Real stories, told by real people.
[This is part 1 of an hour long conversation]
We're back!! And this time Kyle joins us to talk about CELL PHONE ADDICTION. The depression, and despair of no longer being in control of oneself is something I think a lot of us can relate to. Kyle shares his struggle with depression, a lack of self esteem, and addiction. But, his story doesn't stop there. He also offers hope, and speaks about his motivation to want to reclaim his livelihood and the steps he took to make it happen.
Kyle's services include : Life Coaching, Health Coaching, Digital Minimalism, and Career Coaching.
You can connect with Kyle for one on one coaching, or to find out more of what he does at https://www.level10lifecoach.com/
"From time and stress management to diet and nutrition to quitting a bad habit, we help you level up your life!" - Level 10 Life Coaching
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Connect With Giants Amongst Us :
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Now, here's a little story I got to tell.
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We're back at it.
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And this time around, Kyle joins us.
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And he's going to be speaking about cell phone addiction.
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How many of you can think of a time in your life when things seem to be spiraling out
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of control, when you were losing grip on reality and it all seemed to be slipping away?
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Kyle shares some of those struggles with us today.
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The depression, a lack of self-esteem, and addiction.
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But his story doesn't stop there because after every rainy day, there's sure to be
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a little sunshine that follows.
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Kyle, he offers that ray of light and speaks about his motivation to want to reclaim his
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livelihood and the steps he took to make it happen.
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This is part one of a two-part conversation.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is Kyle and his story.
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Mr. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us.
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You're welcome.
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You're welcome.
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Glad to be here.
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Give us a little rundown and background of where you come from and how it was growing
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up in your neck of the woods.
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Yeah, so I was born and raised in Northern Utah to a large family.
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I've got five sisters.
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I'm the only boy.
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It was a lot of fun growing up.
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We didn't grow up wealthy.
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We didn't grow up poor.
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We had enough for what we were doing and not much more than that, but it was a really,
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really good childhood.
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I grew up just running around the neighborhood with all the other kids, very normal childhood,
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but my story starts in probably high school, 10th, 11th grade.
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I heard something once and I adopted it for a couple years and it was a little saying,
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that saying was life sucks, then you die.
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Have a dark thing looking back on it, not the greatest thing to live by, not a lot of
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hope in that statement, but that definitely goes back to-
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It certainly isn't.
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The glass isn't full.
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No.
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Going back through all my memories, that's where my story really starts.
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They're going to fast forward a couple years and get into my early career choices, I guess.
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I always thought it would be cool to fly planes.
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I was like, I'm going to go explore a little bit and if all else fails, I'll come back
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and be a pilot.
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I did some cool jobs that didn't end up turning into anything and then I came back and said,
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okay, well, I guess I want to be a pilot, how am I going to make that work?
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Flight school is not cheap, I'm not rich, let's go work at a cheese factory and make
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some money.
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Working at the cheese factory was the only way I could make flight school work and it
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just so happened, the only shifts they had open were night shift.
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This is where the life sucks, then you die, really hit hard.
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Work night shift for four and a half years at that company and it kind of broke me.
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Yeah, so this was, let's see, started working there in 2017, 2018, got my pilot's license
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by private license, kept working on all my ratings and stuff like that and then COVID
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hit.
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So you were going to school during the day at that time?
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Yeah, so I'd go fly two or three days a week for a couple hours at a time and then do all
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my ground studies and all that kind of thing.
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During the day, I have a couple hours to sleep in the afternoon, work all night long, 12
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hour shifts.
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You were grinding.
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Yeah, it was a grind for a good three and a half out of those five years that I worked
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at that company.
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Anyways, COVID hit and we were on a cruise, the whole family, big, first time everybody
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had been on a cruise together.
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It was March of 2020 and we were the very last cruise ship to go out before they canceled
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all the cruises.
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So that's where we're at, pandemic-wise.
