Why do you use your phone too much? Most technology critics will say because social media apps are very addictive. But there's another thing on those phones that keep pulling you back, and that is texting. If you think that your family or your friends or your coworkers are waiting to hear back from you on their latest message or emoji that they sent your way, you are going to feel very compelled to pick that phone up again and again and again.

What I want to do here is play a clip for you from an episode that first aired over the summer where I tackled what I called the texting dilemma. And what I'm going to do in this clip is I'm going to break down exactly why social expectations around messaging makes us feel like we have to use our phone.

And then I'm going to give you a bunch of strategies for how you can begin to increasingly disconnect from your device without alienating the people you know. I think this is really critical tips if you want to be less on your phone. All right. Check out this clip. I really think you're going to like it.

Today, I want to talk about a topic that we often overlook when we discuss building a healthier relationship with our phones, and that is messaging. I'm talking texting and iMessage and WhatsApp. We tend to worry more about flashy apps like TikTok and Instagram into which we know that billions of dollars have been invested to try to keep us coming back to them again and again.

And by contrast, when we think about messaging, we tend to think of that as sort of simple and old-fashioned. It's, you know, getting a note from your kid that they need to be picked up from soccer. It's something that we were doing before smartphones existed. Those apps are plain.

They're not flashy. There's not a lot of money invested to them. And so we don't think much about messaging. But what if it's not actually something we can ignore? What if instead of being at the periphery of our issues with smartphone addiction, it is actually at our core, and we just haven't realized it, sort of like the digital version of Kevin Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects.

What I'm trying to say here is maybe texting was Kaiser Soze all along. So these are the claims I want to investigate in today's deep dive. I'm going to let this proceed in three acts. All right. So act one, I am calling the problem hiding in plain sight. Now, not long ago, I came across a study.

Jesse, I don't know if we can put this up on the screen here. It was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior and was written by a group of researchers from the Netherlands. So there it is for those who are watching instead of just listening. As you can see, the title of this paper is sort of innocuous.

It's called Modeling Habitual and Addictive Smartphone Behavior, The Role of Smartphone Usage Types, Emotional Intelligence, Social Stress, Self-Regulation, Age, and Gender. It featured a pretty straightforward experimental design. They just surveyed 386 respondents. But what's interesting is what they found in these surveys. And it's going to set up our whole discussion of texting as this sort of hidden driver for some people of excessive smartphone use.

I'm going to read you three quotes from this study. Quote number one, people who extensively use their smartphones for social purposes develop smartphone habits faster, which in turn might lead to addictive smartphone behavior. Quote two, social stress positively influences addictive smartphone behavior. Quote three, men experience less social stress than women and use their smartphones less for social purposes.

The result is that women have a higher chance in developing habitual or addictive smartphone behavior. Those three claims, they might be stated sort of simply, but really have in them some really big ideas that I want to highlight for you right now. Here's the first idea we need to pull from those three quotes.

They're arguing that a big driver of phone use is not just the addictive nature of what you're using on the phone, but social stress, right? This is how this works. If you dive deeper in this paper, we are wired to be wary of ignoring or disrespecting other people in our social circles, right?

If we go back to our Paleolithic path in which the social circuits in our brains actually wired, if someone in our tribe is tapping us on the shoulder, you better turn around and see what they want. To ignore your tribe members, to hurt your pair wires or what they would call dyadic social bonds between your tribe members puts you in danger of not being supported by your tribe members.

You could be outcast from the tribe. Your reproductive success is on the line. So we take sociality very importantly. We're wired to be very socially aware. So here's the problem though. This means when we imagine in the modern context, messages arriving, a text message, an iMessage, a WhatsApp message from people in our social circles, our Paleolithic brain says someone is tapping on their shoulder.

Our survival of our genes are at stake. We better answer it. And if we're not, when our brain imagines that communication from our tribe is building up and we're ignoring it and that this ignoring of it might be creating friction, what's the result? What the researchers call social stress.

And that is an acute type of stress because we're so social. It's not a very comfortable type of stress to feel. All right, so idea number two, once you start checking your phone a lot because you worry about social stress, you get in the habit of using your phone for other things.

This is a huge concept that comes out of this paper that it might be the social stress that drives you to your phone a lot. And now you get in the habit of looking at your phone a lot. This is what then allows those flashy apps with billions of dollars invested to make them really sticky and exciting.

This is what allows them to then get their hooks in your brain and become a big part of your phone usage routine. In other words, TikTok and Instagram and these type of apps are in some sense potentially monetizing your instinct to be loyal to your friends. So for some people, the social stress from texting is what drives you to your phone.

