June 11, 2025 • 14 mins
What happens when you strip your smartphone of its “smart”?
In this Doctor’s Desk deep dive, Justin and Kylie unpack a groundbreaking new study showing what really happens when people block mobile internet on their smartphones. The results? Better focus. Improved wellbeing. Healthier screen habits. Drawing on the science, personal experience, and insights from Jonathan Haidt and game designers themselves, this episode offers a wake-up call—and a way forward—for families navigating digital overload.
KEY POINTS
- First-of-its-kind research:
A randomised controlled trial published in PNAS Nexus found that blocking mobile internet improved sustained attention, mental health, and subjective wellbeing. - 91% improved:
Nearly all participants in the study saw measurable gains by turning off mobile internet for just two weeks. - How behaviour changes:
People spent more time socialising, exercising, and being in nature—activities that are strongly linked to happiness and resilience. - Jonathan Haidt’s insight:
The greatest harm of screens isn’t just anxiety—it’s the destruction of attention and the erosion of childhood development. - Addiction by design:
Game developers and social media engineers want you and your kids to be addicted. Their business depends on it. - Not all screen time is equal:
Watching a movie with someone? Often fine. Scrolling alone on a touchscreen? Psychologically harmful.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE
“We are prisoners to our devices—and the smartest people on earth designed it that way.”
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Study: Blocking Mobile Internet on Smartphones Improves Sustained Attention, Mental Health, and Subjective Wellbeing (PNAS Nexus)
- The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt
- The Parenting Revolution – Dr Justin Coulson
- happyfamilies.com.au
- The Light Phone 3 (Justin’s personal attempt at going “dumb”)
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS
- Block Internet Access on Phones
Use settings or third-party tools to disable mobile internet on smartphones, especially for kids. - Switch to “Dumb Mode”
Calls and texts only. Move social and entertainment use to desktop computers to limit impulsive use. - Model Change Yourself
Consider your own phone use. Try a one-week mobile internet detox and note how your mind and mood change. - Prioritise Real-World Activity
Encourage (and plan for) more time in nature, exercise, and in-person connection. - Educate & Equip
Talk to your kids about how screens are designed. Teach them to spot manipulation—and reclaim their attention.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Of all the topics we discussed on the Happy Families podcast, Kylie,
which one would you say is probably taking more of
our time, focus and attention than any other screen?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Screen screens.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So today in our very special Doctor's Desk episode of
the Happy Families podcast, we're talking about a first of
its kind study, a brand new study published just recently
in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Science as
an Oxford academic journal, in the last couple of months
that grab my attention and it's fascinating and it just
impacts so heavily on everything we're doing in our families
(00:37):
when it comes to screens. Can't wait to talk to
you about this one. Hello, Welcome to the Happy Families podcast,
Real Parenting Solutions every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast.
We are Justin and Kylie Coulson. Kylie, let's crack on
straight away. This one caught my attention and I can
see that you're sitting on the edge of your chair,
riveted by what I'm about to say.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Please share.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Okay, So this was published, like I said, in p
and As Nexus, just a couple of months ago. The
title of the journal article is blocking mobile Internet on
smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well being.
So basically, here's what happens in their study. Researchers use
(01:21):
a mobile phone app to block all mobile Internet access
from participant smartphones for two weeks and then well, that
way they can track compliance, like are you using a
smartphone to access the Internet? No, because we've blocked it.
It's only a two week intervention. It's specifically targeting the
features of smartphones that make them smart. But they can
(01:44):
still use their mobile phone for texts and calls, and
they can still use non mobile internet, so they can
still use their desktop or their laptop to get work
done and even use social media if they want. And
here's what they find. After two weeks of not being
able to use your smart phone as a smartphone, but
just using it literally like a brick, like a dumb phone,
(02:05):
the intervention improved mental health, subjective well being, and objectively
measured ability to sustain attention. Ninety one percent of participants
improved on at least one of the outcomes. What they
found was that when this study was carried out, people
spent their time differently. When people didn't have access to
(02:27):
mobile Internet. On the smartphone, they spent more time socializing
in person, more time exercising, more time being in nature.
