How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition - by Catherine Price (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Now fully revised and updated, this evidence-based, user-friendly guide presents a 30-day digital detox plan that will help you set boundaries with your phone and live a more joyful and fulfilling life.

"If you are a human being and you own a smartphone, you need this book."--Jonathan Haidt, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation

Do you feel addicted to your phone? Do you frequently pick it up "just to check," only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Does social media make you anxious? Have you tried to spend less time mindlessly scrolling--and failed? If so, this book is your solution.

In How to Break Up with Your Phone, award-winning health and science journalist and TED speaker Catherine Price presents a hands-on 30-day digital detox guide to breaking up--and then making up--with your phone. The goal: better mental health, improved screen-life balance, and a long-term relationship with technology that feels good.

Now fully revised to reflect advances in the technological landscape, this groundbreaking book features new expert advice and research on the science of addiction, with expanded chapters explaining how social media and algorithms are designed to addict us, impairing our abilities to focus, think deeply, and form new memories; and an updated section on the unique dangers social media poses to children, with brand-new tips on how to protect them.

Also newly expanded is How to Break Up with Your Phone's life-changing, evidence-based 30-day plan that will guide you--and your friends and family--through the process of creating new, healthy relationships with your smartphone, tablet, or other digital devices.

Whether you're seeking refuge from an exhausting news cycle or you're concerned about the negative effects of social media, How to Break Up with Your Phone offers practical solutions. It's guaranteed to help you put down your phone--and come back to life.

Review Quotes

"I wrote The Anxious Generation to help adults improve the lives of children. Many readers have asked me for a version of the book aimed at helping adults and teens help themselves. Catherine Price has written the best such book. How to Break Up with Your Phone is deeply researched, yet playful. It is hard hitting but will touch your heart gently. Above all, it will help you regain your attention, your time, and your life in just thirty days. If you are a human being and you own a smartphone, you need this book."--Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University-Stern School of Business, and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation

"The Marie Kondo of brains . . . for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to feel like a human again."--Kevin Roose, The New York Times

"A slim, insight-packed volume that's both a primer on the toll smartphone overuse can take on our mental and physical health, and a practical manual for a 30-day reset designed to put you on a path to moderation, this is a book whose message couldn't feel more timely, or more urgent. (No, really: after finishing the whole thing in one horrified sitting, I immediately pre-ordered 3 more copies for friends and family.)"--Sarah Karnasiewicz, Health

"Price dissects the way her phone has impacted her personal and professional lives, and gives practical advice on how to forge a healthier relationship with technology--without the fear mongering."--Refinery29

"The most important book I've read in years. Life-changing."--Sali Hughes, The Pool

"Could be one of the most important books to be published in recent times."--9Honey

"To design a more joyful life includes reframing some of our old perceptions and habits. Almost no single thing in modern life deserves a reframe more than the smartphone. In How To Break Up with Your Phone, Price offers an accessible and clever way to accomplish that reframe and discover more time and energy for a better life."--Dave Evans, coauthor of Designing Your Life and adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program, Stanford University

"Price's book is an invaluable guide of how--in the author's own words--to turn your phone back into a tool, not a temptation. In these dopamine-drenched days of the smartphone era, hours can be lost to the mindless scroll. Price's easily digestible tome is practical, not preachy, and a must-have for even the worst phubber."--Pandora Sykes, journalist and former Fashion Features Editor at The Sunday Times Style

"Fascinating, entertaining and extremely timely. Your phone is an abusive partner--get rid now."--Will Storr, author of Selfie

About the Author

Catherine Price is an author, speaker, consultant, and health and science journalist. Her work has appeared in a multitude of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Popular Science, and she also runs the newsletter-turned-podcast How to Feel Alive. Her speaking engagements include TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and SXSW. Catherine is also the author of Vitamania, Mindfulness: A Journal, The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, and The Power of Fun.