Preview
  • Smart Phone Dumb Phone

  • Free Yourself from Digital Addiction
  • By: Allen Carr
  • Narrated by: Jot Davies
  • Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (57 ratings)

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Smart Phone Dumb Phone

By: Allen Carr
Narrated by: Jot Davies
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Publisher's summary

Do you pull out your phone at every idle moment? Do hours slip away as you mindlessly scroll? Has your smartphone added a level of detachment between you and the outside world?

Sadly technology which should be a wonderful boon to us has started to blight our lives. The average adult spends nearly 10 hours a day looking at digital screens, leading to unprecedented levels of stress, isolation, procrastination and inertia. The fact is that digital dependence is an addiction and should be treated as such.

Allen Carr's Easyway is a breath of fresh air when it comes to addiction treatment. Tried and tested as an incredibly successful stop-smoking method, its principles have since been applied to other addictions such as alcohol, gambling and caffeine with outstanding results. Here, for the first time, the Easyway method has been used to overcome digital addiction, and it really works!

Smart Phone Dumb Phone rewires our relationship to technology. By unravelling the brainwashing process behind our addictive behaviour, we are freed from dependence and can reassert control over our time and productivity. Including 20 practical steps to help you along your way, this wonderful guide will release you from the clutches of your smartphone and allow you to live in the moment. It truly is the easyway.

©2019 Allen Carr's Easyway (International) Limited (P)2019 Arcturus Digital Limited
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Critic reviews

"The Allen Carr method has helped millions quit smoking. Now its experts are determined to tackle our obsession with digital devices." (Daily Express)

What listeners say about Smart Phone Dumb Phone

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Fantastic.

Stopped immediately. Excellent in helping to reframe the situation and once that’s happened, it’s over.

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1 person found this helpful

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Very helpful in quitting digital addiction (social media, online video games, etc.)

Well written, well read. Has truly made it easy to walk away from addictive use of technology, gaming, etc.

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Excellent

Highly recommend if you not in denial about your phone addiction. Book is beautifully narrated and easy to understand.

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wow...

truly hits the nail on the head. explains me to a"T" great self help book

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Good take on another addiction

I've read Allen Carr's Easy Way to stop gambling and loved it. This book follows the same principles and is a valuable tool for those willing to limit their digital use.

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3 people found this helpful

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This worked to quit cigarettes. How about phones?

I quit smoking about 8 years ago using Alan Carr's Easy Way method (the same method used in this book). I had smoked for 30 years, a pack a day, and had tried literally every way there is to quit smoking. Nothing worked and it was always an incredibly painful struggle. Just unbearable. With Alan Carr's method, it was effortless and completely painless. I never went back.

I have since developed a catastrophic phone addiction. I'll spend 12 hours a day sometimes scrolling through twitter. It's become unbearable and is interfering with my life. I just finished this book and am 100% convinced that it will work just as well as it did for smoking. I'm DONE with my phone addiction! Today is 9/26 and I will come back and update this review so people reading it will understand that this WORKS.

After finishing the book, I was incredibly excited because I absolutely knew that it had worked. Incredible. Alan Carr was a genius. This technique is life-saving. I am so grateful!

And what a bargain! $8 for a way to eliminate 12+ hours a day of COMPLETELY wasted time? Yes, please, and thank you very much!

If you're struggling with "phone addiction," then don't think about it. Buy this book and start reading it. By the time you finish, you will have everything that you need to PERMANENTLY break your addiction and FREE yourself from the prison of "smart phone addiction."

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Genuinely helpful and thought provoking.

Questioning the psychology of addiction, with good reason. Offering a simpler alternative. Quite useful. Highly recommended for everyone, not just addicts.

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Provides a simple but rare understanding.

It’s incredible how totally and effortlessly I was able to change my behaviors upon understanding the book’s premise: that all patterns of addiction result from falsely believing that the negative behavior provides pleasure relative to one’s normal state, when in fact it merely salves the withdrawal/negative feeling which was caused by the behavior itself.

The author calls this “false pleasure,” as opposed to genuine pleasure. Whereas false pleasures leave one feeling worse when they finish engaging in them, genuine pleasures leave one feeling great afterward. The author says that digital addicts engage in junk-use of their phone/[social media]/games in order to feel just as good temporarily as non-addicts feel all the time by default (but without realizing this).

He also points out that certain behaviors provide genuine pleasure within certain boundaries (in short, in contexts where they don’t conflict with one’s long-term priorities), but provide false pleasure outside these boundaries. Thus, clarifying such boundaries is critical to becoming more aware of whether, in any given moment, a given behavior will truly yield pleasure, or just the illusion of pleasure, followed by increased pain (emotional, psychological, or physical). In summary, learning to recognize the dynamic of false pleasures frees one to choose behaviors that they truly feel good about.

When faced with a choice between short-term vs. long-term pleasure, it can be hard to make the wise choice in the moment. But when one realizes that the short-term pleasure option was just an illusion, and that doing that behavior will actually only result in pain (and zero pleasure), there is no longer any real choice to make at all—only sanity compelling one to do what is sane. Author argues why reliance on willpower is a symptom of misunderstanding the dynamic at hand, and I now agree.

Would recommend Allen Carr’s books to anyone who’s interested in understanding how to feel totally free to choose what they feel is best and wisest for themselves, without ever again struggling with their “habits” (addictions) or needing to rely on willpower.

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Interesting analysis of digital addiction

I’d give it overall a 3.5 out of 5. The book tries to apply the methods for cutting smoking and other drugs to digital “junk”, which sometimes works, but often makes it confusing. Because, as he explains in the book, digital devices aren’t always bad or always good, they are good or bad depending on the way they are used, and which apps in particular. I think it could’ve been written better and less tacky, and that it would’ve been better if it was built from scratch, rather than taking the template from Allen Carr’s smoking book. But I did get some good insights on how to quit any addiction, and think it will positively affect my digital use.

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It works if you want it to work.

The book does what it says it does. As long as you want it to work it will.

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