Off the hook—how to have a better relationship with your smart phoneOff the hook—how to have a better relationship with your smart phone
All In The Mind
How to renegotiate your relationship with your smart phone.
32:51•13 Aug 2017
Off the Hook: Rethinking Your Relationship with Your Smartphone
Episode Overview
- Smartphone use can run on the same trigger–behaviour–reward loop that underlies addictions like smoking and overeating.
- Intermittent rewards such as unpredictable likes, emails and messages amplify dopamine responses and keep people checking their phones.
- Bringing mindful attention to thoughts, bodily sensations and emotions during phone use helps reveal unconscious habits and mixed feelings.
- Meditation and attention training may reduce stress, improve memory and lead to less compulsive task-switching in busy digital environments.
- Personal changes (like a regular digital sabbath) matter, but wider cultural and workplace norms also need rethinking to support healthier tech use.
“Craving is this urge to do something. Like, I want. It's a need that really has this edginess to it. This drive that says, do this now.”
What drives someone to seek a calmer, saner relationship with their smartphone? This episode of All In The Mind looks at how our phones hook into the brain’s reward system and what you can do to loosen that grip. You’ll hear psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Judson Brewer explain how the brain’s ancient “trigger–behaviour–reward” loop, once used to help us remember where to find food, now gets hijacked by digital tech.
Stress becomes the trigger, checking your phone is the behaviour, and that tiny hit of relief or excitement is the reward. As Brewer puts it, “Craving is this urge to do something… this drive that says, do this now,” and modern apps are cleverly tuned to spark that urge over and over. Professor David Levy, a longtime technologist and author of *Mindful Tech*, brings a contrasting calm.
He talks about living in both the “fast world” of Silicon Valley and the “slow world” of calligraphy, meditation and reflection, and how he’s spent decades trying to reconcile the two. Levy points out that distracted living affects memory, learning and our ability to truly connect – think of families at dinner, each person glued to a different screen. Rather than saying phones are bad, the episode looks at how to become more conscious of their effects.
Levy shares his classroom “phone meditation” exercise, where students notice how their breath, posture and emotions change as they think about, hold, open and finally put away their phones. Many report anxiety, conflicting feelings or relief, and from there start to sketch their own guidelines for healthier use. The conversation also reaches beyond personal habits into workplace norms, tech industry design choices and ideas like a regular “digital sabbath”.
Levy admits he still gets caught in frantic multitasking, but he’s clear on his aim: “What I’m trying to do every day is to be intentional about my use and to continue to learn from it.” If your phone feels more like a boss than a tool, this episode might prompt you to ask: who’s really in charge here – you or the device?
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