Transcript of Angela Duckworth: Push Those Cell Phones Away

Something as consequential as your major or where you land your first job. And that’s where you choose to keep your phone. Where you physically place your phone just might be one of the most consequential decisions you make. And unlike some decisions, the choice of where you keep your phone is one you get to make over and over again, every hour of every day for the indefinite future.

I’ve spent my career studying grit, goals, self-control, and this research has made one thing abundantly clear. And it may surprise you, because it definitely surprised me. Willpower is overrated. In study after study, psychologists like me have found that achieving what you want out of life has very little to do with forcing yourself to act in one way or another. In fact, if you follow around successful people as they go about their everyday lives, you discover that they rarely rely on inner fortitude to resist temptations in the heat of the moment. Instead, they avoid them altogether.

In other words, successful strivers are exquisitely aware of how the situation shapes their behavior, and they deliberately design their situations in ways that make wise choices easier. Which brings me back to your phone.

The Screen Time Reality

Your generation, Gen Z, is spending more than six hours a day on their phones. If you have a younger brother or sister, the odds are that they’re spending even more time on their screens. Teenagers in the United States are now up to about eight hours a day on screens. That’s 56 hours a week, a full half of their waking lives. If being on a phone were a paid job, we’d be getting overtime.

Now, each time you pick up your phone, you invite a cascade of notifications, messages, and images to hijack your attention. Each time you stare into a screen, you look away from what’s around you. And research suggests that very often you do so reflexively, mindlessly, automatically. In other words, when you pick up your phone, you may be doing so as instinctively as blinking or breathing.

Lessons from High Performers

Ten years ago, when I was researching my book, Grit, I interviewed athletes, artists, CEOs, scientists. They were all at the top of their game. Now, the word grit may make it sound as if these world-class performers just force themselves to do things. But that’s not accurate. They love what they do. And because they love what they do, they create sanctuaries where they cannot be distracted from their craft.

I didn’t interview her for my book, but my mom is one of my very favorite artists. As a painter, she says, it’s nearly impossible to do your best work unless you have, as the writer Virginia Woolf once put it, a room of your own. My mom was in her late 80s when she marched down the hall of her senior living community and knocked on the door of the manager. Could I use the unoccupied apartment one floor below mine, she asked. Why, the manager wondered. Oh, I need a place to work, my mom explained. A room where I can get things messy and not worry about it. And where I won’t be interrupted. The manager’s answer, yes. At the age of 87, my mom got, for the first time in her life, an art studio where she could paint to her heart’s content. A room of her own. And that’s where she paints today.

The Portrait That Changed Everything

Very recently, my mom told me she painted my portrait. It was the largest work she’d done in many years. A canvas five feet tall and six feet wide. When at last she was done, I couldn’t wait to see it. And when I did, I couldn’t believe it. My mom had painted me standing in an art gallery with red, white, and black sculptures in the background as if I, too, were a work of art. A statue frozen in time. But you can’t see my face because I’m hunched forward and looking down. And what am I looking at? What am I staring at so intently that I’m oblivious to all the beauty around me? Some of you have guessed by now. And you’re right. My phone.

When I asked my mom why on earth it was that she chose that particular composition, she said simply, oh, that’s how I see you most of the time. Of course, I rushed to defend myself. I pointed out that when I’m on my phone, I’m not playing Candy Crush or scrolling through TikTok. But then in the middle of justifying my need to pound through work emails, I realized something. The fact that I was using my phone every moment of the day to do work doesn’t make it fine. At least it doesn’t make it fine by me. Because I don’t want to spend my entire life oblivious to what is going on around me.

Something smarter than Willpower: Situation Modification

In my research, people who vow to spend less time on their phones typically rely on willpower to do so. But as I said, relying on willpower to rescue us from digital distractions is downright foolish. So what do we use instead? Something smarter than willpower. Situation modification.

Situation modification means using physical distance to create psychological distance. For example, if you don’t like how your phone grabs your attention, directs your thoughts, triggers your desires, then push it away. On the other hand, if you do want something to take up more of your conscious awareness, art, poetry, a really good novel, keep it close. As close as possible.

The research on situation modification is remarkable. In what’s now known as the brain drain study, researchers found that when taking an IQ test, having your phone within sight, even if it’s face down, lowers your score. While keeping your phone in a bag or in another room raises it. Seeing your phone and then forcing yourself to ignore it saps mental energy, leaving you with less cognitive bandwidth for the task at hand.

My research team has found a very similar pattern. In a nationally representative sample of teenagers, we found that students who keep their phone farther away while studying do better in school. The farther the phone, the higher the GPA.

Adult Pacifiers and Social Connection

And there’s more. Research also shows that when we feel awkward, anxious, or bored, we reach for our phones the way a toddler reaches for a comfort object. In other words, cell phones are effectively adult pacifiers.

Now, here’s what’s really troubling. The research on phones and face to face interaction. The surging popularity of social media since 2004 parallels a striking decline in time spent socializing in person over the same period. Something that I think IPCs know a lot about. In person community. Now, think about that. Text messages, DMs, and emojis displacing moments of rich, nuanced, in person communication. Think about all the things you can’t do when you’re stuck to a screen. Bear hugs, high fives, locking eyes with a future soul mate.

