If Phone Addiction, Then Play This Simple Game
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
I've struggled with phone addiction for years now and finally came up with a way to stop the addiction every time within a few minutes. The fun part about it is that it's a game I play with myself. Listen to this episode to learn how to play "The Dope Game" too.
CREDITS:
Podcast Creator: Jordan Taylor
Samuel Smith as the realtor.
Sara Taylor as herself.
TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Jordan Taylor, and welcome to the If then podcast. Our brains our a conglomerate of if/then statements, like in computer code, and oftentimes new lines of code are hard to write in our mind when we’re trying new things. For example, if I want to play piano, then I need to read music. Sitting down and coding that particular if then statement could take years of dedication, but when we do sit down and create new then statements for a complicated if, it feels freaking amazing. This podcast is your weekly motivation, and mine, to get uncomfortable and write some neurological code.
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”—Robert Collier
When I got married and immediately bought my first house, I knew nothing.
Realtor: “Congratulations kids, here’s the keys.”
Jordan: “Thank you sir.”
Realtor: [Walks to car and gets in] “Oh and don’t forget to change the locks.” [Drives off]
Jordan: “Oh right…Alright, Sara, so…should we go to Home Depot or something to get those?”
See I lived with my parents up until then, and I’m ashamed to say just how little I knew. I saved a lot of money that route which helped me out in the long run, but at the cost of not knowing some basic things.
Jordan: “What time is it?”
Sara: "Uh... 6:00PM”
Jordan: “You’ve gotta be kidding me. 4 hours?? Why is this taking so long?”
How do you pay an electric bill, or set up your water?
Sara: “What’s that man doing out front?”
Jordan: “I’m not sure. Is that the water meter, dude? Like the meter reader or whatever?”
Sara: “It looks like it. He’s opening the water meter. Why don’t you go talk to him?”
Jordan: “Ehhh…alright. Sir? SIR?? Hey, what?….sir??? I don’t know, I think he was just reading it.”
Sara: “Jordan, the water’s off.”
Jordan: “Are you serious? We just bought this place today” [BUZZ] "....and there goes the electricity."
Before you ask, yes, that was a true story.
Other things like, what supplies do you need in your house at all times? What insurance should I get? How do I fix a leaky faucet, replace an entire toilet? This was one of the more frustrating times of my life. All at once, tons of if then statements needed to be formed, and fast. Very fast. My home didn’t just depend on it, but my self-image and mental state. I struggled with feelings of inadequacy. I felt like a loser. In a way, I kind of was. Here I was mid-20s, struggling to pay a water bill. To this day, it’s hard to admit that.
Every single day was a day filled with ifs and no thens. Things that should take 10 minutes took me hours of writing and deleting buggy code in my mind before I got to anything even remotely workable—the code not clean, but hey, at least it ran. For now. Kind of. I’d worry about the rest later.
At some point, scrolling the internet was just easier. After all, that was something that was already hardwired in my brain. It gave me immense temporary comfort, but there was a cost. We were living in only one room of our 2,000 square foot house. We were essentially living in a small apartment with unfinished projects piled up in each room of our fixer upper.
Sara: “Jordan the faucet’s been leaking for weeks now.”
Jordan: “I know, I’m gonna do it now, ok?”
Getting up off the couch, I knew that that probe was a four hour if/then trudge. It felt nearly impossible to force myself off my computer to do. I was working off of a cedar chest in the living room that my wife’s grandfather made. A make-ship desk for the time being—it had been too much time though. It felt like an ultra-marathon through the desert to get from that chest to that bathroom, stepping over piles of half-done things, to pick up the tools I didn’t know how to use, to begin to make countless mistakes before the drips stopped—for now at least.
The thing I realized, though, was that once I started working on the project, it was never as bad as it was built up in my mind. Yes, it took me a shameful amount of time to do what seemed like screwing in a lightbulb, but it felt rewarding. It was valuable. It made me feel useful and capable. But even though I knew that, it was still nearly impossible to get off my make shift computer chair—a turned around IKEA couch, facing the wall and cedar chest.
After years of struggling and a lot of wasted time, I developed a trick, more like a game—something I could do to get myself up off the comfy couch, out from under that warm blanket, off my phone, and into an uncomfortable situation to better myself.
I had to convert the pain into a game. I called it The Dope Game. I would start my watch and begin the action of fixing the faucet. As soon as I felt the urge to pick up my phone to get that dopamine rush, I would stop the clock. 5 seconds. And then reset it to 0, and start again. I was amazed with how many times my mind instinctively gravitated to Instagram, the news, youtube. Every time I felt like I “accomplished” something, I would get that urge for the reward of a phone scroll, no matter how pitiful the accomplishment. Get off the couch, urge, clock, 15 seconds. Walk into the bathroom, urge, clock, 12 seconds. Find the right tool, urge, clock, 20 seconds. Assess how to engage tool with faucet, urge, clock—hey, a minute this time. Without fail the clock would extent on a graph up and up, not the smoothest curve mind you, but a curve nonetheless. And by monitoring the addictive behavior, I was able to begin looking at it more objectively. I was able to see, with real numbers, the damage I had programmed into my brain’s reward system. All at once, it was very real. I was outside of the program, actively adjusting the code, desperately rewriting it from my proverbial keyboard, the stop watch. I could see progress as the urges’s spacing increased more and more: 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. I could feel my brain calm, peace abounding even as a demanding problem was reached within the engaged project. What size pipes are these? Are there different sizes of copper pipes? Surely there are. How do you solder? Is that even something I should attempt? At some point, my brain would be so engaged that I completely forgot about the clock until I would wonder what time it was, and looking down, see the timer going—and all at once feeling proud that I had forgot. Soon enough, or not so soon enough, the faucet was fixed.
The Dope Game has been one of the most valuable concepts I have come up with to get myself uncomfortable and write new neurological code. This small effort, repeated daily if need be, is highly effective for one reason. It rewrites buggy code. It’s taught me that before writing new code, new if then statements, I have to first reprogram old, buggy if then statements. If pick up tool, then check phone; if walk down hall, then check phone are terrible pieces of code that I unwittingly wrote along the way. I might have written that same type of code 100 different ways in 100 different scenarios, but The Dope Game is like writing a function within a program that finds all of those faulty if then statements and corrects them automatically without having to individually find each one buried within the brain’s folds. It resets the brain and allows for new useful if thens to be written on a fresh slate.
So I’ll leave you with this, “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”—Robert Collier
Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of the If Then Podcast. If you have feedback you want to give me or if you have anything you want to say, email me at contact@ifthenpodcast.com. And if you would, leave me a 5 star review if you found this podcast valuable. It really helps the podcast to get seen by other people like yourself. We’re almost at 100 on Apple Podcasts and 150 on Spotify. And as an extra bonus, for those of you who help me spread the word, I’ve been giving away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week this May. Last week, Daniel and Sammy won a free credit for an audiobook of their choice + access to their Plus catalog which includes thousands of audiobooks with no credits needed. And if you win this week, don’t worry the gift card is available to you even if you already have an Audible account. All you have to do to enter to win is take a screenshot of this podcast and share it on your Instagram while tagging the account @ifthenpodcast in the post or story. If you shared the last episode, you can also share this one too to be entered to win again. And, also, be sure to follow @ifthenpodcast on Instagram to find out if you’re the winner this week. If we get 100 shares by the end of the month, each of you will be entered to win a pair of AirPods. We’re a third of the way there, so keep sharing! Thank you so much for listening, my name is Jordan Taylor, and what if/then will you write today?
