The Blog
Honest, occasionally silly writing about browsing too much, taking breaks, and the small furry creatures who somehow keep us sane.
For years I treated breaks as a moral failing. Then a seventeen-pound tabby named Biscuit started walking across my keyboard at 3 p.m. sharp — and accidentally taught me everything the research already knew.
An octopus genuinely runs eight arms with a kind of distributed intelligence no human nervous system approaches. We open eight apps and call it multitasking. The brain doesn't do parallel attention — it switches, and each switch costs something even when it doesn't feel like it.
Your apps are training you the same way you train a pet. Here's how to reclaim the leash.
Elevators, queues, and waiting rooms used to leave your mind with genuinely nothing to do. Research on mind-wandering and boredom suggests that empty space wasn't wasted time — it was doing real work, and phones quietly deleted it before anyone noticed it was gone.
Corvids famously abandon a reliable meal to investigate something new and shiny. Your browser tab behaviour runs on the same neurochemistry — and knowing that turns out to be more useful than willpower when it comes to changing it.
Your brain has evolved to navigate complex real-world relationships. Social media gives it the signal without the substance.
My backyard squirrel buries acorns she'll never dig up again — most of it isn't food, it's insurance. It turns out my 60 open browser tabs are running on almost the same logic, and research on choice overload explains why each one costs something just by sitting there.
Microsoft published a report in 2015 claiming humans had an 8-second attention span, shorter than a goldfish's 9. It was on the news, in productivity books, and in every tech piece about distraction. It was also based on nothing. Here's what's actually happening instead.
My snake sheds her entire skin every few months and comes out looking brand new, even though nothing underneath actually changed. Research on the 'fresh start effect' says humans do something similar with Mondays and New Year's — and explains why waiting for the next one can backfire.
FOMO isn't just a mood — it's a measurable psychological pattern with a validated scale and a documented cause behind it. Here's what the actual research found, and why understanding the cause points at a different fix than "just check less."
Dopamine isn't the pleasure chemical checking your phone gives you — it's the anticipation chemical that gets you reaching for it in the first place. A look at the neuroscience of wanting versus liking, and why it explains the urge better than the payoff ever does.
A phone doesn't have to buzz, light up, or even be touched to change a conversation. Research on 'phubbing' and the mere presence of a phone suggests the device on the table is doing quiet work on the people sitting across from you.
My betta fish attacks his own reflection because he genuinely cannot tell a rival from a mirror. It turns out my brain has almost the same blind spot every time a feed puts someone else's highlight reel in front of me.
My hamster runs herself exhausted every night and ends up exactly where she started. It turns out my scrolling works on the same principle — and the psychology of the hedonic treadmill explains why the same twenty minutes stopped feeling like enough.
A wall you can't get past doesn't remove the urge to get past it — it just adds resentment on top. Reactance research and the 'white bear' studies explain why a visible override button often makes a limit easier to keep, not easier to break.
Blocking a site removes the door, but not the habit loop wired to reach for the doorknob. Here's what habit research actually says about why blockers get uninstalled, and why interrupting with friction works better than denying access outright.
"No screens before bed" is right, but the reason is usually explained badly. There are two separate mechanisms working against your sleep at once — and night mode, which most people treat as the fix, only touches one of them.
Skinner's pigeons kept pecking long after the food stopped, because the reward had always been unpredictable. Feeds run on the exact same schedule — and understanding why explains a lot about why 'just put the phone down' never quite works.
Students studying at home last less than six minutes, on average, before switching to a phone. The real cost isn't the minute you lose — it's what happens to your focus after you come back. Here's what the research actually says.
The default 30-minute limit and 5-minute break are a reasonable starting guess, not a rule. Here's how to actually calibrate both numbers to your real habits, with different starting points for remote workers, students, and late-night scrollers.
Most of what buzzes your phone isn't a person who needs you. It's an algorithm that needs your attention back. Here's how to tell the two apart, and a practical audit for cutting the ones that aren't earning their keep.
Your brain spends its first waking minutes in a uniquely unguarded state, still shaking off sleep and forming the cues that will shape the rest of the day. Handing it a phone during that window may be one of the costliest habits nobody warns you about.
A cockatiel who screams the exact moment I open a social app taught me, against my will, that doomscrolling was never a discipline problem. It was a design problem — and design problems need external fixes, not more willpower.
Screen-time extensions mostly fall into four camps: blockers, trackers, gamified timers, and gentle interrupters. Here's what each one is actually good at, and how to tell which kind will survive contact with your real habits.
Rabbits don't do subtlety. Mine trained me out of late-night scrolling by thumping the floor until I put the phone down — and it turns out his method lines up with what sleep researchers have been saying for years.
I didn't download a productivity system. I adopted a beagle mix named Pixel who refuses to understand "just one more email." Here's what a dog knows about boundaries that I, a grown adult, did not.
But the real thing is better. Add My Pet Gatekeeper and let your own pet handle the reminding.
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