Ryan Bonick

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Victim to the Compulsion

I think most people, at this point approximately 20 years into the era of smartphones, consider their phones to be some level of addictive. “Three in five gen-Zers say they’d like to be less connected to the digital world.” (The Guardian)

Whether Candy Crush or refreshing social media to see if anything new was posted in the last 12 seconds since the last time you refreshed it, we (at least, me) find ourselves reaching for our phones at any point where we feel the slightest bit of boredom, even if that means while we’re actively walking someplace, or at dinner with friends.

I’ve been reading books recently that have convinced me this really isn’t healthy. They each focus on different aspects of the same core problem, and I’d recommend all three wholeheartedly:

How often are you able to sit down and focus on a single project – whatever it is – for more than fifteen minutes without being distracted and clicking over to social media or opening up some app? Our brains are being deep fried by instant engagement, social media, and instant rescue from “boredom”, and as a result we can’t abide any instant of boredom, which feeds back into the problem. We no longer have the ability to just sit and be bored for even a couple minutes.

We also don’t have the ability to focus our attention on what really matters in life. A friend recently confessed he has to keep his phone in a different room when at home with his infant child lest he “fall victim to the compulsion” (a phrasing I 100% stole for the title of this). Because we’re so used to having ten different distractions available at the click of a button, we aren’t able to focus on anything anymore!

I really love how Hayes’s book frames this allure of the modern smartphone: as a siren’s call. From the Odyssey, Circe advises Odysseus to tie himself to the mast, lest he fall victim to the enchanting song of the sirens and steer their ship into the sharp rocks that surround the sirens (why didn’t he just stuff his ears with wax like the other sailors?).

Anyways, I’m sick and tired of being tethered to this otherwise handy little device in my pocket, and incapable of living and experiencing the world and people around me, even if it can get boring sometimes. So, I’ve been trying to cull this compulsion.

Part of me just wants to go back to a dumb phone, but there are so many useful, utile aspects of a smartphone that I genuinely think are helpful and better! I want to keep those:

So instead, I’m going to try to wrangle this device into being a tool for me instead of an addiction.

Casey Johnston (She’s a Beast [that’s her publication but it’s also true!]) wrote up her strategy that worked for her: creating a dumbphone out of a smart phone via The DIY Dumbphone Method. I like this idea but it feels overwhelming and excessive to completely factory reset (which is the whole point of the factory reset, to truly reset). Maybe I’ll reach that point eventually. For now, I am focused on some slightly smaller steps.

Disabling Notifications

Social media is designed to bombard us with notifications. Someone liked your post, someone who hasn’t posted recently posted, someone sent you a video they think you might enjoy. All of these are to pull you into the app, where badges and instant gratification and infinite scroll await, all desigend to keep you there.

Even if you’re able to resist that allure, that siren’s call, do you really need to have your phone buzz just because someone liked your content? Is that really worth interrupting living your life over? Personally, I thought no.

Johnston recommends (and probably correctly so) just completely deleting social media off your phone entirely, and limiting use of it to a specific room in the house by using an old phone without cell service and a shitty battery. I’m tempted, honestly I should do it, but I haven’t yet.

I started by only disabling notifications and leaving badging on, but I found the badges still caused me to click in and see what it was anytime I noticed it, which distracted me from whatever I had originally opened my phone for (I swear, half the time I open my phone I forget what I was trying to do with it). So I turned them completely off.

I started with social media, but there are so many apps whose notifications really didn’t seem useful. So I keep turning them off if and when I spot one that I’m unhappy about seeing.

There is also a feature on iOS I’ve started using, the scheduled summary. This lets you defer all notifications from selected apps to specific times - I’ve done 8 AM, 12 PM, and 6 PM. I’ve put apps that are important to see but not immediately urgent like email in this, and it’s cut down a lot on the notification -> click in -> get distracted by something else cycle.

Homescreen Layout

I (re) read James Clear’s Atomic Habits recently, and one of the points he makes about habits is that making habit triggers visible (so, for example, leaving floss out on the counter) or invisible (hiding the floss in a cabinet) can make it easier or harder respectively to follow the habits.

