 Are you addicted to your cell phone? I know at times I feel like I am. The cell phone is a spaceship in your pocket. It connects you to the world. You can listen to music, you can Google things, you can find out where you are, you can call an Uber, you can do all kinds of amazing things on that damn cell phone to the point where you can find yourself stuck on it for hours in a day. Sometimes I am, sometimes I catch myself and say, what the hell am I doing? What is the negative side of this? Well, the negative side is that it distracts you. You don't have relationships or good conversations or connections with people. You're constantly checking it. You have no focus, you have no clarity. Productivity can be sapped in your day. If you're anything like me, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you know you shouldn't reach for your phone and you know you shouldn't check something, but then all of a sudden you do and that sends you down a spiral of lost productivity. I'm pretty good. Most of the time I don't do it, but sometimes even I fall prey. Have you ever left your house or a apartment without your cell phone? You're like, oh my God, I don't have my phone. Oh my God, what am I gonna do? Today we're gonna talk about how to break your cell phone addiction and how to create two awesome hours in your day where you can just crush productivity and get things done. Today we're joined by Dr. Josh Davis, PhD, who is the Director of Research and the Lead Professor, Professor I should say at the Neuro Leadership Institute, which is dedicated to synthesizing scientific research. He's taught at Columbia University, New York University. He's written for psychology today. He lives in New York City and Dr. Davis is gonna help us today curb our cell phone addiction. I was gonna say like eliminate it, but let's face it, we're not gonna eliminate our cell phone addiction, but he's gonna give us some strategies here and how we can do better in relation to our cell phone and how we can create two awesome hours in our life. In fact, he is the author of an amazing book called Two Awesome Hours, Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done. Sounds good to me. Dr. Josh Davis, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you so much, really nice to be here. What kind of cell phone do you have, Dr. Davis? I've got an iPhone 7. Aren't you fancy? There you go. I got my iPhone 6 plus here. I haven't upgraded yet. How addicted are you to your cell phone? Well, you know, I'm more addicted than I wanted to be and so I downloaded some of those apps like Moment and things like that to just to find out, to just get the numbers. And I was happy to see that I really do put it down on the weekends and don't really check it much, 10 to 15 times, but during the weekdays, there's times when I'm checking it, where it's getting in the way of work and where it's getting in the way of family. So yeah, so I've made some changes. Tell us about your family. Well, my wife is a medical resident. I've got a 13 month old baby and he's an amazing guy, we're having a good time with it. Amazing, congratulations. And have you ever found that yourself, like before you figured out the ways to manage your cell phone addiction, I guess, or your cell phone use, did you find that that was getting in the way of your relationship with your wife or family time in general? Oh, very much so. And I would say it's a work in progress as well because it's so tempting and they keep on providing new things on the phone and they want to draw you back. But yes, very much so that there were, the classic dinner time, not connecting when we're together in the room, not hearing sometimes when one another would say things that were really meaningful, not realizing when our son was around and just how many minutes were going by before we were getting to him sometimes if the phone's there, so nothing out of the ordinary. But that's just it, it's the ordinary, when something's ordinary, when something is what everyone does, then we tend to say, okay, well, it's fine because that's what everyone does. It's a sort of a shortcut, a mental shortcut that human beings have used for millions of years and it used to be that that would guide you very well but when it comes to something like an addiction or, and that word may be too strong here in terms of technical addictions, but it behaves that way. So when it comes to something that is getting in the way of some of life or co-opting certain neural mechanisms that were designed for other purposes to help us find food and relationships and things like that, then I think we really need to pause and say just doing what everyone else is doing is actually not a good strategy in this case. Can you drop some stats on us as to how many times people check their phone every day or how much time people now spend on their phones every day, Dr. Davis? I believe the average is that you've got people checking close to a hundred times a day. Now that would depend on the group and the location and the country and that kind of thing. The number of hours of course can range quite a bit but if it's, you know, if you're spending more than two hours a day on your cell phone, then chances are there are some things you're missing out on. Chances are you're draining yourself unnecessarily. I think those are some good cutoff points to be thinking about that that's, you know, a hundred times two hours. A hundred times a day seems a lot, isn't that a lot? I mean, I'm a bit old school. I'm not sure how old you are. I'm 41, but I remember in the mid 90s when mobile phones, as we called them in Australia, I was a newspaper reporter at a newspaper there and when I would go out on assignment, like when I would go out sort of, you know, past an hour outside of where the newspaper headquarters were, I had to sign out. I had to go and get a mobile phone, which is like a brick, like this big brick thing. And I had to sign for it and say James Swannick has one of the mobile phones. And then I would take it out on this job and then sometimes if I couldn't get back to the office in time, I would phone up and read my story to a copy taker who would then, you know, submit