June 23, 2025 • 15 mins
Is your smart phone a useful tool, or a colossal waste of time? What does long term freedom from your phone really look like—and is it sustainable for people with… you know… jobs? Based on his experience of a year’s sabbatical from his smart phone, Richard Simon is author of UNPLUG: How to Break Up with Your Phone and Reclaim Your Life. Richard Simon directs the website strategy at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., and is a former reporter and webmaster at Baltimore’s The Daily Record.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to get connected. Thanks for listening. Your smartphone, I
would bet it is right next to you, I would
bet it is on The average American spends about five
hours a day on their smartphone. But how much of
that time is it a useful tool? And how much
of that time is your phone just a colossal waste
of time? If you are ready to reset your relationship
to your phone, this is the conversation for you with
(00:34):
Richard Simon, author of Unplug, How to break up with
your phone and reclaim your life. Richard Simon, thank you
for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Well, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Richard Simon directs the website strategy at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC.
He's a former reporter and webmaster at Baltimore's Daily Record.
So you're not a luddite, you work in this field,
you're not anti tech. But what was your relationship, Richard,
to your smartphone that made you want to try a
year of detox?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, it was straining so many facets of my life
as a father at the time of two young kids
in twenty nineteen. I just felt like I was in
a constant state of distraction with them, and take them
out to the zoo, take them out to the aquarium,
and I felt like I was half present and half not.
And the same thing with my wife. It was impacting
the relationship I had with her. I wasn't focusing as
(01:20):
deeply on work task as I'd like to, and more
than anything else, I wasn't finding the time to really
invest in myself. Average Americans spends more than five hours
a day on their smartphone. It's like seventy five days
in a full year, and I certainly was no exception
to that, and I felt like I was really losing
out on time.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
For this book, you talk about your own experiences, and
you profiled professionals who include a school principal, a software engineer,
a chess grand master, major League Baseball player, really smart people.
You start the book, however, with a brief reference that
I think was really interesting. It was to referencing the
digital d talks of Robert Hassan. He's a university professor
of media and communications in Australia who thought he would
(01:59):
be immune to the distractions of screen time. Even people
who know better are not immune to it because it's
designed for us not to be immune to it exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, Robert Hassan's a great example of someone who literally
he has studied the meaning of time. He's a communications
faculty member, and he realized that he was losing out
on time and he knew that. Yeah, he wasn't immune
to it either. And yet it's really really remarkable how
it doesn't matter matter whether you're an on call anesthesiologists
one of the top research hospitals in the country, you're
(02:31):
a social media marketer, a law partner, a software engineer.
I found this with all these people that I profiled
and got the chance to interview. It doesn't matter what
kind of walk of life you're in. It doesn't matter.
It impacts everyone.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I think so many people feel like there's a way
to get into this and kind of put your toe
in the water. These ideas to chip away at your
screen time with hacks, apps that make you wait a
certain amount of time before you can go on Instagram,
or you put it on airplane, or like you you
were practicing digital sabbaths. We talked about this with cal Newport,
who I know you mentioned in the book for Digital
Minimalism where you turn it off from say, sundown Friday
(03:06):
to sundown Saturday. Why didn't that hack work for you?
And why don't hacks in general work?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, because the cell phone and the smartphone is just
far too addictive. In terms of the digital sabbath, it's
incredibly noble. The leading social media applications totally noble. All
these shortcuts, these hacks. They are wonderful, but they're not
grounded in science, and certainly in my case. You know,
I observe the sabbath. I turn off all technology from
Friday night to Saturday night, and it's like telling a
(03:34):
cigarette addict to not smoke one day a week. That's
really a nice, nice thing, to not smoke one day
a week, But what's going to happen the other six days?
And I think that's what ultimately ends up happening for
people who practice digital sabbaths. It's a beautiful thing, but
ultimately you're going to get right back to all the
bad habits you had once you've turned back on your devices.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
One thing I thought was really interesting about your book
is you talk about because it's addictive there will be withdrawal,
and so cold turkey is a challenge. So like getting
ready for any sort of process of cutting something off,
in a sense, you need to be prepared. What can
you say about preparing for a detox?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, I have whole sectional preparation in the book, and
I'm glad you brought it up, because you really can't
detox quickly, the kind of thing where if you're listening
to this right now, the next day you're going to
the AT and T store and switching over to let's say,
a basic phone. It's not as easy as that. It's
really really important that you prepare. And the two things
(04:34):
I'll point out just for the sake of this conversation
is one, establish a support group. It's really really important
to get whether it be family members, friends, colleagues on
board before you embark on something like this. And then
two is is that what you're going to find is
that you're going to have hours of free time that
(04:54):
you didn't have before. So what are you going to
do at that time? And what I recommend is that
people get an actual phys school piece of paper and
they write down key categories, key values in their life,
whether it's community, whether it's professional, whether it's athletics, charity,
whatever it might be. And then within each one of
those categories, write down what you want to invest in.
