How to prevent Phone addiction
In our modern world, it is almost impossible to exist without a smartphone. When you go outside, most people are interacting with their phones in some way. Whether scrolling through Instagram, or reading the news, phones have become a staple of our modern world. While phones offer a lot of convenience, they are also causing issues of their own. The modern attention span has been on the decline. In this blog, I will tackle what phone addiction is and how to combat it.
Table of Contents
What is Phone Addiction
Phone addiction is pretty self explanatory. When someone has a hard time being without their phone, they are addicted. Some signs would be unable to cut phone usage down, using your phone during all of your down time, and checking your phone every couple minutes even when you know you are not expecting messages.
Why does Phone Addiction Matter
This matters because the majority of people are distracted by the ploys of their phone and it is an advantage to be able to be without your phone in order to focus. When everyone around you is distracting and scrolling endlessly, you can stand out by being able to control yourself and focus on important matters, such as work or school.
Methods to Prevent Phone Addiction
Screen time
In order to address the issue of screen time, you first need to figure out how much time you are spending on your devices and what you are spending your time on. Then when you know how much time you are spending on your screen, work incrementally to lower your screen time. It is important to work slowly to achieve your goal. So I would suggest reducing your screen time by ten minutes each day until you reach the amount of screen time you want to limit yourself to.
Cold Turkey
A classic method is just completely getting rid of your phone’s fun activities. No games, videos, social media. Just apps that are required for work or school. This approach, if successful, can be very effective. However, this method requires an extreme amount of will power because you will likely get very bored.
Distractions
Without screens you might have nothing to do. This is where distractions come in. Maybe try taking up a sport which will have many benefits including better sleep, better mental health and more. Or you could try working on things that you are really passionate about. Hanging out with friends is also a great way to distract yourself from your phone.
Exercising
I cannot stress the benefits of exercise enough. Exercising increases endorphin levels making you feel better, it helps you to actually feel tired and get better rest, it can even help regulate your diet. Exercising can also get rid of the extra energy you have that would be going towards your phone.
Notification
In order to combat the addiction you need to make sure your phone is not getting your attention. Notifications are an easy way for your phone to grab your attention and suck you in again, taking away minutes or even hours of your time. For me I turn off notifications for almost all apps except for important messages or emails.
Bed
Another way to combat the addiction is to prevent using your device particularly when you wake up and before you go to sleep. Starting and ending your day with your phone is bad because it builds bad habits and can make you dependent on using your phone. Like I know that for some people in my family before they go to sleep they sit in bed with their devices which causes worse sleep and makes them reliant on using the device before bed. You want to remove your device from as many aspects of your life as you can and this is key to doing that.
Habits
I think that the most important thing to remember is that addiction is a bad habit and you need to replace this bad habit with good habits or else you will likely relapse. Some good habits you can adopt are trying to read daily for 30 minutes which is a skill that people are losing or you can start journaling.
Now it is important to remember that breaking an addiction in general is a long term journey. Even if you relapse remember that you are playing the long game and as long as your trend is upward you are winning.
Thank you for reading Impromental and be sure to stay tuned for the next post.