A few years ago I changed job, and as a result I had to go East rather than West on the Central Line at Oxford Circus. But my brain kept me going the old way for ages. It was like I was caught in a current. I had to double back when I snapped out of it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from commuting over two decades, it’s humans’ formidable capacity for continuity. We commuters do each day what we did the day before. We all stream up and down the stairs in Waterloo as one, as surely as if we were on rails. Our routes through London mirror well-worn neural pathways. We can’t change it easily - no sudden moves allowed.

Very gradual change we can manage. Christian Wolmar would be able to trace the decline of the hat, the decline of the suit. And the arrival of the phone, first held by one, then many, then all.

When I saw that some of my phone use was automatic, I believed that I had caught sight of the brain’s underlying, overwhelming unconscious adherence to continuity.

You use the phone a lot, says the brain, so let’s keep doing so.

(Read last week’s piece here - part one of three marking six months of phone free commuting, and explaining what all of this is about).

How to root out this automatic impulse?

I had tried everything and it had failed. Whatever obstacles I put in the way of my phone use, I cheerfully dismantled. Now I had seen that the impulse to pick it up was entirely unconscious, I was ready to try anything to intercept it at the source.

After nearly four years of trying everything, could meditation help fix my phone addiction?

I read a lot of books, and listened to a wonderful course on the app Calm.

The overriding message was to forget the image of relaxation, and to embrace daily training. A little like learning an instrument.

I learnt to set a timer for a short period, say five minutes, and to choose something to focus on for that time. Traditionally one chooses the breath, but I learnt it could just as easily could be an ambient noise. I chose the sound of the fridge. As it seemed less spiritual.

I closed my eyes, concentrated on the fridge sound, and…WHOOMPH. I completely forgot what I was doing. I spent all the time thinking about how Clive from work hated me. And then the timer went off. Great.

Luckily, I had taken good advice. I knew this wasn’t a failure. I knew the mission was to come back the next day and try again.

Same time tomorrow.

But of course the same thing happened again. And again.

So I gave up.

Meditation is perhaps the world’s most abandoned habit.

But I had two advantages.

Firstly, I had a problem I wanted to solve. A problem that I already knew had major effects on my family life. And a problem that interested me.

My second advantage was that in years of fighting the phone I had learned not to underestimate how hard it is to start a new habit. So I signed myself up for an app that fined me if I didn’t meditate.

And… I got fined quite a bit. A month or so in, my wife noticed the payments.

The embarrassment of having paid out over 100 dollars (the app was American) for failing to regularly do nothing was all too much.

I started again, with my tail between my legs.

But for weeks it was the same. Try to focus. Forget. Feel no change.

It wasn’t that I was distracted. It was that all thought of meditation was totally obliterated. My little boat of fridge focus was capsized by a massive wave that I didn’t see coming. A whole load of thoughts about whether I should have written “All my best” on a work email.

Until one day, a few seconds or even minutes later, my tiny boat bobbed back to the surface. I remembered that I was meditating. I returned my focus to the fridge.

This was the moment I had been training for.

In that second of coming back to focus, there’s an opportunity to clock that a thought arose that I didn’t originate.

Conscious me didn’t think that stuff about the All My Best email. Conscious me was aiming at the fridge.

Who changed the channel? It was the hidden mind. Aha! Saw you.

This observation, I learned, was mindfulness.

I kept training. The gaps where I could concentrate on the sound of the fridge became longer. Even pleasant.

As my focus improved, so the unauthored incursion of old thoughts stuck on repeat became even more glaringly obvious.

My wife and I get on very well (that’s loving, isn’t it). But our Achilles heel is tidying the house.

One day my wife suggested that we should perhaps tidy the kitchen. My habitual response would be to interpret this suggestion as a veiled attack. She was, I believed with all my heart, secretly saying it was all my fault.

My usual move in this situation was to expertly parry her concealed attack by talking about a time some two months back when she had left out some dirty plates. Take that.

Until one day - and I remember this vividly - the instinct to say that arose, and I saw it in embryonic form! I saw it with the same clarity, the same distance that I saw my thoughts meditating.

