This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of neurons in your brain, associated with your short-term motivation system, that recognize different situations and then effectively vote for corresponding actions. If you’re hungry and see a plate of cookies, there’s a neuron bundle that will fire in response to this pattern, advocating for the action of eating a cookie.
The strength of these votes depends on an implicit calculation of expected reward, based on your past experiences. When multiple actions are possible in a given situation, then, in most cases, the action associated with the strongest vote will win out.
One way to understand why you struggle to put down your phone is that it overwhelms this short-term motivation system. One factor at play is the types of rewards these devices create. Because popular services like TikTok deploy machine learning algorithms to curate content based on observed engagement, they provide an artificially consistent and pure reward experience. Almost every time you tap on these apps, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by a piece of content and/or find a negative state of boredom relieved—both of which are outcomes that our brains value.
Due to this techno-reality, the votes produced by the pick-up-the-phone neuron bundles are notably strong. Resisting them is difficult and often requires the recruitment of other parts of your brain, such as the long-term motivation system, to convince yourself that some less exciting activity in the current moment will lead to a more important reward in the future. But this is exhausting and often ineffective.
The second issue with how phones interact with your brain is the reality that they’re ubiquitous. Most activities associated with strong rewards are relatively rare—it’s hard to resist eating the fresh-baked cookie when I’m hungry, but it’s not that often that I come across such desserts. Your phone, by contrast, is almost always with you. This means that your brain’s vote to pick up your phone is constantly being registered. You might occasionally resist the pull, but its relentless presence means that it’s inevitably going to win many, many times as your day unfolds.
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Understanding these neural mechanisms is important because they help explain why so many efforts to reduce phone use fail—they don’t go nearly far enough!
Consider, for example, the following popular tips that often fall short…
Increase Friction
This might mean moving the most appealing apps to an inconvenient folder on your phone, or using a physical locking device like a Brick that requires an extra step to open your phone. These often fail because, from the perspective of your short-term motivation systems, these mild amounts of friction only decrease your expected reward by a small amount, which ultimately has little impact on the strength of its vote for you to pick up your phone.
Make Your Phone Grayscale
There is an idea that eliminating bright colors from your phone’s screen will somehow disrupt the cues that lead you to pick it up. This also often fails because colors have very little to do with your brain’s expected reward calculation, which is based on more abstract benefits, such as pleasant surprise and the alleviation of boredom.
Moderate Your Use with Rules
It’s also common to declare clear rules about how much you will use each type of app; e.g., “only 30 minutes of Instagram per day.” The problem is that such rules are abstract and symbolic, and have limited interaction with your short-term motivation systems, which deal more with the physical world and immediate rewards.
Detox Regularly
Another common tactic is to “detox” by taking regular time away from your phone, such as a weekly Internet Shabbat, or an annual phone-free meditation retreat. These practices can boast many benefits, but they’re not nearly long enough to start diminishing the learned rewards that drive your motivation system. It would take many months away from your phone before your brain began to forget its benefits.
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So what does work? Our new understanding of our brains points toward two obvious strategies that are both boringly basic and annoyingly hard to stick to.
First, remove the reward signals by deleting social media or any other app that monetizes your attention from your phone. If your phone no longer delivers artificially consistent rewards, your brain will rapidly reduce the expected reward of picking it up.
Second, minimize your phone’s ubiquity by keeping it charging in your kitchen when at home. If you need to look something up or check in on a messaging app, go to your kitchen. If you need to listen to a podcast while doing chores, use wireless earbuds or wireless speakers. If your phone isn’t immediately accessible, the corresponding neuronal bundles in your motivation system won’t fire as often or as strongly.
In the end, here’s what’s clear: Our brains aren’t well-suited for smartphones. We might not like this reality, but we cannot ignore it. Fixing the issues this causes requires more than some minor tweaks. We have to drastically change our relationship to our devices if we hope to control their impact.
I’m so glad to see the acknowledgement that these oft-touted hacks are ineffectual, at least for people like me. I wish we didn’t live in a world where it’s expected, even required, to have your phone in your hand constantly. I don’t own a smartphone, because I know myself (and please trust me on this before offering advice), but it’s getting more and more complicated to live without one. Worth it, but not easy, and I don’t know how long we’ll manage to hold out. At least some vaguely better options are coming on the market now that some people are waking up to the harms.
Thanks again cal….master you are
Looking forward to the podcast this week. I suffered from this like now hundreds of millions of Americans and even more people across the globe. I tried many of the suggested frictions, but to no avail. The only solution for me was to delete my social media accounts entirely and soon after revert back to a non-smart device. It’s been over three years now, and I can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten for others over that span.
I observe so many people clinging to their devices for ‘necessary’ life functions that are far from necessary. Switching to a flip phone has reintroduced many frictions back into my life, and I embrace all of them.
What intrigues me about this is that so many of the popular tips that Cal mentions not only have I adopted, but I have often adopted after recommendation from Cal and reading Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. Though I do understand some of the difference is in terms of degree and severity, and granted I haven’t had any social media in almost a decade, but I do still have a smart phone. I have used Freedom to block most functions from my phone, created rules to limit my use of other functions and activities like TV bingeing, and texting constantly instead of calling people on the phone, and have done semi-regular Declutters when I feel things slipping.
Although I have begun to wonder lately how much my only person anxiety is tied to some of the encouragement on blogs like Cal’s to go further. I complain about my screentime, and how tied I feel to my phone, and then my screentime ends up being on average a little under 1.5 hrs, and then I see my friends’ which are routinely over 6 hours. Yet I still get stressed that my rules and habits aren’t restrictive enough.
