Life’s too short to … use a smartphone

Rutger Bregman, author

For years, I told myself I could manage my smartphone use. I tried the usual tricks: switching off notifications, deleting addictive apps, moving icons around, greyscale mode. None of it worked. Without notifications, I just checked more to see if something had happened. When I deleted apps, I used the browser instead. And when I deleted that … I would eventually reinstall everything in a weak moment. (Which usually meant spending even more time on my phone as I had to log in everywhere again.)

It slowly dawned on me that, vis-a-vis the smartphone, we cannot pretend to be fully rational adults with free will. I was addicted, of course. And if a system is designed to hijack your attention, the solution isn’t more heroic self-discipline. Ideally, big tech would be regulated: dopamine taxes, limits on algorithmic addictiveness, the whole package. But until that world exists, I needed a personal version of structural change: parental controls.

So I deleted the addictive apps again, marched over to my wife, and asked her to set a passcode. And crucially, I asked her to block the browser, too. That sounds extreme for many, but it’s the key step. Of course, I kept the useful non-addictive apps such as Maps and Photos, but removed all the infinite-scroll dopamine traps.

The feeling of liberation was … shocking. In the first days, I constantly grabbed my phone out of habit, only to stare at a device that couldn’t give me the sugar hit my brain was expecting. And slowly but surely, the compulsive urge weakened.

I still relapse sometimes. When I need to update apps, my wife temporarily removes the block, and occasionally forgets to put it back. Within days I’ll find – with a mix of shame and fascination – that all the old addictive stuff has somehow found its way back on to my phone. It may sound slightly pathetic to outsource your willpower to your spouse, but until we regulate big tech properly, I genuinely recommend it to anyone who struggles as I did. Life is too short to let your phone win.

Moral Ambition: How to Find Your Purpose by Rutger Bregman is out in paperback on 15 January (Bloomsbury, £10.99); guardianbookshop.com.

… get hangovers

Patrick Grant, business owner and judge on The Great British Sewing Bee

When I turned 30, I noticed hangovers for the first time. I must have had them before, but I hadn’t registered they were annoying until that point. At 40, they got worse. By the time I was 45, they were debilitating. I was getting up in the morning and my brain was foggy and my body felt like mush. Even if I’d only had a couple of glasses, I was waking up feeling way below par.

The final straw was when my friend had a divorce party and there was champagne, cocktails, wine with dinner, then dancing afterwards. I was downing absinthe like it was Lucozade. I ended up having a hangover that lasted from Saturday until Wednesday.

The party was in October, and I decided to give up alcohol until January. November and December in the fashion industry means endless opportunities for serious booze consumption. I went to all the same parties and dealt with everybody raising their eyebrows and trying to foist drinks on me. And I got through the absolute tedium of drinking elderflower, which was the only alternative to alcohol then.

Within a week I felt different. Within a month, I felt considerably different. When I got to January, I felt I had achieved so much more in those two months than I had at any point in the previous 10 years. It was like my brain had been taken out and rinsed and stuck back in my head. So I decided not to start drinking again until Easter, and then my birthday, which is in May. And when I got to May, I thought, I’m just going to stop until after filming Sewing Bee, which was late summer, and then I thought, I might as well just do a year.

By the end of that year I’d actually done all the hard stuff. The difficult bit is trying to work your way through all those social situations in which booze is the baseline: going to a party, pub, dinner, wedding, picnic, summer cricket matches in the sun – all the stuff that in this country is built on booze.

The other difficult thing is the first or second time you hang out with friends who are still drinking, and try to rebuild a way of relating to them that doesn’t involve drink. You learn that, actually, all the funny things can still happen, because everybody else is still drunk. If you go into those situations willing to be carried along on the wave of it all, you can have fun, too.

Eight years on, I have forgotten what hangovers feel like. I’m reminded because my girlfriend occasionally drinks. I am sympathetic, but also inside I think, “I’m so glad this isn’t me.”

… care what people think

Andi Oliver, chef and presenter

I have quit being pressured by external influences, and caring what others think of me. Or you could say, I’ve given up on giving a shit. On the one hand, I’ve always been quite a free person. When I was young, I was in a band with Neneh Cherry called Rip Rig + Panic. We used to feel so free on stage: we’d hurl ourselves around, tuck our dress into our knickers and dance barefoot. We were conscious of not conforming to stereotypical ideas of what beauty is, what body type we should have, how much room you’re allowed to take up as a black woman.

