Breaking Up (and Making Up) with Your Phone – Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Over the summer, my phone broke, like it started to deteriorate.

Yes.

From the inside out. And that happened to be like the day before you and mom left town.

Uh huh.

And so I was home alone, taking care of Sky and Soleil with a deteriorating phone.

Right.

That’s me in the podcasting studio with my daughter Sage. As you may know by now, I’ve been bringing all my daughters along for the ride this season, and Sage is up next.

You’re the, my favorite primary daughter.

I wanted to sit down with Sage because I think, like many of us, she feels that a week without her phone is kind of impossible. Tell me about what was the biggest challenge that week.

I had to memorize my friend’s phone numbers, call them on my Alexa if I wanted to talk. It’s not convenient to have to call someone every time you have to say something to them.

[laughter]

So you had to actually call them?

To tell them that stuff. Doesn’t sound like such a hardship to me.

Yeah, what if they’re busy and they can’t talk on the phone.

Well then don’t answer then, they just call you back.

What if it’s important? What if Sky and Soleil need to be picked up from their sports or their friends houses and I have no idea how to get there, and they can’t text me to tell me when they mean to be picked up. And they can’t call me when I’m on my Alexa. I can only call them.

I think your, the picture your painting is one of where the phone was in of tremendous need in order to communicate.

But if you had your phone that week. But just no social media, it would have been okay.

I think I would have been kind of lonely.

These days, it does feel like our phones are a part of us. After all, they go with us everywhere, and sometimes they’re even under our pillows. And as Sage said, they can keep us company when we are lonely. But here is the struggle I’ve had so far this season. On one hand, we’ve heard about some troubling potential side effects of being online too much. Last week, a self-described mediatrician, a doctor, told me that he treats patients whose phones are amplifying their stress or anxiety. But at the same time, my own daughters have made it clear that being offline can make them feel stressed out as well. Isolated. Honestly, I get it. Even I feel a sense of FOMO sometimes, like there’s something that I’m missing. But the question is, where does that leave us? What is the right balance between being totally off the grid on one side or always plugged in on the other?

So I thought this might be a good time to learn more about the phrase that seems to pop up everywhere I turned while working on this season: Digital Detox. Now for starters, I’m not even sure what that means. Just the word detox – eliminating toxins from your body. Does that imply that the phone itself is a toxin? It all sounds pretty intense, but the truth is, these detoxes do exist. And there are some extreme examples out there. In South Korea and China, there are these internet camps where young people are physically separated from their screens, sometimes for weeks at a time. Now, maybe that doesn’t sound too hard to you. But consider just how attached young people are to these devices. After all, they’ve had screens their entire lives. In fact, while estimates vary, the average person checks their phone more than 300 times a day, most within the first 10 minutes of waking up. And more than 60% of people say, yes, they have texted someone in the same room as them at the time.

It was 4:00 o’clock in the morning when Yoo Chae-rin realized she’d been on her phone for 13 hours. This was when the 16-year-old decided she needed help.

In other countries like the United States, people will actually pay pretty big sums of money just to disconnect for a week or more. Now, I’m not that interested in that. I’m not going to ship Sage off to one of these camps. Frankly, it would be just a lot easier and cheaper to take away her phone. But before we get to that point, I did want to know if she would ever consider hitting the pause button herself.

Do you feel like if you needed to stop. if you just said, hey, I’m going to go cold turkey or essentially go on a fast. Could you do it?

Yeah, I think I could quit TikTok and Instagram. I think it, Snapchat would be a little bit harder to give up because like, that’s my probably my main, like, source of communication.

For some people, it does feel really daunting to just think about locking your phone in a drawer or even just getting rid of one app. And I think the question for a lot of people is, how do you know? How do you know when it’s time to scale back? And if so, how do you do it? So today I’m going to ask an expert and a mom about the best way to break up with your phone.

One suggestion I do have, for all of us, is to get in the habit of taking a break so that you can both better understand the effect that your relationship with technology is having on you and then also appreciate its benefits more.

