How To Stop Checking Your Phone: 4 Secrets From Research

You do not have a short attention span. 

Have you had multiple car crashes this week because you can’t pay attention to the road?See? You can pay attention when you “have to”. That’s not a short attention span. This means we lack attentional control, the difference between what we say we want to focus on and what we actually focus on.

This thing you call “your life” is made of memories. And your memories are made up of only the things you paid attention to. Exactly 2.32 bazillion things are happening in the world right now but all that exists for you and all that will ever exist is what you paid attention to. Attention determines your life and your happiness.

We think so much about the events in life and so little about attention, yet we all know that we can be experiencing something objectively great but not appreciate it because our attention is elsewhere, feeling we don’t deserve this, or worried we’ll screw it up, etc. In that way, attention is more important than the events themselves.

These days we spend so much time trying to get others attention yet the true determinant of our happiness is where we direct our own.

We have a “mind control” problem. But it’s not other people’s ability to control your mind. It’s your own.

 Our phones are merely the canary in the coal mine, warning us about the bigger problems with the attentional weakness that threatens our happiness and relationships.

This is from a new medical study on people addicted to their phones:

…the patients verbalized what the most appropriate social responses would be under certain circumstances. Yet, when actually performing, they instead pursued behavior aimed at immediate gratification, despite knowing the longer-term results would be self-defeating.

Well, I lied. That’s not from a study on phone addiction; it’s a description of people with prefrontal brain damage. the two have something in common. And we’ll get to the bottom of it by looking at the most famous story in all of psychology —

September 13, 1848. Phineas Gage is foreman  drilling holes in rock with explosives. He makes an error, things go boom, and the fourteen-pound, three-foot-long, inch-wide iron pipe he’s working with gets sent through his skull like a bullet. It flies in beneath his left eye and out the top of his head, landing 80-feet away…

But he doesn’t die. In fact, he’s not even rendered unconscious. But as he recovers, the results of the brain damage become clear. He’s extremely impulsive, unable to plan or focus, and very short-tempered. His friends said he was “no longer Gage.”

Humans are wonderful creatures  but we’re still animals. And the older parts of the brain are a tad more animalistic. What you think of as “you” is mostly the prefrontal cortex (PFC), and it often creates “you” by being the brakes that keep the animal in line. 

Phineas became impulsive because that rod shredded a big section of his brakes. But here’s our problem: even when your PFC is intact and healthy it’s still pretty weak compared to the parts of your brain creating those urges.  Our current environment and often poor habits exhaust your poor little PFC. And when your PFC is overwhelmed, you’re not going to be who you want to be.

Gage actually recovered. Not completely, of course  but he became functional again. How?

He moved to Chile and became a stagecoach driver. And he was in an environment that forced him to focus, to plan, to socialize — to relearn control. It’s critical that “someone or something gave enough structure to their lives for them to relearn lost social and personal skills.”

We need to structure our lives and strengthen our lil’ PFC to focus in this world of distraction.

Time to strengthen our attentional control… 

1) Overall Health

If your body is weak and tired, your PFC is too. So exercise. Get your sleep.

Even a single bout of exercise improves cognitive control.

From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:

Boosts in cognitive control abilities occur even after engagement in a single bout of physical exertion, as assessed in healthy children and those diagnosed with ADHD, with benefits extending to academic achievement… Similar training benefits of acute and chronic exercise on cognitive control have been shown in both young adults and middle-age adults.

And a single bad night’s sleep reduces it.

From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:

…even a single bad night’s sleep can impair cognitive control and how ongoing sleep deprivation can have severe and long-term consequences.

And while we’re on the subject of oft-repeated basics, stop multitasking. The PFC is a weakling. You can really only focus on one thing at a time and cognitive “switching costs” are steeper than payday loans.

From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:

…if the two goals both require cognitive control to enact them, such as holding the details of a complex scene in mind (working memory) at the same time as searching the ground for a rock (selective attention), then they will certainly compete for limited prefrontal cortex resources… The process of neural network switching is associated with a decrease in accuracy, often for both tasks, and a time delay compared to doing one task at a time.

