How to (Knowingly) Part With Your Phone
Hack your notification badges . Shades of gray . State the reason why you are going to look at your phone. There are endless tactics available these days to help you cut down on the time you spend on your phone.
Finding a quick jailbreak that will supposedly change the way you use your smartphone forever is the easiest task. However, “you can never change your relationship with the phone if you start with tips and tricks,” says science and health journalist and writer Katherine Price, author of the recently published book How to Lose Your Own. Smartphone: 30-day plan to get back to life .
“If you just say, ‘I’ll make my phone black or white,’ or say, ‘I’m only going to spend 40 minutes a day on my phone,’ for no real reason, it’s just a random limitation,” she says. “You really need to take a step back first and figure out what your current habits are, what you want your habits to be, and how you want your life to be. […] It’s not about spending less time with your phone, it’s about spending more time with your life. “
Rephrase the problem
The key is to take a different approach to this problem, because if you approach her with a limited mentality, she says, “It’s like dieting. Nobody wants to go on a diet. ” Instead, she suggests, if you’re creating time away from your phone as a gift to yourself, as if you’re actually returning to what really matters to you, then it’s a completely different experience. Your phone goes out of the temptation that you are denying yourself something that is stealing your time.
“It changes the dynamics of the relationship in a way that I think empowers people,” Price explains.
Arm yourself with scientific evidence
Also empowering is being scientifically aware of an issue. The first 10 chapters of Price’s book explore how phone use affects our brains. Specifically, she explains, our brains change in response to how we use it, or to the stimuli we subject them to. The average American spends over four hours a day on their phone. “As I said in the book, if you do something for four hours a day, you will be successful. So we really have to ask ourselves what it is. […] The first thing that comes to mind is that there is actually evidence that this is actually training our brains to be distracted and reduce our ability to concentrate. ”
By training our brains to be distracted, we also learn to interfere with the creation of both short-term and long-term memories because we don’t give the brain time to process information or think. Long-term memories, in particular, require the creation of new proteins in your brain, Price says, and this process can be easily disrupted if distracted.
Moreover, she adds, since the way long-term memories are stored is like a network of seemingly disparate things, the more connections you have between your memories, the more ideas and creativity you will have. If you don’t give your brain time to make these connections between things, you will actually dull your ability to think deeply and have creative thoughts. ”
Think about how your phone is affecting your relationship.
For Price, it was not only more information about what her phone was doing to her brain, but possibly the baby who triggered her wake-up call to truly reevaluate and change her relationship with the phone (and do all the research for this book). In the fall of 2015, she sat with her six-month-old daughter late at night.
“The eyes of babies […] their focal length is the evolutionary distance between them and the face of their parents. I think I had it deep down and I was sitting with her, it was late and I had this out-of-body experience when I realized that she was looking at me, presumably focusing completely on my face and I was looking in your phone while buying antique doorknobs on eBay. “
Price says this moment is special for her because she realized that this was not what she wanted her daughter’s experience of human relationships, let alone her relationship with her mother, to look like.
Go from waking up to breaking up
Are you ready to make a real difference? Start with what Price calls “technology sorting,” which involves downloading a tracking app that tracks how often you pick up your phone and how much time you spend on it each day so you can collect data about your current behavior. phone. After a few days of tracking, she offers a period to pay attention to things like your emotional state before and after using your phone, situations in which you usually reach for your phone, and how and how often your phone needs your attention. notifications and the like.
Once you’ve analyzed this information, start creating what Price calls “speed bumps” or obstacles that make you slow down. These can include everything from uninstalling social media apps so you have to go through your internet browser to check Facebook or Twitter to changing your lock screen image to a visual prompt that asks, “Why did you pick me up?” or “What do you want to pay attention to?” It is at this point that you apply the tactics mentioned above.
After sorting, the next step is to make changes to your environment, both on and off the screen, to remove what grabs your attention and maintain the habits that you’ve defined what you want. “Every time you remove a trigger for a habit you don’t want,” Price says, “you need to replace it with a trigger for a habit you really want.”
If you find yourself constantly checking email on your phone, uninstall the app and choose to check on desktop only. If notifications are taking up your time, turn them off or for everything except phone calls, texts, and calendars.
Rebuild and retrain your brain
As your habits change, it’s also important to regain some of the concentration that our phones have taken from us. Price recommends a variety of formal mindfulness practices, from adding small doses of silence to your day to reading (a printed book with your phone off) and meditation.
Price also offers a 24-hour split trial when you’re planning a full day without a phone or any screens. Take a dramatic break and watch the magic (and personal observation) flow from it. It is these observations, along with everything else you do, that will help you figure out how you want to move forward.
While this may all make you want to keep your old landline phone, or want to buy a dumb phone, Price makes it very clear that she is not suggesting that you really get rid of the phone.
“Breaking up with your phone doesn’t mean throwing it under a bus or throwing it,” she explains. “It’s more like going from an obsessive romantic relationship to having you sleeping with your phone, thinking about it all the time, and you crave it when you’re not with it, to returning to just friends. As the saying goes, maybe friends with benefits. Healthy relationships with borders ”.