Stepping Out of the Attention Economy

While it’s true that most of us appreciate the ease and entertainment that we get from our digital devices, it may also be true that we are spending more time on them than we want to be.

Why is this?

Well, it turns out that our brains are biologically programmed to respond to the content and the alerts of digital media and there is an entire attention economy dedicated to taking advantage of that and using your neurobiology to get more and more of your time, attention, and money there.

Over the last two months, I drastically limited the amount of time I spent on my phone and digital devices and today on the podcast, I’m sharing that experience, the things I learned about myself and my brain by doing it, and the overall impact less digital media has had on my life.

This episode will teach you about your own neurobiology and shine a light on how our brains respond to the digital experience, so you can make more conscious decisions about how you spend your time, and the quantity and quality of the things you let take up space inside your own head.

Transcript 

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Hello podcast universe, welcome to episode 252 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I want to wish all of you a very happy Leap Day! We get a whole extra day this year. Are you excited? I'm wondering how you are spending that extra day. I hope you're doing something fun. It's pretty awesome that you're spending at least part of it here with me today. I looked it up just for fun and found out that there's not going to be another leap day on Thursday until 2052. So like, I can't predict the future, but I'm pretty sure that I probably will not still be podcasting in 2052. So, not only is this our first Leap Day episode, it is also probably our last one, our last Leap Day episode. So I think it needs to be a good one. And I just I want to start today by just pointing out like why we have Leap Day anyway, because I think it's applicable to all of us who are trying to have a well-lived life.

And so, like you probably already know this, but the reason that we have Leap Year is that our orbit around the sun doesn't quite fit into nice even 365 days, right? Like the orbit around the sun takes 365 days and six hours. And so, like you might be thinking like I did, well, who cares, right? Like it's close enough, like 365 days. Like, what difference does six hours make? But if we didn't account for that six hours every four years and add, you know, an extra 24 hours onto the calendar every four years because of that, then over time, the calendar would shift and the months would no longer line up in the seasons in the way that we expect them to.

Right? Like eventually winter would happen, be happening in July and in the middle of summer would fall in December. And, you know, we follow the Julian calendar and Julius Caesar, like, really thought it was important that Easter always fall in the spring. And so that's why they set it up this way. And, and like if they did that right, like if we didn't adjust for the time in about 700 years, like it would, it would flip. So that winter was happening in July, right? So like over time that six hours starts to accumulate over 700 years, the calendar would be completely opposite. And the only reason that I bring this to your attention is because it just demonstrates the power of accumulation, the power of small or seemingly insignificant shifts that can make huge differences over time. Right? Like there are 8760 hours in every year. So like what is six hours matter compared to 8760, right. It's like 0.07% of our year, not even a 10th of a percent.

Right? But notice how much power it has to change things as it accumulates over time. And so I think as humans, we're just like programmed to like notice and only care about big changes and big improvements and like big shifts in our lives. And we're even all, like, all waiting for big swaths of time in order to, like, change our lives and do the things we want. And we really dismiss and diminish and undervalue the small things, the small changes, the small shifts, the small pieces of time.

Like our brain just doesn't consider the value in any of that, but the power that the small things have as they accumulate and as they compile, you know, is incredible. And in fact, it's through that accumulation and aggregation that our lives are created. And so, I hope Leap Day remind you of that. I hope that it remind you to focus on the small choices that you make every day. Right? That is how you are going to control and create your life. You know, like this week I started my seventh week of training for some of these events I'm doing later in the year.

It's like seventh of 35, right? Like my brain is like, oh my gosh, we have so far to go. But like when I think about what I want to do and what I want to accomplish, like with the marathon or with 2929, like it's so easy to get overwhelmed and it's so easy to think I'll never be able to do that. And I have to just always bring my mind back to the smallest increment, which is today. I have to bring it back to what I can do today and just let everything else take care of itself. I can only control what I have to do today, right? And that's all I ever get to choose as well is like what I do today.