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So I take a look at that and I'm really close to finishing up my commercial license and
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I'm watching the entire airline industry collapse.
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So everything I've been working on for the last three years is just collapsing in front
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of my face.
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And I said, I'm going to step back from flight school for a minute and just see what happens.
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Take a break for a year.
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I'm almost done so if everything recovers, I'll just hop back on where I left off and
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no big deal.
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During that time, I was relying on flying.
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That was kind of the thing that was keeping me motivated, keeping me going, keeping me
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social and active and all the things that you do for good mental health.
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So after I stopped flying, that's when I needed something else to fill my time.
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And that something else was my phone.
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So in that, the last year and a half of the pandemic, I got very, very addicted to my
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cell phone.
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My average was up there 10 to 14 hours a day, every day of the week.
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And basically, I fell into a depression that I'd never experienced before.
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And it was very much, life sucks when you die for a few months.
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Everything all that time on your phone, looking back, hindsight's 20, 20.
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I realized that I let all of my social connections, all of my friends, all of my friendships,
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just let them kind of go.
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I didn't exercise at all because I didn't have to stay in really good shape for flying.
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So flying's one of those things you should probably be in decent shape if you're going
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to be up at 10, 12 feet without oxygen for a few hours.
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So I had kept myself in really good shape.
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But I kind of let myself go on all fronts.
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There was a point in my life that I would just go to work for 12 hours.
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I would come home, lay in my bed, on my phone, try to sleep.
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Couldn't sleep because it was the middle of the day.
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And it just started spiraling very quickly.
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Before you knew it, I was very depressed.
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I was suicidal.
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I was in a really bad space mentally, physically, emotionally, all the things you could be.
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And that was a hard few months of my life.
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Now, could I ask you as...
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Yeah, go ahead.
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When you said you were depressed and suicidal, does this tie into the things that you were
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feeling your feet with as far as on the phone?
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Was it certain things that you were consuming that was putting you in that state?
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Or it was just your overall mind state of like you just weren't in a happy place?
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Yeah, it was kind of...
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At first it was just, okay, I'm just waiting for the pandemic to be over so I can go back
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to life as normal.
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And then it became more of a, I don't know how to cope unless I have my phone.
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I don't know how to interact in the real world anymore.
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I had unlearned all my social skills.
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I had unlearned everything.
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The only thing I knew was my phone.
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And it came down to a feeling of kind of worthlessness that I, because I knew it was a problem.
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Self-esteem, everything just takes a hit.
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I knew it was a problem, but I couldn't quit.
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So I remember going home for Christmas and the whole family was there.
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We all get along great.
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I've got a bunch of nieces and nephews that were running around.
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And I'm the favorite uncle by far.
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Just putting that out there for the world.
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Yeah, that's right.
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Let it be known.
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Yeah.
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So, favorite uncle Kyle, I got to a point where my nieces and nephews wanted to play.
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And normally that's like you go talk to uncle Kyle and he'll finish whatever he's doing
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and then we'll go play Legos or we'll go play outside, shoot, you know, if the girls want
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to play some dolls, whatever, you know, we can make it happen.
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That's something that was always really important to me when my sisters all started having kids
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is I want to have a relationship with all my nieces and nephews.
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And I want to be kind of the favorite uncle, the cool uncle, the one that does fun things
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with them.
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And so I had a couple of my nieces and nephews come up to me and say, uncle Kyle, can we
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play?
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And I was at a point in my life where I was just so tired and so depressed and so sad inward
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looking and I didn't have the energy mentally to go play.
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And that broke me.
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It was one of those things that I was like, well, if I can't, if I can't play, I'm gonna
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play with my nieces and nephews.
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You know, what else can't I do?
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How far down this hole have I gone of just no sleep, no social interaction, no exercise,
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no anything healthy, no decent food in my body.
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I mean, he's eating out at McDonald's probably nine or 10 meals a week.
