Should your phone be in another room when you focus?

In the Huberman Lab episode "How to Focus to Change Your Brain" (February 2021), Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman described what he does before a long block of focused work. He turns off the Wi-Fi, and then:

I put my phone in the other room.

Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab, 2021

He went further in the same episode. If he catches himself getting up to fetch it anyway, he locks the phone in his car outside, and he admits to having once thrown it onto his roof so he couldn't reach it until the end of the day. His reason is that the phone "is pretty compelling", and we find reasons to stay in contact with it.

The popular explanation: a phone nearby drains your brain

Huberman didn't claim more than that in the episode. Many people have heard a stronger version of the advice elsewhere: that a phone in sight quietly uses up mental capacity even when you ignore it. That idea comes from a 2017 paper. In two lab experiments with undergraduates, people whose phones were in another room did better on tests of available mental capacity than people whose phones sat on the desk (Ward et al., 2017).

The better reason: distance makes the reach longer

Huberman's own reason, that the phone is compelling and we find reasons to reach for it, fits the research well. Most checking starts with you. 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). A phone in another room turns a two-second reflex into a walk, and the walk gives you time to notice what you're doing.

Huberman's own story shows this. Another room wasn't always far enough, so he moved the phone further, to the car. That's the useful lesson: if you keep fetching it, the distance is too short for you, and you lengthen it. In a small trial with 70 students, the self-chosen settings that cut use by nearly an hour a day included keeping the phone out of reach, as part of a package (Olson et al., 2022).

How this fits the phone program

In the phone program, distance is the starting point for the pattern we call the Reflex, where your hand moves before you've decided: you start by keeping the phone at arm's length. The first paid chapter takes apart your longest pick-up into the cue, the reach and the pull, so you can see where distance helps, and the next one moves your charger, quiets your alerts and limits your top app on your own phone. Before you finish, you test that your people still get through. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: Huberman Lab, How to Focus to Change Your Brain, 8 February 2021 Research: Ward et al. (2017) · Hartanto et al. (2024) · Parry (2024) · Heitmayer and Lahlou (2021) · Olson et al. (2022)