To prepare. Like last Saturday, I had to run ten miles and my brain is like, there is no way, there is no way you can run ten miles, right. And and like and and that's only part of what you have to run. If you can't run ten, you can't run 26. Like my brain is like, you just should quit right now. Right? But I just brought it back to that day, okay? What do I gotta do today? I gotta run ten miles, and then I break that down even further. I just break it down. What do I have to do right now? I have to. Run this mile. Sometimes I have to break it down even farther. What do I have to do right now? I have to run this half mile or I have to run this minute, or I just have to keep taking one step in front of the other.

Right? Like every time my brain got panicky, I brought it back to the mile that we were in. Right to this step, to this choice, to this mile. And I told myself, like, if you just get through this mile, the ten miles will automatically accumulate. All right? And that is true for you too. Instead of thinking you need big changes in your life, you instead need to bring your attention to the small things, to the daily choices, to this moment that you're in. And just keep reminding yourself that that's where your agency is, that we only get to choose this moment right now. Control the small things one day at a time, one choice at a time. And when we do that, then we harness like the most powerful creative force in the universe, right. Which is accumulation. All right. So none of us have the power to snap our fingers and create a new life and, and and have the things we want, but we all have the power to choose this moment. This choice, right? That's all we ever get. And those choices will accumulate to create your life.

Okay all right, so there you go. Your leap day thought. Forgive me for that leap day tangent. Uh, probably just like in the episode right there. But I actually have something else that I wanted to talk to you about today, because it's the last day of February. I really wanted to talk to you about this experiment that I've been running the last couple of months and taking an extended break from my phone, and particularly my social media use, but like, it ended up extending to a lot of other areas of my phone, which I'll talk to, talk to you about in just a second. And I wanted to talk about that experience, about these last two months and what I've learned being off my phone significantly and kind of like what surprised me and what kind of permanent changes I have decided to make going forward. And so, I just want to start with a little disclaimer now, when I'm talking about phone use, of course phone use is an action. It's a choice that we make. It's something that we do right. And mostly on this podcast, I spend my time focusing on our thoughts because I don't ever want to be in a position of telling you what to do, like the choices that you should or shouldn't make in your life.

I in fact, I don't even actually want to tell you what to think either, right? What I'm doing when I talk about thoughts is just bringing your awareness to your thoughts and to what they create and asking your yourself is this creating what I want? Right? And I'm trying to bring your awareness to the choices that you have when it comes to your thoughts. But I really do try intentionally to stay away from the action line as much as possible to not tell you how to live your life, right? Because I don't know how you should live your life. I don't know what you should do. I don't know what choices you should make.

Only you can know that. And quite frankly, I think you have way too many people in your life, strangers and people that know you, that are telling you what to do and the right way to live and telling you what choices to make. And I think that you should bring all of that in-house. I think you should be making all of those choices yourself. All right. So please know that I am not sharing this episode and this experience as a way of saying this is what you should do or this is what you should not do, right? This is how you should live your life, right? Any more than when I tell you, like about 29029, for example.

Like it isn't to make you think, oh, I should go do that event. I'm just sharing it because I learn things about myself and my brain when I do them. And I think that insight into the way that my brain works, which is not so different from the way that all of our brains work right, can be super helpful for you as you experience, you know, your own life, right? So today I really just want to shine a light on the things that I learned and what I learned about my brain and how our brains respond to social media and and other phone apps, and just bring your awareness to your own experience so that you can make a really conscious decision about how you spend your time and about the the quantity and quality of the thoughts you take in through your phone and deciding, like, are those the things that I want taking up space inside my mind? Like those are all decisions that you get to make, and I just want to kind of bring your attention to the way your brain works and, and how our phones are really, you know, designed specifically to be able to, like, hack our brains.

All right. So just to give you a quick recap, first, in case you haven't heard this on another episode towards the end of last year, like really for quite some time, I really felt like I was spending way too much time on my phone and too much time, you know, just mindlessly scrolling and looking to be entertained or fulfilled in some way, or get some information or not miss out on something. Right. And just spending a lot of time there, not even intentionally right. And noticing that I only the more time I spent there, the more distracted and difficult it was to concentrate and the more empty I fell and the more unhappy and anxious I felt.