I’m Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.

I did want to ask you a question, Sanjay. How do you feel, when you’re away from your phone for an extended period of time?

Aha! Okay, I, I’ve got to think about it. It’s a lot. My answer will be very long.

One of my producers, David, asked me about this after one of our recent interviews, and I really had to take a beat to think about it because, you know, as a neurosurgeon, I’m actually in these “no-phone-zones” a lot. After all, I can’t use my phone when I’m scrubbed in the operating room. But still, that doesn’t mean that separation is always easy for me. Here’s what I told him.

I remember this one time I was on an international flight and it was going to be a long flight, and at some point realized that that plane did not have any wifi service. And I remember thinking, Wow, that’s going to be a long time off the grid. But instead, I read books. I got more sleep than I otherwise probably would have. I did some other work. And when I landed and finally had cellular service again, there wasn’t that much that I had actually missed. There wasn’t some huge thing that had happened. In fact, I was able to answer emails and text messages between the time that we landed in the time that we got to our gate. I was all set. I would have spent hours probably on the device before. But instead, in terms of my actual work obligations, responsibilities that I needed to complete, I was able to do it quite, quite quickly. So how do I feel? I feel fantastic. And I feel fantastic in part because I am allowed to feel fantastic. I don’t have to be somebody who’s beholden to the phone.

Being away from my phone feels good. For sure. And just thinking about it makes me wonder, should I just go off the grid? After all, for most of my life, I did not have a cell phone and I certainly did not have social media. My reality, though, is that it feels impossible to take a break even for an afternoon. But my next guest thinks it’s doable and the key is to start small.

I typically don’t use the word digital detox because to me it implies that you’re trying to totally take a break from technology for an extended period of time, which I don’t think really is realistic for most people. But with that said, I think that having some kind of rituals in which you regularly do take breaks from devices is a great thing.

That’s Catherine Price. She’s a science journalist and she’s author of the book, “How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30 Day Plan to Take Back Your Life.” As with Catherine, like me, this work is deeply personal. It really came into focus for her not long after her daughter was born.

I had these moments where I would find myself up late at night, actually, often in this very room feeding her. And then I’d have kind of an out-of-body experience, probably because of the sleep deprivation. And I would see her looking up at me. And then I was looking down at my phone and that just devastated me.

You know, that really got to me. As soon as Catherine described that story with her daughter. I remember my own daughter Sky once, she was just five-years-old, running into my room to show me a drawing. I admittedly was distracted. I was on my phone. I did not give her the attention she deserved. She ran out of the room. Ten years later, she still never let me forget it. After Catherine had had this moment with her daughter, she did something. Something I can really relate to. She used this personal moment as an inspiration for change, to not be one of those parents. And in many ways, she got this incredible additional benefit. She suddenly found herself with a lot of time on her hands.

So one really nice ritual that I personally love and that I would encourage everyone out there to try is taking a digital Sabbath. Just have a 24-hour period where you don’t interact with your devices. If that freaks people out, you can start shorter. Just do it for a night. In my experience, you know, I’ll go for a walk and I like do something with our daughter and I’ll practice an instrument and I’ll do something else. Then I’ll look at the clock and it’s like 11:00 o’clock and I’ll no idea it’s only 11:00 o’clock in the morning. And that’s also often accompanied by a sense of physical relaxation and calm that’s so profound that many people report not wanting to turn their devices back on at the end of the 24 hours.

It’s hard for a lot of people. And I’m not even talking about kids. I mean, I think even for adults, the leave aside whether or not you’re doomscrolling and just using it for that sort of reason, you’re expected to answer emails and text messages and stuff, kind of be on call 24-seven, you know. As you say in your book and you talk about it, you’re not saying completely get rid of it. You understand that…We probably can’t think of this as an addiction because addiction, ultimately the core sort of therapy for addiction is abstinence. And you cannot have abstinence, really. I think.

