Two Simple Steps To Ditch Your Phone From Your Morning Routine So That You Can Focus and Be Happier

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If you're like most Americans, you're checking your smartphone within 10 minutes of waking up. Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans, 18 years and older, and 60% of them said that they sleep with their phone at night. Have you done this? And 89% check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up. Americans also check their phones 144 times on average per day, and this seems to be down from 344 times a day in 2022. We spend about 4 hours and 25 minutes each day on our cell phones, maybe more. And get this, overall, an average person will have spent over 2 months, that's 65 days, on their phones in 2023. So I think you can agree with me that we spend way too much time on our phones. Unless it might be work-related or saving us time in other ways. However, the problem is that trying to get work done on our phones is like trying to work in the middle of an all-you-can-eat buffet when you're starving, because the pull of all of the distractions that are designed to fight for our attention is really, well, super distracting. So suffice to say, you're probably not working efficiently or connecting with other people as deeply as you can. Picking up our phones first thing when we wake up can also cost us big time in cognitive function, AKA our mental abilities to focus or be productive for the remainder of the day. Now, I know this is really important to me and to you, so let's go into a little more detail on how this happens. So why is first thing in the morning a particularly bad time to pick up our phones? Because when we first wake up, we move through a phase called sleep inertia. Dr. Lynn Marie Trotti of the Emory Sleep Center and Department of Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine wrote an article in Sleep Medicine Review titled "Waking Up Is the Hardest Thing I Do All Day: Sleep Inertia and Sleep Drunkenness." According to Dr. Trotti, quote, sleep inertia refers to the transitional state between sleep and wake marked by impaired performance, reduced vigilance, and a desire to return to sleep. The intensity and duration of sleep inertia vary based on situational factors, but its effects may last minutes to several hours. End quote. This impaired performance and reduced vigilance creates a brain state that's more susceptible to being distracted and doomscrolling on social media or getting absorbed in a spiraling down of all the headlines grabbing our attention. Making us feel like it is the most important thing that we have to read right now. Our mind is saying, we need to know about this right away. We need to know right now who's winning the men's semifinal at the US Open. Because let's face it, the people that are putting those headlines out there, their whole lives they've trained to get our attention. And also AI algorithms know what we are interested in. I'm sure you've experienced that as the minutes tick by and hours maybe, and maybe even days, Being on our phones can cost us in motivation to do what we wanna do for our future selves. For example, perhaps we wanna be in good shape, exercise, meditate, or get to work or school on time. But once we're on our phones, everything in there designed to capture our attention and our brains in an impaired performance and reduced vigilant state has a very hard time resisting. Our sleep-drunk brains will find it very hard to pull away from all of the yummy content. Now we know that exercising and meditating and eating healthy foods and being productive at our work or studies, for the vast majority of us, this is a conscious behavior that requires effort on our part to do it consistently and well. We have to remind ourselves why we're exercising or meditating, why we're studying, or why we're doing the work we're doing, or why we are writing the book that we wanted to write our whole lives. Why? Because the rewards are often delayed. Usually the rewards are felt after we exercise or meditate, hours later, or after we've written that book or thesis, months, years later. Whereas the dopamine reward is immediate for smartphone content. And finally, it can cost us our good mood for the remainder of the day. It affects our emotions because often the headline news is bad. Weather disasters, other disasters, war. All of this is important, but we don't need to be looking at it 24/7. These things may not be a problem directly in front of us affecting us. However, the onslaught of emails, texts, and social media creates this sense of mental busyness and overwhelm. Funnily enough, we feel busy, but we're not actually getting anything done. Can you relate? I'm getting anxious just talking about it. But now you missed your morning workout or your meditation or both, and maybe you're even late to work or school. Maybe you got in an argument with a loved one because you weren't paying attention to them when they were talking to you. You've already fed your brain a lot of anxiety-provoking information from the internet, and now you're also feeling a little bit unsteady. All of this leads to an uneasy feeling of regret and overwhelm. The missed workout, being late to work or school, then the accumulation of all these stressors, plus the stress from the digital news and media consumption, then leads us to grab a donut instead of a healthy breakfast. So you can see how easily we can set ourselves up for a suboptimal day. And even worse, another day that doesn't move us toward our goals of physical and mental wellbeing and peak performance over the long run, because we all know