Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I am so excited today because Catherine Price is here.

She has written phenomenal books. She has a phenomenal sub-deck. She has another kid's book coming out really for teens and tweens.

So it's kind of a kid's book but you know like for that age group and she's got courses so much to help you have a more fun and less tech-filled life. Katherine, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. So you've got a fantastic books. We got a lot of parents that listen in and these are ones you want to read, that you want to read. You want to read and then help your kids to prepare. Then you've got a book that's coming out for teens and tweens.

But the two that I have, and you have more than this, but are how to break up with your phone, which is a poem-sized book that you can drop in your purse and also is laid out incredibly cool. It's really going to help you. Like you want to break up with your phone. You know you don't want to live like this. and then the power of fun, how to feel alive again.

Can you give us a little background, Catherine?

I know you've got your fantastic sub-sac. Is it called How to Feel Alive again? It's called How to Feel Alive, not even again, just straight up how to feel alive. How to Feel Alive. Yeah, your substack, and I'll make sure I'll put the link in the show notes for that. Where did you get interested in this topic? Well, interestingly, it was actually from the

room I'm speaking to you from right now, if I'm taking your question literally, but the, the that. Where did you get interested in this topic? Well, interestingly, it was actually from the

room I'm speaking to you from right now, if I'm taking your question literally. But the reason I

wrote those two books in particular was that I had my daughter 10 years ago. Before that,

I was writing mostly about food and nutrition. I wasn't writing about technology. And I'd had my

daughter and I just started to notice that there'd be nights when I was up with her late at night actually in this room. And I was looking at my phone while she was looking at me. And I have a background and, you know, mindfulness and try to think of myself as a self-aware person. And so I did recognize, oh my goodness, this is not what I want to be doing. You know, here's this little baby looking up at her mother and here's her mother looking down at her phone.

And that's not how I want to live. It's not what I want my daughter to think of, you know, in terms of a human relationship, let alone with me. So that's what inspired me to write How to Break Up with your phone. That was back in 2016, I believe, was when I started thinking about that project. And I noticed that even though many people

weren't talking about it yet, a lot of people were struggling with their phones. We just hadn't

started this dialogue about it. And more importantly, when I looked to see what books existed on the

subject, there were some that talked about screen time, but I couldn't find any that offered a solution.

And so I basically wrote the book for myself to find and create a solution and then help other people with their relationships with their phones. And it's not about dumping your phone. It's not about like throwing it under a bus. It's more about creating a healthy relationship with better boundaries. And once I had done that, so I went through the steps in how to how to break up with your phone myself. It's a look at the science of what our screen time is doing to us. And then there's a 30-day plan to take back control. So I did that myself. I reclaimed a lot of time from my devices. And then I didn't realize I opened up this new problem for myself, which is what I wanted to do with that newfound time. Because suddenly I had more free time and I wasn't spending it on screens.

I'm a writer so I didn't really want to like read more to be honest. And I had this kind of existential moment where I thought, oh my goodness, I don't know what I want to do to make me feel alive. And long story short, I signed up for a guitar class because I said, you know, I always say I want to learn guitar and I supposedly don't have time, but I actually do have time because I was just wasting it on my phone.

And through that guitar class, which was basically a group of adults having, you know, a good time together on Wednesday nights and learning songs just for the fun of it, I ended up getting really curious about the feeling of fun because I was filled with this

buoyant energy in this class that really lifted me up for the whole week.

And it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the best word to describe it

was fun.

I think that that was because of early parenting.

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