An Experiment in Healing Attention

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Of all the potential effects of using smartphones, the one that seems to inspire the most anxiety is what scrolling could be doing to people’s attention. On social media (ironically), many people express a desire to “heal” their attention spans from the damage they feel technology has done. They’re picking up on something real. In one 2025 study, researchers found that blocking the internet on people’s phones for two weeks led to improvements in sustained attention equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. In this final episode of How to Touch Grass, host Julie Beck embarks on an experiment to see if she can heal her own attention span. Beck and co-host Natalie Brennan also hear from Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, about how Odell’s antagonism for her phone actually helped her make peace with it, and how nature can teach us to pay deeper attention to the world around us.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

[Birds chirping]

Brennan: Julie, attention is one of the biggest things we’ve heard people talk about when they are renegotiating their relationship to their phone.

Beck: Ironically, I feel like every time I go on social media these days, I see someone talking about how they’re trying to heal their attention span from technology that they’re currently using.

Brennan: (Laughs.) Yes.

Beck: And it’s always that word too, heal. It’s like we’re sick or we’re injured, and we must heal.

Brennan: Is it something that you’ve been worried about?

Beck: I do worry about my attention sometimes. Like every time I go to the gym lately, I forget to lock the locker that they have in the locker room. I put my stuff in there; I shut the door.

Brennan: And you don’t lock?

Beck: Then I guess I simply walk away.

Brennan: Huh!

Beck: And I don’t realize until I get back that—I mean, no one has taken my stuff, luckily, so it’s all good. Good Samaritans out there. But that has happened not once, not twice, more than twice. (Laughs.)

Brennan: I guess the way that the attention-span thing comes up for me the most is when I think about the number of hours that I spend on my phone.

Beck: You’re pouring your attention into that phone.

Brennan: Yeah, I see those as very interconnected. But I’ve also noticed that I very actively try not to think about it. I rush to swipe away the screen-time notification every Sunday. Obviously, that anxiety points to the fact that I want to have a different relationship with my phone, right?

Beck: What do you think has stopped you from actively trying to get that screen time down?

Brennan: I think it’s scary to sit with ourselves when we have grown really accustomed to all the stimuli.

Beck: Mmm. Love stimuli.

[Music]

Beck: That’s Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing. When that book came out in 2019, and I remember at the time it was one of the first things I read that really raised a concern about what modern technology and social media were doing specifically to people’s attention. So now it’s seven years later, and I asked Jenny how her thinking has evolved and how she’s doing with her own screen-time habits.

Odell: I mean, I’m … [(Laughs.)] Look, I’m doing great.

Beck: That’s—I’m so happy to hear it. I can’t say the same. (Laughs.)

Odell: I’m okay with my relationship with my phone and screen time.

Beck: So can you walk me through a little bit?

Odell: Yeah. I would say, like, part of the attention economy is the selling of quick fixes when, you know, habits form over time. They’re like grooves, right? Like, they need to be sort of formed over time. And so …

Beck: Like, geologically.

Odell: Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, if you try to, say, go cold turkey, it can be frustrating when you don’t see immediate results.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: Or even within a couple of months, right? And then in that meantime, there’s all this uphill struggle of, like, your friends are still doing it. You need to be on Instagram to see this and that, and there’s just muscle-memory things, things you’re used to. You get up in the morning; you look at your phone. These are just—that’s hard. Like, those things are really ingrained, especially, I think, if you’re younger. I’m good now. But I just wanna stress that it took some time, and in that time there’s a little bit of a leap of faith.

Beck: Yeah. I mean, I deleted TikTok off my phone for the third or fourth time, who’s counting? But like you were saying, the muscle memory of, like, the thumb going up and down, has just transferred to Instagram unfortunately. So we gotta work on that.

Odell: I would say there’s, honestly, you know, I’m almost 40. Actually standing, like, with your very heavy head, like on your neck; when you get older, you start to notice the problems from that, and it’s like that is another kind of physical limit. I can’t sit at a computer for that long without injuring myself.

And then I think I really had to think about my relationship to the news was a really big one that I hadn’t quite figured out. When you’re kind of scrolling, you’re scrolling through it, you’re not really deeply engaging with any one particular issue.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: You’re just seeing a list of bad things, and they’re bad in all different kinds of ways, and they’re terrible. Like, even just sitting with one of those things produces this paralysis. It’s like, in order to do something, you need an orientation toward the future and a situation in which you feel that you have some agency. There are certain things that I have started to do in the last couple years. One of them is volunteering at a native-plant-restoration project every week. I’ve also been going to a lot of repair fairs. Also kind of volunteering-type things that are in person.

