Can we live without our phones?

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1:38The Documentary, home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service.

1:48Hello, I'm James Reynolds. This time in the documentary, it's BBC Conversations, where we bring people together to share their experiences of tech addiction and whether or not we can cope without our smartphones. How long would you last? Last month, the social media giant Meta agreed an$18 billion settlement with US states to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children. Meta denied any wrongdoing but agreed to implement a two-hour daily limit for teenage users across its platforms. And this week, the boss of Snapchat said that his firm would also be willing to restrict the time that teens could spend on his app.

2:31If this has got you checking your own screen time, later we'll hear from people who've chosen to do it all very differently. They don't own smartphones at all. They talk about the difference that has made to their lives. But for our first conversation, my colleague Priya Rai brought together three people who found help through recovery programs for people struggling with tech addiction. Tom is in the US state of Michigan. Alex is in Vancouver, Canada. And Julia, not her real name, is on the US West Coast. I struggled with this addiction for a really long time, for well over a decade, and it actually started manifesting as a teenager.

3:11And for me, I mean, it's different for all of us, but it was games, videos, it was all kinds of things, blogs, podcasts, books, really anything that could hold my attention online. and it started out as fun and it was only occasionally causing problems. And then, you know, by the end, it was causing problems all the time. And I was, you know, losing sleep. I was facing a lot of consequences at school and work. I was really getting more and more withdrawn and anxious. And yeah, I didn't understand that it was a technology addiction. I thought, you know, I wasn't managing my time well. I just had to be more responsible.

3:56But it actually was the technology. And the proof of that is that when I finally, you know, joined this community and was able to stop, my life got unimaginably better in ways that I didn't understand. Some of my problems were connected to the addiction. Very relatable. My story is that I loved internet technology growing up. It actually brought me a lot of joy for quite a while. I'm 36 now. I think there were some issues popping up, but I still enjoyed it. I had a really nasty situation like breakup in 2018. And in 2019, I discovered, oh, I'm like really addicted to technology. I think I had been addicted far before that, but that was the moment I realized it.

4:41So I went on a quest for like six years to resolve my addiction. So I did things like I did a three-month dopamine detox. I would abstain from certain types of technology and it wouldn't work. And the situation kept getting more hopeless. I fell into suicidality. I didn't even know where it was coming from. I basically was blaming everything else. And then in 2025, I joined the community and things started to click for me. And my life's been getting better basically since then. Alex, tell us your story and what addiction looked like for you. Yeah, I got my first computer in 1998. And yeah, and I spent the entire summer in front of it during how to program.

5:26And then I got the internet connection. And, yeah, there was so much. There was so much information, so much fun to have. I kind of started with this just spending time on the internet and enjoying myself. And with time, I kind of spent more and more time there. And after college, I broke up with my girlfriend. And for 10 years, I didn't have any girlfriend. And most of my relationship was through computer. And it wasn't really great. I really loved my grandma. My grandma got dementia. And in the year when she got really bad, I couldn't really spend time with her because I was on my computer, cycling through social networks, YouTube, Netflix.

6:15I didn't do games because games actually require some work. But everything else, yeah, social networks. By the end of it, by 2024, what it looked like is that During the workday, I would spend quite a bit of time on Hacker News, going to Twitter, reading technical articles. And by the end of the day, I would switch to YouTube shorts and watch them. And then I would go to Netflix and watch a season of a show until 5 a.m. And then I had to start my day at 7.30, so that was not sustainable. a ball i i just had this feeling that like there is nothing in me that can stop it yeah and that's when i um went to my first meeting and it really helped me and uh this is when it really clicked and i stopped doing that like cold turkey essentially i i feel more connected now to people and it's the biggest regret of my life that i just wasted like over 20 years of my life to this and And yeah, that's me.

7:27Thank you so much for the details all three of you have shared. I wonder how it feels talking about this out loud. It's one thing within your groups, but of course now as well on a radio program. What is that like, Tom? Oh, it's great. I love talking about this. This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. So just being able to talk about it and air it out feels great. being able to relate, being able to have people that are interested in the problem. Basically, for me, these days, it's kind of difficult for me to feel joy. But I do notice that I feel joy when I am able to try to talk about this subject or help other people out.