it to the sub editor. And so there was this big kind of process where it's like, oh, I've got to go upstairs. I've got to sign for a mobile phone. They've got to give it to me. I then have to take it out and guard it with my life. I should only use it like on, you know, where necessary because the cost of using it will be so much. I mean, this was only 20 years ago. Right. It was 20 years ago. And that was just for the phone function. That was just for the phone function. Right. And now the function of the phone is just, I mean, it's out of control. It has more processing speed than what NASA had when they sent people to the moon back in the 60s. I'm checking this thing a lot and people are checking it all the time, like GPS directions, music, like I said. I mean, it's terrific. It's a great tool. But it's got to have some kind of, it's got to be hurting us somehow, Dr. Davis. How is it hurting us? Besides obviously, you know, what we talked about, which is being distracted from connection with people and a bit of lost productivity. Well, I would say more than a bit of lost productivity actually, you know, just yesterday actually I was, I found myself, we were in a group of people, everybody pulled out their phones and somebody said, somebody said, where would we be without phones? You know, I think we were all trying to schedule something. You know, it would be so crazy without phones. So I, because I'm 42 also, so I remember the world before them and so I immediately said, well, do you remember how it was before phones? And of course the answer was no. But so, but my point was that when we had, when we didn't have them, we had to be more deliberate about what we intended to do and when and with whom. And we had to make decisions essentially and stick to that, but what that did was to free up a lot of mental space to then show up and be present the rest of the time. When we're constantly making decisions, which is what not really committing to something, what the flexibility of the phone allows, then it actually wears out our self-regulation and decision-making capacity over time. So the more we do that, the more that we kind of leave things open and sort of keep on re-deciding when and where we're gonna meet and keep on the flexibility that it allows, the constant information tracking that it allows, the more we do that, the less we're capable as the day goes on. And so that means that it becomes harder to really think through all of the evidence that's relevant for a decision. It becomes harder to control your emotions. It becomes harder to resist eating the foods you don't wanna eat. It becomes harder to get yourself to the gym. It actually becomes harder to stay focused. So I mean, there really are changes in what we're cognitively capable of when we wear ourselves out that way. And I think there are a lot of inadvertent ways we wear ourselves out without realizing it by being constantly on with the phone, constantly changing. Yeah, well, we wanna shine a light on those things that you mentioned that maybe we don't realize where it's hurting us. Let's shine a light on that over the course of this interview. We're talking to Dr. Josh Davis, PhD, who is the author of the book, Two Awesome Hours. And we're talking about cell phone addiction. So let's just say, you know, let's do a common kind of day in the life of someone, of the average user. What are they currently doing with their cell phones from the moment they wake up to when they have breakfast to lunchtime to dinner? Like what's kind of, what have you seen as like the average or the standard day of use? And then let's then talk about some practical steps that we can take to stop that or to harness, or to, you know, make that a little bit better so we're not so addicted. Yeah, so one thing starting at the very beginning of the day, many people use their cell phone as their alarm clock, right? Now, when you do that, sometimes you can just treat it as an alarm clock. But so often we pick it up and there are notifications and immediately we then move on to other apps and we start processing information. It turns out that time early in the morning is really useful for thinking big picture, for being able to connect with what's important. It's harder to do that at other times of the day. So we miss out on that. But so that's the first one. So when we use it as an alarm clock, very common thing. Usually when people get distracted, they tend to pick up the phone. It's a very common thing. When they're bored, they tend to do it. If they have any kind of social engagements where they're wondering, you know, what did this person think of me? Or did so-and-so text me back? There's, once the workday has started and many people have work environments where there's an assumption that they will be checking email, you know, at least hourly. So there's a certain guilt associated with that. That pulls them back to the phone. So any of these things that pull them, of course, those are the times when the phone is both useful, but then also causes trouble. And part of the reason, when we look at what's happening in the brain, it becomes easier to see why it is that it's so hard for people to just use the phone in sort of a surgical laser-like way in the way that it would be useful and then set it aside. So in principle, all of those things are wonderful. The phone makes it easier to do all the things we need to do. In practice, we're not just dealing with getting tasks done, but we're dealing with a human brain getting tasks done. And then the phone is kind of... This is where the word, the language of addiction, I think, becomes helpful. The phone is tapping into a mechanism that was designed for something else. And kind of overusing it. The same way that cocaine or a drug, for example, will tap into the reward systems in the brain more directly than something that may have evolved for. So it's driving, it then drives the person to keep seeking out more of the drug, even when it's detrimental to them. And the phone is actually designed in such a way that I think it's reasonable to say it is tapping into mechanisms in the brain artificially in a way that is self-reinforcing and is getting