The Last Word On Nothing

Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life was just published 10 days ago, but since we here at LWON are not confined by space or time, we can already tell you how her 30-day plan worked for us.

Last spring, the two of us were part of a virtual group of writers and others that Catherine convened to test her advice; every week for four weeks, she sent each of us an email with background information and daily exercises, following up with a questionnaire. (For the record, neither of us knows Catherine personally.) We began the month by assessing our current phone use, then moved on to exercises designed to change our habits, restore our attention spans, and maintain our new and healthier relationships with our phones. Here, we discuss the results.

Helen: So, Michelle. Tell us the before story. How bad were you before you tried to break up with your phone?

Michelle: Well, before I joined Catherine’s study, I was already using this app called Freedom, which can block my use of any website or app on all my devices, according to a schedule I set — I still swear by that app. But I was mostly using Freedom on my laptop — on my phone, I would go through spells of blocking everything and then giving up and unblocking everything. My worst habit was sleeping with my phone nearby — I like to listen to podcasts, and would often fall asleep listening to something soothingly dull. But then my phone would move to the next podcast in my list, and I’d be woken up by somebody yelling into my ear about the Mueller investigation. What about you?

Helen: Oh my God, that sounds like a nightmare.

Michelle: Yeah, it was. Almost literally.

Helen: I actually uninstalled Facebook from my phone after the election. The panic of my liberal friends was too much — I couldn’t be exposed to it all the time. But I still had Instagram and Twitter, and that social media is all just so darn enticing that it was really hard to stay off of my phone. I had the same bad habit as you, sleeping with it because I like listening to music when I’m falling asleep. But then I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think “Oh, hey, look, it’s my phone!” and the next thing I knew it was two hours later and I’d be all tied up in something I saw in my email or on Twitter or whatever. I also had this feeling of never quite doing one thing 100 percent — I’d be watching TV, but also scrolling through the internet.

Michelle: So what’s the first exercise or piece of advice you remember finding useful? For me it was when Catherine had us “assess our current relationship” with our phones, and make a list of things we loved and didn’t love about it. I’d been thinking of my phone use as all-or-nothing, but that exercise made me realize that there were some uses I liked and wanted to continue, and others that I found useless or worse and wanted to quit.

Helen: Ooh, yeah, that’s a good one. For me, it was the assignment to notice when I was picking up my phone and why — how I felt at that moment, and what might have motivated me to reach for it. My urge to pick it up was sharpest during the first 24-hour phone fast we did, which, incidentally, was terrifying. Catherine had to send me personalized emails with swear words to get me to do it.

Michelle: She sent you emails with swear words!? Before the fast or during it?

Helen: Before. I was like, “Ugggh, this is going to be too hard! I don’t want to make all of my friends adjust to my stupid temporary way of communication!” She said, “F— that!” They could deal for one day, she said, and of course, they did. It was fine.

Michelle: Did you call them on a landline, or send a passenger pigeon, or what?

Helen: I think I emailed or texted them ahead of time to tell them they couldn’t text me — I mean, there are like three people who might actually expect me to text back in a timely fashion, not hordes — and then, when I needed to get in touch, I called on a landline or emailed from my computer. The most stressful point was when I was meeting a friend at a theater to see a show and she was late, which was not out of character for this friend, and I waited in the lobby for 20 minutes. Finally I went to the Will Call desk and left her ticket — it turns out there are ways to handle these things without cell phones! I was about to go in when she showed up. I think it was a lot more stressful for her, because she couldn’t call or text to update me. But I’m OK with it being more stressful for her, because she was the one who was 20 minutes late.

Michelle: So during that 24-hour fast, what made you want to pick up your phone?

Helen: It amused me, actually — the main reason, I noticed, was wanting to know some fact. I love that my primary phone trigger is nerdiness. The second reason was being alone — like when I was waiting for my friend in the theater lobby, I felt like I should be staring at my phone, because that’s what we all do now when we’re waiting for things. Instead, I looked at other people in the lobby. Also, when my friend and I were at a restaurant after the show and she got up to go to the bathroom, I reached for my phone. I think I ended up rereading the program instead. Maybe staring into space. Staring into space is good.

Michelle: That’s when Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote one of the songs from Hamilton, right? While he was staring into space on the subway? Staring into space is underrated.

Helen: Totally underrated! And now that I’ve been through Catherine’s process, I find it a little sad that we all stare at our phones while we’re waiting. I don’t do it anymore, and I spend a lot of time looking at other people looking at their phones.

Michelle: You’re making me want to renew the stare-into-space-more resolution that I made after finishing Catherine’s process. For my phone fast, I feel like I almost cheated — I did it when I went camping for three days with family and friends, and I just left my phone at home. So I was with most of the people who would have noticed if I didn’t respond to a text or call, and since my phone was miles away I didn’t need to resist temptation. I did notice when I missed my phone — which was during idle moments, like you say, when I wasn’t absorbed in something else — and at night, when I was used to being able to listen to something but just had to, you know, LIE THERE.

