Reclaim Your Brain Newsletter

Reclaim Your Brain is a Guardian newsletter for anyone who wants to waste less time on their phone. After launching in January, it quickly became the fastest growing newsletter the Guardian has ever created, and ended up cutting its subscribers screen times by an average of 40%.

Co-written by Catherine Price, the bestselling author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, it provides a five-week coaching plan with expert advice and evidence-based assignments. It’s an asynchronous newsletter, meaning that readers can sign up for it whenever they want and receive the same five-week email course.

For some subscribers, the newsletter changed their lives. “I feel like a fog has been lifted, and for the first time in years I can account for every moment of my day – none of it has been spent mindlessly scrolling,” one reader told us. Meanwhile, another said “I can engage more with my son. I get out of bed easier in the morning. My battery lasts the day.”

After signing up, subscribers receive five weekly emails guiding them through the different stages of Catherine’s program. It starts with helping them identify what’s making them unhappy with their phone use, before moving onto exercises that will help reduce their screen time. In later editions the newsletter provides tasks that help improve their attention spans and find joy outside of their phones.

The newsletter also includes a weekly diary from Guardian writer Rhik Samadder, tracking his rollercoaster journey to get off his phone. Hilarious and at times very emotional, it provides an amusing and relatable accompaniment to Catherine’s coaching plan.

To accompany the launch of the newsletter the team published a series of 30 articles on the Guardian website across the first month and a half, all tackling the topic of phone addiction and how we can address it. These articles helped raise more awareness around the issue, received over 5m views, and drove around 100,000 sign ups to the newsletter.

Some of the Reclaim Your Brain stories we published on site include a reported feature on a school that banned phones, a Q&A with five world-leading phone experts, a quiz readers could take to find out their phone personality, and a look at the latest science of phone addiction. We also published op-eds, exclusive news stories, and a podcast episode.

On social media, the team designed an original, eye-opening visual – the Reclaim Your Brain Lifeometer, which tells you how many days you’re spending on your phone every year based on your daily average screen time. It became the Guardian’s most effective social media post at driving newsletter sign ups, and helped find thousands of new subscribers.

The Guardian is submitting Reclaim Your Brain for this award because of how effectively it was able to identify such a significant issue among readers, and help them deal with it in a way that proved to be hugely impactful. Thank you for considering it as part of the Press Awards.