And anyway, as I was thinking about this and my phone use, I heard an interview that Tom Holland gave about how when he gave up drinking for Dry January, he couldn't stop thinking about drinking, and when his next drink was, and he could see how much of his brainpower was dedicated to thinking about his next drink and how much he was missing out on his life because of it. And anyway, when I heard this interview, I felt like everything he was saying was how I felt about my phone use. It was like I couldn't stop checking it and I would find myself there without meaning to be.

And I was even there when I was doing other fun things right, and my brain felt like it was there instead of in my life. And I was thinking about other people and other people's thoughts and other people's lives more than my own. And. It never made me feel good, right? It was like this. This endless void that you would fall into that. That never filled you up. Right? And I just thought, like, what is my purpose on here? What am I doing on here all the time? Why am I checking all the time? What am I looking for? And what are all these minutes and hours accumulating and adding up to? Like, what am I creating here and how did I end up here? Right? And it turns out, actually, that there was a really good reason that I was there all the time.

And it's because our brains are specifically programmed to be there and to be and to respond to that kind of stimulus. So, it turns out that our phones, and particularly the way that social media apps and and other apps are specifically designed, are they are programmed to get more and more of your attention and and to, like, really entice you to be on there longer and longer. And there's a guy named Michael Easter, and he wrote a book called The Comfort Crisis. And he recently wrote another book called The Scarcity Brain. And in his book he describes, like the addictive nature of slot machines and, and the people who were kind of like designing the slot machines, did all these studies to try and figure out how do you push people into wanting more and to staying on there longer and to like being on the slot machine more. Right. And they do it through this thing called a scarcity loop. Like all of our brains are programmed in the same way to respond to this scarcity loop.

And the scarcity loop is made up of three things. Opportunity. Unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability. All right. So the first one opportunity it's like what are you going to get out of being there. Like when you're working on a slot machine the opportunity is I might win, I might win money. I might, you know, hit the jackpot, I might win admiration. People might notice me. Right? Like there's opportunity, there's something that we want.

And then the slot machine provides an unpredictable reward. Like you're going to get something sometime, but you don't know when and you don't know what, right. So there's this kind of like, unpredictability about it. Like at any moment you could get that opportunity that you came for at any moment you could get that thing you wanted, right. And then finally, quick repeatability, which just means you need something that where you can immediately repeat that behavior, like the faster you can repeat a behavior, the more likely you are to repeat it, the more ease there is and the less friction is, then the more likely you are to repeat it.

In fact, they were. He was talking about how when they went from like the hand-crank on the slot machine into like the digital format where you could just touch it. He said people went from playing 400 games a session to playing 900 games, right? Because there was so much less friction. It was so much easier to repeat. The repeatability went up. It was the same opportunity, right? It was the same unpredictable rewards. But use went up because the repeatability became so much easier. And these same things exist and are built in to most social media apps. All right. So it's just like an infinite scroll, right? That is super easy. You just keep scrolling and the opportunity right. You're looking what do I get from there? I might get humor, I might get information, I might get connection right. My brain is looking for all of these things. It's an unpredictable reward system. Like sometimes it's going to be good and sometimes it's not.

Sometimes you're going to see something funny and interesting and sometimes you're not. Sometimes you're going to see somebody you know and feel that connection and sometimes you're not, right? Like sometimes you're going to get a hit and sometimes you don't. Right. And so it's unpredictable in that scroll. And then right there's a lot of quick repeatability. Like it's easy you just flip to the next one. You didn't get what you wanted. You just flip to the next one. And it's very, very simple. And your brain is just like designed to want more and more and more of that. This is true of dating apps. It's true of like lots of different kinds of apps, gambling apps, etc..

All right. So the first thing that I want you to kind of take from that and understand is like way more compassion and empathy for yourself and less shame, like there's a corporate interest in getting your attention there on those apps. And they have been designed specifically with all the right triggers in that scarcity loop to make your brain want to be there. And how does the corporation make more money to capture more of your attention? You know, I've just noticed since I've been off there, the corporations that I used to participate on, on my phone.

