 Of the more than 7 billion people on earth, there are some 2.5 billion smartphone users and the mobile app market tops more than $100 billion a year. With the market that large, app companies have forward hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping people as gripped to their phones for as long as possible. But how do they do that? And how can you escape their clutches? Are we addicted to smartphones? Well, the problem is our devices are designed to keep us engaged. They're intentionally addicting. But if you understand the tricks that grab your attention, you can learn to control your phone instead of having it control you. So how does this addiction work? It starts with notifications. They used to signal when another person was trying to communicate with you, like a friend sending you a text. When you get a call, a text, or a message, it's usually because another person wants to communicate with you. But a lot of today's apps simulate the feeling of that kind of social interaction to get you to spend more time on their platform. Apps like Facebook and Instagram will tell you when friends post, send suggestions for who to friend, or tell you when a lot of friends are going to an event. By doing this, they simulate human interaction and pull you onto their platform. But notifications weren't always this malicious. When they were first introduced for email on BlackBurys back in 2003, they were meant to be a way to check your phone less, not more. If you got a message whenever someone emailed you, you wouldn't have to keep checking your email every hour to see if you got a new message, letting you spend less time on your device. But developers quickly realized how they could use these notifications to use people's time, rather than save it. A perfect example are games like Candy Crush or Clash Royale. In Clash Royale, you battle other people using a choice of 8 cards from a list of about 100, and you get these cards from unlocking time chests. It works the way a lot of free apps work these days. A chest will take 3 or 8 or 12 hours to unlock, and they use these chests to send you constant notifications, trying to get you back on the app. For starters, every time a chest unlocks, every few hours, boom, a notification. On top of that, they have daily and weekly quests that send you their own notifications. And if a friend wants to battle, bam, more notifications. Having the game installed on your phone, you could easily get in the double digits of notifications every day, and that's just from one app. If you replace chests with Harvest Times, you've got Farmville. Replace it with Swipes, and now you've got dating apps. It's a cookie cutter formula, and the specifics can be swapped out for different apps. And these notifications can be personalized with what you're most interested in. An example Android users may be familiar with is the recent rollout of automatic news notifications without having a news app downloaded. At first, they're pretty random, but by seeing which stories you open versus what you swipe off and what stories you read for longer, your phone can quickly learn what you're interested in and provide content that appeals more to you. So if you're into the latest celebrity gossip, you'll start getting stories about that. Financial news mow your speed? Well, you'll get notifications for these stories instead. All personalized to your interests. That's the secret of how these notifications succeed. The average person gets over 45 a day, but you probably didn't notice that. That's because if an app sends you a ton of annoying notifications, you're probably gonna turn them off or even delete the app. And that's no good for the companies that make them. So they play a delicate cat and mouse game, trying to send you as many notifications as possible, keeping you on their platform without sending you so many that you want to do something about it. Games like Clash Royale manage this by having adjusted notifications. If you click on every notification in a day and play a lot, they'll continue to send you notifications throughout the day. But once you swipe off on a few of them, they'll cool off for a while until they think you might be in the mood again. Content libraries like YouTube and Netflix that have treasure troves of content far more than anyone could ever consume have had to master the art of selective recommendations. Apart from push notifications, there are subtle features keeping you glued to your screens. Most apps use these bright contrasting colors to catch your eyes. And many have taken cues on keeping people hooked from casinos, like the use of slot machines to unlock items in games. It's no coincidence that the current fourth top grossing game is literally a slots game. So armed with this knowledge, is there anything you can do to free yourself from the clutches of your phone? Well, for starters, you can turn off notifications that don't come from people. That way, you get pulled into your phone less often. Another thing you can do is grayscale your screen. The easiest way for these apps to attract your eyes attention is through colors. In eye tracking tests, humans tend to gravitate towards these bright and poppy colors. It's also why notification bubbles are often red or blue. The little icon like this or this doesn't have the same impact on your attention as this. So you can neutralize that distracting effect by selecting a grayscale color filter in your phone's accessibility settings. Finally, you can restrict your main screen to everyday tools. Make sure that when you unlock your home screen, it doesn't have anything except the in-the-moment tools that help you live your life. These are things like rideshare services, maps, calendars, and communications. Apps that you can't fall into a bottomless pit of content on for hours at a time. Research shows that people rely on visual cues more than internal cues to stop consuming something. In a 2005 study, individuals who ate soup out of a self-fulfilling bowl ate 73% more than those great out of a normal bowl filled by servers. But those who ate from the self-fulfilling bowls didn't feel any more satisfied. These apps work the same way. YouTube and Reddit never have an endpoint so you can easily get stuck in them. So you want to design your home screen to avoid these distractions. If you liked the video, be sure to let us know in the comment section down below. It really helps the analytics on a smaller channels. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an upload. Have a great day and remember, there is always more to learn.