The video addresses the prevalent issue of smartphone addiction, emphasizing how these devices, while connecting us to a wealth of knowledge and social interaction, also act as powerful distractors. The creator shares personal anecdotes of incessantly reaching for the phone during idle moments. The discussion progresses to practical solutions for this dependency.

To combat smartphone addiction, the host offers four practical steps. These include activating grayscale mode to make phones less visually stimulating, simplifying home screens to enhance focus, turning off most notifications to avoid distractions, and conducting an app audit to ensure the phone serves productivity rather than diversion. The host highlights how these steps help align smartphone use with personal goals without succumbing to mindless habit.

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. conjuring [ˈkʌn.dʒərɪŋ] - (verb) - Producing or creating something seemingly as if by magic. - Synonyms: (summoning, invoking, producing)

...like a wizard conjuring his wand, my phone magically manifests itself in the palm of my hand.

2. overstimulate [ˌoʊvərˈstɪmjuleɪt] - (verb) - To stimulate excessively, leading to possible loss of function. - Synonyms: (excite excessively, agitate, provoke)

Everything about it is designed to overstimulate our poor little brains into a state of frenzied consumption.

3. frenzied [ˈfrɛn.ziːd] - (adjective) - Wildly excited or uncontrolled. - Synonyms: (frantic, mad, hectic)

...designed to overstimulate our poor little brains into a state of frenzied consumption.

4. vortex [ˈvɔːr.tɛks] - (noun) - A situation regarded as drawing into its center all that is nearby, often suggestive of a powerful and destructive force. - Synonyms: (whirlpool, maelstrom, cyclone)

...you've been sucked into a digital vortex and you're scrolling fluffy cat videos on TikTok.

5. intention maintenance [ɪnˈtɛnʃən ˈmeɪntənəns] - (noun) - The act of preserving one's purposeful effort or aim over time. - Synonyms: (focus retention, purpose maintenance, goal alignment)

So this is a form of intention maintenance that I find critical for avoiding getting sucked into mindless activities.

6. consumption machine [kənˈsʌmpʃən məˈʃiːn] - (noun) - A tool or device that promotes consistent and often unnecessary use or intake of content or resources. - Synonyms: (utilization apparatus, usage device, intake gadget)

Whether that's scrolling endlessly on social media, playing Angry Birds until your fingers bleed, or watching a never ending parade of YouTube videos, your phone is a perpetual consumption machine

7. cortisol [ˈkɔːrtɪsɒl] - (noun) - A steroid hormone released in response to stress and low blood-glucose concentration. - Synonyms: (stress hormone, glucocorticoid, hydrocortisone)

I could literally feel my cortisol levels spike and my heart rate increase.

8. physiological [ˌfɪz.i.əˈlɒdʒ.ɪ.kəl] - (adjective) - Relating to the way in which a living organism or bodily part functions. - Synonyms: (bodily, physical, anatomical)

Research shows that you are having a physiological reaction when you see those notifications.

9. auditing [ˈɔːdɪtɪŋ] - (verb) - Conducting a systematic review or evaluation, often for adherence to prescribed standards or rules. - Synonyms: (reviewing, inspecting, evaluating)

Alright, so the fourth step in dumbing down your phone is to conduct an app audit.

10. endlessly [ˈɛndləsli] - (adverb) - In a way that seems to have no end or limit. - Synonyms: (infinitely, ceaselessly, perpetually)

Whether that's scrolling endlessly on social media, playing Angry Birds until your fingers bleed...

Your Phone Is Your Enemy

So I've got a problem. Actually, it's more like an addiction. See, the moment I'm even remotely bored, or have more than three seconds of uninterrupted time where the world isn't blasting my face with a constant stream of entertainment, well, in that simple moment of peace and quiet, somehow, some way, like a wizard conjuring his wand, my phone magically manifests itself in the palm of my hand. Now, the smartphone is an incredible tool. It connects us to the universe of knowledge, interaction, social connection, and potential productivity. That's actually, if you really stop to think about it, kind of hard to wrap your mind around. But this tool is far too smart for our own good. More often than not, I find that this tool is using me more than I'm using it. The smartphone is the single greatest weapon of mass distraction the world has ever seen. Everything about it is designed to overstimulate our poor little brains into a state of frenzied consumption. If you're anything like me, then you often just open your phone, thinking, I'm going to fire off a quick text, and the next thing you know, you've been sucked into a digital vortex and you're scrolling fluffy cat videos on TikTok. How the hell did I get here again?

If you're tired of playing the game of life on hard mode and you want to reclaim your focus so you can direct it with intention towards the things in life that would actually move you towards your goals, then it starts by dumbing down your smartphone. In this video I'm going to share with you, four simple steps to do just that. Now, creating a dumb phone for a smart life. It begins at the moment you unlock your phone. See, most people you know, they're met with a gorgeous background, a dozen notifications from their email, their text, their DMs, and a bunch of brightly colored apps all just begging to be open. Turning on your phone is a lot like stepping into a digital carnival. So the very first battle we have to win occurs at that moment of unlock.

