Who's in Charge — You or Your Phone?

(hissing sound) (clicking sound) (enlightening music) Headspace Studio. (soft music) Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Sahar Yousef here, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday. As you know, this week is all about how to have better focus so you can be more productive and get more out of life. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I've studied all the ways that our phones can be distracting and how they steal our precious attention and energy, especially when we're scrambling to get things done. So today I'm sharing some simple tips on how to improve your relationship with your phone and how to keep your phone as a tool that you use versus a tool that uses you. Our phones have truly been designed to steal your attention and keep you coming back for more, because every single time,, my mind wanders to looking at my email, checking a text message, and then I redirect my attention back to, let's say, my document or the thing that I'm trying to focus on. Guess what? It doesn't come for free. You pay for it. It is simply going to take you, sometimes up to twice as long to get the same amount of work done and you'll be more exhausted by the end of the day if you allow yourself to work in a way where you're allowing yourself to be constantly interrupted. So really taking a hard look at our relationship with these devices is going to be of utmost importance if you do wanna bring your A game to your productivity so that you have more time and energy for your actual life. The number one change that I would recommend as it relates to our notifications and our phones, hurting our productivity? Do an audit. Turn off almost all of your notifications. The only reason a notification should be allowed to actually interrupt your train of thought and interrupt your day is if it has one or both of these qualities. It is more important or more urgent than what you are choosing to do in this moment. You're sitting down in a meeting with your manager. You shouldn't be getting any notifications. Why? Because, presumably, maybe that conversation is what you're choosing to focus in on and that you have deemed as the most important and urgent thing in that moment. You're talking to your kid in that moment. Maybe that is the most important thing that you need to be focusing in on. But honest moment, life is messy. Life is complex. Life is full of fires. So the notifications that come through the filter, the notifications that push through your defenses, those are the ones that are more important or more urgent than what you are doing in that moment. So, for example, maybe it's your kid's school calling. Maybe it's the daycare. Maybe it's your boss, your boss's boss. Go into your Settings, not just for your phone, but also your...