But I’m reluctantly breaking that habit due to a very odd experience last week on the 1853.

As long time readers will know, the true benefits from going phone-free aren’t actually felt on the commute, but are enjoyed 24/7. I wrote here about how they kicked in at around four weeks in.

The commute itself is pretty unpleasant for the first few weeks. And then becomes neutral.

But I’ve now done this for four months, and clocked up 116 hours. And it’s got interesting.

There is lots to be said about what I think about, my relationship with my thoughts. All that.

But the odd thing first.

The Steam Train Paradox

When the kids were younger we’d go for rides on steam trains. The start is very exciting, seeing the locomotive blow off steam.

And then you get on the carriage and you realise that you are just in a train. The fact that onlookers are seeing a beautiful old locomotive doesn’t benefit you - you could only see that by sticking your head out of the window. You’ve bought an expensive ticket for a normal train ride. So you have to try and enjoy it.

Last Thursday I started my commute home after a tough day at work. Previously I would have scrolled away to distract myself from it. But as I pulled out of Waterloo and looked out of the window, I remembered the steam train.

And I wondered… can I choose to enjoy this journey?

And yes, it turned out I could. The journey from Waterloo to Surbiton is not pretty. I would never say it was. But there is a lot to look at and if you are in the right mood it reminds you of a fun day out.

Near Vauxhall there’s streets full of Victorian cottages. A tourist would love to see the way the chimneystacks wind up the hill.

If you’re watching closely, the approach to Clapham Junction is spectacular. It’s way more interesting than the little halts you get on steam railways

When our train pulled out, it did so exactly at the same time as the Gatwick Express. Our trains bobbed along together and I could see inside the other carriage. For a second I had an instinct to wave at the people in the other train. But they were all on their phones.

I looked at the tops of the trees that marked the edge of the railway. I had always thought these dismal. But they are the same species of trees you see in a country walk, and that day they lost their grim trackside context and looked like country trees. Proper trees.

At Berrylands I could see into people’s gardens. Kids were bouncing on trampolines and I could imagine a smell of spag bol.

I couldn’t see it, but I knew we went under the railway bridge at Surbiton where parents sometimes take their toddlers to look at the trains. Before they learn they are just commuter trains.

We all grow up. It reminded me of those black and white photos of crowds of trainspotters. It occurred to me that was a very pre-phone hobby. Before we had other things to do.

When we pulled into Surbiton, people got up to go. Most put their phones in their pockets, but a man my age walked up beside me still using his. He looked at my stupid high vis vest with (understandable) fatherly disappointment.

I glanced at his phone. He was playing one of those games where you manage a little town. Like the one we just went through.

Finding Beauty In The Everyday Ugh

There are tonnes of people who tell you to look at the everyday through fresh eyes and find it beautiful. To appreciate every detail.

I firmly believe this advice is horsecrap. Personally, if I had tried to do that as a commuter on this same line many years ago I would have failed. And I likely would have thought less of myself in failing.

This is why I was hesitant to write an article like this.

But here I am. That annoying person.

What changed? 116 hours. I firmly believe that my 116 hours of phone free silence have made it far easier for me to take pleasure in the everyday.

Heavy phone use encourages the mind to look at normal life with uneasy, restless disappointment. Conversely, to spend time in silence is to teach your brain to accept that ordinary things are okay.

This is an invaluable training of the mind. This is neuroplasticity in action.

If you can find the joy in the commute, you can find it in a lot of places. You can appreciate everyday life not as a result of deliberate effort, but as a default. You can treat life with a little more lightness. Its challenges can be more like the game the guy was playing.

So my advice isn’t to take pleasure in the everyday. I’m not saying it isn’t important. There’s a reason why it’s the message of so many movies and so much philosophy. It’s true that it’s a key part of happiness.

It’s true. But it’s not helpful advice.

My advice instead is to put down your phone each day, sit in silence, be a little patient. And see what happens for you.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share with them.

For several years I worked a four day week. One day a week was spent looking after my kids.

Or to put it more honestly, one day a week was looking after my kids and looking at my phone.

(We should likely add “and looking at my phone” more often to descriptions of what we are doing. “I was watching a film and looking at my phone.” If we were watched by aliens, that’s what they would report back to base.)

Fortunately I didn’t need an alien to tell me.

One day I took my three year old son to his football class. When a ball bounced near me and needed returning, the huge coach shouted “Oi, Phone Dad!”

The name stuck.

This week on the commute I’ve found myself thinking back to that time. As you all know by now, thinking time isn’t in short supply for me.

And these days I view it all very differently.

You might imagine I’m going to say I regret it more. But that’s not true. I regretted it plenty at the time. I definitely noticed I used my phone too much.

No, the change in my thinking is why I used my phone. Back then if you challenged me I would have said “Oh, a bit bored.” And if you asked me to characterise my overall habit, I’d have conceded that I was probably “addicted” to my phone.

But after many hours of reflection, I’ve realised those words hide a multitude of far, far more interesting things.

I love a bit of neuroscience. But I have to say ultimately I agree with Jonathan Haidt, who once wrote that metaphor can be a powerful way to understand the mind.

There’s a long and venerable tradition of this, from Plato’s chariot pulled by two horses, to the Buddha’s wild elephant, through to Freud’s warring provinces of the psyche.

Those thinkers grappled with profound questions. Why is the mind tempted by evil? Why does our mind seem beyond our control? How does our past live with us?

I am grappling with my habit of checking a classroom WhatsApp group, and then refreshing the same damn group five seconds later.

And, of course, why I found myself looking at my phone at my daughter’s ballet rehearsal in a way that made her cry.

Less profound perhaps, but no less interesting.

The Iron Wheel

The philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote about how the pace of technology can alienate us from those parts of our life that we need to slow down to enjoy.

For four days each week my mind was working pretty quickly. On my day off, I expected my mind to adapt to being with the kids. And it didn’t.

The mind can’t turn on a dime. It can’t change speed quickly. It kept rumbling on at the velocity I previously set.

Imagine you swap a fast-paced day in the office for a day with a toddler who tells very very slow and mazey stories that don’t end and when you think surely this story has ended, it never does because then they say “and then” and just carry on.

Listening to that very slow story, the mind is still going pretty fast. At the speed set by the previous days. It craves something at a faster pace than the toddler’s story.

And it finds it in the phone: buttons to push, things to check, things to fix, things to check again. The fast whirring mind loves an activity centre.

I imagine a heavy iron wheel in my head. It’s turning really fast, telling me to use the phone. It’s not going to stop straight away - it has enormous momentum. This is one of the reasons I came convinced I needed to carve out some time each day to stop properly. To slow that spinning flywheel.

But in the years I worked a four day week I was nowhere near figuring that out.

I just assumed my mind would do what I asked it to.

The Caveman’s Darkest Fear

But that’s only part of the reason.

Time to mix metaphors.

When people talk about phone use they tend to talk about scrolling. But for me with the kids, it was refreshing work emails that took up most of my energy.

That wasn’t because of any notification - I switched them all off. It wasn’t because of colleagues - they were respectful of my time and careful not to bother me. And it was rarely because I actually had work I needed to do.

No, I think when I strip it back, it was because I was plagued with a question that wouldn’t go away: “What do my colleagues think of me?”

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has written fascinatingly about how humans have evolved to be obsessed with how they are perceived by others. We are animals that work in a team to hunt mammoth, so we are pre-programmed to make sure we eject bad hunters from the group. And that rejection from our group is our ultimate hardwired fear.

It is this caveman fear that plagued me when I worked part time. I couldn’t see the rest of my industry. But I imagined they were out there, judging me. Ready to reject me.

It drove me to check my work emails incessantly, as a way of picking up any information on this question. The LinkedIn feed was another treasure trove.

Despite all this effort, I almost never got a clear answer as to what everyone thought of me. But the searching only increased the anxiety.

At its worst there were moments that - without much evidence - I fully convinced myself that my colleagues believed I was worthless. I became panicked, and almost breathless with fear.

In these moments the phone could suddenly switch to a new role. Having failed to answer my primal need to know what others in my tribe thought of me - and having increased my anxiety massively in the process - it then offered the only distraction available from that anxiety. Scrolling became the only way to clear my head. My toddler with his long stories never had a chance.

I believe it was this strange fuel cocktail that powered my phone use.

And the more I used my phone, the more it reinforced the wiring in my brain. The iron wheel turned faster and faster. Pickups became automatic.

What The Football Coach Should Have Said

Back in that room, I was a million miles away from the advice I needed to hear:

“That mind of yours is leaning forward, forever reaching forward. That heavy iron wheel in your head is turning so fast. It’s going to take patient work to slow it down.

You need to learn to say no to checking and fixing. Practise accepting the world as it is, and the iron wheel will turn slower each day.

And that phone of yours. It’s never going to tell you what the world thinks of you. You need to become comfortable sitting with that anxiety and knowing you will never be certain.

The answer, in all cases, is to practise accepting.”

But no-one said that.

They just said “Oi, Phone Dad”.

So I looked sheepish and kicked the ball back.

And tried really hard to watch my son playing football.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

On the plus side, I passed the one hundred hours mark. One hundred hours of mental silence on the daily commute. No phones, no music, no nothing - since the start of the year.

But on the other hand… turns out I’m rawdogging. Ugh.

I’m not a big TikTok person. I’m someone who can get addicted to checking if connected apps are charging properly; if I’d ever got seriously into TikTok it’s likely I’d still be in that same room where I first downloaded it, having not slept in the intervening years.

But I’d vaguely heard of rawdogging. Look it up if you really want to, but it’s a term both for going on public transport without any sort of distraction, and also having sex without a condom. Great, thanks a lot, TikTok.

Really, is there anything worse than social media? Not content with being really annoying and destructive itself, it also gives a terrible name to the practice of taking a break from it.

Every now and then on the commute someone might mention the R word. Especially the young folk. Many of them on the tube are curious to see what this wise old man is doing wearing high vis. They approach him to hear what life lessons he can impart. When I describe the thoughtful contemplative experiment I have embarked upon they say “Oh, rawdogging!”

I thought it was just the young’uns. But then I bumped into an old friend on the train. He is a pillar of the Surbiton community, a Deputy Headteacher no less. We had a detailed discussion about the Meta/Google case and the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. It was very clever and thoughtful, and I imagined the people on the train listening in and thinking how clever I was.

He then turned to me and said “So you’re rawdogging then?”

I was taken aback. Him too?

Great. So just as I’m ready to celebrate the 100 hours mark of dignified mental silence, I learn I am the Rawdogger-In-Chief. Thrilled about that.

So it was in a grumpy mood that I read this piece about it on Substack. Seeing as the world has decided this is what it’s called, it made me think about how useful that name is, and also what it misses. In my humble opinion.

Rawdogging: the Rawdogger-In-Chief’s Verdict

First the good.

Most coverage of rawdogging treats it as an extreme challenge. This is useful. It’s deeply unhelpful to imagine putting aside the phone at first will be pleasant or in any way relaxing. Rewiring your brain is hard work.

But now, the bad. The rawdogging concept is too raw. It misses three important ideas.

• Training for the long haul. There’s an enormous prize to be had if you do this daily for four weeks. Neuroplasticity says this is the minimum for meaningful change in the brain. For me it was terrible for three and half weeks, but in the fourth it became quite amazing. Having had that experience, I really can’t see the point of doing this sporadically. Suddenly attempting a long haul flight is like running a marathon with no training - at the end of it you won’t be fit, you’ll just be miserable.

• Mindwatching. I’m a huge fan of letting the mind wander and not putting oneself under any pressure during this. But it’s worth being prepared: your mind will inevitably call you back to the phone. You should be ready to hear that voice - in fact it’s great training yourself to hear it clearly. And to practise saying no to it - no, I will not check that now. I’ve written here about how this can be quite an entertaining experience with the right priming.

• Being aware of the present moment. I’d argue that choosing to concentrate on any aspect of the present moment is good training (read this about how I learnt this from my dog). On a commute, it’s easiest to pay attention to sounds. I found it really helpful to imagine this as rebuilding my phone-shattered focus. Or training my mind to be in the present moment, so it more readily defaults to it at home with loved ones. Noticing that you become gradually more able to do this each day is very motivating.

The one term no-one wants to hear

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the above strays dangerously close to meditation.

Some would more happily use a term for a sex act than they would use the M word. It’s common in articles on rawdogging to say something like “Don’t worry, you don’t have to meditate”, as if any planned or sustained effort in these rawdog sessions might suddenly transform you into someone who talks about the cosmos all the time and buys healing crystals.

Despite the mountain of clinical studies attesting to its power, for a huge part of the population it’s inescapably wishy washy woo woo. Which is a shame, because really it’s mental training, and the one thing that the phone-addled among us need is steady and patient training to rebuild our focus. Without any sort of framework, you’re denied any sort of feeling of progress, which is a recipe for abandoning this on day three.

And of course, watching your mind, well that’s mindfulness: meditation’s even more boring cousin. It smells like a corporate retreat. Our society has garbled the translation of an extremely powerful concept so it now means pretty much everything. The other day I saw you can buy a mindful fizzy drink.

Whatever we call it, the need is real

We’ve created an enormous dilemma for ourselves by inventing the phone.

