Why are you scrolling your phone in bed AGAIN?

- Oh, hey there. We need to have a chat because if you're watching this, I'm guessing you're watching it in the morning, in bed, as part of a social media scroll session that you told yourself you were not going to do when you went to bed last night. You told yourself, I'm gonna get up immediately tomorrow morning. My alarm's gonna go off, I'm out of bed, I'm getting stuff done. Maybe you have a morning routine you're trying to go through, maybe you're trying to read, maybe you had plans to go to the gym, maybe you've got an hour of time in the morning if you wake up early enough before you have to go to work and you can work on that side project you're trying to get built. But instead, you grabbed your phone off of your nightstand and you started scrolling. Now I'm not gonna cyber-bully you in this video because I've done the same thing more times than I care to admit. I make productivity content on this channel but I will be the first to admit that I'm not always the world's most productive person. I go through phases. Sometimes I'm right out of bed and I'm going into a morning routine. Sometimes I just roll right into work. Other times, I've grabbed my phone off my nightstand and I've opened up Twitter and lost sometimes an hour to social media scrolling. In my case, the problem app was always Twitter. And it always starts the same, right? You grab the phone, you're a little groggy, and you're just like, "I'm just gonna check my mentions while I wake up. "It'll take five seconds. " It's like the same lie every single time. Just gonna check the mentions. Before I know it, I'm scrolling through the home feed, replies on a tweet on the home feed, worst thing you can do, and now I'm looking at a tweet from somebody who has a frog profile picture just saying the most ignorant crap ever. I wanna dunk on him. I don't realize I've wasted an hour of my life. But ever since 2024 started, all the way back in January, I haven't done this once. And that is due to one simple action I decided to take when this year started. It was so easy to do physically, and yet I don't know why it took me this long to convince myself it is what needed to be done. I deleted social media off my phone and it won't be back. Twitter is gone. Facebook, gone. Instagram, out of there. I still check these things on my desktop deliberately. I am a social media person after all, and I have a lot of friends who I interact with, especially on Twitter. I've made a lot of genuine great friends through Twitter. But I don't do it on my phone now because there's a difference between checking social media on your phone and checking it at a desktop computer, at least in my opinion. When you sit down and decide to check it at a desktop computer, it is intentional, or at least it's more likely to be. When it's on your phone, it's likely you grabbed it off your nightstand and you're scrolling it unconsciously just because it's easy, it's habitual, and it promises a quick dopamine hit in 30 seconds or less. And I decided that I didn't want that to be part of my life anymore. So I took the simple 10-second action of holding the screen, hitting Remove App, and getting those apps off my phone. I'm never putting them back again, even if it's inconvenient. Even if I don't have someone's phone number and I'm trying to set up a lunch date or something, I'm DMing them on my computer saying, "Here's my phone number, call me, text me, "beat me if you wanna reach me, "'cause I won't have to enter my phone. " And this has caused a genuinely positive change in my life beyond just the fact that I'm not scrolling my phone in bed in the morning, because I'm also not pulling it out in the checkout lane to idly scroll. I'm not pushing my workout rest periods to 10 minutes or 15 minutes 'cause I get caught up in social media. It just makes life better. And I've also noticed that I now have more energy to do things like cooking. Before, I feel like the constant access to that dopamine hit that you can just get by pulling your phone out and opening social media makes certain non-essential activities, like if you can order takeout, cooking is non-essential, it makes non-essential activities like that seem like too much of a pain in the butt. And when you get rid of those social media apps, at least for me, you kind of deprogram your brain a little bit. I once read in a book on habit building, could have been the power of habit, could have been atomic habits, credit to you, James, if it's the latter, that we don't get rid of bad habits, we replace them with better ones. And I think that's what's happened here. I've replaced the bad habit of constantly going for my phone to get that dopamine hit with other more positive things. I find fulfillment in cooking. keeping my house cleaner, actually. It's been this interesting change. And a lot of this probably sounds obvious to people who don't keep these apps on their phone, but I know a lot of you watching this video have the exact same problem. You're constantly scrolling, constantly filling all those little dead moments of the day with those dopamine hits. What would your life be like without them? Well, one way to potentially find out is to try removing the apps from your phone. This is an exercise in environmental design. There's a book I read a while back called "The Happiness Advantage" by Sean Aker, and he coins this term called activation energy. Essentially, the more activation energy, the more friction there is involved in doing something, the less likely you're going to do it, especially on a whim. So he coined this thing called the 20-second rule. If you wanna do something more often, make it take less than 20 seconds to start it

AKA, reduce the activation energy. If I wanna play guitar, it's right there. I can grab it, start playing right away. And conversely, if you wanna do something less often, make it take more than 20 seconds to do. Delete the apps off your phone. If you have a problem with ice cream, like I honestly do, don't keep it in your freezer every single day. Don't constantly buy a new pint. If the activation energy goes up, you are much less likely to engage in the behavior that you don't wanna be engaging in. I'm not going to tell you need to delete social media off your phone, but I will report that it has been very beneficial to me and it might be worth trying. No sponsor on this one. That's it. There might be another video right there, but I don't know, maybe clicking another video is actually what you shouldn't be doing right now. Maybe there's something else in the real world you should go do instead. So touch grass.