And only once you're there, do these other apps then become a part of your routine. And you end up with a more generalized feeling of smartphone addiction. That's backwards to the way that most people think about it, which is texting is not that important, but TikTok is really addictive.

We might have that backwards. The third big idea I want to point out from those quotes is that women are more susceptible to social stress than men on average. This is because of just well-known differences in personality type and wiring. So they end up more likely to face smartphone addiction.

In other words, there's a sort of unfair technology penalty here for being more socially conscientious. Men are more likely to be a little bit more loner, be a little bit more antisocial. It makes us a little less prone to phone addiction. So I think this is important because often if it's men talking about this issue, we don't realize that the relationship women might have to this issue could be different, that we might not feel the same level of social stress around texting that then causes these other issues.

And advice for improving your behavior with your phone that ignores those realities is not going to be complete advice. All right. So those are the big ideas. Let's go to act two here, diffusing the social stress trap. Now, I call this the social stress trap, the situation I just described, because we have sort of these two things that are in contradicting contrast to each other, right?

So on the one hand, it's hard for us to address or reduce other habitual behaviors that we don't like on our phone, sort of like the addictive use of our phone, if we feel social stress about messages that we're ignoring, but it's hard to avoid feeling social stress about messages we're ignoring unless we become significantly less social, but that could make us feel just as bad.

So either we have to feel bad about using our phone too much because social stress drives us there, or we have to eliminate social stress, but then we're lonely and we feel bad anyway. So it feels like a trap, like there's no way out of it. I want to talk about some concrete ways to escape it.

Basically, we need to find a way to rewire the social brain so that long stretches away from messaging apps does not create that sense of really distressing social stress. As you will see, this is going to be just as much about rewiring your brain as it is rewiring the brains of the people that you know.

All right, let's get more specific about it. The concrete thing you're going to do first to try to work on this social stress trap is break what I call the constant companion model of phone use. This is an idea I first introduced in a New York Times op-ed from five or six years ago.

The constant companion model of phone use, as the name implies, is that you have your phone with you essentially everywhere you are. If I'm at home, it's in my pocket. If I'm at the gym, it's in my pocket. If I'm at work, it's right next to me on my desk.

If I'm in bed, it's right next to me on my bed. It is a constant companion. When it is your constant companion, it is very difficult to get away from habitual phone usage. So what we want to do is try to break that constant companion model. So let's talk about how to do that first, and then second, talk about how to deal with the social stress that might create.

So the easiest thing to do is to plug it in. And what I mean by that is in the primary locations where you operate and have a phone with you, you find a different location for the phone where you plug it in. So when you're at home, it's like in your kitchen or your foyer, you have it plugged in in that location.

When you're in your office, you have it on like a bookshelf or a chair across the room plugged in. It is not with you as a companion. When you're at the gym, you keep it in your gym locker, which means, and I know this is going to be shocking for people to go to the gym.

You're going to have to bring a paper notebook with you to keep track of what you're doing, and you're going to have to have a simple music player if you want to listen to music, not your phone. You can't just sit there and stare at your phone in between sets.

All right? So that's the physical thing to do, get some physical separation between you and your phone. What do you do about messaging? Well, now what you're going to do is batch check your messaging apps on a semi-regular basis. You should let probably at least an hour go by between checks.

It's something you can schedule. At the top of the hour, at lunch, I'm going to go check and catch up on my messages, my text messages, WhatsApps, et cetera. Now, when you do this, be ready for it to maybe take more time, right? If you are social, you might have a lot of messages.

You might not realize like how much you're tending to these conversations throughout everything else you're doing. So when you batch this more, it might take you more than a few minutes. Oh, I have a lot of messages I have to catch up on here. This is going to take me, this is going to take me some time.

Okay. How do we then deal with the social stress situation? Here, I think the idea is to manage expectations and emergencies. So based on experience, first of all, you do not want to explain to people in advance. Your new plan. Oh, I'm checking my phone less often and here's why and I want to tell you and I want to apologize in advance.

Do not preemptively apologize. Most people don't care. Some people don't know they care until you preemptively apologize and then they start caring. There's no reason to sort of waste people's time with that. It's also a little bit self-focused. People don't really care what your texting strategy is as much as you think they do.

Only explain what you're doing if people complain. So if someone is texting you, hey, where are you? Are you mad at me? How come you're not responding to text? That's when you say, hey, you know, I've been having trouble with my phone use, so I'm trying a new thing where I keep my phone across the room for big swaths of the day.