We know it’s making us ill. Each individual use might be harmless, but constantly checking, fixing and distracting 24/7 makes you anxious and stops your brain resting. (Read about checking and fixing here).

Unfortunately it doesn’t work to just “use the phone less”, phone use just spreads back in. And you need sustained periods of rest to let the Default Mode Network do its thing.

Many are coming to the conclusion that the only way to undo the phone’s brainfogging effects is by an intentional digital break. The incidental pauses in life that the phone destroyed need to be consciously rebuilt. (Read here about how the phone invades every little gap in family life).

There seems to be a real academic and cultural consensus emerging behind this.

But far less of a consensus as to what to call it.

A rawdog session by any other name…

Rawdogging is gross. Meditation is woo woo. Mindfulness is meaningless (in popular culture I mean).

More and more experts are reaching for “you have to be bored” (TV producer talking here: great pitch, guys), or doing nothing, or mental rest, or being present. There’s truth in all these terms, but none really give you the framework or motivation you need.

And the English language folds in on itself under the pressure of describing it - I’ve argued that mental rest involves activity. Hmm. As soon as you try silence, your brain becomes very loud. Okay.

We don’t have the words, and it’s irritating and distancing.

If we are (unfortunately) averse to borrowing terms from cultures more adept in this, we have to invent a whole new language to dig ourselves out of this hole.

I’m still not sure myself. Going Phone Free I quite like, it captures the joyfulness of the end result, but it’s a negative and there is something active to be done here. Anti-phone training perhaps? I’d be genuinely curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.

Or maybe things are just what everyone calls them. If you can’t beat them, maybe I need to join them.

Until next week,

Raw Dog Will

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

After a week away from the commute, a short one this week.

One of the advantages of spending two hours in silence each day is that ideas for these articles just pop into my head. I’ve been reading for years about the mind, the brain and phones. And then, on the commute, my mind swirls it all around and offers up (or vomits up) ideas for articles entirely unbidden. As a High Vis Idiot I don’t like to be lofty, but honestly I am visited by some sort of weird messed-up commute muse.

But not last week, I was having too much fun for this to happen.

And what’s more, it was hard getting started on Monday morning. Though I’m now into my fourth month (next week will mark 100 hours of mental silence), it felt a little like starting again.

It took me back to the very early days of the Phone Free Commute. And the very first benefit I noticed.

And although I think there are a thousand brilliant reasons to do what I’m doing, if I had to pick the number one piece of advice for any public transport commuter…

If you stop using your phone on your commute home you feel a lot better in the evening.

The weekday evening can feel pretty short. No-one really expects much of it. But added together these unloved hours are a significant chunk of life. If you can make them feel better, it’s a huge prize.

And if you can stop being such a grumpy A-hole in them (no offence), everyone you live with will thank you.

Inside the commuter’s brain

Though I’ve been away from the commute, little has changed. People are still scrolling away like crazy - especially on the journey home, when it’s easy to imagine they are distracting themselves from the mental hangover from work.

Watching them reminded me of a brilliant piece I’d seen on Substack by . She writes about the science of the brain, always accessibly but in fascinating detail.

She described the chilling changes in your brain after one hour of heavy phone use.

• Your motivational baseline drops. Your dopamine receptors “shrivel inwards (internalise) like curling paper under a hot flame”.

• Your ability to get pleasure fades. Opioid receptors desensitise.

• Unease increases. Dynorphin (which Ryan describes as anti-endorphin) builds up.

Very little of this is felt during the act of scrolling, but it builds up a chemical debt we have to repay as our brain recovers. (I wrote about how that feels here - be warned, it’s a bit bleak).

As a rule of thumb, Ryan suggests if you scroll for an hour, the debt is felt for two - easily enough to ruin the short weekday evening.

Ryan lists out a range of clever ideas for recovery.

But unfortunately at this point our commuter has brought this addled brain home to their family and is now engaged in what’s laughably called “Quality Time”.

Tragically, they might have rushed home for their kids’ bedtime.

I’m not an expert on the science. I tend to think in terms of the felt experience. I’ll bet that for this poor commuter their bad feeling doesn’t feel like chemical imbalance generated by the phone use. It instead manifests in unease about how everyone hates them for the stupid thing they said at work (this piece about that is the most popular I’ve written).

Unfortunately bad moods aren’t easily attributed to their rectangular creator.

The Evening Airlock

Beyond avoiding the phone, I’d argue there’s lots of benefits to doing nothing on the commute home. That allows the brain’s Default Mode Network to “breathe”, giving us space to process the worries of the day.

And there are practices drawn from contemplative traditions that can help us handle our restless anxiety, and also to have confidence that we are actively training our brain to counteract the phone’s effects in the long term. (I’ll write a little more about this next week).

And I’d argue these techniques work for everyone, not just public transport commuters - we can find this airlock anywhere.

But even if none of that’s for you, please read Juliette’s article and treat your brain kindly. If you don’t fancy silence, do a puzzle, read a book, or as once suggested, write out the worries of the day.

Give the phone a break on the way home. Your loved ones will thank you.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s where it all began

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

I’ve been writing on Substack now for three months. To say I have enjoyed it is an understatement. I’ve been thinking and reading about phones and the mind for years, and it’s so satisfying to work it through in writing. There have been over 15,000 views of these pieces now - although the majority were me checking for typos.

And last week a lot of people said hello on the commute. Maybe it’s the warmer weather.

Here’s the truth though. While people were supportive, and while everyone hates phones, I got the sense that phone use is no-one’s number one worry.

I get that. There’s very real problems in the world. And we’ve each got our own particular thing that keeps us up at night.

People were definitely bothered by other people’s phone use. Maybe their husband or their kids.

But their own phone use? Everyone recognises they use it too much, and everyone has tried and failed many times to reduce it.

But, if they were drawing up a list of worries, they’d likely put it at around number four.

Meanwhile, in Ancient Rome

Boethius was a man with problems.

A high-ranking Roman official, he had been accused of treason and imprisoned. He suffered the indignity of a sudden and dramatic fall. He then suffered the further indignity of being a story in every self-help book ever, which is where I encountered him.

In the months he spent in his drab cell, Boethius narrated his journey from rage at his bad luck and intense fear of his upcoming execution, through to extraordinary peace and acceptance.

He described a series of imaginary conversations with Lady Philosophy, who helped him see comfort in the transitory nature of fortune and his own virtue. He couldn’t change his circumstances, but he could change how he perceived them.

The resultant work The Consolation of Philosophy is said to be an exceptionally powerful expression of an important truth. If you change your mind, you change your world. Our internal perspective doesn’t just observe, it creates everything.

We see this truth again and again when we see people in fabulous circumstances who are deeply unhappy, and people in the worst who have managed to be cheerful.

Boethius didn’t change his situation, or solved any of his problems. But through a brutal internal struggle, he came to peace with them.

The cruellest punishment of all

Let’s try a thought experiment for a second.

In prison, Boethius complained of being cut off from his library. He only had his own thoughts.

Let’s imagine that wasn’t the case.

And some evil Roman jailer put a phone in there with him.

I’d bet he’d never have been visited by Lady Philosophy if Lady Tiktok was there to tempt him.

I find it near impossible to get my thoughts together if I have a phone to hand. My train of thought begins on its journey confidently, then I instinctively pick up the phone and before I know it I catch a glimpse of my train of thought chugging off in a totally different direction and I know it’ll take ages to turn it around.

And I’m especially vulnerable to the phone if times are hard. Boethius would have alternated between repeatedly refreshing the status of his appeal application on the Roman government’s website and then the hardcore distractions of 10 Gladiator Fights That Shocked Everyone.

I’d bet he would have found himself scrolling the platitudes you can get on Facebook, Instagram and (yes) Substack Notes. In a cruel twist of fate, some of these platitudes would have been exactly the “our life is the creation of our mind” message he needed. But Boethius wouldn’t have been able to absorb them in bite-size. Minds don’t work that way.

My bet is that a phone would have been the very cruellest punishment you could give Boethius.

My bet is he needed silence and introspection to come to that extraordinary peace.

Phones hide their true damage

In the years since I made my daughter cry, I became fascinated by my failure to reduce my phone use and determined to do anything to cut it down.

But if at any point you’d have asked me what really kept me up at night, it would be work worries. A combination of “Why on earth did I say that to Clive in that meeting, I’m such a doofus” and “Aaargh! AI is going to take my job”.

I had no idea that my seemingly unrelated efforts to tackle my phone use would help me handle all these (very real) worries much better.

But I should have figured this out.

Phones squeeze out healing periods of being bored, of silence and introspection. Those times when the brain’s Default Mode Network is left to breathe.

Phone use, with its constant checking and fixing, makes us feel more anxious. That anxiety doesn’t just manifest as a general state, we feel anxious about something. The thing we are anxious about isn’t a made up thing, it’s a pre-existing real thing - we just view it more darkly.

In this way, phones hide their damage.

Then, when we are at our lowest ebb, phones present themselves as omnipresent distraction to relieve this anxiety.

It’s quite the trap we are caught in.

Though I hope your problems aren’t as bad as those facing Boethius, I’ll bet they feel more pressing than your inability to put down the phone.

Boethius would definitely have noticed his scrolling addiction. But I’d reckon he’d put it at problem number four, behind his loss of status, his imprisonment and the fact he would soon be brutally beaten to death.

Phone use isn’t his biggest problem. But it is what’s standing in the way of him finding peace.

Clear a bit of space for your mind, then look at your problems afresh.

[Images by AI, words all human]

We are excellent at seeing others’ phone use.

When I use my own phone, it’s quite subtle. Just a quick check.

When my wife uses her phone, I huff and wait impatiently for her. And remind her about an article we both read about phubbing.

But it’s my kids who really stick out like a sore thumb.

When I look up from a necessary and important phone task that needs to be done right now and see my children uselessly messaging, there is an immediate and intense irritation.

It compels me to immediately launch the app that monitors their phone use, and then to Google how many hours a day they should be using it for.

Big news in phone world

One of the dangers of becoming a high vis idiot is that it’s actually turning me into a real idiot. I miss a lot of news.

Keen-eyed readers will have detected a bit of a humblebrag. Not following the news is getting pretty fashionable. I’ll run through the pros and cons in a later post (especially as my day job is as a TV producer - please don’t tell my bosses).

This week on the commute, someone mentioned the Meta/Google case. They said it was shocking. I didn’t know what it was. To my eternal discredit, I nodded and agreed.

I then spent the remainder of the journey home, some 40 minutes, tormented by a desire to look it up. Once again the high vis vest had to work very hard.

For others who’ve never heard of this, Meta and Google were found liable for the mental health problems of a young woman living in California who was a heavy social media user. The design of their services like Instagram and YouTube was found to be inherently addictive.

The world is rightly convinced that children need to be protected from this.

And the world will get round to that in a minute, they just need to check something on their phone first really quickly.

The Kitchen Epiphany

My daughter has been a huge part of my long battle with the phone. This all started when I made her cry by looking at my phone instead of her at a ballet rehearsal. In the years after, I battled my phone and lost - whatever I tried, I could never get in control of my usage.

Then we got my daughter a phone. And watching her pick it up, my frustration with my own usage was gradually blended with fascination. I became genuinely interested in why these devices were so inescapably compelling.

Like many parents I read ’s The Anxious Generation.

Amid the mountains of evidence of phone harm, one innocuous-seeming section changed my life.

It cited an experiment in which young women were exposed to images of very thin women and average-sized women. They found that the subjects exposed to images of very thin women were made more anxious about their bodies. Not particularly surprising.

But here’s the thing - the subjects were only shown the images for 20 milliseconds, which was too fast for them to be consciously aware of what they were seeing.

I’ve heard of subliminal messaging before. But for some reason this particular example stayed with me.

Around this time, I had a lifechanging experience. I was in the kitchen holding my phone and was absolutely certain I didn’t decide to pick it up.

It was the experience that ultimately led me to believe that my conscious willpower was useless in fighting my phone. I became convinced that my mind was on a pre-laid track, so it would not only pick up the phone automatically, but also demolish any obstacles I might put in the way of that.

There’s mountains of evidence that our minds work in very strange ways. But for some reason reading about this experiment and then watching myself closely as I used the phone… it really cut through.

How could my mind be affected by something I couldn’t directly perceive? How could my mind do something I didn’t want it to?

It made me feel like my conscious experience of the world, the little man inside my head seeing out of my eyes and pulling levers… that that was only part of my mind.

That there was more to my brain than what I could perceive. I’m not describing anything cosmic or woo woo or unscientific here - as I read more about the neuroscience, the more it became overwhelmingly obvious.

For me at least, it led me to devote hours to retraining this rogue part of my brain.

In a high vis vest.

Adults: not looking very adult on the commute

We protect children for a number of very good reasons.

Their brains are still being formed. And they don’t have the life experience to cope with potentially harmful content.

But if we seek to protect them because they don’t have effective control over themselves, then we should be aware that we adults are equally vulnerable.

On the commute, it doesn’t look a lot like people have control over their phone use.

It doesn’t look like literally everyone is intentionally choosing to pick them up.

As an overall scene, it looks chillingly automatic. The product of unconscious impulse multiplied by a train carriage.

And it doesn’t look at all fair on them.

It’s worth remembering that Meta and Google lost the case not because the court decided that the content was harmful. It was because the design was inherently addictive.

