Is your smart phone eating your brain?
I have a confession to make… I LOVE my smartphone. I carry it with me on hikes along with about 40 Gigabytes of educational MP3s (and a little music). I love being able to ask Siri to “call my wife”, “take me to Portsmouth”, “find movie times”, and occasionally see how much she loves me. (She’s not really so fond of the last request)
I’m more productive in many ways because she’s with me most, if not all the time. I can check my email and respond to critical decisions when I stop for gas on a long trip. I can easily check and update my calendar if I’m out of the office and need to schedule an appointment. I can pay bills, FaceTime with my niece and nephew (though admittedly we do little more than make stupid faces which gets old kinda quick… at least for ME!), look up hiking trails, quickly check the weather, and SO much more!
But I’m also aware of a problem… For a long time I’ve been a little worried that my smartphone might be eating my brain. Oh, I’m NOT talking about the radiation and brain tumors… I’ve taken measures to protect myself from that for years now. (Hint: Keep it at arm’s length when the cellular and data connections are active, and turn them off when you don’t need them).
But over the last year or so I’ve come to realize I’m unduly nervous when I don’t have my phone near bye. Almost like a smoker without his cigarettes, except it’s a LOT harder to “bum an iPhone” than it is to bum a smoke!
Enter Travis Coty, copywriter and author of the upcoming book “30 Days Unplugged” Travis apparently was a LOT more bothered about his smartphone (and general technology) addiction than I was… so much so that he actually got up the nerve to UNPLUG from the last 15 years of technological advancements for 30 days. (Can you imagine such a thing!!? What a lunatic! How did he ever survive?)
Of course, being a copywriter, author, AND stand up comedian Travis documented the whole thing on a camcorder. (Yes, he knows that’s technology too, but it was here 15 years ago so hold your horses there Bucko)…
He also did an exhaustive amount of READING–you know, like in books and stuff, not on his Kindle if you can bear the thought–about the impact smartphones, social media, iPads, etc. are having ON OUR NEURO-PHYSIOLOGY…
And in this VERY interesting interview, you’ll hear Travis and I discuss…
- Why his conclusion after this daring experiment is absolutely NOT to totally unplug and go back to the stone age. (If it were, the book would have to be called “Unplug Forever”, right?)…
- The very strange reason his friends thought he was either on drugs or must have discovered a new form of meditation just 3 days after he “turned off the lights”…
- Some very practical–if somewhat unusual–advice regarding simple steps you can take to unplug while simultaneously enhancing your productivity and movement towards life and business missions…
- A new perspective on multitasking which might just change how you approach it. (Note: Turns out that when you look at the science, the line is drawn at more than TWO tasks, not more than one)…
- How many of us may be inflicting an ancient doctrine of war against ourselves EVERY DAY without even knowing it…
- The reason so many people in our society today are actually demonstrating symptoms of diagnosable psychiatric illnesses due to real (temporary) physiological changes in our brains brought about by the overwhelming inputs in the modern technological matrix…
- And much, much more!
Listen, Learn, Enjoy!
The Good Dr. G
