230 | How to Take Back Your Time, Build Resilience, and Rewire Your Nervous System (Without Giving Up Your Phone)

Show notes:

Ever wonder where all your time is going—and why you still feel so exhausted and disconnected?

In this episode of Whole Again, Michael uncovers a surprising chart about screen time that reveals a disturbing digital trend: we’re trading our healing time for scroll time. You’ll discover how your phone habits could be slowing your physical, emotional, and social recovery—and what to do about it.

Takeaways

• See how your phone might be stealing 10+ years of your life—and your presence
• Understand how your nervous system responds to notifications, dopamine spikes, and micro-distractions
• Learn 5 simple actions to break free from the scroll trap and make space for real healing and joy

Take a deep breathe and discover how to reclaim your time, reduce digital overload, and start healing with more focus and energy—without tossing your phone.

Transcript:

And if you’re new here, you might wonder, why do I talk about digital health each week? Well. It’s because it impacts our social, mental, and physical health. So how we engage with our screens and how we use our phones impacts, how we heal, it impacts everything. So that’s why I’m so passionate about our digital health.

And in this episode, you’ll discover a trend about what we’re doing on our phones. And what to do about it. But before we get there, I wanna take a moment to thank you for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor. All right, let’s get into it. You may have already seen this on the internet. I just came across it for the first time a few weeks ago, and it’s a chart.

And in the chart the headline is Your Life on a Smartphone. It illustrates through a series of circles or dots how an 18-year-old would use her time between the ages of 18 and 90. It tries to show all the big bucket activities that we humans do. For example, they account for 288 months for sleep, but 125 for work and school, 36 for cooking and eating.

Some time for driving about 18 months, although we don’t drive that much anymore since many people are still hybrid. There are 36 months for chores and errands and all that jazz hygiene, 27 months, and the rest of it is free time, 334 months open time to do anything she wishes to do. Now for the disturbing part, on average, the average American spends about seven hours a day on their phone or other screens, so she would use up 10 years of her life.

Out of those remaining 334 little circles or months, about 120 of those would be dedicated to looking at things on her screen or being on her phone. How often do we talk about, gosh, I wish I had an extra hour in the day to do something else, to get stuff done or rest and recover, or work on a puzzle or read a book or simply hang out with friends.

The time is there, it just happens to be, or at least so much of it happens to be on our phones and on our screens. I want to share. I’m not anti screen or antis smartphone. I think they can be really wonderful. They can help us connect and discover and so much more. This is really about finding better harmony with our screens and our devices.

The Japanese have a phrase called a sense of or harmony. This sense of why is important for our recovery, our healing. So when we spend so much time on our phones, it disrupts our healing. It gets in the way of becoming whole again, let me share further. When Steve Jobs introduced us to the iPhone back in 2007, it was served up as an important tool, but.

It’s like a drug now. No shade on Steve Jobs. If he didn’t introduce it, someone else would’ve. At least that’s my perspective. But here’s the thing. With our phones, based on how the tech execs have engineered the algorithm, it’s taken hold of our nervous system. It’s taken up space in our head, in our heart, and also our healing.

So when our nervous system is already fragile from what we’re recovering from, the phone adds to that burden. It adds to what the central nervous system has to carry, and this is why it gets in the way of our healing. And very specifically, it creates dopamine spikes, which are followed by a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

Even GABA production is impacted and the gray matter in our brain shrinks. So there’s a lot going on when we’re on our screens and using our phones that are simply not healthy. And this is especially true as we try to heal. As you know, our bodies keep score. They hold stories. Our bodies and trauma isn’t.

Just something we remember. It’s something we carry with us, and the healing process requires some space and silence and presence. But our phones on the other hand, keep us in this state of micro ation, and each notification that we hear pulls us from what we’re focused in on right now and into the vortex known as the algorithm.

So if you feel a bit more anxious lately, or you feel those phantom vibrations or you feel like you always have to be on, or you are having trouble sleeping or feel disconnected from yourself and other people around you, or even your primary nature, then you might have a relationship with your phone that could use some work.

It’s calling out. Your body’s calling out, looking for you to improve your relationship with your device. Now you might be thinking, okay, I get it. Our phones are everywhere. Our devices are a problem. I’ve tried to detox, but each time the phone pulls me back, so I don’t know what to do. And if this is you, well, congratulations my friend.

You are a human. You’re part of the club. We can first start with awareness and why you grab for your phone in the first place. It might be due to boredom or loneliness or having a belief that you always have to be on. So as you grab for the phone, take a moment to notice why are you doing so? This is always the first step.

The first step is always awareness. Here’s the second thing you can do. Silence your notifications, all those ding, ding, ping, ping. They pull your attention away and I’ll just say they’re distracting for everyone else. So you’re gonna have a lot of fans. Once you silence your notifications. Here’s the third thing you can do.

Make your phone ugly. Go from colored mode to gray scale. Something happens when we dull the visual appeal of our phone. Sometimes the urge to scroll often fades as well, so you can make your phone boring, but your life doesn’t have to be because you’ll be living it off the phone more frequently. Here’s another thing you can do, create no phone zones.

They might be right before bed when you first wake up. Or when you’re talking to someone, these four steps can really help. And I would like to put in a plug for our new feature on the Pause, breathe, reflect app called Microdose eq. It’s available for everyone on Team iPhone that has the iOS version 16 and higher.

And this has done wonders for people. People are saving an hour plus a day in screen time through it. They have found more time for other things that bring them more joy, like being present with family and friends or using the time to work on their recovery or another aspect of their health, or even.

Pick up a book or do a little hobby. So I would really encourage you to check this out if you happen to be on a iPhone and let me know what you experience. The feedback again has been fantastic. So these are all steps you can take to start to improve how you use your smartphone. So then your smartphone is no longer using you.

I do wanna stress the phone isn’t the enemy. Smartphones are an essential part of living today, so I don’t think we’re all gonna go to a flip phone or go all analog. So the phone isn’t the enemy. The algorithm on the other hand, well, you could make a case for that, but here’s the thing, when it comes to our healing, distractions can be the enemy.

Actually distractions impact every aspect of our lives and we deserve better. So no, you don’t have to give up your phone, but you don’t have to give your life to it. We can change our relationship with it and start to scroll and stress less, and heal and live more

in this episode. You discovered how much time we’re actually spending on our devices and how much time we have to spend on other things that bring us more joy, and five different steps that you can take to improve your relationship with your phone so you can get to a place where you’re using it and it’s not using you.

As always, thanks for being here. I appreciate you

and if you wish to further enhance your digital health, I’ll invite you to take my smartphone wellness check and you can access it through the link in the show notes, or you can visit my website, which is Michael O’Brien shift.com, and it’s absolutely free. And it will help you scroll less and live more.

And of course, I hope you’ll join us here on whole again every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and discover how to heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience. Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this. And we’ve got you.