If I can’t bring myself to be comfortable with my own thoughts, then how in the hell can I expect anyone else to want to be alone with me?

Technically, those aren’t the words of Dr. Josh Misner, author of Put the F**king Phone Down: Life. Can’t Wait. It’s a poignant observation or insight made by one of his students. Put another way, if it were possible to meet yourself, do you think you’d like yourself? Would you be your friend? Would you want to spend more time with yourself? These are the kinds of tough questions and personal challenges you can expect to find in this book.

As you can likely glean from the title, Put the F**king Phone Down is really much more about fighting our addiction to our digital devices. How often do we whip out our smartphones, almost reflexively, when we experience a brief pause in our days? While waiting in line at the supermarket, while blindly navigating the aisles at Costco, and even at the dinner table while we are eating our food.

We can’t stand the silence… but what if it isn’t about the silence at all?

Reflexively reaching for your phones is utterly mindless. We all do it. But, as much as we all want to blame our devices and the evil algorithms, part of the root cause comes from within ourselves.

Scientists at York University defined boredom as the unpleasant experience of wanting to engage in satisfying activity but being unable to fulfill that craving, which suggests that, when we experience boredom, we are disengaging from internal thoughts and feelings (whether by choice or unintentionally) while simultaneously failing to find interest in external happenings. Basically, being bored means that the s**t around us is wholly uninteresting, while our heads are full of s**t we’d rather not think about.

We reach for our smartphones because we’re bored, right? We crave that dopamine hit. This is especially true for those of us who experience social media performance anxiety, measuring our self-worth in likes and views and comments. How’s the engagement on that Instagram post?

On another level, though, we tell ourselves that we are bored because it’s so loud inside our heads with stuff we’d rather avoid thinking about. Our anxieties, our worries, the critical view we have of ourselves, that sort of thing. Am I good enough?

It’s an escape mechanism as we seek out more positive stimulation. That’s why we scroll through Facebook and Instagram, at an increasingly quickening pace. This is channel surfing on steroids, one with a never-ending supply of “new content” so we don’t have to take the time to be alone with ourselves. With our own thoughts.

Because those things are downright terrifying.

The same scientists, however, stated that most of us attribute our boredom to our environment, completely ignoring the fact that we’re avoiding our thoughts like they were that one dude from high school who dropped out of college to become an insurance agent and now tries to contact everyone he went to school through LinkedIn to talk about term life insurance.

At the end of each chapter, Dr. Josh Misner offers a challenge or exercise. Several of these are in the spirit of mindfulness. Do you think you’d be able to sit alone, sans device, for an extended period of time? How long do you think you’d last before you start to fidget? Or what if you chose to be much more mindful about the meals that you eat, taking the time to consider how the ingredients got to your plate?

Rather than seek out a twitchy dopamine hit, what if we just chose to slow down? To put down our phones and actually be fully present. On purpose?

Put the F**king Phone Down is available now in paperback and Kindle. Dr. Josh Misner is a communication professor at North Idaho College, TEDx speaker, mindfulness researcher, and “avid profanity aficionado who missed the bus to adulthood somewhere around his mid-20s.” For more, check out his website at joshmisner.com.