Beck: Where you bring like a broken toaster or something—

Odell: Yeah..

Beck: —and learn how to fix it.

Odell: And learn how to fix it. Yeah. Totally. When I’m there, there is no desire to look at my phone. Like, it’s just so far from my mind, and it has this weird lasting effect throughout the week, actually, because I had this experience that was so direct, that was so meaningful.

Beck: And tell me what is the good thing about the repair café, about the, you know, weeding the native plants? Like, what is the good thing?

Odell: I think, you know, some of it is just recognition. I think we as humans, we want to be socially recognized, right? We want to feel seen. We wanna feel heard. We wanna feel welcomed. You know, it’s like Cheers or whatever.

Beck: (Laughs.)

Odell: Like, you wanna walk into a room and have people be like, Hey, it’s you. I know you.I’m happy to see you. This is just kind of like a really basic thing that we want. I kinda think that social media, especially early on, the evil genius of it was that it was hijacking that. And so I feel like these are in-person events. I feel incredibly recognized and acknowledged. And then it’s like, when you feel This is the real thing,

it becomes very obvious what is not the real thing. That’s a big part of it. And I think you’re there. You have a shared project. You’re getting some traction with something, right? Instead of just sort of constantly being washed over with information and not really having anything to grasp onto.

Beck: For most people in this day and age, totally going without a smartphone just isn’t possible, or at least not practical. Like, the infrastructure of society, you know, they’ve got the QR-code menu at the restaurant, the stores are all accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay, and so many websites require you to receive a text and then put the code in to even get in there. So trying to resist getting sucked into your phone just feels like resisting the inevitable sometimes. Have you found a way to resolve this tension for yourself?

Odell: I live in the same society you’re describing, and I just used my phone to pay for lunch before this. But then I put it away.

Beck: Mmm.

Odell: I use the phrase standing apart as a way of kind of not leaving or believing in the fantasy of escape from something, and just sort of being like, I’m standing in a position from which I can see the thing.

Beck: You’re not running away from it or—

Odell: But I have critical distance. And I think about something like food. You know, you go to the grocery store and, I mean, depending on the grocery store you’re in, you kind of understand that 80 percent of the food in it is bad for you. We kinda know that, right? It has been that way long enough.

Beck: Doesn’t stop me from getting the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, but yes. I do know.

Odell: (Laughs.) But it’s just this understanding that that space is just not set up for me to thrive.

Beck: Mm.

Odell: And I think that it’s helpful to maybe transpose that to your phone. What is a phone? A phone is a communication device. What I want from this is communication. The apps, you know, social media in particular, are not designed for you to thrive. They are designed for the opposite. (Laughs.) These are actively bad for me, and I won’t feel good.

For me, it’s sort of a level of acceptance of, like, antagonism has been helpful. Where it’s like, I’m never going to have a peaceful relationship with that universe, and I’m just gonna kind of accept that and take what I need and leave.

Beck: You know, recently I hear so many people, both online and in real life, talking about, “healing their attention spans” from the damage that they feel like technology has done. And I’m curious why, of all the things, you think people are worried about their attention specifically.

Odell: One would hope that what you pay attention to is what is important to you. That’s an ideal situation.

Beck: Not always the case.

Odell: Right, exactly. So if you’re not paying attention to things that are important to you, there’s something, I think, like, deeply unsettling about that on the level of identity because it’s like, Am I even who I am? Right? Am I who I want to be if I’m paying my attention to something that I don’t feel I ever chose?

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: I think it really deeply affects people on the level of, like, self-control and their sort of understanding of their identity.

Beck: Yeah. Well, it seems like the solution that many people have landed on for healing their attention span is just trying to be online less, however they can. So do you think that logging off is the answer, or no?

Odell: I think that the best approach, personally, is to just treat it as an experiment. Honestly, it makes it interesting, like I’m a curious person and I’m curious about myself and my own reaction to things. Kind of being like, Okay, I’m gonna try this. I’m gonna see what happens when I try this.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, immediately after this interview, I really felt the itch to do what Jenny said—to try an experiment. And when I was thinking about how to do that, I remembered this study I had seen from 2025 where researchers blocked the internet on people’s smartphones for two weeks.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: And just doing that, they found that the improvement to people’’ sustained attention was equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline.

