
Excessive phone use linked to problems with productivity, relationships, health - Terretta
https://cognitiontoday.com/2020/08/phone-addiction-coping-solutions-research-statistics/
======
halotrope
Phone addiction is like food addiction. It is incredibly hard to moderate
something that you have to consume every day. Both phones and food are also
designed by industry to be as addictive as possible. I am struggling to read
books because my attention span got so low.

~~~
pjot
I almost entirely read books from my phone now - the ability to search through
notes and highlighted passages is just too good.

I’d argue that’s it’s not the phone per se, but the presented media that’s
most damaging.

For me at least, dropping all social media was a game changer. No longer being
force-fed content or having an app explicitly vying for my attention feels
really refreshing - I choose where my attention goes.

I’ve noticed colleagues that receive Slack notifications for every. single.
message.

I can’t comprehend how they’re able to continue to use a computer.

~~~
martinaoe2
How are you reading books on your phone? I find the screen narrow and
scrolling difficult.

~~~
pjot
I use the “Books” app that comes with iPhone. All books are downloaded in
.ePub format (.mobi if on Kindle I believe).

epubs enable full text search, highlighting, bookmarking, ToC, automatic
annotations, and dynamic scaling of page-numbers respective to font size.

As for turning pages, I really prefer the continuous scroll as opposed to the
sideswipe. Maybe try that?

Reading a pdf can be a pain in the ass though, especially if it’s multi-
columned. Although I gripe about that even with a monitor. My preference is to
print in that case.

------
namshub
And all the while machine learning engineers explicitly work to make them more
addictive. At least tobacco companies didn't have a monopoly on information
and they still held on to plausible deniability for as long as possible. This
a serious problem that also affects our capacity to solve the problem.

------
ninjavis
What worked best for me was simply to put my phone on airplane mode, and only
check it at specific intervals during the day.

Most people can wait for a response. It's quite absurd that we have
collectively encouraged immediate response as 'normal', and rude if not done
so.

It is pretty obvious that we become great at what we habitually practice every
day. Therefor it's no coincidence that we will become great at being
distracted because that's what we habitually practice.

------
valuearb
Correlation is not necessarily causation.

