An average adult spends around 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media today. That’s around 16% of your waking hours, scrolling. The accessibility to a device that can instantly fill up those minutes where you don’t know what to do with your free time is the perfect recipe for addiction.
People holding their phones to their faces is ubiquitous and that makes it seem normal and harmless but what’s overlooked by those who think this way is that there's been a significant upward spike in depression since the introduction of smartphones into the population and It’s only going up as time goes on.
My purpose for writing this article is to bring awareness to the detrimental effects of using social media and how to curb the addiction. If you wish to curtail your usage of smartphone and reclaim your life back, here are some helpful tips to follow:
Hold yourself accountable
No one else is going to come to your aid if you aren’t willing to help yourself, the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem with excessive use of your phone. When you accept that fact, you will put yourself on the path to living a healthy life. Almost every phone has the option to check the app usage and track every second of the time spent on the device. Use that as a means to set your target. Allot yourself a total time to be spent on it per day. And if you cross that limit you’ll know it.
Realizing It’s harmful
The research on social media consumption is clear as day, It’s inversely correlated to the happiness of the user. Why is it so addictive then? The reason people constantly seek that dopamine hit is because they have developed a habit of reaching for their phones when they are bored, not knowing boredom is not to be averted artificially by these digital drugs. The brain, when constantly immersed into the device and shown algorithmic content fed to it, to be stimulated, rewires itself to find the everyday tasks mundane and makes it seem that your life is monotonous. That kind of regular bombardment of other people’s best sides of their lives to you, makes you compare your life to theirs and down-regulates your positive outlook on life.
Understanding the opportunity cost
As alluring as the time spent on your phone is, It’s intentionally engineered to captivate you and keep you from putting your phone down. So it would do you good to not even get on the app, to begin with, unless you need to “check something real quick”, in that instance. Do hold yourself to that “quick”. There are so many other things you could be doing -reading a book, going on a walk to break that sedentary lifestyle, making plans with an old friend for lunch/dinner or working on a personal project that you’ve put aside for the reason of not having the time for it. You’ll find yourself with a lot of time on your hands after you cut out the unnecessary scrolling on the phone.
Positive feedback loop
After staying off social media, it would be a good idea to intentionally notice your general frame of mind and see if you feel any differently. If the change is evident, it’ll give you the motivation to stay off your phone and fuel you to resist It’s pull even more.
Taking up a new hobby
Changing behavioural patterns is never an easy task to shoulder, that’s why instead of just stopping cold turkey, cultivate a new hobby and drift off towards spending more time becoming better at the new hobby, you could take up anything, from building a table from scratch, or writing a book to putting an effort into noticing the surroundings and appreciating existence.
Few Pointers
- Home Screen changes
Remove all the apps from the home screen and put them somewhere where you have to take a few steps to get there. Something as trivial as this is enough time for your brain to remember that you are about to waste time.
- Make a new folder
Make a separate folder and name it- Junkie/ Bad/ time waste- doing this will guilt you into not opening that folder when you wanna open the app.
- Black and white
Every little detail, down to each pixel, is designed to make you stay engaged so turning on the system-wide black and white filter will make it unappealing for you to look at the phone.
- App lock timer
In case your work calls for you to be on social media, set a time limit for how long an app can be used before it locks you out.
- Delete the apps
Delete the apps and use the website version to break the spell of addiction, the web version of most popular websites is deliberately built to make users install the app for a ‘better experience’. The clunky user experience is enough of a deterrent to not use it.
- Turn off notifications
Turning off notifications altogether for some apps would be great but if you don’t want to do that. You could tailor what notifications to let through to the Lock Screen within the app. Many apps allow you to block notifications of certain types.
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