(05:15):
I could be going to church twice a week, that
could be reading a book for thirty minutes every evening.
You're gonna want to find ways to fill in that time.
And when you put that up on your fridge, you
then have your menu. You go right to your menu
if you feel like there's any time you want to
fill and there's going to be plenty of it.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
There's so many different ways to look at that. You
note in the book, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of
the telephone, purposefully did not have a telephone in his
own study because even when it was just the telephone,
he recognized it was a tool but also a distraction.
It robbed him of his focus. And I don't know
what they called it then, but that idea of deep work.
Can you talk about the potential benefits of deep work?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Yeah, it's I'm glad you brought that one up too,
because that's fascinating. The phone in literally its most innacent form,
and Alexander Graham Bell wanted nothing to do with it
when he was in a study. He said, no, no
calls at the house. And this is like in the
in the eighteen hundreds, how wild deep work is really
is really essential. You know, we have gotten into a
(06:18):
system where between our smartphones and email where ultimately you
look at what you did over the course of the
day and it's just meetings and emails, and we're not
spending the time that we need to focus deeply on
tasks uninterrupted. And that's really where our value is as
workers is ultimately focusing deeply and not being distracted. So
(06:42):
when you remove a smartphone from your environment, that's will
end up happening even just a meeting if you are
in person and you're not virtual anymore. If you are
in person and you're in a meeting and you have
your smartphone with you, your attention is not going to
be there. Being able to focus deeply distracted is so
critical for career capital.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Our guest is Richard Simon, author of Unplug, How to
Break up with your Phone and reclaim your life. You're
listening to Get Connected on one six point seven light
FM im Mina del Rio. The fear for many of us,
of course, on the flip side, is that you know
you need your phone for work. I'll fall behind, I'll
be out of a loop, I'll be unavailable. Can you
talk about the option of using a basic phone a
(07:25):
flip phone, how do they balance that?
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Sure? Absolutely, So I'll break it into two pieces. So
one is I go through four different breakup styles in
the book, and one of them is to simplify your phone,
and basically you're going to switch from your smartphone to
a basic phone. And for the sake of the Detox,
I recommend sixty days of having your smartphone off. The
reason why I say sixty days is going to take
for some people a few days, for other people two
(07:49):
to three weeks in terms of withdrawal symptoms and getting
through that. A basic phone, I recommend for the Detox
being as basic as possible. We're talking TCL flip or
getting an ALCATL flip phone. These things are very cheap.
You get to know kiaphone, it's very cheap from Best Buy,
and those phones basically just have calling and texting, and
that's really going to reduce your screen time dramatically. So
(08:13):
I think for listeners who are tuning in, I think
that this will be like a really appealing option and
might be the easiest out of the four breakup styles.
Four breakup styles that I mentioned.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, in the book, you do have models of a
few basic phones that consistently came up in your conversation
with the interviews you conducted. Some have Internet and email,
some don't. Notably, again, they are supremely inexpensive when compared
to a smartphone. So that's the good news. But my
question is, were there moments for you in your detox
here or for others you spoke with who were burned
for not having a smartphone? And what was your takeaway
(08:48):
from that or the takeaway from others who had it
happened to them?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So interesting? I asked every person that I interviewed did
they ever get burnt? And each time someone would share
something with me, just for me objectively, I was like,
that is just such a small thing. So I interview
in profile lead off the book with right fielder for
the Philadelphia Phillies, Nick Costianos, and I asked Nick he
had his phone off for the entire twenty twenty one season.
I asked him, I said, did you ever get burnt?
(09:14):
So we thought and thought and thought, and then finally
he said, all right, I have one, he said. He
was at it on the road at a hotel. They
just finished a night game and it was midnight. He
got back to the hotel late and he was really hungry,
and he realized he couldn't uber eat anything. He said,
you know what, I'm just gonna this is a great
(09:34):
time for me to practice being hungry. And I told Nick,
I said, wait, that's it over the course of the
entire year, Like, that's the one memory you have for
being burnt. He's like, yeah, I think that's the only one.