We tend to think of them as just one thing, but it’s not one thing. It’s like saying a refrigerator is all food. Like if you look inside the refrigerator, you’ve got all sorts of different categories of foods, and some of them are good for you and some of them are really bad for you, and some of them are delicious in small quantities, but will make you feel gross if you have too much. And I think that’s very much the same with our phones. So are you going to get addicted to your banking app? I don’t think so. I’m not particularly worried about that.

Those of you who listened to my last conversation with Dr. Michael Rich know there is some debate about whether social media can really be addictive. There is no clinical diagnosis for an internet addiction. And Catherine is quick to point this out as well. But that also doesn’t mean that it’s easy to quit.

If you look at the design that goes into some of our most problematic apps, such as social media, it’s they they deliberately are designed to mimic slot machines. And slot machines are widely considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented. So I actually don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility at all to say that in the future you will have things such as social media addiction as actually a psychiatric disorder that we take more seriously.

I think we do have to distinguish in terms of a conversation like this devices from social media, no question about it.

But when you talk about addiction, if you just drill down on that metaphorically, would it be more like like opioids or more like like food? Like we need food. We know we can eat too much of it. If you don’t require opioids, you’re just taking them because you’ve become addicted to them. You don’t need that. Nicotine maybe it would be a good example. There’s no redeeming qualities to nicotine and and I’m not trying to sort of gild the lily here. I’m just saying, where is the inflection point? What point do you say that the device itself is something that I need to take a break from versus, you know, just certain aspects of the device?

Well, I think that that’s a good distinction to make. I would say it’s I have met a few people in my life who say they need TikTok. I find it hard to say that the way that most of us interact with social media is out of a genuine need for really anything. It’s really more of a desire for stimulation, a desire to avoid anxiety, to self-soothe to, as I was saying earlier, many of the same reasons that we turn to substances. Now is everyone who has a glass of wine after work going to be an alcoholic? No. And so is everyone going to be addicted if it becomes something that is classified as such to social media? No. But is still is, I think, a highly risky behavior that doesn’t have that many redeeming benefits in most cases. Of course, there are exceptions to every statement one can make.

But a little bit’s okay?

I think it depends on the person. I mean, it’s kind of the same as the substance, right.

But this is why I asked the opioid versus the food question, though, right? I mean, it’s exactly what you’re saying is that it’s different for every person. How do you find the inflection point? I mean, you wrote a book about this. And you also realize, I think this was a study that you mentioned from the American Psychological Association. Most people kind of get that it probably be a good idea to unplug for a while. That’ll be good for their mental health. I think you said two thirds of Americans in that study believe that. And yet a very, I think a very small fraction of people actually do it.

I think one important factor in figuring out whether or not your current use of whatever you’re doing on your phone is okay or if it’s problematic; It’s the other people in your life, right? Like, you might think that your alcohol use is just fine and then you talk to your spouse or your children and they’re like, actually, it makes me really uncomfortable or actually it’s harming our relationship. So I think that that is a very important thing people should do, is talk to their families, to their friends, to their kids, no matter how young their kids are. It’s amazing how perceptive, really young kids can be about this and ask how they feel about your device use. That can be a real wake up call for people.

We’re not calling a detox. What do we decide to call it? Breakup?

Well, I call it breaking up with your phone and then making up with your phone. I mean, the idea being that, like, you know, if you break up with a human being, you’re not saying I’m never going to date another human being again.

Right.

You’re just saying that relationship was not right for me. Hopefully, you have a moment of self-reflection to evaluate what was good and what was bad about it and what you would like in the new relationship.

You know, I went into this conversation wondering about digital detoxes, but now I find myself thinking about this in a different way. This isn’t necessarily about restricting like those social media camps I mentioned earlier. Instead, it’s about finding balance and finding balance by being mindful if whether or not your phone is making your life better or worse. And part of that is to have conversations with the people in your life and ask what they think about your phone use. That’s not easy, but it’s really important. And then once you’re aware of that, the question becomes, what can we do? What can you do about it? When we come back, Catherine is going to tell us how to actually begin the breakup process.