Now, the easiest and possibly the most powerful way to transform how you use your phone is by simply turning on something called grayscale mode. Listen. Your phone, it produces a remarkably high resolution image that your brain simply did not evolve to experience in nature. This means that our brains light up like Christmas trees right alongside all of those pixels flashing across the screens. Now, on the one hand, this leads to an incredible viewing experience if you're watching a movie or you're playing a game. But here's the problem. We often get sucked into these movies or games without even realizing it. We might have just reached for our phone with the intention of doing some actual work, and the next thing you know, you're knee deep in Flappy Bird or whatever games the kids are playing these days. The reason this occurs is because your phone is blasting out high resolution images at you the moment you turn it on. This stimulates a dopamine response in your brain. And the one thing you need to know about your brain is that it is a fiend for dopamine. Once it gets that first taste, it will stop at nothing to get the next. And your brain doesn't care at all whether or not it's getting the good kind of dopamine that results from doing hard work, productive work, or if it's the cheap dopamine that you get from that sketchy guy on the corner slinging mindless TikToks.

Now, if you don't want to go chasing the dopamine white rabbit from app to app, the solution is quite simple. But I need to warn you first. See, I can almost guarantee your initial reaction will be one of resistance. You're not going to want to do this because just like a junkie, you know you want to get clean, but you also don't really want to give up the thing you're addicted to. So you're going to rationalize with yourself that you just need to figure out a way to use this drug more responsibly. That if you can just find balance, it's all going to be good. But I promise you, you will always be a slave to your phone if you are unwilling to change the things that enabled it to master you in the first place. And this first change is the most important. You need to put your phone into grayscale mode. The iPhone has a button in settings you can turn on for this, whereas on Android, there's a few more steps involved. But in short, all this does is it turns everything on your phone into black and white. And the reason this is so effective and why you're probably not going to want to do it is because it generally makes your phone less beautiful, less interesting to look at. And I get it. We spend thousands of dollars on our phones because they are so beautiful and you want to enjoy it. So here's my recommendation. Turn on grayscale so that it's your phone's default mode. Then if after a long day of work, you decide, you know what, I want to play some games, I want to watch a video, then you can go into your settings and you can turn it off, but this one extra step makes it less likely that you're going to unintentionally fall down the mindless consumption rabbit hole. Truly, of all the hacks I've experimented with over the years to try and change my relationship with my phone, none have been more powerful than grayscale. Because it is instantly makes my phone less interesting. Give it a shot for at least a week and then observe how much less time you spend on your phone. I think it's going to blow your mind.

Okay, now let's talk about the next step in dumbing down our phone at the moment of unlock. That is Home screen simplification. An interesting study called Interactions of Top down and Bottom Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex found that clearing clutter from our work environment resulted in increased focus and information processing, not to mention productivity. This supports the idea that a messy desk equals a messy mind. Now, full disclosure, I'm saying this as a person with severe ADH who believes in my heart of hearts that it's okay to use the entire floor of my office as a hamper and good luck ever convince me that I don't know exactly where something is amidst all the piles of papers and notebooks on my desk. But here's the simple truth. My heart of hearts is a distractible, unorganized idiot who cannot be trusted. In reality, my default organization system. It's not very good. One of the things that's helped me on my journey of turning ADHD into a superpower is the realization that I need to start building better organizational systems with more intention, and in particular, the system that I use for organizing my phone.

So my home screen used to be a hodgepodge of widgets and folders labeled with things like productivity, finance, health, social media, and utility. It was like my life's dashboard that enabled me to see everything at a glance, and I thought that somehow made me more productive and effective. But one thing that I started to notice was that I would open my phone intending only to check my email, but then something on the dashboard would catch my eye and down the rabbit hole I go. So I asked myself, is this more often helping me or distracting me? And I couldn't say for certain. So I ran an experiment. It started by figuring out what are the apps I use on a recurring daily basis. And as it turns out, there's really only nine apps that I use every single day. That's it. Those apps include email, calendar, maps, phone, calculator, clock, text messages, Internet browser, and notes. You'll notice these are all just pure utilities, nothing entertaining about any of them. So I put these nine apps into a single folder on my home screen and I moved every other app on my phone to a secondary page.

