Tech Addiction: An Interview with Catherine Price

March 19, 2019

This week we're featuring an interview with science journalist Catherine Price, whose new book How to Break Up with Your Phone offers a highly practical synthesis of recent research on tech addiction. In the second half of the book, Price provides a complete 30-day plan for restoring a sense of balance and autonomy with our devices. Check out her New York Times article here and buy the book here.

Psych of Tech Institute: The book's dedication contains a paraphrase of William James: "You are what you pay attention to." Could you speak a bit about what that means to you, especially in the context of technology?

Catherine Price: I think that we often turn to our phones mindlessly without having any awareness of what we're doing, and fail to recognize that when we spend our attention on our phones, we're never going to be able to get it back. What I came to realize as I was writing the book and thinking about this is that really our attention is our most precious resource, even more so than time. Because we can spend time with someone, but if we're both on our devices, then it didn't really count as time together. What really matters is paying attention.

PTI: Relatedly, mindfulness practices figure heavily into the book. How do you think mindfulness can help with the problem of tech addiction?

CP: I'm a science journalist by training, and I have also done a lot of writing about mindfulness and practicing mindfulness myself. My husband and I did a mindfulness-based stress reduction course about seven or eight years ago. Before that, I had written articles about meditation and gotten a chance to interview Jon Kabat-Zinn and some other people in the meditation community, and then I wrote a guided mindfulness journal. I kind of had that in the back of my mind.

I think what's really neat about it is that, if you start practicing mindfulness with your phone, you can turn your phone from this temptation into a real tool for mindfulness in the sense that we have our phones with us all the time, most people sleep with them next to their beds, we have them in our pockets, we have them in our purses, we have them on our desks. They're always there, so if you can condition yourself to associate your phone with checking in with yourself about your current moment, you actually can transform your phone into something extremely useful in other areas of your life, too, because every time you reach for your phone, and you recognize what you're doing, you're giving yourself an opportunity to ask a broader question of what you're doing in the moment and whether it's really what you want to be doing. Does that answer your question?

PTI: Yeah.

CP: I also like the idea that it's not judgmental. There's no right answer to the question. It's really just about, okay, we're paying attention. The inspiration scientifically for that approach  -- I guess it was a variety of sources -- but one of them was the work of Judson Brewer, who at that point was at University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. He's now at Brown, and he did these really interesting studies with smokers, as I wrote in the book, where he compared a mindfulness approach with the American Lung Association's gold standard Freedom to Quit program. He had smokers just pay attention to how they felt when they were smoking cigarettes, what a craving felt like, what it felt like to not give into the craving, how long it would last, pay attention to the taste of the cigarette, the smell, all of these emotional and mental and sensory details.

That was really the crux of his program, and it turned out that just that actively learning to pay more attention to their actions around cigarettes helped people quit at twice the rate of the American Lung Association's program. When he did a follow-up, they had sustained that at five times the rate of the American Lung Association's program. If you think about nicotine as being one of the hardest addictions to quit, a true chemical addiction, I think that speaks to how effective this can be with something like our phones.

PTI: Many of these apps seem deliberately engineered to inhibit that kind of awareness.

CP: Yeah, for most apps -- particularly advertising-based apps such as social media, email, the news, dating, games -- they are making their money off of us spending time on the apps, so mindfulness and mindful use of your time is the exact opposite of what they want us to do. It's counter to their business model. Their incentives are to get us to be mindless, because if you're mindless, then you won't notice how much time you're spending on the app, and they'll make more money.

It's the very same design techniques that are used in casinos and with slot machines in particular, to keep you glued to your phone. These problematic apps are deliberately designed without what are called stopping cues, which are things that make you slow down and have to make a decision to continue. If you're, for example, at a casino, you'll notice, or maybe you won't notice, that there are no clocks and there are no windows, and that's deliberate, because they don't want to have any stopping cue of you recognizing that "oh, my goodness, it's two in the morning. I've been sitting here for eight hours." They don't want that to happen. They want you to lose track of time. The same thing is true on phones when you have an endless social media feed, or if you're on a dating site, you can endlessly swipe. That's very deliberate, because that way, you're going to lose track of time, and they'll be able to maximize what they call "engagement" on their site or their app. Engagement on an app is the opposite of what we would probably call engagement in real life.

PTI: Another thing you mention in the book is that the habits of distraction we build on our phones may be limiting our capacity for deep and creative thought. 

CP: The reason for that is that our phones are constantly with us, and they're constantly putting us on intake mode. We're responding to things on our phone. We're fending off emails, we're reading news stories, it's just intake all the time. Anyone who has ever had an insight in the shower or while they're out on a walk or anything like that knows that often your best thoughts and best ideas come when you're sort of engaged with something mindless, that doesn't require much thought, and you free up some space in your brain to let your brain draw connections.

If you think about creativity as the ability to make connections between seemingly disconnected things, that requires you to have a lot of things to draw connections from to begin with, which is another way of saying you have to have a lot of long-term memories. One fascinating thing about long-term memories is that they actually require the creation of new proteins in your brain, and this process is easily interrupted by distraction.

PTI: What steps would you like to see researchers take toward mitigating tech addiction?

CP: I'd suggest studying mindfulness as an intervention -- and not just in a self-perceived way, but actually in terms of changes in the structure/function of their brains. I would also love to see more studies done that actually measure the physiological effects of constant connectivity -- e.g., the effects that different degrees of phone usage have on cortisol levels, measuring stress hormone levels in response to notifications/forced separation, measuring what changes occur hormonally when people take 24-48 hour breaks from their devices, etc. 

With that said, I think that we focus too much on getting "hard" data for what is a "soft" problem (or, rather, we're viewing this quantitatively rather than qualitatively). If you are trying to determine if your phone usage is affecting you negatively, the first -- and I'd argue most important -- question to ask is simply "Do you feel like you're being negatively affected by your phone?" If the answer is yes, then you don't need a brain scan or an NIH-funded study. You've answered your own question. And the intervention (spending less time on your phone/replacing phone time with something meaningful to you) has basically no side effects -- so what's the harm in just trying it?

This interview has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.