So I'm not always seeing texts anymore as they come in. Over time, people's expectations will change. If they hear that enough times from you, the small fraction of people in your circle who care will adjust internally their expectations. Oh, this is someone who doesn't necessarily see text right away, so I'm not going to text and expect to have an immediate response.

They just refile that away in their head. There's lots of people who are in this situation, and people are completely possible. It's very easy for people to refile in their head your availability. Like I think about, like, my youngest sister is an ER doctor. We just know when she's on shift, she's not going to be answering her text messages.

It's easy for us to adjust our expectations over time, and now we just know that. So people can adjust their expectations. The other thing you're going to have to do here is get better at batch responses. So when you're responding to a lot of text messages at once, because you're only checking every hour or so, you can't respond to these text messages in a way that just bounces the ping pong back to their side of the proverbial conversational net, and they're going to have to bounce it back to you, and you're going to have to go back and forth.

If you're not going to be on your phone all the time, you have to be much more definitive. You have to find a way to answer a text with enough detail and options and plans that it's okay that you might not see their response to that for another hour or two.

So instead of just being like, yeah, they say, do you want to grab dinner before the movie? Instead of responding, yeah, what are you thinking? Which is not going to work because you're not going to see the response to that. You might be like, yeah, we should definitely do that.

Let's plan to meet like roughly at this time. I might not see my text again for a little bit. So here's my, here's a couple of suggestions. You choose, or we'll figure it out when we meet, let's just meet at this location at this time. And then when we meet, we can figure out the dinner.

Like you do a little bit more time to transform back and forth into more just like, here's a response. And now we can take this conversation out of the text thread. All right. So I said, you have to manage expectations and emergencies. What do I mean about emergencies? Well, there's certain things that are time sensitive and emergency is one of them.

You know, what if someone needs to reach you, not when you next check your phone for text messages 20, an hour from now, but they need to reach it right now. Or what if there is some sort of logistical thing going on, right? I need to hear from my kid when practice is over.

And I don't know when that's going to be. They're just going to text me when it's over, right? How do we deal with emergencies? This is often the thing that prevents people from batching or changing their texting or messaging behavior as they worry about logistics, time sensitive logistics or emergencies.

Don't let the existence of these force you back completely into a constant companion model. There's a couple of things here you should do instead. For example, set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows text from a certain number of white listed numbers to still come through. If your kid's at sports practice, you can have a do not disturb mode in iOS that allows their text messages to come through.

Now, they're not going to be texting you a bunch of stuff because they're at practice, but their text will come through when practice is over. So then you can have your phone's ringer on, still across the room, but you'll hear a text sound when they text you. And it's like the only text sound you'll hear because everyone else, it's in a do not disturb mode.

Do the same thing with calls, right? Tell people, "If there's an emergency, call me." And that really works. In my book, "A World Without Email," I call those an escape valve strategy. If people know there's a way in an emergency they can get in touch with you, you know, it's high friction, they wouldn't normally do it, but they'll call you if there's an emergency, they feel better and you feel better.

Because you say, "I'm not taking something off the table." If there truly is an emergency, if my parent has an accident and is going to the hospital, people can call. Most people don't call me normally, but they can call on my ringer on. And I'll be able to hear a call.

And so I don't have to worry about emergencies. So if you're a little bit careful, you can have something in place for emergencies and logistics that doesn't just let you go back to like, "I better just have my phone with me all the time, engage in conversations with anyone that I see." All right, so my argument is, if you manage expectations at emergencies, breaking the constant companion model of your phone is going to be, long-term, is going to reduce the social stress you feel to check it.

As you get a sense of emergencies are handled, people's expectations have shifted over a period of a couple months, they understand it now, and I'm getting better at texting back to people so we don't need back and forth. Your social stress will die down. It will be pretty easy not to have to check the phone often for text.

When you don't have to check it for that, it's much easier to deal with all the other habitual uses as well. So all of these things are tied together. All right, the third act of this discussion, there is a couple of nuances I want to mention. In fact, I have three in particular I want to mention because there is some care that is needed when dealing with these issues with messaging.

Nuance number one, people worry, if I'm less available like this, does this make me a worse friend or a worse sibling or a worse child? Is it because this ongoing back and forth digital conversation can feel like connection? I'm in these constant conversations with people I know on text messages, doesn't that mean we're really connected?

