Break Up With Your Phone: How to End Cell Phone Addiction
Stop living life through a screen - Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
How To Break Up With Your Phone Once and for All
Imagine it’s Saturday night and you’re partying on a tropical island with a group of your closet friends. World renown DJs spin the latest house tracks from atop moonlit mega yachts as the downtown Miami skyline glitters in the background. Leggy models make like palm trees — swaying to the music while servers dart through the dance floor with bottles of Veuve and plates of carpaccio.
“This is the stuff Instagram dreams are made of,”
you think, as you survey the sea of designer suits around you.
Suddenly — like a scene from Inception — your dream begins to crack. Everyone is on Instagram — right now! —scrolling, tapping, and posting selfie stories. In a moment of horror, you realize that you and the DJs may be the only ones at the bar who are truly aware of their surroundings.
Maybe you can relate to my perspective in this story, or maybe you’re one of the people slouched under a cabana on their phones. Either way, if you’re a human with a device in 2020, you check it about 50 times per day for 5 hours, on average. If you’re part of the 82% of people who think you spend less time on your phone than the national average, you’re wrong.
Yup. You’re addicted.
But it’s not all your fault. Your lizard brain is no match for the billions of dollars spent on research each year to ensure you stay hooked.
To hint at how bleak humanity’s current state of affairs is, the main goal of digital marketing these days is to “stop the scroll.” Not to sell you anything— just to get you to pause long enough to see a post. These days, you’re scrolling for the sake of scrolling. And you’re doing it too fast to ingest what’s on your screen. This is insanity.
The good news is, there’s a way out of this mess. But you need a strategy. So here’s what you do, and what you don’t, to end your device addiction once and for all.
So, on in this episode of the podcast. I'm going to give you at least seven strategies that you can use to rein in your phone use.
My History of Cell Phone Addiction
Reducing screen time is something that I have been trying to do for years, which has been a work in progress. I first decided that I was going to cut back on my phone and social media use in 2015. During the 2016 during the election cycle, because my ex boyfriend told me that I was spending way too much time on my phone reading in bed. And I was probably spending hours a day reading about what was going on in the political situation. And then, when things happened differently than people expected, I thought, I think I wasted a year and a half of my life.
That’s when I decided I was going to take a step back from my social media and cell phone views. A few years later, I've made huge gains.
Stats on Phone Addiction
In 2020, people check their phones on average 450 times a day for five hours a day. 82% of people don't think that they are on their phone that much.
Okay, so probably all of us are in that 80% people tap their phones, about 2600 times per day. And it doesn't matter what age group you're in what demographic you're in. Everybody does it, from millennials to baby boomers to Gen Z.
So if you're reading this, you’ve probably felt addicted to or annoyed with your phone at one point or another. Maybe you have too many messages or maybe you're like me and you had a phone habit at night where you would bring your phone in bed and scroll Instagram or Twitter or Facebook for hours. But everybody has has felt at one time or another they spent too much time on their phone.
How Much Time Do You Spend On Your Phone?
I actually tracked how much time I spent in 2019. And it was somewhere around 400 hours of just wasting time on social media, that doesn't include messages, WhatsApp notifications and other stuff. That’s a significant amount of time.
If you're spending even one hour a day on social media and you're doing it for leisure or entertainment purposes - that’s okay. But it becomes a problem when it's interfering with your life, productivity and mental health.
What Not To Do - Rely on Willpower Alone
So the one thing that doesn't work when you're trying to break up with your phone is willpower, because we only have a certain amount of it for a day.
Willpower doesn't work because we only have a fixed amount of it per day. What does work is focusing more more on controlling our environment than controlling ourselves and our willpower.
How? You can do that by creating an enriched environment, or putting into place what's called a forcing function. So a forcing function would be, instead of relying on yourself to only look at your phone for 15 minutes when you sit down on the couch it’s turning off your phone so you can’t use it.
James Clear. the author of Atomic Habits, has similar advice. He talks about how to start really small with habits and why you should make new positive habits very obvious attractive and easy. At the same time, make bad habits really difficult to do.
Example: So if you are trying to lose weight but you have a bunch of cookies in your house, you're going to be tempted to eat them all the time, whereas if you don't have them and you have to literally go out to the store or order delivery food or something to get a dessert you're going to be less likely to do it because there's some sort of friction between you and the bad habit.
It goes without saying that overuse of a device is a bad habit. There's rarely cases where that’s adding to your life, so I came up with a few different ways that have helped me. Over the past years, to establish forcing functions to prevent me from using my cell phone in that way over time I lead myself off of social media and cell phone addiction.
At least one of these is going to help you - st art with the easiest one. If you can claw back 100 hours of your time per year, it's worth it, or even 10 hours.
