how to stop your phone addiction : It’s Been a Minute : NPR

Are you, or are the phones?

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Do you have trouble concentrating? Are you stuck to social media longer than you want? Well, maybe it’s not you … maybe it’s the phones.

Eighty percent of Americans have a smartphone, and more than half of adults say they spend too much time on their phones. With omnipresent phones, how can we move away? In a conversation for It’s been a minuteThe host Brittany Luse is joined by Magdalene Taylor, writer, cultural criticism and editor -in -chief at Playboyand Fio Geiran, producer at Ted radio time and a writer of their Electric body Bulletin. They enter into the effects that smartphones have on our brain, how some people return to “stupid” and why it could take more than the will to manage our relationships with our phones.

Highlights of the episode

What smartphones do to our brain

Fio Geiran: The effects of your phone are there even when you don’t use it at all. [One] The study has shown that even when phones are completely silent, there is always a traction to our attention. [In an] Experience where participants put their silent phone and had them on their desk facing down, in their pockets, or in a completely [different] Room, the closer the phone was close to the person, the more he drew them from the task they did … even if the phone was completely silent. We have so much mental energy listening to and looking for these random messages from our phone. It is therefore logical that our attention is drawn to this direction, even when we do not do it.

The attraction of “stupid”

Fio Geiran: We have seen people negotiate themselves in their phone and the demotion of a rocking phone – or at least talk about it a lot and thinking it could repair them. But the most recent evolution of this trend is Tiktok’s current fascination for blackberry. I think many young people see blackberry as the ideal point between a flip phone that does not do too much and the modern smartphone that is too much. And I think you could also make the cracker in part of the admiration of retro technology technology, but I think it’s more than aesthetics. In [a 2022] Gallup survey, more than half of adults [reported] Have the impression that they are too much on their phones. Well, statistics increases to 81% when you look at people from 18 to 29 years old.

Brittany luse: wow. It’s interesting. It is therefore as if the group 18 to 29 is both too deep and aware that they are too deep.

Magda Taylor: I think that for the young generation of people who are considered from, many of us just don’t really know another way of existing without being constantly on our phones.

Fio Geiran: Yes, I mean, I think this interest in stupids, I think there is a feeling that the old models of phones seemed very fun in many ways. The design is not as addictive. You can get a pink phone, you can unleash it. And I also think that there is a little revisionist history here. People called him the crackberry just because it was so difficult to place it.

How to renegotiate our relationships with our phones

Magda Taylor: I think that the omnipresence of phones and the way they have become mandatory are all proof of how we have personal responsibility here to think about our relationship with this product that we only have the choice to use now. And so I just think that we are at a point where we must ask ourselves if this relationship with our phones benefits us, and if it does not give us quite what we want, when can we do to improve it?

Fio Geiran: I think the best way to get space is to settle in situations where you feel something bigger than your phone. Whether you spend time with nature or spend time with friends, I even think you just have solo time when you are very, very intentional and try to sit with yourself. I think it’s not really a matter of will. I think it is more about creating moments of connection that interrupt some of the telephone habits in which we are stuck.

This episode was produced by Liam McBain. He was published by Neena Pathak. We had genius support from Kwesi Lee. Our supervisor producer is Barton Girdwood. Our executive producer is Veralyn Williams. Our vice-president of programming is Yolanda Sangweni.