How do I get my students to stop looking at their phones?
We can all use some help to put a little distance between ourselves and our vices. Here鈥檚 something I wrote recently on the topic for as a :
Question: What temptation is hardest for teenagers to resist?
Answer: Cellphones
How do I know? I鈥檝e been studying self-control in adolescence for nearly two decades, and increasingly, my data implicate cellphones as the single most potent temptation in the lives of young people.
Phones are a limitless source of immediate gratification. Finished scrolling through your Instagram feed? You can rewatch an episode of 鈥淭he Office.鈥� Craving something else? There鈥檚 always Snapchat, TikTok, and ... the list goes on.
When pitted against homework and studying, phones are the 鈥渆asy鈥� choice because, to paraphrase Aristotle, the fruits of education are sweet, but the roots are often bitter. In other words, thinking hard about things you don鈥檛 yet understand is not nearly as effortlessly pleasurable as the myriad diversions you have in the palm of your hand.
It鈥檚 impractical to ask teenagers to swear off phones altogether. But it is possible to share evidence-based strategies for outsmarting their smartphones. The trick I like best is also the one most commonly recommended by undergraduates in the classes I鈥檓 teaching this year鈥攚hat scientists call . It involves intentionally changing your physical surroundings to make it easier to resist temptation.
Consider, for example, this data collected from thousands of high school students on . The farther students reported keeping their phones when trying to study, the higher their report card grades (see illustration below).
Of course, . Still, my guess is that the young people in your life have already discovered that their phone is less tempting when it鈥檚 out of sight, out of earshot, and hard to reach. But it may not have occurred to them that they can, as a habit, capitalize on situation modification.
For the middle or high school students in your life, here are suggestions, courtesy of my undergraduates, on how to successfully resist reaching for their phone:
Try ...
... putting your phone in a closet or on another floor.
... downloading the , which blacklists access to websites for a predetermined time period.
... putting the notifications on your computer on 鈥渄o not disturb鈥� and shutting off your phone for 30 minutes at a time.
... turning your phone completely off and putting it in a random bag somewhere. This will especially help when you have a busy day with lots of plans already set out.
... plugging your phone in across the room before getting in bed so you go to sleep without wasting time on your phone.
Angela Duckworth, the founder and CEO of the education nonprofit , is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. You can sign up to receive Tip of the Week or follow Character Lab on Twitter .
