How to break a phone habit: make the reach a little awkward

On Hidden Brain ("Creatures of Habit", 2020, a rerun of a 2019 conversation), psychologist Wendy Wood told host Shankar Vedantam about one of her oddest studies. Her team handed moviegoers boxes of popcorn while they rated trailers. Some boxes were fresh. Others had been popped a week earlier and left in a plastic bag in the lab.

People who rarely ate popcorn at the movies did what you'd expect and left the stale stuff. Regular popcorn eaters, she said in that conversation, ate about 70% of their box either way, even though they told the researchers afterward that they hated the stale popcorn. The cinema, the dark and the box were cue enough. Then the team asked people to eat with their other hand, and the regulars stopped eating the stale batch. Wood's explanation:

If you add that thought to the behavior, you make people attend to it

Wendy Wood, Hidden Brain, 2020

Habits don't check whether you're enjoying it

Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, describes habits as mental links between a context and an action, built by repeating the action there and getting a quick reward. Once the link is strong, the context starts the action before you decide anything. That's why the stale popcorn kept going in.

Swap popcorn for your phone and the picture is familiar. A queue, a lull in a meeting, the sofa after dinner: the hand moves first. In a study that filmed people's everyday phone use, about nine in ten interactions were started by the person, not by an alert (Heitmayer and Lahlou, 2021). Like the popcorn, a lot of that checking may not be something you'd choose if you stopped to think.

Awkward on purpose

The other-hand trick works because it puts a thought back into an automatic act. Phone studies point the same way. In a field study of a self-nudge app that adds a short pause before chosen apps open, 280 users dropped about a third of their attempts to open those apps over six weeks; the study had no control group, and the app's creator is a co-author (Grüning et al., 2023). In a small trial with 70 students, those who chose their own package of settings, such as the phone out of reach and social apps off the home screen, cut nearly an hour a day, against 11 minutes for those who only tracked their use (Olson et al., 2022).

None of this needs willpower in the moment. It changes what the moment looks like, so that the reach becomes a choice again.

How this fits the phone program

The phone program's first paid chapter does what Wood's study did: it slows one automatic act down so you can see it. You take apart yesterday's longest pick-up into the cue, the reach and the pull. The next chapter changes the context around the reach: you move the charger, quiet your alerts, tidy your home screen and limit your top app, setting up your own phone as you go, with steps for iPhone and Android. If your pattern is the one we call the Reflex, where the hand moves first, you start by keeping the phone at arm's length. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: Hidden Brain, Creatures of Habit, with Wendy Wood, 28 December 2020 Research: Heitmayer and Lahlou (2021) · Grüning, Riedel and Lorenz-Spreen (2023) · Olson et al. (2022)