So basically causal evidence. All the research that we've got
is correlational. There are no randomized controlled trials. This is
the first one that I'm aware of causal evidence. Blocking
mobile internet improves psychological outcomes. And I think the broader
(02:51):
point is this, whilever we maintain the status quo, whilever
we continue to stay constantly connected to the Internet, it's
going to be detrimental to our time use, to our
cognitive functioning, to our ability to sustain attention, and most
important of all, to our well being.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
We experienced the positive impact of removing our phones from
our lives for a week when we went away recently,
and it's amazing just how much lighter we felt. Freedom
is the only word I had. I felt unshackled. I
felt this capacity to think for myself and to think
(03:27):
in a way that I don't usually think.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah. What stood out to me is that I didn't
notice it while we were going without, but when we
got back to it and we had access to it again,
that's when I noticed it.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
The bombard moves.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yep, Yeah, constantly curiously. In this particular study, what they
found was they had to look at how much smartphone
usage was happening. The intervention significantly reduced smartphone use. Average
screen time decreased in the intervention group from three hundred
and fourteen minutes at time one to one hundred and
sixty one minutes at time too, and then it rebounded
(04:01):
back to two hundred and sixty five minutes at time three,
Whereas for the other group, what they found was it
went from three hundred and thirty six minutes to just
three hundred and twenty two minutes, and then finally when
they got to do the intervention later, it dropped to
one hundred and ninety minutes. So fundamentally, when you don't
have access to the smart content, the smart functionality, you
(04:23):
just use the device a whole lot less and you
feel better about it. They've got data on psychological functioning
which changes as well. Like the word that you used,
you felt free, You felt freer. I don't know that
I've ever thought about it like this until the very
moment we're having this conversation. This wasn't planned, but in
(04:43):
some ways we are prisoners to our devices. They hold
as captive because.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Even as a mature aged adult who understands and knows
the implications of smartphones and what they can and do
do to us, get literally.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
After the break, we'll talk about how you can unhook
your kids and yourself from the barb that captures you
and holds you captive. Okay, Kylie, everybody knows about Jonathan Hate.
We've been talking about him on the podcast. Well it's
not because we've been talking about him, but we have
(05:22):
been talking about him. He's a global phenomenon. He wrote
The Anxious Generation, and he said this recently in an
interview with Ezra Kline on his podcast. Just want to
share this because it highlights just how important is that
we get this right, and also how much he actually
got something wrong in his book In.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
The Anxious Generation, I think I grossly underestimated the harm
that's happening because I focused on mental illness. But the
bigger damage, I think is the destruction of human attention
in millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids
around the world. When you talk to pre tech teachers,
they seem the kids are coming with language delays, social
problems because raised on iPads. So let me give a
(06:02):
suggestion to parents like you with your young kids. I
wish I'd understood this when my kids were young. Let's
distinguish between a pretty good use of screens and a
really really bad use of screens. So pretty good use
of screens is to put on a long movie like
ninety minutes more, you know, a long movie. They're going
to pay attention to a long movie about characters in
a moral universe. So there's issues of good and bad
(06:24):
and norms and betrayal, and it's part of their moral training,
their moral formation. And they're watching it with another person.
Now that can be you, ideally, but it's okay if
it's a sibling or a friend, because it's social. Here's
what's really really bad, iPad time by yourself, because that's
exactly the opposite. It's solitary. It's not stories. And if
(06:47):
they are stories, there are fifteen second stories that are
a moral or really immoral, really disgusting, degrading things and
terrible things, people doing terrible things to each others. And
then the other thing that I really want parents to
understand is that this is not TV. TV is a
good way of entertainment. TV puts out a story but
a touch screen is a behavioral behaviorist training device. A
(07:10):
touch screen, you get a stimulus, you make a response,
and then you get a reward which gives you a
little bit of dopamine, which makes you want to do
it again and again and again. So a touchscreen can
train your child the way a circus trainer can train
an animal. TV isn't like that. So iPad time iPhone
time for your three four five year old is just
not a good thing.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
This was the clip that I was telling you about
a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. Yeah, listening
to him, he's not saying we have to eradicate screens
from our lives. The reality is we live in a
world off screens and technology. We can't get away from it.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Well, I was going to pick him up on that
and say it would be better if you weren't watching
the screen at all, But he's choosing between the lesser
of two evils. His screen's there. Then ABC Kids, Bluey
a movie. That kind of thing is way better.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
And in some ways I think parents can kind of
just relax a little bit when it comes to this.
