why everyone you know is addicted

Hey there,

Everyone you know is addicted to their phone.

And that's exactly why you can't see it on yourself. When literally everyone around you does the same thing, addiction stops looking like addiction and starts looking like normal life.

It's like asking a fish how the water is. The fish goes "what's water?"

And yeah, you're probably reading this on the exact device we're talking about. So let's test it.

The 5 minute test

Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor who studies the science of happiness, has a simple way to check.

Put your phone away for one hour and count how many times you think about it. How often you reflexively reach for it, wonder what's on it, feel that little pull to check.

If it's more than once every 5 minutes, your brain is hooked.

And before you feel bad about that, it's honestly not a weakness thing. Dopamine isn't a pleasure chemical like most people think, it's an anticipation chemical.

Every notification trains your brain to expect a reward, and your phone runs that training hundreds of times a day.

Your brain is working exactly as designed. It just got hijacked.

Why scrolling makes it worse

Here's the part of his research that hit me the most.

Doom scrolling doesn't relax you.

It feels like switching off, but the constant input and the social comparison actually raise your anxiety while you do it. So you're "relaxing" in a way that stresses you out, and the empty feeling afterwards is the proof.

Brooks compares the phone to a bottle of whiskey. A numbing device.

It doesn't solve your boredom or your problems, it just mutes them for a while, and they come back louder.

I know that feeling way too well, because that was pretty much my life three years ago. Hours of scrolling, feeling behind everyone I saw, and telling myself I was just relaxing.

The way out (and it's not what you think)

Brooks says breaking free from any addiction takes three steps.

Getting fed up with it. Interrupting the cycle. And then the one everyone misses: living in a different way.

Not less of the old thing. More of something new.

And that's the part I can confirm from my own life, because I never beat my phone addiction with discipline. I beat it by accident.

I started building a page on the exact same screen I used to escape into, and the hours didn't disappear, they just changed direction.

Consuming became creating. And somewhere in that switch, the numbness went away. Because building gives you back exactly what scrolling takes from you: the feeling that your time turns into something real.

You don't beat the phone by fighting it. You give it a better job.

If you want the way out

That switch became Elevenstoic. Over a million followers, built from the same phone that used to drain me.

And two days ago I released Cinematic Studio V2, where I show you step by step how to make the same switch: building your own faceless brand, on the device you're holding right now, together with 800+ people who already changed direction.

The relaunch price and all bonuses exist until the end of this week. After that, everything goes up for good.

Same phone. Same hours. Different direction.

→ Join Cinematic Studio

Just one life,

Richard
Founder, Elevenstoic

P.S. Try the test today. One hour, count the pulls. And if the number scares you a bit, remember: the fix isn't putting your phone down forever. It's picking it up for a different reason.

P.P.S. If you want to go deeper into the science, here's the full video I found on this: [Your phone addiction is keeping you from achieving flow state | Arthur Brooks]. Worth every minute.