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How I’m successfully overcoming smartphone addiction
46 points by SnowHill9902 on June 26, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
- Every time you feel the urge to check your phone, don’t do it immediately.

- Count to 10 so that your higher self is engaged. Now ask yourself “do I need this to achieve my goals?” The answer can be yes or no, of course.

- You don’t have to avoid using the phone completely. You can answer yes at times if it’s justified. Just be able to intervene between the phone and your intuitive addictive self, and make a conscious decision.




Let me speedrun for you the results of all these technical "solutions" to the quite real biological problem - after banning for yourself "fancy_thing_A" you will get distracted on the "fancy_thing_B" and so on and so on. It is literally impossible to run out of thing to distract you. At various points in my life I was distracted reading some absolutely shitty and uninteresting books, reading an introduction tutorial to the absolutely unnecessary tech for me at that time, watching a very interesting and educational video, cleaning years old stuff in the storage, organizing Documents dir on the laptop, sharpening a knife, writing a todo list (the fiftieth one), and so on.

PS: I don't know a solution. Maybe meds, people suggest visiting a doc, but since I'm a professional at distractions I've yet to try it.


I did hit a point where I was sharpening knives for fun.

At some point, it's just easier to learn to be passionate about things that matter vs trying to be too disciplined.


The difference is that smartphones and their apps are designed to be incredibly addicting. Dull knives and uninteresting books are not.


The smartphone is just an example. The same applies to any other addictive stimulus.


A few years ago I started developing addictions and as a result I just uninstalled everything. That is, LinkedIn, Youtube, chess.com, even personal gmail (I don't have facebook or any other 'social' app).

I was still tempted to waste time on my laptop, so I turned off every functionality (i.e. javascript) on pages I was visiting, and I added custom rules on adblock, so it's too many steps to enable everything again. On pages I wanted to visit (Linkedin due to messages from recruiters) I added restrictive custom adblock rules that only allow accepting invites and replying to messages.

I noticed I was becoming badly addicted to reading news and watching videos, also to chess. And somebody here adviced just to cut it off. It was good piece of advice.


> I was becoming badly addicted to reading news and watching videos, also to chess

Chess is the first step toward delinquency and madness.


I'm asking out of pure curiosity as I'm not native English speaker.

Chess leading to madness - I think I get the joke here, and well, who knows, some grand masters have gone mad (although I'd guess some will dispute if there is clear link between madness and chess).. but delinquency? I'm not native English speaker so maybe I'm missing the full meaning of this word but translator tells me this word is clever way of saying 'crime', how on earth would chess lead to crime :) (other than, if played on paid time it is, well, crime of a sort, but same as browsing through social media).


It might be a reference to:

https://gizmodo.com/chess-was-once-deemed-a-menace-to-societ...


Drugs lead to delinquency (crime) and madness. Depending on your view that is what some might say drugs do.

Since the OP said they had to block chess because of phone addiction, the joke is just replacing drug addiction with chess. Chess (drugs addiction) leads to delinquency and madness.


I think it's just a joke about how chess (generally considered somewhere between harmless to noble) was used as an example of contributing to negative behaviour by the poster they answered to.


Create an extension that literally shutdowns your devices on your network. When you power them on. The extension will just resume and shutdown the device.

To disable the extension. Do some multivariable calculus and a bit of discrete mathematics to find the nth prime of some random hash the extension gives you.

If that doesn’t stop you from powering on your device until the next day. I don’t know what will.


Honestly I find I check my phone mostly when I'm bored. So I find productive or healthier but fun things to do.

Also, IMO, phones aren't worse than what my parents' generation did to waste time which is watch TV.


> Also, IMO, phones aren't worse than what my parents' generation did to waste time which is watch TV.

I'd argue phones are much worse. The TV stayed in one spot in your house and you had to share it with others. You didn't put your TV in your pocket and take it to work with you then put in on your desk. You didn't take you TV with you on dates or social outings and check it when you where bored. You didn't fiddle with your television while you where driving, etc., etc., etc.

If you knew someone who watched a lot of television in the 1990's, they perhaps where in the presence of a television 8 hours a day. That's a lot. However, by contrast, if you had your phone with you 8 hours a day and locked in a drawer the rest of the day, that you put you among the lighter phone users among us.


Do you mean 8hrs of screen time?


Yeah "phone addiction" is just the new TV.

Though there are some dark patterns used by social media to promote it, that's kinda true. In that sense it's more like social media addiction.

Of course TV also had its dark patterns. Like the cliffhanger.


Switching to greyscale on iOS really helps reduce the attractiveness of wasting time

Settings->Accessibility->Display&Text->Color Filters

And you can activate with triple-click of side button also

Settings->Accessibility->Accessibility Shortcut->Color Filters


On Android this is called "Bedtime mode". You can also have a shortcut in the menu that slides from top.


Yes, greyscale works. Eye candy is seductively seductive. Shiny! Shiny!


For me, it's not smartphone addiction but video addiction which can consume hours of my time, just watching on sites like Twitch.

I was inspired by the recent Hacker News thread that talked about decreased attention span https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874846 (My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span)

My hypothesis is using phone for reading books is much better since it can be done in chunks at a time and is less addictive than watching video so I'm using my smartphone for long-form book reading.


I tried that, didn't work well enough.

What worked was uninstalling and deactivating social media, Facebook, Reddit, anything with sexy pictures (women/food/gaming). Also the instant gratification stuff like videos of people dodging death or people doing dumb stuff then getting punched in the face.

Now I don't have to think too much about using my phone.


There is this surprisingly effective feature on a browser extension called Leech Block where you can add a short delay (like 15 seconds) before the distracting sites load. It basically forces you to go through the process you mentioned. That small extra friction is enough to break the habit of randomly visiting those sites.


A great help is to decide on a productive alternative. So, let's say, you have an urge to get the phone then reach for a book and read a few pages instead. Or, do a few push-ups, or what every you decide.

Having a replacement activity helps a lot.

It's interesting. It used to be that some addiction programs with the same idea but for drug addicts was to have them smoke a cigarette if they had an urge to do drugs. Yes, it helped with the drug addiction but they got hooked on cigarettes. You sort of wander if it was a solution.


One thing I've tried is switching the display to greyscale. (On some phones, it's a built-in option under "Bedtime mode.")

The idea is it makes everything less attractive on your phone.

And of course, turn off as many notifications as you can. (Sometimes I'll even power it off, and only power it back up when I need to do something.)


It's on some new Android versions. It's only slightly less attractive but that slightness puts me to sleep a couple hours earlier.


Can you share some of your goals? I use my phone to seek for information that would help me achieve goals. Train your feeds to be nothing but positive and high signal and bookmark anything you find useful going forward. Ignore the Internet Hype Machine and reframe FOMO as JOMO / Joy of Missing Out.


I found it helpful to remove shares and unnecessary bank account apps from my phone i.e. I kept my main bank account, the rest are checked monthly on the desktop. I find the need to login to a desktop app the best medicine for quickly losing interest.


> “do I need this to achieve my goals?”

Will you stop it with your “goals”?

Is calling your mom helping you achieving your goals? Is drinking with friends moving you forward in any way? Should you sing in the shower, or should you listen to the latest “how to get vc funding” podcast episode?


> Is calling your mom helping you achieving your goals?

Yes.

> Is drinking with friends moving you forward in any way?

Possibly not.




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