Now it’s time to change the world around us to make attentional control easier…

2) Control Your Context

One of the clearest and most profound lessons to come out of social psychology over the past few decades is that context matters. What surrounds you influences you — whether you realize it or not.

Clear distractions from your surroundings and it’s easier to focus. What’s the first step toward successful dieting? Don’t live in a bakery. Same principle applies here.

Turning your phone off and putting it in another room is — believe it or not — still legal in most countries. But most people think they can just ignore it. Yeah, it’s possible…

But it’ll cost you. According to MRI studies, ignoring is not a passive process. Whether you notice it or not, it takes brain effort.

Turn off notifications by default. Instead of unlocking your phone with a fingerprint or FaceID, switch it to a long password that’s a pain to type. Or best of all, just put it away and only get it at designated times.

The harder it is to check, the less you will check. 

3) Mindfulness

From Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence:

“Mindfulness,” he said, “boosts the classic attention network in the brain’s fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.” Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractors… Mindfulness strengthens connections between the prefrontal executive zones and the amygdala, particularly the circuits that can say “no” to impulse— a vital skill for navigating through life…

And the benefits described above extend well beyond phones — to being able to let go of nagging worries and to focus on the good in life. Meditation strengthens your PFC and increases happiness.

From Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life:

…average subjects who had completed an eight-week meditation course showed significantly increased activity in the left prefrontal regions that are linked to this optimistic, goal-oriented orientation.

I won’t lie — meditation can be difficult and it takes time. But increased attentional control is worth it, for you and those you love.  Follow the breath and keep your spouse.

Meditation is strong. But there is one method that is even stronger. 

Quite simply, it’s transforming you… 

4) Your Not-So-Secret Identity

“I’m just not the kind of person who would do that. That’s not who I am.”

And you would not struggle with this choice. It would be easy and painless. The most powerful method for gaining control over impulses is to leverage identity.

Ask yourself: “Who am I?” (No, not in the Jason Bourne way.) And, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

In Nir Eyal’s book, “Indistractable” he discusses a 2011 Stanford study that split a pool of registered voters into two groups, asking one cohort, “How important is it to you to vote?” and the other, “How important is it to you to be a voter?” Those asked the latter question were much more likely to turn out on election day.

A lot of previously hard decisions become answered for you once you accept a new identity. Identity can be hard to shift on your own.
So let peer pressure do the work for you. Spend more time with the people you want to be. People who have goals and ambitions beyond Instagram likes. People who would look at you funny if you impulsively whipped out your phone every three seconds.

The Longevity Project, which studied 1000+ people from childhood to death, said this:

The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. For people who want improved health, association with other healthy people is usually the strongest and most direct path of change.

If you don’t have a group, one friend will do. Nir suggests an “identity pact.” Hold each other accountable and become better together.

We don’t check our phones when we hang out. That’s just not who we are.

(To learn how to deal with passive-aggressive people, click here.) 

Sum Up

This is how to stop checking your phone:

• Overall Health: Get your sleep and exercise.
• Control Your Context: Your phone is not a pacemaker or an insulin pump. You can turn it off and put it away. Distractions drain your brain whether you notice it or not.
• Mindfulness: Imagine being able to let go of the negative, to focus on the positive and to get a second chance to decide before impulsively engaging in bad habits. Won’t make you one of the Avengers, but it’s a superpower nonetheless.
• Your Not-So-Secret Identity: Who are you? I could summarize this in greater detail but I’m just not the kind of writer who does that. It’s not who I am.

We spend so much time, money and energy to do things to be happier — because the secret to happiness is more experiences that make you happy, right?

Wrong.

Via 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior:

Ed Diener and Martin Seligman screened over 200 undergraduates for levels of happiness, and compared the upper 10% (the “extremely happy”) with the middle and bottom 10%. Extremely happy students experienced no greater number of objectively positive life events, like doing well on exams or hot dates, than did the other two groups (Diener & Seligman, 2002).