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It's one of those things that looking back on, I understand so much more than I did before.
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But in that moment, I was just devastated.
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So I actually just went out and hopped in my car and I drove home and I cried the entire
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way home.
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And that was the turning point for me.
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That was where I said, I need to get help.
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I need to change how I'm living my life because this isn't working anymore.
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So that's where the turning point kind of happened for me is the people I love the most.
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I didn't have enough energy to spend the time that I wanted to around them.
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And it made me really sad.
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And this was a matter of months of you being on the phone the way that you were on your
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phone, we're pretty much just consumed all of your off time and put you in this dark
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place pretty much just drains the life out of you.
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You have no will to do anything but just consume whatever it is that is on that screen, that
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flickering screen.
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Yeah, it was, I would say my phone usage was high before the pandemic, like probably four
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or five hours a day.
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And then during the pandemic it slowly started creeping up.
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So it was over the course of about two years, but really the March of 2020 through December
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of 2020, that was kind of the big part of my life that was 12 hours a day, every single
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day on my phone.
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So probably nine months of that.
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But this is where the turning point comes in the happy part of the story.
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So one day I was quite sick of being depressed, but I had a problem.
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I couldn't go to a doctor and say, hey, I think I might be depressed.
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Can we get me on some meds?
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I really wanted to because if that was a quick fix, it was just going to work.
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Man, I was in for it.
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I was so down to just say, put me on some meds, if we can fix this in a month, that's
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great.
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The problem with that is the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration, doesn't really like
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it when pilots are on depression medications.
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So if you go talk to a doctor, it goes on your record permanently, and it's very hard
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to continue the career path of being a pilot.
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So I was like, well, I guess I'll have to figure this out on my own.
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So I went to the library and checked out a couple books a week and just started reading
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and reading and reading and reading.
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I read a lot of books about depression, about psychology, about happiness and kind of philosophy.
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What is happiness?
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Where does it come from?
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How can we become happier?
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Can we become happier?
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And one of the books that I read was literally called How to Be Happy.
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I don't remember the author, but it had a lot of sources of there was a study done here,
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here, and here that said if you go outside for five, 10 minutes a day, get the sunlight,
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that's one thing that will make you happier, scientifically proven.
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Another thing was eating healthy.
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That will make your body feel better in turn, creating a little bit more happiness.
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Another one was real social connections.
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And this is where I realized how much time I was spending on my phone.
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I opened up the screen time app one day and saw that for the last year, more or less,
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it had been a good 12 hours a day, between 10 and 14 on average for an entire year.
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You do the math on that and that's more than half of my year was spent on this phone that
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I wasn't really getting anything back from and I realized that I had kind of lost control
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of my own life.
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The phone had taken control and had kind of held me hostage for a year.
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That made me a little angry.
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I'm not going to lie, but I still couldn't figure out how to put the phone down.
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I was at that point, I was getting down to like eight hours a day on my phone.
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A little bit better, but it was still so much time that I knew I was wasting.
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So let's see, where do we go from here?
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I started to get into yoga.
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That was one of the things I was going to ask you was, did you just go cold turkey?
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But it sounds like you slowly, slowly started to work on that.
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It was a slow grind for about the next year.
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Last of 2021 was me working and figuring out how to get over this addiction that I had
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to my phone.
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And so it was a lot of reading books and figuring out how to change habits and creating new
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habits in place of old habits.
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So I started just small.
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I was like, okay, cool.
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Yoga is a thing that was in that book that, hey, this could make you happier.
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So I said, you know what the heck, we'll try it.
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I've kind of always been interested in yoga.
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It's been a thing that has been talked about a lot, but I've never really got into it at
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that point.
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So I started just with five minutes of YouTube video.
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I was, you know, okay, I'm going to watch YouTube, but it's going to be yoga and I'm
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going to do the yoga while I'm watching YouTube.
