2,617 Times a Day: Are We Losing Our Minds?
People touch their phones an average of 2,617 times per day. No, that’s not a typo. Business Insider reported these findings in 2016. What do you think that number is in 2024? I doubt it’s less. And this was just for the average person—the top 10% of users touched their phones 5,400 times daily. Here are some other startling facts:
What are we doing with these phones? What the hell is going on here? Have we lost our minds? I’ll tell you what’s going on here. And yes, we have lost our minds—or more accurately, we’ve lost control of our minds. As a culture, we’re addicted to social media.
This addiction has led to a disastrous inversion. Our spirit, soul, or true self, whatever you choose to call it has been dethroned. The mind has taken the throne. And while the mind is a “great servant, it makes for a terrible ruler.”
Don’t think for one second that these disastrous statistics happened by chance. There is nothing new here. Since time immemorial, governments, commercial titans, and religious leaders have sought to subordinate the spirit, in hopes of capturing the minds of the masses. They do this for their reasons. And trust me, their reasons are less than noble. In truth, their reasons are ignoble. Their motivations, however, are outside the scope of our discussion.
Like nicotine, alcohol, and opiates, social engineers know well that social media has addictive qualities. When we receive a favorable emoji or any positive reaction to the content we post, our brain releases the feel-good neurotransmitters dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin.
The mind interprets these neurochemical changes in the brain. It then mixes them with thoughts, emotions, cognitive biases, and erroneous beliefs. Out of this psychic stew arises compulsive behavior.
There you have it. Those snared in social media’s web suffer from both an addiction and a compulsion. Addicted to hearts and “likes.” And a compulsion to constantly seek updates for fear of missing out (FOMO).
As a ruler, the mind can be likened to the American pygmy shrew—a mammal that must eat three times its body weight daily to survive. Throughout the entire 24-hour cycle, the shrew eats about every 15 minutes. For it, an hour without food means certain death. For many of us, an hour without a like, heart emoji, or a thumbs-up puts the mind, like the pygmy shrew, into a death spiral.
But unlike the shrew, which can die from starvation, the death of the mind is an illusion. The mind is illusional—it’s a tool of the true self. It’s not real; it’s a construct. Think of a movie projector steaming images onto a screen. What we see on the screen seems real, but it’s just light and shadow— a temporary projection. The true self, like the light behind the projector, is the constant source that makes the illusion possible—yet remains untouched by it.
While the mind frantically leaps from Instagram to Facebook, then over to TikTok, the true self lies in stillness—“stretched in smiling repose.”
A Five-Step Solution
If we're to make inroads into these disastrous statistics, we must subjugate the mind. Just as the princes of darkness have sought to control the human mind since time immemorial, the champions of light have shown us how to master our minds—how to make our minds the servants of the true self.
Step One: Boredom
The practice of boredom is the first step. The 17th-century mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal introduced this concept and exercise. Despite his early scientific achievements, Pascal is perhaps best remembered for his philosophical and theological work, particularly Pensees, a collection of his thoughts on faith, human nature, and existential questions.
How do we practice boredom in our modern world?
We start by setting aside time each day to disengage with all devices. No phone, tablet, TV, or computer. Maybe start with 10 minutes and gradually move to 30 minutes a day. While disengaged, acknowledge your boredom. Notice the strong desire to engage with a device. Then notice the anxiety that grows out of it. For whatever time you’ve allocated, just be bored and anxious. Once you’ve resolved that you won’t engage, observe how your mind begins searching for a book, a magazine, or anything in sight. Don’t grab it. Like the shrew, your mind wants something to feed on. Resist the temptation. Just be bored.
While standing in line at the Supermarket, Starbucks, or T.J. Maxx, resist the urge to take out your phone. Don’t rummage through the magazine rack or inspect a trinket on the counter. Just be bored. When tied up in traffic, don’t start making phone calls. Just be bored and observe how your mind frantically searches for something to feed on.
Obviously, being bored is not an end goal. In addition to a projector, your mind can be likened to a merry-go-round. By allowing your mind to be bored, you are bringing the merry-go-round to a stop. When the constant spinning of your mind comes to a halt, and you let boredom set in, you’ve created a transitional space for the next step.
Pascal famously wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Once you’ve become comfortable with boredom you can move on to meditation.
