Chronic phone makes life feel less meaningful. Here’s why and how to start breaking the habit.

Like most of us, I’m a little bit addicted to my phone.

Years of chronic phone use has affected my focus⁠. Movies are harder to watch; books are harder to read. It’s difficult to complete a task without checking my notifications at least once. (And usually, much more than that.)

It’s also affected my presence. I sneak quick glances at my email inbox on hikes—on runs—in pauses during conversations with friends.

But I never felt motivated enough to start changing my phone habits until I learned that research shows chronic phone use erodes our sense of meaning⁠.

Here are the four reasons why⁠—and four helpful tools you can use to begin breaking the habit.

🧠 1) Chronic phone use prevents memories from forming deeply.

Your brain needs a few, continuous seconds of focus to turn an experience into long-term memory. But constant phone interruptions break that continuity over and over.¹

As a result, your memories become shallow—and because meaning is built from memory, shallow memories = shallow meaning.

⏰ 2) Chronic phone use fragments your experience of time. 

Every time you check your phone, your brain task-switches⁠—and every time this happens, your brain has to reset its working memory.

If that reset happens thousands of times a day, your internal sense of time starts feeling choppy⁠—like your day happened in pieces instead of an arc.

This really matters, because psychologists who study time have found that a sense of meaning emerges during states of deep absorption and presence.  They call these states “thick time.”²

But when you’re constantly task-switching, you live in “thin time”—a state of speed and forward motion⁠—which makes it harder for meaning to accumulate.

🎨 3) Chronic phone use reduces your emotional landscape from a full palette of color to black and white.

Chronic stimulation—like the kind you get from Instagram notifications, email inbox pings, and endless TikTok doom-scrolls—makes your brain addicted to constant hits of shallow novelty over emotional depth.

It narrows your attention until all you want, constantly, is more—while reducing your sensitivity to subtler emotional states like inspiration, feeling moved, or feeling awe.³

Research shows that accessing awe and wonder is one of the 4 key ways humans find a sense of meaning—but when we’re always on our phones, they’re really rare.

💭 4) Chronic phone use erodes your ability to integrate your experiences.

Non-stop phone use puts your nervous system into an chronically activated state—and in this state, it’s nearly impossible to integrate, and deeply reflect on, your experiences.⁴

When you’re always looking for the next notification, video, or task, your mind can’t slow down enough to metabolize your experiences into insight—and without insight, life feels unprocessed.⁶ As if you’re going through the motions with no deeper meaning.

So what should we do about it?
Here are the 4 steps I’m personally taking.

Chronic phone use and social media addiction are global, systemic issues⁠. These platforms are designed to be addictive⁠—which means that personal habit changes matter, but they can’t be the whole solution.

That said, as a fellow phone-over-user, here are 4 things that have significantly helped me reduce my phone use:

1) I learn about how chronic phone use impacts my brain to build my motivation to break the habit.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend The Social Dilemma, a fantastic Netflix documentary that explores how these apps are designed to be addictive⁠—and the how they dangerously shape our minds, world, and political systems.

2) I keep my iPhone screen set to greyscale.

Making your iPhone screen black-and-white reduces its addictive pull by removing color stimulation—which leads to to less screen time, better focus, and reduced eye strain.²

3) I use the Freedom app to restrict my access to certain apps and sites (hello, Instagram). I set it before I go to bed so that Next-Day-Hailey doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

You can decide exactly which sites you want to be locked out of⁠—and for how long. (Freedom doesn’t pay me to say this; I just love the app. It’s much better and harder to hack than the built-in iPhone Screen Time function).

4) I seek out communities of people who are equally committed to reducing screen time⁠⁠—communities where being “less online” is not punished, but actively encouraged and celebrated. (I’ve got one for you!)

I don’t believe that breaking these addictive habits can (or should) happen in a vacuum. The cultural pressure to be always plugged-in and always online is powerful—and I believe we need subcultures and communities where being “less online” is not punished, but actively encouraged and celebrated.

That’s part of why I created the Hustle to Heart Bookclub: an intimate community of meaning-seekers who are intentionally stepping off the productivity and achievement hamster wheel.

✨With monthly thought-provoking reads, rich discussion, and structured no-phone monthly book club meetings, Hustle to Heart members support one another as we trade burnout and achievement-chasing for presence, meaning, and vitality.

You can learn more and join the community here.

What have you found most useful for reducing your screen time? Drop your ideas in the comments!

Citations

¹Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11(6), 671–684.

²Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience.

³Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2003). Addiction. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 25–53.

⁴Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

⁵McAdams, D. P. (2013). The psychological self as actor, agent, and author. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 272–295.

⁶Healthline. (n.d.). We tried it: Does setting your phone to grayscale reduce screen time? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/we-tried-it-does-setting-your-phone-to-grayscale-reduce-screen-time