Take your life back from the scroll.
Want your phone less. Feel calmer. Get your attention back. And have more time for actually living your life.
Stop feeling out of control around your phone.
Maybe you’ve noticed your phone habits have gotten a little… out of control. Like you’re addicted to it or something. Or plainly, you’re just tired of being on your phone so much.
Can’t read a book without reaching for your phone.
Can’t watch a show without scrolling at the same time.
Attention span is shot.
Screen time is beyond.
Open Instagram, close Instagram, and somehow open Instagram again????
Hours lost to TikTok and brain feels like mush.
Reach for your phone when you’re bored. Tired. Lonely. Overwhelmed. Avoiding something. Waiting in line. Watching TV. Eating lunch. Going to bed.
Somewhere along the way, scrolling became the answer to everything.
And half the time, we’re not even enjoying it anymore.
We doomscroll, feel like sh*t, then scroll MORE to feel better about it.
We compare ourselves to everyone because everyone is right there. Their followers. Their likes. Their shares. Their seemingly perfect lives.
And eventually we find ourselves thinking: Why can’t I stop scrolling even when I don’t want to be scrolling anymore? Why can’t I put this f*cking phone down?
That’s the cycle The Phone Pause is designed to interrupt.
Because you don’t just want to spend less time on your phone.
You want to want your phone less.
You want to feel calm around it. Like you’re the one in control—not that little device in your hand.
So, what exactly is The Phone Pause?
It’s an on-demand audio course with 21 audio lessons and 21 companion workbooks for powerful self-reflection about each of those lessons. You receive around 7 hours of teaching total.
You will walk away with an entirely new relationship with your phone, scrolling, social media, and the algorithms.
Understand why you reach for your phone and what you’re actually looking for.
Know when scrolling has stopped feeling good and how to stop when you've had enough.
Understand where your attention is going and intentionally decide where you want it to go.
Recognize how your feeds, algorithms, and online habits affect your offline life.
Spend less time consuming other people's lives and more time participating in your own.
Build a relationship with your phone that feels intentional, calm, and fully yours.
The goal is that you don't have to keep forcing yourself to use your phone less—because once you see your behavior this clearly, you naturally start making different choices.
7+ hours.
21 audio lessons.
21 companion workbooks.
All of it intentionally designed to be powerful, transformative, and help you change your relationship to your phone. The course is structured in 21 days, but you can listen at your own pace.
There’s nothing live. No set time you need to show up. No community to keep up with.
Over the course, you’ll start seeing your phone use much more clearly—and that awareness gives you the chance to make different choices instead of automatically reaching, opening, scrolling, and repeating.
Then, by the end, you’ll use everything you’ve learned about yourself to create your own Digital Wellness Plan for how you actually want your phone and the internet to fit into your life.
Welcome to The Phone Pause.
It’s time to get re-obsessed with your own life.
Wouldn’t it be nice if…
you could read a book for 2 hours without dying for a scroll?
you could watch an entire movie without picking up your phone?
you could enjoy social media for a while and then—wild concept—be done?
you could wait in line without immediately reaching for your phone?
you could have hobbies you actually lose yourself in?
you could think for yourself again without crowdsourcing your opinions?
you could text back when you text back?
you could leave your phone in another room and forget it’s there?
you could spend time with someone without scrolling and half-listening?
you could get your attention span back?
be bored again without it being an existential crisis?
feel calm around your phone?
in control around your phone?
use it when you want it…
and put it the hell down when you don’t?
Your phone can have a place in your life. It just doesn’t run your life.
And all that attention you were giving away becomes blissfully available again.
For your ideas. Your friends. Your family. Your kids. Your interests. Your creativity. Your passions. Your dreams. Your hobbies.
Your actual life.
This isn’t just a nice list of things that sound good.
You’re not actually at the mercy of your phone. You just haven’t built a calm, balanced, intentional relationship with it yet.
And how could you have?
Phones and social media showed up and just… took over our lives. Most of us never paused long enough to even ask: How do I actually want my relationship with my phone to be?
That’s exactly what The Phone Pause is designed to help you figure out.
What you get
The Phone Pause Curriculum
21 audio lessons. 7+ hours of teaching. A companion workbook for every lesson so you can self-reflect, apply the teaching, and implement it in your own life.
The Phone Pause is a complete digital wellness curriculum designed to help you understand what’s actually happening between you and your phone—so you can stop relying on restriction, willpower and constant self-monitoring and build a relationship with technology that feels intentional, calm and fully yours.
Part 1: Understand Your Relationship With Your Phone
Lesson 1: The Scroll Spiral
Understand why scrolling became the automatic answer to practically every human feeling and start identifying what you’re actually looking for when you reach for your phone.
Lesson 2: Your Relationship With Your Phone
Look at your phone use as a relationship: what it gives you, what it takes from you, how it feels, and what you want to change.
Lesson 3: Behaviors of Presence
Turn “be more present” into specific behaviors that help you fully inhabit your life instead of constantly splitting your attention with your phone.
Lesson 4: What Do You Want the Internet For?
Decide what you actually want social media and the internet to give you and where they’ve started doing jobs you never consciously gave them.
Lesson 5: Your Digital Environment
Examine how your feeds, platforms, and the content you consume actually make you feel and what you want more and less of in your digital world.