Step Two: Meditation
Meditation. I use the term in the broadest sense. In our modern culture meditation has become an umbrella term for many different mind disciplines. It could be sitting still while doing breathing exercises, visualizing, or reciting internal affirmations.
For some, meditation is best understood as described by Eckart Tolle. The practice of becoming fully present in the moment. Allowing thoughts to pass without attachment or judgment. In this space, you transcend the mind’s constant chatter and connect with the stillness of your true self. The objective of the process is to produce a state of pure awareness, where one accesses a deeper sense of stillness—beyond thoughts. In this state, one can experience the separation of the mind and the true self.
For me, I see meditation in the same vein as Marcus Aurelius. His approach was rooted in Stoic philosophy. He stressed the importance of maintaining inner tranquility despite eternal chaos. He was the first Western thinker to emphasize that our reactions, not events themselves, define our experiences. He understood the transitory nature of life, and if we don’t focus on the present moment, we miss the essence of life: the NOW.
For Aurelius, meditation is a way of life, as opposed to a daily discipline. With vigilant attention to the activities of the mind, one can develop, embody, and live a virtuous life. According to Aurelius, living a virtuous life was the highest calling of a human being.
His chief aim was to develop the virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. By cultivating these virtues, he sought self-mastery, where he believed true power lies. He held that only through achieving this inner strength could one discover life’s purpose, live in harmony with nature, and fulfill one’s duty.
For Marcus Aurelius this was meditation. ?
Irrespective of your approach to meditation, with practice, you begin to observe the daylight between the true self and the activities of the mind. ?Once you have experienced that daylight, the true self and the mind can begin to separate. Once separated, the subjugation of the mind can take place.
Here’s an example of what may happen once this separation begins: You reach for your phone for the 1200th time in a day, and suddenly you become conscious of it. You say to yourself, “Why am I reaching for this phone, what am I looking for?” Then you can make the conscious decision to engage or not engage with your phone. Carl Jung had an insightful observation regarding this behavior, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it [the unconscious] will guide your life, and you will call it fate.”
Step Three: Spending Time in Nature
In my formative years, I was influenced by scores of writers and speakers, but three stand out among them: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jim Rohn, and Earl Nightingale. In his book, The Essence of Success, Nightingale shared several short stories. One has stuck with me for decades, it’s titled, The Man, the Seashore, and the Four Prescriptions. ?
It first appeared in the magazine Guideposts way back in 1945. It’s ?a classic story—we might even call it archetypal:
A businessman felt he reached the end of his rope. His interests in life had vanished. He couldn’t muster any excitement for his work, in fact, his work suddenly felt meaningless. Although he had his family, even they couldn’t rescue him from his dark despair. He was in the depths of depression. And out of desperation, he went to see the family doctor.
[After listening to his story, the doctor friend didn’t run a series of blood tests. He didn’t refer him to a psychiatrist or psychologist. Nor did he prescribe him an SSRI.]
Instead, he asked him, “when you were a child, what did you like to do best?”
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“I liked to visit the seashore,” he said.
“All right, the doctor said, “you must do exactly as I tell you. I want you to spend all day tomorrow at the shore. Find a lonely stretch of beach and spend the entire day there from 9 o’clock in the morning until 6 o’clock in the evening.
Take nothing to read and do nothing calculated to distract you in any way. I’m going to give you four prescriptions in order. Take the first at 9 o’clock, the second at noon, the third at 3 o’clock, and last at 6 o’clock. Don’t look at them now. Wait until you arrive at the shore tomorrow morning.
The man promised he would take the doctor’s advice. The next morning, a little before 9 0’clock, he parked his car on a lonely stretch of the beach. As he left his car, he could feel the strong wind blowing from the sea, the surf was high and pounding. He walked to a sand dune near the seething surf and sat down. He took out prescription number one, it was just one word:
Listen
That was all that was written on it, the one word, “listen!” For three hours that’s all he did. He listened to the sound of the buffeting wind and the lonely cries of the gulls. He listened to the sound of the booming surf. He said quietly, and he listened.
At noon, he read his second prescription. This time there were two words:
Reach Back
For the next three hours he did just that. He let his mind go back as far as it could go, and he thought of all the incidents of his life he could remember. Why had he stopped coming to the seashore. The happy times, the good times, the struggles, and the successes.
