Breaking the Phone Habit – From Compulsion to Conscious Use

You might consider suggesting to the audience to move to grayscale on their i phones. Ie black and white. It has proven that when the screen is less attractive to look at it, people spend less time looking. just a thought. Continued hatzlacha . i love the show, and i am a regular listener.

Hi! I just want to make the oilam aware that the ARTSCROLL IPAD mentioned in the last podcast actually is NOT internet free and is not “offline” as R’ Leibowitz thought. It is a **REGULAR IPAD** that just has the ARTSCROLL APP on it!! Yes, it is crazy and scandalous that Artscroll would sell a regular ipad with internet. Ppl give them as bar mitzvah presents and to rebbes and rabbis all the time, its crazy. Yes, they can be brought to TAG to filter them, but please KNOW that they COME with INTERNET ACCESS. they flash a little notice that says “you do not NEED to connect to internet to use the app on a daily basis” which is true, it does WORK offline, but it absolutely connects to regular wifi and comes with a browser and app store and is a very regular ipad!! its nuts, but its true. PLEASE PLEASE help me spread awareness of this!!! so many young people have been nichshal with this!!

Really interesting.

I recently saw two relevant articles. One was an interview with Canadian neuroscientist James Danckert, on boredom as a “call to action” that tells us that tells us “you need to explore your world for something better to do than what you’re doing right now.” He likes Tolstoy’s description of boredom as the “desire for desires.”

The Science of Boredom | James Danckert, PhD

And the other described a study which used an app blocking internet access while allowing phone calls and texts. It showed that “simply removing mobile internet access—while still allowing calls and texts—can produce measurable improvements in psychological functioning in as little as two weeks. Researchers effectively turned smartphones into “dumb phones,” and the results were striking: improved sustained attention, improved mental health, and higher subjective well-being.”

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/turning-off-internet-on-your-phone?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=3pjm7&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We talk a lot about phone addiction; it would be really interesting to hear someone summarize the relevant neurobiology, and in particular the ways in which gambling addiction resembles phone addiction–and the ways in which the combination is likely to be particularly destructive, especially to developing brains.