Recently, my colleagues at Stanford completed the largest randomized controlled experiment on social media and emotional health in history. What they found is that paying people to get off Instagram and Facebook for just one month measurably increased their happiness and decreased their anxiety and depression. And consider this. **Phones now give us 24-7 access to chat GPT and other AI chatbots. More and more, people are turning to chatbots for life advice, for companionship, and even for love.** Harvard Business Review, by the way, says that is the number one use now of chatbots. Companionship, advice, and comfort. Affection.

What if the time we spend commuting with digital companions displaces the time we spend with one another? That’s the concern of a terrific young researcher named Dunigan Folk. Dunigan has found that people turn to chatbots when feeling lonely, but those interactions with chatbots may actually increase loneliness in the long term. In other words, chatbots may be the equivalent of social junk food, providing short-term gratification at the cost of long-term nourishment.

Six Practical Strategies for Phone Management

Shaping your situation before your situation shapes you starts simply. And today, you’ve made a start. Sure, I nudged everyone to hand phones to neighbors, but the decision to do so was yours. Here are six ideas for dealing with your phone. Six ways you can use situation modification in your everyday life. See if any of these appeals to you.

Number one, when you need to focus deeply, put your phone in another room. Out of sight is out of mind.

Number two, change your sky to screen ratio. When you’re feeling awkward, anxious, or bored, get up and walk out the door. The blue canopy above, even on this cloudy day, well, it has no marketing department, no fancy algorithm to keep you hooked. But whoa, what an awesome alternative to the glowing blue rectangle in the palm of your hand.

On August 22, 1853, Henry David Thoreau reflected on his two-year experiment of living at Walden Pond. In his journal, he wrote this, “All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick.”

Unfortunately, very few of us are taking Thoreau’s advice. These days, most American adults spend less than one hour a day in the great outdoors. So that’s a sky to screen ratio of about one to six. Only you know your own sky to screen ratio. Only you can change it.

Number three, when you’re having dinner with people you care about, for example, this very evening, you might agree to keep your phones off the table. Ideally, in a zip pocket where your habit of reaching for it will be interrupted.

Number four, when you’re behind the wheel of a car, keep your phone beyond arm’s reach. Each year, distracted driving causes nearly 800,000 accidents, more than 300,000 injuries, more than 3,000 deaths.

Number five, don’t keep your phone in your bedroom. As relationship expert Esther Perel says, if the last thing you stroke before bed and the first thing you caress in the morning is your phone, you are not moving in the right direction.

And finally, number six, when you decide deliberately that you want to listen to something on your phone, look up the Ezra Klein podcast featuring the British author Zadie Smith. When Ezra asks Zadie why she refuses to get a smartphone, she says this, I had one for three months in 2008 when it came out. Other people’s opinions matter to me as I’m sure they matter to everybody. The thought of being exposed to those opinions every second of every day, of having to present my life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a media presentation, I cannot imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be.

Intentionality Over Abstinence

Speaking of relationships, situation modification isn’t about abstinence. It’s about intentionality. It’s about creating space between stimulus and response, between notification and reaction. And it’s about reclaiming your attention.

Here’s something else to consider. At Bates, face-to-face conversations with friends, well, came built into your daily life. You lived together on campus. You studied together, at least sometimes, in LADD. Of course, you ate together in Commons. But starting today, maintaining your friendships will require more deliberate effort. You’ll need to schedule time, travel distances, and prioritize showing up for the people who matter to you. All that becomes infinitely harder when your default response to free time is to dive into your phone.

Now, some of you may be thinking, wait, my phone helps me connect with other people. And that’s true. Phones can connect us to people who are far away. But they can also separate us from the people right in front of us. How many times have you been alone together with a friend, physically present, mentally elsewhere, scrolling through feeds, pretending to listen? How often have I ignored my own mother?

Small acts of situation modification may seem trivial, but they compound over time. That’s what one of my closest friends told her two boys as she removed the flat screen TV from the family living room. Oh, the boys complained, but she reminded them of the Hindu proverb her own mother had passed on to her. You worship what you sit next to.

A Final Challenge

President Jenkins, thank you for permitting this little experiment that we all just carried out together. Now that we know what it feels like to be separated from our phones, it is time to get them back. So take them out. Exchange them, President Jenkins.

Graduates, as you leave the quad today with your hard-earned diploma, walking for one last time beneath this beautiful canopy of trees, the trees that have witnessed generations of Bateses before you, I urge you to make a humble yet powerful vow. Commit to situation modification because this is what mindfulness looks like in the digital age. Not willpower, but the wisdom to shape the situations that shape you.

Oh, one last thing. All of us have a fear of missing out. Surely each of us missed at least one text message, notification, or email during the 17 minutes our neighbor was holding our phone. As for everything in life, there are tradeoffs. When you make your choices, remember what the writer Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Thank you, and go Bobcats.

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