Right. Like they hate that I'm not on there. They send me emails all the time saying, you've been off Instagram for 600 hours and you've missed videos by this person and this person and this person, like, it's constantly telling me, like, all the things I'm missing out on because it's like, you know, it notices that it no longer has my attention and like, it has a vested interest in getting my attention there, like a vested monetary interest. Right. And so I just want to have you just have some awareness, like there's a reason that I'm there, and it's because of the way that I've been evolutionarily programmed.

All right. It's how we are wired. And it actually works on all animals, right? Like all animals that they've tested on will actually choose unpredictable games over predictable ones. So they did this experiment on pigeons where they had these two kinds of buttons, and the one button that they pushed was like a predictable button. They would get the same amount of food every time they hit it, and then they had another button where it was the unpredictable system, and it wouldn't like it wouldn't give them a reward of food every single time they pushed it.

Sometimes it was like two times they needed to push it, sometimes it was five, sometimes it was more, and there were different amounts of food every time, and they couldn't predict it. And it turns out that the pigeons who picked the first button, they actually ended up getting more food overall. But 97% of the pigeons picked the second button. They chose the gambling game. They chose the unpredictable nature because of the way our brains are programmed. All right. So even though if they push the first button, they could get more food.

They. Chose the second button. They still chose the unpredictable game, right? And we're all just like running according to our programming. And so I just really want you to have way more understanding and compassion for yourself and for the way your brain works so that you can make more deliberate choices. Right? Because right now, they estimate that the average person spends 13 hours and 20 minutes engaged with digital media every day. Right. And that's gone up since the last time they tested it two years ago.

It's gone up by two hours. All our brains want is more and more and more. And think about it like 25 years ago, probably, we were spending zero minutes a day engaged with it. And, you know, the way that technology advances is that things start as like this fun advantage and then soon enough, like it becomes a part of our society and then it becomes a constraint, right? Like I can't just be off it because I need it for work or I can't just be, you know, off my phone because I need to be able to be to be reached.

And so the things that were once just nice to have start to become necessary. Okay. And not only that, I've mentioned this before, but we are programmed to look to our tribe to alert us to danger, right? When there were just a few of us out gathering food, we used to tap each other on the shoulder to like, warn each other of dangers or of predators or of, you know, things that we need to do to, to know about. And now every notification in that phone is like a tap on the shoulder. And if you find yourself checking it all the time, I'm moving from app to app to app, and from email to another app to to another app and back to your email and just find yourself in that checking loop.

It's because your brain is checking for those taps. It's checking to make sure it didn't miss out on anything. Some like essential information that our neighbor has for us, right? And so just know that, like your brain is evolutionarily designed to be on your phone and to stay on your phone, and you don't need to make yourself wrong for it, it is not your fault, but it is also, you know, your problem to solve if you want to change that. Okay? And again, I don't think there's any wrong way to do this, but for me, like I just thought I needed to make a really significant change.

And so starting in January, I decided I was going to get off social media, and I set up some really strict rules about checking my emails and even the amount of times that I got on Google on my phone, because as soon as I stopped checking Instagram, my brain started wanted to check my email non-stop. And when I started, like I thought I just needed to add some friction to make it harder to get on the apps. And you know, because if you remember, one of the three components of the scarcity loop is quick repeatability.

And so, the more friction you can add, the less quickly you can get on there, then the less appealing it becomes to your brain. And so, you know, I set up these apps that would like slow me down. Every time I tried to log on to Instagram, I would say, do you really want to be there? And it would make me breathe and like, like really decide on purpose if I wanted to be on there and like, you know, that was really good awareness for me to start there, right? Because it would tell me, like, it would add up the amount of times that I tried to be on there and it'd be like, you've tried to log on 24 times this today, right? And like all of that was really good awareness for me. But after a week or so, I decided it would just be easier not to have the apps on my phone at all. And so I took those off, like I said, and I put on restrictions of like how many times I was going to check my email and I and how many outside podcasts I was going to listen to every week. And I did that for the last two months. All right. So now I just want to talk quickly about the things that I have learned and the things that I've really become aware of over these last two months. All right. And just taking this out of my life, I want to start by just like pointing out what I have more of and what I have less of.