Our brain, however, doesn't really think so. We don't know what digital text-based communication is. We don't recognize that as social. It's not really strengthening your connection. It's just on paper you feel like maybe this makes me social. So the solution here is with the people you really care about, couple this shift away from constant companion texting with reinvesting new time into in-person analog interaction with that person.

Yeah, I don't text all day anymore, but we should start going on a hike every Wednesday morning. We should have a phone call. I'm going to call you for my commute twice a week. We should just check in, right? You have a more analog way of communicating and you emphasize that.

So it's like a trade-off. I'm trading off this social snacking sort of lightweight connection for something that's more meaningful. I'm actually going to feel more connected to people. And if you do that at the same time that you cut back to constant companion model that has you on your phone all the time, that'll make a difference, right?

Nuance number two. What about extenuating circumstances? Something's going on where you have to be on your phone, right? There's your parent is going to the hospital. Your siblings are on this text thread. One is there. You're trying to handle logistics and like it needs to happen over text. What do you do in that situation?

You get on your phone. Yeah, there'll be extenuating circumstances. That's okay. We're just trying to change like your normal relationship with your phone, your average case. Go easy on yourself. The key thing here is changing your relationship to this messaging. It's not like the alcoholic abstaining from alcohol, whereas you really can't go back to this at all.

You don't know what's going to happen. It's not like that. If you need to be on your phone for an afternoon texting because of something that's going down, that's not going to necessarily make you back into a constant companion texter. You can just go back when you're able to to your default.

All right, nuance number three. If you're a parent, this is not just about you. It's also about what your kids see. This is the problem with the constant companion model of the phone driven by texting. As you know, as the parent, what I'm doing on this phone is actually somewhat noble.

I'm making logistics for the upcoming carpool. I'm checking in with friends. Like this is all good stuff. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not doing the stuff I don't want my kid doing on the phone. This is like meaningful, good old-fashioned, like adult communication. Your kids don't know that. They just see you're looking at your phone all the time.

And now you're normalizing to them, regardless of what they say, see what they do. A phone is something to be using all the time. It's something very desirable. Look at all the attention it gets from my parent. So when you break the constant companion model and stop doing communication all the time on your phone, your kids will see that you're not on your phone all the time.

It will be modeling to them that the phone is a thing you go and use where it's plugged in when you need it, but it is not a companion that's with you all the time. So this is not just about you. All right. So when it comes to our ongoing efforts to reform our relationships with our phone, this might be one of the trickiest and most overlooked areas.

Messaging is a huge driver of habitual and unhealthy phone use. And it is so hard to shake because social stress is something we hate. But we can get around that if you understand what's going on, you can find ways to change your relationship to messaging that will over time change the expectations of the people you know.

You can get away from constant companion checking without having to feel social stress. And if you do this, it really will, this is a classic digital minimalism move, will really improve your relationship with your phone. Not everyone has this issue, but a lot of people do. And I think it's often ignored.

So I was happy to have an excuse to talk about it. Now, the irony of this, of course, is this entire time that I was talking, Jesse's just been like texting me and name things. So Jesse, I don't think you understood. I think you understood the point of this.

I think it evolves. Yeah. Um, one thing that happens, like say you're, you're doing the batching method and you said, all right, in your working memory file, like text so-and-so, and then you go to text so-and-so, and then you see like three other texts. Is there a way that you know of, of, I mean, sometimes I go into the contacts, but I rarely do this, like where you pull up the contact and just text them as a, so you can't see other people's texts.

If you're, I mean, maybe. Yeah. Maybe like batching, it doesn't really matter, I guess. But if you're batching, it doesn't really matter. Like the point is you're like, I am waiting, I'm waiting into a lot of stuff right now and I'm going to try to find my way to the other side.

But I'll tell you what though, here's the advantage of waiting is a lot of stuff gets worked out before you get there. Like if I had answered this initial text on this text group, uh, I would have been in the mix of it, but because I waited an hour, like they kind of figured it out.

And so it, it actually, a lot of the stuff you might not have to actually answer and other stuff you might just say, I'm just not going to answer it. That's another expectation thing is on your group threads. Like don't always answer. And it just changes the expectation. You chime in when you, when you can, but you don't chime in all the time.

And that takes a lot of social stress off the, off the table as well. And then for other like non-group texts or whatever, do you delete texts or just keep a long thread history of texts? I guess I just keep a thread history. I mean, I'm bad at my phone.

Um, I don't know how to delete a text. I'm going to say no. Got it. Probably not. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of like more complicated things you can do, but I'm like, eh, just check it less and manage expectations and it works itself out. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

Check it out.