Downgrade your Phone to Upgrade your Brain (and Butt)

Recently I voluntarily put myself through a type of Hell in the eyes of modern millennials: I gave up my iPhone SE to experiment with downgrading to a “dumb” flip phone. It lasted 4 months and was about as terrible as it sounded, but also humbling and enlightening in many positive ways.

The effects on my attention span, focus, and my butt surprised me. Yes, my butt, and I’ll expand on that later.

My Brain on Smartphones

For 8 years prior to the Great Downgrade (what I’ve begun to call it), I always had a phone that could provide endless distractions along with its main function of calling.

During the early years in the keyboard phone era, my T-Mobile Sidekicks and Blackberry curves were still phones that had advanced texting capabilities, data plans with internet access, maps, and other nifty extras. Quietly developing my Twitter fingers before there even was a Twitter, these phones’ keyboards and trackballs were gearing up my dextrous digits for the “smart” future on the horizon: iPhones. Once the iPhone 4 entered my life with touchscreen glory and fast access to worlds of information, games, and media within my palm, my brain rapidly began to change too. My adapting attention span, physiology, and most likely biochemistry was not able to look back — quite literally.

Studies have strongly demonstrated that smartphones create lethargic thinking, with one even citing that these lazy brain habits spill over into decision making. The research from this study shows that people who go with their gut more in decision making often rely on smartphones more. The analytical and intelligent brain will be more patient in judging and weighing options to reach a conclusion, and is more likely to not use their smartphone for immediate answers. Muscles are small and less useful when needed if you don’t practice using them, and so the brain behaves when we stop flexing it.

Years in to smartphone use, it became obvious that my memory and focus were diminishing. I had no need to remember much information since I could google anything in seconds and summon accurate answers. That movie I would be currently watching with what’s-his-face — let me Google what’s-his-face — ah, yes the answer would be right there! It was Cillian Murphy all along! I like him. Too bad I’ll forget him next time he pops up because I’ve spent no time to commit his name to any significant connections in my brain’s cortex. As these instances occurred with increasing frequency, the time length of these instances would drastically increase too with smartphones encouraging tangents into other distractive thoughts or links. The mobile Facebook or Instagram applications are a perfect example with hordes of information and influence dragging you deeper into the rabbit hole.

Bad Habit Factory

There were obvious and glaring bad habits built from having infinite distractions in my hand:

I often felt my focus was at 50% on discussions or time with friends (they reciprocated from their end with their smartphones in hand too).

What used to be a 5 minute morning poop suddenly became 20–25 minutes of sitting on the toilet checking email, social media, and jumping right into brain stress my butt had to suffer through.

Arguments with my girlfriend suddenly boiled down into nonsensical ping pong of “who can google the most sources that prove any point” instead of meaningful debate with firm stances on a topic. This happened no matter where we were.

Having countless communication platforms among friends frustrated me too. I often would get messages via text, iMessage, Whatsapp, Instagram, email, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and even calls from Facebook Messenger and Skype in addition to FaceTime and normal calls. Over-communicating much?

Social interaction with others became less visceral and intimate. Train rides, dinners, and other classic opportunities for ripe human interaction evolved into awkward, diminutive words between phone sessions, barely a conversation.

My sleep and energy were getting affected by unintentionally staring into my phone for hours in the night instead of reading books or sleeping, which my brain and eyes would naturally prefer.

The rapid fire, hyperlink highway of accessing and delivering information was overwhelming my brain and body without my awareness. The integration and reliance of this access felt inescapable too.

Life normally felt like going somewhere but frequently falling and landing hard, building the muscles to sustain greater falls. Smartphone life gave me an unlimited jetpack to get me places faster, but kept me from ever falling, allowing my legs to wither away from dwindling usage.

The Great Downgrade

There were two major lines of thinking that led me to strongly want a major downgrade to a simple phone. The first was encompassed in all of the reasons above regarding my mood, energy, and general feeling that something was off and my phone perpetuated those issues. The other, was that I never liked the idea of carrying a $500–800 device in my pocket that would catch sweat, get dropped, and was generally quite fragile. This made me worry about my phone all the time since it was such an expensive, powerful device that I heavily relied upon while being extremely vulnerable.

