What My Own Phone Addiction Therapy Is Teaching Me About Behaviour Change (And What It Means For Your Personal Training)

A few days ago, I appeared in a BBC News feature about phone addiction.

It's a strange and uncomfortable thing to see your name next to a statistic like "14 hours of screen time in one day" - (hmm that only happened once (or twice) but I get the need for the BBC for a catchy hook)

It's stranger still to talk about it publicly, given that I spend most of my working life as a personal trainer is helping people build discipline and consistency in their own lives.

But I'm not writing this to revisit that conversation.

The last few weeks, in therapy sessions about my own compulsive phone use, have taught me more about behaviour change than most textbooks I read during my qualifications or through my own arm-chair psychology interest.

Everything I'm learning maps almost exactly onto what I see in personal training clients every week. This includes the missed sessions, the all-or-nothing thinking, the relapse after a "good streak."

If you've ever felt like you "should" be more consistent with training, eating, or any habit you're trying to build, I think you'll recognise a lot of this.

The Habit Loop Is the Habit Loop, Whether It's a Phone or a Fork

In therapy, one of the first things we worked through was the idea of the habit loop: a trigger, a behaviour, and a reward.

For me, the trigger might be a lull in conversation, a quiet moment in the garden, or simply boredom. The behaviour is picking up my phone. The reward is a small hit of stimulation such as a notification, a scroll, a sense of "checking in."

This is exactly the same mechanism I see with personal training clients and food, or clients and skipped sessions.

A stressful day at work (trigger) leads to ordering a takeaway (behaviour) which brings short-term comfort (reward). Or a missed early alarm (trigger) leads to "I'll just going to the gym today" (behaviour) which removes the discomfort of getting up in the cold (reward).

Here's the useful part: once you can name the trigger, you can intervene before the behaviour, rather than fighting the behaviour itself.

In my own case, this looks like noticing the lull-in-conversation trigger and consciously choosing to look around the room instead of reaching for my phone. Or a sense of loneliness when I've been sat at home too long alone, can lead to a desire to self-soothe by immersing myself in the world of instagram.

With my personal training clients, it might look like noticing that the trigger for skipping a session is always the Sunday-night admin pile-up, so we plan around it, rather than relying on willpower in the moment.

Practical example: One of my clients used to skip his Saturday morning sessions almost every other week. We didn't address it by telling him to "try harder." We worked out that the trigger was that Saturday was a day when unexpected social demands were most likely to pop up, or maybe a late night out on the Friday before made the Saturday session tougher to get out of bed for (hangover and late night). We decided to move his session to a weekday morning instead. The trigger disappeared, and so did the missed sessions.

Willpower Is the Wrong Tool for the Job

One thing my therapist has said to me: "This isn't a willpower problem." At first that was hard to hear, because I've spent 16 years telling clients that consistency is a discipline they can build. But there's an important distinction here.

Willpower is a finite resource you draw down across the day.

Every decision you make from what to wear, what to eat, whether to answer that email right now, uses a small amount of it.

By the time many of my clients get to their independent evening workout, they've already spent most of their willpower on work decisions, parenting, traffic, and a hundred other things.

Telling them to "just have more discipline" is like telling someone with an empty fuel tank to drive faster.

What actually works, for me and for clients, is removing the decision rather than relying on resisting it in the moment. In my case, that means physically keeping my phone in another room during certain hours, rather than trying to resist its presence on the table next to me.

For clients, it means having gym clothes already out the night before, or, and I'd argue this is one of the most underrated tools in fitness, choosing a training time that doesn't require a decision every single day, like a recurring slot with someone else expecting you to show up. This can include a personal trainer or a friend.

Practical example: I no longer keep my phone in the room when I'm reading a book. It's not about resisting the urge because if I do this then there is no urge, because the trigger (seeing the phone) is gone.

We can apply that same logic to your kitchen: it's far easier to never decide whether to eat the biscuits if there are no biscuits in the cupboard, than to fight that decision fresh every single evening.

Urge Surfing

A technique that's come up a lot in my sessions around phone addiction is something called urge surfing, the idea that an urge (to check your phone, to skip a workout, to eat something off-plan) rises, peaks, and falls, usually within a few minutes, if you don't act on it.

