Ezra's Bookshelf

How to Break Up with Your Phone

by Catherine Price · 193 pages · ~3.5 hrs

Psychology & MindScience & Technology

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Catherine Price offers a science-based guide to reclaiming attention from devices designed to capture and monetize it. Price, a science journalist, explains how smartphones exploit neurological vulnerabilities: variable reward schedules that mimic slot machines, social validation metrics that trigger dopamine, and infinite scroll features that defeat our natural stopping cues. The book synthesizes research on attention, addiction, and digital design while providing a practical thirty-day program for changing phone habits. Price distinguishes between tools that serve our purposes and technologies that manipulate us, encouraging readers to identify which apps add value and which merely extract it. She examines how tech companies employ behavioral scientists to maximize 'engagement'--a euphemism for addiction--while outsourcing the costs to users and society. The program includes specific exercises: tracking screen time, removing social media apps, creating phone-free zones, and practicing mindfulness techniques to notice urges without acting on them. Price writes with self-deprecating humor about her own phone dependency, modeling the honest self-assessment the book requires. Rather than demanding digital abstinence, she advocates for intentional use that restores phones to their proper role as tools. The book equips readers to resist manipulation by understanding how it works, offering both critique and constructive response to the attention economy.

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