8:07It's a lot of this like pent up energy that I finally am able to channel in a positive direction in a way that actually helps people where I don't have to act like I have to save everybody, I can just share my story. Really, that's all I'm doing is I'm just sharing my story. And it just feels good to be able to air it out and know that people are listening and that it's useful. There's a quote in a book where it says that feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. And when I talk about my experience, that's what happens for me. I would never tell a soul about this before when I was actively addicted.

8:41I couldn't even talk to my therapist about it. I thought I was being honest with people about my life, but there was this huge thing I was leaving out, I would say, oh, I just didn't sleep all night, but I wouldn't say what I had done. And the reason for that is I was deeply ashamed on some level. I couldn't even look at it for myself. But when I came into Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, I started to open my mouth and actually talk about this stuff. And the reason for that is, I googled technology addiction. This came up and I went to a meeting. It was on Zoom. And I still remember someone there was talking about her experience, how she had taken this exam.

9:25It was a timed exam in college. And she had started using the internet to distract herself during the exam, even though it was time limited and she had studied. And I was like, I've done that. I've done all of this. People would share about all these experiences that it was like they were looking into my brains. They were staying up all night and hating themselves in the morning and feeling all shaky and zoned out all day. And I started to talk about my story too, because I was emboldened by the experiences that I was hearing. And I found that these people actually had a solution and they seemed to be pretty happy with their lives, even without technology, which I couldn't imagine.

10:10So yeah, recovery has been about this honesty and openness and, you know, integrity, bringing together these different parts of myself that were so hidden from each other. And I do that so that I can tell people about what has happened and tell people that there's a solution if they happen to be struggling with the same thing that I was struggling with that, you know, we, we can, we do recover and that it gets better. I think the good question to ask is, can you do it on your own? And are you trying to figure it out? Because these things don't work for me. And I wonder, do they work for you? Because like figuring out is like, turns out not to be a solution.

10:58I cannot figure it out. And the question maybe is can you yeah i can answer that no i can't and that is just based on my direct experience of trying to figure it out myself and it not working for a long time and so when i do have someone like we you know someone new that comes into the ita program i really just you know as julia said i lead them to solutions where they're allowed to just kind of let go of the problem And that's really what it's all about is allowing myself to be helped. That has been one of the most powerful things for me is allowing myself to be helped by other addicts and allowing myself to just reach out and find that.

11:43It seems like my brain wants to control everything. So it wants to do everything by itself. And every time I kind of fall into that mindset, I start suffering again. And then when I let go and I just sort of follow life as it's happening, then I get back to serenity. I will totally agree with that. And I will just say, I had to get to a point where I really gave up on myself. I could no longer keep the promises that I was making to myself. I couldn't look myself in the mirror and trust the person looking back at me. But that was actually the best thing that ever happened to me, honestly, because that forced me to give up on trying to do it on my own.

12:25and it forced me to reach out. Help is out there if you're looking for it. And I finally decided to start looking for it. And honestly, like it's not an exaggeration. It's the best decision that I ever made. And the past three years have been like every year is better than the last. Julia, Alex and Tom. Listening to them, it's easy to see why screen time has become such a big talking point. Recent research by psychiatrists in Japan warned that an increasing number of children are now suffering from smartphone addiction, which they say is becoming a wider social problem. And on our live weekday programme, Outside Source, we heard from clinical psychologist and addiction therapist Fazul Waheed in Pakistan.

13:10The human brain has evolved to seek novelty, social approvals and social connections. and I think social media delivers all three almost simultaneously. So that's the problem, that like other addictive substances, it appeals to the reward circuit of the brain and it hijacks it and the brain starts assigning more value to social media than other natural pleasurable activities. You're listening to The Documentary with me, James Reynolds, from the BBC World Service.

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15:16Los Angeles. The prime reason I don't have a smartphone is time. As I'm getting older and still working, still making a living, I'm just finding it more difficult to have personal time to do what I want. I'm a block printmaking artist as well as a writer. So I teach writing classes, I teach woodcut printing, and I try to do writing and printing on my own. And honestly, it's just very difficult for me to find time each day to do that. And I see what a smartphone does. It just squeezes time from your life and makes it real, real difficult. So that's prime reason number one. And prime reason number two is security.