Helen: Like an ANIMAL!

Michelle: Yes, like a drooling BEAST!

Helen: Phone fasting while camping is totally cheating, by the way, because I had to go without my phone while traveling by public transportation in a major city and meeting up with a friend who is always late. A city whose public transportation is kind of a notorious disaster, and Uber wasn’t going to save me when my phone was at home.

Along the same lines as your wanting to listen to podcasts at night, I’m looking at my journal from the day of my first phone fast — I did two! — and I wrote, “Woke up about 7. No phone in the morning meant I wasn’t sure what to do when I woke up.”

Michelle: Ha! Do you remember what you did?

Helen: Yes, I wrote it down: “Read by the window for a few hours.” Doesn’t that sound nice? So much nicer than opening the Washington Post headlines and getting all angry before I even get out from under the covers?

One of the things I really liked about Catherine’s process was how she pulled together research on how phones are affecting us and put it into a psychological framework. I was familiar with some of this before — social media is so addictive because it intermittently rewards us with little hits of anger or delight or whatever. The thing that stuck with me the most, and made me the most pissed off and motivated to get more distance from my phone, was the idea that all of these companies are selling my attention.

Michelle: I agree, I was familiar with some of that research — I had probably read about it while scrolling on my phone — but it was pretty powerful to have it pulled together in one place, and be forced to think about how it related to my own habits. And yes, the idea that my bad habits were making money for someone else was great motivation to change them. I want to keep that money and time for myself, and for people I know and like!

Helen: Yes! I’d heard that saying “if the product is free, you are the product,” and I’d thought well, yes, Facebook knows a lot about me and can use that to make money off advertisers, whatever. I’m not going to buy anything from a Facebook ad, so who cares? But the fact that they’ve devised their product so that it will keep me dully scrolling forever, looking for one little meaningless emotional reward after another — that pisses me off. I need my attention. I use it to write and to draw and to connect with my fellow humans.

So let’s talk about how our habits are now. What changes have you made? How do you fall asleep now?

Michelle: Catherine’s process made me realize that the things I like about my phone are 1) being able to check email occasionally when I’m away from the office, especially because that lets me spend time with my kid during someone else’s regular working hours 2) messaging and texting with faraway friends — those ongoing conversations make me feel more connected with them when we do meet up in person and 3) listening to podcasts, just not necessarily at night!

I realized that I don’t need or even want to check social media on my phone. There’s never going to be a Twitter emergency — well, there might be, but it’s not one I’m going to want to know about when I’m doing something fun away from the office.

So I set up Freedom to block social media on my phone, 24 hours a day — now I can only get to Facebook and Twitter on my laptop, and only for an hour a day. That was a huge change and actually pretty easy, even though I use social media for both work and play. I didn’t miss it much.

Breaking my sleeping-with-podcasts habit was harder — I told myself, “Oh, I’ll just listen for a few minutes and then I’ll start the block on my phone …” I made all kinds of excuses. But a few months after I went through Catherine’s process I went cold turkey and banished my phone from the bedroom. That was a drag for about a week, just LYING THERE, but then I started sleeping much better. And I started reading in bed again, which I used to love to do. I’m still keeping my phone mostly out of the bedroom, and I’ve read a lot more and slept a lot better since.

Helen: I started charging my phone in the living room at night, like Catherine told me to. But I missed having music, and also around the same time I found out about the app My Sleep Button, which has made a huge difference to my sleep problems. Eventually I dug out an old phone. It doesn’t have a SIM card and it doesn’t have much on it — I use it for My Sleep Button, Amazon Music (I have five or six albums downloaded), Neko Atsume (I sometimes feed the cats when I wake up in the middle of the night), and not much else. Most of the time I don’t even have the wifi on. So now my current phone lives in the living room overnight and my ancient Nexus 4 sleeps next to me.

Michelle: That sounds like a good solution. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I do go get my phone just so I can listen to white noise, which always helps me sleep. But white noise is better than the Mueller investigation for sure.

Helen: So have you backslid at all? Do we need Catherine to put us back in line?

Michelle: I had such a delayed reform with the podcast thing that I haven’t had time to backslide much. The social-media ban on my phone has been pretty lasting.

Helen: I do sometimes go to the living room in the morning, get my phone, and get back in bed with it. But then, without Facebook or Twitter, there’s not much demanding my attention. I look at my email, and then I decide not to open the Washington Post headlines because I’ll just get mad.

I still pick up my phone and expect it to entertain me. But now I know that I’m doing it! I feel like that’s the most valuable thing I got out of the process — Catherine made me think about why I was picking up the phone, and now I’ll pick it up, unlock it, stare at it, and think, “Oh, I’m expecting my phone to make me happy,” and then I’ll look at my old pictures or maybe scroll through Instagram for a few minutes and put it away again.

 

Top photo courtesy of Michelle’s phone. Which she still meets for coffee — often.