Battling addiction and an intense dependency to your smartphone, the internet, and social media in general is no easy feat. Who is to blame? Is it because of Facebook’s endless stream of videos, our constantly buzzing Snapchat, or our social media obsessed culture overall? No matter what your vice is when you seek out your phone, the gravitational pull that it has on our mental focus, sense of time, and environmental awareness is significant. What originally felt like a couple minutes scrolling social media can easily turn into a wasted hour of time that could have been put towards doing something more productive.
The best way to overcome addiction to your smartphone is to realize that your life doesn’t depend on using it. You won’t fall off the face of the Earth or instantly become irrelevant because your phone isn’t between your fingertips. As a busy college student, learning early on about how to manage my time and limit my smartphone use has tremendously improved my daily productivity. Of course, I won’t lie to you and say that staying off my phone was a piece of cake. I definitely went through periods of extreme withdrawal when I needed to really sit down and focus on classes. Yet, over time, the habit of limiting my time online felt much more natural and now requires little effort at this point in time. Let’s break down some easy tips to pull away from the newsfeeds and accomplish fighting addiction to your smartphone.
- Stay sane. You can effectively unplug from the internet if you’re battling addiction. Studies show that we feel the need to check our phones every fifteen minutes, even if we have no incoming notifications. That intense compulsion to check notifications and feeds interferes with our ability to focus and affects our psychological mood overall. The most basic step that experts suggest to get off your phone is to set alarms for how often you can check it. Start small with cycles of fifteen minutes, then half an hour, and eventually up to an hour. Each time you hear the alarm, allow yourself to check everything within one minute and catch up with your media. As hard as it sounds, this method was great for me to reduce my anxiety to respond to texts immediately and I held myself much more accountable.
- Turn off your notifications! The nagging buzzing that comes from it can easily drive you up a wall and only makes your urge to check your phone worse. When I’m working on something important, I place my phone on airplane mode so I’m not as bothered by texts, Snapchats, Facebook messages, or calls. If you can’t completely unplug, turning off a couple social media apps at a time is great place to start. That way, the most distracting updates won’t clog your head and will help conquer your addiction to your smartphone.
- Get good sleep. This is easily done by not letting your phone into your bed right before you doze off. Not only will your sleep improve because you’re less distracted, but you’ll be less awake from the bright light it emits. You’ll also be much less tempted to start your day by getting sucked into the pile of messages and updates in the morning. Overcoming addiction to your smartphone doesn’t have to be hard if you can take small changes such as this and implement it to your daily life!
- Grayscale is king. Studies show that the bright and diverse colors of our smartphone screens draw us in more than one that is purely black and white. What you may not know is that you can actually set your phone’s display to grayscale. I found this trick incredibly effective for keeping me off highly distracting apps such as Facebook and Instagram. I only turned the setting off if I needed to access photos or was using my phone to Facetime friends or family. You can easily turn on grayscale by accessing the “Accessibility” category of your phone’s settings within a few clicks. If you have an IPhone, first find “Display Accommodations” and then turn on “Color Filters” to turn on grayscale. If you happen to have Samsung device, tap into your “Vision” page and then scroll down to “Grayscale” to give your display that retro look. Your eyes and mental focus will thank you!
Take Initiative
If the tips above are difficult to make happen on your own, don’t forget that support groups exist for a reason to boost your motivation. You gain a strongly knit group of people who are experiencing the same addiction as you are and can hold you accountable. Online addiction support resources are also available to help during your recovery. No matter what, don’t give up and be a doer to see positive change in your life!