We've had so many conversations about you know, you can
only watch this much time each day on a screen,
but understanding and annoying. If I had to choose between
letting my kids scroll even for thirty minutes and just
you know, see TikTok videos or reels compared to spending
(08:18):
an hour watching a movie, that that's actually the better option.
It's not so much about a time thing. It's about
what they're doing with that.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Time central thing. That stood up to me when he
said I have grossly underestimated it.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, I actually wrote those words the impact, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And the screens are literally training our kids. They have
been set up by the world's smartest people who understand
neurology and neuroscience and how our brains work better than
anyone on the planet, and not just one or two people,
like thousands of people have sat down. They do so
much to capture our children. Recent conversations that I have
(08:55):
had with Brad Marshall, Doctor Brad Marshall, and also Withfessor
Wayne Warburton. Both of those conversations coming up on the
podcast in the next few weeks, highlight new data that
is indicating that problematic gaming is actually more harmful than
we always thought, and that our kids are being hooked
by these addiction machines. I want to read this quote
(09:16):
to you. This is something that I quoted in The
Parenting Revolution in my book The Pairing Revolution, from a
New York Times essay by a guy called William Sue.
Williams Sue is a former game developer and founder of
Storm eight. He's launched more than fifty mobile games. Collectively,
they've been download or over a billion times. He's also
generated more than a billion dollars in sales. So this
(09:37):
guy knows what he's talking about when he describes how
this all works, Kylie word perfect. This is his quote
out of the New York Times. I am very familiar
with game addiction, as that's what I thought about every
day for more than a decade. I hired product managers
and engineers to track everything players did and analyze their behavior.
Using the data we collected, we experimented with every feature
(10:00):
our games to see which versions allowed us to extract
the most time and money from our players. For us,
game addiction was by design. It meant success for our business.
And then he adds this compelling statement, that's the ultimate
goal to build habit forming games that have players coming
back every day. In other words, it takes away the
(10:23):
decision making. We wanted people to reach for their phones
first thing in the morning and jump right into our games,
just as they check their social media and emails. The
smartest people in the world are trying to literally addict
our children. And the same parts of the brain that
light up when you gamble or when you take drugs,
(10:44):
the same parts of your brain that light up when
you get onto social media or when you get onto
an online game. The most recent research that captured my
attention was participants were put into a relaxation state in
this study, sitting there, they're relaxing, they're breathing, and then
their mobile phone pings about six minutes into their relaxation,
(11:06):
just thing notification, text message. It's been sent by the experimenters.
It's just that the people didn't know that they were
going to get a text message. Their brain's being monitored.
It's an EEG. It's an electro and cephalogram and it
just measures brain waves and as soon as this text
message goes ding, their brain goes crazy. All the reward
surgery in the brain's like what is it? It's like this, Yes,
(11:30):
somebody's thinking of me. Somebody wants to talk to me.
It's so profoundly impactful, and it hits our kids. I
mean it hits all of our brains hard, but it
hits our kids' brains such a sensitive period in their development.
Let's go back to the study because we need to
wrap this up. We've talked for way too long, Kylie,
the randomized controlled trial. First of it's kind that I'm
(11:51):
aware of blocking all usage of the phone, all Internet
connected usage of the phone. It's just text messages and
telephone calls, and people are going, hmm, yeah, I'm happier.
I can sustain attention.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Where do I get this app?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, it's called a dumb phone? Like literally it's called
But how.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Hard is it to get a dumb phone these days?
Like it's almost non existent.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Mine's almost here. I've been waiting for so long. I've
ordered this thing called the light Phone three, and it's
going to be here in the next month, and then
we'll find out how viable it is to use one
if it works for me. Though, I can't wait. I
just can't wait.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Do they even print refordexes anymore?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
For those of you who are not familiar with the refidees,
it's also known as a UbD or a melwase. That's
the that's the map that you use to buy and read.
Do you reckon our kids? W know how to do that?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
No? Not in a billionaires.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Good luck doing this in your home. Here are our tips.
Minimize screen us, particularly minimize smart device access. If you
can reduce your Internet usage on your smart phone, you
can still use the Internet, just don't use it on
the phone, and you'll find that you usage you go down,
your physical activity will go up, your time in nature
will go up, and your socializing time will go up.