So first, what do I have more of? First is I have a lot more sleep. I have lots better sleep. It's so much easier for me to fall asleep, and it's way easier for me to stay asleep. And this was something I was not expecting, but I really feel like I have so much better sleep since I since I did this. Next, I have lots more time, right? Like actual physical hours of time. And I don't know why I wasn't expecting that, right? Because those 13 hours have to go somewhere, right? But I really have found so much more time in the first couple of weeks after I did this in January, I wrote in my journal that I had accomplished more in the first ten days than I did in the entire year last year. I like I know that's exaggerating, but I did so many things that I had been procrastinating. Like I renewed my passport. I cleaned out this huge closet in my bedroom that has been packed for the last six years. I cleaned that out and and gave myself a whole new closet. I have read three books right? And it just is like amazing to me. Like how much time I was spending on my. Phone and it reminded me of this quote by James Clare where he said, stop paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing and run your own race.

How much time he wrote is spent reading other people's posts on social media, watching other people's exploits in the news, listening to other people's ideas on podcasts. Go have coffee with a friend. Go make something. Go outside. All those hours spent looking at someone else's life on a screen could be used to take action in your own life. And that is exactly what I found. Like all those hours I spent thinking, oh, this isn't that big a deal. I'm not on here this much. Like, what else am I going to do? I might as well just be on here, right? Like all those hours I spent looking at someone else's life could be used to take action in your own life.

And I just found that is so true, right? I think the thing is that, like, none of us mean to spend our time that much time there, none of us mean to spend 6 hours or 13 hours a day there, right? None of us go on there thinking, all right, now I intend to waste six hours on Instagram. Right. But it's just these little pockets, these little moments, and suddenly, like, they add up, right? And like, we are devaluing our most precious resource when we're on there, which is our time. And and that's just the truth. Like, one of the things that you cannot make more of and you can't acquire more of than someone else is time. It is a fixed quantity for each of us, and all we get to decide is not how much of it there is, but how we use it, right? And, you know, we talk about saving time or wasting time, and I don't want you to use those words. You aren't wasting time. We're always using it. Right? We are always using time. We don't save it. We don't waste it. We use it. And there's no way not to use it. We're always using it.

But how we use it, the way we use it, that is what is up to us. That is where our choices. And I have been frankly shocked at how much time has opened up in my life by making this decision. Okay, next I have way more presence and attention, and that has actually led also to way more enjoyment of my life. And it was just interesting, like at first when I when I first made these restrictions, I remember doing things and thinking, well, how am I going to tell people about this? Who am I going to tell about this? It was like I couldn't be present and just be like, enjoy the thing I was doing because I needed to tell somebody about it. It was so interesting to me that my brain was like, it didn't really happen and it doesn't really count, and it doesn't really matter unless other people know about it. Like that's where the attention economy has gotten me right. It was just so fascinating. Like when I would do a long run or when I did my surf lessons, my brain was like, oh, like, we should tell other people about this and like this need to like, validate what I was doing by letting other people know about it, right? And it's just so interesting to me that, like, we're trading this sort of like, pretend connection with everyone else in the world for real connection and for real connection, like with ourselves.

And I just found that like, it was just interesting to notice how my brain felt like I needed validation for someone else. Like, not that they were going to say anything about it or say good job or like even even respond to it, but just that they knew about it, that that was the only way that that it gained any validity, right? And I think so many times when we're not on our phones, we're afraid of missing out or afraid of like not knowing about something. But what we're missing out on is our lives, our experience, our attention. And I just found that, like, even just simple things like. You know, watching a movie with my husband or being out to dinner with him, like my brain was unused to spending that kind of attention and being that present for those activities. And, you know, we live at a time where we have this like hyper connectivity, but we are all lonelier than ever. And I think this is why, right? Because when half of our brain is thinking about what's on that phone or what other people are going to think about it, we aren't present.

We aren't putting our attention to where we are. And as a reminder, your reality, the experience of your life is always happening in your head. And if half your head is somewhere else inside your phone, you are missing your reality. You're missing your life. I also have way more room for my own thoughts and for my own opinions. And I was thinking about how like we like really, what's challenging about our world and our life right now is that we are grappling with abundance, right? Like we have an abundance of information. We have an abundance of connection, quote unquote connection. Right? Not actual connection, but like connection with strangers. Right? There's like an overabundance of that. We have an abundance of other people's thoughts. We have an abundance of opinions. All of that used to be limited by where you lived, by who you interacted with on a daily basis, by who you called on the phone or who you talked to, like at the store. But now we get it from everywhere. We have so much access to all the thoughts, all the opinions. And the truth is that when you are thinking about other people's thoughts, you are not thinking your own right.