Now, when I turn on my phone, I only see two things on my home screen. The Latch app, which is what I use to get into my apartment, and a single folder which is home to those nine core apps. Now I can hear you saying, why bother with the folder? Why not just put those nine apps on the home screen? Well, for me, I found that I often just turn my phone on as a reflex to boredom. But when I land on a blank homepage, it's almost like a pattern interrupt that catches my attention and gives me a moment to stop and reflect on what I'm actually trying to accomplish in that moment. So this is a form of intention maintenance that I find critical for avoiding getting sucked into mindless activities. Now the interesting result of this little experiment is that I actually led to a significant decrease in screen time over the course of a two week period, which is crazy considering all I did was make the apps that I typically waste time on a little bit harder to access. That's a lot of benefit for only a slight tweak all told. But if you want to take it to that next level, you really want to turn your phone into a tool of productivity. The next step is to eliminate notifications.

So the other day I'm sitting down with my marketing manager and he casually leans over to show me something on his phone. Whatever it was he was trying to show me, however, it was completely lost as all I could see was was this little red notification bubble over his Gmail which said he had 4,315 unread emails. I kid you not, I could literally feel my cortisol levels spike and my heart rate increase. The amount of anxiety that I felt in that moment was quite astonishing actually. I told my marketing manager about the severe physiological response that I was experiencing and he just kind of shrugged it off with a laugh and he's like, oh yeah, you know what? I don't even notice that anymore. My response is bullshit. You might be numb to what's happening in your body, but research shows that you are having a physiological reaction when you see those notifications. And it's not a positive one. Those notifications create open cognitive loops, which is something we've talked about in previous videos. So I'm not going to go super deep into it here. If you want to learn more about them, you can check out this other video that'll pop up here on the screen in a second.

But here's the important takeaway. Ignoring notifications requires willpower and mental bandwidth. Most of the time these notifications aren't even important, which means we're leaking attention for something that doesn't even matter. The no brainer solution here is just to turn off all notifications on your phone. And I literally mean all notifications. Social media off, email off, text messages off. Missed calls off. Don't need them. Turn them off. Notifications are nothing more than the external world's attempt to make their agenda your distraction. Do not let the attention tourists win. Now, if you are going to keep notifications on your phone, at minimum, turn off push notifications by putting your phone into do not disturb mode when you're doing focused, deep work. But I'm telling you, you're really not going to miss much by turning off all the notifications on your phone. I promise.

Alright, so the fourth step in dumbing down your phone is to conduct an app audit. Now, this might be a controversial take, but I believe your phone should only be used as a tool in pursuit of your goals. It should not be used as a distraction and escape or as entertainment. You might disagree with that, and that's totally fine. But if you're not currently where you want to be in life and you have ambitious goals that you're striving for, then you will eventually have to face the harsh reality that you cannot consume your way to a life of fulfillment. It can only be created. And your phone, for better or worse, is primarily designed as a tool of consumption. Whether that's scrolling endlessly on social media, playing Angry Birds until your fingers bleed, or watching a never ending parade of YouTube videos, your phone is a perpetual consumption machine.

Breaking the cycle and taking control of your phone requires that you select the apps you use with intention. For myself, this means no games, no social media on my primary phone. For you, this might mean having these apps on your phone, but only allowing yourself the ability to access them at certain times of the day through parental locks, or by using something like the 1sec app, which makes distracting apps less appealing by making you wait for a certain period of time before the app will open. It's a really cool little app. Go check it out. Now, those delay apps, they're actually quite useful. I highly recommend them. But if you really want to optimize your phone usage, then the solution that's worked well for me is to surprisingly just have two phones. I have a social media phone and I have a primary phone. The primary phone is the one that I carry with me everywhere. I use it for texting, email navigation, note taking, and Google searches. My social media phone is exactly what it sounds like. It's just a $400 phone that has all my social apps on it.

Now, there are two things that make my social media phone especially useful. First, I rarely carry it with me when I go out into the world. Second, this phone doesn't have a data plan, which means that the only way I can use it is when it's connected to wifi or if I set up a mobile hotspot using my primary phone. This means that the only way I can really use this phone is with intention. I don't ever find myself standing in line at the coffee shop or stopped at a red light and then just reflexively reaching for my phone for a quick scroll. If I'm out for dinner, my partner goes to the bathroom, I'm not immediately reaching for my phone like some sort of social media junkie. And perhaps the way this phone has proven most useful in my life is that I never take it into the bedroom with me. So I don't find myself in bed scrolling at night before falling asleep or first thing upon waking. Truly, having a designated social media phone has been a game changer for not only my productivity, but overall for my ability to stay present in the moment. And that, honestly, is priceless.

Alright, so truly, the smartphone is an incredible invention. It's enabled us to do so many amazing, remarkable things. But my only hope in sharing these tips with you is that it gives you the ability to turn this into a tool that you're using more often than it's using you. Take these, implement them, give them a try, see if one works for you, and I'll see you in the next video.

TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION, INSPIRATION, SMARTPHONE ADDICTION, PRODUCTIVITY, DIGITAL WELL-BEING, ANTHONY VICINO