And I said to myself, maybe I won’t say that.

And we tidied the kitchen without arguing.

And house harmony was improved.

It was a transformative moment.

Across my life I could suddenly see all sorts of well-worn negative behaviours and intervene before they happened. When I was driving and someone cut me up, I had an automatic impulse to do an middle finger gesture below the dashboard. Now gone! I stopped barking at the kids in the morning, even when they were eating cereal so painfully slowly.

I used my new skill all the time. Sometimes, when my wife was speaking to me about some chore or other, I would decide to concentrate hard on my mindfulness. My eyeballs would even bulge a little, and she would say “Are you being mindful now? Because that’s brilliant if you are.”

Many years ago I had read all sorts of articles extolling the virtue of mindfulness. I had even been on corporate courses. But for me personally none of it clicked, none of it was possible, without the meditation - without the regular training of a distance between me and my thoughts.

After all, no one learns how to play a guitar by reading articles about it.

When I had picked up the phone, I had asked “Who’s Me?”

My answer at this point would have been clear. The real me was the part of me that was mindful. If I could strengthen that me, it could observe well-worn patterns from a distance and then decide whether or not to action them.

But if mindfulness was about me versus continuity, it turned out that phone use was the boss battle. Of all the ingrained negative habits, the one that started this whole thing was the most stubborn.

Until one day, I was lying on the sofa in between other things with nothing to do. I vividly remember mindfully observing a call to pick up the phone. I firmly believe it would have been automatic before.

And then, thanks to my newfound comfort with doing absolutely nothing, I did that instead.

I lay on the sofa and rested. Maybe for the first time in years.

A decline in automaticity, and a comfort in doing nothing. Together they gave me a taste of free will over my phone.

Boy, do people who learn to meditate go on about it. I remember feeling it was the third best thing to have happened in my life after marriage and kids.

And, what’s more, it was the first thing that seriously reduced my screen time.

Arguably this would have been a great place to stop.

But I had the bit between my teeth now. Though I had a taste of success, I still didn’t have the full control over my phone use I set out to find.

I decided I needed more time to meditate. I increased my daily dose to an hour each day. But the kids kept ruining it.

So I searched for a huge block of available time.

And soon enough the sound of the fridge was replaced. By the sound of the train.

And I went deeper.

To be continued.

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 the joy of Phone Free Will.

Share Phone Free Will

But I haven’t fully explained how it all started.

Not fully.

First some important context: my family are terrible at stacking the dishwasher.

I too was once ignorant like them, and had to live with the consequences of that. One day I was drinking from a glass of water and I was horrified to discover it was full of weird orange gunk powder.

I had long imagined that the dishwasher rained water on items from above. I say imagined - it’s more like this was my default opinion, the unconscious impression one has about something that you’ve never given any real thought.

But after a little patient study, I saw that jets of water are pushed out of the spinny arms BELOW each tray.

After working to gain a better understanding of how dishwashers work, I now know how to stack the dishwasher far better. For example, I now NEVER put little plastic cups in the bottom. If I do, I know that the jets of water make them fly up and fall through the gaps, blocking the arm from spinning.

This is wisdom I patiently share with my family almost daily.

I didn’t want to spend any time learning about the dishwasher. Dishwashers are boring. But I had to.

So it was with my mind.

For most of my life I found stuff about the mind to be deeply boring and off-putting. So I never took any interest.

Even as, entering my forties, I was feeling increasingly anxious day and night. Often about work. I was feeling glum about life ahead, and sometimes urgently panicky.

Yet I still wasn’t interested in my mind, because these feelings did not make for a compelling mystery. Actually it seemed like a pretty common experience in midlife.

But there was one area of my life which did feel like an interesting problem to solve.

In the years since the ballet recital disaster, I had been trying everything to reduce my phone use and failing. I had a real bee in my bonnet. But no matter what I did, I was compulsively picking up the phone any time, day and night.