How to Take Your Time Back from
Apps and Algorithms:
Step 1: Install the Timeline Blocker Extension
So this actually wasn't even on my phone. It was on my computer. So that way, anytime I opened Facebook whether it was for work or for messenger or something like that. I never saw my timeline. So, There's one Chrome extension that I use, it's called newsfeed Eradicator, and it replaces the newsfeed with an inspirational quote and you can even put your own message there if you want to give yourself a reality check. And so that's one option, you know another strategy would be to block Facebook altogether or delete your account or something like that but I don't know how realistic that is for everybody. So a really good start is just to delete your, your newsfeed, and then you'll never get sucked into it. Likewise, if you want to have a similar effect on your phone. You can of course remove the Facebook app but then probably will reinstall it at a later date.
Step 2: Install the Freedom App on Your Phone
But an app that I have on my phone that kind of takes care of all of that is called freedom, and it works on both your desktop and your phone. So, all you do is turn it on and you can block as many websites or apps as you want for a set amount of time. And you can even turn off your entire internet connection. So, instead of trusting yourself to not look at your phone at night or you know if you have an Instagram habit or something like that, or maybe a Tinder habit and you're swiping for an hour a night and you're like, what is the point of this, then it's you install freedom and you blocked it. I think there's even a way to set it up on a schedule. And then you literally can't access it like you're a drug addict like you're trying to access this app or this website and you just can't. But be really careful with that because I've turned it on before when I was writing, because I didn't want to be distracted by other web pages and things, and then I ended up blocking my whole internet connection for like three hours and I had to look up something for my research and I couldn't do it so it was annoying. But anyway, you can use freedom app on your phone or on your laptop or your desktop and set up something that works for you, you know, maybe you turn it on. So at 9pm or 10pm, your app goes on, and then you just can't get on the internet. At that point in time. It seems extreme, but you can even just do it for a while, until you break your addiction and then you can like, go back to some something a bit more normal.
Step 3: Set a Nightly Phone Cut-Off Time
And then another thing that really worked for me was setting, I might leave no phone time. So, I would put my phone in airplane mode or turn it off, or something like that, I did it at 8pm, because I know that nothing productive is going to happen on my phone. Usually after that time. So after I go to the gym when I come home and I eat dinner. It was like eight o'clock nine o'clock. If I turn. If I go on my phone. I might not go to sleep until way later because the blue light will keep me up and then I'll also just waste time at night, reading stuff, or whatever on on social media so I do have a no phone time at night and on the nights that I don't do it. I'll end up at midnight, looking at my phone in bed, or something. No, not now.
Step 4: Charge Your Phone Outside of Your Bedroom
My fourth tip is not to bring your phone into the bedroom. Are these stories about people looking at their phone while they're having sex don't scare you then nothing well, carrying your bedroom, can be pretty toxic, and it can disrupt your sleep patterns, and there's even studies, saying that like, if your phone is turned on and within arm's reach or even if it's in the room, you can be like, it's like 17% less productive if you're working more distracted and less present, and whatever it is that you're doing. So, what I started doing with my thought. Eat dollar alarm clock on Amazon and I leave my phone in the living room on airplane mode and I go to bed and sometimes I'm annoyed because I really want to check Twitter, or I really want to see what's going on in the world. And like unwind but I decided that unwinding with my phone like using my phone. As a trigger to go to bed was counterproductive. So I had to stop doing it because I wasn't getting enough sleep. I was wasting a lot of time, and the worst thing before going to bed is to fill your subconscious, with a lot of reactionary activity is like reacting to a bunch of stuff on social media or filling your head with a bunch of negative news or politics or something like that. Alternatively, you can journal for a few minutes you can read a book you can watch Netflix like literally do anything else, and give your subconscious a problem to solve overnight. Think about something you're grateful for. We just have to try to change this habit of just being on our phone. All the whole time we're awake and the fifth thing which I kind of already talked about is going phone free outwork, a lot of remote workers, and people who work from home that I know some of the most successful ones don't even look at their phone until after brunch. And I know that that sounds crazy and maybe your dog will allow you to do that. But, if there's any possibility of doing it. See what you can do.
Step 5: Don’t Look at Your Phone Until After Lunch
I don't do this every day, but I usually try not to look at my phone, until after I have had breakfast and read that I read every morning, or after I do my first work block, even if it's an hour or two hours, because I know if I email or know if I look at my phone. It's just a downward spiral. And so the longer you can put off checking your notifications and looking at your phone, the better. So try to think of some way that you can do it or some off hours that you can set so that your co workers or your boss or clients or people know that you're not going to be on line until 10am, or agreement or something like that. And of course if you can work from anywhere and travel, you can really play around with this because if you're living in your house and all of your clients are in America, then we can have the whole baby itself before you have to answer to anybody during those business hours.