If you're always on media, your ideas are coming from others. And there's a guy named Tim Wu and he wrote a book called The Attention Merchants, and he wrote, as William James observed, we must reflect that when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. Like, isn't that powerful? At the end of our lives, what what we have is what you know. What our experience equals is what we have paid attention to, either by choice or by default. And like so much of our lives, are less about our own and more about other people's. Right. And we talked at the beginning of this podcast about accumulation, about the accumulation, what it creates, and when we are accumulating everybody else's thoughts and everybody else's opinions and everybody else's idea of what is good and and popular and right and necessary, then what are you going to have at the end of your life? Like you're going to have everybody else's life instead of your own.

All right. And so, like, I think we have to be much more disciplined about deciding how many thoughts are going to come into our brains. Right? Everything on that phone is just a thought. And we have to, like, be the gatekeepers and be really disciplined about what's coming in. Okay. I also have more creativity and this has been slower coming, right? What came before creativity actually has been boredom. I also have a lot more boredom in my life. Right. And what I found is that is not a bad thing.

We have really programmed boredom out of our lives, out of our modern lives, and there's no room to ruminate or think or be creative. And at first that boredom really made me uncomfortable. But as I have allowed it and just like, recognize like no, boredom is good. Boredom is something I want. Like there's an evolutionary reason for boredom. Like if I was out on a hunt and no animals came by and I was bored, that like motivated me to go look somewhere else and problem solves something else, right? And so just like letting myself sit with that boredom so that I can be creative so that my brain can long to do something else, to produce something else, to to think about something else to, to come up with its own thoughts.

And so, I've really kind of made this like internal shift towards boredom to welcoming boredom and thinking about how I can reinsert more boredom into my life, because that is where my ideas and my creativity will be born. And I really think that boredom and creativity are inseparably linked. So I've been cultivating boredom as a way to access my creativity. Okay, now some of the things that I have less of. I have so much less anxiety. It is remarkable.

Like how much less anxiety? And I did not expect this at all. I had no idea that the kind of like constant hum of anxiety that I felt all the time was coming from that need to like, constantly be checking. And I was at a place in my life where, like when I went to bed, I was just like filled with anxiety. I couldn't settle down, and the first thing I felt when I woke up was anxiety. It was like I needed to be checking about whatever it was that I was missing. And I have so much less anxiety because I now have a space that is free from checking, that is free from like missing out, that is free from like thinking it is not enough, that is free from noticing what else it needs and what my life is lacking.

Like that space has been cleared, right? Done a lot of thinking about this, like why there's so much less anxiety. And I think just being on social media apps is exposing, right? Even though you're just looking and it feels anonymous, your brain and your nervous system doesn't know that, like it thinks you're in front of all the other people, right? Like that is your tribe, and it feels like you're exposed all the time, even when you're technically not. You never have a cave to go into, just always exposed at the watering hole, so to speak, right? Like you're always in view of other people. And so your nervous system never gets to rest. You're always watching for for danger or looking for the tap or like looking for the alerts. And you never get to rest. Your nervous system never gets to settle down. And I want you to remember that we have the same brains and nervous systems as our ancestors, and like, we aren't equipped to deal with the amount of information and stimulation alerts that are coming through those phones. And that is what was making me so anxious. So, I was not expecting that result.

But I love it so much. It has been so different for me. Like the experience inside my body is so different and for this reason alone, I am so unwilling to go back to using my phone in the same way. The other thing that I find that I have so much less of is comparison. Like obviously, I have so much less outside voices telling me that that I need to be different in some way, or they need something else in my life, or that this is the right way to do something and whether I know it or not. Like, like my brain was constantly comparing what I was seeing to my own life, right? What I was seeing in other people to myself.

