📴👹Overcoming Phone Addiction: Unlocking Productivity and Mental Clarity by Beating Your Phone Monster.

TUNE IN TO LEARN:

Ever wondered how much your phone is actually costing you in terms of productivity and mental clarity?

Join me, Angela Shurina, your Brain's Coach, as I share my eye-opening journey of battling phone addiction and the transformative impact of my three-hour rule.

Discover the science behind the addictive nature of our devices, and how a simple rule has unlocked new levels of focus and creativity. From immediate improvements in relaxation to a significant reduction in anxiety, you’ll hear firsthand how this strategy can change your daily life.

But it doesn’t stop there.

"BRAIN DRAIN STUDY"

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of your Brains Coach podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your Brains Coach and, as you learned today, your Brains Guardian against Phone Monster. Here on Brains Coach podcast, I'm excited to bring to you, share with you, all the fascinating curiosities from different branches of performance scientists, from health to mindset, training to productivity and getting things done, getting the right things done and getting them done better. All of this on this podcast. And I'm learning as I go, just as you do, folks. Just yesterday I was doing organizing of all my processes, from my workflow to my nutrition routine, to how I structure and organize my work with clients, my content creation, my learnings. I either created the structure or put time on my calendar. So I get back to that and work on that. Because sometimes folks let's face it, folks, let's face it doing organizing projects might be a bit or a lot overwhelming, because just too much stuff and we already are short on time. But guess what, you don't have to do it in one go. You can spread it out, schedule it and then come back to that with ready to attack mind and time on your calendar without rush, so you could get through this, one step at a time, creating more flowy and streamlined life experience. But anyhow, today, folks, I'm going to be sharing with you what I went through yesterday.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Today, folks, I'm going to be sharing with you what I went through yesterday. I was working on organizing my workflow and I realized that, heck, I think I'm just like everyone else, addicted to my phone. When I see it, I'm going to use it. I'm going to check my WhatsApp messages if there are any missed calls, I'm going to check my bank account, my reading app, and none of that. Let's face it, most of the time is urgent. You could be checking in now, or three to six hours from now, and guess what? It's all going to be okay, but you spend, you waste five, at least five minutes For me it's always like 10 minutes, sometimes more looking through all this stuff and then you forget what you were doing in the first place and you lose that creative flow. Oh, my phone just fell, but fear not, I was too enthusiastic, we're going to continue and I realized how much time, and also how many ideas, I could be wasting, how much productivity is wasted all the time. And then again, my mind is in a completely different space, I'm thinking about these messages or the things and I forget what I was working on to a degree, and then it takes time to get back into focus and the more you see your phone. Well, folks, let's first get back to what we were talking about on our last podcast.

Speaker 1: 3:43

Habit or behavior, is a function of a person in any given environment. Habit behavior any action has this cycle Trigger something, you see something, you hear something, you feel, so trigger action and followed by a reward or some sort of outcome. And when the outcome is rewarding, like for example, when you see a phone, you use it, you get some dopamine because you maybe learned something or you connected with someone, for whichever reason was it productive or not, it's another story, but you get the reward. Especially the newness is the reward of itself for your brain and that's why this behavior and also the ease of it picking up our phone, checking it, getting those reports, those micro, sometimes macro dopamine hits and you get a habit that is solid. So every time you see your phone, every time I see my phone, I want to pick it up and more often than not I do. Even if it's for two or three minutes, it still steals my attention from all the other things that I were doing before and I sat down with myself and, like Angela, this is not working. Let's be honest with ourselves, let's face it, this is not working and I decided to go back to my three-hour rule that I used to have.

Speaker 1: 5:08

When the rule goes like this, my phone lives outside of my workroom, in the kitchen, in the living room, whatever it fits, wherever I was at the moment, whatever it was a good place outside of my room. So I don't see it at all. Or sometimes it lives somewhere in the wardrobe, so I just don't see it and very often I would forget where it was. So it lives outside of my working area, out of sight, out of mind. It's in the airplane mode, so there are no notification, nothing is coming through, and I pick it up every three hours to check on things. So I'm not that anxious that I might be missing on something. Maybe a client wants to connect with me and say that let's reschedule something, et cetera. So I decided to get back to that rule. Three hours again is enough time for me to make sure that I'm not missing anything urgent or essential, and it allows me to have peace of mind and be in that state of flow for the next three hours and get a lot more done. And so I decided to introduce it right then and there, and yesterday was my first day getting back to that rule.