Irresistible, you might say.

As I say, we are excellent at noticing others’ phone use.

I remember years ago I watched a documentary about social workers.

A dad was about to lose custody of his kid. In order to make a final decision, the social workers set up a room full of toys, invited the dad and his toddler son in, and watched them play together for an hour.

While the two year old explored the toys, the dad sat and looked at his phone.

Back then, I was tempted to judge that dad terribly. I marvelled at him in horror. How could you scroll in this very moment, when you are literally being assessed for one hour so you can prove you can keep your kid?

I’m not so sure of myself now.

[Photo by Matias Megapixel on Unsplash]

80. Hours. Of. Nothing.

I have been through boredom and come out the other side. I can’t imagine ever being bored again. (This is a new superpower that would have been very helpful when the kids were young. It could have really come in handy watching In The Night Garden.)

The whole point is to gain wonderful benefits in the rest of my life, so generally that’s what I write about. I don’t normally talk about the experience of the commute itself. And with good reason - it’s pretty drab.

Since joining Substack I’ve really enjoyed reading writers like , who combine brilliant writing about midlife reinvention with the beauty of rural Portugal. What you get here is me describing how I am worried about the stupid thing I said at work combined with the beauty of the Bank/Monument Complex.

I was hoping I could find some beauty in the commute. After 80 hours I was hoping to be like the guy in American Beauty who videos the plastic bag. By now I should be telling you why seats on the tube are secretly beautiful. Unfortunately they have remained resolutely seats.

Although it’s not euphoric, it is pleasant. It’s a haven. When I close my eyes, the rhythmic movement, the ruffle and fuffle can be soft and cushioning. I can get quite focused here. I’ll come back to this.

The other day I opened my eyes, and someone asked me if I was meditating. I said no, not so much, more than anything I was just deliberately not using the phone.

They said oh, okay. And left me to it.

And that was the only thing that happened on the commute that whole week.

So I’ve had a lot of time to chew on their question, and what I should have said. (If they’d have stayed to listen to a crazy middle-aged man wearing high vis).

Meditation, phones and me

I first became interested in meditation as Tactic 458 in my long-running battle against the phone.

I learnt there’s a lot of options available.

The standard advice is to go to a quiet place, set a timer for a short period, sit and concentrate on your breath. When your mind wanders, you gently bring it back.

Others say as long as you concentrate on any aspect of the present moment - like sounds for example - and then train your attention to come back to it, then that works too. Others go further with the same idea, and focus on chanting.

Some types of meditation need no object of focus at all, but ask you to be fully aware of what’s going on in your head. (Easier said than done.)

The variety is endless. People are relaxed about eyes open, eyes closed. Sitting in any posture is fine. Standing is fine, as is walking. There is an honourable tradition of using simple chores like gardening as meditation.

After a while, one begins to suspect the word has become a little meaningless. Sure, it’s generally solitary and there’s a unified respect for a daily training ethos. But If you ask, “can I meditate while doing x” there’s probably someone out there who’d agree with it. You might start to think… what isn’t meditation?

But there’s one red line. One thing that can’t go anywhere near it. One thing that feels anathema to meditation. Phones.

The opposite of phones

The idea seems immediately absurd. Of course scrolling couldn’t count as meditation.

When you line up phones and meditation, they seem opposites in every way.

Science says heavy phone use is bad for your mental health. The heavier the usage, the worse you will feel.

Science says meditation is very good for you. There have been thousands of clinical trials now evaluating different types of meditation. The broad headline is after 8-10 weeks you feel a great deal better.

If we’re completely honest about the science, in neither case is it 100 per cent clear exactly why.

But I could take a guess from my felt experience:

• Meditation says focus on the present moment. Phones say Hey look at these photos of when your kids were tiny, now they are big and you are old. Oh, and soon AI is going to take your job and we’re all going to die.

• Meditation is about where you are. Phones constantly transport you to the other side of the world, often in the company of Donald Trump.

• Meditation says look inward. Phones say Nah, look at everyone else, look at their beautiful living room, look at their new job on LinkedIn.

• Meditation is about accepting dissatisfaction, that you don’t know and that’s okay. Phones say, Uh oh better check that. Oo, what’s next in the scroll. Now check that first thing again - might have changed.

• Meditation says you must anchor your mind in the body. Phones say Screw that! You’re just a floating mind. Stand for hours with your back hunched over and your pathetic finger moving up and down, doesn’t matter. I once visited that place in the Netherlands where they show you the inside of the human body. To see a collection of organs and muscles holding a phone looks weirdly absurd.

• Meditation is about mental training, sharpening focus and placing your attention. Phones are… do I even need to finish this one?

In all of the above cases, the absolutely crucial thing is that the effects aren’t just felt in the moment - they set a mental baseline in a way that makes the original cause hard to identify.

Humans have a default setting

Much of what meditation “says” is entirely obvious, true and unremarkable. We do have a body and are in the present moment.

These truths would have been evident to cave people. But then once cave people used their first computers, their minds started to depart from this default setting.

Fortunately when they they shut down their computers (with Windows 95 they had to do it properly, they couldn’t just hit a button) their minds settled back into their baseline.

Then the cave people got phones, which were the first devices that could be used 24/7. Phones are so compelling and useful that they have entirely eradicated what would have been incidental mental rebalancing.

Previously the cave people would have got their mental reset waiting for the bus or waiting to pick up their cave kids or walking from the train station back to their cave. Those gaps are now gone, because the phone fits into any hole. (I wrote about that here, I think it might be my favourite piece). No-one planned the eradication but it happened all the same.

The real price of getting a phone

Take physical exercise as a parallel example. Our ancestors would have cheerfully got exercise from hunting mammoths. At a certain point, human civilisation noticed the eradication of that incidental exercise. And CrossFit was born.

Yes, many argue today you can get your physical exercise incidentally. Yes such things are possible, especially if your job isn’t sitting at a desk all day.

But many of us have decided that realistically that doesn’t happen, and feel that swinging a kettlebell is a necessary price to pay for enjoying modern life.

I fear it may be the same with phones. They are so useful. And addictive. The gaps that remain aren’t enough. The resultant fog of anxiety is permeating everyone, and might be why the world seems to have spun off its axis since phones appeared.

Unfortunately the way out is far from easy. Phone use makes us so anxious about everything that we then badly need distraction - which we get from phones.

And you can’t just take occasional detoxes, that’s no good for resetting your baseline. Unfortunately neuroplasticity demands consistency to do its thing.

A regular training programme is what lifts your mood and clears the fog. The results, after a few weeks, are spectacular.

And so here I am.

Paying the price for having a phone.

In a necessary daily gym for the mind.

Wandering around the Bank/Monument complex.

(If you find drawing a parallel between mental rest and exercise a little odd, last week’s post may help).

That’s what I might have said to the person… if they’d have stuck around for it.

I see dead people

Before I go, something to confess.

Recently, I’ve felt myself sucked back into Phoneland again. I felt my mood darkening with it. The other day I repeatedly caught myself using the phone without ever having chosen to. It reminds me that the battle with the phone is never fully over. I hate those automatic pickups - I feel so machine-like and dead.

I said there were thousands of types of meditation. I only mentioned the modern ones.

Meditation fans don’t talk much about Asubha Bhavana.

It is the practice of visiting a charnel ground to stare for hours at rotting corpses. The intention is to train the mind to - among other things - counteract lust.

The Tube is the charnel ground of dead, thoughtless scrolling. I can see my own automatic pickups multiplied by a million. I say this with solidarity and contrition - after all, I’m the one who made my daughter cry - but it really puts you off phones.

Actually, on reflection, probably for the best that the guy ended the conversation when he did.

See you next week.

If you’re like me with a full time job and kids, you only rarely get a moment to yourself.

But, every now and then, lightning strikes. There’s no-one around. The dishwasher is unloaded and loaded, all the clothes are put away (except the socks - all of them are now in the odd socks bag where they can stay forever), the surfaces are clean (mostly).

Great, you think. A rare bit of me time.

Now what?

Probably shouldn’t sit and scroll. If you’re an office worker, you’ve been looking at screens all day. Your mind, you’ve heard, deserves some rest.

Great. Rest the mind. Will do.

But how?

You dream up Instagram-worthy images of relaxation. Almost certainly you should read a book. But you don’t have a book on the go, and it feels tiring to start one now. Could run a bath… but somehow the phone always finds its way in. Even if you’ve lit a candle to ward it away.

So after a bit of indecision, you go for a compromise: telly.

But as you enjoy Yellowstone or one of its many spinoffs, there is a nagging unease. A better person than you would have done something else. Is Yellowstone resting the mind? Probably not.

But another day you’ll be better. One evening soon you’ll rest your mind. Like you’re supposed to.

The Great Late Night Podcast Debate

Last week I wrote about silence. I wrote about how phone use, whether through screen or earbuds, could fill all the incidental gaps in life. I mentioned the trend of more and more people listening to a podcast to help them to get to sleep.

That part in particular clearly hit a nerve. A LOT of people shared it was something they did, including a life coach and a neuroscientist. So if this is you and you were feeling at all bad about this, don’t - you are in the company of experts.

It made me think a lot about evenings, and the pressure (to which I’ve clearly now contributed!) to have the right kind of rest.

Fortunately I have a lot of time for thinking things through. Hours and hours of it. It’s one of the biggest advantages of Phone Free Commuting.

And, here’s my deeply personal, but earnestly held view…

And it’s good news! Do what you like in the evening. Watch telly and then listen to podcasts (as long as it’s not disrupting your sleep of course). Go nuts.

It’s during the day that you might want to think about making a change.

What Is Resting The Mind Anyway?

I used to jumble up silence with resting the mind. But while silence is easy to define, resting the mind really isn’t. (Despite all the smug images suggesting it just involves staring wistfully out of that window cradling that coffee.)

I read a brilliant piece by a few weeks ago which was one of the few to recognise that resting the mind is actually formidably complex.

For a second let’s put aside sport, exercise, conversation and come back to that dilemma at the start: at home, late at night, on your own.

Rest is an idea from the physical world. To rest your body, you just stop. You flump on the sofa and stop using your muscles, and they rejuvenate and repair. I am good at this. Never had any trouble here.

Obviously not really an option with the mind. Your body might stop, but your mind is like a shark that keeps on swimming. For me, any attempt to “stop” just led to convoluted overthinking about work.

Which doesn’t feel like rest.

To combat this overthinking, I can distract myself in all sorts of ways. And I found I was never satisfactorily distracted by knitting or reading a book or the things you are supposed to do, so I turned to a screen. Which, as we all know, is stimulating - and therefore isn’t actually rest for the mind after all.

Some contemplative traditions argue that the closest thing to resting the mind is being present. Being where you actually are, hearing the sounds around you and seeing what you are seeing. There’s a lot in this I agree with.

But I’ve always found it irritating that people urge you to “be present” like it’s immediately achievable. But it’s not something you can actually choose to do. Oh right, I’ll just stop with the intrusive thoughts. Great. They’re intrusive.

So back to distraction again to get rid of it. But that’s not allowed.

So really it’s no wonder we’re at a loss as to what to do in the evening.

Resting Your Mind Is Surprisingly Hard Work

A well-rested mind is a mind that defaults happily to the sights and sounds around it. Rather than having to struggle to be present, it just settles into it naturally. The mind feels accepting rather than uneasy and jumpy, and the volume of negative overthinking gets turned down. This is a mind that hasn’t been amped up by 24/7 phone use.

Unfortunately this isn’t a mind you can just decide to have on any given evening. But it is one you can train to rebuild. I found it took me around four to five weeks.

I do it by daily intermittent digital fasting and patiently teaching the mind to be present. I’ve written a lot about that training already. If you’re interested, I’d recommend this post about training to be present, and this one about how to hear the mind’s endless calls to use the phone.

But the key thing I want to stress here is that it’s really hard to start this in the evening.

We might imagine we have to do it in the evening because evening is for rest, or we’ve “looked at a screen all day”. But while the evening is a great time for resting the body, it’s a rubbish time for resting the mind. A tired brain has less energy for executive function, meaning it just defaults to pre-established well-worn behaviours. And a tired brain is easily besieged by intrusive thoughts, making distraction far more attractive.

(I’ve written about how the overthinking/distraction loop gets worse over time - unfortunately those worries keep coming back louder and louder. It’s connected to the need for the brain’s Default Mode Network to “breathe”. Ending this vicious cycle is not easy.)

And so returning to the dilemma at the start… do what you like in the evening.

And if like the neuroscientist and the life coach I heard from this week, you find you’re doing it to drown out the demands of the day, don’t feel bad about it.

If you want to change things up, set aside some time when you’re most awake to repair your brain. Schedule intentional silence during the day. If, like me, you happen to commute by public transport, I’d argue that’s the perfect time. Otherwise, go for a daily walk, or try driving in silence.

Each day I do it, I find that in the evening I feel less guilty about kicking back in any way that suits me - even if that’s cowboys locked in a vicious, endless property dispute.

Mindworld, as I’m learning, is upside-down. You learn to rest not during the evening, but during the day. Because learning to rest can be hard work.

That’s been my experience anyway. I’d be really interested to hear if it’s yours.

Next week - More from inside Mindworld. I’ve now clocked up over 70 hours of silence on the commute. I’m getting to know my mind pretty well - and coming to some unsettling conclusions.

