Me, fully concentrated on my book and not getting sidetracked by my damn phone.
Are you addicted to your phone? Do you want to spend less time on it? Let’s see how we can achieve this.
Number one is probably: Don’t feel you always have to be reachable. In the not-so-olden days of letters and landlines, contacting someone was slow, unreliable, and an effort. In the age of WhatsApp and Messenger, it’s free and easy and instant. The flip side of this ease is that we’re expected to be there. To pick up the phone. To get back to the text. To answer the email. To update our social media. But we can choose not to feel that obligation. We can sometimes just let them wait. We can risk our social media getting stale. And if our friends are friends, they will understand when we need some headspace. And if they aren’t friends, why bother getting back anyway?
Turn off notifications. This is essential. This keeps me sane. All of them. All notifications. You don’t need any of them. Take back control. Have times of the day where you are not beside your phone. Okay, I am bad at this one. But I am getting better. No one needs their phone all the time. We don’t need it by the bed. We don’t need it while we are eating meals at home. We don’t need it when we go out for a run. Here is something I do now: I go for a walk without my phone. I know it sounds ridiculous to present that as some big achievement, but for me it was. It’s like exercise. It takes effort. Don’t press the home button to check the screen every two minutes for texts. Practise feeling the urge to check and don’t. Don’t tie your anxiety levels to how much power you have left on your phone. Don’t dissapeare in the Instagram and TikTok Reels. JUST TURN OFF THE PHONE.
Don’t swear at your phone. Don’t plead with your phone. Don’t bargain with your phone. Don’t throw your phone across the room. It is indifferent to your feelings. If the phone has no signal, or no power, it is not because it hates you. It is because an inanimate object. It is, in short, a phone.
Don’t put your phone by the bed. I am not judging, by the way. Most people sleep with their phone by the bed because they are replacing alarm clocks. Everyone I know has their phones by their beds. Maybe one day our beds will be our phones. But I do seem to sleep better when my phone isn’t by my bed. You know, if it is in another room, or even just another part of the room. I know it might be unrealistic. But it’s good to have an aspiration. A dream to work towards. Like in the olden days when we didn’t have phones.
Practise app minimalism. An overload of apps and options adds to the choice but also stress of phone use. We are given an almost infinite array of things we can add to our phones. But more choice leads to more decisions and more stress.
Don’t try to multitask. We have phones that can do everything from reading maps to tuning our guitars, and it’s tempting to imagine that we can do as many things, and all at once. According to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, we aren’t really made for the kind of multitasking the internet age encourages us to do. “Even though we are thinking we are getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient,” he writes in The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction cycle, rewarding the brain for losing focus. It can also increase stress and lower IQ. “Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks,” concludes Levitin.
Accept uncertainty. The temptation to check your phone is down to uncertainty. That’s what makes it so addictive. You want someone to get back to your text, but you don’t know if they have. You want to check. You want to see the promise and mystery of the three little circles, dancing with hope. You want to know how your photo or status update is going down. But why do you need to know right now? Why can’t it all wait until after your meeting/walk/meal/daydream? Do people really need to check their phones during meetings, or while attending funerals? Maybe if we understand that the checking is never fully satisfying, we wouldn’t. Because there is no end to this uncertainty. There is no final checking of your phone. Think of all the times you checked your phone yesterday. Did you really need to so often? I certainly didn’t. I have definitely cut down, but still have ways to go. How many times do you touch your phone a day? Or look at it? It might be hard to keep count. Imagine, I say to myself, if you just looked at your phone, say, five times a day. What catastrophe would occur?
