A Scrolling Addiction

Phone Addiction

When I got my first cell phone in seventh grade, it was something that became attached to my hip from the very start. I would send hundreds of text messages a day, and it would always be close by. This phone was the LG ENV Touch, and extremely basic compared to the supercomputer that we have access to today. I used that phone for texting, calling, and basic internet searches. The IPOD Touch was much better than the LG ENV at going on the internet.

Fifteen years later…. (Which pains me to say) I now have an iPhone 16, and life has definitely changed since the LG Env Touch. I have access to every social media imaginable and even these sites have changed over time from learning so much data about you to keep you hooked and to continue scrolling even if you have responsibilities to take care of. I am so hooked to my phone that I tried to leave my phone in my car during work and within the first five minutes I needed to get it out of my car because I had to do an authorization app to log onto my work computer.

Setting up the stage, I have screen time of about six hours a day. Six hours, glued to my phone. A fourth of my day I am staring at a phone, and the rest I am staring at a computer at work, or watching TV at home. If I average six hours of screen time per day, everyday for a year, that would be 91 days out of the year spent staring at a screen. Three months. Sometimes I do put on some Youtube videos in the background while I drive or while I do chores which could boost up this screentime, but I would say more than half of it is mindless scrolling.

I really want to fix this. But how? I read Atomic Habits a couple of times, this is one of my favorite books of all time because I am full of bad habits. It really gives me some strong motivation to push me for a few weeks or months before I fall back into what is easy. And scrolling on the phone is very easy, and as you move through social media it gives you the fake dopamine hit, and it continuously does this before you are just lost in the phone, and time just flies by. Atomic Habits says to make the bad habits, difficult, and make the good habits, easy. How can I design my life when I want to use the phone in a positive way to stay in touch with people that I can’t see in person, to research items when needed, to engage in hobbies, work on the business and to even improve in chess, a game that I love to play that uses my brain.

The worst habit on the phone is social media. I pick up my phone close to a hundred times a day, and when life gets quiet and boring, I can dive into social media for empty scrolling that distracts me. But I can’t completely delete social medias as I do want to have some social media presence for my travel agent work.

Today, can I use it in a more positive way? Start the process of getting off that phone. My mom was right, it was that damn phone.

I still want to decrease usage across the board so I will only use it during scheduled times. For the rest of the day, I will leave it in my car to fight through the boredom if it comes to me. When I get home, I will put it on the charger in a different room so I can get space away from it, and it is a bit more difficult than just pulling it out of my pocket, clicking a button and being able to be filled with cheap entertainment for as long as I want.

Another use that I put on my phone is being a stopwatch to track all the hours I put on a business venture, or to track a thirty-minute block of homework. The more I spend time without it, the more I see how much I relied upon it to do small tasks to make my life easier.

I just had my first scrolling session in the car where my phone is stuck in and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed having it off my person the most though. I feel like this might be a great way to get more things done. Be more productive at work, and maybe even keep my energy for longer instead of being inundated with entertainment.

Right now I am feeling extremely positive in the way things are going, and I think I would like to continue this for as long as I can. Finally doing something that I have wanted to do for a few months now, as soon as I leaned on my phone as much as I do today. With it gone, I just don’t have the urge to pick it up every five seconds because it is so easy to do. So easy at work because I looked harder into my average phone use and during the week I average seven hours of screen time, and on the weekend, I average maybe four. Commutes and slow time at work can rack up screen time. I feel positive about things now. I really do. 

I have probably hit my most productive day at this venture in a very long time. I am not having to struggle to start this, instead of picking up and scrolling through all of the social medias I have just started ripping through these blogs to push into giving myself a huge buffer between all of my content and days without posting.

I just took another break for phone usage, and I gave myself fifteen minutes on the clock and scrolled, and texted, and just got all of my phone usage out of the way for the next hour or two. To think my mornings typically consisted of three hours of phone usage and it has been cut in thirds, with only an hour of usage on the day. And it isn’t mindless usage either, it is deliberate usage for the amount of time I give. I enjoy it too.