[Images by AI, words all human]

Having raced home from work to get there, I was thinking of myself as a great dad for graciously offering my presence. So I was a little put out when he asked me to leave.

I asked him why.

He said that as soon as everyone left, lying in bed on his own, he went into a Dreamworld. And he said that the story in the Dreamworld was pretty good at the moment and he was keen to get back there.

I asked him what was in the Dreamworld. He wouldn’t say. Fair enough.

I went downstairs to watch telly and fiddle with my phone.

I’ve now experienced two hours of daily mental quiet for over two months.

For those new to the story: made my daughter cry due to my phone addiction, then after years of trying everything to kick the habit, I became convinced that the best way to stop picking it up all the time was a daily intentional break. And, for me and my routine, it was best to do it on the commute.

It’s been a spectacular success.

First it was very hard. Then, at around the four week mark (when the science of neuroplasticity says my brain rewired) I began to experience enormous benefits across my life.

I’ve come to love my commute. And despite appearances, there’s a lot going on… indeed it’s getting pretty weird (I will write much more about this in coming weeks).

But there’s no-one to talk to. They are all on their phones. They are checking and fixing.

And if they aren’t swiping, they have the little earbuds in. You think for a second, Wait! That person doesn’t have a phone! But then they rearrange their hair and you see the little white things. Even the book readers you occasionally see normally have them.

It has quite a cumulative effect. Someone from Mars would assume these things have a special importance to us, like these little stoppers hold our brains in place.

And I feel like I notice it more out and about. When I’m walking Jumble The Dog nearly all of the other dog walkers have them.

The other day I read an article about how half of American podcast listeners use them to get to sleep. I once downloaded Calm - I was surprised to find it full of sleep stories.

Every little moment of incidental silence is being closed off. And as you have likely already guessed, the science suggests this is bad for us.

Last month, when I experienced all sorts of benefits from my phone free commuting, I asked AI to look at the neuroscience to see if people could get the same result with music and podcasts. It said it reduced the chances by about 70%.

Neuroscience is increasingly clear: the brain does not just want a break from stimulus; it requires one to function.

THE WALL OF SOUND

People don’t get judgey about listening to the phone in the same way they get judgey about scrolling on TikTok.

It’s hard to argue with someone who’s listening to an opera or a great work of literature while on a dog walk (and they wouldn’t hear you anyway).

But when it’s all the time, you can begin to see where things can go wrong. You can easily imagine that a brain that is constantly stimulated would feel uneasy and unsatisfied when that stimulation is withdrawn.

For me, any silence was quickly filled with negative thoughts, mainly the stupid things I said or did at work. OH MY GOD! Why did I say that to Clive? In a big meeting and everything! I’m such a doofus.

Radio Clive was the last thing I wanted to hear, so when I couldn’t scroll it away, I chose to mask it by listening to something… anything. Often mental health podcasts about the virtue of silence.

But neglected, unaccepted and unheard, those ghosts of Clive were waiting in the wings to haunt me every time I stopped. And they started screaming louder and louder, breaking into my day.

For a kid, Dreamworld is lovely. For an adult, after a few years of failing to accept your worries, silence becomes Nightmareworld. Soon you’ll do anything to avoid it.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING. AGAIN.

Once again, it’s the phone doing its thang: taking something good and making it omnipresent. Listening to stuff is great in moderation, but phones offer an infinite buffet of constant distraction.

I wrote the other week about how I don’t like to differentiate between types of screen use, between buying my son the school trousers he so very badly needs or scrolling on TikTok. You could definitely argue one is worse than the other, or that he really really really needs those trousers now he looks awful, but the problem is endlessly checking and fixing at all hours. It’s not about what you’re doing, it’s that you’re never getting a break.

It’s the same for noise. It used to be only meditatey types who gave silence any thought, but now thanks to stupid 24/7 phones, we are all forced to actively seek it out.

SILENCE: CRAP AT FIRST, WORTH IT IN THE END

The world is very much waking up to the need for silence. But much of the pro-silence stuff that’s out there is annoying and misleading.

Silence often gets conflated with “rest” or “doing nothing”. But these are all different things. I want to write more about this next week.

And the worst thing is that people pretend silence is immediately pleasant, accompanying it with AI-generated pictures of smug people cradling coffee in a garden.

Silence is properly hard. At least for a month or so. You need to grit your teeth through it. But when you tune into it, it’s a huge prize.

These days, I still scroll. (Away from the commute I mean). But whether walking the dog or driving the car or having a bath, I’ve stopped listening to anything.

At home, if I choose not to scroll, it’s because I shouldn’t. I don’t listen to podcasts because I now genuinely don’t want to.

Given the right conditions, experiencing silence can be quite lovely.

My son was way ahead of me on that.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

Since I started winning the battle against my phone, my Sunday Scaries have largely gone away. It goes without saying - it’s a huge prize. That’s a whole day back with the family that was previously lost to a muddy fog of terror.

That sounds weird doesn’t it. Why would taking a daily, silent intentional break from the phone lead to that?

But it shouldn’t be surprising.

There’s now a mountain of scientific evidence that phone use lowers your mood 24/7. So if you cut use and if your mood is going to improve generally, that’s got to manifest somehow right? Stands to reason Sundays would feel a lot better.

But during the week on the commute, the mood on Sunday feels a million miles away. So I can completely understand people going crazy for it on their phones. It all feels like a freebie.

But after two months of Phone Free Commuting, it gets a little dystopian to be constantly surrounded by all the swiping and refreshing.

It’s nearly Spring in London. The other morning was properly cheery weather.

As we passed Earlsfield, we whizzed past rows of Victorian terraces getting ready for their day. The train was going quickly, but every now and then there was a flash into a morning domestic scene, a hurried kitchen here, a frantic hall there. We were so fast, I only caught two people clearly.

I kid you not, both the people I saw were on their phones.

Four thousand Sundays

You get four thousand Sundays in an average lifespan. I’ve had around half of them (probably don’t need to say that; I think we can all detect there’s something mid-life going on here).

For a decent proportion of the two thousand, my main preoccupations were

• thinking through a work worry

• trying to work out how not to think through a work worry

During the week, evenings always felt like a shadow thrown by work. I wrote about that experience here - let me know if you find it relatable.

Then, when it came to Friday evening, that didn’t just persist - it worsened. Suddenly everything I failed to do in work during the week returned as a crowd of ghosts.

Unable to escape their haunting, I lived with what my wife and I called “Work Head”. As in “I’ll pick up that crying baby in a second, I still have Work Head. I need to draft an imaginary email in my head, so therefore can’t really concentrate on what’s going on. Or what you’re saying about the crying baby.”

These worries would persist through Saturday morning and then - for some reason - they would vanish.

Real Weekend would begin at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon. Real Weekend was delicate though. First rule of Real Weekend: you can’t notice that you aren’t worried about work, or it’ll all suddenly flood back.

Sunday mornings were mostly good too. We use the posh coffee, we never got papers but we could have done.

But at a certain point, Real Weekend was over. The colour would drain out of things. There was an imperceptible heaviness. At any given moment you could tell it was Sunday. All the flowers in the garden centre looked grim.

Sunday nights? Well, we all know there’s nothing good to be had there.

Solving Sunday Scaries

Clouds of dread aside, weekend worries were about my mind endlessly trying to tackle problems without my permission.

Some problems were ridiculous, others were very real, but the moment chosen to think them through was always wildly inappropriate.

Dilemma: Should I have used “All My Very Best” at the end of that email?
Timing: While waiting for my turn in a game of Uno with the kids.

Dilemma: Should I now draft a second email to cover that up? And what other emails can I draft right now? Can I get the wording right on all of them?
Timing: Late Friday night, failing to get to sleep.

Dilemma: Will the AI revolution trigger catastrophic job losses in the media industry? (With particular reference to people who sign off emails inappropriately and are therefore unemployable.)
Timing: A garden centre toilet visit.

I tried everything to stop this happening, but nothing worked.

But meanwhile, in an unrelated area of my life, I was making some progress. At a certain point I realised that meditation (or mental training, if you prefer) would help cut my phone use.

And then one Sunday, the Sunday Scaries just didn’t descend. It was so odd. I didn’t connect it. It was only when three Sundays in a row had happened - combined with a parallel end to the Friday Fog - that I started to figure out what was going on.

How did that happen?

I will write in another post about whether it was the cut in phone use or the meditation that did for Sunday Scaries - or whether it even matters. It’s something to do with the brain’s Default Mode Network. You’re going to love it.

But it all makes sense with a little imagination. The phone is all about mental activity in an inappropriate context. I’m brushing my teeth - let’s brush up on geopolitics at the same time. The phone shatters the logical walls around your attention. If you think of it that way, it’s not so far-fetched that the mind would just give up any semblance of staying present and just wander where it fancied. And into dark places.

The main thing I learnt from all this: never again concentrate exclusively on the actual thing I am worried about. Unless it’s “I’m on fire, how shall I put it out?”

It might be ridiculous (like the email) or very real (like AI). But if a worry recurs repeatedly at a wildly inappropriate time, then instead of trying to solve it, I will try and focus on the factors that have created my mood and see what I can do about them. It’s never easy, and it might take a little effort. Or training.

Whatever your recurrent storm clouds, I’ll bet your phone use is probably the low pressure cycle that allowed them to move in.

You know that feeling when you have a cold and everything feels a bit bleak? You find yourself obsessing over a work drama, an argument with a friend, or a crack in your marriage. You interrogate the problem for hours, because it is a real thing and it does need solving.

And then you remember: Oh, wait. I have a virus. Viruses make the whole world look grim. I’ll wait til the fever breaks, and then I’ll be able to think more constructively. I’ll worry about the problem then.

Heavy daily phone use is exactly like that. It is one big virus. Let the symptoms pass. And then look at your life afresh.

COMING UP: Everyone goes on about scrolling like it’s the only harmful thing we do with our phones. But we need to talk about how podcasts crowd out any silence, which means we never rest the mind. (Whatever resting the mind means.)

[Images by AI, words all human]

The world and her mother say you need to take a regular break from the phone. You have probably got that message by now.

I am arguing for something more active: making a daily date to train your mind to undo the damage the phone does. (Read more here).

The main aim of that training is to stop the ingrained habit of automatically picking up the phone at home. So you can it own it, rather than it owning you.

But it also had - for me at least - an unanticipated benefit.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I noted an odd sense of optimism creeping in at around Day 30 of my Phone Free Commute. It was glorious and quite lovely.

But I couldn’t work out what was going on. I think I have it figured out now.

The Science Bit

Neuroscientist recently broke down how phone use changes your brain.

Dopamine is the brain's neurotransmitter of motivation and reward: an anticipatory signal released to reinforce behaviours essential for our survival, such as finding food or shelter.

Evolution favoured dopamine for a reason. It made our ancestors look at a spear and say: “Not good enough, I’ll shape it better”. This extraordinary relentless impulse created the Pyramids, fractional reserve banking and Surbiton station.

But the phone hijacks this instinct to check, fix, and improve, turning it into an endless activity.

• Constant phone use stimulates constant dopamine release. The brain’s reward processing hub responds to this flood of dopamine by removing receptors, essentially “muffling” the signal from the dopamine. Accordingly our mood in general worsens. We find it harder to find joy in normal levels of stimulation.

• Repeated phone pickups are associated with less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision-making centre of the brain.

In short, constant phone use makes us feel glum, and makes picking up the phone automatic.

Ng suggests many useful remedies for tackling excessive phone use.

But, perhaps surprisingly, he also suggests meditation.

He describes how a long-term daily habit (rather than a sudden short detox) reinforces the wiring in the prefrontal cortex, allowing our phone use to be less automatic and more intentional.

And then gradually, thanks to neuroplasticity, the dopamine receptors come back (accounting for my hugely improved mood).

His piece is excellent, and I couldn’t agree more.

But the challenge is making it all feel tangible. We can’t perceive dopamine or the Prefrontal Cortex. On the other extreme, meditation feels vague or even off-putting to some, and it’s really hard to imagine how it’ll help address chemical imbalances.

But I believe it is possible to connect the neuroscience with our felt experience. There’s an honorable tradition from Plato to Freud of using metaphor and story to envision the mind.

Using our imagination creatively can help us see how mental training can defeat the phone’s grip on us.

Plus it can be quite entertaining too.

The Evil Advisor

The moment you commit to a break from your phone, your mind invents a reason to pick it up.

For me, it’s heard as the voice of an Evil Advisor, endlessly suggesting a variety of increasingly desperate (and hilarious) reasons why I need to use my phone.

The Evil Advisor is how I feel dopamine. It’s the instinct to check, to fix, to improve.

The Advisor is never sated. And he mixes stupid tasks (let’s refresh the feed yet again! that next video might be better!) with ones that genuinely need doing.

If you’re just generally trying to cut down phone use, you’ll judge his requests on merit. Good point, even though it’s near midnight, I should indeed order Tommy’s new school trousers now, because he looks like a doofus.

But this isn’t about merit of each use of the phone. It’s about us checking and fixing and improving 24/7, which only serves to amplify the calls to do so - until we hear the relentless drumbeat of unease all the time, day and night.

That’s why we need a daily period of intentional training, so you can say firmly, whatever the merit of the Advisor’s request, No, I will do that later.