Brennan: After two weeks?

Beck: After two weeks.

Brennan: That discrepancy feels huge.

Beck: It’s huge. So I tried the experiment on myself for two weeks. Now, I didn’t perfectly replicate the conditions of the 2025 study, to be clear. They blocked mobile internet using an app called Freedom. I used, instead, this device called a Brick.

Brennan: Huge among my friends.

Beck: Oh, your friends are all into it.

Brennan: Yes.

Beck: Okay, so you know. So I used this device. I picked all the apps I was gonna block, and you have to physically touch your phone to the device to unlock it.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: I tried to, you know, keep all of the things that would allow me to communicate with other people, and so I blocked all games; I blocked all social media, email, Slack, internet browsers, and most internet-connected apps.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: So I blocked all of that for 23 hours a day. I was allowed one hour of non-Bricked time if I needed or wanted it. And I could do whatever I wanted on a computer, same as in the study. It was only the phone that was restricted.

Brennan: And how were you going to test this?

Beck: So I got in touch with someone from that 2025 study, and they shared an attention pre-test with me and a self-report questionnaire. So I took those for a baseline.

Brennan: How long was the test?

Beck: It felt like 1,000 hours.

Brennan: Totally. (Laughs.)

Beck: I think he told me it’s actually, like, eight minutes. (Laughs.) I did both of those things before I started the experiment, and then I took them again at the end of the experiment. And I agreed to record a little audio diary along the way.

[Music]

Brennan: OK, Julie! First check-in. What off the bat did you think you were going to do more of with your time that you didn’t wind up doing?

Beck: Using the phone as a phone, as a communication device. Actually, like, calling my loved ones to catch up, you know, what the phone was invented for. Shout-out Alexander Graham Bell. But I think because I had blocked so much, and I was getting more used to just not having my phone on me and in my hand at all times, I was just thinking about my phone less overall, which was the goal.But I kinda come to think that as much as the distraction of the phone, like, has a cost, there’s also a cost to putting more distance there, because the phone is where the people are.

Brennan: It’s interesting how much our relationship to our phones is intertwined with our relationship to others.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: When we overuse our phones, that isn’t good for our relationships, and the way we use our phones is definitely influenced by other people.

[Music]

Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like, think about it. When do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? Like, the person picks up their phone; what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit, like, lives between people.

Beck: It’s so true, because my friends will, you know, text me TikToks still even though I am trying to get off TikTok. And then if I’m like, Okay, I’ll just watch the, like, Lord of the Rings meme that they sent me, of course my phone prompts me like, Don’t you wanna download TikTok again? And so it is, like, sort of driven by, like, the relationship of wanting to see this meme. But I guess my bigger question is: Is logging off to pay attention to something else in the real world actually better, or is it just different?

Odell: I always think about, like, if you saw someone hiking and looking at their phone, you could be like, That’s so depressing. But then it’s like, what if they’re looking at iNaturalist?

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: And they’re, like, identifying a plant. There are good things on the phone; there are bad things on the phone. There are good things IRL; there are bad things IRL. One thing that you can say is that the sort of quality of attention that one often experiences on the phone with things like social media is pretty narrow versus things off the phone. There are so many different kinds of experience, so many different scales of time, so many different scales of space. I love seeing movies in a movie theater.

Beck: Oh, yeah. Me too.

Odell: I’m like a movie-theater junkie. I love to see horror movies in a theater.

Beck: Oh. Not me.

Odell: So there’s things like that, but then there’s things like looking at a very small bird in your neighborhood, or being at a table with a group of people and being part of a conversation. Like, these are all just so different. Even if you think about your body in those spaces; it’s so different. I think it’s good to have a variety of different contexts for your attention.I think that’s probably healthy.

[Music]

Beck: We’re gonna take a quick break but when we come back: how the way we think about our phones affects the ways we use them.

Brennan: Plus, did Julie fix her attention span? The results of her experiment, coming up.

[Break]

Brennan: Julie, day 7 was midway through your experiment. What started to shift for you by that point? Did the way you think about your phone start to change?

Beck: I think what you learn, or at least what I learned when you block access to almost everything on your phone, is that the phone is not just one thing. There’s a lot of different stuff in there. Like—

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: —you know? I think in our frustration with our attention span sometimes, people, myself included, will demonize the phone as a device. Like, smartphones are evil. Smartphones are sucking our life force, and they’re making us stupid, and that kind of flattens the problem, I think. What kept coming up for me is there’s a lot of different things I turn to my phone for, and some of them are more problematic than others. Like, checking the weather is, uh, very helpful.