A month before leaving to Asia for a 40 day trip, I downgraded to a $50 LGB470 flip phone and deactivated my retired iPhone SE.

Inside of a week, I noticed drastic adjustments to previous habits. These were extremely rewarding and I welcomed their advancement. The immediate results noticed were:

• The return of the 5 minute poop. No apps or distractions on the toilet outside of doing math on the calculator got me in and out.
• Texting was brief, but extremely meaningful. T9 texting forces you to say only what you need to say
• More tactile memory required — no notes apps, audio recorder, video recording, etc.
• Focused social media use on computers only — no social feed vacuum following me everywhere.
• Learned locations and maps better — memory and real maps required again.
• No multi-tasking within the phone meant I needed specific devices to do specific things.

Wow.

These may seem like small changes, but they were felt immediately. As time went on and I had the additional challenges of traveling through Asia with this phone as a primary device, my brain’s natural mechanics were strengthened even further. Better sleep over weeks and months, manifested into a healthy body ready to take on 3 weeks of 5 hour days doing Muay Thai in a camp on a hot island. With the distraction of a smartphone hampering my sleep and energy, this experience could have been an even greater struggle.

Years of an office chair hugged against my butt, combined with unnaturally prolonged time on the toilet with a smartphone, resulted in a minor hemorrhoid that was a nuisance for years. Within the second month of my minimalist flip phone life, they simply went away. Healthy butt, healthy life, so they say (…or I just made that up).

The greatest benefit of all though, was the combination of all these changes and their increasing benefit on the relationship between my brain and body (and butt!). I was very content and optimistic about continuing the experience with a flip phone as there were a few pain points, and as long as I could call and do simple texts, I had great opportunity to execute the other functions through other means.

Nothing Great Lasts Forever

There was evident pain felt throughout my experience also— Holy buhjeezus texting was damn near impossible! Camera? What camera? Oh you mean that Tonka toy lens attached to the back of the phone. Pulling my phone out when bored could only lead to doing random math in the calculator. The navigational menu should have been renamed the LG Block Labyrinthe. The speaker and call quality sounded like a conversation with Rob Brydon’s small man trapped in a box. Group texts would break my phone, meaning that I would get them individually and they would eventually cause my data to be completely used up from GIFs and images everyone was sending.

That last one eventually became the undoing of my experiment too. I physically couldn’t operate the phone when someone would accidentally include me on a group text despite my begging to keep me off of them. The phone would simply state that it was unable to do any further tasks until I putz around its menus and slowly delete manually all the messages, pictures, and data clogging it up. This made it impossible to continue to utilize the basic features of calling and simple texting, therefore rendering me with no phone.

As soon as it was gaining steam, my minimalistic phone lifestyle was brought to it’s knees, force fed the Kool-aid of a demanding, always-on, complex world, and poisoned until it could no longer stand to live.

Reluctantly I researched other options and found a $70 Huawei Android Ascend XT phone to call my own. It at least satisfied my rule of not having a fragile expensive device vulnerable to constant carrying, but still invited me back to the brain altering black holes provided by smartphones.

With a powerful, traumatic, and enlightening experience still so close in the rearview mirror, it has taught me that I can limit the applications that encourage a lazy brain, and instead use the phone for it’s intended purpose. They were meant as a gift to empower us, but unfortunately the business environment, human instinct, and natural biochemistry of our brains cannot handle this responsibility.

I strongly encourage everyone to give the Great Downgrade a try — your brain will thank you for it immensely.

Whoa. You made it this far down? If you liked this, it would be appreciated if you clicked the green ♡ below to share the love.

I like to learn, just like you:

If this story resonated and you enjoy self-growth, lifestyle experimentation, exploring the world, and learning to build an interesting life, come join LiveDiff.