You don’t need more happy things if you can control your attention and focus on the good stuff already present in your life. It’s the essence of gratitude. Attentional control allows you to savor what is here instead of anxiously checking your phone, hoping for something to lift your spirits.

One study took three groups of people and had them go for daily walks. First group was told to focus on the good things they noticed, second one on the bad, third was told just to walk for exercise. What was the result?

From Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life:

At the end of the week, when the walkers’ well-being was tested again, those who had deliberately targeted positive cues were happier than before the experiment. The negatively focused subjects were less happy, and the just plain exercisers scored in between. The point, says Bryant, is that “you see what you look for. And you can train yourself to attend to the joy out there waiting to be had, instead of passively waiting for it to come to you.”

You can be the kind of person who really feels and appreciates the good in life. The kind of person who has deep focus and attentional control. You have it in you. I know it. 

Most Productive People: 6 Things They Do Every Day

1) Manage Your Mood

Most productivity systems act like we’re robots — they forget the enormous power of feelings.

If you start the day calm it’s easy to get the right things done and focus.

But when we wake up and the fray is already upon us — phone ringing, emails coming in, fire alarms going off — you spend the whole day reacting.

Here’s Tim:

I try to have the first 80 to 90 minutes of my day vary as little as possible. I think that a routine is necessary to feel in control and non-reactive, which reduces anxiety. It therefore also makes you more productive.

Studies demonstrate happiness increases productivity and makes you more successful.

As Shawn Achor describes in his book The Happiness Advantage:

…doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

So think a little less about managing the work and a little more about managing your moods. 

2) Don’t Check Email In The Morning

Why is checking email in the morning a cardinal sin? You’re setting yourself up to react.

An email comes in and suddenly you’re giving your best hours to someone else’s goals, not yours.

You’re not planning your day and prioritizing, you’re letting your objectives be hijacked by whoever randomly decides to enter your inbox.

Here’s Tim:

…whenever possible, do not check email for the first hour or two of the day. It’s difficult for some people to imagine. “How can I do that? I need to check email to get the information I need to work on my most important one or two to-dos?”

You would be surprised how often that is not the case. You might need to get into your email to finish 100% of your most important to-dos. But can you get 80 or 90% done before you go into Gmail and have your rat brain explode with freak-out, dopamine excitement and cortisol panic? Yes.

Research shows email:

1. Stresses you out.
2. Can turn you into a jerk.
3. Can be more addictive than alcohol and tobacco.
4. And checking email frequently is the equivalent of dropping your IQ 10 points.

3) Before You Try To Do It Faster, Ask Whether It Should Be Done At All

Everyone asks, “Why is it so impossible to get everything done?” But the answer is stunningly easy:

You’re doing too many things.

4) Focus Is Nothing More Than Eliminating Distractions

Top CEOs are interrupted every 20 minutes. How do they get anything done?

By working from home in the morning for 90 minutes where no one can bother them:

They found that not one of the twelve executives was ever able to work uninterruptedly more than twenty minutes at a time—at least not in the office. Only at home was there some chance of concentration. And the only one of the twelve who did not make important, long-range decisions “off the cuff,” and sandwiched in between unimportant but long telephone calls and “crisis” problems, was the executive who worked at home every morning for an hour and a half before coming to the office.

5) Have A Personal System

Great systems work because they make things automatic, and don’t tax your very limited supply of willpower.

What do we see when we systematically study the great geniuses of all time? Almost all had personal routines that worked for them.

(“Give and Take” author Adam Grant consistently writes in the mornings while Tim always writes at night.)

How do you start to develop your own personal system? Apply some “80/20” thinking:

1. What handful of activities are responsible for the disproportionate number of your successes?
2. What handful of activities absolutely crater your productivity?

6) Define Your Goals The Night Before

Research says you’re more likely to follow through if you’re specific and if you write your goals down.

From Eric Barker's https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2019/05/kids-successful/

This Is How To Make Your Kids Successful: 4 Secrets From Research

You want your kids to grow up and be more than just… older. You want them to be successful and fulfilled.