All of those things are associated with better outcomes for
(13:07):
you and for your family, and we think it'll make
your family flourish. I know we keep on hammering this point,
but I think that we're losing more human potential today
because of what we're doing with smartphones than at any
time in human history. It's just devastating. Here's my provocative
take for today. I know that there have been awful
war criminals that have created catastrophic damage and harm, and
(13:30):
so I'm mindful that what I'm about to say could
be taken the wrong way. I don't know if I'm
putting it to that level, but I reckon. We're pretty close.
I reckon people like Mark Zuckerberg and those who run
the biggest platforms and create these devices are responsible for
more human misery, suffering, misfortune, and unhappiness than almost anybody
(13:52):
who has ever walked the face.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Of the earth. Well, after that Debbie downer over comment,
I think I need to go watch if your Real
was just still lighted.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I still have some work to do, obviously. We will
link to the study in the show notes. Thanks so
much for listening. We are so glad that you love
the podcast and we hope that it makes you family happier.
The Happy Family podcast is produced by Justin Roland from
Bridge Media, and if you'd like more and feel about
making your family happier, please visit this at happy families
dot com dot au.
Of all the topics we discussed on the Happy Families podcast, Kylie,
which one would you say is probably taking more of
our time, focus and attention than any other screen?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Screen screens.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So today in our very special Doctor's Desk episode of
the Happy Families podcast, we're talking about a first of
its kind study, a brand new study published just recently
in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Science as
an Oxford academic journal, in the last couple of months
that grab my attention and it's fascinating and it just
impacts so heavily on everything we're doing in our families
(00:37):
when it comes to screens. Can't wait to talk to
you about this one. Hello, Welcome to the Happy Families podcast,
Real Parenting Solutions every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast.
We are Justin and Kylie Coulson. Kylie, let's crack on
straight away. This one caught my attention and I can
see that you're sitting on the edge of your chair,
riveted by what I'm about to say.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Please share.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Okay, So this was published, like I said, in p
and As Nexus, just a couple of months ago. The
title of the journal article is blocking mobile Internet on
smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well being.
So basically, here's what happens in their study. Researchers use
(01:21):
a mobile phone app to block all mobile Internet access
from participant smartphones for two weeks and then well, that
way they can track compliance, like are you using a
smartphone to access the Internet? No, because we've blocked it.
It's only a two week intervention. It's specifically targeting the
features of smartphones that make them smart. But they can
(01:44):
still use their mobile phone for texts and calls, and
they can still use non mobile internet, so they can
still use their desktop or their laptop to get work
done and even use social media if they want. And
here's what they find. After two weeks of not being
able to use your smart phone as a smartphone, but
just using it literally like a brick, like a dumb phone,
(02:05):
the intervention improved mental health, subjective well being, and objectively
measured ability to sustain attention. Ninety one percent of participants
improved on at least one of the outcomes. What they
found was that when this study was carried out, people
spent their time differently. When people didn't have access to
(02:27):
mobile Internet. On the smartphone, they spent more time socializing
in person, more time exercising, more time being in nature.
So basically causal evidence. All the research that we've got
is correlational. There are no randomized controlled trials. This is
the first one that I'm aware of causal evidence. Blocking
mobile internet improves psychological outcomes. And I think the broader
(02:51):
point is this, whilever we maintain the status quo, whilever
we continue to stay constantly connected to the Internet, it's
going to be detrimental to our time use, to our
cognitive functioning, to our ability to sustain attention, and most
important of all, to our well being.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
We experienced the positive impact of removing our phones from
our lives for a week when we went away recently,
and it's amazing just how much lighter we felt. Freedom
is the only word I had. I felt unshackled. I
felt this capacity to think for myself and to think
(03:27):
in a way that I don't usually think.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah. What stood out to me is that I didn't
notice it while we were going without, but when we
got back to it and we had access to it again,
that's when I noticed it.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
The bombard moves.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yep, Yeah, constantly curiously. In this particular study, what they
found was they had to look at how much smartphone
usage was happening. The intervention significantly reduced smartphone use. Average
screen time decreased in the intervention group from three hundred
and fourteen minutes at time one to one hundred and
sixty one minutes at time too, and then it rebounded
(04:01):
back to two hundred and sixty five minutes at time three,
Whereas for the other group, what they found was it
went from three hundred and thirty six minutes to just
three hundred and twenty two minutes, and then finally when
they got to do the intervention later, it dropped to
one hundred and ninety minutes. So fundamentally, when you don't
have access to the smart content, the smart functionality, you
(04:23):
just use the device a whole lot less and you
feel better about it. They've got data on psychological functioning
which changes as well. Like the word that you used,
you felt free, You felt freer. I don't know that
I've ever thought about it like this until the very
moment we're having this conversation. This wasn't planned, but in
(04:43):
some ways we are prisoners to our devices. They hold
as captive because.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Even as a mature aged adult who understands and knows
the implications of smartphones and what they can and do
do to us, get literally.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
After the break, we'll talk about how you can unhook
your kids and yourself from the barb that captures you
and holds you captive. Okay, Kylie, everybody knows about Jonathan Hate.