And then one day, I noticed something I believed to be fascinating. I was standing in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, and I was convinced - absolutely convinced - that I didn’t deliberately pick it up.

I had very clearly done so automatically, with no conscious choice that I could remember.

It felt like an insight that was new and at the same time oddly familiar. Like I had always known this on some level, but not paid attention until now.

It was the first time I properly wondered why I was doing something that I didn’t decide to do.

Clearly my mind didn’t work in the way I imagined. If I did give it any thought, I would have guessed it was almost like a little guy in my head, looking out of my eyes, pulling little levers to make things happen. But here something had happened without a decision.

Driven as much by curiosity as a desire to reduce my phone use, I watched carefully. I looked out for those moments where my body did stuff without me consciously deciding to do so. And I started to see it everywhere.

The hidden me bit my nails. It could drive quite a long way without my conscious mind intervening. It could play football - it seemed extremely clear my conscious mind was rarely involved in that. And of course it used the phone a tonne. It loved doing that more than anything.

Who’s me?

What was the nature of this hidden me that did all these things?

And why did it keep eating cheese from the fridge like an apple, without cutting it nicely with a knife?

I read a lot. Philosophy, neuroscience, contemplative traditions.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t the first person to notice this curious division in the mind. A lot of writers described it with metaphor - for example, an iceberg, with the conscious aware mind that could see and hear and feel at the top and a vast unconscious mind below it, making decisions for hidden reasons.

None of this implied anything supernatural or cosmological. I could see why some people felt the universe was speaking to them, but me personally it never felt that way. (Not least because these cosmic forces kept directing me to the fridge to eat ingredients that had already been set aside for a future meal. It seemed odd that the universe would do that).

Far from being unscientific, this division seemed to fit with a lot of science. Stuff I had heard about but not paid much attention to all my life. Hypnosis. Brainwashing. Subliminal messaging. These were all methods of speaking to, and influencing, the unconscious mind.

And this division seemed to make sense of a tonne of self-help. The clue is in the name I guess. All sorts of advice seemed underpinned by the notion of trying to trick the hidden mind as if it were a third party. Almost as if it were a wayward child.

In my mid-40s I found myself wondering why I hadn’t clocked this division before, and whether I was unusually stupid. It was odd. It seemed I had known all this in the abstract but not accepted it as actually pertaining to me.

Or, like the dishwasher, I had an imagination of my mind that was default and had never been challenged, even in a cursory way.

Why was I so thick?

But I didn’t have time to focus on that. I had a more pressing problem.

The hidden part of my mind was a phone-addicted dick.

I needed to find a way to get to it.

And correct it.

To be continued.

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 the joy of Phone Free Will.

It was apparently very popular in the 1820s to let your mind wander, and enjoy what popped in. Doctors warned against it, worrying that people’s minds would become unhinged if not used constructively.

Times change.

Unfortunately, my most productive “waking dreams” - 149 hours of them so far - have been almost entirely about the phone. This is a bitter irony.

Rather than brilliant ideas for novels, I end up with lots of different ways to think about how the phone affects my mind.

And about the challenge which I think faces all of us in 2026: how to learn to be bored again.

So rather than Frankenstein I get boredom and phones.

Ah well. As my daughter’s dance teacher used to say when handing out sweets to the kids, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

The Boredom League Table

Let’s line up a few activities in order, from stimulating to boring.

• Going on a rollercoaster

• Using a phone

• Watching Yellowstone or one of its many spinoffs

• Listening to a podcast

• Me telling my wife about my day at work

• Listening to Chappell Roan

• Watching the Netflix rotating screen, unsure what to watch

• My wife telling me about her day at work

• Doing some DIY

• Going to B&Q to look at paints

• Country walk

• Listening to opera

• Looking at artwork for more than 30 seconds

• Being told about Minecraft by a four year old

• Loading the dishwasher

• Commuting on a train doing nothing

• Breathing

Everything towards the top is really easy for the mind to do.

Things lower down the list tend to be more boring. By boring, I mean that these activities in isolation will make you feel antsy and unsettled. You’ll be constantly yearning for more stimulation, for faster input. If your mind doesn’t get them it’ll revolt by filling them with negative thoughts.

