Free Of My Phone Addiction

Food-writer Michael Pollan has a great name for the ultra-processed food that now lines our supermarket shelves. 

“Food-like substances.” 

You can eat them, Pollan says. But they’re not exactly food.

I’ve been thinking about how so much of the information I consume day to day is really more of an “information-like substance”. 

The click-bait headlines, which may or may not accurately reflect what’s in the article (I’ll never know, I just keep on scrolling to the next headline, and the next).

The social media posts or (my personal soft spot) Reddit threads about ‘who is the asshole’ (there’s only ever one) in various absurd situations, most likely made up to provoke as much ire as possible. 

So colourful, these headlines and pictures and posts. Like junk food. So full of high-crunch, adrenalin-spiking ingredients.

Munch munch munch

Tired of the crunch

I’ve known for some time I’ve wanted to get off this stuff. That it isn’t good for me. Or just as important, that I’m not actually enjoying it. 

Simply put, I don't want to use my phone like this, I crave it. The headlines, the act of scrolling itself. Not for the information I gain but for the 'hit' it gives me.

(Information-like substance.)

But the hit doesn't hit like it used to.

My body knew this before I did. Bodies are good like that. The tense shoulders. The cortisol drip starting up again with just one glance at my phone on a coffee table, or that phantom buzz in my pocket that wasn’t actually a notification but let-me-just-check.

So how’s this for a headline. I think might have actually done it? Broken free of my phone.

For the past thirty days, I haven’t gone near the news. I’ve used my phone for twenty minutes a day or less (as opposed to three hours or more). I’ve barely even gone on Reddit.

And it feels wonderful. In a wonderfully ordinary sort of way. A return to something simpler, that I’ve been craving for years.

So how did I get here?

It starts one month ago, with the world’s most mundane adventure.

"Our pursuit of pleasure is making us miserable." 

So says Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation. 

I’m listening to her on a podcast. I’m also flipping between two different news websites, and three messaging apps, all of which I only just looked at fifteen minutes ago.

Here’s how it works, Lembke says. We used to live in a world of scarcity. We are well designed for that world.

Now we live in a world of abundance. Food, connection, sex (or convincing simulations of all three) are available at our fingertips, all the time. We need never lack entertainment. And it’s changing our brains. 

Digital depression

Lembke says, when the brain is constantly bombarded with instant pleasure and easy rewards, it gets overwhelmed. So it changes how it processes pleasure.

Over time, everything - even fun and wholesome and rewarding things, like real food and connection and sex - feel less rewarding. A state not unlike depression.

This is the third podcast interview with Anna Lembke I’ve listened to this week. I already know what she’s going to say next.

Her prescription to counter all this overabundance is simple. And appalling. 

We need to seek out pain, Lembke says. Cultivate inconvenience. We need to stop chasing the instant sugar rush of a phone or TV binge and in return our reward is to feel alive again, with all the boredom and occasional bliss that entails.

The good news? It only takes about 30 days of abstinence, she says, for the brain to reset, for the regular old boring fun stuff - like a walk in the park or a good book or a chat with a friend - to feel as good as it once did. And then you’re away laughing.

I am already convinced by Lembke’s logic. I have been for days now. I know what I have to do, which is exactly why I’m putting off doing it. 

I search the podcast app for another one of her interviews.

It's now been a full week since I first heard Anna Lembke speak. I decide it’s time to read her book, Dopamine Nation. 

Having heard all the main talking points already, I’m also now pretty convinced that as soon as I start reading it, I’m going to embark on what Lembke calls a “dopamine fast”. 30 days off of whatever your drug of choice is. The aim is to reset your ability to feel good again, then from that happier place decide which of your old habits you want to bring back into your life.

In my case, this means 30 days of no unnecessary phone use, no news or random internet bullshit, no TV, no podcasts. I’ll still use the internet for work, for setting up actual in-person hang outs, and for checking in with friends and family overseas. But that’s it.

But first, I’ll read the book.

I start by doing the obvious thing. I look for the fastest, most convenient way to get it.

I try downloading Dopamine Nation to Honor’s old and decrepit kindle. But the kindle is taking forever to load, and when it does, the store function doesn’t work properly. 

I open my laptop. I can have a physical copy sent to me by tomorrow. But as my cursor hovers over the ‘one-click purchase’ I realise something. This does not exactly feel in the spirit of Lembke’s suggestion to ‘cultivate inconvenience’. 

I’m home alone tonight, I have nothing better to do. Or more precisely, every ‘better thing’ I can think of violates the terms of Lembke’s dopamine fast (e.g. monging on my phone or watching a TV show). 

I’m not ready to fully commit to the fast yet, but I’m willing to dip another toe in. I also really want to read the book tonight. Which is great, because now I at least have something to do with my evening.

My assignment: To get hold of Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation

The wrinkle: To do so without using digital technology

I will tram to a bookstore. I won’t bring my phone. This alone spikes a nervous thought (‘what if I get lost!?’) before I remember that I’m 40 years old and I know how to get home again.

Before leaving the house, I open my laptop once more to check if this particular bookshop even has a copy of Dopamine Nation in stock. But again, I stop myself. If I have to sit on a tram with no phone to entertain me, won’t the whole thing be just that little bit less mind numbing if I don’t know for sure if they even have it? 

(Intermittent reward, analogue style.)

Egged on by this new thrill-seeking element of the trip (will they even have the book, WHO KNOWS) I even refuse to check my bank balance before I leave, so there’s a chance my checking account won’t have the required funds, and I won’t have a phone to rectify it. 

OH THE SUSPENSE.

At the tram stop…

When will the tram come…?

…Will the tram ever come…? 

…Do trams even exist anymore? ? ?