15:59I've had a number of friends who've been scammed via their smartphone. I don't need it. So I choose to go without it. For me, I feel very much like Lauren, that these devices are really designed to mediate who we are, the feelings we have, the experiences that are available to us. And there's a really enormous kind of cascading impact on our minds and our consciousness. And a person like me or like Lauren are able to have our lives be more deliberate and I think more meaningful. I was participating in the Academic Senate here a few years ago. And when I would come into campus like today on a Monday morning, and I would see the tension on people's faces from the WhatsApp group, you know, I don't need that in my home life over the weekend to be thinking about all these stressful things.

16:42It really allows, I think, in my professional life and in my personal life, me to design what I do and to really hold my attention on the things that I think are most worthwhile. Well, I'll tell you one thing you don't have to deal with is family groups. I can see the benefits of not being on those sometimes. Lauren, on that question, though, of needing a smartphone, you had some medical tests recently, didn't you? Was it a problem there in getting your results because you didn't have a smartphone? I mean, do you have moments where it is difficult? Yeah, that was a pain. It was I had my yearly physical.

17:16And of course, they send a link so I could access them via a smartphone. And since I didn't have a smartphone, I had to drive down to the doctor's office, make an appointment first and and view them. And that was a pain. I'll agree. But quite honestly, I agree with Jeffrey that any advantages that the smartphone offers, I think is outweighed by the disadvantages. My wife does have a smartphone. So when I was traveling, we used her smartphone and that made life a lot easier. So that was, I think that was one instance where I would say that a smartphone was valuable. But, you know, there's a third reason I don't use smartphones.

17:56And I do think there's some kind of mass hypnosis going on in the world. You see how the world is today. I don't think anyone would disagree that there are crazy conflicts on all sides right now and people are sort of losing their mind and and i think it all happens via the smartphone i think it's a it's a device that allows us to be brainwashed to a certain extent and at the very least i don't want to seem extreme but at the very least it just takes up our time and i know that i'm impressionable if i had a smartphone i'd probably be wasting time just like everyone else can i apologize there because i made the fatal mistake of not turning my smartphone off.

18:35And it was my son calling me as you were making a very valid point. I wonder, though, on that point, Lauren, that idea that you have that there's good and bad, but the bad outweighs the good when it comes to smartphone. Why not just deal with the good? And we need to get better at controlling ourselves. I don't need to. I mean, if the day comes where I need to, fine. But thankfully, right now in my life. I don't need to. I do use a computer. So, you know, I am one of those troglodytes who, you know, resorts to email. If that's adequate to me, why bring that into your life? There's no need. It's much like drinking wine.

19:16I mean, I think wine is wonderful and I'm sure there are some benefits for it. But for me, I don't need it. I don't. And I'm glad I don't drink it. It's Less time, now I'm drunk. What's happening right now has a lot of similarities to what happened in the last century with the automobile. The smartphone infrastructure has a lot of overlaps with that. The unbridled kind of adoption of car culture has destroyed landscapes, air, silence, public transit, and while enlarging. But it's the benefit. Some would argue against you that it's benefited the economies greatly, hasn't it? Take a country like Germany.

19:50No, but if you look at the automobile over adoption kind of amounts to a Chernobyl of the physical environment. And smartphones promise to do the same things to the mental environment in which we live in. It's really a sad time in which, you know, city layouts are ones you have to have a car. They're here in Puerto Rico and in California, places like that. There's no way to not have a car. And look what's happening to the environment. And these things are all very, very damaging. And we're on the same track with respect to kind of the QR codification of all things. However, no, I do recognize that there are some very positive things.

20:21I have a colleague of mine who's a professor at the University of Connecticut. He works in the psychiatry department and he has clients who are undergoing, for example, in psychosis. And he tells them, call me immediately on your smartphone so we can do a web chat. That can save lives. It does save lives. And you can't deny that it does. But for you, the negatives outweigh those positives. Can I just ask you both? We've seen an example of it just now with my son calling me. Does it annoy your family, your friends sometimes that they can't get hold of you all the time? Lauren, firstly. Initially, it did.

