Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 192 pages
Audiobook Length: 4 hours and 28 minutes
First Published: 2018
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Publisher’s Description
Packed with tested strategies and practical tips, this book is the essential, life-changing guide for everyone who owns a smartphone.
Is your phone the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you touch before bed? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,” only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Do you say you want to spend less time on your phone—but have no idea how to do so without giving it up completely? If so, this book is your solution.
Award-winning journalist Catherine Price presents a practical, hands-on plan to break up—and then make up—with your phone. The goal? A long-term relationship that actually feels good.
You’ll discover how phones and apps are designed to be addictive, and learn how the time we spend on them damages our abilities to focus, think deeply, and form new memories. You’ll then make customized changes to your settings, apps, environment, and mindset that will ultimately enable you to take back control of your life.
Quotes from How to Break Up With Your Phone
Steve Jobs was right: smartphones really are different. They’re different in a lot of good ways, obviously. But smartphones also talk back at us. They nag us. They disturb us when we’re working. They demand our attention and reward us when we give it to them. Smartphones engage in disruptive behaviours that have traditionally been performed only by extremely annoying people.
Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship with it, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don’t.
If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.
In other words, what we think of as irresistible impulses are actually invitations being sent by our minds. This is an important insight, because once you recognize this, you can ask your mind why it’s inviting you to such crappy parties.
About Catherine Price
Catherine Price is a science journalist, speaker, author, and consultant. Her books include Vitamania, 101 Places Not to See Before You Die, and How to Break Up With Your Phone. Originally from New York City, Price currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Visit the author’s website →
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