We've been talking about him on the podcast. Well it's
not because we've been talking about him, but we have
(05:22):
been talking about him. He's a global phenomenon. He wrote
The Anxious Generation, and he said this recently in an
interview with Ezra Kline on his podcast. Just want to
share this because it highlights just how important is that
we get this right, and also how much he actually
got something wrong in his book In.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
The Anxious Generation, I think I grossly underestimated the harm
that's happening because I focused on mental illness. But the
bigger damage, I think is the destruction of human attention
in millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids
around the world. When you talk to pre tech teachers,
they seem the kids are coming with language delays, social
problems because raised on iPads. So let me give a
(06:02):
suggestion to parents like you with your young kids. I
wish I'd understood this when my kids were young. Let's
distinguish between a pretty good use of screens and a
really really bad use of screens. So pretty good use
of screens is to put on a long movie like
ninety minutes more, you know, a long movie. They're going
to pay attention to a long movie about characters in
a moral universe. So there's issues of good and bad
(06:24):
and norms and betrayal, and it's part of their moral training,
their moral formation. And they're watching it with another person.
Now that can be you, ideally, but it's okay if
it's a sibling or a friend, because it's social. Here's
what's really really bad, iPad time by yourself, because that's
exactly the opposite. It's solitary. It's not stories. And if
(06:47):
they are stories, there are fifteen second stories that are
a moral or really immoral, really disgusting, degrading things and
terrible things, people doing terrible things to each others. And
then the other thing that I really want parents to
understand is that this is not TV. TV is a
good way of entertainment. TV puts out a story but
a touch screen is a behavioral behaviorist training device. A
(07:10):
touch screen, you get a stimulus, you make a response,
and then you get a reward which gives you a
little bit of dopamine, which makes you want to do
it again and again and again. So a touchscreen can
train your child the way a circus trainer can train
an animal. TV isn't like that. So iPad time iPhone
time for your three four five year old is just
not a good thing.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
This was the clip that I was telling you about
a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. Yeah, listening
to him, he's not saying we have to eradicate screens
from our lives. The reality is we live in a
world off screens and technology. We can't get away from it.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Well, I was going to pick him up on that
and say it would be better if you weren't watching
the screen at all, But he's choosing between the lesser
of two evils. His screen's there. Then ABC Kids, Bluey
a movie. That kind of thing is way better.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
And in some ways I think parents can kind of
just relax a little bit when it comes to this.
We've had so many conversations about you know, you can
only watch this much time each day on a screen,
but understanding and annoying. If I had to choose between
letting my kids scroll even for thirty minutes and just
you know, see TikTok videos or reels compared to spending
(08:18):
an hour watching a movie, that that's actually the better option.
It's not so much about a time thing. It's about
what they're doing with that.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Time central thing. That stood up to me when he
said I have grossly underestimated it.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, I actually wrote those words the impact, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And the screens are literally training our kids. They have
been set up by the world's smartest people who understand
neurology and neuroscience and how our brains work better than
anyone on the planet, and not just one or two people,
like thousands of people have sat down. They do so
much to capture our children. Recent conversations that I have
(08:55):
had with Brad Marshall, Doctor Brad Marshall, and also Withfessor
Wayne Warburton. Both of those conversations coming up on the
podcast in the next few weeks, highlight new data that
is indicating that problematic gaming is actually more harmful than
we always thought, and that our kids are being hooked
by these addiction machines. I want to read this quote
(09:16):
to you. This is something that I quoted in The
Parenting Revolution in my book The Pairing Revolution, from a
New York Times essay by a guy called William Sue.
