3 ways to curb your phone habit
TL/DR: Turn off your gosh-darn push notifications people. Leave only the essentials: messages, phone calls, and if you must, work emails. Consider only having the little app badge dots. In addition to that, you can use the three techniques of awareness, app limits, and leaving your phone in another room to curb your habit.
____
Most of us spend more time on our phones than we care to admit. If you’re pleased with your current phone/screen usage, this post isn’t for you. And while you’re at it, let me know your favorite techniques so more people can feel that same sense of contentment. Contentment certainly isn’t the norm and it typically takes an albeit worthwhile concerted effort to turn into your norm.
Phones are definitely in the “too much of a good thing” category. There are wonderful opportunities to connect with family, friends, and strangers-turned-friends that our flip phones simply didn’t offer us. You can follow music, podcasts, and articles you’re interested in without having to get up off the couch. In a lot of ways, that’s a beautiful thing. That said, when we reach the interaction level of mindless, it’s time to take a step back.
Intentionalism is the process of evaluating whether certain things are serving you, for instance, your phone habit. How many times have you set your phone down, only to feel that little knot in your stomach wishing you’d just spent the last 40 minutes doing anything other than scrolling through Instagram or Reddit? How many times have you told yourself, OK next week I’ll cut down on my time scrolling? This is about cutting down the time spent on your phone that you regret spending on your phone. If you’re spending an engaged hour on Reddit and you get off your phone feeling happy, more power to you. This is about staying true to yourself.
TECHNIQUE #1: AWARENESS
So while this may seem obvious, it’s actually harder to do than it sounds, at first. Reaching for our phone at the first sign of boredom, sadness, fatigue, you name it, has become an automatic motion. In fact, it’s so automatic that we don’t always acknowledge or recognize the emotion or state of mind that triggered it in the first place. We frequently don’t notice we were on our phone until we set it down and look around. Hello, present moment, have you been here the whole time? It’s like stepping into daylight from a dark room.
Real talk, I had curbed my screen time a ton by the beginning of 2020, and I felt really good about it. I was getting more time to read/cook/watch TV, which I valued more. Once the lockdown happened though, I was on Instagram a lot, getting the pulse on how other people were doing and just generally listening. While I consider that an extenuating circumstance, it did mean my screen time went up exponentially. I’ve since reclaimed my screen time, but I basically started over in terms of progress. It’s not a coincidence that my phone usage spiked when the lockdown anxiousness was at an all time high. I am certain I’m not the only one whose phone time spiked due to the lockdown and corresponding stress/anxiety. The kicker too, is it never does quell my anxiety, it simply adds a layer of guilt on top.
So, I started with awareness. I tried my best to keep my attention in the present moment, and was on high alert for the times when I reached for my phone. The key with this awareness is pausing, even just for a moment, to acknowledge that you are in fact holding your phone. Often times this still meant I’d continue to click on Instagram, but I was slowly getting used to training my brain to notify me when I was doing so. The idea here being, it’s OK to be on Instagram as long as I had made the conscious decision to do so.
Once I had a few days of simply noticing, I moved on to shifting my habit. A habit consists of a trigger, a routine, and a reward. So with regards to phone usage, this looks like: feels bored > opens Instagram > dopamine hit of “likes” and DMs. Knowing this, if I reach for my phone when I’m bored, instead of clicking on Instagram, I can divert my clicking to something like the weather app, where I don’t receive that same dopamine hit. Taking it one step further, after looking at the 10-day forecast, I turn off my phone and actively decide to do something else to quell my boredom [for me this usually entails reading]. It’s important not to divert to another app like FB, mail, or anywhere that you receive messages/notifications. You’d ostensibly habituate to that app instead, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Once you break the reward cycle, you can start to dismantle the habit. For the sake of this conversation, table the idea of rerouting the trigger beyond the above option. In June I’ll dive deeper into habits! Once you’ve started diverting your attention, you may find you need another digital line of defense. In steps app limits.
TECHNIQUE #2: APP LIMITS
App limits aka parental controls. I’m sure the various developers had no idea how many adults would find the parental controls useful for themselves. App limits are phenomenal, and there are several options. Full disclosure, I have an iPhone, so if I’m missing a great resource for Android phones, please do let me know. Likewise, if you have an older phone, some of these suggestions may not be available to you, so please be aware of the limitations of your own device.
IN-APP LIMITS: Instagram offers its own limit options! Go to your profile > three-line hamburger menu in the top right corner > Settings > Your Activity. You can set a daily reminder here, if you have a total time you’d like to spend on Insta. It will notify you as you approach that limit. I imagine Insta isn’t the only app that offers this, so poke around in your fave apps to find out!
