The Summer Break series is a short, practical series of episodes inspired by the science of happiness, designed to help you rest, reset, and rediscover happiness throughout July and August.

In this bite-sized Summer Break episode, discover how constant phone use impacts happiness—and learn five quick, science-backed micro-rest moments to help you reset and enjoy your summer. Swap just one phone check for a mindful break and notice the boost in your mood.

Remember, happiness is found in the moments you reclaim for yourself, not in your notifications.

Hello happiness seekers. Welcome to the summer break at the Happiness Challenge.

Summer break is all about short practical episodes inspired of course by the science of happiness to help you rest, reset and rediscover happiness this summer.

Because summer tends to be the season when we want to truly slow down, recover, reorganize, connect with loved ones and overall enjoy our time away from our responsibilities. And today I'm diving into the science of digital detox.

Because ever notice how you instinctively reached out for your phone sometimes without even thinking? Me too. I sometimes even stare at the phone in my hand thinking what I was doing. Why is it in my hand again? What was I checking?

Let's explore what's really happening in our brains and discover five micro rest moments to help our brain feeling like it's on holiday. And also to help us reclaim our time during our summer adventures. Let's dive in. So let's start with some statistics.

It has been estimated that we check our phones approximately every 12 minutes while we are awake. And that simple automatic pick up and check something on the phone adds up to approximately five hours a day of our time. Which is huge.

Now the issue is also that every time we pick up our phone, our brain gets a quick hit of dopamine. The feel good neurotransmitter. Dopamine is often released when we anticipate reward like a new message or a social media like. But here is the catch.

These constant dopamine surges throughout the day can actually numb our brain's reward system system making it harder to feel genuine joy from everyday moments.

So over time this can leave us feeling distracted, restless and less happy overall and I think we all been there and we all been guilty of picking up our phone at the restaurant table rather than enjoying a meal with our family, doom scrolling by the pool or when on the beach, rather than enjoying and swimming, soaking up the sun, concentrating on taking perfect pictures of a nature on a hike rather than engaging in mindful walking. So how do we break the cycle to really enjoy our summer break a little bit more?

So science shows that the micro rest moments, short intentional breaks can help us to do this because they can help us to reset our brain and and boost overall happiness.

That is what we trying to do here is rather than automatically reaching out for our phone, we try to break that habit and instead have a micro rest moment to enjoy the present moment a little bit more. So here are five micro rest moments that you can try instead of picking up your phone.

I tried all of them and I really think they quite practical Easy to do.

It doesn't matter where you are, you can quickly have that micro rest moment and really help you to be more in the present rather than reaching out for your phone. So idea number one, 60 second briefing exercise. So simply closing our eyes and taking five deep breaths.

Focusing on the sensation of our moving in and out. Really tuning how we feel, what we hear, what we taste. Just this moment of a micro rest. Number two, nature glance.

So noticing something beautiful in your environment. A tree, a plant, a cloud, the way the light falls into your room.

Imagine also, and this is where I really love to get more playful, imagine that you are describing that moment for a book, for a novel, let's say. And how would you capture that moment? With words. You can even write it down. You can just have a quick pause and think about it in your head.

But it's just that moment of pausing and almost taking a snapshot of what's happening around us. Number three is a microstretch. Stand up, stretch your arms overhead, roll your shoulders, notice how you feel. Again, quick break.

Especially, especially if like myself, you are sitting quite a lot in front of laptop. This is really a nice way to reset and energize entire body. Number four, Gratitude pause.

Rather than grabbing the phone, why not thinking about one thing that you are grateful for in this moment. Letting yourself to really feel feel that gratitude. And if you are with someone, share that gratitude moment with them.

And final one, idea number five, Mindful sip. So having a cup of tea or coffee or a water and taking a slow mindful sip, paying attention to the taste, temperature and how it really feels.

This one for me is really a game changer at work. Because I often have a cup of tea next to my laptop. And again when I think oh to I have to pick up my phone, I need to check something.

Rather than doing that, I often just take few mindful sips of my favorite tea to really just ground in that moment. So now if you of course want to take this step farther is you can ditch your phone completely. Especially for the key summer experiences.

And this is because results from a series of experiments indicate that even when people are studying successful at maintaining sustained attention and we are good at avoiding the temptation to check the phone, the mere presence of our phone reduces available cognitive capacity.

So even if we sing our phone in our peripheral vision, we are still, or our brain is still thinking about what we could do on the phone, what we want to do. Maybe it reminds us of our to do list. Maybe it reminds us of an unanswered emails.

Maybe it reminds us on the pose that we make and we want to check the engagement. Whatever it is.

The moment our phone is not there we move it away, our brain stops craving it and we having more mental capacity to engage in other activities at hand. And that's definitely another hack that I use. I often hide my phone so I just I don't have it there and I can concentrate on what I'm doing.

So you're there for today. For this week. Try swapping one phone check for a micro rest moment and notice how it impacts your mood.

Happiness actually isn't found in our notifications, it's in the little moments that you reclaim for yourself, especially when you are on holiday. Also, it's really interesting to note that there are several studies that showed the psychological benefit of digital detox.

Often when people are on digital detox away from their devices they report having higher mental well being, higher level of social connection and lower level of fear of missing out. So fomo.

So try to experiment with those micro rest moments, maybe a bit of more digital detox of moving your phone when concentrating on on certain activities. Whatever you feel it's it's useful. But remember this can really give you the break you are after. Thank you again for listening.

I wish you a wonderful summer adventures. I just want to share with you one exciting piece of news.

My book the Alphabet of Happiness is now available for pre orders also via the Guardian Bookshop online and I feel really touched and really honored by this because the Guardian Bookshop doesn't just talk any books according to their tagline they are placed to buy brilliant books. So I am really happy and honored now. If you would like to receive more science based hacks for happier living, join my Substack newsletter.

I'll be sharing some fun summer break exercises so hope to see you there. But in meantime as always, I dare you to be happy. Bye.