20:56But I mean, they know me and they love me. So they know I'm a little different. So that's fine. I mean, I find it's funny when I when people say, can I text you? And I always reply, I don't text. And they don't get that. I don't think people can process that. You know, I miss those family confabs. Believe me, we have those. and I know they're going on forever, but my family's pretty accepting. Sometimes when I'm dealing with new work people, they might get a little confused by it, but for the most part, it's no big deal. I mean, I think people forget that, at least those of us old enough, we had lives before smartphones came into existence and it was fine then and I think it's fine now.

21:37I think we should treat smartphones kind of the way that we treat cigarettes and recognize that they're habit-forming, they're addictive, they can encourage and cause compulsive behavior. anxiety, especially for young people. And aside from the impact of a smartphone, for example, in classrooms and with a constant kind of workplace interruptions, I think one of the great underreported things in our time is how many traffic deaths are linked to smartphone distractions. I don't think that the numbers on that are reliable. And I think like cigarettes, smartphones could become infrastructural, which is to say that The cigarette regulations have become, okay, you can use it in this space and not in this space as long as you're far away from people.

22:18Those types of things I think would be very positive as far as regulation. A lot of people would say you two are not the norm. Some people may even use, and forgive me for using this phrase, it's a bit weird that you don't have a smartphone. What do you make of those comments? Because I'm sure you've had them. Yeah, I do. I get that comment a lot. And in fact, a lot of times people like don't believe me when we're at a restaurant and that there's like a QR code for the menu. And I have to say, do you have a paper menu? They kind of look at me strangely. People do kind of think it's weird, but I think that just about everybody, if not everybody, especially my students and people appreciate it.

22:52And they can understand the value of it and what people like Lauren and I are trying to do. And, you know, how I think is a healthy thing for the broader, the most important things in our lives. I would say that yes I agree it is weird but what's wrong with being weird in some ways it's I think it's freeing I think what to me what's weird is when a couple go on a date and instead of looking at each other and talking with each other they're staring at their own phones and texting people and doing whatever the hell they're doing that to me is weird and I see elements of of weirdness on smartphones all the time, all the time.

23:30So to me, the overusage of smartphones is much more weird than not having one. One thing I did want to mention after Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, there was a really unprecedented apocalyptic time. The electricity was out for a lot of people are out for a year. But where I live, it was three or four months. Everybody now talks about that time with a certain nostalgia, even though I would not say there was anything positive about it because it was horrific. It was traumatic. But everyone had this experience where you came out and you got to speak to your neighbors in a way that you had never spoken to them before.

24:04One of the questions that was always asked when you see a colleague or a friend you hadn't seen for a couple of months is, what are you reading? Say you had dinner and then the sun goes down. There was a gap of time, which what do you do at that time? And everybody kind of did the same thing, went back to reading. And so that type of thing was really interesting. It revealed that kind of what disappears when digital connection is the default condition of everyday life. In the absence of electricity, television and Internet, people turn towards each other and we start, you know, interacting again.

24:31And that was really I think it showed me that connectivity is not human connection and that one can it can be at the expense of the other. Do you think more people are going to take your path as we move forward and there's more debate over the impact of smartphone? Or do you think you'll always be a bit of an outlier here? Well, I'll always be an outlier. But yes, more people will turn their back on the smartphone. But most people follow the trends. I think most people will continue to use it. I'm in Los Angeles where marijuana is legal. Once weed became legal, everybody smokes it. You can't go anywhere right now without encountering marijuana.

25:07When things become legal and available, most people just follow it without really questioning it. I agree. And I think that it's also very difficult to deny that giving up your smartphone or taking a digital break can kind of reboot your mood. an improved focus and give us some calm, have better thoughts, better connections and all those things. I think that we need infrastructure that makes that not only possible, I think it makes it that would make it necessary. One of the things we're doing on our campus, we have this project called Techno Moral Character Initiative that really asks questions about how education can use character in digital spaces as an opportunity to develop knowledge about how disconnecting, And specifically, like the under title of our project is Knowledge Disconnected.

25:49And how creating spaces, be it a library that has no cell phone or no Wi-Fi or maybe a no cell phone day on campus and these types of initiatives can kind of get people little by little into really appreciating the importance of being offline to human life. Jeffrey and Lauren on the joys of life without smartphones. It does make you think of all the things you could do if you weren't simply looking down at your phone. I'm James Reynolds. You've been listening to The Documentary from the BBC World Service.