Probably the key word here instead of boring is unsatisfactory.

For each of us, you could draw a line somewhere along the boredom league table, and have a boredom threshold. A Boredom Line.

Above the Line is okay, below it is Boring.

The Boredom Line (And Its Lifechanging Effects)

This line can move. Thousands of years ago hunter/gatherers did very little. Do we imagine they were walking around talking about how bored they were? Likely not. I ride every day on a train that would blow a Victorian’s socks off.

So the line moves up and down - but sadly it doesn’t do it on request. If your spouse is telling you a story about their day at work and you find it boring (ie you feel restless, and like you want to be doing something else) it’s not much good for them to tell you not to feel that way. Sure, you can pay attention and mask your irritation. But you’re still bored.

You don’t want to be bored during this work story about Clive, but you are. What you want doesn’t come into it.

There are plenty of things lower down the list we want to be able to say we find interesting. But deep down, very honestly, we may worry that we are bored by them.

Recently I’ve read a lot of very honest (and quite disturbing) discussions in which people who were once avid readers say they struggle to concentrate on a novel.

The trick to happiness is to gradually move the line downwards so these things become genuinely satisfactory or even enjoyable.

How do we move the line? By steadily, day in day out, reducing the amount of time we spend doing things at the top of the list.

Each minute of the day we spend at the top of the stimulation list moves our boredom line upwards.

And looking at the top of the list, there’s one clear candidate for moving our baseline. I’m sure there’s someone out there who works testing rollercoasters for whom everyday life has been rendered tedious, but for most of us it’s going to be the rectangular thing in our pocket.

The phone is resetting our minimum stimulation levels. It is the thing that is making everyday chores more boring. It’s making interactions with our family more uneasy. It is recasting more and more of our life as unsatisfactory.

With the Boredom Line too high, trips to B&Q to look at paints feel like a waste of time. After the neon glow of the phone, all the paints look the same. Instead of feeling like part of building a home with the person you love, it feels like not enough.

It’s chores like these that are going to comprise the bulk of our lives.

And what does it do to our children when we have to focus hard on their stories? To perform presence, even as the rectangular magnet pulls your eyes back?

And how many people might get on better with their spouse if their Boredom Line moved down a bit? It’s easy to imagine there are couples who have split up who’d still be together.

If you like, you can understand all of this scientifically. I’ve written about downregulation of the dopamine receptors. All that.

But for me the Boredom Line is a more powerful and persuasive argument for using the phone less.

You don’t get away with any usage in my opinion - it all has an effect. You need to ration it carefully. Pick your method.

Mine is to go phone free and do nothing for an hour or two each day. I’ve written about how it rewires my brain, stopping me automatically picking up the phone throughout the rest of my day.

And I believe I’m also enjoying a side effect of that technique. By regularly training my mind to be happy with something at the bottom of the list, I believe I’m actively lowering my Boredom Line.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I can now sit and enjoy my commute. It’s a nice party piece. But the reason I did it wasn’t for the commute.

It’s to put my thumb on the scales, to overcompensate from all the stimulation I get elsewhere.

Because in the middle of the Boredom League table is everyone I love, everything that’s worth doing, and the default activities that will occupy my days.

If that stuff gets submerged below the Boredom Line, if the everyday gets mired in unsatisfactory irritation, then the loss is incalculable.

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.

(Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash)

Coming up, as they say on Morning TV. But first: back to the early days of the experiment.

When I started this in January I reported that one of the strange side effects of a consistent phone break was a weird loneliness. For me it shifted after a couple of weeks. Back then I wrote a piece about it, The Lonely Spaceman on the 9.17.

In that piece I speculated whether the London commute was a colder, more disconnected place since the phone was introduced. I imagined that in the days of ruffled newspapers, people might have smiled and talked to each other.

Frankly, I was just guessing.

Fortunately, , the unparalleled social historian of the railway agreed to a brief interview. I was thrilled. If anyone could reveal the truth about the social side of the pre-phone commute, it’s him.

