Save Your Brain, A Digital Survival Guide

Our brains are fried. Or at least that’s what it feels like for most of us. Chances are you’ve experienced at least one of the following:

You sit down to read a book, only to find that your brain isn’t complying. You read a paragraph but don’t remember it a second later. Your attention can’t stay focused and your mind keeps jumping from thought to thought.

You’re at dinner with your friends and family; your phone is tucked away in your pocket, but every minute or so, your mind drifts off to what you have to do for work, or what the score of the game is, or if that Instagram post has gotten any more likes. Your friends and family may even ask if you are there…to which you reply yes, but their asking is proof that perhaps you aren’t.

You’re sitting down to work and feel a buzz in your pocket. You grab your phone, slide your finger to open it, only to see that there isn’t a notification. Welcome to the phantom vibration.

There’s even a name for this forgetfulness and inability to focus: Digital Dementia. There’s no secret. Just about every one of us is on our phones or digital devices too much. Ourselves included. We’re losing the battle to the engineers who are designing devices and apps to keep us scrolling and pulling the digital slot machine.

What we want to cover below is how to fight back; how to tilt the battle in your favor just enough so you don’t lose your mind to your phone. First, what’s going on in your brain: A slew of ​research​ shows that our phones hamper our attention and cognitive capacity. We’re pushed to a kind of partial attention, filled with frequent task-switching that prevents us from ever being deeply focused on any one thing. Our brain wasn’t built for this. We suck at multitasking, yet our phones demand it. As a result, research shows that our working memory, focus, and cognitive flexibility are impaired. If you set out to design a device for the sole purpose of deteriorating our attentional skills, it would be hard to beat an app-filled phone…

Other research shows that constant task-switching and information overload dysregulate our stress response. We end up getting frequent hits of stress without a true action to alleviate or act on it. It’s like those rodent experiments where the mouse gets shocked but can’t do anything about it and eventually succumbs to chronic fatigue. We are the mouse. This combination of cognitive decline and stress dysfunction explains why ​researchers​ found that the higher someone scores on a smartphone addiction scale, the worse they are at self-regulated learning, staying in the present, or experiencing flow. So what do we do about it?

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind:

A common tactic is to put your phone on silent or do not disturb. While this beats having notifications buzzing and beeping at all times, it’s not much better. ​Researchers​ found that the mere presence of a phone, even if it is face-down and off, tends to lower concentration and cognitive performance. In these experiments, scientists even used someone else’s phone (instead of the participant’s) as the distraction. Guess what? Same impact, even though participants knew it wasn’t their phone. Our environment invites action. We’ve trained our brains to think that the rectangular object is the most important thing in the world. It doesn’t just represent social media or text messages, it’s a reminder of all that we have to do and can do in the world. It’s why even if your phone is on silent in your pocket, you can’t stop thinking about the work you have to complete, though your kid is asking about your day.

Your brain is designed to lock on to valuable information. For our ancient ancestors, it meant the rustling of the leaves that could signal danger (e.g., a lurking mountain lion), or the person sitting across from you at the campfire, because your survival may depend on them at some point. Now, it’s your phone. If you want to break free for periods of deep-focus time, you’ve got to remove it from sight altogether.

2. Leave it Out of the Bedroom:

Most of us charge our phones beside our beds. It’s convenient, as the phone acts as an alarm. But it also reinforces our addiction—just think about it: the last thing we see before we go to bed and the first thing we grab for when we wake up isn’t a book, diary, or our significant other; it’s our phone. It’s the ultimate addiction training. It also makes us sleep worse.

In a ​longitudinal study ​on young adults, researchers found that nighttime phone use correlated with feeling stressed and depressed. Other ​research​ found that keeping your phone near your bed is associated with worse sleep. A ​review of research​ linked nighttime phone use to later bedtimes, longer sleep onset latency, shorter sleep duration, insomnia, reduced sleep quality, and daytime tiredness. The best solution is the simplest: Move the phone out of the bedroom, far enough away so that even if you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night you aren’t tempted to be a degenerate and check your phone. For some, that means charging the phone in the closet. For others, that might mean downstairs in the kitchen. It might mean getting an analog alarm clock. Or perhaps turning the ringer on loud, while it’s charging in the other room in case of emergencies. Or maybe even get a separate pared-down flip phone for emergencies only. But the point is that small inconveniences can be worked around.