Step 6: Uninstall Apps from Your Phone, Change Your Passwords, and Log Out of Them
The sixth thing that I have done is actually uninstalling apps from my phone. You can even take this to a next level and have one phone for social media and one phone that's basically a dumb phone, not a smartphone. So I actually have two phones because one is an old iPhone, that I have Instagram and all of those apps on and my Facebook pages and stuff like that and then on my iPhone 10. I don't have anything I don't have Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, or actually I think I do have Facebook now for my facebook group. She can join badass digital nomads but I'm not addicted to Facebook anymore because of the timeline newsfeed Eradicator and the other steps that I put in place before so now I can actually have Facebook on my phone and not even remember it's there and not open it. Just open it intentionally if you want to engage with my group, and not get sucked into the timeline. One of the things you might notice is that after you break your habit to certain apps, you might acquire another app habit. So after I cut back on my Facebook time I spent more time on Instagram, and then after I cut out, Instagram, I spent more time on Twitter. And then after I deleted the Twitter up uninstalled on installed it for my phone logged out and put an anonymous password so I couldn't even log back in. And then I started reading on Google News. What am I doing and I took off the apple news app too. It's just so addictive, that. Yeah, once you start, you're like you just want to tap on an app and you want to scroll, it's like a human some kind of genetic thing that we want to do, and
Step 7: Put Your Phone in Black & White Mode
I read an article about it on medium by a guy who worked in developing these types of apps in Silicon Valley and he said that one of his tips was to turn your phone, through the handicapper accessibility settings you can turn the color off and put it in black and white, but basically they make it so colorful so eye catching like a bag of Skittles. That it attracts our eye, the same way that slot machines and casinos and things like that are any type of light like our eyes attracted to light color motion. And these phones are like crack for eyes because they have all the things that we are wired to perceive in our environment. So, You can also put your phone into a black and white mode and you'll find that it's way less attractive and less addicting.
Step 8: Buy a Separate Device for Social Media and Addictive Apps
But I didn't uninstalled Instagram actually until about a month ago. And that was really life changing too so now I mostly answer messages through a web browser or there's also an Instagram messages extension right you can add Chrome, there's probably one for Safari. And you can also post from the web app. It's a way to go into the developer tools of your browser and show the phone up version of the page versus the website version of the page and I'll find the instructions on how to do it and add it in the show notes because I didn't know you could do that. But you can actually post photos from written Instagram web browser. If you do that, and there's even third party apps now that allow you to post photos or videos from your desktop computer. If you need to use it for work, and not have to do it from your phone. And then you can also hire somebody you can hire a social media manager to post for you on all of your accounts. You can schedule stuff out in advance. You don't have to be logging into these apps on a daily basis, especially if it's not giving you anything in return, as far as fulfillment and happiness and joy and money, then of course you want to stay connected sometimes with people you want to see what's going on in their life you want to support what they're doing. So, there is, I think, a time and place and a positive use for social media, and in our phones which are magical devices but you know seeing all of these people at this party. And they didn't look happy like you guys will be way more happier if you're out on the dance floor and not slumped in slouched in your chairs in the back of the club.
Conclusion and What To Do Next
The other phasic strategy is just to combine these in a way that works for you, so going cold turkey and just deleting everything off your phone and deleting your accounts or something like that it's not realistic it's going to be really hard to stick with that and you'll probably end up caving and reinstalling everything again. But if you just pick one of those and see how it works for you. I guarantee that you can cut back on your device time.
How Much Time You’ll Save
And just remember, If you save one hour per day, on your phone. 365 hours per year. That's basically equal to one month of your life in a year, based on a 12 hour a day. So you save three hours a day on your phone. That's 1095 hours per year. If you save five hours a day that's nearly 2000 hours per year. So for those of you spending five hours a day on your phone. Plus, TV plus Netflix, plus messages and email and all the other stuff you can literally get back half of your time if you just stop doing that. And this is really applicable to. I think everybody who listens to the podcast because you guys, either work from home, or want to work from home or you're tech savvy or you're consuming content that's enriching your life. And you're probably really well connected because we're, you know, we're living in 2020, people are well connected people have a lot of apps, and tools and things on their phone, whether it's slack or Instagram or a travel booking app, or whatever it is. So, this is just a way for you to reclaim your time and your autonomy and your personal life and be able to set healthy limits on your technology use, because the alternative is for a lot of negative things to happen, whether it's isolation or loneliness or depression or procrastination.
And so part of thriving in our digital economy is being the boss of our devices and not letting them control us. So, with an extra few hundred hours per year you can make 10,000 extra dollars freelancing at $20 an hour, you could read 100 books, you can complete 50 online courses, you can create five or 10 new digital products that can make passive income for you. You know you can change your life if you take this time back. And there's a study that came out in 2019 rap ranked how people spend time on their screens on their phones, and the top two culprits for those millennials, and boomers, or Facebook, Follow right Instagram. So people spent between 60 and 70 minutes a day on Facebook, and 45 to 52 minutes a day on Instagram, and then it's let's up a little bit millennial spent about 15 minutes per day texting Boomer spent the same amount of minutes on their email so generational thing there, but yeah, and then it goes down from there there's like Snapchat music, Twitter, YouTube, but even if you just cut out Facebook, or you just cut your consumption of Facebook and Instagram in half. You're going to get back about an hour a day. So that's worth it.
So think about what you can do to implement some of these strategies, and I really hope that it enriches your life and it helps you make the most of the time that we have left in 2020, and also the rest of your life.
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