Speaker 1: 6:23

And what do you think happened? Three things happened, actually. Let me share them with you and you might notice. Exactly the same thing, and it also happened to quite a few of my clients who I recommended to try this as a challenge for a week. So what happened? Three things that happened. I felt more present and more relaxed. Like you know, you are present. For the moment, you're not trying to check something. Your mind can wander, can go into the dreamland and really think about what you're working on, instead of checking your phone in those micro moments of rest. So I'm present, I'm relaxed, I'm not feeling like I'm missing out. I don't have this formal anxiety.

Speaker 1: 7:06

Number two I felt way less cognitive overload and fatigue, probably because my brain actually had those micro moments of rest here and there, when I allowed my brain to wander, instead of again being glued with my eyes to my screen and thinking about all of the conversations and things happening how am I going to tackle this or that or this happening. So I allowed my brain to rest. A lot less cognitive overload and, plus, a lot less different processes and thought patterns. All of this this interrupts the thing that I was working on with this additional information that my brain, of course, had to process. So way less feeling of cognitive overload and cognitive fatigue, less, a lot more less scattered attention. That still goes to the point number two less cognitive overload, less scattered attention. And number three I've gotten a lot more things done, much faster and better. It's like I plan two hours and then I'm done in an hour. I'm like, oh, that was fast and that was because my brain stayed on one task uninterrupted in the flow.

Speaker 1: 8:25

There is a power in being a unitasker, not a multitasker. Your brain gets a lot more efficient and effective with handling any task at hand. So those three things happened More present and relaxed, less cognitive overload and getting things done much better, much faster and I'm here to argue much of better quality. Even writing this newsletter that I'm writing every day, by the way, and you can subscribe by following the link in the show notes One newsletter a day that your best will thank you for. Even writing this short newsletter got a lot more creative.

Speaker 1: 9:07

So my challenge to you this week, just like to myself, take a week and check your phone, not whenever you see it, but set yourself a time period that makes sense for you and folks. If you feel scary, terrified and anxious just by thinking about turning your phone well, not turning it off, but putting it, for example, in the airplane mode and putting it away and being unreachable, if you already feel anxious and terrified, realize that is normal, but also realize that for most of you out there, completely unjustifiable, meaning there is no excuse. But your feelings are totally valid. We all are addicted to this constant stream of social interactions and information, and when we remove that, plus all the thoughts that are going to be flooding you additionally something that you might have been hiding from, but that's for another story. So your feelings of discomfort are completely valid, but, again, completely unjustifiable, and there is no excuse why you cannot try this. Well, there are some cases and excuses, but that's not the case for majority of people all of the time.

Speaker 1: 10:30

So I'm inviting you, just like I'm inviting myself, to take this challenge and set the rule for your phone usage and put this phone away out of sight, out of mind. And why is that important? Fun fact, fun study out of University of Chicago. The study's title goes like this Brain Drain the mere presence of one's phone, smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. And the thing they did in the study they make people do cognitive tests and cognitive tasks with their phone present on their desks a little bit away, like in their back, a little bit away, and then completely out of sight, out of mind, somewhere in the other room. And people's performance on cognitive tasks improved as the phone was placed further and further away. So the link to the study, if you want to dig into that, is in the show notes Brain Drain Study that's the title for short.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Check it out and take the challenge. And take the challenge. Think about the way you're going to use. You're going to limit your phone this week, put it away without notifications, figure out a system there's always a way to do that and then test how many more things you get done, what's the quality of that? And also, how much anxiety do you feel? Overload, fatigue, how's your creativity going? Just check on those parameters. You'll be pleasantly surprised. I have zero doubts about that. So take the challenge.

Speaker 1: 12:26

Stay tuned for more episodes of your Brain's Coach podcast this week. Check out the study in the show notes and, folks, don't forget to share this podcast episode if you find it valuable and please do share. We don't run any ads and we want to help. I myself personally want to help as many superheroes as possible to come out of their shell, to bring their greatness into the world and build awesome things, living an extraordinary life experience. So let's help each other out, share this podcast, help me share and reach more people. Take the challenge and I'll talk to you very soon. Have an awesome, extraordinary fun, free or close to that week.