Brennan: You made a mistake in blocking that one (Laughs.)

Beck: I did. Like, I realized that actually the first day. But I suppose that is the point of the experiment, right? To figure out which parts of my phone are actually adding to my life and which are taking away from it.

[Music]

Beck: Jenny, have you heard of these devices that block certain apps on your phone? There’s the Freedom app, the Unplug, the Brick device.

Odell: Yeah.

Beck: What do you think of the recent popularity of these things?

Odell: Honestly, I’m all for it. I don’t use any—I’m not trying to brag. I don’t need them. I think they’re great. There’s one in particular that I think is called SocialFocus, and it lets you kind of change the appearance of websites. Like, you could go to YouTube and not see the auto suggestions, for example.

Beck: Mmm.

Odell: Or maybe not see comments. It kind of allows you to change what you see. And I think there was a Chrome extension that came out called News Feed Eradicator. And guess what happened? I stopped going to Facebook. And I didn’t decide to do that. It was because the News Feed is there to keep you on Facebook. So if you eradicate it, replace it with some sort of mindfulness quote, you go to the site; it’s inert. It can’t grab you in that way.

Beck: Hmm.

Odell: And so I just simply stopped going. It was a totally unremarkable thing. I didn’t even tell anyone, Oh, I’m quitting Facebook. I just stopped going to it. And I think that’s really powerful. So that’s why I’m a big fan of anything that can give someone sort of granular control over what the—it sort of reintroduced choice in areas where people have never experienced choice. Because that, in and of itself, will cause someone to reflect upon what it is that they want.

Beck: All of this reminds me of a study I’ve been thinking of a lot lately, that found using an app that was similar to the Brick for two weeks had such a big effect on people’s attention spans that it amounted to, like, reversing 10 years of cognitive decline—

Beck: Oh my God.

Beck: —which seems really huge.

Odell: Wow. That’s incredible. I’m surprised and not surprised. Actually, honestly, this reminds me of, like, ecological restoration because when you restore a site, some things come back quickly and some things don’t, right? Like, you restore a wetland, some species are gonna come back almost immediately. The nutrient cycling of the entire site might take 100 years. Maybe our attention is similar in that, or our behavior, let’s say, it takes a long time to totally overhaul something. But at the same time, I think you might be surprised at how quickly certain things change. Like, in times when I was a little bit more embroiled online and using my phone a lot, and then I would maybe go somewhere, put it away for a while or whatever, I found that after a couple of days, I would notice that my attention felt different.

Beck: Hmm.

Odell: And by attention felt different, I mean I would notice details or small differences in things. It’s almost like having a higher-resolution image or something.

Beck: Are there other seemingly small changes to your routine that you feel like might have that kind of big cognitive benefit?

Odell: You know, I think trying to replace habits with other habits—I meditate in the morning, only just for, like, 10 minutes. I kind of calm down to a level where then it’s not going to as easily occur to me to then pick up my phone, or at least I’ll be a little bit more reflective about it.

Beck: Yeah. My thing so far, my recent thing has been taking up knitting and crochet, and this seems so small, but it’s like now while I’m watching TV, instead of looking at my phone, my hands are in hand jail, right? Doing knitting.

Odell: (Laughs.) Hand jail.

Beck: And it doesn’t seem so virtuous when I’m like, Now I’m only looking at one screen, but I feel like, you know, it’s an improvement.

Odell: I think that’s great.

Beck: Maybe I’ll get down to zero screens, TBD. But the other layer to that that I was just thinking about when it comes to phones and social media and stuff is, like, a lot of times where I’m going to learn how to do this new stitch or whatever is YouTube.

Odell: Mm-hmm.

Beck: So it’s not, you know, one is totally replacing the other, but there is sort of a relationship. Like now I am using that tool kind of for this other thing.

Odell: Yeah. Right, and I think that points to an important distinction, which is maybe a bit more nuanced than just, say, screen time as a statistic. You know, you were asking earlier about my changed relationship to my phone.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Odell: I think about it more as like: When I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool. And it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole.

Beck: Like a portal to the underworld or something.

Odell: Yeah. Or, frankly, I wasn’t even looking at it. I’m already picking it up. Like, I’m already in there. I’m already in that world. There wasn’t even a point where I perceived the phone as an object.

