Your Phone Is Stealing Your Identity

Break the loop or become it

Your eyes flutter open. You try to gauge the time from the early morning light seeping through the blinds. 

It’s still early. 

You unlock your phone and ten people’s social lives invade your head all at the same time. 

Your melatonin drops 30%. 

You’ve got 10 new likes from a story you posted the night before. 

Your dopamine spikes immediately. Your heart rate increases. Your blood pressure rises slightly. 

You swipe up. There’s been another shooting in America. 

Your cortisol jumps 50%

You’ve been awake less than 5 minutes and your hormones are already completely fucked. 

You wander downstairs to smash a coffee.

As sentient humans, we like to think that we’re in charge of our devices. But the truth, as I think many of us are realising, is inverted.

Phones are in charge of us. They are becoming our masters. They dictate the loops that we live inside. 

And it's all very intentional. 

Stanford Medicine has written about how social media’s design - flashing notifications, novel content, infinite scroll, the algorithms, leverage our neural reward system. The design intentionally maximizes engagement, novelty, and social connection to produce dopamine rewards.

Every swipe, every click is wired into the oldest systems in your brain. It’s the same circuitry that makes gambling addictive. The same variable reward schedule that keeps people pumping pound coins into slot machines long after they’ve paid out. That’s what’s in your pocket. That’s what you call a phone.

Over and over, studies show that apps don’t respond to your impulses, they amplify them, until you can’t tell the difference between choice and compulsion. 

Social-media platforms use ‘likes’, complex algorithms and AI-curated feeds to hijack your reward circuits. One study with Chinese university students found that “persuasive design” in your favorite apps correlates with “problematic phone use behaviours.” Another fMRI scan of people receiving likes showed activation in the brain’s reward centre the same way we respond to food or other strong stimuli.

Then there are ‘dark patterns’ - these are interface tricks that nudge you gently without you realising; push notifications, auto-renewed subscriptions you forget to opt out of, apps that reward time-spent. The evidence is everywhere; the design isn’t innocent.

You don’t choose to “just check” Instagram. The loop has already chosen you.

This pattern carves subtle grooves into your brain. Neural pathways reinforced thousands of times a day until they fire automatically. It’s why you want to pull your phone out at red lights. Why you take it to the toilet with you. Why your first thought when something unique happens is to unlock your phone and share it.  

It’s not an accident. It’s a feature.

On top of this, we still call them “phones.” Like they’re just for chatting (lol). But the iPhone in your pocket is more powerful than the computer that first sent man to the moon. It’s not a phone. It’s a supercomputer. A casino, a newsroom, a slot machine, a theatre - all wired into your delicate nervous system.

The obvious, more immediate cost is time. 

Minutes and hours slip by. Six hours a day. Seven. Eight hours a day, gone. Research shows that the average ‘Gen Z’ user will spend somewhere in the region of three and a half months a year staring at their ‘phone’ screen. 

We all intrinsically recognise that that time could have been spent in more productive ways. Nobody with any sense of self awareness reaches the end of a doom-scrolling marathon and feels proud of themselves. 

But the deeper, daily cost happens on a macro level;

• Focus. Early morning phone use cuts deep work capacity by up to 40% for the rest of the day. Your brain never gets out of low-attention mode. It skates the surface of everything.

• Memory. Studies show excessive phone use weakens working memory and the ability to retain information. Why bother remembering when everything lives in your icloud?

• Mood. A 2024 study of college students found that higher mobile phone addiction (MPA) correlates with elevated levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Importantly, anxiety mediates the relationship between depression and phone overuse.

• Presence. You stop noticing things. You film gigs instead of dancing and singing. You scroll on the toilet instead of thinking. You eat dinner with one hand on the fork and one on the feed. You train your brain to fear stillness.

I made some changes in my life a few years ago. I had to. The alternative was almost certainly sitting in some sort of facility. One of the major changes I made was re-adjusting, or ‘reframing’ what my mornings look like. Breaking out of old patterns, old scripts, and building new ones. 

Ancient Indian practices begin the day with water, sun, and breath. The Stoics began with reflection, reminding themselves of mortality and virtue. Even within living memory, mornings meant silence, paper, coffee, stillness.

Suffice to say, I avoid my ‘phone’ for the first hour of the day. This, for the reasons I’ve already discussed, is hugely important. Important in building a long term healthy lifestyle, but more immediately, in building a brilliant day ahead. If you want to have a calm, peaceful productive day, you must have a calm, peaceful productive start to that day. I often like to use the rolling scale prescription;

Imagine your mood on a rolling scale from 1–10. 

(10) being you at your absolute best, (1) being, you want to get in a shopping trolley and roll yourself into the nearest river. 

If you start the day in the right way, with no phone for the first hour (8), a bad event that day might drop you down to a (5), which is manageable. 

But if you start the day the wrong way, scrolling on your phone, with your hormones and nervous system shot to bits (5), the same event collapses you to a (1), or maybe even a (0), which is dangerous territory. 

Attention is a finite resource. We only have so much. If it’s already been used up by the morning doom-scroll, there’s nothing left for the things that matter.

*For a full breakdown of how to structure mornings like this, check out my E-Book HERE.

Identity isn’t just what you wear or how you label yourself. As psychologists remind us, it’s ‘all of the beliefs, ideals, and values that help shape and guide a person’s behavior.’ Or simply: identity is the accumulation of what you notice, what you act on, and what remains in your memory.

Identity is Attention
→ what you notice and return to.
Action
→ what you practice.
Memory
→ what sticks and shapes the next choice.

Identity isn’t a label you put on. But rather, it is the residue of repeated attention. What you feed your mind on most, often becomes the default lens you use to interpret the world.

Our ‘phones’ accelerate that cycle.. 

Cue, swipe, reward. Cue, swipe, reward. 

If you practice that loop daily, as many of us do, it rewires your identity, until that’s just the person you’ve become.

Impatient, performative, externally paced.

Identity = attention × action × memory, on repeat.

Which means every loop matters.
– Scroll outrage, become outraged.
– Scroll envy, become envious.
– Scroll novelty, become restless.
– Scroll nothing, become numb.

Your phone isn’t just stealing your time, it is stealing your autonomy. It is scripting the loops for you. We think we have free will, but really, unless we take decisive action, we are hopelessly stuck in a cycle.

A Cycle Of Disordered Chaos. 

Entropy. The natural drift from order to disorder.
Without effort, everything falls apart. Physics. Rooms. Minds.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it psychic entropy - the mind’s slide into disorder when it isn’t given structure. Our ‘phones’ accelerate that slide. They flood every spare second with noise so you never notice the chaos building.

And entropy erodes more than productivity. It erodes identity. Without focus, there is no story. Without story, there is no self.

That’s why your ‘phone’ habit feels so hollow. 

Because what’s slipping away isn’t just time, it’s you.

protocol

• No phone for the first hour, upon waking. Keep it at the other side of your room, or even better, keep it downstairs and buy an alarm clock.

• One walk a week with no phone. Non-negotiable.  

• If your feed doesn’t make you think deeper or live better, unfollow. Curate with intent. Your feed is your environment - choose what lives there. 

• If you feel yourself reaching for your phone, ask yourself these 3 questions;

- Why am i picking it up?

- Is it necessary?

- What will happen if I don't unlock my phone? 

You don’t need to throw your phone away.

You just need to stop giving it the first and final word on who you are.

Because every scroll is a choice. Every glance is a loop. And every loop changes your identity.

The only question is: do you want your identity to be written by yourself, or by your ‘phone’?

Take Care,

- James