Strategies That Will Help Put an End to Your Phone Addiction

Setting time limits on apps, especially social media, is an effective first line of defense towards the doom scroll. Decide what a reasonable amount of time on any given app looks like for you and establish limits based on that. By the end of your allotted time spent on a given app, you’ll receive an alert that time is up for the day, and so long as you don’t override the limit, you can prevent yourself from spending too much time on apps.

Alongside setting app limits, head over to your phone’s settings and look at the section “screen time.” There you will get a report on your daily average of time spent on your phone alongside a breakdown of your biggest offenders. Using this information, you can set time limits on your personal most addictive apps and decide on a plan to scale back usage. If you spend hours a day on your phone, consider halving that time to start.

Instead of allowing your phone to control you, control where your phone goes by establishing phone-free areas in your home. Perhaps the living room will be a reading-only zone or the backyard. In your bedroom, make it a point to keep your phone on the other side of the room, and don’t allow it to be near your bed. These restrictions can seem like a lot at first, but are a small step towards limiting your desire to constantly reach for your phone or worse, allowing it to keep you up at night.

Some apps were designed to peel your attention away from everything else. Scratch that, most apps are designed to steal your attention for the most amount of time that they can (looking at TikTok, in particular). If your apps meet these two requirements, addictive and unnecessary, consider deleting them.

While it sounds a bit outdated and old-fashioned, phones should be put away at the dinner table and social outings, if you can help it. While being glued to your phone with friends or at a restaurant may not be uncommon if you look around any public space, it’s not polite or present. Phones were intended to connect people and are now the very thing contributing to social disconnection. Fully enjoying time with friends and loved ones means keeping the phone hidden when you get to see them!

Swap that hour of scrolling before sleeping with reading. Reading before bed is a fantastic way to slip into a stress-free, tired state, and studies have shown that this simple habit significantly improves sleep quality. Additionally, this change in bedtime routine is an effective way to reduce screen time and the negative effects it has on sleep.

Most of the time, there is nothing dire on your phone needing your attention. However, when notifications start popping up, it can feel urgent to tend to them or curiosity gets the better of you to check. Switching to “do not disturb” during the workday or even when you are having a social event or class can deter you from checking. Without notifications to look at, you'll enter into the frame of mind to be present in what you are currently doing.

Don’t just fill your time with hobbies; turn those hobbies into social outlets. Take a cooking class, start salsa dancing, regularly attend yoga classes and cast a wider social circle net in the process. Phones and the apps on them can mimic social connections but do not adequately supplement them.