Catherine Price is a journalist, science writer, and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. How much are our phones affecting our brains? Our attention spans seem to be getting shorter, and many of us feel more forgetful. So how much of this can we blame on our phones and what can we do to fix it? Expect to learn how many hours a day people spend on their phone, what phones do to our attention span, if Tik tok memory brain is real, the real impact this kind of cellphone usage is doing to our brains and how it changes your focus and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Catherine’s SubStack: https://catherineprice.substack.com/ Website: https://catherineprice.com/ Book: https://tinyurl.com/tnrfk84m Instagram: @catherinepriceofficial LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/catherinepriceofficial BlueSky: @catherine-price Twitter/X: @catherine_price TikTok: @catherinepriceofficial YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@catherinepriceofficial Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How much time do people really spend on their phones daily?
How many hours a day are most people spending on their phones? How many times are they picking them up?
It's hard to get a firm answer on how many hours, but the best statistics I found range between four and six hours a day that people are spending on their phones. If you want to go for the middle number there, five hours a day, it adds up to about 75 days a year. It's really a shocking amount.
Yeah, I wonder what the comparison is, because that's presumably across a bunch of different age groups. So if you were to go under 30, I would guess that that number goes up. I would also guess that the hours of sleep would go down under that. I certainly know Luke, who is a good friend of mine and my tour manager. He regularly manages to double his sleep time with his screen time.
So he's 12 hours a day on phone, six hours of sleep.
Oh, that direction. I thought you were going the other healthier direction. No. Oh, that's not good. Does he need an intervention?
He's a club promoter. He's like patient zero for phone use. All of us are. So anybody that used to run Nightlight stuff, we basically were hardwired into WhatsApp. And it's very, very difficult to get rid of that. Maybe this is me just creating a... an excuse for myself.
But yeah, if you grew up being some sort of club promoter type person, you have maybe the worst neural networks possible for phone use. It's not good.
So that's a separate category. So you have like 18 to 29-year-olds, 29 to 40, and then you have like club managers. Correct.
It's a different species, technically. Yes, yes.
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Chapter 2: What are the generational differences in phone usage?
How can people work out whether or not their time on screens is something they want to be doing or something they don't? Given that we all do it, so presumably at the time we want to be doing it, kind of.
I don't know if we always want to be doing it kind of. I think a lot of times it's an automatic habit by this point.
We've been so conditioned, and we can talk more about this, but we've been so conditioned to associate our phones with some kind of reward, emotional reward, usually, like the alleviation of boredom or anxiety, that we do it on autopilot, and then we get sucked in, and we don't even recognize how much time we're spending.
But I do think you raise a really important point, which is that one of the most effective things you can do if you're trying to, quote, break up with your phone, as I put it, or change your relationship with your phone, is to become more aware of when you reach for your phone. And so I do have a couple exercises I always recommend to people.
And one of them is this mindfulness-based exercise I call What For, Why Now, and What Else. So WWW for short. And I always recommend people start by putting something on their phone like...
a rubber band or some kind of like i tell women like a hair tie the point being that when you pick up your phone on autopilot you'll notice there's something on the phone and you'll have a split second of being like why is this thing on my phone and that will be a reminder to ask yourself these three questions and the way that works is you ask yourself what for like what did i pick up my phone for right now like did i actually have a purpose or was it just kind of like an autopilot thing and you might have a purpose but what what did you pick it up for
And then you ask why now, you know, is it a time sensitive reason? Like you actually wanted to send a specific text message or email, or you really wanted to check something in particular, or this is more likely, is there an emotional reason behind it? Like you were, you were bored and you wanted a distraction or you were feeling lonely. You wanted a connection. Something like that.
And once you identify this reward that your brain is after, that's when you can ask the final question of what else? What else could you do in this moment to alleviate or give yourself that reward that doesn't involve reaching for your phone? So instead of, I always say, instead of checking social media for a quote connection, you can actually call a friend or find someone to just chat with.
You could take a break by going for a walk around the block. But I also always say to people, you might decide that for your what else, you actually want to do nothing, which is an excellent choice because our brains need more time to decompress from all the stuff we're putting into them. And then you also might just decide, I want to be on my phone right now.
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Chapter 3: How can you assess your screen time habits?
I don't think anyone's saying it's a solution, but sorry, go on.
It's something that's just going to be, sorry, a solution in that it would satisfy their desire for connection and attachment in a way that would preclude them from actually going and seeking it in the real world over a long amount of time. I don't think... Because there isn't the prestige, there isn't the amount of selection that's going on.
All of that being said, I do think there's a white pill here, especially when VR comes online and if we can get good chatbots, good VR headsets, etc. I think that you can create, whoever does this will be very, very rich. If you could gamify the flirting process with a very highly dexterous, accurate,
virtual dating environment where you can say and move and it can detect body language and tonality and what you're saying and it can respond in real time. Dating is one of the few things you don't get to sandbox. You know, you can practice free kicks for football all day long. You don't get to practice going up to that girl in the bar.
You just have to every time that you try to practice it is game day over and over and over and over again. Whereas I think that overcoming approach anxiety, which is one of the myriad of reasons why I think there is a sex recession at the moment.
overcoming that if you've been you dude i'm level 55 on flirt ai uh i i got this in the bag i'm like a black belt or whatever um and i genuinely do think that it would help to give guys the confidence to be able to overcome that approach anxiety so there are some white pills in there why would you buy so i i hear what you're saying and i hope that's true although i also sound like you're like the reason guys want to have girlfriends is because it makes them look good
So putting that aside, you know, hopefully some men also want... There's more reasons.
There's many, many, many reasons.
There's a couple more reasons. We can talk about that later if you want. But I don't know. I think I genuinely am concerned, even at the level... When you start to hear some of the voice chatbots that already exist, and you start to see some of the... I haven't seen any of those.
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