If you’re trying to quit smoking, it would be really dumb to keep cigarettess in your pocket. So if you know one app is a problem for you and it’s not actually benefiting you, then get it off your phone.

That’s coming up.

Welcome back to Chasing Life. Now more of my conversation with science journalist and author, Catherine Price.

It’s time to sit down with our phones and tell them it’s not you, it’s me. So how do we begin the break up?

Many people think that the first step with breaking up your phone is to just like delete apps, or turn it to grayscale, or do kind of like a tip or a trick that they’ve heard somewhere.

Yeah.

There’s actually benefits to that. But what I really like to emphasize is the first step you need to take is to actually have a moment of self-reflection and ask yourself what’s important to you in life, and then how is your phone helping? How is it hindering you? If you say that your family and your kids are the most important thing to you. And then you ask yourself, when I’m with my family and with my kids, am I actually present with them or am I actually just scrolling through my work email?

If the first step is realizing you have a problem and look, most people do. Then the next step is to take a close look at your home screen.

Actually go down to the level of looking at the apps in your phone and asking yourself, well, which one of these are necessary or useful or truly enjoyable? And then which ones are actual waste of time that I know that I just feel bad after I use them, that I don’t want to spend as much time on.

Okay. You know, the first thing you need to do is to delete those extra apps. And you know what, I’m going to I’m going to just do these right now. Clubhouse gone. Oh, my look at all these games. This takes up a lot of time. Solitaire, space shooter, alien shooter. I never realized I had so many games. Another solitaire, Golf Rival, Uno deleted. All of them gone. Okay, these are the hard ones over here – Twitter, Instagram. I’m just going to move those off to the side for now. But got rid of TikTok and Snapchat. Gone.

Okay. That actually wasn’t so hard. Honestly, I feel better already.

If you were trying to quit smoking, it would be really dumb to keep cigarettes in your pocket. So if you know one app is a problem for you and it’s not actually benefiting you, then get it off your phone. You can always check it from a desktop. You can always reinstall it to look at it for your at your phone, on your phone and then delete it afterwards. Or you can check it from the browser, but get the app off your phone. You also then can do things like go into your settings and make it so that you can turn it very easily to black and white. That’s in the accessibility settings. Google it. I also would highly recommend minimizing your notifications, like I think of those as interruptions because they’re there to interrupt you. So what’s worth being interrupted in the middle of your family dinner?

That one is easy for me. Catherine is right. Family dinners are sacrosanct for the Gupta family. No phones at the table. And, you know, once we started that policy, I saw several things happen. My girls ate more slowly. They relaxed, they smiled. I saw their eyes. It wasn’t easy to make this happen. And my girls tried to bully me into letting them have their phones at the table. “Dad, you’re being ridiculous. Dad, every kid I know is allowed to have their phones during dinner. What if something important happens? Blah, blah, blah?” It wasn’t easy initially. And keep in mind again, that on average someone is likely to reach for their phone several times during a one hour dinner. It’s a tough habit to break.

The thing about the design of many of our most problematic apps is that they’re designed to hijack our brain circuitry so that we end up checking them without even realizing what we’re doing. And then we end up spending way longer than we wanted to on them because they’re designed to make us lose track of time. So one suggestion I have to people is to put like a rubber band or something on your phone. And the idea is that when you reach for your phone on autopilot, you have the split second it being, why the heck is there a rubber band on my phone? And then you can say, Oh, I just picked up my phone. What am I doing?

As a lover of the brain, I’m really into this idea. I think the way to think about it is that it’s all about introducing some sort of disruption into the mindless things that we all do every day. Think of it like bringing your brain back online for just a split second when it’s gone into this sort of automatic mode. That’s the split second Catherine is describing. When you feel that rubber band, for example, it makes you think and that can be just enough to break the cycle.

