You’re Probably Addicted To Your Phone… Here’s How To Kick The Habit!

Let me start this article by asking a few questions…

Do you sometimes feel like the day has “gotten away” from you?

Do you feel like your mornings are rushed, even after you’ve gotten the kids fed and dressed?

Do you sometimes get to the end of your workday and feel that kinda icky feeling that you could have done a lot more? Oh well, there’s always tomorrow, right?

Are there a few work projects that aren’t quite as far along as you hoped?

Do you find yourself staying up later than you originally intended?

How long has it been since you read a real book?

Have you not made much progress on that business idea/novel/home-improvement project?

Do you feel isolated or generally unhealthy (physically or mentally)?

If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be addicted to your phone.

“Oh, please! Everyone needs to be on their phone!”

That’s true to some extent. But let’s look at why and when that phone usage is occurring.

About a year ago, I was addicted to my phone. I didn’t really know it because I felt the same as many people feel… that smartphones have become such a big part of our lives that it wasn’t weird for me to be on my phone a lot throughout the day. After all, I needed my phone to check work emails and sign onto my work VPN. I also needed to make sure I was always reachable since I have a wife and kids (ie people who depend on me).

But my phone usage extended far beyond those instances. And I was making excuses for using my phone way more than I should have.

Before we get into things, let’s establish a bit of a baseline for phone usage.

The average smartphone screen time EACH DAY in the United States (according to Google AI) is over six hours for Millennials and Gen Z. For Boomers, it’s only slightly less horrifying with an average of over four hours.

Those numbers are averages. So, obviously many people are going ABOVE those numbers each day. Also, keep in mind that this is just PHONE screen time. This doesn’t include other screen time like work, watching TV, or playing video games.

It is my opinion that phone screen time is the scourge of our lifetime, not dissimilar to what smoking was decades ago.

Smartphones have so insidiously embedded themselves into our day-to-day lives that many of us can’t even fathom being even physically separated from them!

And that’s where I was a year ago.

I always toyed with the idea of permanently limiting my screen time. I did periodic experiments, but nothing really stuck, long-term. I even wrote a whole article about it years ago and lamented at the end of that article that when the experiment was over I went right back to using my phone just as much as I had before!

But two specific things occurred to me a year ago that forever altered my opinion of phone screen time…

At that time, my phone usage was about three hours a day. I would play on my phone in the morning before work and then periodically throughout the work day if I felt bored. At night, I would scroll through social media or read articles after my wife had gone to bed (since she tends to get tired before I do).

I didn’t feel like my phone usage was problematic in any way (although I would have related to many of the questions posed at the beginning of this article).

The first thing that occurred to me (and the biggest thing that made me realize I was addicted to my phone) was that I realized that I felt uncomfortable if my phone wasn’t physically near me at all times. Even if I wasn’t using it, I wanted it close to me. I wanted it in my pocket or on the table where I could easily reach it. The thought of leaving it charging in the bedroom or something brought me actual discomfort. Even when I would consciously decide to leave it in the other room, I would go and get it after a few minutes just to quell that discomfort.

Why?

At the time, I didn’t know exactly. It wasn’t like I was waiting for an important call or email. I just didn’t like the idea of my phone sitting in the other room. I always wanted the opportunity to pick it up and look at it if I wanted to.

Again… why?

It was because I was not comfortable feeling boredom or any sort of “mental downtime”. And I knew that my phone provided a mental analgesic to any unpleasantness I might feel. My phone “filled the space”.

When I realized that I couldn’t be physically apart from my phone, I felt a little sick inside.

For so long, I used my phone as an antidote to feeling any sort of boredom. If I was sitting quietly at home for a few minutes, I would reach for my phone. If I was about to start a particularly boring (or difficult!) project at work, I would reach for my phone. If I was standing on line in the grocery store, I would reach for my phone. I never let myself feel much of anything since I always had a distraction within arm’s reach.

I’ll always remember how my parents described what it was like to smoke. Both my mom and dad smoked when they were younger and I always found it fascinating when they described what it felt like. My mom always said “How can I talk on the phone without a cigarette? How can I have a cup of coffee without a cigarette? How can I wait for the bus without a cigarette?”

My dad would say that smoking was alluring not just because of the nicotine, but because it was something you did with your hands! If you felt nervous or uncomfortable, you always had something to occupy yourself. Any sort of mental discomfort or anxiety could be soothed by the familiar “dance” of lighting and smoking a cigarette.

People who are new to acting often find it more comfortable being on stage if they have a prop of some sort. Something to hold or handle. A hat or an umbrella or a newspaper. Better yet, a bit of business they can engage in which keeps their body occupied in a natural way, since they are so afraid of appearing “unnatural”.

That is what smoking did for our parents. And that’s what smartphones are doing for us.

