Before you start

This is a short book. You can read it in two or three evenings, and I'd rather you read it on paper or on something that doesn't also hold your messages.

It's about one habit. There's a spare moment, in a queue or a lift or the two minutes before a meeting starts, and your phone is in your hand before you've decided anything. You look at the same few things you looked at a quarter of an hour ago. The moment was supposed to be a small rest. You come out of it slightly more tired than you went in, and if you add up a day of those moments you come out of the day the same way.

I'm not going to tell you to get rid of your phone, or to go back to one that only makes calls. A phone is a map, a bank, a camera, a train ticket and the way your family reaches you. Nothing in this book asks you to give any of that up. I'm also not going to tell you that scrolling is rotting your brain. I don't think the evidence says that, and you've heard the lecture before without it changing anything.

What I'll argue is narrower. Using your phone for something and reaching for it for nothing are two different acts that look the same from across the room. The first is mostly fine. The second promises a rest and doesn't deliver one, and it uses up the small empty moments that were doing more for you than you knew. You can learn to tell the two apart, keep the first, and do a lot less of the second.

One caution before we start. This book treats the reach as a habit, because for most people that's what it is. For some people the phone is doing a heavier job. It may be covering low mood, or loneliness, or anxiety that comes up whenever things go quiet. It may be the way into gambling, or spending, or pornography that has got out of hand. Those are different problems from the one in this book, and chapter 13 says where to take them. If you take medication for your mood or for anxiety, nothing here is a reason to stop it or change the dose.

The middle chapters each take one belief that makes the reach seem sensible. "It's a rest." "It's only a minute." "There might be something." "I'm bored." Each one is partly true, and I'll try to give it its due before I argue with it.

Some of the arguments rest on research. The notes at the back say which studies, and how far I think they can be trusted. The rest is my own reasoning, and I'll say so where it matters.