A Holiday From My Smart Phone

August 1, 2023

I have a dirty little secret: I'm addicted to my smart phone.

I've decided it's time to try an experiment for the next four weeks. I'm turning my smart phone into a "dumb phone" -- in other words, a phone more like those of my past, with little-to-no computing or internet capacity.

Unlike my 12-year old son, I remember life before smart phones. When phones had buttons for numbers and were designed just for calling people. And when you did call a friend, you usually got their physical answering machine, complete with tape cassettes that recorded the messages. I remember the days of early texting, pushing the buttons multiple times to get the right letter, and the laborious effort associated with forming words. Text messages were much shorter in those days! This was before phones had cameras, and certainly before phones became mini-gaming, shopping, streaming entertainment devices through internet connection and endless downloadable applications.

In July, I became mesmerized by a recent episode of my favorite podcast, The Hidden Brain, called The Paradox of Pleasure. In it, host Shankar Vedantam interviewed Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (2021), about the brain and how it experiences pleasure. What struck me as I listened was her insight that it's not just drugs, alcohol, and gambling that are the only substances or behaviors for which she's treating patients. Modern life in a rich country, with its abundance of highly accessible and dopamine inducing streaming activities, is creating the conditions for any of us to become addicted to unhealthy behaviors.

Lembke explained that when our brains produce dopamine, which causes the sensation of pleasure, it then counterbalances that pleasure to achieve homeostasis, or balance.

The more we overstimulate our brains with dopamine-inducing activities, the harder our brain works to offset the pleasure. It becomes harder and harder to feel pleasure through the same activity, so we have to increase the dose or the novelty to get the same feeling. She also believes there's good evidence that this is a huge contributor for why we have more depression and anxiety, and less happiness, than we used to experience. What was most surprising was her description of clients with addictions to behaviors like online shopping, and recounting her own addiction to certain romance novels. These are not the activities I normally consider when I think about dopamine.

I started to examine my own behavior. I thought about the times when I sat on the couch going down a YouTube rabbit hole. Or shopping for a pair of shoes, trying to get the best deal possible -- only to have the shoes arrive in the mail and have already forgotten them. Also, checking my email compulsively after work hours -- or, more disturbingly, while driving. The pleasure in all of these actions was from the anticipation in my clicking, the promise of some magical great thing if I just kept going. It was becoming hard to stop, to control my compulsion, but easy to hide because everyone, it seems, is also on their phones too.

I felt ashamed to admit my growing dependency, but also felt motivated to change.

The companion episode, The Path to Enough, described what to do about these problematic behaviors. Lembke suggests a four-week abstinence program to allow your brain to reset.

Over the next couple of days, I thought about what would happen if I replaced my smart phone with a flip phone? In order to check work or personal email (or get on a web browser) I'd have to go to my laptop, which I normally keep in my home office. I realized that leaving my desk at 5 or 6 o'clock in the afternoon I'd really be forced to stop checking email and connect with real people, like my family, for the evening. This thought excited me, and I began to make a plan.

1. I realized that I didn't need to buy a flip phone. I could just convert my iPhone into a "dumb-er" phone, mostly by removing a lot of apps. Check out my companion Article, Wellbeing "Hacks" for Your Smart Phone.
2. I took an honest inventory of my smart phone usage so that I'd have something to compare my behavior with after four weeks. I learned that last week I spent an average of 2.5 hours a day on my phone, totaling about 17 hours a week.
3. I communicated my plans with people who need to know about the change. This list was surprisingly short. My immediate family of course. I decided to tell a few close friends as well, which created more accountability for my personal four-week abstinence goal. For my immediate co-workers and my clients, I wrapped it into my upcoming two-week vacation, and I told them I was not checking email in order to truly unplug. If they needed to reach me with something urgent, they should text me directly. They were completely supportive.
4. I decided to record the experience of abstinence from my smart phone. I will be writing down every day what I'm experiencing, how it feels, what I'm learning, and share it with others. I'm especially curious if spending less time on my smart phone will help me in my daily mindfulness practice.

Stay tuned for more on how it went at the end of August!

(9/8/23 update: Read Dumb Phone Experiment Results to learn what happened!)

Sofia Michelakis?sometimes describes herself as a "motivating storyteller." ?Professionally, she is a philanthropic advisor, helping people turn their vision for social change into action. As former lead strategist and deputy director overseeing the Giving Pledge and past board chair of Social Venture Partners International, she is a trusted bridge between philanthropists, their teams, and nonprofit leaders. Sofia has partnered with influential global visionaries on giving strategy and family engagement, developed engaging curricula and winning models for social impact.