The instinct is to believe the urge will keep building until you act, but it doesn't. It crests like a wave and then passes.

The first time I sat with the urge to check my phone instead of immediately giving in, I was shocked at how quickly it faded once I stopped feeding it attention. It wasn't comfortable but it was over far sooner than I expected.

This reframes a huge amount of what clients describe as "cravings" around food, or the urge to cancel a session.

The goal isn't to never feel the urge, that's not realistic, and expecting it sets you up to feel like you've failed the moment it shows up.

The goal is to recognise that the urge is temporary, and to have a plan for riding it out rather than immediately obeying it.

I really try to feel the urge deeply instead of run away from it. I sense that listening to the urge has huge healing potential. By listening to the urge, facing it directly, you become stronger each time, as you get familiar with its rise and subsequent fall.

Practical example: I now tell clients who struggle with evening snacking to set a 5-minute timer when the urge hits, rather than telling themselves "no" outright. Almost every time, by the time the timer goes off, the urge has either passed completely or weakened enough that they can make a clearer decision. It's a small shift, but it takes the fight out of the moment.

Relapse Isn't Failure But It's Really Useful Information

After a strong week of reduced phone use, I had a terrible day where I was back to checking it constantly.

My instinct was the same one I see in clients after a "bad" week of training or eating: a kind of internal collapse where I think to myself I've ruined it, what's the point now, I might as well just use my phone a lot now.

A relapse isn't proof the plan failed. Instead, it's information about what's still unresolved. In my case, that bad day followed an evening of feeling lonely, (again largely due to having lots of free time alone that day) and the phone became a numbing tool rather than a habit out of nowhere.

It's a signal pointing at the actual problem (loneliness), which the phone was only ever a symptom of.

I now think about client relapses the exact same way. If someone has a "bad week," I'm far less interested in the bad week itself than in what triggered it.

Was it stress? A change in routine? An emotional low point that food or skipped training was filling the space for? The relapse is the entry point into understanding the reasons.

Practical example: A client who'd been consistent for months had a week of cancelled sessions and noticeably looser eating. Rather than focusing on "getting back on track," we talked about what had changed. It turned out that work stress, (an issue with a colleague, was causing him a lot of stress, and affecting sleep and causing lots of anxiety). The training wasn't the problem. The anxiety and tiredness due to poor sleep was. Once we chatted a little about potential solutions to the problem (he decided he had to bring the situation up in the following meeting the next morning to air it out), the consistency returned on its own.

Identity Beats Behaviour

The most useful single idea from my sessions so far is this: behaviour change sticks when it's attached to identity, not outcome.

"I'm trying to use my phone less" is an outcome-based goal, and outcome-based goals are fragile as they collapse the moment you slip up, because the slip-up disproves the outcome.

"I'm someone who's present with people in the room" is an identity-based statement. A single slip doesn't disprove who you are; it's just one moment that didn't match it.

This is the single biggest shift I try to make with clients now, especially beginners. "I want to lose two stone" is an outcome that can feel further away every time the scale doesn't move. "I'm someone who shows up for my own health" is an identity that survives a missed session, a holiday, a bad week. The behaviour becomes evidence of the identity, rather than the entire point.

Why I'm Sharing This Publicly

I run a private, one-to-one studio in Arnos Grove precisely because I don't believe lasting change comes from shame, intensity, or gym-bro bravado.

It comes from understanding the actual mechanics of why we do what we do, and building a life around that understanding rather than fighting it every day with sheer willpower.

Talking about my own phone addiction therapy publicly isn't comfortable.

But if going through it teaches me things that genuinely help the people I train, and it has, more than I expected, then it's worth being honest about.

I am able to successfully navigate and manage my phone use better than ever before.

Even though I'm further from where I want to be with how I use it, every day offers me a chance to get to know myself better and to understand what works best for me, and in turn, sharing my experience with you and my clients, can help others too.

If any of this resonates, whether it's about your phone, your eating, your training consistency, or something else entirely, I'd like to hear about it. And if you want to work through it properly, with someone who isn't going to lecture you about discipline you don't need more of, you know where to find me.