And I've just noticed, like I have way less comparison and that makes me like feel way more grounded about my own thoughts and opinions and ideas and feel way more positively about my life and the choices I'm making. And in like, even just simple things like my house or my clothes or my body, all of that is so much better without that input that it should be done in a different way.

Okay, so what does all that have to do with you? And what do you want to do with all this information? First of all, I just want to tell you, like, this is just my experience. And you can take this information and these thoughts, they're just thoughts for for what they are. And I just want you to know that if you want to make some changes, if you're curious about how it would feel for you to spend less time on your phone, I just want to give you a few tips. First, awareness is huge. Like just to place some awareness. Like how much time am I on here and why? Why am I here? What am I trying to get from this? This is like such an important question to ask. Like what am I doing here? What is this for? What is my purpose? What's the intention here? Am I getting that right? Like just bring some awareness to it.

Number two, I would say is don't use that awareness to make yourself wrong, right? Just use that awareness to empower yourself to make a different choice. Number three, I would say, is to just be so insistent at protecting your own time and energy and space and being really protective, like all you have is your attention. That is what is creating your life. That is the only thing you have to give to someone else. That is the only thing you will have at the end of your life, is the accumulation of what you've paid attention to.

And you need to be, you know, as my good friend Karen Hebner says Savage about protecting that space in your own mind, that attention. All right. And so you've got to, like, decide for yourself the way that you're going to protect your time and energy and space there, and then figure out what that means for you. You can either figure out a way to slow it down. There are all kinds of apps that will help you add friction to the time on your phone. And don't be afraid to experiment. Say, listen, I'm just going to try it for a month and see what it's like, right? Remember, there's no wrong way to do it.

You just running an experiment in your life. What works for you? What doesn't? And pay attention to yourself, to your own opinions about it. Not mine. Not anybody else's. Okay, last I would just remind you that we need stimulation in our lives. Like we're on there because we want the stimulation. Our brains crave stimulation. They want to be busy. They want to be creative. They want to be active. They want to be problem solving. And like, we've just traded all that for the stimulation on our phone. If you remember that pigeon experiment that I told you about, that 97% of them went to that gambling game, right? So. That changed.

They didn't experiment with those same pigeons where they put them in an environment that mimicked the outside world, where they had lots of room to to fly and to interact with each other and to build nests and to like, you know, be creative and curious and walk around their environment and do all that. And they would pick the gambling one unless they were in an environment where they could be stimulated. And once in that other environment, you know, they picked the for sure button. But like when they were just kept in those small sterile cages, like they would always pick number two, they would pick the, the, the stimulating one that the gambling won.

Right. And so like I want you to think about that. Right. We need to insert positive stimulation into our lives. I'm going to turn off this phone and then I need to insert some positive stimulation. What excites me? What do I want to do? How can I be creative? How can I interact with other people or my environment? How can I get outside? How can I talk to somebody I love? Like you want to start to be captivated by other things in your life? And give yourself permission to try that, to figure out what you like.

To figure out what is stimulating to your brain and to exert conscious effort towards doing that. Like we're just all stuck in our small, sterile cages looking at our phones, right? And we need to, like, get that stimulation somewhere else. Okay, finally, I just want to say again, like I started with that accumulation and compounding are powerful creators, and accumulating and compounding time on your phone may not be creating the things that you want. You know, I don't want you to make the mistake that I'm vilifying all of this technology and saying, like, you know, that it's bad. Like there is so much good. I'm sure that comes from it. There's so much ease that is introduced into our lives and that can all be good. We just have to be much more intentional about the way that we use it.

If it's not making us happy, if it's not creating the things we want, if it's not giving us a well-lived life, then we have to remember that we are the choosers and that our choices are accumulating. Whether you're doing the things you want or you're just living your life on default, it's the same. All those small choices add up, and you are the one that gets to make every one of them. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you're serious about changing your life, you first have to change your mind. And the best way to do that is through coaching. I work with my clients one on one to help them change their thoughts and their feelings about themselves, their lives, and their challenges so that they can live a life they love. If you'd like to work with me one on one, you can learn more and schedule a free call to try coaching for yourself at Aprilpricecoaching.com.