Lesson 6: Your Algorithm Is a Mirror
Learn how your algorithm reflects and then multiplies what captures your attention and how what you repeatedly see online shapes what you take offline.
Lesson 7: Know When You’ve Had Enough
Recognize your personal point of diminishing returns so you can notice when scrolling stops feeling good and know when you’ve seen enough.
Part 2: Reclaim Your Attention and Reinvest It in Your Life
Lesson 8: Do More Than You Consume
Understand how consuming content about the things you want to do can become a substitute for actually participating in your life.
Lesson 9: Unplug FOR Something
Stop thinking only about what you’re unplugging from and start identifying what you want to give your full attention to instead.
Lesson 10: Make Space for Your Own Mind
Rediscover the value of boredom and mental space for creativity, original thought, inspiration, individuality, and thinking for yourself.
Lesson 11: Your Attention Is a Resource
Start treating your attention as something valuable that you can intentionally invest in the parts of your life you actually want to grow.
Lesson 12: The Answer to Comparison Is Reinvestment
Learn to use comparison as an alarm bell that tells you when you’ve drifted away from your own life and need to reinvest in it.
Lesson 13: Grow the Garden You Already Have
Turn your attention toward what is already special, exciting, and meaningful about your life and make sure you’re actually investing in it.
Lesson 14: Good Digital Hygiene
Understand how outrage, callouts, pile-ons, and emotionally activating content can shape how you feel online and how you experience people offline.
Part 3: Enter the Connected Era
Lesson 15: From the Scroll Spiral to the Connected Era
Move beyond using the scroll as the default response to being human and build a richer repertoire for boredom, loneliness, anxiety, restlessness, curiosity, and connection.
Lesson 16: The Discourse Detox
Explore what constant exposure to everyone else’s opinions does to your own thinking and what happens when you give yourself space to get your own brain back.
Lesson 17: Stop Optimizing Everything
See how endless options, convenience, reviews, and crowdsourcing can keep you searching for something better instead of fully inhabiting what you’ve chosen.
Lesson 18: Connectivity Isn’t the Same Thing as Connection
Recognize where constant digital connectivity has become a substitute for the deeper human connection you’re actually craving.
Lesson 19: Create Phone Boundaries That Give You Something Back
Create boundaries around notifications, availability, and access to your attention based on what those boundaries positively give back to your life.
Lesson 20: Create Your Digital Wellness Plan
Bring everything you’ve learned together into a personal plan for the relationship you want to have with your phone moving forward.
Lesson 21: Make Your Life More Interesting Than the Scroll
Reinvest your attention in your own life until connection, creativity, experience, and aliveness become more compelling than endless scrolling.
Hi, I’m Jamie Varon and I’m the founder of The Phone Pause
I’ve spent most of my adult life on the internet.
In 2009, I went viral for the first time. Since then, I’ve built an audience, career, businesses and much of my creative life online.
I love the internet. And I can also acknowledge there is a lot going on there that I am not a fan of.
But after spending nearly two decades living and working online, I’ve become deeply interested in these questions:
How do we go online without letting it take over our life?
How do we curb the addictive nature of social media?
How do we scroll without it becoming a replacement for living?
How do we actually develop a balanced, intentional, & calm relationship with our phones, social media, and the internet in general?
I created The Phone Pause to explore those questions and to create a movement around digital wellbeing that relies on curiosity and awareness.
I’m not interested in doom, gloom, shame, or blame. I’m interested in co-existing with the internet, finding the good in what it offers, and then living the hell out of my life with full presence and enjoyment.
I’m the author of the novel Main Character Energy, named an Amazon Best Romance of September 2023, as well as the novel Charlie Quinn Lets Go, both published by HarperCollins. I’m also the author of self-help book Radically Content and Radically Content: The Journal, both published by Quarto. I’m also the author of The Alchemy Within, self-published under my own imprint.
With more than 300,000 followers across social media, my writing has been viewed and shared millions of times—including by Kelsea Ballerini, Khloé Kardashian, Camila Cabello, Chrissy Metz, Lucy Hale, Maren Morris, Shay Mitchell, Lil Nas X, and Hayley Kiyoko.
I’ve been interviewed on various podcasts, including The Financial Diet, The Deep Dive with Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael, The Everygirl Podcast, and Work in Progress with Sophia Bush.
Beyond my books, I’ve spent nearly two decades building a career on the internet—writing, creating, building audiences, launching businesses, and developing digital experiences and educational programs that have reached people around the world. I have created several digital courses, including Live with Intention, Bring the Magic Back, Write That Book, and The Reality Rewrite.
I’ve been featured in:
The Phone Pause
Cheat Sheet
What is it? 21 on-demand audio lessons. 7+ hours of teaching. A companion workbook for every lesson so you can self-reflect, apply the teaching, and implement it in your own life.
Is it live? No. You get everything once you enroll.
Where is it? Online.
What am I doing? Learning and examining how I use my phone, the internet and social media—and deciding how I actually want to use them so I spend less time scrolling and more time living.
Are you going to tell me to stop using my phone? No.
What does it cost? One payment of $79, 2 payments of $39.50, or 4 payments of $19.75.
Are there refunds? Yes. If you get halfway through The Phone Pause and realize it’s not for you, just email me and I’ll refund you.
Do I get the content forever? Yes, you have lifetime access.
Can I sign up anytime? Yes and you can go through The Phone Pause at your own pace, although I do recommend going through a lesson per day.