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Stop Scrolling: How to Take Back Control from Your Phone

2024-07-19 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:56 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health, sleep and habits (also: Productivity and time) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Evidence-based framing, Sponsor segment present

Ali explains why phones are addictive (the attention economy, apps engineered around dopamine and random rewards), what phone addiction does (nomophobia, anxiety and depression, procrastination, loneliness, citing Jonathan Haidt) and gives seven tips, from blocking apps with Opal to answering messages only from his computer.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: average screen time and what the video covers

  • ★★ Citing worldwide screen time statistics, Ali says the average person spends six hours 40 minutes a day in front of screens, mostly the phone: 40% of waking hours, or 20 of the next 50 years. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali thinks it fair to say that a lot of people are addicted to their phones and that most do not want to be. — 00:00:00 · Mental health

00:01:11 — Why is your phone so addictive?

  • ★★ In a 2016 study by Larry Rosen, an expert in the psychology of technology, students tracked by an app unlocked their phones over 60 times a day and spent over three and a half hours (220 minutes) on them. — 00:01:40
  • ★★ Ali says phone addiction is not entirely under our control: "brain hacking" means technology purposefully designed to change the way we think. — 00:01:40
  • ★★★ In the attention economy, Ali says, tech companies all compete for our limited attention, which makes us the product rather than the customer. — 00:02:10
  • ★★ Because social media companies earn from advertising, Ali says, they employ armies of thousands of very smart engineers working to keep you on your phone, against a brain evolved for a different environment. — 00:02:39
  • ★★ Scrolling apps have infinite scroll, and Instagram holds back likes so they arrive when least expected: a random intermittent reward that spikes dopamine, Ali says. — 00:03:15 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali says we release dopamine on an unexpected reward, so something designed to be addictive packs in as many dopamine triggers as possible, as phones and social media do. — 00:03:15

  • ★★★ If you feel addicted to your phone, Ali says, it is not your fault: you are fighting a losing battle in the attention economy against the engineers companies hire to take your attention. — 00:03:44

    “it's not your fault. You are fighting a losing battle in this attention economy”

00:04:13 — Sponsor read

  • ★★★ Even though phone addiction is not our fault, Ali says it is our responsibility to take control and do what is under our control to cure it. — 00:04:13
  • ★★ Ali says we often only notice our phone addiction when we lose the phone and feel acute anxiety: nomophobia, the fear of not being able to use your smartphone. — 00:05:12

00:05:20 — What is the problem with phone addiction?

  • ★★ In a 2021 study Ali cites, people separated from their phones but hearing four texts arrive during a 10-minute lecture showed a significant rise in skin activity, a sign of anxiety. — 00:06:25
  • ★★ Ali cites a study finding that young people who overuse their phones and have strong withdrawal symptoms have raised levels of cortisol, the body's main stress hormone. — 00:06:25
  • ★★ Ali says that when we cannot reach our phones the body reacts with fight or flight, and since checking the phone is the only relief from nomophobia, we get trapped in an addictive cycle. — 00:06:55
  • ★ Ali names two coined phrases: ringxiety, always checking the phone in the feeling that a text or call came, and textiety, the anxious need to reply to messages as soon as they arrive. — 00:06:55
  • ★★★ Ali finds convincing Jonathan Haidt's case in The Anxious Generation that Gen Z's higher rates of depression and anxiety come from the 2010 to 2015 surge in smartphones and social media during their puberty. — 00:07:53 · Mental health
  • ★★ For most measures of Gen Z mental health problems, Ali says, the rise is close to a doubling rather than 10 or 20%, especially for younger girls. — 00:07:53 · Mental health
  • ★★ Jonathan Haidt (quoted): Answering the view that the rise is only self-report, Jonathan Haidt points to the same sharp uptick for girls in self-harm hospital admissions and psychiatric emergency visits across the developed world around 2012. — 00:08:37 · United States, United Kingdom
  • ★★ Jonathan Haidt (quoted): In his interview with Andrew Huberman, Jonathan Haidt says there is no alternative explanation for depression rising faster in girls than boys across the developed world around 2012. — 00:09:07
  • ★★ Ali cites research that the more you use your smartphone, the less self-control you have, through delay discounting: you favour instant gratification, which leads to procrastination. — 00:09:28
  • ★★ Ali cites a 2018 study in which students who limited social media to about 30 minutes a day became less lonely and less depressed than students using their phones as normal. — 00:09:58
  • ★★★ Ali's favourite way to control phone addiction is an app that blocks other apps: he recommends Opal, a paid app he has no affiliation with and calls very good. — 00:10:27

00:10:36 — What can you do about it?

  • ★★ Ali has Opal block all social media apps from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., so he never scrolls at night or first thing in the morning. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ Ali says you can also set screen time limits on your phone, either capping time on a particular app or blocking apps completely at certain times. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ An app blocker is the first thing Ali prescribes to friends with phone addiction: free or cheap, easy to set up, and it immediately frees up much more time. — 00:11:19
  • ★★ Ali lives by his calendar: whenever it shows an event, his phone switches on a focus mode automatically, letting through only a handful of contacts such as his girlfriend, brother, mum and grandma. — 00:11:19
  • ★★ As a simple hack to improve sleep, Ali advises keeping the phone off the bedside table, charging across the room or ideally in a different room overnight. — 00:11:56
  • ★★ Ali suggests a Kindle on the bedside table: it is light and dim, so you can read in bed, and if you wake in the night you can read rather than scroll. — 00:12:25 · Kindle
  • ★★ Ali keeps no social media apps on any of his home screens: to open Instagram he has to swipe down, type its name and tap it. — 00:12:25 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali used to use OneSec a lot but has now replaced it with Opal, because he prefers the way Opal works. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ OneSec puts an artificial five-second loading screen before apps such as Instagram, YouTube or TikTok, asks you to take a breath and offers links to apps such as Kindle and Audible instead. — 00:13:01 · Kindle, Audible, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali says a few seconds' pause before opening an app gives a gap between stimulus and response, in which you choose whether you really want to open it or are acting from muscle memory. — 00:13:01
  • ★★ Ali suggests turning the phone to grayscale mode; he has not tried it himself, but about half his team keeps their phones in grayscale all the time. — 00:13:30
  • ★★ Ali's general manager Angus swears by grayscale mode: he told Ali his screen time dropped by 50% because it makes the phone much less addictive and interesting. — 00:13:30 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★★ Where possible Ali does not reply to messages from his phone: all his messaging apps are on his computer through Texts, which brings together WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram and Twitter messages. — 00:13:59 · WhatsApp, Instagram
  • ★★ Since every reply brings another response, Ali batches his replies to people: a few minutes in the morning after deep work, after lunch and after work. — 00:14:28 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Emergencies are rare, Ali says; contacts who might reach you in one, such as children or parents, can be added to focus mode exceptions, as his mum is. — 00:14:57

00:15:27 — Sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali says he has struggled with phone addiction at times, as have many people he knows. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: attention economy · nomophobia · Opal

Also: People: Andrew Huberman · Angus (general manager) · Jonathan Haidt · Larry Rosen

Works: The Anxious Generation

Organizations: Instagram

Concepts: dopamine · grayscale mode · Mental health · random intermittent reward

Places: Australia · Canada · New Zealand · United Kingdom · United States

Products: Audible · Focus mode · iMessage · Kindle · OneSec · Texts · WhatsApp

Also centred on Opal: My honest advice to someone who feels behind in life · THIS Cured My iPhone Addiction

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