Williams Sue is a former game developer and founder of
Storm eight. He's launched more than fifty mobile games. Collectively,
they've been download or over a billion times. He's also
generated more than a billion dollars in sales. So this
(09:37):
guy knows what he's talking about when he describes how
this all works, Kylie word perfect. This is his quote
out of the New York Times. I am very familiar
with game addiction, as that's what I thought about every
day for more than a decade. I hired product managers
and engineers to track everything players did and analyze their behavior.
Using the data we collected, we experimented with every feature
(10:00):
our games to see which versions allowed us to extract
the most time and money from our players. For us,
game addiction was by design. It meant success for our business.
And then he adds this compelling statement, that's the ultimate
goal to build habit forming games that have players coming
back every day. In other words, it takes away the
(10:23):
decision making. We wanted people to reach for their phones
first thing in the morning and jump right into our games,
just as they check their social media and emails. The
smartest people in the world are trying to literally addict
our children. And the same parts of the brain that
light up when you gamble or when you take drugs,
(10:44):
the same parts of your brain that light up when
you get onto social media or when you get onto
an online game. The most recent research that captured my
attention was participants were put into a relaxation state in
this study, sitting there, they're relaxing, they're breathing, and then
their mobile phone pings about six minutes into their relaxation,
(11:06):
just thing notification, text message. It's been sent by the experimenters.
It's just that the people didn't know that they were
going to get a text message. Their brain's being monitored.
It's an EEG. It's an electro and cephalogram and it
just measures brain waves and as soon as this text
message goes ding, their brain goes crazy. All the reward
surgery in the brain's like what is it? It's like this, Yes,
(11:30):
somebody's thinking of me. Somebody wants to talk to me.
It's so profoundly impactful, and it hits our kids. I
mean it hits all of our brains hard, but it
hits our kids' brains such a sensitive period in their development.
Let's go back to the study because we need to
wrap this up. We've talked for way too long, Kylie,
the randomized controlled trial. First of it's kind that I'm
(11:51):
aware of blocking all usage of the phone, all Internet
connected usage of the phone. It's just text messages and
telephone calls, and people are going, hmm, yeah, I'm happier.
I can sustain attention.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Where do I get this app?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, it's called a dumb phone? Like literally it's called
But how.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Hard is it to get a dumb phone these days?
Like it's almost non existent.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Mine's almost here. I've been waiting for so long. I've
ordered this thing called the light Phone three, and it's
going to be here in the next month, and then
we'll find out how viable it is to use one
if it works for me. Though, I can't wait. I
just can't wait.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Do they even print refordexes anymore?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
For those of you who are not familiar with the refidees,
it's also known as a UbD or a melwase. That's
the that's the map that you use to buy and read.
Do you reckon our kids? W know how to do that?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
No? Not in a billionaires.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Good luck doing this in your home. Here are our tips.
Minimize screen us, particularly minimize smart device access. If you
can reduce your Internet usage on your smart phone, you
can still use the Internet, just don't use it on
the phone, and you'll find that you usage you go down,
your physical activity will go up, your time in nature
will go up, and your socializing time will go up.
All of those things are associated with better outcomes for
(13:07):
you and for your family, and we think it'll make
your family flourish. I know we keep on hammering this point,
but I think that we're losing more human potential today
because of what we're doing with smartphones than at any
time in human history. It's just devastating. Here's my provocative
take for today. I know that there have been awful
war criminals that have created catastrophic damage and harm, and
(13:30):
so I'm mindful that what I'm about to say could
be taken the wrong way. I don't know if I'm
putting it to that level, but I reckon. We're pretty close.
I reckon people like Mark Zuckerberg and those who run
the biggest platforms and create these devices are responsible for
more human misery, suffering, misfortune, and unhappiness than almost anybody
(13:52):
who has ever walked the face.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Of the earth. Well, after that Debbie downer over comment,
I think I need to go watch if your Real
was just still lighted.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I still have some work to do, obviously. We will
link to the study in the show notes. Thanks so
much for listening. We are so glad that you love
the podcast and we hope that it makes you family happier.
The Happy Family podcast is produced by Justin Roland from
Bridge Media, and if you'd like more and feel about
making your family happier, please visit this at happy families
dot com dot au.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.