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21 " there is nothing wrong with spending your attention on social media (or on any other app). There is also nothing wrong with a designer trying to make an app that’s fun, engaging, and profitable. But as users, we should be using our apps because we’ve made a conscious choice to do so—not because of manipulative psychological tricks that are meant to make money for someone else. "
― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life
22 " Imagine how difficult it would be to doze off if all of the people you follow on social media were in the room with you, the television was blaring in the background, and several friends were having a political debate. That’s essentially what you’re doing when you bring your phone into bed with you. "
23 " The more you practice being mindful, the more it becomes obvious that your brain has a mind of its own. (I like to think of my mind as a good friend who also happens to be totally crazy.) The moment you recognize that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your life "
24 " BPA has become controversial in recent years in part because of its potential effects on gene expression, "
― Catherine Price , Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest For Nutritional Perfection
25 " Schlitz Sunshine Vitamin D Beer was launched in 1936 with the tagline “Beer is good for you . . . but SCHLITZ, with Sunshine Vitamin D, is extra good for you. "
26 " Oh, and if you’re thinking that this obviously does not apply to you, keep in mind that the more sleep-deprived people are, the more vigorously they may insist that they are not—possibly because their ability to judge their own mental state has been impaired. "
27 " We called the ritual a “digital Sabbath,” and by the second or third time we’d done it, we’d settled into a rhythm and worked out the kinks. "
28 " ONE OF THE MOST COMMON defenses of phones is the idea that they’re making us better at multitasking and, in so doing, more efficient. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. There’s actually no such thing as multitasking (that is, simultaneously processing two or more attention-demanding tasks), because our brains can’t do two cognitively demanding things at once.* When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching.” Like cars making sharp turns, our brains need to slow down and switch gears every time we stop thinking about one thing and engage with another—a process that has been estimated to take twenty-five minutes every time you do it. "
29 " Today, we’re going to start practicing something that’s simultaneously simple and hard: being still. We tend to think of stillness as being synonymous with boredom, and it’s true that we often use both words to describe the same state of mind. But while the word boredom carries with it an element of feeling trapped, stillness offers an opportunity for peace. As Pema Chödrön writes in her book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “If we immediately entertain ourselves by talking, by acting, by thinking—if there’s never any pause—we will never be able to relax. We will always be speeding through our lives. "
30 " Mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly”—including ourselves. "
31 " We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch of [our cravings]. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives. —Pema Chödrön "
32 " The closer we pay attention to the options we’re given,” he writes, “the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs. "
33 " And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back. "
34 " When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives. "
35 " Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. —John Lanchester "
36 " Perhaps this is part of the reason that Jobs—the man who introduced the iPhone—restricted his own children’s access to his company’s products. "
37 " The point is that many of the same feel-good brain chemicals and reward loops that drive addictions are also released and activated when we check our phones. "
38 " HOW TO UNLIKE “LIKES” If you find yourself obsessed with amassing likes, you may want to install a Facebook demetricator browser plug-in – it removes all the “scores” from Facebook so that instead of saying “57 people liked your post”, it will simply say, “People like this”. See if this makes a difference. Then ask yourself why Facebook itself doesn’t provide this option. "
39 " The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. "
40 " This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives. "