It’s easier navigating a party if you’re holding a drink. It’s easier navigating life if you’re holding a phone.

But phones are dangerous in their own way, because while cigarettes engaged just your hands, phones engage your hands and your mind.

You can smoke a cigarette and write a poem. You can smoke a cigarette and fall in love with a woman. You can smoke a cigarette and play ball with your kids.

You can’t do anything like that while looking at your phone.

Yes, smoking eventually kills. It dramatically shortens one’s lifespan by an average of ten years. But this leads me to the second terrifying thing that occurred to me…

My phone usage was eating up roughly 20-25% of the time I was awake each day. That meant that almost a quarter of my waking life was spent staring into a little plastic toy.

I realized that while smoking chops off a hunk of your life at the very end, phone usage skims a little bit off the top of each and every day. So while I might have my full allotment of years, I have less time each day to spend with my wife and kids.

Most adults in the US spend an average of six hours a day on their phones. Do we spend that same amount of time hugging our kids and telling them we love them? Are our phones so important to us that we are willing to sacrifice time with our loved ones?

And that’s what phones, just like cigarettes before them, are robbing us of: time.

Before I started limiting my screen time, I felt harried each day and that I couldn’t get “on top” of all the things I needed to do. That feeling has diminished significantly. Now, I feel like I actually DO have enough time in the day to get done all the things I want to do.

That’s because not pouring 25% of my time into my phone means I can think deeply about things. I can plan. I can daydream. I can fantasize. I can focus.

Playing on your phone robs you of deep thought. It freezes your mind at the point of the first superficial thought that enters your brain. Picking up your phone to get those little dopamine hits puts a handbrake on your creativity because once things start to lag, mentally, you open up Instagram or TikTok and get bombarded with colorful images that pull all your focus away from what you were thinking about.

Planning the next step in your business or figuring out dinner plans for your wife’s birthday will never be as pleasurable (in the short-term) as sports bloopers, pictures of ponies in sweaters, or pretty girls in bathing suits.

But keep in mind that the emphasis of this article is on PHONE screen time. I don’t demonize all screen time the way I do phone screen time. I, like many of you, make my living using a laptop or some other form of computer. But the difference is that I don’t ever feel ADDICTED to my laptop because laptops aren’t built the way phones are. My laptop can’t be carried in my pocket. I can’t open up my laptop at any second of the day or night. I don’t keep my laptop on my nightstand.

Also, even though I don’t particularly like social media, I don’t feel that social media is the problem. I can look at Instagram on my laptop… but I hardly ever do that. Why? Because the delivery system (my laptop) isn’t as addictive as my phone!

Phones are made to be intuitive and, thus, addictive. Don’t we always marvel when babies get a hold of our phones and end up taking 1,000 selfies? It’s because phones are really easy to use!

They have been designed that way. They have been designed to get and keep us addicted to them. The makers of smartphones have hacked our brains to keep us using their products and giving them money. It’s always been about money. Didn’t we all get along just fine before smartphones? It wasn’t like the invention of smartphones solved some basic human need, like when indoor plumbing drastically increased public health. Or when antibiotics and vaccines kept people from dying from plague and yellow fever.

Nope. Smartphones were just a brilliantly engineered product that became ingrained in our lives simply because they were diverting.

But they are stealing your time away. They are stealing away the time you could be using to make yourself a better man, husband, and father. When people get older, they always say, “I wish I had more time with my loved ones.”

Well, now is your chance to get that time back!

If you have realized that you are addicted to your phone, how do you kick the habit?!

I’m glad you asked! Here is how I beat my phone addiction.

First, you need to establish a baseline for yourself. Do you know how to check your daily/weekly screen time? If you have an iPhone, go to “Settings” and then go to “Screen Time”. It’s pretty simple. It will give you a view of the current week and what your screen time is each day, and what it equals as a week-long average.

If you scroll down from there, it will tell you how long you spend on each app.

It’s pretty sobering when you first look at those stats and have your phone usage quantified in plain numbers.

Those numbers are your starting point. Go week by week and try to reduce your weekly average. The reason I advocate looking at it on a weekly basis as opposed to daily is because if you have a particularly screen-heavy day, you can make up for it the next day. A one-day lapse doesn’t necessarily have to kill your week.

I keep my screentime to an average of one hour per day. This allows me to still check work emails, call my wife if I need to, check the weather, manage my bank account, or plug something into my GPS.

When I first attempted to reduce my screentime, like I said earlier, I tried to make the conscious decision to put my phone out of reach, like in the other room. This was only somewhat successful because I still felt the draw. The secret was removing the draw itself.