Has a flock of crazed birds taken over the tram depot and now the tram that’s supposed to be here has been turned into some kind of ersatz MAGPIE PALACE oh wait no here’s the tram.

One small concession to entertainment: I have brought a pen and my pocket notebook. The notebook makes me look like a hall monitor writing secret entries about everyone on the tram. This is only half true, I’m also writing about people outside the tram.

Watching people slide by the tram window is a bit like watching TV, if you squint hard enough.

Plots emerge, but only just. Are those two people a couple? Or did they just happen to be walking side by side the moment the tram passed? Is that dog with anyone?? Oh right it’s on a leash, just one of those really long near-invisible ones.

It’s like really poorly made TV. Or a torturous art film you’d have pretended to love in your twenties. The tram is a fickle filmmaker, panning endlessly away from a figure just as they’ve piqued your interest. 

(Good. I wouldn’t want Anna Lembke to think I was cheating.)

Somewhere halfway to the bookshop I realise I’m having an embarrassing amount of fun already. I'm out of the house. I'm making my own entertainment.

Maybe my lack of control here is the point: 

When the tram comes. 

Who and what I look at. 

If the bookshop even has the book, and if I have the money for it. 

Lembke says, so many of our modern, digital rituals are about trying to control the way we feel, moment to moment. So often that’s all it is, controlling how I feel, not controlling what actually happens. If my phone tells me when the tram is due, does it make the tram arrive any faster? It takes the edge off the feeling of uncertainty, but what is the price of always running from my uncertainty?

On a whim, I get off two stops before I need to. This is all now part of the game. Walking two extra stops for no reason? Yes! Even more inconvenient!

The short stroll feels primed with possibility. Not of something exciting happening, more like the possibility of the mundane.

Glued to my phone, this little trip to the bookshop would look exactly like almost everyone else’s commute, regardless of where they were going. Eyes down, thumbs scrolling, it would be measured not in street blocks but in news headlines, or social media posts. 

They might even be the same news headlines and social media posts. On a phone, each trip is just like everyone else’s, filtered through a light sheen of personal choice. This news outlet, or that one? This highly popular podcast, or that one? 

It’s not necessarily bad just because it’s homogenous. But it is maybe lacking something in its sameness - if not its sameness to everyone else then at least to the day before and the day before that. 

Getting off my tram at a random early stop, I am hungry to know if there’s a surprise out there for me this time, and enticed by the very high likelihood there might be no surprise at all. This is hard to put into words. It’s a kind of longing. A longing to be less thoroughly entertained. 

I stop by a kerbside power box just the right height to rest my notepad on and attempt to capture all this. Looking back at the excited scrawl, I’m not convinced I’ve managed it. The phrase “drenched in the mundane” is underlined. On sober reflection, this may be overselling it. 

But then this: “The homogenous DENSITY of modern media - in your eyes and ears at every spare moment. What if I am bored with THAT?”

If non-stop entertainment itself becomes boring… Maybe the only next step is to seek out boredom itself? 

Lembke says, boredom is the space that allows a thought to form. If we’re never bored, we’re just endlessly reacting to other people’s thoughts. Only in boredom do we really find room for ourselves.

I reach the bookshop. 

Dopamine Nation is not in Personal Development, nor is it in Psychology, where I’m almost sure it’s meant to be. 

Then I see it, the only copy in the shop, slotted out of alphabetical order off to the side near History. It’s as if someone else was here before me, on the exact same adventure, but had to hide the book while they went to put money in their checking account.

Too bad buddy maybe you should have checked first.   

I swoop it up with more urgency than is perhaps required. The woman browsing nearby takes a polite step away. 

I cradle the book to the counter and hold my breath until the purchase goes through. 

My prize. It’s all mine. 

On the tram home, I savour the book, reading the back cover and the epigraph. It sounds trivial, but the whole thing feels just so much more rewarding because of the effort it took to get it. 

And I decide something. I may as well start my dopamine fast here and now. 30 days, starting today.

In the four weeks that follow I’ll have a number of these little ‘adventures in mundaneness’. I’ll end up doing absurdly wholesome things like going fig-scrumping with a friend after choir practice in the communal garden behind her house. The red ochre of the ripest figs will strike me as a less angry analogue for those little red notifications that used to structure my days. 

I’ll start looking forward to social events with more than the usual ‘I know I’ll enjoy it once I get there’ grave cheer, because being out of the house means actual entertainment, contact, connection, instead of being at home wishing I could turn on the TV. 

I’ll have slips and setbacks and also whole stretches where I forget I even own a phone, let alone that it has for fifteen years so thoroughly owned my attention. I’ll watch people walking dogs and even crossing roads without looking up from their screens and I’ll think good god that’s usually me.

And I’ll perfect the art of it, getting off my phone, because I think there is one - an art. 

As always, my recipe won’t be the same as yours, but maybe it’ll be useful to hear it. For now I’ll save that for a future issue, if enough people are interested. 

First, I’d love to hear, for those of you who’ve wrestled with this same unwanted behaviour…

What's your experience been with trying to limit your phone use?

What's your drug of choice when it comes to your phone / internet? 

What have you tried so far to use it less? What's worked, what hasn't?

What DON'T you want to give up, even if you want something to change?

I'd so love to hear from you. Let me know here.

-- Graham 

p.s. big response to last issue, on cold showers and speaking your body's language. Thanks to all who sent their thoughts through. I loved reading them. 

I've since had further epiphanies about the role of the body in big feelings, including some quietly revolutionary stuff with a new practitioner I've been working with. More on that at some point no doubt. 

Meanwhile, a big hello to all of you out there living in tense, activated bodies, doing your best to navigate life! Hopefully it helps just a little to know, it's not just you my friend. Let's keep sharing the little things we pick up on the path that do help xx