant. You could do that math for yourself, because I think that is a very frequent thing that happens is we and it goes back to the anxiety side of why we're tethered to our phones. We've talked about the dopamine slot machine aspect, but the anxiety is very powerful. The fear of missing out on something, not just on social media or something that ultimately we really do know is trivial, but something that's important, like a parent needs help in the middle of the night or a child or something like that. I think it's really useful to put it in the context of how often in the experience of your whole life has that actually happened, just to remind ourselves that emergencies actually don't happen all the time for most of us. I mean, you're the Surgeon General of the United States. If anyone was going to have some emergencies, I would think you'd have a couple. But like even for you and I recognize that's a personal situation, you're talking about, but even people in very demanding high stress jobs, when you actually push them to say, alright, what what number of times like actual incidents can you recall in which this was the thing is often very I mean, countable on one hand. But I'd also say you made a really interesting comment right there, which is, oh, I started doing this after I got rid of the landline. Well, there still are landlines. And I'm not saying that you need to sign up for a whole package where you're getting cable and a landline and internet, you know, spending a lot of money on that. But just as a personal example, my husband and I, because we like to do those digital Sabbaths I was talking about, we got a voice-over-internet phone so that it's less than $20 a month, which I think is totally worth the freedom that comes from not feeling tethered to our devices. And we got it so that in that circumstance we do have a phone. We will get woken up. If one of our parents has a problem, someone desperately needs to reach us. It's a great backup. Or if we're just taking a break from our phones, I often will set an automatic text message response that says I'm taking a break from my phone. If you really need me, call us on our landline. It's not that I'm taking a break from human contact. I'm taking a break from the phone, from the other stuff on the phone. You also can do stuff like actually set up your phone so that you have a list of VIP numbers that do come through, even if your phone's and do not disturb. So you in other words, I think what I would recommend that people do, first of all, is take a hard look at what you're saying is essential. And ask yourself really, like, is that really why you're keeping your phone with you at all times, or is it because it's a habit and because, I mean, we all have kind of a compulsive relationship with our devices to phrase it carefully. And if you do determine that there are some instances in which it truly is or would be essential for you to be reachable, then brainstorm ways to make that happen without sacrificing everything else. Because I would say to you, as you just told me, that like once out of sixteen years you did receive this emergency call in the middle of the night. But it makes me wonder, what did you miss out on during all those other nights when you did have your phone next to your bed, even if it was 15 minutes of sleep? I mean, again, do the math. It can add up to a lot. So I think it's always important when we think about phones or really any use of our time, not just to think about what we're doing and could be missing out on, but what we're not doing, what you're missing out on by being on the phone. I think about that a lot in terms of teenagers in particular, just in terms of if you start to spend hours a day on apps on your phone, there's a big debate, which I'm happy to comment on about whether or not that's detrimental. But regardless of the result of that debate, it is you cannot debate the fact that it's a lot of time and anything anything you spend time on is going to take time away from other things. So what's the opportunity cost? But the short answer is really evaluate what's actually an emergency, what are just kind of excuses you're giving yourself and for the things that really could be an emergency, figure out an alternative way to communicate. As a side note, I also really recommend this with email because a lot of people keep their phones, professionals will say, I need my phone because of work email in case there's an emergency that comes through email that has to do with work and as a result, they keep their phone at the dinner table, they have their phone at their kids sports games, they have their phone out all the time. And I say to that email is a horrible way to communicate an emergency. That's not what email is for. I mean, it was originally just to replace written correspondence. Letters are a really bad way to communicate an emergency. So instead, both personally and in the workplace, I'd recommend coming up with a better strategy for how to be reached in an emergency. What is an emergency and how to communicate it. So in the workplace context, don't email people. There should be an agreement at a companywide level that it's going to be through a phone call. What you're doing by making that decision is freeing up all your employees to actually put their phones down in those other times in their lives, which not only will improve their personal lives, their relationships, everything else that is outside of work, but actually probably will make them more effective at work too, because they won't be as burned out.

Yeah, I think these are very good points. And you're raising, I think, a critical point which I'm going to reflect on more in my own life, which is is that we tell ourselves stories of why we need certain things, why we need our, in my case, my phone by my bedside, or why we need to have our phone all the time in our pockets or why we need to have it on the table while we're having dinner with a friend, just in case somebody you know needs us. And I think the real question that I want to examine in interrogating myself is, are those stories true? Or are they workarounds? Like, I think about a work colleague of mine who, you know, had an incredibly busy job and decided, though, that she wanted to be with her children every evening for dinner and for bedtime. But she also had that kind of job where she needed to be reachable in an emergency. And there were often emergencies. But what she did is she took her phone, put the volume on it, made the volume high, and then put that phone in another room such that if it rang, she could hear it, but it wasn't intruding on her interaction with her family. And it strikes me that a similar solution could work at bedtime as well. So this is incredibly helpful. I know that our time is coming to a close, but there is one more thing I would love for you to share with us, which is now that you've put this out into the world and I know you've gotten so much feedback and people in so many countries have read your, you know, observations and your reflections and are taking your recommendations and putting them into practice, what have you heard from people who have actually gone through this reexamination and re-engineering of their relationship with their phone? What impact has it had on their life?