In the silence you have carved out, you are practising so you can hear that call to the phone clearly. (He’s fully capable of controlling you without a whisper otherwise).

And you are practising saying to him: I accept that I do not know everything. I accept that - though this could be checked, fixed or improved - I will not do so right now.

To me, that is what it feels like in the moment to strengthen the Prefrontal Cortex and to “regrow” your dopamine receptors.

To get a sense of how it’ll feel over weeks and months, I believe it’s useful to learn from the world’s great contemplative traditions.

The Guy In The Garden Centre

Ng is one of a number of experts calling for meditation in the battle against phones.

It’s perhaps no surprise that those who watch the mind closely would perceive the effect of dopamine in the mind, centuries before neuroscience classified them.

Until I became obsessed with my phone use, the Buddha was just a guy I occasionally encountered in garden centres, often as part of a water feature. He did not live to see smartphones but, from what I’ve read, I suspect he would not have been a fan.

• He described the felt effect of dopamine in the brain: the human tendency to feel every moment is unsatisfactory and incomplete. He called it Dukkha.

• He also noticed that “Whatever a person frequently thinks and ponders upon, that becomes the inclination of their mind” - a perfect description of the well-worn neural pathways that make phone pick ups automatic.

• And of course he noticed the effect of regular mental training. He knew that diligent concentration could redirect the mind - anticipating neuroplasticity.

I don’t personally believe the universe or the cosmos is telling me anything. Nor do I believe in reincarnation or anything outside of the physical world. As far as I know, my brain is a strictly biological thing that creates my conscious experience.

But I don’t believe you have to be religious to admire how the contemplative traditions have documented the weirdnesses of the mind. They were the first cognitive scientists.

And where they are especially helpful are in describing how a daily project to rewire the brain feels.

• Meditation literature warns us we will naturally be assailed by negative thoughts, and that if we keep distracting ourselves from them, they’ll just come back with a vengeance.

• It says that in those moments when you are able to place your attention on the sounds around you, or the breath, you should celebrate it. Training the mind to be present is the best training of all.

• And the literature also tells us that none of this will feel easy. That the right attitude to have is one of patient training.

And that last message is probably the most important one. Of all the lies told about the phone, the most dangerous is that you feel good when you put it down.

You are turning away from the path of least resistance. Well worn mental wiring screams at you. Your Evil Advisor screams at you.

But you say: No, not now. I accept the uncertainty and the incomplete task. You grit your teeth. You remember neuroplasticity and those regrowing dopamine receptors.

Four weeks, and the automatic use of the phone will slow, ending the forlorn battles and guilt at home.

Four weeks, and you’ll feel a mood you haven’t felt for years.

Four weeks, and you’ll be out of this glum fog.

(For an FAQ, read more here)

Welcome!

This article is part of a long-running experiment to reclaim minds from the phone.

We’ve all noticed how phones waste our time. But they also destroy our mood. We all feel ground down by worries about work, about our health, about the world. But we seldom recognise that behind the scenes it is our heavy phone use that is crushing our spirit, poisoning our positivity and making every little thing seem daunting.

Not having a phone is near impossible. We likely need them for our lives and our jobs.

Many of have tried everything to cut our phone use, but found whatever we do, we continue to pick it up entirely automatically.

The answer is not just to continue to try and use the phone less - that doesn’t work. Instead it’s to carve out a clear, daily intentional silence from the phone. You could call this intermittent digital fasting.

In that time we train our mind to stop automatically picking up the phone, and reverse the phone’s (frankly massive) psychological effects on us.

This daily training can be done at any time of day in any way that suits you. Could be driving, could be a morning walk, but for me it was easiest in my commute.

I dedicated my whole commute to it, two hours a day. After around four weeks - roughly the time it takes for a brain to rewire (see the science below) I found:

• It drastically cuts phone use in family time, by reducing instinctive/automatic phone use

• It acts as a psychological airlock to stop work worries leaking into the evening and weekend

• It helps me concentrate at work (which more than makes up for any time lost working on the commute)

• It helps me feel much more optimistic in general

• It helped me get back into reading for pleasure at home

• It makes me much better to be around (in my opinion at least, not confirmed by survey).

None of this is subtle - it is amazing, and well worth it.

I’ve now been commuting without a phone for several weeks, and I’m going to do it for the rest of my life. The science says it has made my brain ten years younger, and honestly that feels about right. Feel considerably less mature anyway.

I’m going to continue to write about that experience of daily silence, surrounded by the oddness of the commute, as it gets deeper and weirder.

This post serves to answer all the questions people normally ask me when they see me in the Phone Free Commute high vis vest.

When it’s underlined, I’ve linked to a post I’ve written, for those interested in reading more about my abject history of phone addiction failure.

What on earth are you doing?

I’m a TV producer and father. A few years ago I made my daughter cry when I looked at my phone rather than watch her during a ballet recital.

In the years after, no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop using my phone (or thinking about my phone) with my family.

When I realised I was picking up the phone automatically I decided I needed to take time to train my mind against this effect. I have a busy life, so I use my commute for it.

Because I have failed to resist the power of the phone many times before (and because why not, life is short) I do it wearing Phone Free Commute high vis. The social commitment has worked - I don’t look at my phone at all on the commute.

After a month, I declared victory (of sorts) over the phone. It has improved my life massively.

What is Substack?

My writing is hosted on Substack, which allows you to get my posts emailed to you once a week on Tuesday mornings. Avoid the distraction machine and receive these direct.

And I’ll be honest - subscribing, or liking my posts, or commenting, or sharing with friends… It all supports me and gives me a little pat on the head. It’s a funny old thing putting your mental life out there, so I really really appreciate the encouragement.

Obviously, it’s totally free - I’m doing this because I believe in it.

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The commute is the one time I can get my phone stuff out the way. I’ll just tackle my phone use at home.

That is what I did for years.

But then I learnt about how using the phone rewires the brain, so it makes you use the phone more. Phone use creates phone use.

If you use it heavily in the commute you will want to use it when you get where you are going and feel uneasy if you can’t.

And because phone pickups are automatic, they near impossible to fight. Battling them at home is depressing, stressful and almost everyone feels like they are failing - this is a hugely common experience.

Try something new.

If you have dead time that you can use for anything, use it to rewire the brain.

At least I have something to do on my commute. What’s it like having nothing to do?

I do have something to do.

I’m training the mind to get rid of the instinct to pick up the phone automatically.

I use a technique inspired by mindfulness that allows me to watch my thoughts rather than to just have them, to separate “me” from the urge to scroll.

And to be honest, that’s hard.

First, the mind thinks up a thousand reasons to use the phone. I like to think of that as like an Evil Advisor in my head.

Then the mind gets filled up by whatever you don’t want to think about. For me, that’s work worries - why did I say that to Clive? Clive thinks I’m rubbish etc.

And then I found I experienced a weird kind of loneliness. (Warning - this piece is a bit bleak).

Around week four I began to feel the benefits I described above, which have been beyond amazing.

What’s it like a month in? You must be so bored.

I still want to use the phone. I still have to train, to practise saying to myself It’s okay, I’ll do it later.

I try and practise being present, by listening to the sounds on the train. This is training to rebuild my phone-shattered focus, training to be more present with my family (I learned this from my dog).

I see the other commuters on their phone, and it doesn’t look appealing. It feels like I’m in a shelter while others are caught in the trillion dollar war for their attention.

The commute now feels much easier, but the real benefits are felt in the rest of my life.

It all sounds meditatey. Are you meditatey?

I’ve learnt a huge amount of helpful things from that world. But for many, meditation is a loaded term - maybe training the mind is an easier way to imagine it.

Practice to resist the call to the phone, combined with rewarding yourself for being present, is mental training for the smartphone age. It’s anti-phone training, to undo the damage. It’s the price of having a phone.

I suspect that in the centuries before phones were invented, we maintained our mental health in the incidental gaps in life. During those moments we were resting our minds, or maybe even being a little mindful without knowing the term.

Now the phone has spread into all those gaps, not just through screen use but also through podcasts. So now we have to choose silence intentionally.

It would make more sense if you read a book.

I found it easier to imagine this as training rather than relaxing. I think it’s important to know it won’t be easy.

And for me the silence was the medicine.

But, as far as I know, a book would work just as well (if you can stick to it).

Or why don’t you just listen to relaxing music or a podcast or something?

I’m trying to escape 24/7 distraction.

When I asked AI to use its neuroscience knowledge to estimate what would happen with podcasts and music, it said the chances of psychological benefits are hugely reduced. (Books don’t cause anywhere near the same reduction it seems).

I’ve now started to genuinely prefer silence to podcasts, but if I’m honest that took two months.

Have you just made this up? What’s the science behind this?

I read a tonne about neuroscience, contemplative traditions, the psychological effects of the phone and behavioural science before deciding on this plan.

When I started feeling the benefits, I learnt all I could about neuroscience to work out what happened. Apparently doing this daily consistently for four weeks rewires the brain in positive ways:

• Heavy phone use reinforces the automatic habit to pick up the phone. It strengthens the wiring in the brain’s basal ganglia. Using this technique strengthens the pre-frontal cortex, allowing conscious control of phone use.

• Taking a daily break from distraction and so processing your worries (from work or wherever) is good for you. You need to allow the brain’s Default Mode Network to “breathe”.

When I asked Google AI to characterise these changes it found a study that estimated that a typical attention span in the pre-smartphone days was 150 seconds. It’s now 47 seconds. It said my brain was returning to 2006 levels.

It found it to be comparable to reversing 10 years of age-related decline.

I am speaking to a human expert about all of this. Coming up in a future post.

What about my commute? I drive / walk / work at home

The commute worked for me because it fitted so neatly into my life.

If that’s not you, I’m guessing you can get your daily dose of mental focus another way. Neuroplasticity does not care where you are: it only cares that you are regularly doing the work.

If you drive, try driving in silence. (I drive in silence and find it quite safe, but obviously you are the best judge).

If you do not commute, try a twenty minute morning walk. The rules remain the same:

• No Phone: it stays in your pocket, or at home.

• No Input: no podcasts, no music, no digital noise.

• Active Observation: You let your mind settle by engaging with the physical world.

It will feel uncomfortable at first because your Evil Advisor is screaming for a hit. But stick with it.

(Because it’s an addition to your daily routine, you will likely need to employ techniques from the world of habit formation to stick to it. I wouldn’t underestimate the challenge - part of the joy of the commute is about attaching this habit to something that we already do ever day. More on this soon.)

Okay, I’m suddenly converted. This sounds amazing. You’re amazing and you look great in the high vis.

I commute by train. Can I join you?

Thank you. Definitely go for it, and please let me know how you get on.

I wouldn’t have been able to stick to this without the social commitment that comes with the high vis vest. If you have the same experience, I’m more than happy to buy anyone high vis.

That’s a hard no.

Don’t worry, I have the answer!

I ordered stickers that say Phone Free Commute. If you want to tap into the social commitment thing, they should work as well as high vis (without you looking like a total idiot).

By sticking this on your phone, book or bag, you are declaring your territory. It is a silent signal that you are fighting back. We are supporting each other in a quiet rebellion against the trillion dollar machine that wants our focus.

Life is short - don’t give up control of your attention.

I’ll send them for free to anyone who wants them, just email me. (Or just reply if you’ve received this as an email. See below, modelled on handy positive notebook.)

If you’re giving this a try, all of the articles above are useful priming. But in brief, I’d recommend -

1. Get in touch and say hello. Whether you feel you need a social commitment sticker or not, every single person I’ve spoken to about this has identified themselves as uniquely addicted to their phone. So clearly the problem is with the phone, not with each of us. We should stick together - it’s much easier if we feel part of something. Plus we can work out together what works.

2. As you might have read in the articles above, it’s challenging at first. Consistency is more important than duration. So maybe start with just five minutes, or a small section of your commute.

3. I leave my phone turned on (I need it to touch in and out, such is modern life) but put it onto Do Not Disturb.

4. Feel free to read a book, but I’d recommend not listening to anything personally.

5. Try and notice your mind calling you back to the phone for all sorts of reasons good and bad. This is training your mind to notice the automatic impulse, and also practising to resist it. It’s invaluable.

6. Beyond this, feel free to let your mind wander. Over time you might begin to notice the environment of the train around you. Maybe the sounds is easiest. I think of this as training my mind to default to the present moment. But don’t worry in the least if this doesn’t come easy - it takes time.

7. Do the above daily without expectation of it being relaxing (or any positive results) for four or five weeks.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

You flip on the kettle. While you wait, you check your phone. You refresh all the apps.

Then the kettle is boiled. You put down the phone again and move on with life.

Phones fill all the gaps in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this during my commute (as you might imagine, I have quite a bit of time to think).

I have been in a strange mood, oddly like a tourist in a city I have lived in for two decades. I’ve been alternating my routes to see different parts of the underground.

At Embankment station they still have the old Mind The Gap announcement. It’s good they do because the gap between the train and the platform is massive. If I wasn’t off to work, I might sit for a bit and watch people step gingerly over the gap. But no, off to work.

HOW THE PHONE SHINES THROUGH THE GAPS IN LIFE

As soon as you get a smartphone, you want to use it all the time.

