Nearly everyone has experienced the diminishing returns of the endless scroll: refreshing social media, swiping on a dating app or trapped in a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
But there’s a way to game your phone usage to break free of this cycle, experts say.
The trick is to divide your mobile phone usage into one ‘kale phone’ loaded with only focus-enhancing, serotonin-stimulating core utility apps and a separate ‘cocaine phone’ loaded with the full dopamine rush of your favorite online distractions.
Cycling between the two phones ‘resets your baseline’ according to social media marketing executive, George Mack, who first proposed the system.
Here’s Mack’s ‘Cocaine-Kale Protocol’:
Nearly everyone has experienced the diminishing returns of the endless scroll: refreshing social media, swiping on a dating app or trapped in a Wikipedia rabbit hole
‘Your Cocaine phone feels too intense after 60 minutes per day,’ as Mack described experience. ‘You start to crave the Kale phone.’
The ‘kale phone’ only has his book-reading Kindle app, a Notes app, and smart phone travel essentials like Uber and Maps. The line itself is for emergencies only, so only a few close contacts even have access to the number.
The ‘cocaine phone’ has everything else one’s heart desires, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and anyone you know has the number.
Mack, chief innovation officer and founder of the digital marketing firm Multiply, is no stranger to the attention-sapping power of 24/7 access to social media. Harnessing all that attention for his clients is literally his career.
‘I get countless DM’s of people who have said this has fixed their smartphone addiction,’ Mack wrote in a Twitter post touting the method.
Mack describes it as the little taken third way between the equally costly solutions of suffering as a ‘phone addict’ or a ‘phoneless luddite.’
‘You either burn out or miss out,’ Mack said.
Practitioners can tailor the technique to their own lifestyle, but Mack restricts his ‘cocaine phone’ usage to only after noon on weekdays and after about 2PM on weekends, so that his mornings are productive while he’s still fresh.
‘I get 90 percent of the upsides of having a phone,’ Mack said, ‘with none of the addiction.’
‘If I want to procrastinate on it, I must read a book or generate ideas in my notes. (Win-Win).’
To the extent there’s some neuroscience to this method, it all comes down to weaning yourself off the dopamine hits that come from incessantly refreshing your feeds, and reinforcing your serotonin creation in your brain’s neural pathways.
Dopamine has been described as the ‘feel-good neurotransmitter’ by the former executive editor of Harvard Women’s Health Watch, Stephanie Watson.
The pleasurable chemical is produced naturally by the brain as a reinforcement mechanism, part of the brain’s reward system.
The problem, of course, is that things like social media use, sugary and fatty foods, and even hard drugs like including heroin or cocaine, can induce the production of powerful hits of dopamine — rewarding the brain for creating bad habits.
Serotonin, on the other hand, the brain chemical associated with happiness, focus and calm is often triggered by working out, as with the ‘runner’s high,’ or exposure to sunlight, as Watson explains on the Harvard Medical School website.
Some studies have shown that extended long-form reading and writing can have a positive impact on the brain’s serotonin production, suggesting that this part of the benefit of the ‘kale phone’ usage.
At least, the system appears to be working for Mack.
‘I still get the optionality that smartphones and social media produce,’ he said of his kale and cocaine phone split. ‘But I don’t consume it 24-7 until my brain melts.’