And that's as the bat, we're so worried about just
even being off of our phones for two minutes, let
alone sixty days, and for Nick a whole season, for
me a whole year, that really everything is okay.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Everything is okay. Once we turn off our phones. There is,
of course, the temptation or whether we consciously think about
it or not, to turn to our laptop or video
games or something very similar that provides that dopamine charge
of this nice thing after this nice thing. What's the
strategy for that?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, so your mind is naturally going to crave high
dopamine replacement activities like the things that you mentioned. So
how do you counter that urge? And something that I
love is a screen addiction specialist told us to me,
and that I included a sidebar about it is optimizing
your home environment. So if you have computers or video games,
(10:37):
whatever it is, laptops do not come into the kitchen
during your detox. That means the kitchen is a place
for eating. So two with your bedroom. Your laptop does
not come into your bedroom. That signals to your brain
it is a place for sleeping. So two with your den,
don't bring your laptops into the den. That signals to
your brain that that is a place for low dopamine
(10:58):
quality activities like reading. So where it happens, Where do
you put your screens? Find one place in your house.
It could be an office, it could be whether it's
you have a table set up in a mud room,
whatever it is, that is the one place for high
dopamine activities. So what does that do? It basically triggers
to your mind. Okay, if I want to get out
(11:18):
of bed and do this thing, I have to go
down the stairs and go up the hallway, or I
have to go up the hallway. That extra friction makes
all the difference. So I did hear from a lot
of people that I interviewed that they ended up using
their computers as a crutch. Now, of course, when you
leave your house, that problem goes away, but when you're
in your house, it's truly important to set up your
home environment during that detox.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Most of the people you spoke to for the book
were able to reset their relationship with their smartphone after
they took their detox. I want to go back to
Professor Robert Hassan. He notably started his detox at the
age of fifty eight, and four years later he said
he was a different person. And I'll read a quote
you have in the book. He says, quote, I gave
myself depths in terms of my consciousness, not my being,
(11:59):
and I feel good, grateful for that. It made me
think about conversations I have with people. I'm in my
early fifties and like so many people who did not
grow up with smartphones, and we had a decent portion
of our adulthood without smartphones. We always talk all the
time about how lucky we are to have had that time,
But then where did the last twenty years go? Right?
We have missed perhaps knowing ourselves in the last twenty
(12:21):
years because we're sucked into this short attention span theater
of our phones. And I wonder for you, after your
year of detox, what would you say about your relationships,
your personal relationships, your relationships to work, and your relationships
to your own mind.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
It's a great question. Certainly, the relationship with my wife
has grown tremendously before going through this whole process. You know,
my wife and I would be texting throughout the day,
so when we got home in the evening time, there
was nothing to catch up on. We've been texting so
much during the day. I'm sure their parents are listening
to us, are like nodding their heads, like, yep, that's
(12:58):
what we do. Now, we really look forward to being
with each other in the evening because we have a
tons to catch up one because we're not texting each
other so too after the kids are asleep, the kids
are in bed, and before we just be on our phones,
sitting next to each other. And that's not really being together,
and that's being together but not being together. And now
we're able to focus on each other so much more intentionally,
(13:19):
and the same with kids. With kids, it is just
a game changer. I used to be so distracted when
I would take my kids out to the zoo or
to the aquarium, I was half with them, half without them.
It was just it was a real problem. It really
reset those relationships and then real briefly, just in terms
of friendships. You know, with friendships, they were mainly reliant
on texting, and that's just connection, that's not actual conversation.
(13:40):
So a lot of relationships fizzled in terms of basic friendships.
But for my dearest friends, now we carve out time
to actually connect in terms of in person or over
the phones. So instead of texting when I'll talk to
each other at least once a month for a couple
of hours, and I like that a lot better than texting.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I like also that you mentioned boredom. Boredom is kind
of a foreign concept when you have these entertainment devices
in your hand, but boredom is worth embracing absolutely.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
You know, before you embark on this is going through
the preparation phase. I really recommend going for a walk
forty five minutes, just forty five minutes, leave your smartphone
behind and go for that walk. And the first one
or two times you'll probably be freaking out inside, Like
really freaking out because you left your smartphone behind. Embrace that.
Learn to be comfortable with your own emotions. Learn to
(14:26):
be comfortable with your own thoughts. Now, whenever there's an anxiety,
we go right to the smartphone. It's okay. It's good
to be able to have to embrace your emotions. You'll
be stronger because of it.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Our guest is Richard Simon. He is the author of Unplug,
How to Break Up with your Phone and Reclaim your Life.
