Let's Talk About How Often We Pickup Our Phones
The hidden cost of 144 daily phone grabs fragmenting your mind
You have a silent saboteur in your life, a blind spot, and it’s right in your pocket. Your smartphone, your constant companion, is slowly eroding your well-being. And the worst part? You barely even notice it.
Sure, you’ve heard the warnings about “screen time.” The Social Dilemma on Netflix horrified you… for about a day. You’ve seen the headlines about Jonathan Haidt’s research, feeling a cold dread as you realized phones aren’t just affecting youth mental health—they’re utterly obliterating it.
But somehow, it hasn’t truly sunk in. Not in any lasting way. If you’re anything like me, you’ve had your wake-up calls—the hurt in your partner’s eyes when you choose Instagram over connection, the creative projects left unfinished, the books gathering dust on your nightstand, the missed sunsets, all sacrificed to the infinite scroll.
You’ve promised to do better. To yourself and to your loved ones.
But here we are, still glued to our screens, caught between knowing better and doing better. It feels like we will forever be one ping away from relapse.
This isn’t just about the hours you lose scrolling mindlessly, the lost-time-living. It’s about how your phone is fundamentally altering your emotional landscape, and with it the overall quality of your life. It’s about how easily you can numb yourself, disconnecting from what you are actually feeling with just a tap or a click.
Sometimes you tell yourself you’re different, immune to this digital disease. After all, you’re a high-functioning adult navigating a tech-driven world! Your phone is essential—for work, family, life itself.
But that’s precisely what makes it so insidious. It’s your blind spot—the thing you can’t see, even when it’s right in front of your face. Your phone is no longer just a tool; it’s become your emotional crutch, your digital pacifier, a phantom limb you can’t stop reaching for.
Studies, ample studies, suggest not only does the quality of conversation at a dinner table decrease, but your cognitive capacity diminishes when a smartphone is even near at hand. Not in use, just fucking nearby!
Again, if you’re like me, you’ve had your phone-free phases—a year without social media, weekend digital Sabbaths, a “mindful” vacation. You felt liberated... until life crept back in. A work email. A FOMO pang. And bam—you’re back, thumb scrolling on autopilot.
Adding insult to injury, research indicates that these breaks often backfire, with usage rebounding to even higher levels as we frantically “catch up,” erasing any benefits gained.1
So, what the hell do you do about this digital stranglehold?
While I’m typically hesitant to offer unsolicited advice in my essays, you might be surprised by how straightforward the solution is. The first step is beautifully simple, almost deceptively so: cultivate awareness.
The cold, hard data you need is right there in your phone settings, patiently waiting for you to pay attention. Darkly comic is the fact it’s the only patient thing about your phone.
Step one?
Track your daily screen time average each week. Commit to lowering it.
But don’t stop there.
There’s a hidden gem buried in your settings that tells an even more powerful story: your “pickups” metric. This number? It’s the real villain of your digital compulsion saga, revealing how often you instinctively reach for your phone.
Because let’s acknowledge the reality—most of us genuinely need our phones for work, family, and the sundry logistics like navigation, rendering mere “screen time” a less operative metric.
In my professional opinion (yes, this is my profession, lol) it’s these unconscious grabs that truly illuminate your digital dependency. As all dependencies are, at beginning and end, embodied acts.
Before you go hunting for it, take a wild guess:
How many times do you think you pick up your phone every day?
Got a number? Good. Now, let’s put it to the test. To help you get started, I’ve made a brief 2-minute video on how to track pickups and screen time.
The average American’s pickups per day? 144.
That’s 144 times every day you reach for your phone, open it, and do something, anything. You’re only awake 16 hours a day. That’s almost ten times an hour that you’re schizoidingly fragmenting your attention, switching between the wondrous tangible world and a pixelated alternate reality bombarding you with images and data intent on making you envious, self-doubting, or filled with dread.
And if you’re an “extremely online” millennial or a Zoomer? Based on my professional work and anecdotal research, you’re probably closer to 300+.
At that point, you are online; the rest of your life is squeezed therein.
The bigger picture
I’d bet my last bitcoin that as you pry yourself away from the screen, you’ll stumble upon moments of clarity. Every time you choose reality over your feed, you’re not just dodging a digital hangover, you’re training your mind to crave and enjoy genuine experience.
That icky, hollow feeling after an hour scroll binge? You’re not just going to reduce it—you’re going to replace it with real-world engagement and the possibility for joy. (Not just the shallow cackles of a legitimately funny Kookslams video or cat meme.)
But I have to be real with you about something: at first, you might not feel better without your phone. This is because your phone, like all addictions, has been distracting you from truly experiencing some scarier feelings. Those could range from existential anxiety to boredom to simmering rage.
