Do you feel addicted to your smartphone? You’re not alone!
It appears that nearly 80% of people are wanting to fix their phone addiction. Just a couple of days ago I read an article about how hard it has been to get students off their phones during class time and no wonder! Our whole lives are connected through our phones. As technology grows so do we. Sadly, this has led to an unhealthy reliance upon our phones that can be unhealthy for our mental, physical, and even spiritual lives.
Here are some basic quick tips to help you get over your phone addiction:
1: Confess to a Friend
Even if it is in casual conversation, don’t be afraid to talk things over with your friends. You might just say “I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been really addicted to my smartphone, it’s like I can’t let it go, can you relate to that?”. Honestly, in today’s world, we don’t talk to each other enough, so perhaps your friend would welcome an honest conversation. You could discuss different ways to help “kick the habit” with your friend. As much as I want to help you, I’m just posting a few quick tips, it’s much better to have conversations with others and get them involved.
2: Find Healthy Ways to Set Down Your Phone!
We often go to great lengths to improve our physical health (like going to the gym) but when our emotional health is at stake, it gets easy to think it’s no big deal. The truth is, we all need to find good and healthy ways to improve our health and break our addictions.
One thing I’ve found very helpful is taking a break from social media. Social media can be toxic and can waste hours of time on your phone, perhaps you should take a week-long break. I would personally suggest letting people know that you are taking a quick break (in a non-obnoxious way) and uninstalling any social media apps from your phone. This is crucial! You need to take away instant access from social media. I have found that taking a week away from social media can really help you stay on your smartphone less and can really give you a good emotional break.
3: Unfollow People on Social Media
If you don’t want to take a break from social media, try unfollowing people that are toxic in your life. You may want to unfollow people who post about politics all of the time. If you enjoy politics, perhaps you would want to unfollow the people that most often get you riled up in debates. When you have 800 friends and you’re following all of them on social media, your feed can be quite long and it can take a long time to get through.
Unfollowing some people can help save you some time and also bring more emotional health to your life. Here’s how to unfollow people on Facebook:
On a laptop: Simply go to facebook.com and log in. Once you’re logged in, on the top right-hand side of the page, there should be a question mark, and next to the question mark you should see a down arrow. Click that down arrow and click “news feed preferences”. Then click “unfollow people and groups to hide their posts”. From there you simply have to click on whoever you want to unfollow, and their posts will stop showing up on your news feed.
If you’re on the facebook app, simply press the three lines in the top right-hand part of the app, next scroll and click on “settings and privacy” and scroll down to “your time on Facebook”. Not only is this a good tool to track your time on Facebook, but you can also find “news feed preferences” there, and tap “unfollow people to hide their posts” which should help trim your time line up.
4: On Android Phones, Use the Digital Wellbeing App
Some newer Android phones have what is called “Digital Wellbeing” which is built into your settings. Simply scroll through your phone’s settings and look for “digital wellbeing” as one of the options. Different phones will have this in different places.
In the digital well-being app, it lists your screen time for each app, and it gives you the option to limit your own screen time. This means that you can set social media to 0, and it will blackout your social media apps for you. You can also set social media to 15 minutes a day, so it will shut your social media down after 15 minutes. You can override this of course if you needed to, but it’s nice to have an easy way to remind yourself to GET OFF YOUR PHONE!
These are just a few tips to help you get back on track. If you have any other tips, feel free to leave them in the comments!
Click here to find out where our statistics were cited from (and also to find out more information on this topic).