Not only do phones host a trillion dollar economy of AI-aided geniuses who battle to grab your attention, not only do they host all your relationships, they also rewire your brain so you feel a magnetic pull to whatever checking/fixing they offer.

Of course, people don’t use phones all the time. Life is in the way. There’s time with the family. There’s work. There’s leisure.

But the opportunity is in the gaps between these activities.

Over the years, I’ve become adept at working out which bits of life are gaps - and therefore I can get away with phone use - and which ones actually aren’t gaps, and phone use isn’t cool.

MARRIAGE

Let’s go back to the kettle boiling. But now, while I am waiting, let’s say my wife comes in and starts talking to me about something to do with feelings or something.

No longer a gap. This is one of those times to “be present”. I resist the pull, even as my mind is rent out of shape by the rectangular magnet. I do one of those nervy automatic refresh/quick put down motions on some app as she talks.

If we go for a meal together, obviously not a gap. But if she goes to the toilet - gap! When she comes back I put the phone away, but once that ball is rolling… Man, I want to look at my phone again. She’s talking about something that can be fact-checked by AI. We can skip this whole speculative conversation and just KNOW the answer if I could just get at the phone! But it won’t be cool to suggest it because this is quality time.

Soon she looks at her phone! It’s a brief check? Oo that’s definitely her Work Teams chat thing. Has this become a gap? Seconds pass. It is. Phew. We can both agree.

We sit at dinner and both check our phones.

FATHERHOOD

Let’s go back to the kettle boiling scenario again.

This time there’s a small child in the room, playing with a toy and chuntering away to themselves. You might say: model good behaviour, dad, this is not a gap.

But really… there’s A LOT of time to be spent with kids. They are around ALL the time. There are other occasions one can model good behaviour. The phone likely gets used here.

Unfortunately, small children have a gap-like quality about them. Despite all the hype, they aren’t THAT interesting. And their engagement with an adult near them is pretty sporadic - it’s not full-on eye contact like in the stock photos.

Fortunately with young children they don’t protest if you get it wrong.

But they grow. I used to look at my phone during my daughter’s ballet recitals. At six that was fine, at seven: she bursts into tears. Clearly what was previously a gap, now no longer a gap. You live and learn.

Children grow up and get a phone of their own. And they sit and use it for a while, problem solved - they’ve generously created a clear gap for everyone!

As they get older and then move out, my wife and I will become those people in their 70s for whom life is one long phone-filled gap.

WORK

Getting on with work can be difficult at the best of times because it is both boring and scary. So a gap inserts itself before getting anything done, which is spent alternating between refreshing emails on the computer and then refreshing the same emails on the phone.

But of course there are deadlines and things, so sooner or later I have to knuckle down. I start delayed, and in a bad mood. And then I have to stay late.

THE KING OF THE GAPS

Then I commute home.

In every situation I’ve listed so far, you could make a case for not using the phone. But in the commute, doubt levels are at 0%. It is a gap.

So I really go for it. I feel bad about the delays at work, and I know now that Clive hates me as a result, so I distract myself from that bad feeling.

And everyone does, they go crazy for it. You look up and down the carriages and it’s checking and sorting, swiping and refreshing. That way, they might reasonably imagine, they won’t have to do it at home.

As if phone use is a finite thing.

START BIG

Why on earth would I advocate not using the phone in literally the one gap in which it is okay to use the phone?

Because the commute the king of the gaps. It’s the engine room of phone use. And it’s the only time I have to set my mind to something intentional and hard to do.

Because phone use isn’t finite. Actually those commuters are nurturing a fungus, that will spread across all their hours. Phone use creates more phone use.

I’ve described it as feeling like a heavy iron wheel in the mind that is turning fast saying usethephoneusethephoneusethephone. The more you use it, the faster the wheel goes. So when you get where you going, you really really want to keep using it.

I learnt last week that actually there isn’t a heavy iron wheel in my mind. That my phone use had shifted to the basal ganglia and had therefore become automatic, rather than an intentional decision made in the prefrontal cortex. And that by using the phone in the commute I was strengthening this basal ganglia wiring. Whatever AI, I prefer the iron wheel myself. Usethephoneusethephone it says, as it turns so fast.

You might think: start small. Look at those hundreds of liminal moments during the day when you use the phone and try and fight in each of them. How’s that working for you?

I spent years doing this. I fought the war in the gaps on a thousand fronts. I tried to jam my hand in that iron wheel while it was turning at full speed. All that happened was I hurt my fingers and felt shit about myself.

I only imagined I was making an oh-so-clever judgement about the gaps. Really the phone use was automatic.

Try something different. Break into the engine room of your phone use and start slowing the iron wheel. Tap into the social commitment power of the commute to enforce a daily habitual intentional break from your phone (fortunately, you don’t have to wear the high vis idiot vest - a simple sticker will do). Get in touch, I’ll send you one.

That urge to use the phone isn’t going to stop immediately, it’s going to take a few weeks to slow the iron wheel. It’s going to grind and groan and sparks will fly.

Whatever, it’s the commute, wasn’t good anyway.

HEARING THE EVIL ADVISOR

And then, in a few weeks, you are standing in the kitchen and the kettle is boiling. And no-one is around! It is a clear gap!

But now, rather than automatically picking up the phone without making a decision, for the first time you hear a voice, a voice you have patiently trained your mind to listen for all that time you were on the train. Master, it says, Master. We did check our emails five minutes ago I concede. But why don’t we check them again? Something might have changed. Let’s know for sure.

You trained your mind to hear it. And to be able to say, No, I will not, Evil Advisor.

Because if I use the phone now, though it seems harmless, I will turn the iron wheel basal ganglia thing. And I’d rather keep it slow.

You might feel a whoosh in your body, as an impulse is denied, almost a wave crashing against you inside. You notice it and you watch it with interest. And it passes.

And your son walks into the kitchen. And you aren’t looking at your phone.

And you wish - oh God, how you wish - you wish you had done this years ago.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

I read it to my young son as a bedtime story. My daughter, who in the years since the ballet disaster had become suspiciously tall, was hovering nearby.

For much of the book, Christopher Robin is happily playing with Pooh, Piglet and Tigger - and less happily with Eeyore - in the Hundred Acre Wood.

But there are subtle signs that things are changing. Pooh and his friends notice Christopher Robin is around less to play with them. He is having to go to school. He is growing up.

And then in the final chapter, Christopher Robin has to explain what it all will mean to his closest companion. Pooh is a Bear Of Very Little Brain and he only dimly perceives how things will change.

“... Pooh,”

“Yes, Christopher Robin?”

“I’m not going to do Nothing any more.”

“Never again?”

“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Reading it, I was suddenly confronted with all the moments that passed while my children were growing up. And I knew that I had never - could never - have been present enough.

Out of nowhere, I began to cry. Thankfully, my young son wasn’t fazed by this. I kept on reading, relieved that I hadn’t traumatised him.

But then I noticed his sister in floods of tears.

BACK TO PHONE FREE COMMUTING

I have now commuted phone free for 30 days. An hour each way, with near-total adherence.

Good news first:

• My phone pickups have reduced sharply. At home, I feel I am offered a choice whether to use the phone or not. I am pulled to the rectangle far less during time with my family. This is a beautiful thing.

• Work worries invade my family life far less. Sunday Blues have diminished dramatically, and evenings feel like life rather than a respite from the office. The Phone Free Commute is a work/home airlock. It is like the lift in Severance.

• I occasionally notice increased optimism. This is harder for me to pin down. I feel like I’ve drunk that lucky potion that Harry Potter got from Professor Slughorn.

These effects are not subtle - they are very noticeable indeed. And they are wonderful.

I have slogged through being taunted by my phone, haunted by work worries and a weird loneliness, but to say it has been worth it is an understatement.

THE SCIENCE

I wanted to know what might be happening in my brain. So I did what anyone in 2026 would do and I asked AI. Here’s some short excerpts from its guesses:

• Phone use becoming more intentional

  • By Day 30, the subject will have physically weakened the neural pathways in the basal ganglia—the brain's habit centre—that trigger the automatic reach for the phone.

• Invasive work worries

  • The DMN vs. Task-Positive Network: In a typical commuter, the Default Mode Network (DMN) is hyper-active but fragmented, leading to “work-looping”. By enforcing 60 minutes of stimulus fasting at 18:00, the subject is triggering the resetting of the DMN.

• Optimism

  • Tonic vs. Phasic Dopamine: Constant phone use creates high “phasic” spikes that leave “tonic” (baseline) levels low, leading to irritability and anhedonia.

I’ll get to what all this might mean in later posts.

For now, the key question: am I unusual in feeling these massive benefits?

I asked AI to draw on its understanding of neuroscience and estimate the chances of someone starting cold getting these gains too. I asked it to guess both for the 30 days I have completed, and then the 60 days I intend to do.

• More Intentional Phone Use - 85% / 95%

• Fewer Intrusive Work Worries - 70% / 80%

• Increased Optimism - 40% / 70%

Wow.

(I should add, for full transparency, that I have been doing 15 minutes of meditation (or Jumble The Dog training, if you will) on the weekend. The AI suggests that without this, the benefits are still huge, but drop by about 10%. I’ll come back to this.)

THE BAD NEWS

As so often when we are playing with AI, I got carried away. I asked it to estimate the chances someone could actually stick to this:

10%

Ouch. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed this before, but phones are addictive.

I have written many times that I believe the Phone Free Commute high vis jacket helped me do this. It’s a huge social commitment on a crowded train.

I asked AI for the chances of success for someone starting cold who did this wearing the high vis.

99.5%

I did mention there was a dilemma.

I have stumbled upon one of the greatest self-help strategies known to humanity. It makes you feel more positive, helps you reclaim your attention and to devote your whole self to your loved ones.

And unlike almost any other new habit, it takes place in totally dead time.

But it extracts a very heavy price: you have to look like a massive idiot.

STUPID V STUPID

Back to my kids. For the years in which we have been playing in our very own Hundred Acre Wood, there have been consistently two things that have stopped me doing Nothing with them.

Worrying about work outside of work, and of course, my phone.

I treated them as separate problems. But increasingly I’m convinced that the phone is the one that shattered my attention to the extent that it wandered onto my weak spot, which for me was work. It was you all along, Fredo.

So for me, rewiring my brain is a no-brainer. I’m wearing the vest.

Though I’ve called this an idiot vest, really it’s not about human weakness. It’s about silent rebellion against the trillion dollar war. About dedication to my family.

The terrible price I’m paying now isn’t feeling like an idiot. It’s the realisation that I should have done this sooner.

Yes I look stupid.

But so does an hour spent endlessly refreshing apps.

I have a phone. I need a phone. In many ways, I love my phone.

But these things are poisoning us. Just as surely as if we were cheerfully handling plutonium on the 9.17. We might worry about the burns, but it’s the dosage we need to keep under control. And we are spreading the radiation to our family.

If you want to learn more about the science behind phone use, read the real expert, . Find the strategy that works for you.

This is what’s working for me. I’m done with just “trying harder” to be present with my loved ones. I’m training to do it in my dead time. Training on a train. Habit-stacking a regular, daily digital rest.

Get in touch, let’s support each other.

Meanwhile I’m pushing on, as fast as South West Trains allows.

I want to understand this new optimism I’m feeling.

And to see if AI is right about the next 30 days.

[Image by AI, words all human (except the bits where AI did the science bit for me)]

It’s Day 23 of the Phone Free Commute experiment.

Next week will mark Day 30. I’m preparing a full report on how this experiment has already changed my life - and my mind - in surprisingly dramatic and wonderful ways.

Thanks largely to the high vis idiot vest, I have mainly managed to stick to this.

I should declare that I briefly used my phone at Vauxhall station. I gave in to a persuasive pitch to donate regularly to Alzheimer’s research, so I had to go into my bank app. It’s an important cause, but if I’m honest I wasn’t donating out of altruism but sheer mindnumbing boredom.

Beyond that, I haven’t looked at my phone at all.

Other people’s phones… well, that’s another matter.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve definitely done a lot of training to be present, listening to my mind incessantly asking me to pick up the phone. All the things I advocate.

But after a while, it’s just too tempting to see what my fellow commuters are up to.

These are the broad categories, in ascending order.

• Movies and TV. The landscape hardcore. Huge stars, teeny tiny screen.

• Chores. Until it freezes on checkout.

• Playing games. Candy being Crushed.

• Podcasts / Music / Audiobook. Soon I will get so bored that I will just ask.

• Messages / Emails / Work. Fair enough.

• Scrolling - Full Frame Video. TikTok and the many apps that now look like it.

• Scrolling - Text & Pictures. Mostly news and social media, but could be long emails? Need to get closer or get a better angle.

But one huge category is definitely the most interesting:

The Ditherers.

For these people, the home page is a decent proportion of their screen time. They cycle quickly through their apps, making quickfire checks. Often they’ll put the phone away, and then get it out again in quick succession.

This is a feeling I know really well, and it’s definitely one I’m prone to in my house. Going in several directions at once on the phone, alternating with realising you should probably put it away. Check messages, check LinkedIn, put it away, Whatsapp, TikTok, put it away, check same messages. And then you stand in your kitchen and you think, what was I doing? Oh yeah, feeding a baby.

You know those moments?

I help make ‘em.

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

I’m a TV producer.