But by the time I was 30, I had a massive nervous breakdown. It had been there in the background, squirrelling away at me all the time: “You’re not quite good enough, you’re a bit too fat, you’re a bit too black, you’re a bit too loud.”

I had to examine where those messages had come from. And the answer was: everywhere. It was in Jackie magazine, where there was never one person who looked like me. I also lived in a racist place in Suffolk in the 1970s. Until I hit this breakdown, I hadn’t understood how deeply these ideas were embedded in me.

So I started to get rid of that stuff. The older I get, the more I get rid of. Now, I live my life pretty free from caring about how other people have decided I am meant to look, how much noise I’m allowed to make, how many opinions I’m allowed to have. It’s wonderfully liberating.

… eat low-fat food

Josie Long, comedian

When I was young, I was trapped in diet culture. I grew up with it, because I was overweight as a child. It sabotaged my relationship with food and my body. I went to a girls’ school, and it wasn’t that we were policing one another so much as constantly criticising and starving ourselves. I treated my body so cruelly and saw food in such a warped way. A lot of people of our generation are survivors of this horrible war on our bodies.

In 2010, I was struggling with disordered eating; I was doing TV and felt under pressure and was critical of my body and myself. And then, that November, I was in a car crash. I was on tour with some friends and we were driving in Wales; we all nearly died. After the accident, we couldn’t believe we’d survived. We were staying with my friend on Barry Island and I went to the local Chinese takeaway and spent as much money as I could there. Then I went to the Spar for a feast of chocolate and prosecco.

From that moment on, I decided: I am here to live, and I am here to live well. So I’m buying butter. My parents bought margarine, which is so gross and bad, and butter is so delicious. Eating it makes me feel like a medieval puritan experiencing the devil’s pleasures. Never again will I drink semi-skimmed milk. Never am I going to eat a low-fat version of anything. I boycott Coke, but I’d never drink a diet cola. And I feel healthier for it. There is nothing sicker for your body than to be in a prolonged state of yearning and compromise. I don’t want to live on my knees eating some processed nonsense when I could have a thick dollop of Greek yoghurt with honey and a walnut on it.

It is a wholesale rebellion against diet culture and the amount of time I wasted hating myself and my body by buying horrible little fake diet treats. Never again am I going to eat two squares of dark chocolate and pretend that is enough. I’m not interested in a parody version of what is good. I want to live a little.

I feel so grateful for the intuitive eating and body positivity movements that have been popularised over the last 10 years. Raising two daughters, what I say to them is that everything is healthy and good if you’re eating it at the right time in the right way. I say, “Your body will get bigger and smaller, and that is normal. You never have to worry about what size you are.” And I am loving my body for them. But also, food is just so nice and I don’t want to eat a rubbish version of it. I want la dolce vita.

… be a people pleaser

Meera Sodha, cook and author

I don’t like the term “people pleaser”. It sounds like sycophancy, constantly flattering others in a desperate attempt to be liked, but that’s not the case. Being a people pleaser means you tend to put others first and yourself to one side. It might seem easier in the short run to be this way – to always say yes and do everything yourself – but in the long run, the only person it hurts is you.

I only found out I was one in later life. The seed was planted after the difficult birth of my daughter Arya in 2017. A therapist asked how things were at home; I said I was finding it really hard: my husband Hugh was doing a fantastic job of keeping the home fires burning, but all I wanted was for him to sit in bed and spend some time with us. “Why don’t you ask him?” the therapist said. This idea of being able to ask for something I wanted or needed, whether a glass of water or a hug, felt totally alien.

A few years later, in 2021, I had a breakdown. I remember waking up and having this overriding feeling of not knowing who I was. I went back to therapy, and on exploring my childhood, I realised I was raised in a culture where the collective was more important than the individual. I wasn’t ever encouraged to have an opinion, and I quickly learned it was much better not to stand up for myself. As a result, I found it hard to articulate what I wanted. Sometimes, I didn’t even know.

