how i'm treating my phone addiction and taking care of my mental health
how i'm treating my phone addiction and taking care of my mental health
hi i'm winnie and i'm a phone addict
I think a lot of us are self-diagnosed phone addicts, and if you clicked on this article, you probably know exactly what you would rather be doing instead of scrolling for hours, messing up your neck, staring into the ceiling, wondering why you aren’t getting your life together.
It’s difficult navigating life in such a digital age. I think we all have this turning point where we began to retreat inside and find shelter on a screen.
skip to the tips here:
Taking note(s) | Hacking your algorithm
Blocking websites | Screen time diet
Putting your phone in grayscale | Writing my journal with pen and paper
Brown Noise | Some other apps I find useful
My Safe Space
Since then, I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours in front of a screen.
My phone became my safe space. A place where no one can hurt me, not even myself. A place where I can look up anything I want. Where I could safely dream and watch others chase theirs.
But I always felt this shame that I was wasting so many of my waking hours on my phone and not spending that time pursuing my dreams. I always had these big amorphous goals like “become a youtuber” or “make apps for a living”. I was stuck in this vicious cycle.
The Vicious Cycle
I would watch all these videos, read a bunch, and get inspired to try to do it
Try doing it
Get discouraged because my stuff isn’t as good as what I thought
Give up and go back on my phone to watch more videos, telling myself I wasn’t ready until I prepared more
I always felt like my dreams were just too big and too hard for me to achieve, so the cycle went on and on. This disconnect between the person who I envisioned myself as and the person who I actually was began to destroy my mental health.
Before I knew it, I became an expert at self sabotage. And maybe you have too.
So here we are, phone addicts anonymous. It's a special club with me and all of you.
Hi, I'm Winnie, and I'm a phone addict.
Phone Addiction
I'm an extremely guilt driven person and I thought that I could shame my way into using my phone less. But this didn't work at all. I always relapsed.
I realized that there wasn’t any easy hack to just stop wasting time on my phone and achieve my dreams. I had to completely change my relationship with myself, phone, and the content I consumed.
In the next sections, I am going to share the habits I have been building to slowly change my relationship with my phone. None of these are a silver bullet but only what I’ve found useful.
Taking Note(s)
So, you see all these people on the internet doing all this cool stuff and think to yourself I wanna do that too. If you mindlessly consume all this content, I think it’s pretty bad for your brain and mental health. Something that I’ve been doing lately every time I see something that inspires me or I find interesting is writing it down in my notes app.
This sounds really dumb, but I’ll watch a video and just save it into my notes app with the link to the video and just write something off the top of my head like “solid video”.
I used to mindlessly save youtube, tiktok, and instagram videos into like “playlists” or “albums”.
But by mindfully taking note of how these videos made me feel and just writing it down somewhere has honestly made a really big difference for me.
Right when I feel that this video made an impact on me, I stop watching it, open up my notes app, and write down exactly what impacted me.
When I do this, I feel like the videos become useful to me and it gives me a pause if I actually need to continue being on my phone.
I’ve come up with a pretty interesting workflow to make capturing these notes easier, which I’ll write up in the future. Let me know if you would like this sooner than later.
Hacking your algorithm
The almighty algorithm that serves up the dopamine at each scroll can be hacked for your advantage.
It’s strange but I think at my worst the algorithm pretty much determined my personality, my likes, my dislikes. So for me when I changed my algorithm, I changed myself.
Everytime I see something that does not spark joy or something that I see a lot that I don’t write any notes about then I will tell the algorithm that I am not interested or to not recommend anything to me.
For example, I was very, very addicted to camera reviews because I felt that if I got the best camera, then I could become a successful youtuber.
Those reviews programmed me and I would make me feel bad because I did not have the greatest stuff and made me want to go out and get it. I purged my feed of these reviews and have not missed it for a second.
Now, I try to make it so that my feed is as positive and inspiring as possible for me; anything that takes away my peace just has to go. It’s not useful.
Blocking websites
Alright, this one is pretty extreme but I parental controlled my own phone.
There’s just some websites that I know just gotta go… and they gotta go 5eva.
So I blocked them.. As a bonus on iOS to block specific websites, you have to block porn also. 🤷
I deleted reddit off of my phone because I was really addicted to it but then I just found myself using the mobile version…. (yes, I was really down that bad)
So I blocked it. Whenever I visit one of these websites, I’m granted one of these glorious screens.
Screen Time Diet
I’ve been talking about changing the relationship between the content you consume but we also need to reduce the absolute value of the time spent watching content. This needs to be done in a healthy way and that’s not too restricting, or you’ll probably relapse.
It’s great on phones nowadays you can set limits but I found that the iOS Screen Time app limits are not limiting enough because you can just ignore the limit.
The app that I found to be the best for limiting apps on iOS is Opal.
Opal will not let you skip the screen time limit unless you go into the app and delete the limit. Because of this added friction and me mindfully setting the limit, when my time is up, I just accept it and do something else.
use my opal link to download it here → https://link.opal.so/em9AYdUZAtJt2AZZ7 (not sponsored)
Putting your phone in grayscale
I saw this so many times online that it “will make your phone boring”, so that you use it less. I did this many times also and have to admit that it’s extremely effective but I always relapsed and “brought the color back”.
The biggest thing here that I discovered was using the iOS Shortcuts app to create an automation that turns my phone to grayscale when the sun sets and rises. I still cheat and turn on the color, but my phone will turn it back to grayscale when I wake up and when the night begins. So my phone is in grayscale almost all of the time now just because it’s automatic. I have to be very deliberate and dig into the settings to turn the color back on. (let me know if you’d like a tutorial)
bonus: If you have a phone with an OLED screen, grayscale will make your battery last forever because the “black” pixels are turned off.
Writing my journal with pen and paper
I was so addicted to my phone for so many years that I endlessly researched the “best journaling apps” because I wanted it to be the easiest, least friction way to journal in my pocket.
I realize that there are just things that we can’t fully optimize and replace with technology. And I stopped writing my journal on my phone and now sit for 30 minutes everyday with my journal, completely focused on writing.
When I used to write my journal on my phone, I would write it in spurts: 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there, sometimes not at all.
Being mindful makes all the difference. I also feel the mind body connection between thinking and writing is amazing for crystallizing thoughts. (many of these ideas here are inspired from my physical journal)
Brown Noise
My god, I wish I found this earlier… I always thought that I needed background music to do work and I would always have my spotify running with my discover weekly or whatever the algorithm would recommend me. I love music a lot, but oh my god, the brown noise just soothes a part of my brain. I found this one on Spotify and I’m embarassed to see my Spotify recap this year because it will mostly be this.
Some other apps I find useful
Two apps that I find extremely useful are I am and stoic. I use I am’s widgets on my lock screen, and stoic’s widgets on my homescreen, and apple watch screen. I find them incredibly moving to see affirmations and quotes across my devices at a glance. They are a bright reminder that I can still continue to change and to focus on only the things that I can control: myself.
I am has a bit more of the spiritual and manifest-y affirmations, which I really like.
stoic has quotes from philosphers and influential people from all throughout history (not just stoicisim). It makes me feel less alone that so many people have thought about “life” so deeply.
Thanks for reading
Sorry Android users 🙏, I know some of the tips are a bit iOS-y, but I hope some of those ideas can be transferred over to your operating systems.
This morning, I actually was scrolling my black & white phone and thought “wow this is really boring”.
It’s still an ongoing process but there’s progress.
Celebrate the small wins and face your dreams,
Winnie