3. Observe a Digital Sabbath:

Pick a day and off lock your phone away. At first, it will be miserable. Like an addict, you’ll crave the checking, stimulation, and reprieve from boredom But the benefits are immense. A kind of mental reset that happens. Your brain lets go of the need to devote a large portion of its cognitive resources to keeping track of your device. You learn to engage in the world again, to be okay with being bored, and to let your mind wander.

It’s not too dissimilar from ​research​ that finds that spending a few days out in the wilderness has a restorative effect on attention and cognition. Scientists have found that nature does a great job of turning down the volume of the constant noise, novelty, and stimulation of urban and digital life. While nature might give you an extra boost, simply being without digital devices has a remarkable effect as is. If you can’t handle locking up your phone, consider investing in a tool like ​“the brick.”​ It’s a simple device that locks specific apps on your phone, essentially turning it into something that only makes calls. In short: live like it’s the 1990s again, even if it’s just for a day.

4. Read Hard Copy Books

Over the past few months, we’ve been having a similar conversation with all of our closest author-friends. Our ability to read feels like it is eroding after we’ve spent too much time on the internet. Our job is to read and write. Although we’ve spent a lifetime doing that, if we aren’t careful, we quickly lose the ability to do so. It’s not too dissimilar from research showing our ability to use maps (or our internal navigation skills) erodes without use. For many people, someone could drop you in the middle of your own city, and you’d have a hard time getting back home, thanks to our collective overreliance on phones and GPS. The same is true for books. Someone could hand you a great book in your living room, but if you are suffering from “internet brain”, you may not be able to read more than a page.

The good news is that we can build back our attentional muscles with a little training. One of the best ways to do this is deep reading. Set aside a few blocks each week where it’s just you and a book. Your brain might resist at first, but the more you get into it, the easier it becomes to find that groove again and focus on the task at hand.

It’s beneficial because reading is one of the greatest sources of knowledge, creativity, and joy there is. It’s also beneficial because the ability to focus is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in today’s world.

5. Set Aside Daily Time Alone in Your Head:

Go for a walk? You’re probably listening to a podcast.

Go for a run? Music blaring.

At a stop light while driving? A brief moment to check your DMs.

On public transport? Scrolling.

Standing in line? Can’t be bored for a moment, grab the phone.

We’ve replaced the times when we used to be forced to be alone in our heads with an instant adult pacifier: our phones. No need to feel restless. No need to be bored. The solution is always in our pocket. But if we never spend time alone in our heads, our very own minds become foreign to us—uncomfortable and unfamiliar places that our brains go on high alert to escape. We need to regain familiarity with our inner world. To develop interoception, or an ability to slice and dice apart the feelings we all experience, instead of trying to push them away or avoid them. Pick something you do regularly and do it without external input. It doesn’t have to be full-blown mindfulness meditation. It could be every time you wash the dishes. Or leaving your phone at home when you go on a walk or run. Or putting your phone in the glove box when you commute to work. Or not pulling out your phone when at a restaurant and your dining partner gets up to use the restroom. These bite-size moments are great training, and very important. They remind your brain that you don’t have to fill every second of nothingness with stimulation. You don’t need to outsource your brain’s attention and entertainment. There’s a reason so many great scientists experienced their breakthroughs on long walks. It’s wild to imagine that if Darwin, Curie, or Einstein had been addicted to their phones, they may not have made their incredible leaps in thinking, and we’d all be suffering as a result. A recent ​article​ in the Financial Times asked if humans have “passed peak brain power.” We don’t think there is anything internal that is inherently making us dumber, but our addiction to devices very well might be.

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With everything above, think: practical and good enough, not perfection. When it comes to digital hygiene, too often we try hard to radically limit our use with a large dose of willpower, and then when that inevitably fails, we give up. We tell ourselves some version of, “It’s just the times we live in,” while our kids, friends, or family notice us drifting off scrolling while we lay in bed or eat dinner, instead of living in the real world. The goal is not necessarily to shun all digital devices or rewind the clock to 1990. It’s to place enough constraints in your life so that you can be creative and present. So that you own your phone instead of your phone owning you. It’s pushing back just enough so that you can think deeply and focus intently again.

-Steve