us away from how it's useful. I can get a little bit more specific about that to help color in what I mean. But I would like to make one comment if I may about addiction, the word addiction. So using it here loosely, it's a very serious issue for many people. And so I do want to assure some people listening, saying that when we talk about a cell phone addiction, that's often not the same thing as when we're talking about an alcohol addiction or addiction to a substance with certain medical consequences. The reason that I think it's useful to use that language is because it is a scenario where there's a relationship that is harmful to the person. They don't feel like they necessarily are able to stop. And also it's the common language. It's what we use to talk about this. And so I think it resonates with where people are, where they're starting from. It's just wanted to add that caveat. The irony is, is that most people who are listening to us right now are listening on their cell phone because they've got the podcast app, they're listening to the James Wanick show. Or maybe they're watching this on a YouTube video because we're recording video as well. And maybe they're watching the YouTube video on their cell phone. And this is amazing knowledge. Now that's a good use of your phone though. It's an amazing use you've had. Going back to the first point, which was, I think what you were trying to say was don't use your cell phone as an alarm clock, right? That's like the first strategy that we can really implement here. And I must admit that I have at times been guilty of this. In fact, I'm guilty of it right now. I use my cell phone as an alarm clock. And even just this morning, it's 10, 28 in the morning as you and I are recording this right now, at least on the West Coast where I am. And I know I woke up this morning at seven and the alarm woke me up and I don't usually do this. But today for some reason I went, ah, and I quickly went to CNN to see what the news was going on. In my head I'm like, oh, it's 10 o'clock in New York. There's gotta be some news going on. So let's have a look. And then that set me down the spiral of reading stories about Donald Trump and all this kind of stuff. And then I was looking at my Slack conversations with my swanic sleep staff to see how people in the, my team in the Asia Pacific area what they had been talking about while I was sleeping. And then I checked my WhatsApp. And then I don't think I checked my, I didn't check my email, but I looked at my text messages. I had a text message from someone who had responded to me from a text that I sent the night before. And today it was particularly ordinary. Now I usually am pretty good. And in fact, I have an entire program called the 47 day habit hacker program which teaches people how to hack your habits. And so I know how hard it is for people because here's me coaching it and living it most of the time. And even I fall prey on occasion like today. So coming back to your main point, we could talk about this subject for four hours, but I want to, I kind of want to reign us both in here and just really move on with some strategies here. I think the first strategy is don't use your cell phone as an alarm clock because it basically puts the phone in your hand first thing in the morning at a time when you really should be doing creative thinking. That's right. First thing is don't do that. And there's a couple of other don'ts. After I say what they are though, then critical piece is going to be that it's not enough to just say, don't do something. We're going to have to replace those habits with something else if we really want to succeed. We're going into strategy now. Here we go. We're going into step by step formulas. All right, all right. So don't use it as an alarm clock. Don't allow notifications to pop up. And now this is a do, but do have some spaces in your house that are no phone zones. So these are three simple steps. And I'd like to suggest we actually keep it to just a few steps because it's much easier for people to act on if they can just have a few in mind. Those are three that are probably going to be relevant for just about everyone. Now there's a little bit of fear involved in turning off the notifications. What if I miss something critical and get in trouble? And each person is going to need to take a moment and think about how am I going to handle making sure I get to what I need to get to and when. And what I can guarantee you is there is a solution for everyone that works. The reason for the notifications is this. It has to do with a story about a part of the brain that many people listening may have heard of. It's the most popular part of the brain these days called the amygdala. And what if you have heard about the amygdala, what you've probably heard is that it's the seed of emotions. That's not actually quite right. The reason that the amygdala is considered to be the seed of emotions and in particular negative emotions like fear is because the amygdala is active when we're experiencing fear, but an understanding of a little bit better of what the amygdala is actually doing is helpful in this case. The amygdala is really responding not just to, it's not just an emotional center, it's responding to things that are salient, things that are, that you need to shift your attention to. It could be something positive, it could be something negative, but it's something essentially urgent, something in the environment that says, hey, look at me, like this is potentially threatening, potentially a positive thing, but it needs you to look at me. That's why the amygdala involves emotions. It quickly gets those signals, it starts a whole bodily reaction, fight or flight kind of reaction, that then gets sensed and the feeling of that becomes part of the feeling of the emotion. But so if we think of it instead as an urgency center, as opposed to a fear center or an emotion center, it helps to make more sense of what's going on that the notifications on a phone, they are tapping into something very core to what human beings, what human brains care about. They almost all pertain to social information. Somebody has notified you, somebody