Richard Simon, thank you for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one OHO six point seven light FM. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to show baron, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one O six seven lightfm dot com.
Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to get connected. Thanks for listening. Your smartphone, I
would bet it is right next to you, I would
bet it is on The average American spends about five
hours a day on their smartphone. But how much of
that time is it a useful tool? And how much
of that time is your phone just a colossal waste
of time? If you are ready to reset your relationship
to your phone, this is the conversation for you with
(00:34):
Richard Simon, author of Unplug, How to break up with
your phone and reclaim your life. Richard Simon, thank you
for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Well, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Richard Simon directs the website strategy at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC.
He's a former reporter and webmaster at Baltimore's Daily Record.
So you're not a luddite, you work in this field,
you're not anti tech. But what was your relationship, Richard,
to your smartphone that made you want to try a
year of detox?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, it was straining so many facets of my life
as a father at the time of two young kids
in twenty nineteen. I just felt like I was in
a constant state of distraction with them, and take them
out to the zoo, take them out to the aquarium,
and I felt like I was half present and half not.
And the same thing with my wife. It was impacting
the relationship I had with her. I wasn't focusing as
(01:20):
deeply on work task as I'd like to, and more
than anything else, I wasn't finding the time to really
invest in myself. Average Americans spends more than five hours
a day on their smartphone. It's like seventy five days
in a full year, and I certainly was no exception
to that, and I felt like I was really losing
out on time.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
For this book, you talk about your own experiences, and
you profiled professionals who include a school principal, a software engineer,
a chess grand master, major League Baseball player, really smart people.
You start the book, however, with a brief reference that
I think was really interesting. It was to referencing the
digital d talks of Robert Hassan. He's a university professor
of media and communications in Australia who thought he would
(01:59):
be immune to the distractions of screen time. Even people
who know better are not immune to it because it's
designed for us not to be immune to it exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, Robert Hassan's a great example of someone who literally
he has studied the meaning of time. He's a communications
faculty member, and he realized that he was losing out
on time and he knew that. Yeah, he wasn't immune
to it either. And yet it's really really remarkable how
it doesn't matter matter whether you're an on call anesthesiologists
one of the top research hospitals in the country, you're
(02:31):
a social media marketer, a law partner, a software engineer.
I found this with all these people that I profiled
and got the chance to interview. It doesn't matter what
kind of walk of life you're in. It doesn't matter.
It impacts everyone.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I think so many people feel like there's a way
to get into this and kind of put your toe
in the water. These ideas to chip away at your
screen time with hacks, apps that make you wait a
certain amount of time before you can go on Instagram,
or you put it on airplane, or like you you
were practicing digital sabbaths. We talked about this with cal Newport,
who I know you mentioned in the book for Digital
Minimalism where you turn it off from say, sundown Friday
(03:06):
to sundown Saturday. Why didn't that hack work for you?
And why don't hacks in general work?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, because the cell phone and the smartphone is just
far too addictive. In terms of the digital sabbath, it's
incredibly noble. The leading social media applications totally noble. All
these shortcuts, these hacks. They are wonderful, but they're not
grounded in science, and certainly in my case. You know,
I observe the sabbath. I turn off all technology from
Friday night to Saturday night, and it's like telling a
(03:34):
cigarette addict to not smoke one day a week. That's
really a nice, nice thing, to not smoke one day
a week, But what's going to happen the other six days?
And I think that's what ultimately ends up happening for
people who practice digital sabbaths. It's a beautiful thing, but
ultimately you're going to get right back to all the
bad habits you had once you've turned back on your devices.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
One thing I thought was really interesting about your book
is you talk about because it's addictive there will be withdrawal,
and so cold turkey is a challenge. So like getting
ready for any sort of process of cutting something off,
in a sense, you need to be prepared. What can
you say about preparing for a detox?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, I have whole sectional preparation in the book, and
I'm glad you brought it up, because you really can't
detox quickly, the kind of thing where if you're listening
to this right now, the next day you're going to
the AT and T store and switching over to let's say,
a basic phone. It's not as easy as that. It's
really really important that you prepare. And the two things
(04:34):
I'll point out just for the sake of this conversation
is one, establish a support group. It's really really important
to get whether it be family members, friends, colleagues on
board before you embark on something like this. And then
two is is that what you're going to find is
that you're going to have hours of free time that
(04:54):
you didn't have before. So what are you going to
do at that time? And what I recommend is that
people get an actual phys school piece of paper and
they write down key categories, key values in their life,
whether it's community, whether it's professional, whether it's athletics, charity,
whatever it might be. And then within each one of
those categories, write down what you want to invest in.
