Our Smart Phones Are Making Us Dumber

Dear Community,

Did you know that having your smart phone in the same room as yourself will lower your cognitive capacity? 

1. Adrian F. Ward et al. (2017), "Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity."

This is the famous study that looks at how the MERE PRESENCE of one's cell phone on your desk, or in the room affects working memory and fluid intelligence (defined as one's ability to think, reason, solve new problems, and make connections in new situations).

Researchers assigned people to three conditions:

1. Phone on desk (visible)

2. Phone in pocket or bag

3. Phone in another room

The people whose phones were in another room performed best. Those with phones on the desk performed worst. People with phones in a pocket or bag landed in between.

The researchers' explanation:

Your brain is continuously spending resources not paying attention to the phone because the phone becomes a cognitive gravity well. Even if you're resisting it successfully, part of your attentional bandwidth is occupied by the act of resisting. They called this a "brain drain."

What's even more interesting is that the effect was strongest in people who were most dependent on their phones. The more psychologically attached someone was to their device, the larger the cognitive cost of having it nearby.

Since 2017, some researchers have questioned how large the effect is, but a 2023 meta-analysis looking across many studies concluded that, overall, phone presence does appear to impair cognitive performance, though the effect size varies by situation and task.

Take home GOLD NUGGET:

There is a measurable difference between having your phone on the table and having it in another room when you're trying to think deeply.

1. Dr. Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found that average focused attention on a digital device dropped from roughly 150 seconds in 2004 to 75 seconds by 2012, and to approximately 47 seconds by 2024. Swiss German University

Reviews and meta-analyses show that frequent media multitasking is reliably associated with greater distractibility and poorer sustained attention, particularly in youth. Longitudinal evidence indicates that adolescents with higher media multitasking report increasing attention problems over time. 

Frequent exposure to rapid, fragmented content on platforms like TikTok and Snapchat overstimulates cognitive processes, leading to decreased working memory capacity, impaired cognitive control, and challenges in maintaining focus. SCIRP

1. Income & Productivity: The Cost Is Measurable

Companies lose approximately $650 billion annually due to workplace social media distractions. Employees take an average of 23 minutes to refocus after being distracted by social media. Cropink

A 2025 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics directly examined how mobile app usage affects academic and labor market outcomes, finding measurable negative effects on earnings and employment. Oxford Academic

Studies from 2024 show that media multitaskers underperform by 20% in attention-based tasks compared to single-taskers. SQ Magazine

The income damage isn't just lost work hours, it's compounding skill atrophy.

Deep work — the kind that produces expertise, creativity, and career advancement — requires sustained focus, and if our baseline capacity for 90-minute uninterrupted work keeps shrinking, we end up losing the ability to develop mastery. The people best positioned to thrive economically over the next 20 years will likely be those who can do what most people are programmed by their phone use to not be able to do:  think deeply for long stretches.

1. The constant influx of notifications, short-form content, and multitasking demands encourages surface-level engagement over deep concentration — shifting not only how we consume information, but how we form opinions and solve problems. ResearchGate. Dr. Mark's research also indicates that as attention spans shrink, perceived stress levels and heart rates rise. Swiss German University

The biggest unspoken cost  might not be distraction, but the erosion of tolerance for boredom (boredom as the medium where insight shows up, where  creativity is born and  where self-knowledge starts to form).

Do you know your screen time? (If you have an iPhone: go to Settings, scroll to screen time, see image above.  If you don't have an iPhone you're on your own, unfortunately, I can't help because I don't know the intricacies of any other phone)

The first rule of the smartphone handling is to count your pickups.

Pickups: each distinct instance you open your phone. Please remember, as long as you ignore this advice, you will stay addicted.

The smartphone  itself is not the enemy; it’s the new fundamental force in the universe that we have to learn to use. The harm comes from how many times it fragments your attention per day. Apparently, cognitive decline consistently comes after 40-50 pickups a day.

Ideally, according to the available research, your cognitive capacity is less affected if the amount of smart phone pickups is under 50 every day.

The second rule of  smartphone handling is to vocalize your intention.

Vocalize Your Intention: each pick up, say aloud, even if a whisper, what your intention is for your pickup.

Example: I'm picking up my phone to text my sister 

Bonus: do a push up, pull up, or plank to ‘earn’ each pick up

Counting your pickups and vocalizing your intention will begin to break the spell the phone has over you. (thank you, Erick Godsey, for the very helpful ideas)

More data, for people whose attention span is longer than 90 seconds (there may be a contest with prizes in the future to see who managed to keep their attention span long enough to finish this newsletter!)

This is how much time people spend, on average on their phones (GLOBAL, 2024):

total screen time: 6 hours and 40 minutes/day

social media alone: 2 hours and 21 minutes/day

% of waking hours: approximately 42% (assuming 16 hours awake)

Over a life time (starting at age 2, life expectancy 76 years)

years on all screens: approximately 21 years (Eyesafe/Whistleout data)

years on phone alone: approximately 12 years (US adults)

years on social media: approximately 7 years (at 2 hours and 21 minutes/day average) 

What 7 years (social media lifetime) could look like instead: 

fluency in approximately 14 languages (approximately 600-750 hours to fluency in easy languages, harder ones approximately 2200 hours)

master 3+ instruments (the "10,000 hour rule" applied 6x over- concert-level proficiency in multiple instruments)

read more than 2,500 books (at 3 hours/book x 61,320 hrs- enough to earn multiple PhDs worth of knowledge)

approximately 61,320 extra hours with people you love (the average American spends only 19min/day in meaningful conversation with family). 

Bottom line: you could master more than 3 instruments, be fluent in approximately 14 languages and read approximately 2500 books, if you stopped mindless scrolling.

More data and research to follow.

Please get back to me and let me know what your screen time is, how many times have you picked up your phone yesterday and, if you're successful  at using the first two rules of smartphones handling for a week,  you will be featured in my next newsletter!

Let's learn how to navigate this new era together.