# I Stopped Using My Phone. The results were shocking

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nate O'Brien
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Iewo7zUFo
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41307

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

we're spending a lot of time on our phones in fact the average American is now pushing close to six hours per day of screen time on our devices and if you do six hours a day that's three months per year of your life that you're spending on your phone extrapolate that for 60 years of your life that's 15 years of Our Lives that we're spending on our phones so we're using our phones so much every day and even those these devices can be so incredibly useful I think there's still this feeling that I get sometimes when I use my phone excessively and the only way I can describe this feeling is the feeling of guilt that I'm you know if I'm using my phone for three or four or five hours in a day and I kind of Wonder like why am I using my phone so much I don't even want to be on it so much but I still use it so often and so I had this crazy idea recently that what if I could do an experiment where I stopped using my phone entirely and I replace it with a notebook but I wanted to see what would happen you know look I was born in the 90s and so for the majority of my life phones have really been there I mean I don't really remember besides using like MapQuest when we were going places for directions I don't really remember not having a phone it's kind of wild to even think about but you know there's been 117 billion people on Earth over the past 2000 years and of those 117 billion only like five or six billion of them have used smartphones and so when I realized it that way realizing that you know 96 of the human population didn't use phones in their lives that you know maybe this isn't that crazy of an idea to try not using a phone for 30 days as an experiment to see what would happen I've learned things from this I really was not expected you know I had some ideas of what would happen and and how the experience would go of locking my phone away and not using it at all um but the results were really incredible and fascinating and so let me share that with you today the rules for this experiment were pretty simple I was going to lock my phone away and then I was going to allow myself to carry around a notebook effectively replace my phone with one of these small notebooks that I bought on Amazon because look your brain is this web of information and we need a place to categorize this and store our thoughts and ideas and so I realized very quickly after like a couple hours of not I think my phone is like okay I need to have notebooks and carry these around in my pocket all the time for whenever you have some thoughts or maybe you know they're like oh I forgot I have to go you know turn in this assignment or I have to do this work take care of this project and so just having these basic notebooks in my pocket at all times was really helpful and useful when running this experiment so here's what I learned from this there's three big takeaways okay and there are a couple of big downsides as well but the biggest one that I noticed immediately right off the bat was that by not having my phone on me and leaving it at home in a drawer and going out and doing things meeting up with friends it was one of the most freeing experiences of my life because I think normally you know when we took typically are you store phones we're always reaching around for it and like you probably remember like sometimes where maybe you go outside the house and you go grocery shopping you're like wait where's my phone and you start reaching around for it and we get like this little like almost little like panic attack or like the rush of anxiety where we're suddenly like wondering you know where's my phone and we start wondering like is someone messaging me I need it how do I get home what if there's something wrong and I know this happened to me personally I don't want to speak for everyone else so that's just how I felt but when I immediately made the decision to like actively not have it on me I didn't feel that anymore it's the same way of like when your phone is on two percent battery and you start like freaking out you're like oh my God like I need to you know charge this I need to find a charger and you kind of go into panic mode as well but when you don't have it on you it's like it lifts this weight off your shoulders that was the first thing I immediately noticed when I stopped using my phone so the biggest thing that I've learned from this experiment was that it's good to be bored and it's good to have down time in your life at some point so for example what I mean by this is you know today whenever we're sitting and waiting for something maybe we're on the subway or we're at the doctor's office waiting instead of just sitting there and letting yourself Daydream and let your mind wander instead of doing that we now constantly try to fill every single minute of Our Lives we just reach for our phone and we just browse and we're like looking through our LinkedIn messages we're scrolling through uh YouTube sorts we're doing all these things just to fill our time so that we don't have any little bit of downtime at all and I think this is a big issue today that a lot of like people don't really address or even think about but I've noticed this myself that like when if I don't have any downtime boredom and there's no moments for me to have like this creative kind of like mind-wandering thinking about stuff I don't really feel good when I don't allow myself to do that and so this is the biggest thing that I've learned from not having my phone on me is that it allowed myself to be bored have that down time and then also to recognize things that maybe I wasn't aware of before like

