How to Break Your Phone Addiction and Take Back Control of Your Life

Checking your phone throughout the day may not seem vital, it can develop into a bad habit.

Today, I’ll talk about how I streamlined and removed distractions from my digital life.

I want to talk about smartphones and more specifically my own and how I set them up.

I have an iPhone, but the things I’m going to talk about in this article can be applied to any phone. It has nothing to do with software.

It’s an incredible technology and it has changed all of our lives I feel fortunate to live in a time where I have access to so much at my fingertips.

But for many of us, this phone has gone from being an incredible tool to being more of a distraction.

Phone addiction is a real problem and there are a lot of statistics out there that show we spend on average hours a day on our phones.

So, I want to talk about some simple things that help me to regain a little bit of control over my relationship with the phone.

Let’s first dive into the homepage.

Homepage

I set this up with my morning and evening routines in my mind. Also, you’ll notice one thing right of that I don’t have any social media or any messaging app on here and that is very intentional.

I find that on these apps you are responding to someone or endlessly scrolling. In the morning or evening, I don’t feel that is a good use of my time. Instead, I have apps that I use first thing in the morning or at right end of the day.

On top, we have a clock that is used to set an alarm, Fitness app to get track of my all physical activities. Spotify or Podcasts (Castro )are majorly used during my workout session or during my commute.

Then at the bottom, I have some general tools that I like to have really quick access to. By the way, these are not addicting apps.

I find that this setup is really nice because I don’t want to suck ed into my phone as soon as I unlock it.

Second Page

So, the next page has tools that I find useful, including messaging apps and stuff like my calendar, learning apps that sorts of things.

You’ll notice that I have absolutely, no shortcuts to social media and other apps that I feel pull me in and distract me throughout the day.

I don’t say that I don’t use these apps but I’m intentionally trying to increase the friction between myself and being sucked into these apps.

So the two potential ways to set that up for yourself are, either you can remove the shortcut if possible on your phone so that you don’t see it on your home pages or if you can’t do that then throw these apps into a folder and place that folder in a corner of your phone.

I used to think that it was a silly thing to do because look I’m not 5 years old. I have self-control but that’s not the point. The point is that you’re giving yourself the best odds.

Some Important Features

I want to talk really about some other features that are built into pretty much all phones nowadays.

1. Digital Wellbeing

Digital well-being, which I think is a super underrated feature in a lot of modern smartphones.

The concept is very simple you should track phone usage. This feature is really awesome because it tells me how many times I’ve unlocked my phone today, how many notifications received and how much time I spend on each app.

This is really eye-opening and really useful information because knowledge is power and anything that is tracked gets managed.

2. Do Not Disturb

“Do not disturb” is a godsend. Whenever I go to bed I put my phone on Do not disturb mode so that so it’s not buzzing throughout the night. I use this for long portions of the morning or whenever I’m trying really hard to get some work done.

Do Not Disturb mode is fantastic because it reduces the number of times that you get notifications. It’s okay to not check Facebook 12 times throughout the day.

3. Night Light

One other important feature is Night Light. It turns the blueish light that comes from your phone to more of an orange tone which really helps when you’re trying to prepare for bed.

I don’t think it’s a replacement for just straight up not using your phone or using it a lot less. However, it’s nice I have it automatically set to turn on at 9:30, and that way I’m not looking at so much blue light before I go to bed.

Okay, that’s pretty much it. Once again these are very simple things to set up. It should not take you more than 5 minutes.

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