Are you addicted to your smartphone? You’re not the only one. Most of us feel the same way. After a long day of work, you finally have some time to relax, but you spend it scrolling through social media instead of spending time with your friends and family.
A recent study found that the average person checks their smartphone about 85 times a day. Unfortunately, this excessive usage can negatively affect our mental and physical health. In this blog post, I will share some tips on how to reduce your daily smartphone usage.
Turn Off Your Notifications
Turning off emails, instant messages, and other apps notifications is one of the easiest ways to spend less time on your phone. You grab your phone again because you are distracted by notifications and alerts.
Remove Addictive Apps
There’s no need to be afraid of deleting some apps. I’m not talking about the apps you never use anyway. Those are easy to delete. Instead, get rid of some of the most distracting apps you spend more time on than you would like.
The best way to stop these apps from hijacking your time, focus, and mental clarity is to remove access to them completely.
Use Grayscale All the Time
Apps today are designed to keep you hooked with appealing design tricks. When you interact with them, they will flash you bright, enticing colors as part of one of their tactics.
You can prevent this by switching your phone’s display to grayscale. Due to grayscale, your phone looks less interesting than the natural world around you, causing you to spend less time looking at it. You can do this on both iOS and Android.
Set App Limits
You need to set up some rules after determining which apps should be limited. A healthy detox starts with small steps.
Still, getting rid of Instagram entirely isn’t the best solution. To get comfortable with minimal restrictions, you’ll need to increase them slowly.
If you regularly browse Instagram for an hour, you should eliminate a quarter of that time, limiting your browsing time to 45 minutes.
Don’t Always Carry Your Phone With You
People rarely go outside without their smartphones these days. Take walks without your phone and simply enjoy the scenery. Take a coffee date with your friend and let the conversation flow. Enjoy the company of your friends and family when you are together without your smartphone.
Read Books
Pick up a book instead of scrolling through social media. Imagine how much you could learn in a year if you replaced one hour of mindless scrolling with one hour of reading. Reading can replace any distraction, which is one of the most productive activities.
Check out related article: Reading | 5 Reasons Why You Should Read Everyday
Last Words
In this blog post, we’ll be discussing how to reduce your daily smartphone usage. While it may seem like a daunting task, we’ll provide you with a few tips that should make it easier. Be sure to stay tuned, as we’ll be releasing a follow-up post next week with even more tips!
Image Courtesy: Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash