The 5 Step Guide to Breaking Your Phone Addiction
How to keep social media apps from stealing your time through triggers and habit replacement
The average person spends over 4 hours a day on their phone. That’s 28 hours a week. That’s a part-time job — hell, it’s almost a full-time job.
But that’s just the average American. What about you? How much time do you spend on your phone a week? Go ahead and check right now. It only takes a few minutes; I’ll wait. (Here are instructions on how to do so for iPhone and Android).
Since it’s only fair, I’ll share how much time I spend on my phone in a week as well:
The top number is crossed out for one important reason: I don’t count time using Google Maps toward my screen time. I use Google Maps to check traffic during my work commute, and this is not the sort of phone use which contributes to my unhappiness as a person. It represents a majority of the time spent on my phone, so I choose to exclude it. When I exclude Google Maps from my total phone time, it comes out to 16h 24m. Divided by 7, that’s a daily average of 2h 20m a day.
All in all, I use my phone a little over half as frequently as the average person.
My reduced phone usage didn’t happen by accident; I spent two or three months laser-focused on the task of bringing my phone use under control. I’d wager that at the height of my phone addiction I spent more than 5 hours a day on my phone.
And no, I didn’t settle on anything extreme like deleting all the social media apps off my phone (I tried that for a while) or turning my phone black and white (I tried that too). In the end, I got the best results with some simple changes that you can make in about half an hour.
I’ve written this guide to walk you through them.
Why I Didn’t Take Some Common Advice
Before getting started, I’d like to explain some changes I am not going to ask you to make:
- Deleting all your social media apps. Every time I’ve ever tried to do this, I ended up having to download them back because a friend made a Facebook event, or they wanted me to look at a particular Instagram account, or for some other legitimate reason. We’ll go over ways to break your social media addiction that don’t involve deleting apps.
- Reducing your home screen to six apps. Some people find success this way, but I’m not one of them. There are apps on my phone that I use infrequently, but when I use them, I need them. These are usually utilities, like my altimeter, TinyScanner, and Authy. We’ll be going over ways to organize your phone and reduce its footprint without getting rid of these apps.
- Forcing yourself not to use your phone. We live in a smartphone world. If you manage to cut your phone entirely out of your life, you will find yourself in situations where everyone but you is using their phone (such as waiting in line, or in the car as a passenger). The stoic ideal might be to sit there in contemplative silence, but sometimes I’d rather do something with my time. We’ll be going over ways to use your phone productively, rather than trying to cut it out entirely.
I tried all these things, and while they worked for a while, the changes never stuck. There are two reasons for this:
- When you eliminate a bad habit, the trigger for the habit is still there. If you don’t replace that trigger with a new positive habit, the old negative one will reassert itself. Waiting in line, boredom in a car and situations where other people use their phones are a trigger you can’t escape. In my experience, you can fight it, but not forever. If you don’t design a positive response, you will break. This guide will show you how to design a positive response.
- Any change based on flatly deleting an app you use creates frustration because you encounter a situation where you might have wanted the app, and now it’s gone. In my experience, I would quickly re-download the app and use it. The problem came later when it sent me dozens of big, bright notifications to control my behavior. This guide will show you how to make sure only important notifications get to you, so you control apps instead of apps controlling you.
Without further ado…
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