Ep. 374: This is Your Brain on Phones

I've been talking recently about the idea that making your life deeper will make your devices less appealing, and this is true, but it's not always enough. For some people, the constant allure of their phone is so strong, it's so inescapable that it can seem impossible to find any sort of freedom. This is what I wanna talk about today. How to create relief from your phone overuse to gain enough breathing room that you can actually pay attention to making the other parts of your life more meaningful. Now I have a very particular approach that I wanna take here. I'm gonna start inside your skull, deep within the folds of your brain. Because I think by identifying exactly what is happening among your neurons when you find yourself picking up that device more than you want to will help us come up with specific responses that are more likely to actually work. I understand how the brain works. When you look at your phone, we're also gonna discover why so much of the common advice you hear about phone overload doesn't help. So we'll figure out what does work and what doesn't work. So if you're sick and tired of being distracted from everything that matters, looking at your phone more than you want to, trying again and again to stop this and not having any success, then this is an episode you need to hear. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, the real reason you can't put down your phone and what to do about it. Alright. So here's what I wanna do. I wanna summarize the neuroscience of why you feel the urge to pick up your phone. But I'm gonna do this in a way that is going to avoid naming specific brain regions or going down long list of neurotransmitters. In fact, I guarantee I'm only gonna mention one neurotransmitter and no brain regions, because I wanna get to the core of this without having to get bogged down with too much of the details of the science. Alright? So this is gonna be a sort of high level view of what's happening low down deep within your brain. So here's the basic way I want you to think about what's going on in your head sort of moment to moment. There are numerous groups of neurons and what we can call the short term motivation system. These are neurons that have learned over time to recognize different situations as cues to take certain actions. So we have situations that are acting as cues or taking certain actions. I'm gonna draw you a picture here, God help us all, but I wanna try to illustrate what I'm talking about. Right? So let's start with, I have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. I'm gonna draw a person here. It's gonna be very clear exactly what they're doing. Is it …