Phone Addict? (Start this today)

You can't focus anymore. You sit down to study, to write, to work on something that actually matters, and within two minutes, you're scrolling. You don't even decide to pick up the phone. It just appears in your hands. I know how that feels, and I know that it happens to you. And no matter how many times you put it back down and try again, it's like the focus just won't hold. Now there's a reason this happens, and there's a one-time setup that stops it. I'm Rian Dars. Founder and CEO of FlowState.com. We've trained everyone from Audi, the essential in the US Air Force to use neuroscience-based principles to access FlowStates at will. Now, when you wake up in the morning, what's the first thing you look at? If you're like most, you check your phone within about 15 minutes of your eyes pop and open. For a lot of people, it's within 30 seconds of the eyes popping open. And that single habit of checking your phone that quickly upon waking is blocking your access to FlowState before the day even starts, before you've even woken up properly. Now, FlowState is that state of deep absorption where time disappears, hours go by, in what feel like moments, creativity gets completely unleashed, our focus reaches new heights, and productivity just skyrockets. It's where we get our best work done. And it's probably a state you seek often yet struggle to really access consistently and reliably. The nice news and the good thing I want you to remember is that research shows that were evolutionarily wired for Flow. Our physiology, our brains and body want to drop us into the zone when the conditions are primed for it. The problem is, so often these days, the conditions in our environment and the conditions that our own habits create, impede flow. Mis-timed phone use is one of those conditions. Checking your phone first thing, biologically dismantles the exact neurochemical and attentional conditions that you want to have in play at the beginning of the day in order to be able to access FlowState. And it dismantles those before the day can even begin and get off the ground. You would need a 16-inch pizza just a few minutes before going and knocking out a big 60 or 90-minute workout. In the same way, morning phone use, it doesn't just slow you down, it re-roots your biology away from FlowState before you've even started work. So I want to give you a solve that just works for this once and for all. And it's a fairly simple protocol. I call it flow before phone. And the idea is that you want to get at least three hours of productive flow on your highest-party work landed before you turn on or even touch your phone. Okay, this is the golden rule for Flow. It sounds great in theory, but you've probably tried things like this before. Maybe you've bought those phone blocking devices that you know, you put on the back of your phone, you've downloaded the apps and all that jazz. You probably need your phone to function for the first few hours of the day to get to work by Uber or to use maps or to wake up with your phone as your alarm or maybe you work out early in the morning and you do your workout plan. Some of the other reasons are at some point you end up slipping and checking your phone anyway. You have a lapse in discipline. So how do you actually implement Flow before phone? Well, in training over 15,000 entrepreneurs and executives in Flow, as I mentioned over the last decade, I've only really ever seen one solution that really gets the job done and gets it done permanently. I'm going to break that down for you. The first thing you do is you identify the apps that block Flow the most. And then pretty simple, you use an app blocker that irrevocably, I'm going to come back to that word in a second, that irrevocably blocks these apps during your daily Flow block, which is going to roughly be from waking until you've gotten, you know, three or four hours of high quality time in on your high priority work. So if you wake up at eight, you'll block these apps until about noon. Now, I said I was going to double down on the word irrevocably. You need a blocker that makes it impossible to undo the blocking settings on your phone and to open the app back up in a way that's going to distract you. If you can read down the app, if you can turn your phone on and off, if you can enter a password to unblock them, it will not work. At a behavioral level, if you have any ability to unblock these apps, eventually, trust me, eventually you will. Even if it's tricky, even if you need to go find the password that's written on a piece of paper hidden behind your fridge that's 30 or 40 characters long, I promise you, two, three weeks into this. You'll be rummaging around behind your fridge to find that password and unblock these apps 20 minutes after waking up and the whole thing will fall apart. So at a neurobiological level, there's another reason that we want to have the outblocking be completely irrevocable. Even having the option to unblock these apps means that the brain has to spend energy suppressing the temptation and we need this energy for Flow. So the idea here is that the possibility of engaging a distraction is itself a distraction. Resisting the donuts that are in the fridge, if you're nearby the fridge, doesn't just make you more inclined to go grab the donuts, it actually depletes the cognitive resources that you have. You want to allocate to thing A because part of the resources that you have are mulling over the donuts and tempting you to go to the fridge and engage in thing B, which is shoving those donuts back. So let's get into a little more detail. Which apps do you absolutely have to block for this to work? Well, there's four kinds that are the most insidious to the cognition that you need for Flow. There are the social media apps, there are the messaging apps, news apps, the streaming apps. Social media delivers something called variable reward novelty. The unpredictability of the likes of the posts of the content that you're going to see there is what variable reward novelty is. Maybe it sounds like a good thing, but it's not. Because neurobiologically, this variable reward novelty, it causes these rapid dopamine spikes followed by sharp drops, which end up entraining the brain to seek new stimuli, which biases attention towards scanning and switching across different objects of attention instead of holding attention on one thing in a prolonged way. The opposite of what Flow needs, Flow needs you to sustain and hold your attention on one thing until you're able to release into the Flow State. Now, messaging apps, there's another problem that's slightly distinct that they cause. They push the brain into this constant evaluation mode. They have you asking, oh, is that message urgent? Should I respond? How should I respond? What does this mean? What did they mean by that? Each interaction that you even just see, and if you're not actually going back and forward and responding, activates the prefrontal cortex for decision making. Now, the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that we need to downregulate so we want to have go more offline during Flow. For Flow to Emerge, we want to get