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

like sitting on the subway you start to notice things about other people and like things like you're like wow I never saw that before how did I never see that before well I was so focused on my phone all the time that I never looked up and looked around and kind of observed everything in the world I think that it allows you to balance out like so that you're not always seeking these little hits of dopamine but you have that time where it's just kind of like relaxed and there's not too much going on and I think that's good for us because today we're always looking for that gratification like every minute we're looking for some new form of gratification just constantly looking for dopamine anywhere we can find it now I will admit there were quite a few roadblocks as well from not having my phone on me one of the biggest ones is that I was getting lost a lot like I would have to memorize directions before I would go out to meet with friends or to go even to like a certain store be like okay how do I get to Home Depot and I'll try to remember all the things or I would jot down the directions to get there and then I would end up getting lost and then have to go and like talk to someone and go to like a gas station and ask them for directions and people looked at me pretty funny when I would ask people but it was kind of like this it was fun um and you know people like why don't you just look this up on your phone and I would just tell people oh my phone's dead you know I can't use my phone right now um but yeah there were a lot of issues with it I think the other problem that I had is uh I almost missed my train I was trying to take an Amtrak train and uh I got to the train station I was like wait I don't have my phone how am I gonna print out like I don't have a printer either so I need to find a way to get my ticket uh because I bought it on my computer so I had to go to the Amtrak like desk and talk to them and get it printed out um and yeah I almost missed my train there but I also realized that like I think probably within the next 10 years you won't even be able to run an experiment like this because I think we're going to be at a point where you need to have your phone at every point in order to just function in basic things in society like when you go to pay for things because obviously cash is going out and I think even like physical credit cards are going out soon it's just going to be like tapping your phone to pay for everything um and so I would say probably in 10 years like it'll be difficult to even run this experiment because you won't be able to like flag down a taxi you'll have to do it through Uber or some of these different apps um and so I think there's another thing that like was kind of cool about is like okay like you can do this in 2023 but can you do it in 2033 2043 probably not and so why not try it out as an experiment to see how you feel about um and through this process and it also really helped my social skills when I was walking around town um when I you know had to ask for those directions or also just I was more willing to go out of my way to talk to people I mean not you know randomly approach people like all the time in a weird way but uh just more social as a person um because I didn't have that phone to resort to now I will admit that I didn't actually make it a full 30 days so um it was very difficult to go a full 30 days without using a phone at all I had to go down to Texas and I had to rent a car and do all these other things and I realized look it's really like it's almost impossible to not use a phone exclusively for a long period of time I made it two weeks I'm proud of myself for making it that long through the experiment um but didn't make it the full 30 days so I urge you to try this as well and just see what happens and let me know your thoughts on it I don't think it's the solution to be abstinent from phone usage entirely like we need these devices just to interact in society for the most part I think I have to go back to my traditions of using things like the Locking cookie jar and putting my phone in grayscale mode and turning off notifications and then also I recently found a company called clearspace what this does is it has significantly reduced my screen time on my phone from what I was doing probably a few hours per day down to 90 minutes per day and it does some basic things like for example uh when you try to access certain apps uh it will make you wait I think it's about 15 seconds it'll make you wait and it kind of makes you like second guess like wait do I really need to open Instagram right now and so just those little things that it will do to kind of nudge you in the right direction of like reminding you like hey but do you really want to access this app right now has significantly reduced my screen time and so if you support this Channel and you also really want to reduce your phone usage because maybe you as well feel guilty about using your phone so much then it would really mean a lot to me if you went and checked them out just for transparency here they're not paying me to say this but we did invest a small amount into the company through our Venture fund download the app try it out for a week and let me know how you feel about it um I know like the first few days when I tried it out I was like man like I really just want to get on these apps and it's this like clear space is not letting me like um and then after a certain period of time it's like wow this is really useful um and so try it out for a week at least to see how it works for you that's something I just want to include in there because it's something that you know I personally like as an individual can't like help everyone to reduce screen time I can make videos about it but that's why I really like this company because it'll like they are

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 10:00) [10:00]

working on this issue exclusively and I think I'm going to release a video sometime in the next couple of weeks like on how to how I reduce my screen time from about four hours a day down to 90 minutes per day um and I feel very good about it now like where I don't use my phone too much I use it as a tool and I use it to still you know check a couple of things and you know check Instagram check some other things um but it's really in a spot where I have this quite a bit of freedom in my life and I don't feel like I'm uh completely tied to my phone and I don't need to have it with me all the time and I don't need to check it think there's a lot of people who are totally addicted to their phones I know I certainly was and I really think you could call it an addiction if you have any questions thoughts leave them down below in the comments section I would love to hear them so thanks for watching the video I really appreciate all the support here and I'll see everybody in a future video