might be upset with you, you might not be knowledgeable in this group you're gonna go talk to. It's usually connected to something social, and because it's popped up, it's now in your mind, and there's this sense of, I might need to have this information, I might need to get back to them. There's this urgent element, it's activating the system that we have that's been designed to quickly pay attention to what's urgently important in the environment and to get us going, get our bodies going quickly, get us motivated to take action, start our emotional responses, it's tapping into that. And it's sort of unfair to us because when that happens, that takes precedent because these systems have evolved to keep us alive. And so when we pay attention, going back many years to the famous of advice to stay focused on what's important, not what's urgent, this is a system that is expertly designed, thoughtfully designed by brilliant engineers to instead focus you on what's urgent. Yeah, it's Facebook, that little red ping, that little notification that turns up when you get a Facebook message, it's the most genius thing ever for Facebook because it's like, look at me, and they've done these studies that show a little bit of dopamine is released every time you see that notification, little bit of brain like love is gone. Oh, I'm gonna see that. I actually have changed my notifications on my phone. I'm gonna show this, this is my phone here. Now I used to get a buzz and a text and a sound when text messages or WhatsApps would come in. And then I changed that about 18 months ago and just removed notifications on my phone. So now I actually have to go to my phone to seek out whether someone has responded to me. The only time I get a buzz now is if I get a phone call and I don't really get that many phone calls on my phone. So I've done pretty well with that. The other thing is I mentioned CNN before when I wake up in the morning and this morning and I checked CNN, it used to be on my home screen but I've deliberately moved it to the second screen. So now it's harder for me to get to because CNN used to give me a notification. And then I used to have this Tottenham Hotspur Google page saved where I would look up stories about my favorite English Premier League soccer team, Tottenham Hotspur. And I used to have that on the homepage and I moved that to the third and final screen on my phone so I didn't see that. So it would actually, I consciously have to go into the phone and scroll two pages to seek out that information. That's been hugely beneficial to me, like either removing notifications or if you don't, moving it to like the end of your phone screen so you actually consciously have to go and seek it out. I don't know if you've figured out a way moving off the cell phone. I still on my Facebook messages, when people message me, I still get that damn like you have 27 notifications. Like I'm looking at it now and that little Earth symbol is now showing two on it, two notifications. How do I get rid of that? Do you know how to get rid of that? Because I try to, every time I see it I have to go there and click on it and see what's happened and I wish I didn't. I know exactly what you mean and I'm sure that they have very deliberately made it tricky to figure that out. But no, I personally have not figured out how to get rid of it and I think your additional piece about moving things out of the line of sight is brilliant because when you're dealing with something that isn't really important, isn't one of your top priorities, but you're mostly acting on it because it's urgent, then creating things in your environments that you're less likely to respond is key and that's actually personally what I've done with the Facebook app is to move it farther onto a different screen so I don't see that unless I go and look for it. And the truth is when I do go and look for it then I just find myself getting sucked in because that little red circle is there. So if you're listening and you know how to get rid of that little red circle on when notifications come in, because I'm looking here now and I've got like all these notifications, 52 minutes ago an hour ago. Somebody must know. Somebody has to know and I want to get rid of it. The other thing I did which has been very effective, Dr. Davis, is that in my Facebook news feed I unfollowed just about every person. I didn't unfollow them as friends. Like I didn't de-friend or unfriend, whatever the language is. What I did was I changed my news, my Facebook news feed settings to only allow in information that I wanted to allow in. So in that I have Tony Robbins, the motivational coach. I allowed stuff from my mother and my father, my two brothers, so family. I put in Tai Lopez as a business coach of mine. And then I put in some comments from two of my programs. A 30 day alcohol challenge and the 47 day Habit Hacker program. Oh, and also my James Swanik Inner Circle coaching program as well. So when people ask me questions I allow that to come through. Apart from that though, that's it. So if you're listening to this and you're a friend of mine and you're a Facebook friend of mine, I'm sorry, I don't know what you're doing. I actually have to type your name in to go and see what you are doing rather than when you tell me something you shouldn't assume that I'm gonna see it because I probably won't. Right, right. And they probably have figured that out. And you know, I mean these days we're all, everybody now is aware. I think we've hit a crossroads where everybody is aware that there is more information than we can process. Essentially our technological ability has moved beyond the speed at which we process things that our brains process, right? So we've passed that threshold. And I think more and more people have woken up to the fact that we've passed that threshold. So there also is a process of compassion that I think we need to build that we need to educate one another about how we need to operate with our devices. So as we're saying this and now I've typed in Facebook I've just had two more notifications that have come up sapping my energy. And I'm looking at it as I'm talking to you which means I'm not fully