Beck: Yeah. You skipped right ahead.

Odell: Yeah. And now I feel like the things that I use it for: the Merlin app, it’s like Shazam for bird songs, I use that. I use iNaturalist. I use the Constellation app, voice memos for, you know, recording birds. That relationship, to me, feels really different because the intention and the purpose, I feel like I’m in control of that. I mean on my phone, the first home screen is all what I would call observational apps, so camera, voice memo, iNaturalist, Merlin.

Beck: Mm.

Odell: I’m kind of trying to remind myself of how I wanna use the phone. Like, I now associate my phone with those activities.

Beck: You write a lot about nature.

Odell: Yeah.

Beck: Being inspired by nature, how being in nature helps you, you know, pay attention. A common piece of advice for those who have been brain-rotted by the internet is to go touch grass. So are you also telling us to touch grass?

Odell: Yeah, pretty much. And, I mean, the weeds that I weed at my weekly project are grass, so—

Beck: And you’re touching them.

Odell: —actually, I’m saying Kill grass. No, I’m just kidding. (Laughs.) But the reason I think it became such a—that phrase caught on was because it’s just so obviously true. The obvious truth of it is, like, why it’s funny and annoying at the same time.

Beck: Yeah. What is it that you think the natural world has to teach us about attention?

Odell: Complexity, basically. Like, I think it’s a master class in complexity. It is kind of an antidote to the idea of the easy answer, which I think—I really blame Instagram for the oversimplification of political issues.Like, personally, that is just my ax to grind. And the idea that you could sort of absolve yourself by reposting something is just—yeah. It’s upsetting to me. But I think that there’s no easy answers to anything. Like, if you are a birder and you like birds, well, guess what? You’re gonna have to learn about trees.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Odell: And then gonna have to learn about, like, seasons, and then, I don’t know, there’s just—everything is so tied to everything else, and there are so many things that are sort of, like, neither good nor bad or sort of arguable. We need lessons in that right now. Like, we need lessons in the sort of, like, Let me pick a point in space to look at, and then let me look at the context around that. Okay, now let me look at the context around that. And now you’ve sort of widened this whole ecosystem. I think the opposite of that is what happens online.

Beck: So Jenny, if someone is just starting to rethink the relationship they have with their devices, what advice would you give them?

Odell: Try to take an outsider’s perspective on yourself. I’m a big journaler, so I’ve journaled since I was a kid. So that would work for me. I would look at my phone, I would look at some stuff on my phone, and then I would just write down, kinda what it was and then how I felt about it. And I would be, like, brutally honest.

Beck: Oh, man.

Odell: Just pretend like you’re a scientist. And just talk to a friend about it. You could write it down, like, whatever. But, you know, I think there needs to be that, like, every so often you step to the side and you go, Okay, what did I just do? Like, Why did I do that? How did that make me feel? You can be super brief about it. Just do it for a week. Just see what it tells you.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: Before you try to make any changes, because the danger is that a person feels shame, they feel that it’s bad. They’re like, Okay, I need to change this, and then they try really hard to change it, and then it doesn’t go the way they wanted, and then they feel more shame. And now it’s just, like, a spiral.

Beck: Yeah. I think especially with attention for whatever reason, it does feel very shameful, this like, Oh, I can’t focus; I can’t pay attention. I can’t even, like, read a book without having the desire to pick up my phone.

Odell: Yeah. And

people think it means that they’re a bad person, and it doesn’t. You just gotta be patient and try a bunch of different things and maybe it’ll be more interesting than you think.

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, when you set out to go on this experiment you got in touch with one of the researchers from the 2025 study, Kostadin Kushlev from Georgetown University, who agreed to go over the results of your post-experiment attention test with us. And before we call him up, are you nervous about your results, not so nervous about these results? Will it mean less to you if your attention span didn’t change on paper?

Beck: I mean, I guess I’m a little nervous. I mean, look, I am a nerd and I always wanna get an A+ on my projects. But I really do feel better, and if it’s just a placebo effect, well, a placebo effect is still an effect, right? Like, I’ll take it.

Brennan: Okay, I’m gonna dial Kosta up.

[Phone ringing]

Kostadin Kushlev: Hello.

Brennan: Hi, I’m Natalie. I’m Julie’s producer. I’m also gonna be sitting in on this call.

Kushlev: Hi, Natalie.

Beck: Hey, Kosta. It’s Julie. How are you?

