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 want to 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 want to take here.

I'm going to 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 going to 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.

All right, so here's what I want to do.

I want to summarize the neuroscience of why you feel the urge to pick up your phone.

But I'm going to do this in a way that is going to avoid naming specific brain regions or going down long list of neurotransmitters.

...