engaged in you. So there you go. There it is. It's right there. It's like because I pulled open because I opened Facebook I've now, as I'm talking to Dr. Davis I have another notification that's coming in from someone I know called Eri who's in like one of the groups I mentioned one of the coaches thing that I mentioned. And now it's pulling my attention away. I clicked on it. So it's addictive. We've got to get rid of that. All right. So number one is don't use your cell phone as alarm clock because it pulls you into the phone first thing in the morning. Number two is don't allow notifications. So that means go in and change your notifications. Change if you get a red Facebook symbol when something comes in, get rid of it. If you have your cell phone set up for your phone to ping or buzz when the text message comes in or what's that message comes in, change it. One thing on that, before we move into the third one which is you, we're going to get into like have spaces in your house that are no phone zones. Just before we get into that, what about one thing I've noticed from not having notifications is that I actually do check my phone more, a lot more to see if I've had notifications. So rather the notification saying, hey, look at me. Now I'm like, oh, I better go in to see if I have notifications. So I keep my phone in my back pocket in my genes. I don't put it in my front pocket because as I understand it, the cell phone radiation will destroy my sperm cells or my sperm, I should say. So I want to protect the boys. I put it in the back pocket. But I find myself, you know, like if I'm walking or whatever, I'll now pull out the phone to see if I have notifications. So how can I curb that, Dr. Davis? Well, so now we're getting into the space where we need to teach ourselves new behaviors. So it's one thing to try to just not do something. And one thing that helps a lot is remove the triggers. And that's what, you know, not using it as an alarm clock, not having the notifications on help, it's helpful for it, you know. So then we're removing a lot of the triggers. That's not the whole story though. That's gonna be helpful in terms of getting away from just what's urgent. But then we still have habits. And you know well, you know, about hacking habits and breaking habits. When we remove the triggers, we've made it much easier on ourselves. But there still are habits that are either there because they're useful. We still need to have some of this information. We should be checking sometimes. Or just because we have done them a lot. And if you try to just say, I'm gonna not do this habit, that's been shown to backfire. People who, you know, and all I need to do is point to New Year's resolutions, right? That they very low follow through, we all know that. You know, you say I'm gonna do it or I'm gonna not eat ice cream this year or whatever it is, you know. And just that kind of intention tends to not work. And in particular, when you say, I'm just gonna try to not check my phone. It backfires because when you try to not do something, you're actually activating the neural circuitry associated with doing that thing. So right now, if you think about not pulling your phone out of your pocket and looking at it, the only way you can even make sense of that sentence is to think about pulling your phone out of your pocket and looking at it. I've activated the exact behavior that you don't wanna activate in the neural circuitry. So instead, to work with the brain, we wanna redirect. And this is about, there's another brain system that I think is important and many brain systems involved. So just, there's a second one that I'd like to highlight here that's relevant. And this is what you referred to before as the dopamine system. We sometimes call it the reward system. These are neurons that use dopamine as a neurotransmitter. And what this system, we talk about it as a reward system, but a useful way. Again, kind of a slight revision of what we often hear. It may be more useful to think of it, not just as a reward system, but really about it as an expectation system. It's the dopamine neurons, they become active when we're expecting a reward. So it's actually the sort of the thought, oh, I wonder what's on my phone. I wonder if that person I went on a date with texted me back, right? It's that thought, that that's when we get the activity. Because the dopamine neurons, the dopamine system, it's really in many ways designed to help us repeat behaviors that can get us something we want, get us something positive. And so if you just meet expectations, you actually don't get much activity there. So let's say I pull out the phone and it's just sort of like, I get no information either way, right? Yeah, still no message. What does it mean? I'm kind of left flat, I don't end up, I have a little bit of burst when I think about getting the phone, but when I'm actually looking at it, then I don't have that dopamine activity, then that leaves me in a situation where I'm kind of feeling a little deflated and I want some. So then I say, well, maybe I could find it somewhere else on my phone. And then I get a little bit of that burst again. So I've got a brain system designed to keep me focused on trying to repeat behaviors. If I can retrain this system to instead get excited about something else. So in that moment, when I would have pulled out my phone, then if I can think about, wait a second, I've got an opportunity right now to step back and think about the big picture today and think about what's important. Something I refer to as a decision point in two awesome hours in that work. It's a moment in the day that doesn't come around very often when you get a chance to actually think about what is important and not just what's urgent. Usually we rush through these moments or we just whip out the phone and react instead. So it's the perfect antidote. So when you have that urge to pull out the phone, to pause and say, wait a second, what's something else that I wanted to do? And what I recommend is this, because it's sort of a universal, is instead to say, I've got an opportunity here. So the reason this comes up is because usually that moment when you're