Classic Episode: How Do I Kick My Scrolling Habit? | Monday Advice

Last week, we talked about the importance of meaningful activity as a way to reduce the allure of mindless scrolling. Well, I wanna continue this discussion this week by revisiting a classic episode that first aired back in the winter of twenty twenty four. In this episode, I described what I called a high quality leisure toolkit, which contains six concrete activities that you could consider adding to your life as a way to help rewire your brain to depend less on the quick hits of distraction delivered through a screen. Now I thought I would play this episode for you today as it seems as relevant now as it was back then. Now I recommend staying tuned past the deep dive for the questions in the second segment of this classic episode as there's a pretty good collection of queries. This is, you know, some shows have a better collection of questions than others. There's a bunch of sort of classic questions that I tackle in this episode. So the full episode is worth sticking, sticking through. Alright? Now that my summer travels are winding down, this will probably be our last classic episode that we replay for a while. But I hope you enjoy this final interesting blast from the past. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. My philosophy of digital minimalism, my approach for dealing with these issues, argues that these tools push out other things in your life and therefore then fill a void that those things used to fill. When you just do white knuckle abstention, you are faced with the yawning, void of boredom and your own thoughts and anxiety. It's It's very uncomfortable. You just sit there like, what am I supposed to do? You need something to have that smoothing distraction. So the first step is not to abstain from your phone. The first step is forget your phone. Do what you wanna do on your phone. Watch your Dino Mountain Gravy videos. But start adding at the same time really quality alternatives. Start adding into your life things that can eventually take the place of just looking at your phone, that can eat away at that sensation of boredom and anxiety of being alone with your own thoughts that drives us back to the suker of low quality distractions. So what would these things look like? I'm gonna give you six different things. We'll call this our high quality leisure toolkit. Six different things that you should probably engage with, all of them to some degree in your life in preparation to change in your relationship with your phone. One is gonna be reading. You should read a lot more. This could be a mix of things that are just really fun, magazine articles or books that are really fun to read as well as things that are smarter. A recent episode of the show, Jesse, I …