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So that's kind of one of my first mindset shifts is I can watch YouTube if I am like
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doing something else while I'm watching it.
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If I'm learning actively and yoga was one of those things.
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So I started with like a 10 or 15 minute introductory yoga session and man, it felt great.
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It felt great to just sit there and stretch and listen to my body and breathe.
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And it was so eye-opening to me just that first few sessions.
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Hey, this thing is cool.
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It felt so good that I like kept doing it every single day.
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And it was the next December, right before Christmas, I was in a lot better mental state
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and I was doing yoga one of my morning sessions and I'd gotten into meditation at this point.
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I'd added a five minute meditation on to the end of my 20, 25 minute yoga session.
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And it was this point that I heard, but was like a voice in my head.
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And now I'm Christian, I believe in God.
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I grew up a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons.
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And it's like a whisper in your mind that, hey, you should be a life coach.
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And I was like, what's a life coach?
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First of all, second of all, I don't even have my own life figured out.
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How do I coach people on their lives?
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Like, what's going on here?
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So I've learned that when those kind of things happen, when you hear a voice that's like
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somebody speaking to you in your own mind, that you just do it.
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Because to me, that's God speaking to me and saying, hey, I'm in your life.
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Kind of do what I say and it'll be a little bit easier for you.
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So let's just say two weeks later, I was enrolled in school to be a life coach.
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And the crazy thing with this school was in order to graduate, you yourself had to be
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coached.
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And so for six months, I had my own coach.
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I got to be coached.
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And it was a very slow process.
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But in that process, that's where all the suicidal thoughts went away, all the depression
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went away.
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The training myself to think differently and change my identity, going from life sucks,
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then you die, to I've got so much potential and I can help so many people in this world
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that legitimately need my help.
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That's where that mindset shifted is in those six months.
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Coming up on about a year and a half ago is when that mind shift really happened.
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So any questions?
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I mean, like, I feel like I've just been talking.
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No, that's good.
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I've just been that.
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That's really what I wanted was to hear how it started and the process to slowly get to
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where you are today.
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Because of course, you didn't just come out of the womb and become what you are today.
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I mean, everybody has a story and a backstory of what they had to endure or certain things
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that they had to overcome.
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Now during this time, when you were being coached, were you already completely off of
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your phone?
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I know you said you were using it just to more of a tool as research or if you're educating
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yourself, that type of thing.
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Is it safe to say that you had a pretty good control of how you were using the phone from
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that point?
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That was one of the things that I focused a lot on with my coach was, hey, I know I've
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got a bad habit at this point.
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It wasn't an addiction.
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I could go five, 10 minutes and just leave my phone over there and not even think about
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it.
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Whereas a year before that wouldn't have happened.
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But with my personal coach, we worked a lot on changing that habit into other habits.
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So for instance, replacing it with another habit.
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Yeah.
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Yep.
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Like anytime I wanted to hop on my phone, when I got that urge, it was, okay, cool.
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I know my brain just wants dopamine.
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What else can give it dopamine?
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Go for a walk, a five minute walk, a little bit of exercise, a little bit of blood flow,
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a little bit of sunshine.
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Releases not quite as much dopamine as the phone does when you start scrolling, but enough
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that it gave my brain the hit that it needed, but didn't overdo it.
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So it was a lot of brain training of, hey, what does my brain want?
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Why does it want the dopamine?
00:22:00
Why does it want the oxytocin?
00:22:01
Why does it want the serotonin?
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Why does it want those chemicals from my phone, and how can I transition my phone from being
00:22:11
the provider of those chemicals to real humans or going outside or anything other than my
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phone?
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How can I transition that?
00:22:22
And so that transition, it took a good six, seven months to fully go from eight hours
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down my phone down to the point where I was like, okay, cool, I'm going to ditch my full
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on smartphone and I'm going to go to a flip phone.
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And so that is where the cold turkey kind of happened, is it took a lot of months of
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preparation and then a lot of months of research on things I wanted on my phone.