(05:15):
I could be going to church twice a week, that
could be reading a book for thirty minutes every evening.
You're gonna want to find ways to fill in that time.
And when you put that up on your fridge, you
then have your menu. You go right to your menu
if you feel like there's any time you want to
fill and there's going to be plenty of it.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
There's so many different ways to look at that. You
note in the book, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of
the telephone, purposefully did not have a telephone in his
own study because even when it was just the telephone,
he recognized it was a tool but also a distraction.
It robbed him of his focus. And I don't know
what they called it then, but that idea of deep work.
Can you talk about the potential benefits of deep work?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Yeah, it's I'm glad you brought that one up too,
because that's fascinating. The phone in literally its most innacent form,
and Alexander Graham Bell wanted nothing to do with it
when he was in a study. He said, no, no
calls at the house. And this is like in the
in the eighteen hundreds, how wild deep work is really
is really essential. You know, we have gotten into a
(06:18):
system where between our smartphones and email where ultimately you
look at what you did over the course of the
day and it's just meetings and emails, and we're not
spending the time that we need to focus deeply on
tasks uninterrupted. And that's really where our value is as
workers is ultimately focusing deeply and not being distracted. So
(06:42):
when you remove a smartphone from your environment, that's will
end up happening even just a meeting if you are
in person and you're not virtual anymore. If you are
in person and you're in a meeting and you have
your smartphone with you, your attention is not going to
be there. Being able to focus deeply distracted is so
critical for career capital.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Our guest is Richard Simon, author of Unplug, How to
Break up with your Phone and reclaim your life. You're
listening to Get Connected on one six point seven light
FM im Mina del Rio. The fear for many of us,
of course, on the flip side, is that you know
you need your phone for work. I'll fall behind, I'll
be out of a loop, I'll be unavailable. Can you
talk about the option of using a basic phone a
(07:25):
flip phone, how do they balance that?
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Sure? Absolutely, So I'll break it into two pieces. So
one is I go through four different breakup styles in
the book, and one of them is to simplify your phone,
and basically you're going to switch from your smartphone to
a basic phone. And for the sake of the Detox,
I recommend sixty days of having your smartphone off. The
reason why I say sixty days is going to take
for some people a few days, for other people two
(07:49):
to three weeks in terms of withdrawal symptoms and getting
through that. A basic phone, I recommend for the Detox
being as basic as possible. We're talking TCL flip or
getting an ALCATL flip phone. These things are very cheap.
You get to know kiaphone, it's very cheap from Best Buy,
and those phones basically just have calling and texting, and
that's really going to reduce your screen time dramatically. So
(08:13):
I think for listeners who are tuning in, I think
that this will be like a really appealing option and
might be the easiest out of the four breakup styles.
Four breakup styles that I mentioned.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, in the book, you do have models of a
few basic phones that consistently came up in your conversation
with the interviews you conducted. Some have Internet and email,
some don't. Notably, again, they are supremely inexpensive when compared
to a smartphone. So that's the good news. But my
question is, were there moments for you in your detox
here or for others you spoke with who were burned
for not having a smartphone? And what was your takeaway
(08:48):
from that or the takeaway from others who had it
happened to them?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So interesting? I asked every person that I interviewed did
they ever get burnt? And each time someone would share
something with me, just for me objectively, I was like,
that is just such a small thing. So I interview
in profile lead off the book with right fielder for
the Philadelphia Phillies, Nick Costianos, and I asked Nick he
had his phone off for the entire twenty twenty one season.
I asked him, I said, did you ever get burnt?
(09:14):
So we thought and thought and thought, and then finally
he said, all right, I have one, he said. He
was at it on the road at a hotel. They
just finished a night game and it was midnight. He
got back to the hotel late and he was really hungry,
and he realized he couldn't uber eat anything. He said,
you know what, I'm just gonna this is a great
(09:34):
time for me to practice being hungry. And I told Nick,
I said, wait, that's it over the course of the
entire year, Like, that's the one memory you have for
being burnt. He's like, yeah, I think that's the only one.
