By Gavin Boyle
Feel like you’re glued to your phone? These tips and tricks might help you break your tech addiction.
“When you say screen time, that could be someone calling their mom on WhatsApp and having a beautiful conversation, really fulfilling, or it could be a 14-year-old looking at self-harm content on TikTok,” Cambridge researcher Amanda Skeggs told Vox when explaining why screen time is not a particularly useful metric. “And those two things are equated as screen time, and obviously those relationships to well-being are going to be vastly different.”
In general, Apple and Google do not want their users to spend less time on their phones. Though they have released tools, such as screen time trackers, to help users manage their screen time, most people agree they do little to actually address the problem. Thankfully other options exists to help users who seriously want to break their addiction to their phones.
This technology can sometimes be as simple as “Forest,” an app which makes a user’s phone unavailable to use for a select amount of time. This can help users put their phones away when they need to focus.
However, sometimes completely disabling your phone is not helpful. For that reason, many people now use “Brick,” a device that temporarily disables specified apps on a person’s phone.
“We realized that more often than not, the distracting features win out. Whether at the library, the office, or dinner with family, these devices are constantly pulling us away from what matters,” said Brick co-founders TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz.
However, even that is not enough for some who are now turning to “dumb phones” to free themselves from the burden of technology. The Light Phone is one of these phones, and it only allows users to place calls, text and have limited other functions such as directions and music.
“You use [the Light Phone] when you need to, and when you put it back it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the CEO of Light, a phone company creating paired down phones that offer very limited services. “We get a lot of customers telling us they feel less stressed out; they become more productive; they become more creative.”
Almost everyone could benefit from less screen time. Whether a simple app that disables your phone or a completely new “dumber” device, it is amazing that there are so many ways people can now reduce their reliance on technology and find freedom.
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