One day could just be a fluke, can I have consistency in this new thing. To use my phone as much as I can in set time limits. No mindless picking it up and scrolling away thirty minutes before I even look up. I am going on a cruise this weekend, so I am getting even more of a buffer between me and my phone. I hope the next few weeks can be filled with deliberate phone usage instead of mindless scrolling and random pickups throughout the day. I feel like my day is much longer than it usually is already. It isn’t even noon yet and I hit a goal in the venture that I wanted to hit from the time I started. To do ten hours of venture work per week, and it has dropped to five hours, and now I am lucky to hit three hours of work. Quite a big difference between the 42 hours of phone usage per week.

Right now, it is sitting in my car, and I haven’t missed it. I will monitor this progress as much as I can. As of right now, I am loving it. I feel like I added time to my day to knock out my goals. Now we are at an hour and a half of phone time with thirty minutes of tiktok being the largest amount I have spent. I have done well in almost every area and I can feel a difference. I am about to use it again to shop a little bit for my clients but other than that, it will go right back to the car.

Over the weekend, I had limited phone usage again due to the cruise I was on, but Tuesday at work, I went right back to the phone. An hour and a half on Tiktok, an hour and a half on the internet, and two hours on messages somehow. The hour and a half spent on Tiktok was one of the shortest stints of TikTok in a few weeks. The more I looked back, the more it was more in the two-to-three-hour range. I think at work on Thursday was the best version of this experiment. Where everything was low.

Today will be a good test for how this should go as well. It is a holiday week, very limited commotion in the office, so will I be able to take advantage of the time given, or will I fall into the doom scroll cycle?

So far it has gone extremely well. I have been focused on all of my tasks at work and haven’t looked at my phone at all while I am sitting at my desk. During my breaks I fit as much scrolling as possible, or watch Youtube videos, and just enjoy my screen time in a deliberate way. Today is the first day in who knows how long that I have had more time spent on homework and this venture than staring at my phone. It could absolutely go in a different direction but right now, it feels good to unplug from the cell phone. My brain is a little bit less fuzzy as I can truly focus on whatever task I need to. During slow moments, I can choose to work on homework or my fun venture.

It has now been a week and a half since I began this experiment to have my phone in my car while I have been working. I haven’t maintained the same consistency at home, as I have scrolled for pieces at a time, but here is something I have noticed. I have been able to focus better when the phone is in the car, who would’ve thought? There has been a day or two where I have kept the phone close to me and I couldn’t stop picking it up and scrolling for a few minutes before my brain zapped me back to reality. I think this last Monday was the biggest offender. It was my first day back at work after a long weekend and I just couldn’t help myself, I was tired, I was bored several times throughout the day, and the easiest way to not be bored was to grab my phone. My screen time on my phone has decreased by 33% from six hours to four hours, and I feel it is more DELIBERATE. That screen time is also a bit inflated by looking up podcasts on Youtube while I do chores, or while I am playing video games. My focus has been improved on tasks at hand, as I work through them all without having pause breaks to scroll.

My goal is to reduce my screen time even more. To unplug from ALL electronics, but the worst offender has been the phone for years now. Doom scrolling has been ripping time right from me and it was one of the biggest problems in my ability to focus. Little by little I plan to further pull away from electronics. Getting outside or even being present at home during a walk of my dog, having a conversation with my fiancé pick back up my old hobbies, or being able to finish all tasks needed to get done to keep the house running efficiently. There have been times in the recent past where I would be walking through the house and scrolling on my phone. Anytime I was on the toilet, I had my phone in my hand and I was just running on autopilot. Trying to unplug can be difficult, I had a few days where I just wanted the phone next to me as a crutch throughout the day, but having a more deliberate use of it, has made me feel better. Made me feel much more present.