And that's as the bat, we're so worried about just
even being off of our phones for two minutes, let
alone sixty days, and for Nick a whole season, for
me a whole year, that really everything is okay.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Everything is okay. Once we turn off our phones. There is,
of course, the temptation or whether we consciously think about
it or not, to turn to our laptop or video
games or something very similar that provides that dopamine charge
of this nice thing after this nice thing. What's the
strategy for that?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, so your mind is naturally going to crave high
dopamine replacement activities like the things that you mentioned. So
how do you counter that urge? And something that I
love is a screen addiction specialist told us to me,
and that I included a sidebar about it is optimizing
your home environment. So if you have computers or video games,
(10:37):
whatever it is, laptops do not come into the kitchen
during your detox. That means the kitchen is a place
for eating. So two with your bedroom. Your laptop does
not come into your bedroom. That signals to your brain
it is a place for sleeping. So two with your den,
don't bring your laptops into the den. That signals to
your brain that that is a place for low dopamine
(10:58):
quality activities like reading. So where it happens, Where do
you put your screens? Find one place in your house.
It could be an office, it could be whether it's
you have a table set up in a mud room,
whatever it is, that is the one place for high
dopamine activities. So what does that do? It basically triggers
to your mind. Okay, if I want to get out
(11:18):
of bed and do this thing, I have to go
down the stairs and go up the hallway, or I
have to go up the hallway. That extra friction makes
all the difference. So I did hear from a lot
of people that I interviewed that they ended up using
their computers as a crutch. Now, of course, when you
leave your house, that problem goes away, but when you're
in your house, it's truly important to set up your
home environment during that detox.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Most of the people you spoke to for the book
were able to reset their relationship with their smartphone after
they took their detox. I want to go back to
Professor Robert Hassan. He notably started his detox at the
age of fifty eight, and four years later he said
he was a different person. And I'll read a quote
you have in the book. He says, quote, I gave
myself depths in terms of my consciousness, not my being,
(11:59):
and I feel good, grateful for that. It made me
think about conversations I have with people. I'm in my
early fifties and like so many people who did not
grow up with smartphones, and we had a decent portion
of our adulthood without smartphones. We always talk all the
time about how lucky we are to have had that time,
But then where did the last twenty years go? Right?
We have missed perhaps knowing ourselves in the last twenty
(12:21):
years because we're sucked into this short attention span theater
of our phones. And I wonder for you, after your
year of detox, what would you say about your relationships,
your personal relationships, your relationships to work, and your relationships
to your own mind.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
It's a great question. Certainly, the relationship with my wife
has grown tremendously before going through this whole process. You know,
my wife and I would be texting throughout the day,
so when we got home in the evening time, there
was nothing to catch up on. We've been texting so
much during the day. I'm sure their parents are listening
to us, are like nodding their heads, like, yep, that's
(12:58):
what we do. Now, we really look forward to being
with each other in the evening because we have a
tons to catch up one because we're not texting each
other so too after the kids are asleep, the kids
are in bed, and before we just be on our phones,
sitting next to each other. And that's not really being together,
and that's being together but not being together. And now
we're able to focus on each other so much more intentionally,
(13:19):
and the same with kids. With kids, it is just
a game changer. I used to be so distracted when
I would take my kids out to the zoo or
to the aquarium, I was half with them, half without them.
It was just it was a real problem. It really
reset those relationships and then real briefly, just in terms
of friendships. You know, with friendships, they were mainly reliant
on texting, and that's just connection, that's not actual conversation.
(13:40):
So a lot of relationships fizzled in terms of basic friendships.
But for my dearest friends, now we carve out time
to actually connect in terms of in person or over
the phones. So instead of texting when I'll talk to
each other at least once a month for a couple
of hours, and I like that a lot better than texting.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I like also that you mentioned boredom. Boredom is kind
of a foreign concept when you have these entertainment devices
in your hand, but boredom is worth embracing absolutely.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
You know, before you embark on this is going through
the preparation phase. I really recommend going for a walk
forty five minutes, just forty five minutes, leave your smartphone
behind and go for that walk. And the first one
or two times you'll probably be freaking out inside, Like
really freaking out because you left your smartphone behind. Embrace that.
Learn to be comfortable with your own emotions. Learn to
(14:26):
be comfortable with your own thoughts. Now, whenever there's an anxiety,
we go right to the smartphone. It's okay. It's good
to be able to have to embrace your emotions. You'll
be stronger because of it.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Our guest is Richard Simon. He is the author of Unplug,
How to Break Up with your Phone and Reclaim your Life.
Richard Simon, thank you for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one OHO six point seven light FM. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to show baron, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one O six seven lightfm dot com.
Thanks for listening.
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