about to pull out the phone, it's because you're no longer on autopilot. You've just finished doing a task. You've just finished interviewing someone. You've just hung up the phone on a meeting. You've just finished working on a spreadsheet. There's something's finished. All of a sudden you're not involved on autopilot. You actually have more conscious resources to make a deliberate decision. The idea of pulling out the phone pops to mind, but you're actually prepared unusually well in that moment to think about the big picture. So that's where we can redirect ourselves to. Okay, so in the moment where we pull out the phone, you get to that decision point, think about what's important, not just what is urgent. Pause and say to yourself, what's something else I can do? I've got an opportunity here. So I would imagine if I was walking up Runyan Canyon, which is in the Hollywood Hills here, and I was walking out in nature and I felt the urge to look up my phone. I might say, hang on a second, I'm out in nature. I'm just going to enjoy the nature and I'm going to enjoy the moment. Bigger picture, that's important, Jimmy. That's right, you redirect on to something else that you want in that moment. Gotcha, okay. Let's move on now to spaces in the house that are no phone zones. And then I want to move on to these two awesome hours and the idea around that. We're talking to Dr. Josh Davis, PhD, who is written for Psychology Today and he's taught at Columbia University and New York University. He's the author of the book Two Awesome Hours. So you mentioned there are spaces in your house that are no phone zones. Explain that for us, please, Dr. Yeah, so this is a fantastic way to train yourself, to teach yourself. And it's through leading with the behavior. So if I have a space in my house that's a no phone zone, let's say the bedroom is no phone zone, then every time I'm in the bedroom and through habit, I get the urge to pull out my phone and look at it. It's literally not there. So it interrupts. It disrupts the pattern, right? So I've got something in the environment that disrupts the pattern for me. So I don't even have to do that work. I would have to go out of my way to go get the phone in a different room. But if I've committed to having a no phone zone, then it becomes much easier to realize that I'm doing something for myself here. Because if you've committed to having no phone zone, it's because you believe there's a reason that it's valuable to. So as a result of being in that room and having a rule for yourself that you're not gonna have a phone in there, you're forced to then have to discover what to do in that moment. After doing that a number of times, a week after a week of doing that, maybe a couple of weeks of doing that, you will have learned many new alternatives to what to do in that moment. Then just check the phone. And if you have something that you're deliberately practicing, like taking a moment to step back and think about the big picture and what you really care about that day, then you're likely to really start to create a new habit. So having the no phone zone is a way to lead with behavior before you even need to figure out exactly how to do it. So an example is the bedroom. Where else is a no phone zone as an example? Another known phone zone could be a region of a room. It could be the table, the dinner table. It could be the couch in the living room. It depends on you because we do all have reasons to use our phones and sometimes we wanna be reached, right? And sometimes people wanna be checking things. Some people, rather than having it be a physical region, will have it be a time of day, a no phone time of day. And I think that that accomplishes the same thing. Yeah, so a no phone zone can be a time. So it could be the first hour of the day. It could be the first two hours a day. It could be the last hour before you go to sleep. Absolutely. Okay, great. All right, so there we go. So don't use your cell phone as an alarm clock. People say you should put your phone in another room but have a dedicated alarm clock if you wake up that way. That gets it out of the bedroom, right? So it means that your bedroom is really just for sleep. If you're out and about and you've got your phone when you would ordinarily, oh, sorry, don't allow notifications. So you wanna switch off those notifications. If you're listening to this right now, switch off the damn notifications. Except of course, when a new episode of the James Swannick show comes out, you definitely wanna get a buzz, a ring, you want sirens, you want all those kind of things. Right. Don't allow notifications, okay? And then in those moments where you would have used your phone, remind yourself of the big picture. Just say to yourself, you know what? I got an opportunity here to do something else. And then experiment with having spaces in your home or times in your home or day where you don't use the phone and no phone zone. Okay, great. So you are the author, Dr. Davis of the book, Two Awesome Hours. Science-based strategies to harness your best time and get your most important work done. We've got 10 minutes here to take it home to the end. So can you just give us like a brief overview about what you mean by Two Awesome Hours and some strategies that we can implement? Yes, yeah. So just about a minute or two of saying where this came from, I think really helps to bring it home. I was at a point where this was really almost a moral decision that I was finding myself working all the time. My wife was two friends, you know, I'm sure lots of people listening will have had this experience. We're working all the time, getting lots of good work done and coming home at the end of the day and feeling terrible about myself. It was never enough. There was so much more to do. And it's just sort of, that to me was not okay. That people, good people working so hard could come home and then just feel shitty about themselves. Like this is, you know, it's because we're all kind of at a point to the point that you and I were talking about before, we're at a point in the world where there is too much coming at us. There's more than anyone can actually handle. So