Jennifer Aniston is making a conscious effort to put down her phone and live in the moment, as she believes setting those boundaries allows her to stay present both with herself and in her relationships. “I don’t feel like I’m missing out,” she tells Arianna Huffington on the Thrive Global Podcast, in partnership with iHeartRadio and Sleep Number. “I love being able to connect with the people that [I’m] with.”
The actress is particularly sentimental about the time when our phones weren’t embedded into our every move. “If ‘Friends’ were created today, you would have a coffee shop full of people that were just staring into iPhones,” she points out. “There would be no social episodes or conversations.”
Now, Aniston is focusing on prioritizing her happiness by taking more breaks from her devices. “It felt so liberating not to be tied to [my phone],” she recalls, remembering a recent tech-free yoga retreat that first inspired her to embrace more digital detox moments. “I made the decision to put it away and be there… to take a break from it all.”
Other celebrities and thought leaders have also started practicing unplugging for the sake of real-life connection. “MasterChef”‘s Aarón Sánchez, for example, tells Thrive that he has a “strict no-phone policy at the dinner table.”
Professional basketball player Andre Iguodala says that he turns the practice into a game called Phone Stack: “If you touch your phone, you pay for dinner. It draws great engagement. We’re talking about different things, checking in on each other, it sparks great conversation, and it’s a ritual we’ve grown to have that’s really good for us.”
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