How to reset your relationship with your phone
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The 2024 election pushed some people to put down their phones more and tune out of the news. But author Catherine Price started thinking about breaking up with her phone years ago, after realizing she was focusing on it instead of her newborn daughter.
“Our devices and their apps are designed to fragment our attention, whether it is taking us out of our real-life experience and getting us to focus our attention even momentarily on the phone itself or it's what we do within apps where we are looking at different pieces of content in a particular feed,” Price told “Post Reports” co-host Elahe Izadi.
After realizing how detrimental her phone was to her life, she wrote “How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life.” The book details the negative impact our phones can have on our attention and mental health and provides advice for how to create a healthier relationship with them.
“It really has made me feel more alive,” Price said. “It encouraged me to ask questions that have resulted in me tapping into this broader community of people I never would have met and discovering this joy.”
Today’s show was produced by Sabby Robinson. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Maggie Penman and mixed by Sam Bair.
You can find more writing by Price at her Substack here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before the 2024 election, Drew Steeneki was always reading the news on his phone. |
| 0:08.3 | He's 36, lives in Virginia, and was obsessed with following the presidential race. |
| 0:14.4 | But after the election, that totally changed. |
| 0:18.1 | I turned off my notifications on my phone for all the news apps. I didn't want |
| 0:22.0 | anything pushed to me. He was feeling overwhelmed and really upset about the results. So, he decided |
| 0:28.8 | to unplug from all the news to avoid what he felt like he could not control. And then Drew noticed |
| 0:35.8 | a big shift in himself. |
| 0:38.5 | My brain is just quieter. I've just enjoyed that mental space of like not turning over, |
| 0:46.5 | you know, the possibilities of what's going to be happening in the world next and just |
| 0:49.7 | kind of focusing on like the stuff that that's like my community right like my my family and |
| 0:54.8 | checking in with my friends and checking in with my my sisters and my parents and like there's just |
| 0:59.7 | like so many other places I can put my energy towards and they just like feel so much more |
| 1:03.0 | productive than absorbing the news at this point based on my reporting Drew's not alone in this. |
| 1:12.7 | I recently interviewed people who've been avoiding the news, |
| 1:15.6 | but also disconnecting from a lot of apps on their phones. |
| 1:20.2 | That decision to unplug from their phones has shown them the hold |
| 1:24.7 | that these beeps and interruptions have on our brains. |
| 1:28.5 | I'd had my daughter in 2015, and I noticed that I was spending a lot of late nights with her |
| 1:35.2 | where she would be looking up at me, and I was looking down at my phone. |
| 1:39.5 | This is Catherine Price. She's the author of the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone. |
| 1:45.5 | And I wanted to talk with Catherine about this because she's done all this research around how to create a better |
| 1:50.6 | relationship with your phone and all the apps it has. This work is inspired by her own experience |
... |
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