No one chooses to become a people pleaser. It’s something that occurs as a result of the environment you grow up in. In our family there were a lot of loud voices, and in the wider Indian community, pressure to be a “good girl”, to do what your elders told you to do, and to serve those around you. It is referred to in the TV sketch show Goodness Gracious Me: you are expected to get good grades and live in a certain way, and it all gets played out between the parents, who compete over what their children have achieved. It’s funny, because it’s true.

The moment I realised I was a people pleaser I wanted to quit, but it’s still a daily endeavour. Now, I will listen to what other people think, then I have to tune in to how I feel and ask myself what I want and turn the volume up on that. It’s not easy, but I am getting better at it and making sure that I’m not existing in somebody else’s ecosystem.

It has definitely changed who I spend time with. I only want to be around people with whom I can be myself and I’ve stepped back from family members and some friends as well, which has been very painful. But quitting people pleasing has been liberating. I feel like there is a before and an after for me. I was living life, largely unconsciously, in service to others. Now, I wake up every day caring much less about what others think. I pursue my own pleasures and feel free enough to express myself – and that is one of life’s greatest feelings.

… intermittently fast

Louise Hazel, Olympian and founder of LA gym Slay

Since my retirement from athletics in 2013, when I was 27, my body has changed massively. I was in peak shape, training twice a day, and burning goodness knows how many calories. I had zero understanding of nutrition and the way my body works, but since opening my gym and qualifying as a personal trainer, I have the education and tools I was lacking as an athlete. It is crazy to think I was competing at world-class level with extremely basic nutritional support.

I remember a competition in Sheffield one weekend and winning the long jump with 6.27m. The night before, I’d got together with friends for fish and chips. I always wonder: if I’d chosen a healthier option, would I have surpassed the 6.50m barrier? The perception of elite athletes is that we eat healthily all the time, but the reality is we struggle with the same challenges as everyone else: how do I stretch my food budget further? How do I manage to cook when I’m exhausted? If I’d had a protein-forward diet as an athlete, there’s no doubt in my mind I would have performed better.

When it comes to my clients, if I am going to guide them with their nutrition, I want to have tested it first. One thing I tried for the first time as a coach was intermittent fasting for two months in 2019. I can honestly say it had the most negative impact on my body and I became “skinny fat”: a slim but soft body. I was not eating until noon. From 6am until 12pm, I trained six clients back to back, and my activity tracker told me I burned 150 calories per client. So by 12pm, that’s 900 calories. Where was that energy coming from if I hadn’t eaten since 7pm the night before? The answer was muscle mass – it was being broken down and used as the primary source of fuel for my work day.

I was becoming weaker. I lacked muscle tone and definition and I increased in body fat mass. This is the piece of the puzzle that most people don’t understand about “weight loss”: when you’re exercising but not fuelling, taking weight-loss drugs or overexercising and not eating enough protein, you reduce your muscle mass and become metabolically worse off.

We need to get away from this culture of what we weigh being the be-all and end-all. Science has moved on, even if doctors haven’t. I tell the women I train to focus on body composition: a healthy ratio of lean muscle mass and body fat. We must detach ourselves from the idea that a lower number on the bathroom scales is best for our physical, mental and emotional health – it is simply not the case.

… drink caffeine

Michael Rosen, author

I don’t think I was addicted to coffee, but I very much enjoyed it. It was part of the routine of my life, and then, in 2020, I just stopped it altogether. Some people are desperate to get off cigarettes, narcotics, or whatever, and they can’t find a way to do it. I don’t have any advice, but I did, as I say, just stop.

It is entirely due to the corruption of my lovely wife that I started drinking caffeine in the first place. Before getting together with Emma at the turn of the century, I drank no tea, no coffee. She found this quite curious, and then made beautiful cups of coffee that lured me in. I thought, “This is brilliant. What have I been doing all my life?” On an average day, I might drink two cups of coffee in the morning and one or two cups of tea in the evening.

Then in 2020, I was in hospital for 12 weeks with Covid-19. Being in hospital is incredibly disrupting to your sleep, because you can doze off in the middle of the day; if you do that, you can’t sleep all night. Then the cleaners come around at 5.30am, so you might not have got to sleep until 1am and find you’ve only slept four hours, and then you doze off again later. It is a weird cycle where maybe two or three sleeps happen.

