Welcome welcome, this is the third piece in a series about revamping our relationship with our phones and The Pull. The prior two: Making It Your Own With Your Phone and Your Intent v. Your Phone's Intent.

The trajectory continues...

​

Intermittent Fasting, Digital Edition

​

Long time readers know that I completed a five day dry fast. No food, no water, no joke. But, that didn't happen overnight. My first three day water fast occurred in 2016. The dry fast began in 2020. Meanwhile, I played with many water fasts, OMAD (one meal a day), intermittent fasting with various feeding windows, time restricted feeding, and more.

A cold turkey switch from smart to dumb phone is like zero to five day dry fast for many. A single event like that creates so much friction that it prevents most people from switching at all.

Assuming cold turkey isn't the move, each path to the final destination of "Presence Maximalism" functions like a fingerprint. Presence Maximalism isn't a destination, but a repeated practice. Its not about more peace, not productivity. Whether you use that peace to be more productive, stare at the clouds, cuddle your kiddos, get swole like Tookie Williams, or whatever, its up to you. More presence = more presents. Each little moment stacks up as a gift. The paths to presence remain plenty.

​AIR Method plots a course. Jose from dumbphones.org has a handy four week Low Tech Life Course. Productivity bros and digital minimalists tout digital detox, digital sabbaths, and digital fasts as other tools in the arsenal.

While beneficial, these approaches haven't panned out for me, hence the path-as-fingerprint idea. We all have idiosyncrasies. After all, there's a billion apps in the app store. I haven't seen anyone discuss about the approach I'm taking, hence today's writing.

TL;DR- leverage hormesis little by little for long term behavior change. Hormesis, also known as progressive overload, allows for consistent and gradual ratcheting up.

When it comes to Presence Maximalism, here's what I'm doing:

'Success' Metric- weekly average of one hour max daily phone use. The metric merely serves as proxy for a goal, not the goal itself. Whether focusing on smart v. dumb phone I care less.

Figure out where the new time goes. Anticipate and savor it. Follow through. The latest hipster neuroscience says to increase a behavior, decrease friction. To decrease a behavior, increase friction. Keep decreasing phone friction, little by little, till you hit the goal.

While analyzing my behavior patterns I noticed occasionally I get sucked into my phone for long spells. More commonly though I'd pick it up for something useful, with intent, then get hijacked. Sometimes these hijacks last two minutes. Other times twenty.

There's this strange haze, emerging from phone micro-comas without recalling why I picked it up in the first place.

Other times, a single pickup involves "just checking"--no useful intent, gotta get that fix.

James Altucher refers to this as "The Loop." Others resonate with "the phantom vibrate" or the "just checking" or no labels at all.

These micro moments train us to fracture our attention. These days, its almost cliche to talk about the epidemic in Attention Deficit Disorder or its hyperactive variant. The "just checking" neurosis is akin to all day snacking whenever micro boredom arises, creating a deficit in attention.

Andrew Huberman mentions a diagnosis reversal of ADD thanks to digital detox. Remember, Adderall treats your symptoms, not causes.

Aside from digital detox, some people use phrases like "dopamine detox," "dopamine fasting," or "dopamine reset."

But what about those of us who don't have a formal diagnosis, don't want to take pharmaceuticals, and have never done a dopamine detox? What if we don't need diagnosis-as-catalyst to improve quality of life?

​

Pickups and Put Downs

Screen time happens after a pickup. Even with app limits, grayscale, and productivity widgets on the device, all these features engage after picking up the phone.

I use my willpower to avoid the "just checking" pickups. To help myself out, I'm investing into alternatives to picking up the device. These haven't looked like a one time buying spree after filling out an August Lamm worksheet. Instead, they function like a set of gradually acquired fasting tools.

Each time I can fast a little bit longer, I prove to myself that I can do it. Hormesis, baby! Here's what the trajectory has looked like so far, with baby steps you can copy. Some of these have been covered in prior writings. I'm keeping them so you can see pieces fitting together more holistically. Some of you have requested documentation of the process, since its much harder to empathize and keep the beginner's mind once it is over.

Its important to note that these didn't happen all at once. Keeping the intention to be in right relationship with my phone primed my creativity to notice these little tweaks, and add them to what I was already doing.

NOTE- YOUR PATH IS UNIQUE! MORE IMPORTANT THAN COPYING ANY OF THESE STEPS IS TO PRACTICE SELF HONESTY.

• Replacing sbux app payment with physical card- I go to starbucks daily for a few hours. This switch created a daily mini fast.
• Replacing gym phone badge in with keycard. This replaced checking the phone in the car on the way to the gym, mindlessly looking while walking to the locker room, before/after getting out of the sauna, while walking out of the facility, and on the way home. Another mini fast!
• Habit stacking sunset time after gym time- I watch the sunset as daily routine, but I'd bring my phone with me and mindlessly use it in the car. Leaving it at home, and seeing the sun right after leaving the gym creates extends the gym mini-fast.
• Getting paper insurance cards. I noticed a nagging sense of worry leaving the phone at home, because my car insurance lives in my device. This past weekend I printed the cards and put them in the glove box. Another little piece of phone friction decreased.
• Getting a GPS- I went with a used Garmin. It hasn't arrived yet but serves as another friction decreasing tool. I travel a lot and regularly frequent new places. This replaces the need to check the phone constantly when going to a new spot.
• Alarm clock- even keeping the phone in airplane mode, and having app limits and grayscale setup, I realized that picking it up to check the time reinforces that behavior loop of picking it up.
• Exposure to likeminded people- aside from doing the above, browsing r/dumbphones, reading August's book, going to Peter's event, chatting with my roomie (he's bought a dumb phone and tablet now, too) have kept atop my mind the idea that I'm not alone, there are others, and I can and am piggybacking off of their virtuous example. These create a sense of possibility and "we are in this together" like a habit formation dream team. Heck, maybe one of y'all will buy a dumb phone reading this. Lemme know if you do!

Each of these mini-fasts functions differently than a full-blown digital detox. Just like tons of daily pickups differs from a single eight hour session, tons of daily moments of micro-presence add up as well. Rather than twenty four hours in one chunk, these little chunks build nicely.

Bonus Digital Detox

Something cool happened on Saturday. I woke up, went to the farmer's market, did some writing, made a new acquaintance, printed the insurance cards, got groceries at ALDI, and went to the gym.

I arrived home at 3:35pm before I looking at my phone once!

Woohoo! Its working!

No sensation of pushing it, grinding, or David-Goggins-self-talk to refrain from The Pull.

Unless I happened to be on some retreat, I couldn't tell you the last time I had a Saturday where I didn't touch my phone till after 3:30pm.

These micro steps and micro adaptations produce macro results. No one planned in 2008, by 2025 I'll be using this baby 12 hours a day, have 1,000+ new online 'friends' while feeling lonelier than ever, be on focus meds while remaining terribly unfocused, lose my navigation abilities, stop making friends at the grocery store, and keep my local chiropractor busy thanks to my phone.

We got into this mess little by little. We can return to innocence little by little.

It feels fantastic.

Don't take my word for it.

What's a small step you can take today? One little trip you can take this week and leave your phone at home?

Peace,
Drew