“No, it’s always been pretty terrible,” he said.

This was a shame. I double checked. Surely people must have spoken to each other more?

No, not really. They used newspapers or anything they could get hold of as a social shield so they didn’t have to.

It was a crucial point. The social shielding effect of the phone is formidable. I’ve seen how the phone can help people cope with being thrown together on the tube - it kind of disembodies you, so you don’t feel your unwanted closeness to others. And I’ve noticed that for me, sitting opposite people without a phone is - unintentionally - confronting, almost indecent.

Christian told me the commute was always about avoiding unintentional company. The trouble, he speculated, with saying hello to anyone on the commute is that they might start talking back, and you don’t know if they will ever stop.

He has a point there. And that danger is surely especially acute if the person in question is commuting in high vis.

Then he added an afterthought.

Of course, there were the Commuter Clubs, he said.

Wait, what’s that?

Trains had compartments back then. They formed clubs and played bridge games and the like. (I googled this afterwards, and found a New York Times article about a bridge tournament that was played on the commute in the 1980s).

And then, of course, the evening train would be licensed. People used to drink together on the way home, he said.

I said he was making the pre-phone commute sound very social indeed. He assured me these were isolated incidents.

Ah well, he’s the expert.

Before we wrapped up, Christian did offer some cheerier news - we’d both made the same observations on the train and tube: we have passed the age of peak phone.

We had both noticed more and more people seem to be reading books on the tube each day. Still a tiny minority of course. But when I told him about seeing a full house of five book readers in a row on the Central line, he was politely excited.

We aren’t back at Commuter Clubs yet. But maybe in a few years…

Times Square In Your Pocket

Though I would dearly love a world where the morning train was full of wine and bridge (or indeed poker, a game I actually know how to play), I’m not running this experiment to force people to talk to each other.

I’m using the dead time of the commute to train - to practise the active discipline of being without a screen. The goal isn’t to improve the journey, but to reclaim my mind for everything that happens after it.

And part of that training seems to be going through a spell of loneliness, even as I’m surrounded by other people.

I’ve since heard from two other people tackling their phone use who’ve reported feeling loneliness in the early days. But neither of them were using the commute for their phone free time.

And crucially, for me the feeling passed pretty soon after I wrote the original piece - and not because of any change in commuter behaviour.

So I was likely wrong to say the loneliness was a result of being surrounded by phone-using commuters phubbing me.

I might have been experiencing a general phone use withdrawal symptom.

I remember when I was a kid and going to bed, I felt lonely at night. It was a great comfort to me to imagine the world was still busy and alive somewhere. I used to remind myself that while it was quiet where I was, in New York it would be bustley, electric and exciting.

Perhaps the phone fills that little reassurance we need of a busy world. Over and above close connection with people we know, perhaps we need that ambient connection with our human tribe.

Perhaps glancing at a busy, infinite social scroll is the adult equivalent of trying to remember a bustling Times Square from a quiet childhood bed. A reassurance that the world is still alive.

And when we finally put the phone down, the nightlight goes out. We are left alone in the dark, forced to learn how to process that sudden, cold little patch of blues.

The Loneliness Paradox

So the phone could well be something that comforts us by reminding us of the scale of our tribe, even as it acts as a social shield against real company.

And the irony is that by showing us a beguiling simulacrum of bustle, phones have made us more lonely in the real world. We have unwittingly trained in an instinct to overuse its formidable power as a social shield. Picking it up has become a default that has rippled throughout all incidental gatherings.

A friend with young children told me the other day that at her four year old’s swimming class, every single one of the mums and dads in the little viewing area were on their phone.

We found ourselves talking about what a shame it was for the kids. At that age, they look up to us when they have dived or done something impressive.

But later I wondered whether the greatest loss might have been felt not by the kids, but by their parents. It can be a lonely time, and the more smiles and incidental connection you get from peers, the better. Not that that conversation never happens now - of course it does. But it surely is reduced by omnipresent phones.