At 3 o’clock, he tore open the third prescription. It read:
Re-examine Your Motives
This took so much intense thought and concentration that the remaining three hours quickly slipped by. For those hours, he re-examined his motives, his reasons for living. What was important; what was not. What was fulfilling; what was not. He clarified and re-committed to his goals.
At 6 o’clock, under a gray, darkening sky and with a taste of salty spray on the wind, he read the fourth and final prescription. It read:
Write Your Worries in the Sand
There had been one thing that had been worrying him, so he walked to the hard sand and with a stick wrote his chief worry in the sand and stood looking at it for a moment. Then, as he walked toward where his car was parked, he looked back and saw that the incoming tide had already erased his worry. He got in his car and drove home.
There is no need to cite all the science behind how restorative nature is for what ails us. We know this intuitively.
During the busy day, most of us don’t have access to a beach, the mountains, or a hiking trail. But no matter where you live and work, you can always find a slice of nature. It could be a shady tree in your company’s parking lot, a park not far from the office, or a garden in your own backyard.
In addition to all the other benefits, spending time in nature without any access to social media goes a long way in breaking the addiction. That is step number three.
Step Four: Journaling
Like meditation, journaling has many different approaches.
Some may adopt Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. With her approach, you write three pages a day, approximately 750 words each morning before engaging in any other activity. Another approach would be to free-write for a specific time. With both approaches, you pour out whatever comes to mind onto the page without censoring, editing, or overthinking.
For the specific purpose of identifying the root cause of an addition to social media, you might focus on freewriting. With this exercise, you still pour all your thoughts onto the page, but you restrict your thoughts to one topic. In this case, you might write at the top of the page, “Why do I check my phone hundreds of times a day?”
The practice of journaling acts as a form of “brain drain,” helping you process emotions, quiet inner criticism, and make space for creative ideas to emerge throughout the day. To get the most from a journalling practice, resist the temptation to type out your thoughts as opposed to handwriting them.
Of course, handwriting is harder and takes longer. And yes, I know, you can barely read your writing. But do it anyway, your handwriting will improve with practice.
Handwriting over typing provides several advantages. Here are just three:
1) Deeper Cognitive Processing: handwriting engages the brain more deeply than typing, improving comprehension and retention. The slower pace allows you to process thoughts more thoroughly and reflect more meaningfully.
2) Enhanced Creativity: The tactile experience of writing by hand fosters greater creativity. It encourages a freer flow of ideas, as the mind isn’t restricted by the structured pace of typing, allowing for more organic expression.
3) Mindfulness and Focus: Handwriting promotes mindfulness by requiring more attention and focus. The physical act of writing slows you down, making it easier to stay present and avoid distractions, enhancing the reflective nature of journaling.
To my mind, there are even more important reasons to handwrite rather than type. From the ancient Egyptians to the mystics of the Hebrew Kabbalah and the calligraphers of ancient China, cultures throughout history have viewed handwriting as a sacred art form, intertwining it with sacred geometry as a bridge between the earthy and the divine.
Step Five: Physical Exercise
The final step: Exercise. This one is straightforward and needs little explanation.
Physical exercise can help us break free of the digital universe by providing a natural boost of endorphins. Let’s face it, as we previously discussed, we scroll because we like dopamine hits. Exercise provides a healthier way of getting them. Physical activity also encourages presence and mindfulness, shifting focus from the digital world to the physical body. Over time, regular exercise builds resilience and self-discipline, making it easier to resist the impulse to check social media.
Conclusion
We humans are herd animals. We are influenced by social norms, peer pressure, and collective behaviors. This environment exerts tremendous pressure on us to conform. To conform with societal trends, mass movements, and conventional “wisdom.” Currently, the herd has gone haywire charging into the digital world. Do you really want to follow them with this one?
Social media has ensnared too many of us. Breaking free of its hold is no easy feat. So, I ?offer these steps—in this order—as a way to free ourselves. We start with introspection (boredom, meditation), move to emotional and external balance (nature, journaling), and end with action—exercise.
To be sure, there are many fantastic attributes and applications in the digital universe. A cold beer or glass of cabernet is fine too—but a quart of vodka a day? That’s what many of us are doing—consuming the equivalent of a quart of social media each day. If you can’t practice all five steps, select just one step, or combination of a couple to focus on. Each small step helps to disentangle your mind from the digital universe.
I’m sure you’ve heard these idioms: “the tail wagging the dog” or “the cart before the horse.” If you want to free yourself from social media, stop letting the shadow lead the light.