How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life QUOTES

1 " Every moment of attention we spend scrolling through social media is attention spent making money for someone else. The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 20414, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years' worth of attention on the site, every single day. It's attention that we didn't spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we've spent attention, we can never get it back.

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. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

2 " If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you'd likely end up with a smartphone. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

3 " In short, if ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to look at your phone. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

4 " Steve Jobs was right: smartphones really are different. They’re different in a lot of good ways, obviously. But smartphones also talk back at us. They nag us. They disturb us when we’re working. They demand our attention and reward us when we give it to them. Smartphones engage in disruptive behaviours that have traditionally been performed only by extremely annoying people. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

5 " Put this all together, and it makes sense that spending a lot of time on social media could be associated with depression and lower self-esteem. What doesn’t make sense is that we are deliberately choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

6 " Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship with it, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don’t. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

7 " The irony, of course, is that most people’s feeds do not accurately represent the proportion of their lives they actually spend skiing/surfing/sitting in hot tubs with models. Also, many people with enormous social media followings are actually paid to glamorize their lives. If someone’s existence looks too good to be true, it probably is. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

8 " Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.” I call them “the reason we date jerks. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

9 " I’d argue that we can take this even further: if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

10 " Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on the New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. —Aziz Ansari "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

11 " The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

12 " the fact that so many tech executives limit their own kids’ exposure suggests that they don’t think the benefits always outweigh the risks – to the point that they feel the need to protect their families from the devices that they create. It’s the Silicon Valley version of the drug dealer’s adage: “Never get high on your own supply. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

13 " Multiple studies have associated the heavy use of smartphones (especially when used for social media) with negative effects on neuroticism, self-esteem, impulsivity, empathy, self-identity, and self-image, as well as with sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

14 " I reached for my phone to soothe myself, but I often crossed the line from feeling soothed to going numb. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

15 " 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

16 " 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. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

17 " 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 "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

18 " 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. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

19 " 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. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

20 " 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. "

― Catherine Price , How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life