How to break up with your phone

You want to check an important email. So you grab your phone. You open the email app, get what you need, and close it.

But instead of putting your phone down, your hand, as if with a will of its own, swipes a few times and taps the Instagram logo. You don’t know how, but several hours go by.

When you look up, half the evening is gone, you are hungry, and the house still needs cleaning.

This wouldn’t sound so bad if spending hours watching tiktoks is what we wanted to do with our time. Except that it isn’t.

What terrifies me is that there is no conscious choice in my mind to spend hours doomscrolling once I open a social media app. It just happens. Leaving me confused, and irritated.

I vow to be stronger, to have more discipline, to not let this happen again.

But it does happens again. And again. And again.

After years of suffering with these compulsions, I think I have found some small changes that make a big difference.

Treat your digital environment as you would your physical one

If you wanted to start eating healthier, you wouldn’t have bags of chocolate and candies lying around the house in plain sight. But that is exactly what we do with our phones.

Colorful apps that promise instant gratification just a few swipes away. In moments of temptation, we can’t blame our brains for craving and pursuing what they evolved to crave and pursue.

The difference between calories and content is that the calories we have at hand in our homes will run out. The content won’t.

So here are some practical ways you can start healing your brain:

Dumb down your phone

Remove social media apps, games, and all things that are designed to hook your attention and that benefit the more you use them.

You don’t have to delete your accounts, just don’t have the apps in your phone. Use them in your computer, where they won’t be that addicting.

Make access less convenient, and you will access them less.

Find higher-quality activies to do in your free time

If you make your phone boring but don’t replace that time with anything, you will just revert back to your old habits. You need to use your time to do activities you find fulfilling and rewarding.

You can start reading more, taking more walks, learning a language, an instrument. The world is literally your playground.

I would encourage you to do real things. Without a screen. I’m not sure you know this, but in case you don’t: You can leave your house without your phone and nothing will happen to you.

The excuse of having your phone at all times in case of emergencies doesn’t stand once you realize that emergencies will occur and you will miss them. That’s just life.

A meeting ran late, or you overslept, or you were taking a walk. Things will happen.

And you can’t tie your whole life and wellbeing to a piece of glass just to have an illusion of control.

Stop treating your phone as a constant companion

I have Cal Newport to thank for this framework, it has done wonders for solving my dependence on my phone. (I highly recommend his book ‘Digital Minimalism’).

This model stops treating your phone as something that has to be with you at all times, and starts treating it more as a tool, as something you can access if you want to, and then leave once you are done.

When you are home, leave your phone in a designated place (the entrance works for me, the kitchen works for others). Starting now, your phone stays there. If you want to use it, you get up and walk to the phone. You send the text, make the call, and then leave it there.

The power of this rule is that you know your phone is there if you need it, but it will stop this constant need of checking it just because you have it by your side.

Turn off all notifications

This is non-negotiable. You cannot stop the pull from your phone if it is calling for you with noises and lights at all times.

Set focus modes with Do Not Disturb so emergencies can still come through, but the rest of the time your phone is in the same place and does not make any noise unless someone calls you.

A frame of mind that can help you do this is to start seeing your phone as a tool (because, opposite to what social media engineers have made us believe, it is a tool.

The tool does not choose when you use it. You choose when you use it. With notifications and instant gratification readily available, the phone has been choosing when to use you.

Without it beckoning for your attention, your phone will just exist. When you want to do something with it, you go over to it, do what you have to do, and then leave it there again.

In the beginning, this will be hard. You will check your messages and emails more than you want to. But don’t worry, this will decrease over time as you apply these principles.

The main idea of this protocol is not to use your phone less (although that will happen as a side effect once you remove all the addicting stuff from there), but to break this link in your mind that the phone *has* to be right next to you capturing your attention at all times.

Educate yourself

As an additional point, what helped me was learning about the effects technology and social media are having on our brains. This made me connect my digital habits to real-time effects in my life, which made me raise the stakes and take responsibility for my life (it also scared me a bit). Good starting points are ’Stolen Focus’ by Johann Hari, ‘Irresistible’ by Adam Alter, and ‘The Attention Fix’ by Anders Hansen.

Conclusion

Our immersion in the digital gets deeper and deeper every day. It captures so much of your cognitive abilities that the physical - the real - disappears.

I hope you can try some or all of these ways to reclaim back your time and attention.