It's been really moving to hear what impact this has had on people's lives, because on the surface, it doesn't seem like it would have that much of an impact. It's just a phone, right? Like, okay, we spend too much time on it. Like, what's the big deal? Really? But I've long believed that that's a really big deal. And it's been very validating and meaningful to me personally to hear from other people who feel the same way. You know, I hear from a lot of people some version of I Got My Life Back That's really powerful. And I think that just speaks to how dramatically our interactions with technology are affecting us on so many different levels that we're not really aware of. But when we take a step back and we make some changes, when we actually take control, we really do start to regain control over our lives and I think that's amazing. One of the most heartening aspects of it for me is that while I do think it's very hard over the long run to maintain a healthy relationship with technology, in part because the devices and the apps on them are designed to make it difficult. While, that is true, you also can experience dramatic changes without that much effort, especially In the beginning I remember one person said to me that she had read my book and done a couple of the first changes in it like two days ago, and she said, I feel like different person. She said, I have so much more time. I just I'm just aware, like, I'm so much more aware of how I'm spending my time. I never really thought about how much time I was spending on Instagram, you know, when I decided I actually didn't want to do that all this time opened up and she said she was comparing it to, say, a traditional diet or exercise program where it does take willpower to stick with a lot of those things. It often takes quite a while to see results. And she was saying, this feels different. It feels like I'm getting this immediate reward from just making these small changes. So I found that to be really motivating. And I really it's been amazing to just hear from people, you know, all around the world who have done some version of breaking up with their phone. I'm not expecting everybody to go through this whole 30 day plan that I've laid out, but really any aspect of it and to realize it's really making a difference. So I really do encourage my listeners to try some of the ideas we've discussed or just take a little bit of time today to reflect on your own priorities and what role your phone is playing in your life and start to make little changes. Nothing's permanent, you know, you can try something, decide doesn't work for you and try something else. That goes back to the idea of being curious about it and not judging yourself. Don't beat yourself up. Just make incremental improvements and know that for every advancement you make, you're probably going to fall back on an old habit because it's a habit and that's okay, because the point is to become aware of those habits and work towards gradual change. And it will change. It will change you. So yeah.

Oh, that is so beautiful to hear these stories that people have written to you to share.

I cry. I read their their story, like in Google, I have Google surveys and, you know, obviously people can't see what other people have written because it's a Google form. But I read them and it's a really bad idea if I read these on planes, because I you know, I think there's something about planes that make people cry just in general, whether you're watching a movie or I guess in my case, reading through like a spreadsheet. But I just think, oh my God, these people don't know that the ten people before them, the ten people after them essentially said exactly the same thing. They think they're alone in this problem. They think they're the only ones who feel distant from their own lives or like they can't focus anymore. Or, you know, some people say things like, I feel like an automaton. I feel like my life is stealing. Am I? I feel like my phone is stealing my life away from me, like from under my nose. We're all feeling this on some level, but we haven't joined together to address their problem. And that was one thing I was hoping we could touch on before we wrap up is just particularly when it comes to teenagers. I've gotten really, really passionate about trying to figure out an approach for teenagers and just parents. So if we have a moment's like comment on that or touch on that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more that this is an area where kids and parents are really struggling. And I hear it all the time from parents all over the country who tell me just in very plain and direct terms that they just do not know how to manage social media anymore, or they feel like their lives have been consumed by their devices. What's striking to me is actually how much insight people have, especially kids. Yeah, they're not oblivious to the fact that the these are having negative effects on them, these forms of technology and some of these social platforms, but they're not quite sure how to change that. And that is why I think we have to approach these issues with a sense of urgency, because in first, too many people, their experience of technology is not positive overall, and it's stealing away elements of their mental health, their physical health, their time with friends, their productivity at work and at school. And that's a pretty high price to pay. And so I think we we've got to do a lot on an individual level when it comes to behavior change, but also in terms of changing policy and the environment, you know, so that people can interact with devices that aren't where the odds are stacked against them, because right now the odds are stacked against them. You know, I always at the end of these conversations and I always ask people what gives them hope. And it struck me that you answer that question so beautifully. Already there's stories of people whose lives have been changed. People feel like they've gotten their lives back in a sense, their attention back that is just so hopeful because it tells me that even in a world where it does feel sometimes that the odds are stacked against us, where the the notion of even changing how you relate to your technology just feels almost overwhelming at times. You're helping us understand that you know what it is possible and that small steps can in fact make a big difference. So, Catherine, I'm so grateful to you for having this conversation with me, for giving me a lot to think about, or most importantly, for helping our listeners think about a new approach to their use of technology and what they can hopefully leave them feeling better about themselves, better about their time with others, and hopefully leading a healthier life overall. So thank you for joining us, Catherine. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing.

Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for the opportunity.

That concludes this conversation with Catherine Price. Join me for the next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.