Years ago I didn’t consider myself a part of this story, but my job has changed a lot. Today, TV programmes don’t just compete with other TV programmes. They now compete with games, news, podcasts, messaging, YouTube, TikTok - everything and anything that could get your attention. So I am now part of what’s called the attention economy.

Media expert documents this new intense global battle, creating glorious maps of the multi-billion dollar companies involved in the war for your attention. The scale is jawdropping.

Previously disparate companies have been drawn into one huge competition because increasingly the devices we use can access all types of content.

The most versatile device is of course the phone. And it doesn’t just let you access anything you like. It allows you to access it on the toilet. In all the gaps in our lives. That 24/7 possibility means there is a lot of money to be made. And of course, the commute is the moneyspinning king of the gaps.

We might have opinions on different ways of using the phone. Some content is harmful, some is profound and life-changing. Some Whatsapp messaging might feel excessive, some might feel necessary. TikTok feels bad, news feels good (or does it?) A substack piece about a midlife crisis dad wearing a high vis vest is best of all.

But no matter how noble the ideals, no matter how incredible the piece of work, today it’s all part of an intense 24/7 war for your attention.

A war to capture the castle that is your mind.

HOW TO CAPTURE THE CASTLE

We all know by now that the geniuses behind the attention economy have got all sorts of clever weapons to storm your mental defences:

• Our brains like movement and bright colours, so videos appeal more than text.

• We humans are hardwired to form perfect teams for mammoth hunting. So we are absorbed by comparing ourselves with others on Instagram and LinkedIn.

• Our brains love to assess danger. So we drink in crime stories, and those pieces on the Daily Mail that say something like “I thought it was a harmless lump but it turned out to be cancer”.

The list of weapons is endless, and more and more often it’s AI that chooses which ones to deploy.

But for all these clever tactics, here’s the weird thing about the attention economy: no-one in it feels like they are winning. Because no-one manages to capture the castle for long before someone else grabs it.

They might get your attention with a great movie at home, but as you settle down to watch it you’ll pick up your phone and check something else. There’s no big winner in this war.

But there is a loser.

THE WALLS ARE DOWN

The phone is the first ever 24/7 device. And certainly for me, it feels like all this explosion and noise - all this banging away at the walls around my attention - has turned them into rubble. The walls are down, and they’ve stayed down.

To storm my mental castle, it used to be that you needed an army. A horde of Lord of the Rings-esque warriors to breach the citadel. Someone might pull out all the stops, get all the stars and make an unignorable new drama. Sure, that will win my attention.

But now the walls are down, my castle is just as easily captured by a confused Hobbit wandering in the back door. Like a scan of the LinkedIn feed so I can double check how badly I am doing in my career compared to my peers.

QUIET REBELLION IN THE QUIET CARRIAGE

Some phone activity feels worthwhile, some less so. I’m not a fan personally of judging any of them. It’s more important to recognise the effects of allowing our attention to be competed for 24/7.

I make TV and I like TV. In all its forms. But I don’t want to be a casualty of a trillion dollar war in every minute of the day.

I want to build in a regular, habitual, planned daily break from the explosions and noise. A quiet rebellion in the quiet carriage.

And in that break I want to rebuild the walls, by repeatedly bringing my mind back to the present.

I’ve also wondered sometimes whether the walls being down hasn’t let in other distractions too - even if they don’t come from the phone. I noticed my mind more easily gets captured by worries about the stupid thing I said to Clive at work (my bete noire), about the future, about everything feeling like it’s going wrong in the world.

More and more, life has that late night in bed mind-wandering feeling, where any worry, no matter how stupid or fleeting, can occupy you fully. Maybe if the walls are down, they’re down for any unwelcome intrusive thought.

I should also add, my attention is not a castle really. It’s only a 1930s semi.

But even so, it’s worth dedicating my commute to rebuilding it.

Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.

When the doorbell rings, he barks. The Sainsbury’s delivery guy gets the worst of it.

The answer of course is training. The fashionable approach right now isn’t to punish. Negatives aren’t going to work - if I shout at Jumble, he’s just going to think I’m joining in the barking.

Instead we need to reward the positive here. All the dog books point to how dog brains are rewired most effectively by positive feelings.

For Jumble, the greatest positive of all is cheese.

But in order to know when to give the cheese, we need to answer a crucial question: what is the OPPOSITE of barking we are going to reward?

In this case, it’s not just “not barking” because we’d be giving him cheese all day and all night. The true opposite here is “staying quiet when the doorbell is rung”.

So we constantly rang the doorbell. When through sheer repetition of the act, Jumble gave up barking, we gave him cheese.

Then came the day when someone did ring the doorbell for real, and Jumble didn’t bark!

We had done it!

I celebrated in the way I know best. I reached for my phone and checked whether some connected appliances were charging correctly. No great surprise there, because terrible use of the phone was - and is - my most popular activity.

But it was clear that I needed training more than Jumble.

THE CONDITIONED RESPONSE

By this point I had been at war with my phone for years. I described Jumble as naughty, but he’s not the one who sat in his daughter’s ballet recital looking at his phone. I was the one who needed to take a long hard look at themselves.

I had tried a lot of creative ideas to cut phone use - “I know, I’ll put my phone in this room, and fill it with anacondas.” Then I head to the kitchen. “Oo, what was that recipe again? Right, better get it back. Ouch!”

And, by now, I had noticed that my phone pick-ups were as disconcertingly automatic as Jumble’s barking.

Doorbell rings → Jumble barks

Phone makes a noise → I pick up my phone

I feel a bit low → I pick up my phone

Gap in family activity → I pick up my phone

I wake up → I pick up my phone

DESIGNING THE TRAINING REGIME

So training could be the answer for me. But how exactly?

Fortunately, I too like cheese a great deal. My family have noticed that I am prone to going to the fridge and taking a bite out of it. As if it were an apple.

Maybe I could eat cheese every time I wasn’t using a phone? Maybe. But we would need another fridge.

No, just as with Jumble, I needed to work out what the TRUE OPPOSITE of using a phone is. What is the specific desirable behaviour we are looking for?

And, after a lot of thought, I came to believe that the true opposite of using a phone is being present. Being genuinely with the people around me, rather than mentally being in a newsroom in DC or a Surbiton parents Whatsapp group. Being in the moment, whatever that moment may be. That is what we desire when we talk about cutting out the phone.

If I boil it down, being present is the opposite of using a phone.

What then is my training strategy?

I cannot choose to “be present” just as surely as Jumble doesn’t know when the doorbell is being rung. My mind often gets occupied with thoughts of the stupid thing I said to Clive at work (Ooof why did I say that?!) and then bounces back into the present moment unpredictably. I don’t choose what my mind does sadly.

So perhaps the right move here is to set aside a fixed period of time, just like we did with Jumble. And then try and focus on an element of the present moment, maybe my breath, maybe the sounds around me. In those occasional moments I do find myself in the present, I reward my mind (not with cheese) but a smile to myself and a mental pat on the back.

I was thrilled with my invention. I named it Jumble’s Anti-Phone Training. I felt pretty sure that Jumble (and to a lesser extent myself) would be lauded the world over, having solved this phone business that everyone seemed to be grappling with. With our new invention and our love of cheese, we were set to be the Wallace and Gromit of the mental health world.

Imagine my disappointment when I learned that I had just discovered meditation, by the most circuitous route imaginable.

Ah well. At least I knew how to train. Embarrassed but undaunted, I tried my best. I sat in quiet room, set a timer, tried to concentrate on the sounds around me, applauded myself when I was able to, and stopped when the timer went off.

But it was hard - really hard. I kept forgetting. What was worse, I couldn’t find a regular time to do it. People in my house kept talking to me, or asking me to do things.

I looked around for a chunk of free time to devote to it. The commute.

TRAINING ON A TRAIN

So back to me on the train sitting in silence. It isn’t always easy. I sit with work worries, incessant mental whispering to pick up the phone and even loneliness.

But it is good training.

Those moments I notice that I am present, that I am noticing a sight or sound around me, I give myself a mental pat on the back. I hear a fuffle from a coat sitting down, or chunka chunka from the train, I notice it. I see that poster for the umpteenth time for that film with Paul Mescal. I give myself a warm inner smile.

I do this training every day. In the hope that when I get home, my mind is more and more likely to default to the present moment. If I can train my mind to pay close attention to “See It Say It Sorted” announcements, maybe my mind will pay better attention to my family when they tell me about their day.

So even though the present on a train isn’t a woodland walk, it’s worth a mental pat on the back.

Cheese would be nice too. But standing on a train, wearing a high vis, imagining myself a spaceman and occasionally taking a bite out of a block of Cathedral City? There are limits.

Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.

P.S. Meet the real Jumble. The perfect dog. But 2,500 years behind the Buddha.

I step onto the 9.17 from Surbiton. I am wearing a spacesuit, and it’s ringing with the sound of my rasping breath. Through my thick visor, I see everyone. But I know there’s no connection to be had with them - no eye contact possible through the glass.

I think we’ve already established that no cartoon birds settle on your shoulder the moment you decide to take a break from your phone.

I’m three weeks into the Phone Free Commute.

So far I’ve dealt with my mind inventing successions of utterly ridiculous reasons to pick up my phone.

Then I found myself drowning in the most embarrassingly unimportant work worries.

(I’ve argued that both these experiences, although not pleasant, could be useful training to help me feel better in the rest of my life.)

But two hours a day is a long time. And in the gaps between those clouds, there’s something else to be seen.

A WEIRD MOMENT ON THE TUBE

I couldn’t name that feeling until a message arrived from a fellow passenger who had seen me in the idiot vest.

Yazmin noticed a man on her train breaking an unwritten rule: he spoke to another commuter. He had been reading a magazine, and he asked an older man next to him what the word “sinewy” meant. The older man snapped back “Can’t you just look that up on your phone?”

Yazmin said hello, and the conversation opened up. It turned out the younger man was trying to memorize a poem. Soon the older man joined in the conversation warmly, “almost like a different character”.

Yazmin describes the three way conversation as the “best interaction she’d ever had with a stranger on the tube. I got off at my stop and felt so alive.”

THE DEAD FIZZ OF THE PHONE

So far I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room - EVERYONE on the commute is on their phones. If they aren’t looking at it, they are listening to it. If there was an elephant in the room, they wouldn’t notice it.

Or if they did, they’d react to the elephant with the same immediate distant irritation that Yazmin noticed in the old man.

It’s not just that commuters are busy, it’s that very perceptibly they are in that distinct mood associated with heavy phone use - a dead fizz in the head.

Long before phones were invented, commutes were a time to sit gruffly behind a newspaper. But newspapers weren’t designed by neuroscientists to keep you hooked. They didn’t create dead fizz

To the old man’s credit, the irritability passed for him faster than it does for me. It’s a feeling I’m increasingly aware I brought home to my family when the evening commute was devoted to scrolling.

And I still notice the mood at home when I dip in and out of screens. I still let the phone pour itself into every tiny gap, every little chapter break in our house.

I wrote about a very dramatic Phone Dad failure with my daughter. But if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t change it. It was a useful moment of insight.

Instead I’d want to hop endlessly in my time machine changing the thousands (tens of thousands) of moments that when someone in my house talked to me and I looked up with the instant irritation that Yazmin saw in that old man.

YOUR CORRESPONDENT LIVING IN THE IN-BETWEEN

The phone is conquering the incidental, liminal moments. It is filling the gaps. And as a result, more and more of life is weighed down by irritation. What does it add up to? Society is trying to figure it out.

As someone who has now spent many, many hours living in the ultimate in-between gap … I have my answer..

Yazmin’s email helped me identify the cold blue light that’s increasingly visible when the clouds of distraction part.

I feel lonely.

I’m in a spacesuit on another planet, I have a thick visor, and everyone I see is at one remove.

It’s very understandable they don’t speak to me given my obvious eccentricity. But my unconscious self is craving some sort of contact, and adept at picking up the microscopic signs of distant irritation that everyone is drenched in.

It’s probably what my kids experienced from me on my worst days.

This feeling is self-inflicted, and so I feel no animosity towards my fellow commuters. I was them last year, and - given my track record - there’s every chance I will be joining them soon.

But I am resentful of their phones.

WHY ON EARTH DO THIS?

My main focus in writing this was to see if there were practical benefits. And I’m aware I’m not selling this.

But I don’t think I can be wrong when I say that going phone free doesn’t feel great immediately - otherwise more people would be doing this.

What I increasingly DO have in my spacesuit is a stronger awareness of my surroundings. There’s no one to connect to, and the planet is harsh and cold. But it’s new to me, and so it’s easy to notice the finer details of it.

Uh-oh, you are thinking. The present moment. Mindfulness. He’s going to do all that.

But I’m not taking it as read that awareness of the present moment is a wonderful thing in itself. On the commute, by the way, it really doesn’t feel that way. A beautiful woodland walk it ain’t.

But despite all of that, I’ve come to believe that being actively present on the commute - training on a train - will be useful to me in the long term and in the rest of my life.

Why I think that is another story. A much happier one. It involves our family dog Jumble, his very naughty behaviour, and a HUGE amount of cheese.

Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.

A holiday a couple of years ago. Me and the family were at a theme park. We were having a great time.

And then I got a call about work.

It was day six of the holiday - or day two if you discount the four days it took for my mind to recognise I was on holiday - so when the call came it was as if from another world. And it was a shock. In seconds I switched from feeling wonderful to feeling intensely stressed.