If I can use the dead time of the commute to get rid the automatic instinct to pick the thing up all the time, it will be well worth it.

If Christian is right - and the commute has always been terrible - then we may as well use it as a training ground.

So when we do get where we’re going, we have the capacity to look up.

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.

Two more people I spoke to this week on the commute described what I was doing as rawdogging. The sex act term seems to be bedding in. The profundity I’d been aiming for is slipping away. Drat.

I wanted to say “No, actually what I’m doing is mindfully observing the instinct to pick up the phone (which can otherwise happen automatically) and practising resisting that urge. I’m training my mind to default to the present, so it stays that way at home. And I’m resting my mind, which is newly necessary in an age of omnipresent technology, and in doing so I’m reversing the barely perceived background digital dementia, depression and anxiety created by phone use. It’s born of a conviction that meditation is the most powerful weapon against the worst effects of the phone.”

But the first person said they had to go in the middle of my description.

So when the second person talked about rawdogging, I was ready with something more snappy. I knew that meditation was off-putting, and I knew that anti-phone mental training was confusing.

“It’s a kind of Attention Gym,” I said. They nodded politely and wished me good luck with it.

My hidden talent

Recently I’ve started going to a real gym.

CrossFit, if you know it. It has a bit of a reputation as being very tough - people readily take their top off and swing round on a bar and they look like they are in an advert.

I’m new to it, and to exercise generally. The other day we were asked to do press-ups (I’m not going to tell you how many) and I got a little way into it and my muscles all exploded.

I lay on the ground with my face on the mat, wondering if I needed to turn my head to avoid bedsores. Some of the CrossFit people gathered round to encourage me to do more. They were very nice.

At the end of the session, we were all together stretching. The instructor asked what we were doing during the weekend. One person mentioned they were rowing in a regatta.

The instructor said wow, and asked if anyone else in the group had any hidden skills.

I toyed with the idea of telling the group I was capable of sitting doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time.

But while I was thinking about whether that would make up for the press-up thing, someone else chipped in that they were learning capoeira.

I decided to be the bigger man and let it pass.

Gym v Gym

It naturally got me comparing the two.

Immediate Benefits?

• Real Gym. Clearly it takes time to condition the body. But exercising makes you feel better almost straight away. In my experience, if you do even one session you get flooded with endorphins.

• Attention Gym. Feels terrible when you start, and yields absolutely no burst of good feeling directly after any session. That’s always been my experience anyway, others may feel differently.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Ease In Getting Started?

• Real Gym. Sure, it’s tough to get off the sofa, but at least it’s pretty clear what you need to do.

• Attention Gym. Let’s face it, the instructions are confusing. And coping with the feelings that arise when you stop distracting yourself with your phone is properly challenging.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Looks?

• Real Gym. I guess not great if you are stuck to the floor surrounded by a supportive crowd due to an inability to do a press-up, but clearly has the potential to improve looks dramatically.

• Attention Gym. Rubbish. Especially if, like me, you deem a high vis vest necessary. I’ve always thought it would look amazing to do that lotus position folded legs thing, but I can’t. I tried it at home but when I got up my legs gave way and I nearly hit my head against the table.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Understanding How Your Biological Brain Relates To Your Conscious Experience, And Thereby Reframing Negative Thoughts. Understanding Why Your Habits Never Stick. Understanding How To Make Best Use Of Your 4000 Weeks On Earth. Learning To Focus On The World Around You Without Intrusive Thought (In All Its Forms, Including Sunday Blues). Training To Be Present For Your Loved Ones. Finally Having A Workable Strategy For Your Digital Hygiene. Clearly Seeing The Effects Of The Phone On The Mind.

WINNER - ATTENTION GYM

Sorry. That was childish, I know. But it’s interesting… even as I try to write out the benefits in their most appealing form, they feel so intangible.

The Big Fight

Gym people will always win a fight with meditation people (Put that monk down! He’s already said he submits!)

The real gym is just so tangible. You can very easily imagine your muscles building and your heart getting stronger. And it boosts your mood right away.