The allure and the pull of the phone was real. I, like everyone else, was hardwired over years of use, to WANT to pick up my phone all the time to get those little dopamine hits. In order to rewire my brain, I had to convince myself of one very important truth…

…that my brain was more fun than my phone.

When I really examined it, the videos I would watch on Instagram or the articles I would read on CNN, for example, weren’t more amusing than thinking about what FS article I would write next or how to start my own business. They weren’t more engaging than deciding what to wear to the office next week or how to upgrade my workout.

But those thoughts and daydreams took a few minutes to evolve into something really mentally engaging. The crap online was immediate. So I fooled myself for years into thinking that “immediate” equaled “better”.

I didn’t remember any of the online junk once I scrolled past it. And that’s the stuff that was eating up all my time? Stuff I couldn’t recall two seconds later?

What helped me put away my phone for extended periods of time was not thinking that I was abstaining from something fun, but realizing that I was trading something cheap for something much more valuable, fulfilling, and gratifying…

Myself.

It was the pull of my own mind that made me put away my phone. It made me realize that for so long I had been making myself a second-string character in the story of my life. My thoughts, feelings, and opinions had been background noise drowned out by what was constantly playing in front of my face.

Once I came to the realization that I was much more interesting than the junk on the internet, it made putting my phone away for extended periods of time far easier.

The second thing I did was put literal distance between myself and my phone. I mentioned before how I had tried this initially with limited success, but I found it much more manageable once I completed step number one.

During my workday I would place my phone screen-side-down on the other side of the room. I still kept the volume up, though, in case my wife needed to call me or something, but I didn’t have other notifications like social media or sports scores activated so that my phone wouldn’t distract me unnecessarily.

When I came home at night, or finished up my work day, I would leave my phone charging in the bedroom so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at it. This made it so that I was present with my wife and kids as soon as I was done with my work day.

On the weekends, I would allow myself some time to peruse some news websites while I drank my coffee (similar to reading a newspaper), but once the day got going, the phone went back into the bedroom for the remainder of the day.

It really boiled down to establishing a new habit. It had been my habit to have my phone on me all the time, but once it became “normal” for it to be in the other room, I didn’t mind it.

I stopped feeling the pull to look at my phone because I had started becoming INTENTIONAL about my phone usage. And that brings to me to my next tip…

Be intentional when you use your phone. Don’t just grab it and open it absent-mindedly. If you’re going to look at it, look at it with a purpose.

What’s the weather? Did my payment go through? What meetings do I have today? What was the final score? How do I get to a certain place from here? What was the name of that actor in that movie?

Using your phone intentionally isn’t problematic. All the knowledge of human history is in our pockets. It’s alright to take advantage of that. Intentional phone usage isn’t nearly as big an issue as mindless, Pavlovian phone usage.

Next, make sure you know how long you’ve been using your phone each day. My “Screen Time” feature is probably the most frequently used feature on my phone since I am constantly checking to make sure I don’t go over my weekly limit.

Is that a little too fussy? Maybe. But I am still in the early stages of “phone detox” so I want to make sure I stay on the wagon.

One of the most critical pieces in my journey to limit my screen time has been making sure I have other things to keep me busy.

Yes, my mind is the most important piece, but I also make sure I always have something to DO. I am constantly writing, or thinking about what to write (jotting down notes or ideas). I am always reading something at least somewhat challenging (in the home-stretch of Les Misérables!). I make sure that if I feel the itch to pick up my phone, I can substitute my phone for something healthy and productive.

As it stands now, I can confidently say I am no longer addicted to my phone. My metric for concluding that is that I no longer feel the “pull”. I no longer feel the siren song from the next room. I no longer reflexively reach for my phone. The absent-mindedness is no longer there. Honestly, sometimes I even forget where my phone is since it doesn’t occur to me to pick it up and look at it throughout the day.

Ever since I started consciously limiting my screen time, I have been more successful at work, I am in better shape than I was before, and I spend more time playing with or reading to my kids.

I also get more sleep and spend more time talking with my wife.

Every aspect of my life has improved since I limited my screen time. And that is what I am trying to impart to you… there is NO downside to staying off your phone. You’ll realize that you are much more creative and interesting than you thought you were. It will boost your confidence and make you more perceptive and thoughtful.

I wrote in a different article that obituaries of old people are like “Irving was an Army veteran who, after storming the Normandy beaches, settled in Tulsa with his wife and had four kids. He enjoyed hunting, fishing, and woodworking. He coached high-school wrestling and devoted his weekends to volunteering at the local soup-kitchen.”

I don’t want MY obituary to read: “He loved playing on his phone.”

If that prospect frightens you… good! But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Take a look at your screen time and see where you stand. You might be a little shocked and maybe more than a little bit horrified. That’s ok. You can beat the addiction in only a few months! I did!

Take back your time!

And take back your life before it’s too late.