N4L 077: "How to Break Up with Your Phone" by Catherine Price

Meet Catherine Price, recovering phone addict and author of "How to Break Up with Your Phone." She shares her own story of being too digitally connected and too out of touch with people and passions. What follows is her "30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life," steps all of us can follow to start living and loving our lives the way we should and tapping into our own creativity.  00:15   Intro to Catherine Price, science writer and author of How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life 01:15   Price’s tongue-in-cheek “Open Letter” to her phone 02:35   Old enough to remember the world before smartphones but young enough to not imagine life without it 03:15   Pivotal moment: Price’s baby gazes up at her while she’s staring at her phone 04:15   Begins taking 24-hour breaks from her phone, but has no plan for an end game 05:20   A decade since smartphones hit the market, we feel a paralyzing tension 06:00   “Breaking up with your phone” doesn’t mean throwing technology under the bus 06:25   Smartphones designed to keep us tethered to them, to trigger dopamine 07:45   Just being near someone checking phone can trigger the need to check our own 08:15   Smartphones = “slot machines in our pockets” – the most addictive machine ever invented 08:40   Determining if you’re addicted to your phone using “The Smartphone Compulsion Test” (David Greenfield, 1998) 10:00   Stress from being on phone releases cortisol, impeding rational thinking and increasing risky behavior (e.g., texting while driving) 11:05   Likening checking phone to other addictive behaviors (using heroin, smoking) 11:40   “FOMO” drives us to check phones incessantly without considering other options 12:20   Auto-response for texts still requires a third-party app 13:15   We fear our own minds, leading us to numb our thoughts with a phone without asking bigger questions about how to spend our time 14:00   Study finds people prefer getting electric shocks to being alone (with own thoughts) 15:15   Social apps show our willingness to give up lots of personal information/background 16:00   Our attention is the commodity taken from us 16:45   Others channels to keep in touch with family & friends without compromising info 18:00   Need to speak up against the attention economy, decide what’s meaningful to us 19:40   “Phubbing” = phone snubbing; seemingly acceptable rude social behavior 21:05   Price’s experiment concludes breaking up with a phone can change your life 21:40   The more attention you pay to how you use your phone, the more attention you pay to how you want to live your life 22:05   Trial separation – a “Digital Sabbath” – at first causes withdrawal 22:30   Creates time and space to help us remember what we really like to do 23:40   Take Price’s intake quiz: www.phonebreakup.com 24:15   With spare time, Price takes up the guitar and finds new joy and new community 25:00   Dave Crenshaw’s book, The Power of Having Fun, also emphasizes finding our passions 25:40   “I realized I was giving up my life in five-minute increments.” 25:55   Checking phone can be a knee-jerk reaction 26:10   We can’t have creative thoughts without boredom, stillness 26:40   Brain actually creates proteins to create long-term memories – a process easily disrupted by distractions 28:00   Serendipitously, Price meets neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel 28:45   Others may push back against our decision to disconnect 29:30   First, decide your own boundaries; use autoresponders 30:30   Price’s book provides a 30-day plan to take back your life 31:00   Recommendation: a short video about the book that will make you smile…and give you pause BUY How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life Connect with us! Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube Special thanks… Music Credit Sound Editing Credit