And then I also created this exercise called: What for? Why now? What else? WWW for short. And once you notice your phone’s in your hand, you just ask yourself those questions. What did I pick it up to do? Then you ask yourself why now? What was that time sensitive reason you picked it up. Sometimes you actually will have a reason. Like it’s your friend’s birthday. You need to get a gift for them. Most of the time is going to be an emotional reason. It’s going to be like, I was anxious, I had it and I want it to be soothed. I was bored waiting on this line. I wanted a distraction. I felt lonely; I wanted to feel connected. So identify what your brain is actually after and then you can move to the third step – the what else? Which is to ask yourself, what else could you do in that moment to achieve the same result? Could you actually use your phone to call a friend instead of going to social media? If you’re having a moment of loneliness, you know, could you go for a quick walk around the block if you need a break from work instead of going over to the news? It doesn’t really matter what the answer is. There’s no predetermined right answer. You might decide you actually want to do nothing, or you might decide that you actually do want to be on your phone, and that’s fine. The point is just to make sure that when we’re using our devices or whatever apps are on our devices, it’s the result of an intentional choice instead of just our minds being and our brains being hijacked by the the tricks being employed by the developers of said apps.

What for? Why now? What else? I really love this. It requires a mix of mindfulness and also the idea of building regular routines into your life. So you are constantly reminded how good life is offline. Now, I’m not trying to make this sound too easy. These can be tough habits to break, but they’re worth it.

Trying to change a habit through willpower is a guaranteed way to fail. It’s much better if you can give yourself a positive alternative. So I really encourage people to ask, What do you want to be doing with your time? What’s something you say you want to do but you supposedly don’t have time for?

My list is a long one, and this is probably the most amazing thing about approaching your phone usage this way. You will suddenly seem to have more time and more attentiveness.

If you feel your attention has been slipping over the past few years, you can’t even get through like a blog post without needing to go do something else. It’s probably because you’ve been training your brain to be more distractible. Our brains naturally want to be distractible. So whether it’s putting your phone in another room for half an hour and forcing yourself to read a book, or if it’s doing a meditation or just something where you’re focusing on one thing, these practices are very important in restrengthening our ability to focus.

You know, it’s interesting that you can have so much joy just by paying a lot of attention to something. I was operating all day yesterday and this is something I say in the operating room with my residents, you know, when you’re operating, you’re scrubbed and obviously, there’s no phones and you’re really focused and you have a thing, in this case an operation, and then you are going to complete it. You know, maybe that’s a human evolutionary thing for the brain to to survive, to have been able to pay attention to things. Or maybe it’s that, you know, it’s a little bit of both. You know, you need to be easily distractible as well so that you can recognize threats. But whatever it is, my personal experience is that there’s a lot of joy in paying attention to things.

My biggest takeaway for myself personally, for from how to break up with your phone is that our lives are what we pay attention to, in that you only are going to experience what you pay attention to. You’re only going to remember what you pay attention to.

Yeah.

And that means that every time when you’re making a decision in the moment about what to pay attention to, you’re making this much broader decision about how to live your life.

Yes.

And I found that so powerful that for me, myself, I’m not a tattoo person. I don’t that’s too much commitment. But I made a bracelet for myself that says: pay attention. And it’s exactly that. It’s like we need to be so intentional about our attention and it is becoming more and more difficult to do so because our attention is a resource that’s worth a lot of money. So it’s just more important than ever to recognize its value. It’s even more important than time. You know, you can be in the same room with someone, quote, spending time with them. But if you’re not paying attention, if you’re if you’re just co-scrolling on your phones, like, were you really together?

That last point hit me like a ton of bricks. Our lives are what we pay attention to. And just think about that for a second. It is within our control. We get to construct our lives every day, heck, every minute, every second, by deciding what we pay attention to. Is my life TikTok? Or is it a sunset? A sunrise? My smiling girls faces. A fresh flower. An amazing book. The choices are easy if you can just bring your brain back online and reflect. During the course of our conversation, I was thinking a lot about my own habits, but also my daughters. What are they paying attention to in their day-to-day lives? And if their lives are what they pay attention to, then what are they focused on? I really think about this with my oldest daughter, Sage. She’s about to head to college in the fall. Have I given her the tools as a parent to truly appreciate what’s going on around her?