It’s so hard to imagine that any sort of mental quiet over time compounds to your benefits - to really trust in neuroplasticity. Conversely it’s so easy to fill any gap with phone use and believe you’ll get away with it.

It’s no wonder that many meditation advocates borrow the gym analogy. says that trying to focus on your breath, and then noticing that it has (inevitably) wandered and then bringing your focus back to the breath is like a bicep curl for the brain.

It’s a really helpful comparison. And far far more valuable than making out meditation is easy or relaxing. Which it really isn’t.

How to be Mentally Strong - And Why

Looking out at rows of people lifting weights for fun, occasionally you remember that for most of human existence gyms would have seemed ridiculous. People got their exercise through back-breaking labour. Then incidental exercise disappeared for the deskbound amongst us, and gyms became necessary.

I believe there’s a parallel here with how phones have eradicated all the incidental moments of mental quiet.

So now the Attention Gym needs to be as much a part of life as the real gym. But fortunately there’s no monthly fee.

One last comparison before we leave CrossFit behind.

I go to classes with my wife. She particularly enjoys strength training, because it’s a rejection of outdated expectations of what a woman’s body should be like. Almost a rebellion.

Right now trillion dollar companies are making money from us, not because they produce amazing content, but because our attention span is so shot by all their clever tactics that we default to scrolling their stuff.

Reclaiming your mind from the algorithm is an act of defiance.

The Attention Gym can be a rebellion too.

P.S. I’m heading off for a long weekend in the Lake District, so there will be no long-form article next week. Please feel very free to explore the archive of past dispatches at phonefreewill.com. I will be back in your inbox the following week with a Special Guest Star - please be mindful of your excitement levels.

When I was younger, the main downside of a hangover would be feeling sick.

When I got older, the downsides changed. Feeling hungover and smelling terrible while a little toddler begged you to play with them was a different deal altogether.

Then the hangover that changed everything: I clocked that the main downside wasn’t the physical sensations. It was the mood it put me in.

In all of my hangovers I’ve been plagued by regret. Very understandable when I’ve drunk too much. But also I’d get very anxious about what I did and said the night before.

As I became more sure that the bad mood was the primary effect of the hangover, I became suspicious of these thoughts.

Wait a minute… I didn’t actually say anything THAT stupid. Is the reason why I am so anxious really because of my behaviour the night before? Or is it really my hungover mood right now making it look worse?

Is it about where I’m looking or, where I’m standing?

Like I say, it was an unusually philosophical hangover.

The Mental Weather

There’s a lot of things we can do to alter our overall mood, beyond drinking too much alcohol.

Everyone’s brain is different of course, and I can only speak for my own with confidence. My brain works better if I am well-rested and have been thoughtful about what I eat. If I do a little exercise my mood brightens. Everything looks grim when I have a cold.

After I commuted without a phone for a few weeks, I noticed a sudden change in my mood for the better.

I wrote a piece speculating that it might have a recovery of my brain’s dopamine receptors.

It hasn’t been constant. As you might expect, my mood fluctuates. And in a properly fascinating way.

The Old Grey High Vis Idiot Test

There is a brilliant expression for describing our overall outlook - whether we are glass half full or glass half empty.

The point of course is that we are looking at exactly the same glass, but viewing the situation differently depending on our underlying mood.

In the last few weeks, my mind has come up with a perfect parallel test. Like a good scientist using a control in its experiment, it has been asking itself exactly the same question again and again each day these past weeks.

Though the question stays the same, the answer I get varies each time it is asked.

That question: given you are a grown man with a respectable job, is it a good idea to commute in high vis looking like a massive idiot and then to write about it?

Answers vary from “Yes! This is superb, and the world needs this” through to “Good God, what are you doing you fool?”

I believe the answer depends on three things:

• (1) Thinking/Reason - interrogating the logic of what I’m doing and why on earth I am doing it

• (2) External Factors - has someone written a nice comment on one of the posts? Has someone talked to me on the train and told me how much they hate their phone?

