Your Phone Is Ruining Your Memory

Hey there,

Last year, I noticed something weird.

Every time I felt even slightly bored, waiting for coffee to brew or my dog to finish sniffing the same patch of grass, my hand reached for my phone.

I wasn’t thinking about it.

It was just reflex, like my thumb had a PhD in muscle memory and a minor in self-sabotage.

After twenty minutes of scrolling, my eyes would burn, my brain felt dull, and I’d start forgetting what I was doing.

I wondered if it wasn’t just my attention span getting worse, but my memory too.

Because distraction isn’t only stealing our focus.

It is slowly stealing our ability to remember and to be alone with our thoughts.

We used to joke that Google knows everything, but now our phones actually remember everything so that we don’t have to.

Psychologists call it ‘digital amnesia’ or ‘cognitive offloading’.

Every time a device remembers something for us, our brain decides it doesn’t need to.

Efficient, sure, but it also trains your memory to retire early.

A University of Texas study found that simply having your phone visible can lower working memory capacity by up to 10 percent.

So if you walk into a room and forget why you were there, it might not be early-onset dementia.

It might just be your iPhone.

And now we’re outsourcing more than memory.

With AI and tools like ChatGPT, we outsource thinking itself.

We let algorithms write emails, summarize articles, and help us process feelings.

Convenient, but when we stop using the mental muscles of recall and reflection, they weaken.

Efficiency comes at the expense of depth.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to stop treating my phone like a slot machine.

I deleted every social media app from my phone.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, gone. My X account was deleted entirely.

Because “staying informed” had become an excuse to doom-scroll garbage political opinions that did not help me understand anything useful.

I tried screen timers and digital detox apps, but they all failed.

When you are addicted to dopamine, you will find a way around the fence.

So Mel and I started something we call Hide-and-Seek Weekends.

Every Friday night, we literally hide each other’s phones until Sunday.

No texts, no notifications, no temptation.

We go for walks, play with our daughter, and leave our phones behind.

I would rather actually see her laugh than record it for strangers online.

By Sunday night, I feel recharged, clear-headed, and present.

Now, I carry my water bottle more than my phone. (And yes, I lose my water bottle constantly.)

But that is a small price to pay for remembering what my own attention span feels like.

It’s funny, but the less I try to capture moments, the more I actually remember them.

I realized I wasn’t addicted to my phone. I was addicted to dopamine.

The same chemical that fires when you accomplish something meaningful also fires when you scroll, eat junk food, or check notifications.

So instead of trying to remove dopamine, I started to re-source it.

Dopamine is like calories. You can get 500 calories from broccoli or from Reese’s Cups.

Both fill you up, but only one supports your health.

So, I doubled my strength training time each workout and lifted heavier, and I replaced scrolling with reading for an hour a day on Libby.

Those two habits did more for my clarity and memory than any productivity tool.

And the numbers proved it…

My daily phone pickups dropped from 84 to 56, while my average screen time fell from 3 hours 50 minutes to 2 hours 46 minutes.

Most of that time now goes to productivity, finance, and health apps, plus checking my daughter’s room camera, which is really just a more socially acceptable way of staring at a screen.

Training your focus is like training your body.

It takes reps.

Our phones do not just distract us, they rewire how we remember.

In 2017, researchers coined the term ‘The Brain Drain Effect’.

Just having your phone in sight reduces your available cognitive capacity.

It’s one of the reasons you walk into a room and forget what you came for.

Then there is attention residue, the mental fog left after each notification interrupts you.

Every ping leaves a bit of your brain stuck on that unfinished task.

Do that hundreds of times a day and you are basically running a browser with 300 tabs open.

And it gets worse at night.

Blue light suppresses melatonin, which makes it harder for your brain to move memories from short-term to long-term storage.

So when you scroll in bed to “relax,” you are telling your brain, “Forget everything you learned today.”

Here is what helped me break the cycle:

1. Add friction on purpose.
   Delete apps, hide them, or make them annoying to use. Convenience feeds addiction.

2. Separate creation and consumption.
   Use your phone to create. Avoid using it to consume mindlessly.

3. Reclaim boredom.
   Boredom is not the enemy. It is the incubator for memory and creativity.

4. Do a Hide-and-Seek Weekend.
   Hide your phone for 48 hours and see how your attention feels by Sunday.

5. Move your body.
   Exercise improves memory, focus, oxygen flow, and stops you from looking like a goblin hunched over a screen.

Our phones remember everything, and that is exactly why we no longer do.

We hoard digital information we will never use while forgetting the moments that actually matter.

Memory is not about data. Memory is about meaning.

Meaning only exists when we are paying attention.

When you stop outsourcing your focus, you begin to remember the small stuff again…

Your daughter’s laugh.

The smell of your morning coffee.

Where you left your water bottle. (It’s still missing, by the way.)

Your brain is a muscle. It only gets stronger when you use it.

Maybe the real hack is not learning to remember more, but learning to forget less.

To stop outsourcing your life to devices that do not actually live it.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go play hide-and-seek with my phone.

– Scott

P.S. Get more stuff from me (so my wife doesn’t make me go back to a “real” job):

• My podcast

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