there's this overwhelm and then the question is what to do about it. So over the course of a number of discussions and reading and such, I came upon this idea that, you know, I think probably a lot of people also will have experienced, which is there are certain times when we can just be amazing, right? You could have a half hour of just hitting it out of the park, you know, exactly what your lineup of interviews is gonna be or who you need to have on your team or how you're gonna run this program, right? You can figure that out and really get it right. And then if you're anything like me, you can have two or three days in a row of just being worthless, right? So if that's the case, then there must be conditions for setting up those times when we're really at our best. And that was the launching point for this book. I turned to the research on psychology and neuroscience as well as, you know, physiology, you know, that area, those bodies of work to discover if there's something we know about setting up these conditions for these brief periods of time when we can really be at our best to setting that up at will, setting that up when we need to be. And so the book is about five strategies from research about how we can do that. Great. And can you share a couple of them with us now? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I mentioned one already, which is about learning to recognize your decision points. And there is something about learning to recognize when the brain is capable of really stepping back and seeing the big picture and grabbing those moments in the day. The short of it is we tend to go into autopilot whenever we start a task. And when you're on autopilot, you're not really capable of stepping back and seeing the big picture. But as soon as you get off a task, there's a brief window. It feels uncomfortable, you're extra conscious, you're aware of all the, like, feeling unproductive. You just wanna get onto something else, right? Somebody interrupted you, let's say, and then they finally left. You're like, oh, now I need to get back to work, right? That moment is actually, though, not the time to just jump back into work. That moment is a moment when you're not on autopilot. So you actually are more capable of thinking consciously about what matters. So that's one, it's recognizing your decision points and really leveraging them, because that's how you get to what's important, not just what's urgent. Okay. The second one, and I'll say what, I'll five our first and then go deeper. The second one, so you've got to recognize your decision point. Just to interrupt you for a second. Look at this, my phone is ringing. I don't know who it is, but it's buzzing. Remember I told you that the phone's buzzing? I'm gonna have to change this, I think, because even though it's on silent, it's still like, it's making that buzz. And while we're trying to, right, exactly, even in this moment right now. Yeah. Sometimes I actually, there's one person, one friend of mine who went through, when I changed it completely and I didn't get the ring and I didn't get the buzz, she abused me. She was like, why don't you pick up your damn phone? I've been calling you, blah, blah, blah. Sorry. Well, that's the thing, sometimes what we really do want to be reached, right? It is funny, though, that you and I here, even for these 45 minutes, chose to let our phone sit out on the desk. Yeah, I know, it's right here, it's within arms distance, you know? I've been distracted with damn notifications because every time, ever since I brought up Facebook, I'm gonna close it down now. I'm putting it in the shelf, in the drawer right now. It's insanity, it's insanity. Yeah, I know that I'm not gonna stop and answer the phone right now while we're talking, what's the point in being tempted? I wanna be conscious of time, so let's go through the five and then just an actionable step or two that we can take. You bet, so the five are these, recognize your decision points, learn to manage your mental energy, like know what things actually deplete you and which things don't. You can stop fighting distractions and that'll be a fun one, I'll give you a specific on that in a moment. You can leverage your mind-body connection a lot better, so physical things we can do that actually change how we think and then the workspace that we're in, that we can learn to manage the workspace in such a way that we're actually gonna have a much easier time focusing and some of the things we were just talking about with cell phones I think are really central there, but you know- Let's talk about stop fighting distractions. So what do we do when we're trying to focus and a distraction comes in, what do we do? Yeah, so there's two kinds of distractions, there's the ones that come from somebody else and there's the ones that come internally and when a distraction comes, let's say you're trying to work hard, and you just can't seem to focus, right? What that means is that your brain is functioning properly because attention systems are not designed to keep you focused, they're designed to pick up on what's changing. That's their evolutionary advantage. So we are outfitted with the ability to pick up on what's coming at us. So when we do a very natural thing to do is to either beat yourself up, right? But that doesn't work or just say, all right, I'll take a break, I'll do something fun, I'll check my phone, right? Then you go down the rabbit hole, you've lost a lot of time. There is actually a third option. And the third option is to let your mind wander, right? Your mind is asking to wander, but we try to fight it. We tend to talk about it as a bad thing. At work, people prop themselves up in front of the computer so that nobody will think that they're just kind of daydreaming. But in fact, knowing what I know, if there's somebody on my team who I see daydreaming, I step away and let them do it because I know just how valuable that is. It turns out if you let your mind wander when it's asking to, you leverage a lot of unconscious processing that you otherwise would block from happening. That the unconscious mind is active all the time. It's just putting together patterns. When