How to Combat Phone Addiction When You Don’t Really Want To

The average adult spends 2.5 hours a day on their smartphone, with 45 minutes on social media alone. These statistics are supposed to be disturbing, but if you read them and thought, “Wow, I use my phone way more than that,” then you may have a serious phone addiction. It’s important to minimize your screen time for ‘reasons’, so here’s how to combat phone addiction when you don’t really want to because being addicted to your phone is going sort of fine.

 

Don’t sleep with your phone in your room.

This is a great first step to create some healthy space between you and your device. Leave it charging overnight in the next room so that it’s not the last thing you look at before bed and the first thing you see in the morning. Of course, this means you’re going to have to buy an actual alarm clock, so this solution prominently involves spending money on additional technology that you trust less to do one thing that your phone already does. This is the correct choice.

 

Don’t go on your phone while doing other things.

We all know that multitasking is a myth and no one is actually adept at it. So whether you’re worried about productivity or mental health, add a little mindfulness to how you use your device and don’t go on your phone while you’re doing things like watching TV or eating. Just sit there in silence and eat your boring meal. This will make you a better person because it’s like olden times and that’s when people were good (?). Sounds wrong, but whatever.

 

 

Remember your motivations.

When you’re quitting your phone addiction even though you don’t really want to, it’s important to keep track of what’s motivating your decision. Probably, it’s the general sense that spending too much time on your phone is “bad” for you, and like sure, we all know that but also scientists have only made vague, ominous claims about how we “can’t yet know” the full impact smartphones are having on us, and also after the invention of the printing press when books started to become more widely available, the popular idea at the time was that books were going to make everyone stupid because instead of storing information in their brains people would just read information in books. You hear that? They thought BOOKS were ruining our brains. But no, stop using the infinite knowledge computer that fits perfectly in your back pocket so that you can get better at sitting around thinking intrusive thoughts and not Googling things.

 

So use these tips to combat your phone addiction even though you rely on your phone for absolutely everything and that’s probably just an inevitable course of human development that is futile to resist. Social media is pretty bad, though; we get that one.