As a very video-addiction-prone person, in addiction to Cal’s recommendations that make a lot of sense, two suggestions:
– Curate your notifications aggressively. Picking up the phone because of some irrelevant notifications is a sure way to risk drifting into some other app. For important but not urgent notifications, disable the sound. For other disable them altogether.
– Get a simple smartwatch with no apps. You won’t pick up the phone to see the time and you’ll read simple notifications on the watch without the temptation of using some app.
I don’t know if these apply to others but I found them quite effective.
I really like my Brick device. We bricked my husband’s phone – so now he can’t reinstall social media and YouTube back on his phone. He doesn’t know where the Brick lives, so the friction is long term. I know where it lives and typically I leave social media and the web browser bricked for days at a time, but sometimes I do want to check in and so I un-brick, check Instagram, and then re-brick it again. I think this has really helped me break a lot of bad habits (esp. checking my phone when I am out of the house).
I wonder how and why a laptop is less addictive, because in theory it can give me the same options (apart from the fact that I can’t carry it with me at all times).
Second: the Phone Foyer Method.
https://calnewport.com/a-piece-of-advice-i-wish-id-included-in-my-book/
Do you have an episode where you address the fact that someone in a family needs to be on call for both young kids and aging parents. This responsibility usually falls to women. I love the idea of minimizing the phone’s ubiquity, but this is more difficult when one is institutionally responsible for another (e.g. emergency contact person). Would love a solution!
Thank you, Cal. This essay really resonated with me, and I wanted to share an observation that might add another layer to your argument.
Our small children, ages two and four, don’t use screens or television at all. They have no exposure to algorithmic or reward-optimized content. Yet when grandparents look after them and show them a phone, even something as simple as Google image search, they could stare at it endlessly. There’s no machine learning, no personalized feed, and no history of rewards. Just bright colors, motion, and the world reacting instantly to their touch. That seems to be enough to hold their attention.
I haven’t tested it, but I’m almost sure that if the screen were set to grayscale, their interest would fade very quickly. The attraction seems to come not only from the expectation of reward but also from basic sensory stimulation and the feeling of control – the simple sense that “I touch this and something happens.”
I’ve noticed the same with other children who have simple smartwatches. Even without social media or games, they can spend long stretches looking at the weather or tapping through menus. It’s not the content that hooks them, but the interaction itself.
This makes me think that the pull of screens begins even before any learned reward patterns or algorithmic conditioning. Part of it may lie in something more primitive: our natural sensitivity to novelty, color, light, and agency.
In that sense, your point that our brains aren’t well suited for smartphones might be even deeper than it first appears. Even without algorithms, screens already connect directly to some of our most basic neural wiring.
Thanks again for writing about this with such clarity. Your work has helped me think more carefully about my own relationship with technology, and what it means to introduce it to the next generation.
I use apps that limit my access to social media and let me know just how much time I spend on my phone. I allow myself 5 minutes of facebook twice per day – just enough time to get the value I need from it (most of my clubs announce events this way) without allowing me to doom scroll. I allow the same for email on my phone – twice per day, 10 minutes each (although I often use less). All other email is done on at my desk and on my computer. It’s always possible to bypass the limits, but I rarely do. I’ve managed to go from 3+ hours per day on my phone to less than 45 minutes since January. My goal is less than 30.
Well done! Which apps do you use?
For what it’s worth, for some weeks I did have my phone in grayscale and it did reduce my enjoyment of it. But to my surprise, I found myself compulsively wanting to turn it back to full color to make videos better, and eventually I did.
So the grayscale method failed not because colors were irrelevant to enjoyment, but because it essentially became another form of “increase friction”.
Having said this, I have a new technique that works at least for Apple users — using the Shortcuts app, you can create a “turn off phone” icon on your home screen. To turn off the phone, you tap that button then tap the red “are you sure?” button.
By design, it is difficult and manual to turn off the phone — you need to hold down the power button for several seconds (which doesn’t feel great on your fingers) then “slide to unlock”, which requires you look at the screen and do a fairly precise swipe. You cannot do this without thinking about it, engaging with your phone for several seconds exactly when you’re trying not to, and poking your finger a bit. Turning the phone back on, while nontrivial, is much easier.
But with this “shutdown button” the calculus is inverted — if it’s already unlocked, to turn off the phone is two taps, always in the same place on your screen, which takes less than half a second and you can do without thinking as you’re putting the phone down. Then turning it back on requires fumbling with the power button for a couple seconds and waiting for the several-second boot sequence to complete, and it’s annoying enough that you wonder whether you actually want to do it.
Unfortunately these tips don’t work for my addictions (or addiction-like behaviors): online news, sports and YouTube videos. I do most of these on my laptop. I got rid of all social media over five years ago. But I always appreciate that you take out time to share ideas that may help people.
P.S. Not sure why you think “only 30 minutes of Instagram per day” is abstract. Seems pretty concrete to me. Maybe you meant arbitrary?
ADHD and phones are unfortunate bedfellows! A phone taps into the dopamine release switch, which is supposed to motivate us! But with phones it does the exact opposite – well – it motivates us to procrastinate even more because our brains are getting flooded with dopamine – and that fix for it grows and grows with more screen scrolling. I still catch myself sometimes – I go on social media to complete a business task and I get side-tracked when I see something on my feed that pulls at me. I have slowly developed coping skills to minimize the doom-scrolling (Facebook now opens in the business profile, rather than my own – this way I can post without the draw of all the ADHD sparkles – then I switch to my profile, check in with family members and friends – and then switch it back before I close it out)……its time-consuming to do this but what it does is put up blocks to keep me focused. The hard part is dealing with family who believe I should just be able to focus and not need these coping mechanisms – well – wish I could, but my brain is built different from yours.
I recommend setting your phone wallpaper to an image that says “danger to the brain,” or to a depressing photo of a man hunched over his phone to symbolize addiction.