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This is a composite. I’ve changed details and folded a few men together so nobody’s recognisable. The pattern is real, and I see it a lot.
He came to his first session with his phone in his hand. Not in his pocket, in his hand. He put it face down on the arm of the chair when he sat down, and within a couple of minutes he’d turned it over to check it. He said sorry, put it back, and checked it again before I’d finished my next question.
He wasn’t being rude. He ran a business, he had two kids, and his dad wasn’t well. In his head, every buzz could be the one that mattered. He slept with the phone on the pillow next to him and checked it before he opened his eyes in the morning.
He knew all this. He’d read the articles. He’d turned off notifications, deleted apps and put them back. He could explain the whole thing better than I could. Nothing had changed.
What I didn’t do
I didn’t ask him to put it away. When men are asked to do that, they tend to spend the hour thinking about the phone. Instead I asked him what happened right before he picked it up.
He didn’t know. So I asked him to keep talking about his week and to say “now” out loud whenever he reached for it. The first few times he only caught it once the phone was already in his hand. Then he started catching it a second earlier. He said it was nearly always when he’d stopped talking and there was a gap.
That gap turned out to be more useful to look at than the phone.
The gap
I asked him to sit in it on purpose. Stop talking, leave the phone where it was, and see what happened. He held his breath. His jaw went tight and his leg started going. After about twenty seconds he laughed and said, “I don’t like this.”
The phone was the quickest way out of whatever turned up when he stopped. Worry, mostly. Sometimes something closer to anger, which he couldn’t point at anything in particular.
Over the next few sessions, most of the work happened in that gap. He’d stop, put his feet flat on the floor, breathe out slowly, and say what was there. Some days it was “nothing”. Some days it was “I’m worried about my dad”. He didn’t have to fix it. He just had to stay a few breaths longer than he wanted to.
He still uses his phone a lot. He runs a business. But it sleeps in the kitchen now. He told me the first few nights he lay there and didn’t know what to do with his hands.
Next time you reach for it
Next time you reach for your phone without deciding to, stop with it in your hand. Don’t unlock it. Breathe out slowly, then ask yourself what you were feeling about five seconds before you picked it up. Leave the answer where it is for today.
If the breathing part is new to you, I’ve written about why I start with the out-breath.
This is the sort of thing I work on in one-to-one sessions with men. If it sounds familiar, book a free 30-minute discovery call and tell me what’s going on. I do the same work in somatic coaching, which is open to anyone.
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