When I came home, that pattern continued. I was looking online for advice and read that it might help to stop drinking anything with caffeine in it. And so I went full on abstinence from caffeine, whatever that’s called: cee-total? I haven’t drunk a cup of coffee or tea since.

Do I feel better for it? It’s a bit complicated to answer that, because there are various other things going on. I have an enlarged prostate, as a lot of blokes do at the age of 70-plus. So that means your sleep might well be disturbed anyway: you’ve had a good night if you sleep more than four or five hours. So what you try to do with advancing years is eliminate things that might make anything worse. That’s the “science” behind it.

I have secret chats with elderly gents. When blokes get together, we do what Alan Bennett calls the “organ recital” – asking out of the sides of our mouths, “Have you got a prostate problem?” We quickly get on to the subject of sleep and swap notes: how many hours do you get? When do you stop taking liquids? Do you eat anything last thing at night? I quite often chip in with, “No caffeine!” Some people say they couldn’t possibly stop drinking tea – it is always tea, not coffee. “Can’t you? Oh right,” I reply, and the conversation peters out.

I’ve taken to drinking cups of hot water with lemon. The combination of it being good for your voice box and a bit of heat inside you is very vivifying. If I feel tired, instead of a coffee boost I’ll have a nap. At the theatre I rely on being nudged. My offspring and the missus know that at any moment my head might go down, so their elbows are at the ready.

… be on X, formerly Twitter

Lucy Prebble, playwright and screenwriter

Giving up means two things. When we “give up”, we can be taking control, wielding our willpower. It is a strong thing, a hopeful thing, a belief in our future and ability to change. Or it can mean a fatigued crumpling, a relinquishing of hope into bleak acceptance. I can’t any more. I give up.

X (née Twitter) would love that: a simple, shiny, binary idea. Cleaving the world wittily in two. “Isn’t it wild that giving up means two completely opposite things???!!” Wait for the likes, retweets and petty dissections to roll in. So it was last year I did both. I  “gave up” and gave up on X.

It feels embarrassing to eulogise its early days. Elderly millennials lamenting how it used to be “all laughs”. But it did start that way, a free joke machine and a creative notebook, where I playfully scribbled down thoughts and ideas.

When Elon Musk bought it, I shivered, but I’d always had him blocked so my user experience didn’t shift much. And aren’t all tech overlords the same, I thought? Since when did people willingly stay using a company they hate? Work for it, even? Since when did I? We all joked about being trapped in the hellsite, while decorating our cells with excellent points.

It was a small thing – not to those involved, but to me – that finally changed my mind. The rerouting of a bus I was on in 2024 after a stabbing at Leicester Square. I can track my life through buses. A jumble of people thrown together, some always leaving, some always arriving, only gradually getting where they’re going. I was on one during the 7/7 attacks. I remember the panic as the information spread that day, as we disembarked, as I watched the rolling news back home, what could have been, what was. And then with Covid, after lockdown, there was something so disturbing about getting on a bus and seeing, again and again, even in the height of summer, that no one had opened any windows. I’d walk up and down the aisle, leaning over people, confused, apologetic, reaching for the handle. We know how the virus is transmitted. We know.

Inside me, an unpleasant thought began to fester. Without harm being obvious, immediate, or without being forced to, maybe people just don’t … open the windows?

So I began to feel panicky on that bus last year, as an announcement was made about an “incident”. Londoners will be familiar with the mixture of sighs and bag-gathering among this random, temporary community as we glanced around, trying to work out how worried to be. I did the habitual thing when a big event seems to be taking place. I looked down to look up. Burrowing for information, I was faced with tweet after tweet about an Islamic terrorist who had stabbed a girl and a woman in Leicester Square. The tweets were all worded the same, repeated and amplified by dozens of different “news” sources (none I recognised) attempting to go viral. I assumed the story must be based in a grabbed tabloid truth, but then tracked down a BBC piece and found not only was the mentally ill assailant not an Islamic terrorist, but the security guard who disarmed the knifeman and saved the day was Muslim – this fact didn’t just slip by, but was actively repressed.