• (3) Mental Weather - my overall mood, based on the factors outlined above (exercise, sleep, phone use etc)

And having watched closely, I firmly believe (3) is by far the most important factor in how my mind answers the question.

Then comes (2) external factors. (Though obviously they are beyond my control.)

And last of all, (1) thinking, actual reason, coherent thought, interrogating the idea. This is a very distant third, and seems to make very little difference.

By which I mean, if I am in a bad mood about what I’m doing, no matter how I roll the question around in my head I stay in a bad mood. Conversely, if I feel it’s great to be doing this, no new thought dislodges me from that view.

It feels like the arguments in my head about commuting in high vis are just a manifestation of the underlying mood. Which has been shaped by how much I have slept, whether I have exercised, and so on.

Man Who Commutes In High Vis Vest Advocates Not Thinking

This brain in our head is biological. Treat it well, and the world looks good. Treat it badly, and everything looks grim.

If heavy phone use is indeed making people feel more glum, the implications from that are pretty interesting.

You can start to see how phone use could create consequential bad weather in the mind. Let’s say I have a great idea for something I might do, better even than commuting in a high vis vest. It’s a way of changing my life. A new hobby to sign up for, a new thing I might create. I get a little excited. And perhaps I should be, because this new little project might serve to improve my overall brain health.

And then I pick up the phone and scroll. The energy dissipates.

Nah, I think. Let’s not bother.

We could be caught in a digital hangover, a glass half empty mood, without knowing it.

In part this reinforces obvious, well worn advice. Exercise, eat your greens, sleep well, use your phone less, meditate more (or combine the latter two, as I do). And so on. In short, keep a close eye on how you are treating your brain.

But it also suggests something less obvious. To be more suspicious of our thoughts if we haven’t managed to do the above. It reinforces the lesson of my philosophical hangover.

A brain that isn’t well cared for might start to generate all sorts of thoughts that disguise the true problem. The brain doesn’t say oof you used your phone too much. It says what about x? What about y? What do they think of me? Am I okay? And increasingly, maybe I should ask AI for advice?

It’s not like we can choose to stop thinking.

But I’m ready to downgrade the overall importance I ascribe to it, and pay much more attention to the overall state my brain is in.

Less thinking. More high vis idiot.

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.

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. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not the most typical subject - I had practice meditating before this. I suspect there’s an enormous prize to be had, but only if you do this daily over weeks. For me it was unpleasant 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. Neuroplasticity just doesn’t work that way. 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. For too many, 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.

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 actually 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've been doing it for a year and a half now.

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 - in popular culture I mean. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

A few 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 in hidden ways, 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 to blame. It 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 daily train commute.

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 learnt how to meditate, and spent 18 months doing so daily. It helped, but now I’ve decided to devote much more time to it.

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.

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 over the last year and a half.

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).

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”.

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.

If you are trying this, I’d be really interested to hear how it goes - clearly the challenge will be sticking to it.

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

Can I join you?

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. 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 through collaborative experimentation.

2. As you might have read in the articles above, it’s very 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.

Above all, this is about collective playful experimentation. A small community is forming with the shared recognition that kicking the phone habit is harder than everyone pretends, but the gains from it are much bigger than everyone imagines.

Good luck! And please do get in touch.

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 on the tube.

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 for me, my 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 - to rest it.

And 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, 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. Take a daily habitual intentional break from your phone. Retrain your brain.

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.

Set aside some empty, quiet time in your day to get the feel of those brakes.

Use your dead time to learn to live.

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. 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?

Bear in mind, I had spent 18 months meditating before this, so I am used to sitting still. Overusing AI, I asked it 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%

Whether AI is right or not, I cannot say. But interesting!

(I should add, in addition to knowing how to sit still, I also do 15 minutes of maintenance training on the weekend. Without it, the chances of success apparently drop by 10%).

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. Hmm.

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.

It could be that 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.

It’s Day 23 of the Phone Free Commute experiment. I'm doing absolutely nothing on my train and tube journey across London, one hour there, one hour back.

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 tube 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 a quiet part of my day to rebuilding it.