So, take the phone away, you take the distraction away, and those feelings finally have their day. You must give them their day—so you can have your life. Otherwise, the phone and the simmering feelings will own all of you.
This project isn’t just about screen time, or even pickups. It’s far bigger than that. It’s about cultivating mindful awareness, dare I say awakening, which means you’ll likely have to face boredom and anxiety head-on.
It also means—and this part is important—that you have to intentionally create a better, richer, more fulfilling life. This can be as simple as taking walks, reading books, or volunteering—anything that pulls you into the real world. Touch grass.
Because there will be a void to fill once you’re using your phone less; it’s that void that your phone was trying to fill for you. It’s that void in which you can build an even more bountiful life; find the shit you like to do, finally, you’ll have time to do it.
Thus far, I’ve been tiptoeing around a loaded word: addiction. Why? Because I know it makes you squirm. “That’s not me,” you think, “I’m not some junkie.” But the unfortunate truth is addiction isn’t just needles in alleyways. Addiction is a fancy word for tunnel vision.
Your screen obsession is like wearing horse blinders in the middle of Times Square. If you’re a horse, I get it, but you’re not. So you’re missing the show, instead, focused on a tiny sliver of manufactured reality.
Breaking free isn’t just about expanding your view—it’s about remembering how to see.
Some predictions:
There’s no going back: we are an online species now. Just as we’ll never go back to being hunter-gatherers, short of the apocalyptic necessity, we’ll never again be a mostly-offline society.
But intentional communities will emerge, devoted to offline living. Some will be look like monks moving to mountaintops, others will stay within the bounds of society. They will all be the purview of the wealthy and the educated, who have the time and opportunity to avail themselves of it.
There will be a large socioeconomic disparity between those who live more or less online. Especially for parents raising kids, lower-class youth will suffer most from over-exposure to phone use. This will become ever more an issue of equality and economic output.
In the future, it will become common practice for psychiatrists and therapists to ask you about your screen time in their initial intakes and diagnose/prescribe accordingly.
is already doing this in his clinical practice, where he is commonly encountering clients with 8 hour+ screen time days.Digital addictions will occupy a significant percentage of those in rehab.
There will be a continued burnout pushback against “group text threads” across mediums. Text messaging culture in general creates a feeling of “false urgency” that you have to respond, and I believe there will be culture-shift in how we regard text etiquette. (This is one of my least confident predictions, but certainly a hope.)
We will realize that the outpouring of ADHD diagnoses is highly correlated with digital technology exposure.
Services like those of my friends’ at Yondr, who offer secure phone pouches for students to place their phones in during the school day, will be government-mandated. I anticipate this bridging bipartisan gaps. The tide has already started to turn on this one, within the United States and abroad.
Start tracking with me?
I’ve found that once people start tracking this weekly, the habit begins to correct itself. You become aware of those phantom reaches and start to catch yourself.
But it’s better to do this with friends for accountability and motivation. If you are feeling bold, feel free to drop your pickups and screen time stats into the comments.
Here are my stats from last week. I used to have 6x these amounts. Literally. Even at my current level, I still feel the compulsion and the struggle.
If you’ve found this essay helpful, please share it with others who might benefit. For those interested in going deeper, I teach a self-guided course that helps people overcome all modern dependencies and discover joy at Life Not Wasted. Screen time reduction is where we start. 🖤
While numerous studies point to a “rebound effect” of taking breaks from social media, there are studies that show otherwise. I’ve taken two year-plus breaks from social media, and both were incredible. I believe everyone with a phone should be tracking pickups and screen time, and I’m also an advocate of taking extended breaks from social media, or opting out entirely.
Thanks for this Alex. Not a day goes by that I’m not horrified by it. I heard someone once say that phones are adult pacifiers and I cannot unhear it. I’ve been largely off socials for 8 months but am beginning to feel the creeping urge to return… and wondering if my usage will increase based on the stat you shared.
PS. Can we get a tutorial on your home screen/focus setting? 😇 A friend has it set up so they don’t get any notifications and they don’t show on the app icons - via short cuts - it’s pretty genius (but a pain to set up). What’s helped me most to reduce screen time is putting the phone on greyscale. Becomes so uninteresting to reach for.
Do you not think what you’re doing with your phone might matter more though? Like this was interesting, and looking at my stats has convinced me I need to go disable half my notifications. But I read a lot on my phone, and I certainly don’t think continuously scrolling socials is the same level of mind-numbing as using the phone to read a magazine / book. So my screen time is pretty high but my pickups are pretty low, and I feel like a better metric of phone addiction might be the screen time categories section