Remember when you were young and you used to play pretend? For me, it would inevitably happen like this. I’d be sitting inside and I’d tell my mom that I was bored. She would then spat off that I can either go outside and play or she’d put me to work if I told her I was bored one more time. It didn’t take much else to get me off the couch and out the door at that point. More often than not, I’d find myself grabbing my brother, running out the back door, through the back gate and trotting catty corner through my neighbor’s back yard to get to my friends house. With a knock on the door, my brother and I’s friends would come running down the stairs and we’d head across the street to Cartwright Park. For hours, we would play man on the wood chips or pretend we were spies and run all around the park- finding treasures and hiding from the bad people. As the sun would begin to set, we’d hear mom yelling for us to come home for dinner and through the backyards my brother and I would run, making our way home again.
After reading the book, How to Break Up with your Phone by Catherine Price, I started thinking about playing pretend a lot over the past couple of months. Specifically, I’m wondering how many children now a days play pretend? How many of them who are in late elementary school are out playing on playgrounds with their friends? Are they out exploring hidden places and climbing trees or are they all still inside, satisfying their boredom with their phones.
Creativity is often sparked by boredom, which is another mental state that our phones are great at helping us avoid.
- Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone
Phones take away our boredom and therefore our creativity. They rob us of our joy and supplement true happiness with manufactured bliss. The worst part is, we don’t even recognize that it’s happening when it first starts. Little by little, we spend more and more time on our phones. We pull out our phones when we’re bored, when we have a couple of minutes to spare between classes or at the start of meetings, we even pull out our phones while we are hanging out with our friends- making sure that there isn’t something better happening out there that we might be missing out on.
Half the time, we don’t even realize that we do this. Grabbing for our phones is so second nature to us now that we don’t bat an eye when we do it- it’s so instinctive that when we don’t have our phones on us, we realize that it is missing more than we realize when it’s present.
Once a habit has crossed the line to an addiction, it can be triggered by cues that are so subtle that we don’t even notice them.
- Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone
Over the month of July, I gave up social media. That meant deleting Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn from my phone and logging out of Facebook and Twitter on my laptop. Prior to embarking on this, I recorded my screen time in June and then tracked it in July. In June, I was spending almost 40 hours a week on my phone. Of that, 20 hours was spent on social media. Below is what I tracked in the month of July.
I found some direct correlation between my pickups and notifications. When I received more notifications, I picked up my phone more often. What changed at the end of July is that I turned off almost all notifications on my phone which DRASTICALLY changed how many times I picked up my phone and, subsequently, how much time I spent on my phone. The high points on scree time came from the 4th of July, Amazon Prime Day (the random spike in the middle of the month), and a trip to North Dakota at the end of July where I was using my phone to look things up A LOT.
So where am I at now that it’s been over a month and a half since this social media break? Let me tell you.
It’s really REALLY easy to fall back into old habits. It takes patience, forgiving yourself, and real perseverance to break bad habits- especially breaking up with your phone.
I redownloaded Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn but kept Facebook off my phone. If I need to use Facebook, I log in via my internet app and that is a pain, let me tell you.
With the school year starting up, I find that when I do spend time on my phone, I’m spending a significant amount of time using my phone for work now. From using Slack to communicate to my team to posting content on Instagram and Snapchat for Stadium, I’m using my phone for work more than I had been during the summer.
Sometimes I find myself spending meaningless time on my phone and those are the moments that I am working to quit. What I will say about all of this, though, is that your own recognition of your personal usage is the catalyst that you need to get any real change started.
Enjoy your life. Be present with your friends. Put down your phone.