What’s the latest we’ve been hearing? 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, grit, early specialization, tiger moms…

Are you skeptical about any of these? Good, you’ve come to the right place. (Here, take a seat next to me.) Luckily, someone has done the research and has clear answers for us…

The estimable David Epstein, author of the excellent NYT bestseller The Sports Gene, has a new book out that turns a number of these ideas on their head. (And he’s not just a fantastic author – he’s also a new father.)

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is already one of my “Best Books of 2019.” (It’s so good that I’ll be interviewing David about it, at a live event, on 6/18. If you’re in LA, swing on by.)

Okay, so you want your kids to be successful, happy, and as cool as the other side of the pillow?

Let’s get to it…

1And there’s no doubt — the elites do spend more time on deliberate practice than non-elites. You know it must be true because I have a chart:

Because there’s another athlete’s story you don’t hear as much. This kid didn’t relentlessly focus on one sport. He was skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, playing basketball, handball, badminton and soccer.

He tried everything and was serious about nothing. It wasn’t until his teens that he started to focus on tennis…But that kid became Roger Federer.

And it turns out that the Roger path is actually much more common than the Tiger path. At young ages, Tiger is the exception, not the rule, among elites:

From Range:

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can later draw; they learn about their abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

Yeah, but that might only be true of sports, right? Nope. Same pattern is evident in music.

From Range:

…the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving – a lot less.

And what were the best music students like? They “turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.” Again, more Roger, less Tiger.

10,000 hours is good. But they don’t have to happen between ages 0-10. In fact, they shouldn’t. 

2) Real Learning Is Slow And Frustrating

I’ll repeat that: “the problem might be that kids are doing too well in school.”

Good grades are wonderful. But if they’re coming fast and easy, chances are your kid isn’t really learning all that much that they’re really going to retain. The research is clear: to really learn, studying must be hard. They even have a clever name for this: “desirable difficulties.”

From Range:

“Some people argue that part of the reason U.S. students don’t do as well on international measures of high school knowledge is that they’re doing too well in class,” Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist at Williams College told me. “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard.” Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.

So good performance early can be bad. Sound crazy? Oh, it gets crazier… As a corollary, “great” teachers are often terrible.

How many times did you cram for a test, do fine, but then 24 hours later you couldn’t remember a single thing you studied? Exactly.

That wasn’t early onset dementia. Studies show learning too fast or too easy doesn’t stick. Struggling is essential. In fact, trying hard and being wrong can be better than initially being right.

From Range:

In one of Kornell’s experiments, participants were made to learn pairs of words and later tested on recall. At test time, they did the best with pairs that they learned via practice questions, even if they had gotten the answers on those quizzes wrong. Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.

Yes, it’s very impressive to have a kid easily getting all A’s. But if you really want your child to grow up to be a top performer, you don’t want your kid to be a prodigy.

3) Too Much Specialization Makes You Narrow

From Range:

…And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands – conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem and apply it in an utterly new one.

Kids need to learn a variety of things and how to make connections between them.

From Range:

Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains… Research on thousands of adults in six industrializing nations found that exposure to modern work with self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges was correlated with being “cognitively flexible.”

4) When You’re Young, Quit May Be Better Than Grit.

Being a bit flaky can be good, especially when you’re young, because it gives you the chance to learn about yourself in different environments. As London Business School professor Herminia Ibarra says, “Be a flirt with your possible selves.” 

Sum Up

Here’s how to make your kids successful:

• Children need a sampling period: Raise your kids like a Roger, not a Tiger.
• Real learning is slow and frustrating: I have deprived you of lasting knowledge by making this easy to read and the guilt is overwhelming.
• Too much specialization can make you narrow: A one-trick pony often becomes a very dumb, boring, unsuccessful horse.
• When you’re young, quit may be better than grit: Skip the youthful mistakes and they become middle-aged mistakes — where they’re a lot more costly.

This post is focused on kids because that’s where this knowledge is most useful. But let me tell you a little secret…

It all applies to you too. Keep sampling. Keep learning. Don’t get narrow. Don’t be afraid to quit something that isn’t working and try something new.