Phone Addiction Scientist: Doing This Gives You An Hour Back Every Day! | Dr Sahar Yousef

In my early twenties, building a company, finance made me feel like an imposter. But understanding your numbers gives a small business room to pursue its ambitions. I asked Dr. Sahar the big question: what are you trying to change, and why should we care?

I want science education to help people work with their brains and bodies instead of fighting them. We obsess over targets and quarterly goals—the what—but barely teach the how. Kids are rarely shown how attention, sleep, stress, or flow work. Technology is extraordinary, but our relationship with it creates so much friction that people can barely hear their own thoughts.

I asked what that friction feels like: busy, foggy, pulled in every direction, capable of more but unable to access it. I wanted the experience behind the science, and where Sahar’s authority comes from.

I run the Becoming Superhuman Lab and studied cognitive neuroplasticity at UC Berkeley: the brain’s capacity to change. We want less stress, more meaningful output, and stronger attention, memory, and fluid thinking. We joke about becoming superhuman, but first—darling—we need to become human again. I watched an executive make billion-dollar decisions while email, two phones, a watch, walk-bys, and meetings shredded his focus.

That felt painfully familiar. I asked for the first domino: sleep, meditation, the phone? And what about a genuine emergency while everything is switched off?

Start with sleep. If you average five hours and ask me to optimize you, it is like bringing me a burning car and requesting a better engine. Put out the fire first: aim for at least seven hours. Then clean up your digital environment. Your brain remembers what it attends to. Create VIP channels for your partner, key clients, critical people, or specific email terms; let the rest wait.

It landed that productivity software may not be optimized for my productivity. Slack and email enable collaboration, but their incentives can reward my constant checking rather than my best work.

Exactly. I am not anti-technology or anti-collaboration. But apps arrive with defaults designed to keep you interacting. You deserve better than those defaults. Notifications, colors, sounds, vibration: decide deliberately what reaches you, and protect your time and thought from everything else.

I wanted that eighty-twenty clarity: saying no even to good ideas. But distraction is not only a ping coming at us; difficult work can make us reach for the phone ourselves.

The brain wants to solve discomfort—stress, confusion, loneliness, frustration—and avoidance is easier than facing the task. The phone is a cheap, instant escape. Big Tech resembles processed food: intensely stimulating, effortless to access, and unable to satisfy you. Variable rewards keep you hunting; infinite scroll removes the stopping point. Reverse the design: add friction, put the phone away, make the screen grayscale.

When my phone dies, I feel low-grade anxiety, and I can pick it up hundreds of times. The Skittles comparison made sense: I would not carry sweets all day if I were trying not to eat them whenever I felt bored or stressed.

That is portion control. In one lab study, professionals kept phones grayscale for three weeks; average use fell by about an hour a day. Choose richer, longer material over tiny hits. Short-form can leave you hungry, scattered, and alone. Meet the actual needs: learn deeply, see people in real life, eat together, touch grass, have the dinner party.

I asked how to make deep work reliable, especially when AI raises the premium on original thinking. A focus sprint felt like a method, not another vague instruction to try harder.

Schedule the sprint so your body anticipates it and your team knows you are unavailable. Pick one concrete output, not “work on the deck,” then break it into tiny timed moves. Choose one to three MITs—most important tasks—each day that move you toward your long-term Everest. Do not let small admin wins consume the hours when your mind is strongest.

The deathbed exercise made it real. I pictured my partner, children, and the people I love. I wanted them to see achievement, a father worth learning from, and proof that my time improved the world. Suddenly my priorities were not sixty-nine items long. And, yes: fuck the Skittles.

That clarity tells you what to decline. Nobody reaches the end wishing they had scrolled more and spent less time on their mission or people. Make the enormous goal a sequence of small steps—pole, pole, slowly, slowly. Remove obstacles before adding another hack: phone out of sight, notifications quiet, a familiar instrumental playlist, and a countdown timer.

Time allocation feels like the centre of my influence on the planet. Health, relationships, ambition, and impact are downstream of where I put the hours. It is not about squeezing every minute until life is grim; it is about not being blown around by trivia like a plastic bag in the wind. Nearly Katy Perry, apparently.

The point is to give people their time back. After a sprint, scrolling is not a break; it is more cognitive lifting. Nature was the strongest reset in our study, followed by doing nothing; short-form scrolling was worst. Walk, get daylight, make tea with both hands, move. For creative insight, load up on the problem, then walk away.

I protect podcast recordings from early mornings because my seven a.m. self is, frankly, shit. I had treated that as weakness rather than useful information.

Chronotypes matter. Some people think clearest in the morning; many have two daily peaks; a smaller group, like us, shifts later and may be most creative in the afternoon or evening. You cannot always redesign life around biology, but stop pretending attention is identical at every hour. Put hard thinking into the window where you are awake inside.

The warning was bigger than phones. I can hear when a colleague has handed their reasoning to AI: the writing loses their real voice, even when they have better context and judgement than the machine. Outsourcing the hard bit will be incredibly tempting.

Thinking costs energy, so shortcuts are human; no shame. Nor is there shame in feeling hooked by devices built by hundreds of experts to hold attention. Notice where you leak time and build better defaults. My fear is a future divided between people who can still think critically and everyone else passively directed. We need an intentional partnership with machines, not a life where they think for us.

To close, I tried Sahar’s multitasking test. Writing a sentence and numbers separately was quick; alternating between them was a total shit show. I barely got through forty percent of the work in the same time. Context switching is not a talent; it is a hidden tax.

That is switch cost. When you jump tasks, attentional residue comes with you: baggage from the last job before you arrive at the next. Get cognitive closure where you can. Know your Everest, look for the next pedal rather than the podium, and prime your mind for the opportunities you want. Your attention is a focus machine. Be careful what you train it to seek.