How do you feel like? And I know it’s a little bit weird question to ask, considering I am your father, Luke, but the…

How do you how do you feel like your childhood has been in terms of the how much we’ve allowed you to use these devices, you know, the permissions we’ve granted you, the liberties, things like that, the the rules. How do you feel it’s worked out for you?

Pretty well. I think I turned out fine. I’m turning out fine.

[laughter]

But when I have kids of my own, if I don’t think I want to let them be on social media as early as I was. And I think I’d want to not restrict what they can go on. I just want to like teach them to be a little bit more responsible with their amount of usage and not what they view, but how much they view. Because I, I think I’m a lot better with it now, but I think when I was a little younger. I was on my phone a lot.

I told you these were going to be some vulnerable conversations. And hearing this from my daughter wasn’t easy. I think as parents, we will always wonder how well we did. Did we find that balance between discipline and joy, liberty and rules? Trust, but always verifying. The truth is, there were times I knew Sage was paying too much attention to something that gave her little in return – her phone, her social media, her scrolling. But part of me also felt that she had to learn some of this herself. She needed to go on this journey of self-awareness. And yes, she needed to learn that her life was what she paid attention to and that there was so much beauty in the world. It’s true for all of us. It’s certainly true for Sage. But also for Catherine, whose own journey started when she realized how often she was on her phone around her newborn baby.

Are you hopeful?

[laughter] About about the world?

Our relationship with technology.

Thank you. Ok, I was like, let’s narrow it. No.

With technology and our relationship with technology.

I think it depends on the person to say a totally obvious thing. I would say that my personal hope is similar to what you just described, which is that through conversations like this, hopefully through things like “How to Break up with Your Phone” and then all the documentaries and the new books that have come out about this issue, people become more aware of the tactics that are being used against us and the impact it’s having on our experience of our lives to the point that we actually get disgusted with some of these platforms. I think that disgust is an incredibly powerful emotion when it comes to changing behavior. So my hope is that people will, including teenagers, be like, you know what, actually TikTok is a waste of time. Like the people behind that are trying to steal my time for me and they assume I’m dumb enough to be fooled by it. And guess what? I’m not. And I have my own priorities and I’m going to say no to that. That’s what I hope will happen. Am I optimistic that that’s going to happen in a society wide basis? No, I don’t think so. I think a lot of people are fine or just not thinking about it. But I am hopeful that there are increasing numbers of people who are becoming aware that this is an issue and that they do want to take action on it, and that the biggest thing missing right now is a society wide movement really to take back control. And I want to be part of that movement and I want to help start those conversations.

I came into this episode with one question. Should I log off completely? And I was skeptical of that. But Catherine gave me another way of thinking about all this. What if we just start just start by being aware, really aware of how we use our devices and the impact they are having on our in-real-life relationships. And then we go from there and ask the questions every time we pick up the device. What for? Why now? What else? You might be surprised by what you find and where it could take you. I don’t think most of us are cut out for life off the grid, but this feels a lot more attainable. And with these steps, I’m hopeful that we can start to rebuild our relationships with our devices and with each other. In the next episode, I’m going to talk to someone who’s had to learn to build these boundaries after building a career online.

Sometimes I worry a little bit about how central social media has become in my life. Like you watch Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and you think to yourself, well, that doesn’t all seem great. And then you look over at loneliness and isolation and mental health problems, and it does seem a little bit correlated, if not causative.

YouTuber Hank Green opens up about how he makes a living on the internet without letting it take over his life. We’ll be back next Tuesday. Thanks for listening.

What is your relationship with your phone? Have you reexamined your habits around social media since listening to this podcast? Record your thoughts as a voice memo and email them to ask Sanjay at CNN.com or give us a call at 470-396-0832 and leave a message. We might even include them on an upcoming episode of the podcast.

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Grace Walker, Xavier Lopez, Eryn Mathewson, and David Rind. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan Dzula is our technical director. The executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. And a special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealey and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health, and Katie Hinman.