My most capable clients are becoming prisoners of their phones – but there is a way out | Modern Mind

The first step is making scrolling a little harder by creating an obstacle, giving your rational brain time to catch up with your impulsive thumb The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work In my clinic, a woman in her early 40s recently described something she called “brain lapse”. She is an academic and sharp as a blade, a voracious reader and someone who has held many tasks front of mind for many years. She told me that now, however, she finds herself struggling to follow a television drama. She loses the thread of conversations with her partner and states that she picks up her phone to check one thing (a single thing, she swears) and emerges 40 minutes later having watched a stranger assemble a complicated recipe from scratch and cried at a video of a dog reuniting with its family after a weather disaster. “I feel like my brain has been replaced with a knock-off,” she said. “It’s like I’m running on low-power mode all the time.” She’s not alone. Across my practice, clients of all ages from teenagers to people in their mid-50s are reporting the same symptoms: reduced memory, shortened attention spans, red