Breaking Cell Phone Addiction is Actually Easy. But Can You Do It?
It’s 2021, and we’re now one full year into “lockdown,” “quarantine,” “living hell,” or whatever you’ve come to call it. If you’re anything like me, your screentime has increased. By a lot.
The average person touches, JUST TOUCHES, their phone an average of 2,617 times PER DAY. Just think about that. That’s about 2 touches per minute. Now, assuming you sleep, that average goes up.
For myself, I was averaging about 8 hours a day, with the vast majority of my time spent on social media. That’s pathetic and I’m completely ashamed of myself. Looking at those statistics was jarring, especially considering I don’t even like social media (we’ll get to that). I began to reassess my priorities in life.
Have you ever, say, opened Google, with a clear idea of something you wanted to look up. Then you see one of their headlines and you look at that, then you see something else, so you look at that. Suddenly, it’s 3 hours later, you haven’t looked up what you had planned to look up, you just looked at what Lark Voorhees has been up to for the last 18 years, and you have absolutely no recollection of what you opened Google to search for in the first place. So there I was, reassessing my life.
The first decision I made was quite drastic, but I found it to be completely necessary. My husband said it wouldn’t last a day. But it has lasted almost 4 months, and I haven’t regretted a second of it. I quit Facebook. I didn’t just stop looking at it, or delete the app from my phone, or limit myself to 20 minutes per day (I tried all that before, it didn’t work). No, I quit Facebook. I deleted my account. You won’t find me there. It had become a toxic cesspool of misinformation and a vacuous time suck from which there is no escape. Except I escaped it. I had thought about it for quite some time, but I didn’t want to lose all those years of videos and photos, and I didn’t want to take the time to download and save each photo individually. But then I learned how to download my entire media library to my Google cloud, and, after 3 days, I had everything back in my possession. And I closed my account. The people I truly have genuine, real friendships with are available to me via text, phone, and/or email.
Full disclosure, though, I do still have Twitter and Instagram. What can I say? I’m a sucker for cat videos and sports Twitter. But where I used to spend 2–3 hours per day on both, I am now down to less than an hour each per day. Today, specifically, I haven’t even opened Twitter. Some days, I just don’t feel the need. Breaking that social media addiction is the most challenging part of the entire process. There FOMO is real, but social media is not. I promise you, if you limit your social media time, your life will go on, and, more than likely, it will improve.
But that doesn’t eliminate all of that screen time. For me, I do sleep with my phone next to my bed. It is my alarm. And yes, I could just get an alarm clock, but, and not to delude myself into believing I’m important, if something important happens and someone needs to get in touch with me, I need to have my phone close to me because we do not have a landline. So I have enabled downtime and app limits, which then turns off access to everything on my phone. The only things I do not turn off are the phone, messaging, music, and podcasts. And I don’t wake up in the middle of the night and grab my phone. I just roll over and go back to sleep. This was not always the case, but disabling the apps makes it that much more complicated, not impossible, no, but complicated, to use it.
I have also started using my computer more often, instead of using the apps on my phone. Sure, it’s still technically “screentime,” but the screen is bigger and my hands are not curled around a half-inch thick block. My writing productivity has gone up on my computer, too. Typing on a tiny phone may be convenient, but as far as layout and just mere perception of length is terribly skewed. And typing on my computer is actually LESS distracting.
This week, I am averaging 4 hours of screen time, down 42% from last week, and most of that is my interval timer for my workouts and looking at podcasts and music to turn something on in the background. My personal productivity has increased tremendously. I can get things done during the day and still have time to write daily and read for an hour or more.
Leaving your phone down on your desk, instead of in your hand, has some excellent advantages. For starters, my frivolous quarantine shopping has decreased significantly. I have been able to get in workouts regularly, and they don’t feel rushed because I used all my “me” time scrolling through Facebook and Twitter. I’m not mad because someone’s second cousin’s uncle had a hot take about Covid and I was sucked into a social media debate. My news comes from actual news sites, and not Facebook links. I actually talk to my friends whenever I feel like it, and we start actual conversations, not just memes in the comments (though, to be fair, text conversations can rapidly turn to gif wars). And my house is clean, except for the cat hair, but they can’t help it.
If you really want to break your addiction to your phone, it’s completely up to you. But it is as easy as just doing it. If you take the time to get to know yourself better, you might just remember how great you were before you went down the rabbit hole of technology that is the smart phone.
