How to Break Up With Your Phone ─ The 30-day Plan to Take Back Your Life

A smart, irreverent guide that draws from addiction and neuroplasticity research to present a concrete action plan for breaking your phone addiction and approaching technology's role in your life more mindfully.

Today, most of us find it hard to get through a meal or even an elevator ride without wanting to pull out our phones. Yet recent studies have shown that spending extended time on our phones affects our ability to form new memories, think deeply, focus, and absorb what we read--and the hormones that are triggered every time we hear our phones buzz both add to our stress levels and are the hallmark signs of addiction. In How to Break Up with Your Phone, science journalist Catherine Price explores the effects that our constant connectivity is having on our brains, bodies, relationships, and society at large. Then, she walks readers through what she calls the "break-up" period, helping them to identify their goals and priorities, tidy their apps, prune their email, and take time away. Lastly, she shows readers how to create new, healthier relationships with their phones and establish habits and routines to make these new relationships stick. In the end, readers will be more mindful not only of how they use their phones, but also about how they choose to spend the moments of their lives.

CATHERINE PRICE is an author and science journalist with a BA in history from Yale University and a master's degree from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She's also a recipient of a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Reporting, a two-time Société de Chimie Industrielle fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, an ASME nominee, a 2013 resident at the Mesa Refuge, a fellow in both the Food and Medical Evidence Boot Camps at the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and winner of the Gobind Behari Lal prize for science writing. Her articles and essays have appeared in Best American Science Writing; New York Times; Popular Science; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; San Francisco Chronicle; Washington Post Magazine; Slate; Parade; Salon; Men's Journal; Self; Mother Jones; and Health magazine, among others.