people mind wander, they come up with more creative solutions. They integrate goal-focused thinking with their social kind of challenges in life. Usually it's one or the other. The goal networks are active or the social processing. When you mind wander, it's one of the only times that they're both active, they integrate, and it helps you plan for the future that minds tend to wander to the future and people work out how they're gonna get there. If you don't mind wander, who miss out on those things? You actually don't do those things. That makes sense, Dr. Davis, but I understand letting your mind wander, but surely you create a time to let your mind wander. Surely if you've got stuff to do in the morning and you're trying to write something, you're trying to do a task, you shouldn't let your mind wander. You should just focus on what you're doing, but then set aside a time to let your mind wander. So there's value in doing that. However, I'm gonna disagree with you on this, which is that if you let your mind wander, let's say you go and you just stare out the window and really wander means that you're not trying to direct it, it just goes where it goes, right? If you let your mind wander, usually what happens is after about three or four minutes, you get bored and then you start your, and you've also done that other kind of thinking, that background processing that I was talking about. So actually when you come back to your task, which is likely to happen because you'll get bored of the mind wandering, you'll be coming back to your task after just a few minutes and you'll be fresher, you'll be much more ready to move ahead. You probably will have come up with some creative solutions about how to move ahead that you would have missed. So in the end, you're more likely to get the good work done more quickly if you let your mind wander when it needs to, because if you don't let it wander and you just try to power through, what tends to happen is that we deplete ourselves or we just give up and get distracted and get on Facebook. So I keep reading science that says that if you go off, like if you are distracted, you allow yourself to distract it, that it takes 20 minutes for your brain to get back into the task that you were originally doing. So how does that work? I mean, as I understand it, the glucose in the brain is sapped so much when you're distracted that it then has to re-energize itself or it has to go into those glucose levels in order to then get back on point. Right, well, so a really minor thing, the glucose story turned out since that point, I had read that stuff at the time also, we've got all the glucose we need in the brain. So it's not because of glucose, but you do run out of energy. We just don't know the exact mechanism, but it is true that it takes a while to get back on task if somebody else interrupts you. But if you're trying to work and your mind is drifting and you're having a hard time staying focused, you will be back to work quicker and doing better work if you just let it wander for a couple of minutes. Okay, all right, cool. I'm gonna try that out. Thank you, Dr. Davis. Super quickly, physical things you can do and manage workspace, but let's literally go bang one thing. We've got one minute to wrap this up. Physical things, exercise for 20 minutes, moderate exercise is one of the most reliable ways to reduce anxiety for the rest of the day. I like it, okay. Yeah, moderate. And then you said managing workspace. Managing your workspace. So as much as I love coffee shops, it's a great place to feel social and they're beautiful places. This, the research is pretty straightforward. Noise makes it everybody perform worse at most tasks that are associated with work. There's a couple of exceptions about some really creative things like creative arts with certain people. But for the most part, noise of any kind and speech is the worst. So find a silent place when you really wanna be awesome. I use binaural beats. I put on YouTube binaural beats and there's something to do with the combination of the beta and waves that give me a greater clarity and focus. Does that sound right to you? So it's not just white noise, but it's something that's meant to activate certain brainwave frequencies, is that the idea? Yes. But you know, there's, I'm not gonna say no. All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Davis. All right, Dr. Josh Davis, the author of Two Awesome Hours, science-based strategies to harness your best time and get your most important work done. I'm assuming that the Two Awesome Hours refers to like we all have two hours in the day that we're at our best and the rest of it we're not. Yeah, so you know, you may end up finding some days you can set up eight awesome hours, but Two Awesome Hours is achievable and reasonable for everybody, just about any day. Where can we find more about you, Dr. Davis? Oh, just hop online, TwoAwesomeHours.com. You can find some more about me. I have a series in Fast Company also. You can Google Josh Davis Fast Company, published in some other places as well, like HBR and such. And the book is available, you know, just about anywhere. It's in a bunch of languages too. So just hop on Amazon, have a look for it. There you go. So check it out, TwoAwesomeHours.com, or you can buy the book in Amazon. So thank you so much for your time, Dr. Davis. I really appreciate that. It's been a fascinating insight into the human brain and distractions. It's been very interesting for me as well. I love the way you brought it home and made it all so concrete. Thank you. No worries at all. And if you're listening to this, send me a tweet or a direct message. You can send me a tweet and tell me how many hours a day do you think you are on your phone? Just give me the answer and I'll have a look and I'll reply. You can also get me on Snapchat at at James Swanik and my Insta stories. Ironically, both I record them from my phone and I'm about to record a Snapchat story with Dr. Davis on an Instagram story, which is also from my phone. There you go. So even I have to curb my cell phone use. Dr. Davis, thank you so much for your time and to the listener, I will catch you on the next one.