Put down the F-ing phone

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning and last thing you do when you go to sleep.

Can you have dinner with your family without picking up your phone?

How many times are you driving ,checking your messages or better yet texting while driving.

How many hours do you spend each day checking out Instagram, Facebook, tick tok, et al?

Are you lacking energy and focus?

How is your mood and creativity?

Is your phone at your side during prayer, meditation, and exercise?

Do you watch a show with your family while your on the phone?

Can you have a real conversation with your children, friend without being interrupted by a text, message, e-mail?

You know where I’m going and to an extent I’m guilty of many of these impulses bordering on addiction- difference being that I’m militant about setting time aside to meditate, pray and budget my time using the internet and the phone.

I can workout with energy, focus- read, listen to my favorite podcast and notice traits as you would the “non-smoker”.

Dr. Anna Lembke- an addiction psychiatrist at Sanford Medical school states re. a question by the Stanford Medical Journal about smart phones
AL: I would say it’s naturalistic research by observing the types of problems that my patients have. Problems that are related to behavioral addictions like pornography and gambling are mostly consumed through the Internet. There’s also addiction to the Internet itself, including social media. Very often, the ways people access the Internet is through their smartphone. Also, the smartphone has exacerbated the problems of drug and alcohol addiction, causing heightened access and social contagion. Now you can order drugs like you’re ordering a pizza. Social contagion is a phenomenon in which people go online and learn about other drugs by reading on the Internet or watching Youtube videos of others consuming drugs in certain ways.

TSD: In the article, you mentioned smartphone usage disrupts the creativity flow. Could you elaborate?

AL: This is hypothetical on my part, but I do believe when we’re constantly having our train of thought interrupted by checking a message or checking a text, we deprive ourselves of having a sustained flow of thought, which is crucial to creating something. Yet by constantly checking and responding on the smartphone, we have the sensation of doing or making something. But it’s an illusion, because at the end of the day, we haven’t created anything. We’ve only been in response mode.

Nil Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.

Are smartphones really making our children sad?

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“The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”.

He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes. confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.”

But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?

Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”

Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives

If you haven’t seen Social Dilemma (Netflix)-I would highly recommend watching it and please without interruption.

Our attention span is shortening, anxiety levels are at an all time high, Political, violent and creative thoughts are being manipulated- as is our freedom to think objectively.

Create, Communicate, and Consciously make an effort to box out space in your super busy day for important personal and family time.

Time is slipping by so fast that we need to take an objective view about what’s truly important in our lives, and create winning habits to free ourselves from the 24/7 connection that THEY WANT US to live.

Put down the F-ing phone. Be Bold Or Get Old!