Kushlev: Pretty good. How are you doing?

Beck: I’m doing OK! So, can we just dive right in?

Kushlev: Yes.

Beck: And tell me, before I started the experiment, how was my baseline attention span?

Kushlev: So your score was about three, 3.02.

Beck: Is that good? Good for a 35-year-old? Good, bad?

Kushlev: That’s pretty good. Essentially, you did about how our participants did. It’s a little closer to the level you might see in young adulthood or for somebody in their 60s. (Laughs.)

Beck: (Laughs.) Okay. Humbling. Humbling.

Kushlev: Yes. Yes. But, you know, but once we get to your post score—

Beck: Yes, let’s do it.

Kushlev: —things really change.

Beck: The big reveal.

Kushlev: Yes.

Beck: What changed?

Kushlev: So your post score was actually hugely better. So it was 3.8. And that is much bigger improvement than we saw on average in our study. So your improvement is about four to five times bigger than what the average participant in our study gained.

Brennan: Go Julie!

Beck: Write it down, Natalie. Write it down. (Laughs.)

Brennan: I’m taking notes.

Kushlev: Yeah. So you did really well on that.

Beck: Amazing, I think. Is 3.1 to 3.8 good? Have I reversed my cognitive decline? Or how would you characterize that?

Kushlev: You’re basically off the charts.

Beck: (Laughs.)

Kushlev: But it might take a while to reap the benefits of this improved attention.

Beck: Right. And it’ll probably go away if I just start scrolling Instagram again.

Kushlev: Right. Yeah.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Kushlev: It’s certainly not a permanent increase. But I do like to point out that, you know, just taking a two-week break and not even a complete break from your phone, just sort of like reducing your use, can actually improve that ability to sustain attention. Our lives are just like so tied to these devices, so sometimes the question might be: Have we like essentially permanently damaged our, you know—

Beck: Yeah.

Kushlev: —brains? Like, have we changed our neurobiology and so forth? And so this seems to suggest that no, there is a way out. So it might be worth doing some of those digital-detox interventions.

[Music]

Beck: Thank you so much, Kosta. It was great chatting with you!

Kushlev: Alright, thank you, bye.

Brennan: Bye!

Brennan: Julie?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Brennan: How do you feel about that?

Beck: Unbearably smug. No, no, no. I’m just kidding. No, I feel relieved, honestly. Like, even if the true effect size isn’t as big as it seemed, ’cause I am just one person; it’s not, you know, a full scientific study—

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: —it still feels really good to know that it’s possible to improve so quickly.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: So it’s actually kind of wild that you can do something as simple as this and, like, bounce back so quickly.

Brennan: Are you going to keep using the Brick? Like, how are you feeling about—where’s your relationship at between you and your phone right now?

Beck: My relationship with my phone is cordial. We’re not—it’s not warm—

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Beck: —but it’s not cold. We’re cordial. We’re friendly acquaintances.

Brennan: That sounds like how people describe their exes.

Beck: Yeah. And, well, we haven’t broken up. It really is—it’s a situationship—

Brennan: Totally.

Beck: —that is ongoing forever. No, I’m definitely gonna continue using the Brick, and I have been still. Twenty-three hours a day? You know, maybe not.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: I have been Bricking my phone, at a minimum, before bed, so I can’t doom scroll right before I sleep, and I can’t look at my emails or Instagram the second that I regain consciousness. So that does help.

[Music]

But I would say that throughout this, I kept thinking about my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, and one thing that she wrote was, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Brennan: That’s beautiful.

Beck: So this season, I think what I’ve learned is: Your attention is your life. And I think on some level I knew that already, but after this experiment, I’ve really been feeling it.

Brennan: We started this season because we wanted to understand why so many people were feeling the pull to log off, right? We’ve explored a lot of the ways in which the internet can pull you into thoughtless patterns, whether it’s the way Instagram makes us feel bad about our bodies or the way that AI chatbots can send us into an anxious spiral. But it seems like what we are maybe actually looking for, right now, is ways to be more thoughtful.

Beck: Yeah, I wanted to feel more thoughtful about my life. I wanted to not to feel as much like I’m literally giving my life away to things that I don’t even care about. I wanted to stop nickel-and-diming the moments of my life away.

Brennan: Being intentional about where you give your attention.

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this season of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan, with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineers are Rob Smierciak and Miguel Carrascal. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

How To will be back with a new season soon.