Why Breaking Up with Your Phone Will Change Your Life (and How to Do It!)
What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? For many of us, we check our mobile phones, and the second we open our eyes, we spend the first few minutes of the day mindlessly scrolling through social media, reading the news, and checking emails. We have to ask ourselves: is this healthy?
There’s a reason our parents and grandparents are constantly ridiculing us for being glued to our mobile phones. In a generation addicted to technology, mobile phone obsession is just the tip of the iceberg, and the relationship that we have with our phones is very complex. You know how young children get separation anxiety when they are split up from their parents? Many of us get similar feelings when we’re separated from our phones. Worrying, constantly looking for something, sadness, inability to function – all symptoms of separation anxiety, yet also very similar to the feelings we get when we realise we’ve left our phones at home.
Here’s the headline: it’s time to break up with your mobile phones – and I guarantee it will change your life for the better. Breaking up doesn’t mean you ditch your smartphone altogether, but you make a conscious effort to spend less time on it to make your life better.
Fewer Distractions
Our mobile phones are possibly the most significant distraction we have. How often do you pick up your phone to check something specific, get distracted by a notification, mindless social chit-chat, special offers or pointless celebrity news and then spend the next ten minutes scrolling aimlessly, forgetting what you wanted to do in the first place? It’s the modern equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there in the first place! Breaking up with your mobile phone means you won’t succumb to the temptation of getting distracted – allowing you to be more focused on achieving what you want to.
Take Control of Your Time
How much time do you spend on your phone each day? I bet it’s even more than you think you do. Research has shown that young adults use their phones twice as much as they estimate that they do, and this is for upwards of 5 hours a day! Because of the aforementioned distractions, it’s so easy to get sucked into a black hole of scrolling that you lose sight of how much time you’ve spent. By breaking up with your phone, you are taking back control of your time and the experiences you have in your life. That means more time for doing the stuff you love. Swimming, walking, cooking, cycling, socialising, being with family, yoga, sleeping… all can be improved if you beat your mobile addiction.
Better Sleep
Everyone claims to want better sleep, but few actually achieve it. Aside from a healthy diet, exercise, and meditation, as I have mentioned in a previous post, you can get better sleep by breaking up with your phone. When we stare at our phones before bed, the blue light emitted keeps our minds active long after we close our eyes. This causes difficulty falling asleep wakefulness and prevents the high-quality sleep we need. Not to mention how often we get disturbed by rogue text messages throughout the night! Ditch your phone, catch some z’s.
Improved Relationships
It is very hard to find anyone, or certainly anything, more interesting than one’s smartphone. This troubling realisation has, for most of us, had huge consequences for our relationships and family lives. Healthy relationships are the key to a happy life. Breaking up with your phone is a massive step towards creating improved relationships for many reasons. As well as having more time to spend with loved ones, the quality of that time will be much better if you aren’t staring at your device the whole time. You will have proper conversations and be able to focus your attention on the person you’re with. This will not only allow you to learn more about the other person, but it will also make them feel valued.
How to Break Up
Now you know how dumping your phone will benefit you, it should make the break up a little easier. It’s important to remember that breaking up with your phone doesn’t mean you permanently get rid of it – we all need to make calls on the move and check maps when we’re lost! But phase it out so it becomes an accessory to your life rather than something that sucks up all your time. Here are some steps you can take to ease into the breakup and help you create better habits.
Buy Some Time
Just because your phone can act as multiple things – calendar, alarm clock, step tracker – doesn’t mean you should use it for all of them. Part of the problem with phones is we rely on them to do so many things and then get distracted by them. Buy an alarm clock, buy a calendar, buy a step-o-meter – and stop relying on your phone to do everything for you. This way, you won’t fall into the trap of feeling that you need it to function.
Set Boundaries
Setting yourself rules and boundaries with your phone will make the break-up ten times easier. For example, set a rule about not using your phone after 8 pm or download one of the many eye-opening screen time tracker apps to help you monitor your phone use. Having long periods of time away from your phone will allow you to reap the benefits and will help you set a new routine that isn’t based on constantly looking at your phone.
Leave it at Home
Ever got on the train to work and realised in horror that you left your phone at home? After the initial feelings of panic and stress subside, most of the time, you end up having a perfectly normal day where the world didn’t come to an end! Instead of only being without your device when you accidentally leave it behind, opt to leave it at home on purpose and spend more time doing what you love.
Delete Apps
It’s very easy to get distracted by the hundreds of apps on our phones, so make it easier for yourself and delete them! This allows you to keep your phone for the important things without wasting time looking at time-consuming, mind-numbing apps which ultimately make you feel worse about yourself anyway (you know which ones I’m talking about!). Only keep the apps that benefit you in a positive way and engage your brain, such as Strava, Headspace, and another Shapr (a cool new professional networking app). If you HAVE to keep your social accounts like Facebook and Instagram, try to only follow people you know (if they won’t wave to you in the street, it doesn’t count!). That means goodbye to people made of plastic who live off of a piece of kale a day (they don’t; they just pretend they do). Following friends means you can keep up to speed with what the important people in your life are doing rather than being overwhelmed by Instagram models. If you’re going to follow people you don’t know, make sure it’s someone spreading positive energy and advice like @bexology_uk 😉
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