I felt so sick that day. The violence that had happened, the violence that some now suggested should happen. I cancelled my account. But as days went by, I did miss the access, the community, the glaze of being informed. I decided to set up a blank account. That way I could check in on old faves, not seek followers, but still stay at the boiling frog party. I’m not sure why. In case something cool happened? You know, like a frog boiling to death?

With no followers and not following anyone, here are the first things I was shown on my new X account: bodycam footage of an older American woman dry heaving on to the pavement after discovering the body parts of a murdered homeless man. Then some football stuff. Then a video simply labelled “human waterfall” – CCTV footage of a balcony collapse in which scores of people must have died. Then some footage of women being hit, framed in a jokey way – the joke being that they weren’t expecting to be slapped. It’s like the darkest You’ve Been Framed! of all time. That’s the default. That’s what it was promoting, knowing nothing about me. I closed that account, too.

So I guess I’ve given up. I’ve given myself the illusion of control by rejecting the site designed to give me an illusion of control. Bravo. What a hero. Underneath is a much more profound and destabilising feeling. That, in fact, it’s the opposite of giving up that is required. What’s the opposite of giving up? Taking down? I know it has to be more than finding the perfectly weighted phrase. But if I could, there’s one refrain, one feeling that goes round and round in me through all of this: please, please, let’s open the window.

… miss out rather than go alone

Anita Bhagwandas, beauty writer

Recently, I went to two gigs by myself. Just me, a tepid diet cola, and that slightly awkward shuffle through the crowd to find a vantage point where I – a short-ish person – could see the stage. One gig was in a sticky-floored, insanely hot, sold-out O2 Forum in Kentish Town to see grunge legend Jerry Cantrell, where the riffs were heavy and the 90s nostalgia even heavier. The other was a smaller show, to see rockabilly singer JD McPherson, where I got chatting to some vintage-loving lads on a stag do. I left with my ears ringing and my heart full – not because I’d had anyone to share it with, but because I hadn’t missed out.

The idea of going to a gig alone would have given me palpitations five years ago. Bizarrely, despite this, I spent the early years of my music journalism career going to festivals and gigs on my own to interview artists and review shows. I hated it and felt deeply awkward, but at least I had a job: I was there to work and relay the experience back to an audience. My aloneness had a purpose; I’d scribble notes down in a pad or my Notes app, which gave me a sort of armour.

But to choose to go to a gig alone feels very different. I spent years missing out on artists I wanted to see because I felt there was something faintly tragic about going alone. In 2015, after trying (and failing) to persuade anyone to come with me, I booked a solo ticket to see Scott Weiland in London. But at the last minute, I lost my nerve and didn’t go. A few months later, Scott died – and I’ve regretted missing that chance ever since.

I had the same self-consciousness about booking solo travel. There were so many hurdles to overcome: finding a mate or partner who wanted to go where you did (and feeling responsible for their enjoyment if it wasn’t their first choice); managing to get leave at the same time; having the same budgets and expectations. I’d never considered booking a holiday solo; it felt like a plan gone wrong – a sign you hadn’t managed to find someone to share it with. A loser with a capital L.

But in the last few years, I’ve realised something much more freeing: life is too short to wait around for company. And rather than sad, or lonely, going it alone is brave and dynamic, qualities that are top-notch in a human. I’ve spent too long turning down things I wanted to do, waiting for someone else to validate the plan. Like many people in their 30s and 40s, I’m surrounded by friends whose time is dictated by the rhythm and costs of family life. It means the spontaneous weekends away, the big girls’ trips, the sweaty nights in a crowd, or even the kind of niche trip I like to take (beauty history tours of old apothecaries, a visit to a skull-laden crypt) don’t slot easily into other people’s agendas. And for years, I let that stop me entirely.

But something shifted. Maybe it was a post-lockdown perspective. Maybe I just got tired of looking longingly at Ticketmaster before closing the tab. Whatever it was, I’ve finally stopped waiting. I’ve done a fair few solo trips now: Venice, New York, Bangkok, St Lucia. I’ve eaten alone in restaurants (take a book), wandered through museums (no shame in spending most of your time in the gift shop) and taken myself for long walks with no pressure to make conversation. I’d still rather be with pals or partners, of course. And I definitely get a little bit lonely – but if the choice is going alone or not going at all? I’m choosing me.