I heard Catherine Price interviewed on Dan Harris' podcast, 10% Happier, which focuses on meditation and meditators. Price is a meditator, and also the author of the great new book, How to Break up With Your Phone.
It's no secret that I question the effects that smartphone use has had on all of us, young and old. I believe that the smartphone has led to more scattered thinking, less quiet, less ability to focus, and addiction to quick fixes, to name a few things. Price proves my point with science in the first half of the book, because she's a health and science journalist. In fact she says:
We're never going to break up with our phones unless we think it's vitally important to do so. That's why the first half of this book, “The Wake-Up,” is designed to freak you out.
But in the second half of the book she does something phenomenal. I've never seen this before, and apparently, Price hadn't, either. She'd read all the science and assorted evidence telling you why the smartphone is making you dumber. But she'd ever seen any good solution. So she created it: the 30-day plan.
I'm super excited about this, because it's not a detox where at the end you're using a rotary phone and paper maps. It's a control-alt-delete so that you can establish a better relationship with the smartphone, something that will help you to reclaim your focus and memory and general mental health, and to not be a constant victim to the phone and its allures.
I'm all in.
I'm so excited about this. Over the years I've felt my attention span going. I've managed to reclaim some of it through daily meditation (I'll talk about this in a future article) but I still don't think my mind is as sharp as it used to be. Sure, I'm not young anymore, but even my 88 year-old mother trumps me sometimes in the memory department, and that's just ridiculous. A few years ago, I discovered that I couldn't retain instructions from a recipe without repeatedly going back to re-read the same paragraph. I don't think this is early-onset Alzheimer's or just being distracted by kids and the stuff that goes with middle age. I truly think it's the way my brain has been changed by the smartphone. I think it's out of practice.
This is a 30-day plan, so I'll update a couple of times. I'm starting Monday, hurray!
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