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I wanted maps.
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I wanted music.
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I wanted the ability to Google if I absolutely needed to.
00:23:03
I sat down and made this list of all the things I wanted and all the things I didn't want.
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I didn't want any social media.
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I didn't want any sort of temptation.
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There's a thing that I call the ooh shiny factor.
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Humans like shiny things.
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We're drawn to shiny things.
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We're drawn to see our reflection in a mirror.
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And my old phone was shiny on all four sides.
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And that was one of the biggest things that I didn't realize until right as I was giving
00:23:32
up my full on smartphone and going to a flip phone, I didn't realize that that was one
00:23:37
of the biggest things keeping me hooked was just this piece of tech is really, really
00:23:42
cool.
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And I'm booked because look what I can do.
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That's that's the beat.
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So I switched to this flip phone, yep, and it's ugly.
00:23:53
It's heavy.
00:23:54
It doesn't fit in my pocket very well.
00:23:58
It's meant for construction crews to just call each other back and forth on the job
00:24:03
site.
00:24:04
That's literally what it was designed to do.
00:24:07
It's got a touchscreen on it, but it's probably like those old, those old next tell looks
00:24:12
like a walkie talkie.
00:24:13
It actually has a walkie talkie function on it.
00:24:16
No joke.
00:24:18
The touchscreen on it.
00:24:19
Okay.
00:24:20
Yeah.
00:24:21
I remember those old chirps like, yeah, it's got some of those.
00:24:25
It's funny.
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It's like a blast to the past with a little bit of modern technology thrown in the touch
00:24:29
screens like an inch and a half by two and a half tall.
00:24:34
And it's just it's hard to use.
00:24:38
And that was the thing that finally broke all the addiction to my phone was the physical
00:24:46
changing from a smartphone to a lot dumber smartphone.
00:24:51
Still a smartphone, but it's hard to use.
00:24:56
It doesn't do zoom calls.
00:24:59
I downloaded Facebook on it the first day just to see what it was like.
00:25:03
And it was so nightmarish to use that I was like, this isn't even worth trying.
00:25:07
Yeah.
00:25:08
The inconvenience that makes you not even want to use it.
00:25:10
So changing that physical thing was, yeah, exactly.
00:25:16
So at the same time as I was going to the flip phone, I was starting up my own business
00:25:22
teaching people how to get off their phones.
00:25:25
And I was using all the things I had learned in this coaching school for me being coached.
00:25:32
The coaching school is all about how to help people change their habits.
00:25:36
I don't change your habits.
00:25:37
You have to change your own habits.
00:25:39
So how can I help you help yourself?
00:25:41
Right.
00:25:42
It's basically what I learned how to do in that school and it's become very, very valuable
00:25:46
to me in my business that what I do now is just help people get off their phones full
00:25:53
time.
00:25:54
It's my job.
00:25:56
It's super, super cool.
00:25:57
Now is the majority of the people that you coach having issues with the same thing, the
00:26:03
very same thing, getting off of their phone and just not spending so much time on it?
00:26:08
Yeah, most of my clients are spending about six to 10 hours a day on their phones.
00:26:14
And the first thing I do with them is I sit down and say, well, I hope you enjoyed the
00:26:19
first half of the conversation.
00:26:22
Part two is just around the corner.
00:26:26
And if like Kyle, you'd like to be a part of the show and share your story or even the
00:26:32
story of someone in your life that has impacted you in a positive way.
00:26:37
You can always reach out to me via email.
00:26:41
I'd be happy to connect.
00:26:44
And if you find any value in this, what we're doing over here or if it resonates with you,
00:26:50
leave a review, share your thoughts and give us a rating on whichever platform it is you're
00:26:56
tuned into.
00:26:57
Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
00:27:01
I look forward to hearing from you all.
00:27:04
Until next time, and very soon, peace.