You don't notice the cost. You notice it as "I just can't focus today."
Your phone doesn't have to ring to make you dumber.
It doesn't have to buzz. It doesn't have to be on.
It just has to be on the same desk.
In 2017, researchers proved this with ~800 adults.
The study is Ward et al., "Brain Drain," JACR 2017.
Three conditions to test:
→ Phone on the desk
→ Phone in a pocket or bag
→ Phone in another room
Same person. Same cognitive tests (working memory + fluid intelligence).
The room mattered.
A lot.
Participants whose phones were in another room outperformed everyone else.
Even people whose phones were silenced and face-down took a hit.
In quantitative terms the difference was between "had coffee" and "didn't."
The mechanism the authors propose:
Your brain spends energy NOT thinking about the phone.
Suppressing the urge to check it costs working memory.
You don't notice the cost. You notice it as "I just can't focus today."
Source: Ward et al. (2017). J. Assoc. Consumer Research 2(2): 140–154.
The cheapest productivity hack ever discovered:
Put the phone in another room.
Not on silent. Another room.
@LewisHowes The desire to be liked is universal but you're right. But this is true for any desire. Not just being liked.
You've got to be okay whatever happens in life to be truly blissful
@sophie_launch https://t.co/oiX3d6YiY7 - been working on it for a year. Poured our blood sweat and tears building it from scratch
We help people swap screentime with restful breathwork
Would be incredible if you gave us a shotout - thanks in advance
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned - Buddha
Something I mull over very often and could solve so many world problems
What do you guys think of this quote ?
20 years old. Still under-shared.
Your brain at 60 is not a fixed object. It's an ongoing argument with what you spend your attention on.
So stop spending time scrolling, and start spending time being aware of your breath instead.
Let https://t.co/6k5vYNGBk6 help you get there!
In 2005, a Harvard neuroscientist scanned the brains of 20 meditators and 15 non-meditators.
The meditators had significantly thicker cortex in the regions used for attention and self-awareness.
The thickness gap was largest in the oldest meditators — suggesting regular practice was offsetting age-related thinning.
That wasn't all!
🧵
4/ The mechanism is the boring miracle:
What you repeatedly attend to gets more brain.
The cortex isn't a marble slab. It's a muscle. Reps build it. Neglect thins it.
Lazar's subjects had spent thousands of hours paying attention to their breath.
The MRI showed where the reps went.