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

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