that life, if we're lucky, is a marathon, not a sprint. So what can we do? In episode number 112, How to Decrease Anxiety and Get Focused in a Hypertexting Digital World with Caitlin Begg, founder of Authentic Social, she talks about a method that she calls progression to analog. This concept is basically sneaking in non-tech activities throughout the day. And again, as we spoke about, one of the most important times of the day is when we wake up because sleep inertia or sleep drunkenness can further decrease our ability to perform and our self-control is very low. It's an extremely important window of time to spiral ourselves up towards a better day or spiral down into what we discussed, a chain of events that sets up a low mood for the day. So first thing is to become aware, and you've already listened to many reasons why your brain needs to ditch tech first thing in the morning. So that's a start. The second step is to have a substitute action plan in place when you're about to reach for that phone. So first, we all know, and people have told us that maybe the phone should be away from your bed, maybe even out of sight, out of your bedroom, but it might not be possible for some of us. Physicians often have to have their phone around for emergencies, and you may have reasons to do it as well, but maybe it could be somewhere where you have to get up. And reach for it. So that's one tip, but there was an awesome tip from Katie Begg. She said that she started to read a few pages from a physical book every morning, and this set the tone to settle her brain to focus. Now I'm on day 10 and it feels really good, so I would highly recommend this method. You can also set triggers for the desired activities first thing in the morning, like leaving a glass of water and sneakers by the bed so that you can drink that glass of water and go immediately to exercise. Or if you're a meditator, you can have that favorite cushion next to your bed. Now, one thing is we have to be very strict about leaving our phone out of sight and out of reach when you do that first morning centering activity, cuz it's so easy to fall into it. Remember, sleep drunkenness. It's kind of like having beer goggles. A very interesting paper that I came across from South Korean researchers, one of the most tech-driven countries in the world, had the following solution, which worked for their subjects. The article is called Using Wake-Up Tasks for Morning Behavior Change: Development and Usability Study. The link is in the podcast notes if you wanna read the whole study. They created a very simple app that would do the following automatically, but it's easy enough to do without the app. So they had a morning alarm set, which would turn off when the app user did a math problem. Don't freak out. It wasn't too hard. It was like 93 85 =, and you can adjust it to whatever feels just a little hard enough for you, but not too hard. The second activity they can do to turn off the alarm was to immediately take a photo of an object and select an image taken far away from their bed that matches a reference image the user took before. Once the user does one of these 2 activities and the app starts to nudge the user to do the target behavior, which was in this study at least 15 squats. The goal was to do these activities within 10 minutes of waking up. Oh, by the way, they did have a feature where they could turn off the alarm without doing anything, without doing either of those 2 activities. The authors chose squat exercises as the target behavior because exercising was the most preferred morning behavior according to their preliminary study. Squats are also easy and requires no equipment. And actually it's one of the best exercises that you can do for your body. Of course, do it safely. One participant commented that quote, sometimes I just turn off the alarm and lie down again, but solving a math problem after the alarm fires helps me wake up easily. End quote. Another participant who was part of the picture task group said, quote, I had to get up and adjust the position and angle of the target object. I think this makes me wake up. Surely, and it became easier to do the squats. End quote. So to summarize, the 2 steps to ditch your phone from your morning routine so that you can focus and be happier are: 1, choose and write down your desired target behavior. Is it exercising, meditating, reading a book, getting to work on time or school without feeling rushed, eating a healthy homemade breakfast? So once you decide the target behavior, go to step 2, which is to pick a cognitively taxing task. Ooh, that's a tongue twister. So pick a task that's not too hard, an activity that gets you out of bed, something that's challenging enough to wake you up, but not frustratingly hard. You can choose a math problem, take a picture of something that's far away from your bed like they did in the study. Maybe you can pick a sunrise, for example, or read a few pages in a book like Katie Beig does. And now I do that too. So let me know how it goes for you. Email me at info@mindbodyspace.com and subscribe at mindbodyspace.com/podcast and look out for a Ditch the Morning Tech Challenge coming up in your email inbox.

Thank you so much for listening. Forward this to a friend, a family member, anyone who needs to stress less, and soon enough you'll be surrounded by more Zen people. Your support is literally what makes this possible. Subscribe and head on over to YouTube to my Fall Asleep Easy channel. Sign up for your updates at mindbodyspace.com and get special tips into your inbox once a month. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD. Wishing you wellness.