But here’s the really strange thing… When the call ended, I didn’t rejoin my family.

I stayed on my phone… and instinctively refreshed a news app.

Unusually, I then noticed what I was doing. It was the first time I realised that I often scrolled on the phone because I had negative feelings that I wanted to go away.

THE “WHY DID I SAY THAT?” AVALANCHE

And now of course, if I have negative feelings on the commute, picking up the phone isn’t an option. The high vis Phone Free Commute idiot commitment vest has seen to that. And so each evening, on the way home from work, I’m being hit hard by a tidal wave of worry.

If you try setting aside your phone for a few minutes, you’ll know what I mean.

As soon as you put your phone away, you start replaying in your head the meeting you had with an external client. (Let’s call him Clive). Why oh why did I say that to Clive? Clive already thinks I am weak and now I have played into Clive’s hands. As you grapple with the enormity of evidence that Clive doesn’t rate you, it feels acutely horrible. You would do anything to be free of the feelings of inadequacy - and the fear of Clive.

Then you hear that evil voice… I can make these feelings go away. Look, Master. Look. This funny man is going to skid on ice and then stop on a spot. What will happen to him? It will be funny, Master. Clive will be a distant memory in the face of this hilarious meme.

The voice of course, belongs to that wily whispering Evil Advisor. And it feels like I am training my mind to hear it more clearly than ever.

FEELINGS GOTTA BE FELT

I mentioned the other day I’ve really enjoyed learning about meditation (as part of my long struggle against the phone).

There’s a saying in the meditation world - what you resist persists. That if you have a negative thought, the job is to accept it and acknowledge it. We can’t endlessly distract ourselves from it, because it’ll just come back with a vengeance.

We have become used to this idea with profound emotions like grief. We know that denial is bad.

For me, it seems to be true for the most embarrassingly trivial work worries.

AN EVENING WITH CLIVE

Let’s say I have a tough day at work.

I have said something really stupid to Clive. Then I followed up with an email, but because I used copy and paste from notes on my phone, weird formatting errors have been introduced. The third paragraph is a different size to the others.

Right now, I imagine, Clive is combining the evidence of my weakness with the clear evidence I can’t write an email, and devoting his whole evening to HATING me.

But let’s say in this case that I get to fiddle with my phone the whole way home to keep these thoughts out of my head.

It’s effective, and seems harmless enough. Those memes are really funny, I have put more anchovies in the Sainsbury’s basket and am totally up to date on many, many apps. When I’m walking and I can’t easily look at a screen, I fill the silence with a podcast, because the phone offers 24/7 distraction in all circumstances.

Then I am home. I dutifully put my phone away in its allotted place and I offer my family the greatest gift of all - my company. Lucky them.

But these people, love them as I do, are not as stimulating as my phone. So my mind gets a bit of space for the first time. And it desperately needs to come back to assessing whether Clive hates me.

I’m a great dad. So I might be setting up to play a board game with the kids, one of those ones where it’s really just another version of Exploding Kittens and we have paid £30 for a deck of cards.

But all the time I do it, OOF Clive hates me! OOF No he doesn’t! OOF what if I email Clive about this, what would I say? I can’t think clearly, the stupid kids are still here. Stupid kids stopping me think clearly. And they are no help with the email.

I consider messaging a friend: “If I provide you with all this evidence, can you tell me if Clive hates me?” But phones aren’t polite in the evening.

Later, my wife might be talking about garden centres and then BAM out of nowhere I start up: “So I sent this email. Do you think Clive hates me?”

Later everyone goes to bed, I get time that is truly mine. A rare gift in our busy lives.

So I fiddle on the phone for a bit.

And then I go to bed. And in the silence of the night, the ghosts return. Soon I pass out, the follow up email to Clive still drafting itself in my head.

The next day begins. In any free moment there’s always something to distract me. The worries stack up day after day. They pour into Friday evening, and leech into the weekend. When I finally do take a holiday, it’s like I am under siege from months of Clive ghosts that have been patiently queueing up to haunt me.

It takes four days for them all to pass through me.

And then soon enough I get a call about work in the middle of a theme park.

I reach for my phone and the cycle begins again.

THE FIRST WIN: THE EVENING COMMUTE

That’s the way it feels to me anyway.

And I think in the last few days, I think it’s why going phone free on the commute has made my evenings at home much nicer. My time feels fresher, and more like life rather than a respite between other things.

It does mean that the evening commute is more painful, sitting with inevitable negative thoughts. But let’s face it, the commute always sucks no matter what we do.

May as well use it.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

[Image - Photo by Timo Masri on Unsplash]

When I started this, I did so because I wanted I write about what it felt like.

But in order to actually go fully Phone Free - with my embarrassing history of failing - I felt I needed to make a pretty big commitment. The idiot vest.

At least for the first few days, I’d be lying if I said that that whole endeavour hasn’t been a bit distracting. At the start, at least 90% of my thoughts were “OMG I look like such a fool”. However, that’s starting to subside now as I settle into my new fool existence.

I’m getting the first preliminary results of the effects of two hours each day with nothing to do. I’ve looked at boredom from both sides now.

And here’s where I’m at:

Going Phone Free on the morning commute is easier - but less immediately useful.

Going Phone Free on the evening commute is harder - but more immediately useful.

MORNING

Before I did this, I imagined the morning would be the main event.

And yes, in the morning, it’s a little easier to feel like I’m achieving some sort of momentary calm. Every now and then, I increasingly think “oh how nice, I don’t have to receive any new information for quite a few minutes”. If I close my eyes and listen to the sound of the train, I can get near pleasant… until I get told to “See It Say It Sorted” again.

But then when I arrive at work… Honestly, I don’t feel any different really. I get on with work. I’m not sure I’m necessarily thrilled that I commuted phone free, or feel much benefit from having done so.

I do believe there is a benefit to be had in the long term by doing this on the morning commute. That listening to the sounds of the train day by day can, over time, be good for you. But, for me at least, there’s no benefit in the moment.

EVENING

This is the really interesting one.

The evening commute is FAR less pleasant. Same cocktail of urges to use the phone, boredom and (fading) self-consciousness.

But most powerfully, I’m also being hit by waves of regret from the day at work. They come in two key soundtracks:

• Oh no! Why did I say that? featuring I’m such an idiot and Do they hate me?

• Oh god, I still need to do that featuring Maybe I should make a note of that immediately and Let’s try and imagine we need to do six weeks of work RIGHT NOW

These little punches of worry are really unpleasant. And it’s really tempting to pick up the phone to distract myself from them. And now I can’t.

So the evening commute is a much less pleasant experience.

BUT when I do actually get home, I’m glad I did it.

It’s early days, but I THINK I feel better at home than I normally do in the evenings. That’s probably partly because I’ve let my mind slow down naturally, and not amp’d it up by more checking and fixing and Sainsbury’s apps and emails and LinkedIn and Candy Crush.

But it’s partly I think because I’ve kind of accepted the worries from the day. Not resolved, but accepted.

Because I didn’t distract myself with my phone, I’ve sat with those negative thoughts a bit now. So they have become a little quieter.

HERE COME THE WORK WORRIES

It feels like Week 2 is a new phase.

As I relax into looking like a total banana, more and more of the time I’m going to be preoccupied by the work day about to begin or just gone.

Work worries have been a HUGE thing for me throughout my life. From Sunday Blues through to sudden stabs of panic, through to the increasing number of days it takes me to finally relax into a holiday. I don’t have a hard job, and I work with lovely colleagues. All of the fear comes from me.

And, over the years, I’ve come to believe that 24/7 phone use makes this fear a lot worse.

Every time I distract myself from work fear by using my phone, my work fear responds by turning up the volume - until the Sunday Blues become a permanent soundtrack.

I’ve realized that even when I leave the building, I carry a little Office In My Head cast onto the train.

On Thursday, I’m going to introduce you to its most persistent employee—the one who keeps chattering to me all the way home.

Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.

Without the high-vis “idiot vest,” I would have given up. Because just like everything with phones, the failure would have been absurd, mundane, and deeply humiliating.

I was standing at the gates at Waterloo, and I saw my debit card flash up on my screen after touching in. Suddenly, the thought occurred: I should probably clear out the old cards on there.

Ooo, there’s an out-of-date one. This needs checking. This needs fixing.

Honestly, I was tempted by the most boring admin imaginable.

But then I detected the voice of the Evil Advisor. It was just a trick to get me started. I’d have been on WhatsApp in seconds.

I saved myself from this incredibly mundane and pathetic rebellion just in time.

I’m glad I did, because over this week there have been some definite benefits from this experiment. I want to talk about them in a bit more detail in another post.

For now I want to answer a more pressing question: why would I be tempted by something so comically boring as pruning my Google Wallet?

ME AND MY PHONE - A LOVE STORY

My first vivid memory of phone addiction absurdity comes from the late 2000s. I was going to bed. It was about 1am.

I checked my emails. There were none. I checked my messages. There were none.

And then I checked how the tube was running.

To repeat - it was 1am, and I was going to bed.

This was the first time I noticed my instinct to make a totally pointless check that no reasonable person would have started.

Totally harmless of course in itself. Definitely not a problem. But odd.

It wasn’t until I had kids when I realised how comically incapable of being without my phone I was. It wasn’t just the worry I was letting them down. I saw myself through their eyes.

Then the ballet disaster (see my first post).

Okay I thought, I can sort this out.

METHODS 1-999

Except I couldn’t. It turned out I was the most phone addicted person in the world.

Started off with “just trying”. Didn’t make a blind bit of difference.

Then I tried all the hacks. I turned it off (it found its way back on). I moved it to other rooms (it came back), I put an elastic band around it (at some point that pinged into the abyss under the sofa), and I tried greyscale (but film noir scrolling was even more dramatic).

I installed an app to monitor my restrict and monitor my usage. I muscle-memoried past all the restrictions. And then found myself addicted to checking the usage stats.

I found an app that fined me if I did too many pickups. I had to get rid of it before we needed a second mortgage.

If someone had suggested putting the phone in the oven I would have tried it. But I would have taught myself how to get at the Guardian website with oven gloves on.

All of it made me feel worse about myself.

Why couldn’t I do this?

I was ready to admit defeat. Must be modern life. Everyone seemed in the same boat. I relaxed into it. The commute - between home and family life - was the epicentre of phone party time. It was MY time. And boy did I scroll.

But then it came time to get my daughter a phone of her own.

Every time I looked up from my phone, I saw she was using hers. This would need to be fixed.

I would call over to her to give it a rest. Excellent, parenting done. Now to return to trying to check out the Sainsbury’s basket - great done! Any new emails? Actually none. Oo, LinkedIn notification! Oh no I’m a failure and everyone is more successful than me. Any new emails? None. Now, what’s Trump up to?

I could see myself through her eyes. And not just toddler eyes. Now they were judgey tween eyes.

THE BIG INSIGHT

Now I watched myself closer than ever. I became forensic.

I became sure of something: for at least some of the time, I was sure the behaviours were entirely automatic.

It was really odd. When I thought back, I couldn’t remember the moment that I decided to pick up the phone.

It reminded me of that first memory: the 1am tube status check. That wasn’t in any way a choice. (No one would choose to do that.)

What does it mean if something is automatic?

It means you can’t rely on willpower, and you need to put speedbumps in place.

But what good are speedbumps if the driver is not only doing over 100mph, but is sleeping so heavily while driving that nothing wakes them up?

I became convinced that - for an incorrigible phone addict like me - the fight couldn’t be won in the moments I picked up my phone.

I needed to retrain my brain.

THE HEAVY IRON WHEEL

I had the bit between my teeth now.

In some form meditation seemed to be the training regime I needed. Working what particular method to use was challenging, and forming a daily habit was nearly impossible. (I’ll come back later to all this). But I had a clear purpose.

And after a few weeks a strange thing happened. Increasingly I could make a choice as to whether to use the phone or not. It was like I could hear an Evil voice saying “Oo, shall we check how the tube is running”, and I could say, “No you’re alright actually, it’s 1am so I probably could guess. And I’m heading to bed.”

And, as a result, I used my phone less. I could measure it. The first reduction ever.

Somewhere deep in a dark corner of my mind, a heavy iron wheel labelled “Use The Phone” was turning at speed.

It had been turning for years, and given its weight had built up a lot of momentum.

It could never stop suddenly.

But very gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, it began to turn more slowly.

DAD V PHONE

A form of meditation (I thought of it as anti-phone training) was the first thing that slowed that heavy iron wheel. But I hadn’t got there yet. There was still much more to do.

I knew I needed to double down with my anti-phone training. And so I zeroed in on the biggest chunk of free time I have.

The biggest chunk of available time we all have. And so here we are.

This is a phone free commute. But it’s also anti-phone training.

It’s training my mind to recognise the automatic instinct BEFORE I pick up the phone.

Okay get it, guy doesn’t like his phone. We all don’t like them but a bit OTT to start meditating surely?!

After years of trying everything, I honestly think it’s the only thing that’s offered me a chance of keeping my smartphone (I need it to tap in - and a hundred other reasons) but losing the unhappiness.

And it’s convinced me that the prize on offer from that is huge - much bigger than just reducing an irritating habit.

Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.

[Images by AI, words all human]