what's called transient hypofrontality, which is where this part of the brain actually downregulates. All right, news apps. Why are they so nasty? What they do is they activate threat detection circuits in the brain, which elevates cortisol and neuropneference and shifts you into this hyper-vigilant state that makes Flow much harder to access. Now, streaming, YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, what these do is they provide high dopamine with near zero effort, which flatens motivation for doing tasks that require you to exert effort before you get the reward of dopamine, which trains the brain to expect stimulation without having any corresponding exertion occur in exchange for it. So all these things, they basically perfectly disrupt the exact biological prerequisites that we need dialed in to be able to access Flow. So now that you have that underlying mechanism to understanding, I want to make this nice and easy for you. Before you start thinking that I'm trying to lead you into buying the perfect blocker app here, I want to mention I have no affiliation with this company whatsoever. I've just tested every possible solution and I've trained literally thousands and thousands of people who've also tested all the possible solutions. It's the only one that I found to work. Maybe there's others I'm not aware of them. The app is called Freedom. And honestly, it's actually a little bit of a clunky app. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if it wasn't for this function. However, the reason that I recommend it is because the one thing that's most critical to making this work is the one thing freedom is very good for, which is that it makes the blocking completely irrevocable. You actually cannot undo it. So be warned on that front. You can also download a free checklist of all of these steps for defeating distraction and reclaiming your float state. Just click the link in the description. You can get it immediately. Now here's exactly what to do. Firstly, you want to download freedom. Then you want to create a block list. Your block list is all the stuff that you want to block. And you want to put all the kinds of apps across those four categories that I mentioned above. The messaging, the social, the streaming, the news apps, all of them go on the block list. Okay? And then you're going to start a session. You want to click Recurring and create a recurring session that repeats every day during your focused work block. For me, I run it from 5-AND to new. That's when all this stuff is blocked and my phone is basically a dumb phone, whether I want it to be or not because I can't undo it. What you're going to do is then select your block list so that everything in that block list is blocked during that recurring session. This is the real magic, this next step. The next thing you're going to do and be warned, this is irrevocable. So, you know, I don't need to blame me if you feel unbelievably exasperated that you now can't use these apps during these hours. But again, that's what makes the whole thing actually work. What you're going to do is you're going to turn on two settings, locked mode and uninstall protection. What this does is it stops you from unblocking the apps by entering your password and it stops you from uninstalling freedom or uninstalling the apps and then just re-downloading them without the blocker being on. So, it makes it perfectly irreversible. Bingo, your attention is now your own. You've stolen it back from the attention merchants who are constantly trying to steal your time away from your goals through their sickeningly and aferiously addictive apps. But what if I need to check something during that time you may be thinking, look, humans have only ever had access to these apps for the last 10 years, more or less. If your goals are big and you know you need sustained focus in float to be able to achieve your goals, you can work around it. I even block WhatsApp, which is where I do all my messaging, during those hours. And I work around it. If I really, really need to reach someone, I leave the call setting on on my phone and I call them. And yeah, sure, sometimes I'm traveling and this thing is irrevocably blocked so I can't use my WhatsApp even though I'm going to meet a friend for a flight at 7 a.m. in Japan or something like that. So the hassle is worth it because I save literally hundreds of hours a year to small price to pay for the upside. Now, I want to give you two little bonus protocols to further compound your results here. First, I want you to set up the same block list and the same recurring schedule on the computer that you work from. This way your flow is protected from that device too. Look, the computer is nowhere near as lethal as the phone. All of the addictive UX is designed for the phone, not for the computer. So by the way, another side hack that's quite a good one is to just permanently block social media on your phone with a 24 hour recurring blocker and then just only use social media on your computer. That actually can work really, really well because again, they don't have that crazy slot machine UX on the computer. Instagram is not that fun on a desktop if you ever tried it. Anyway, the next thing I want you to do is set up another irrevocable blocking schedule for nighttime. I know that you struggle a little bit if you're like the vast majority of people with that 90 minute window before bed, you're fatigued, your disciplines down a little bit, maybe even working hard all day. You know what kind of sounds great just click into Instagram or YouTube and just kind of zombie it out for a little while. So many people that we work with, they burn hours and they disrupt their sleep and they go to sleep too late due to unintentional phone use at night. So block all the same categories of apps and have that blocker run for 90 minutes before bed and I promise you you'll sleep deeper and better and you'll save an hour or so every evening as well. One final point of encouragement. I want you to kind of view this protocol as one of the most foundational flow protocols to implement. Optimizing other variables without having protected your attention from the greatest source of distraction in the modern world is kind of like trying to improve your form on bicep curls, getting down to that level of optimization within a workout, yet only eating 15 grams of protein every day and getting all your calories from McDonald's. You want to cut McDonald's and start eating enough protein. Later you can optimize the fine grained elements of your workout protocol and fix your form on your bicep curls. Just land this first. It is the most fundamental peak performance intervention for flow. Trust me. You will have your life changed by this protocol. Just follow the exact steps as outlined. Just use freedom. Do it like this. I've saved you the hassle of figuring out how to do it. Just knock it down and you can tag me later. And if you want to know how to extend your flow states and be in flow state even longer, click this screen and watch the video on here now and it will show you what you can do to access better states of flow now that your distractions are blocked.