Your Attention Is Worth Fighting For.
Your phone was engineered to be addictive. Tips and hacks don’t go deep enough to make a difference. Fight Your Phone offers new tactics to win back what addictive apps have taken from you.
I’m Emmy Laybourne. I spent years working as a creative -- novelist, actor, director, screenwriter, and teacher.
Then I noticed my phone time was sabotaging my energy and my best ideas.
What started as a personal fight became a program, a college course, and a mission to help people reclaim their creativity and well-being.
Phone Fight field trip · day 3
Day 3 is the hardest. So we put the class in an ice bath.
Day 3 is when the Phone Fight gets ugly. The novelty’s gone, the cravings peak, and everyone’s eyeing the exit. So instead of a pep talk, I partnered with Chicago's beautiful new sauna/cold plunge studio Lost Language to give my undergrad students a big treat. The science is real: your phone spkies your dopamine repeatedly and then taxes you for it, so you feel worse the longer you scroll. A cold plunge runs the other direction — pain first, then a long clean wave of clarity and relief. Did it help? See for yourself. (And thanks again to our hosts at Lost Language!)
How I Can Help
The 30-Day Phone Fight
A structured, science-backed online course that guides you to identify the apps hijacking your life and then break free from them -- without giving up your phone.
Speaking & Workshops
I bring the Fight Your Phone framework to universities, organizations, and events. My keynote lectures and day-long workshops are funny, research-driven, and built to change behavior.
Substack
Essays, research, and dispatches from the front lines in all I’m learning. My substack, “Emmy Laybourne Fights Her Phone” is free to read and worth your time.
“My attention is back. It is palpable. Instead of frittering away four or five hours a day on my phone, I am spending my precious, finite time on things I'm truly enjoying and that I'm not going to regret.”
— Steve Pratt, author of Earn It and co-founder of The Midlife Field Guide after doing The 30-Day Phone Fight.