PARENTAL CONTROLS: On iPhones, there are built-in parental controls and screen time limits. Click on Settings > Screen Time. You can set:
Downtime aka quiet hours for notifications and app access (different from Do Not Disturb, which simply limits incoming data)
App Limits aka a time length each day for a specific app or group of apps (i.e. social media)
Communication Limits aka who can talk to you during your downtime
Always Allowed aka the list of apps you want excluded from these limits (for example, I have Maps, Camera, Contacts, Insight Timer, Duolingo amongst others, always available, as my downtime is 8pm - 7am)
Content & Privacy Restrictions aka true parental control-type controls
Additionally, you can set these settings to sync across all of your devices, so you can’t hop to your iPad once your phone locks you out. Likewise, super helpful so you’re not inadvertently going over your limits.
One you reach your limit, a screen will come up that basically says, “You’ve reached your limit. Do you want to open it anyway?” At which point you can say OK and leave the app, or yes. If you say yes, you select “one more minute, 15 minutes more, or ignore limit for the day," whichever option you’re most willing to commit to. I find myself overriding the app limits when there’s a video of a shiba inu I really wanted to show my husband, more than I find myself plowing through simply to scroll through my feed. Not to say I don’t do that, but if I commit to an extra 15 minutes, I find I’m never on nearly that long and I feel compelled to get off.
THIRD PARTY SCREEN TIME CONTROLS: Because I have an iPhone, I have never needed to use a third-party app to limit my screen time. That said, I tried to do my due diligence and found an app called Space that seemed like the first option I would try myself. There also seems to be an app/service called Screentime that allows you to create an account and control your Android devices. I cannot and do not guarantee that either work, that it’s totally free for all features, or anything like that, but wanted to make mention of options available I found. These apps allow you to control how long you’re on a particular app or type of app in a day (i.e. social media apps).
If you dig around as well, you can even find third-party apps that will block your social media time and instead coach you to do other things (i.g. taking deep breaths before you are allowed on your social media). I haven’t used one myself, so I couldn’t make a specific recommendation that felt right. Word on the street is though, that they exist.
With the Apple or third-party screen time limiters, it is entirely possible to habituate to clicking through the app limits warning screen (thus becoming just one more step in the mindless clicking), but it does make you pause for even a moment and commit to logging more time. The awareness is what’s so helpful. Your usage will add up quickly over the day, 5 minutes here, 2 minutes there and all of the sudden you spent 2 hours on your phone. Having the warning of how much time you have left and then that gatekeeper app blocker is usually sufficient to get you thinking, if not totally off your phone.
These apps will give you reports for the week. You can’t get too precious with the data, because sometimes your screen time will be at 5 hours for the day because you spent 2.5 hours driving the length of LA and back using Google Maps. Granted, that’s not a lockdown concern, but for instance, it’ll count your Netflix usage. If you consciously decided to watch two hour-long episodes of a show, it can be kind of insulting for your tech to reprimand your screen time. Though, it is screen time nonetheless, so perhaps it begs your awareness as well? Simply bear in mind what the data is telling you. The more important metric is usually the per-app / per-group limit data and realizing and internalizing that 30 minutes a day went to social media, regardless of the other usage.
Just for fun, 30 minutes a day for 365 days is 182.5 hours a year. Consider the possibilities of 182.5 hours in your life.
TECHNIQUE #3: LEAVE YOUR PHONE ELSEWHERE
If all else fails, let’s take the Boomer approach and leave your phone in another room. Or at minimum, turn off all of your notifications. My phone has notifications for messages, phone calls, and messages from my doctor (through a portal app), nothing else. This way, when I have my phone sitting next to me, it’s dark most of the time, unless my family chat starts blowing up. At that point, I’d usually join the conversation anyway, so it doesn’t feel like a waste or distraction. But this still leaves my phone within arms reach. It can be so refreshing to leave your phone in your bedroom while you’re watching a movie (assuming it’s not on your phone), eating dinner, or just hanging out with a roommate or significant other.
We all know the feeling of being separated from our phones, and if we can adjust to leaving it elsewhere of our own volition, that anxiety starts to fade. You basically practice distancing from your phone. I didn’t have a flip phone until high school and an iPhone until 2008, and my world was just fine before that. If someone needs me ASAP, they will call me and I will receive their message when I get back to my phone. It is incredibly rare to receive truly urgent phone calls, if you think back in your life on those that were. Don’t let the “what if” dictate your whole life. If you’re actually waiting for urgent news or have a friend/family member who may need you ASAP, by all means, keep your phone nearby. But especially during this lockdown, when you’re home, just leave your phone elsewhere and see how you feel. You’ll start to reprogram your brain away from reaching for your phone with every lull, bored moment, wave of sadness, or strong emotion.
With all of these suggestions, you’ll have to find what suits your natural rhythms. If you feel good about your phone usage, awesome. If you’re feeling guilty, don’t be too hard on yourself, simply do what you can to change your actions. That’s all you can ever do. Pay attention to yourself and your phone habits, and let me know if there’s anything you find works best for you. Together we can reclaim our time!