With that in mind, I rearranged my phone homescreen to only include the things I actually value my phone for: photos, music, maps, reminders… and the occasional crossword. Everything else is off in the app library, which is still pretty easy to access by swiping over one screen or just pulling down to open iOS’s search feature.

I even got fancy and used an app called Widgetsmith to make a text widget with simple names that open up those apps. A true anti-phone person would make everything grayscale… but I made my background a simple flat color of International Klein Blue (#002FA7).

Focus Modes

One thing Apple has gotten a lot better at with recent iOS updates is customizability for focus modes. For a particular focus mode, you can silence certain apps, or only allow some apps to notify you. More importantly, you can customize your homescreen pages on a per-focus mode basis, meaning I can have a default focus that I described above that is built to be very not distracting, and still have other focus modes (like a Work mode that only shows my work apps) with alternate homescreens better suited to them.

I also made a “Home” focus, with easy access to social media, but I found myself not really caring about using it, preferring to follow through more on not using my phone for social media and instead just using a laptop or tablet in my living room directly.

Me being who I am, I also made a bike focus with all my bike apps (Strava, TrainingPeaks, RideWithGPS) and all the utility apps for the various bike computers and electronic thingamajigs on it.

Sleep Time

Okay, so this is one that I’ve actually been doing a good job of for years. I don’t really have a problem putting my phone away when I’m getting ready for bed. The blue light of phone screens is supposed to be bad for your sleep, so you should put it away for the last hour or so before bed.

I have the iOS sleep schedule set up, so wind down starts an hour before my planned bedtime and automatically enables the Sleep focus mode (no notifications). I set up an automation in Shortcuts to trigger greyscale mode when this happens. Put together, my phone is quiet and boring when I start winding down. It goes on the charger on my nightstand and that’s it for the night.

For people who do struggle more with night phone usage, I’ve heard keeping your charger in a different room can help force you to not be on it until you go to sleep.

Having a good nighttime ritual without screens is huge. For me, I get ready for bed and then read on my Kindle (e-ink is supposedly not bad?) or a physical book, depending on what I’m reading, until I get tired. Then I turn out the light and go to bed.

Screen Limits

I set up screen limits for social media only (though you could definitely do it for any app you find overly addictive). Fifteen minutes total across all social media apps on weekdays, and thirty minutes on weekends.

Unfortunately I think it is really easy to get in the habit of automatically clicking the “One more minute” or “Ignore limit for the rest of the day” whenever it pops up. But I still think it’s a helpful reminder.

I also installed Opal to grey out / block social media during the work day, so that I’m not clicking on them every time I have a free moment. It works surprisingly well! The app itself does feel a bit overly “optimize your life” for my tastes, but it works well enough. If you really need to use those apps, you can take a break… after a short (six second) waiting period.

Besides Opal, I added One Sec that has a popup that opens when you try to open particular apps (limited to one for the free version). The popup makes you take a deep breathe before offering a button that lets you open up the app, or you can click a button saying “I don’t actually need it”. That six second delay has really helped break the compulsion, since so much of it is automatic muscle memory. Having to wait even a few seconds lets me consciously evaluate if I intend to open social media or am just looking for any form of entertainment.

With both Opal + One Sec installed, it is a huge pain in the ass to try and use Bluesky on my phone during the work day. I have to disable Opal, waiting the six seconds to take a break from the focus session, then another six seconds of One Sec’s deep breath interlude, before I can access the app. If I truly need to post something on my phone (e.g. a photo) rather than just use a real computer, I can… but it’s a thirty second effort. Usually, though, I find that I don’t actually need to post or browse, I’m just momentarily bored.

Success?

I had a strong start after adding all these, but it was still very easy to fall back into the habit of clicking mindlessly into these apps, even with all of the walls I put in my own way. It does take actual mental focus and intent too, reminding myself whenever I find myself on my phone to fill up a ten second wait that I don’t actually need to be stimulated right that second. Beating that urge before you get into the attention machine (which is where those filter apps do really help) is critical to actually breaking the habit.

I found that replacing social media on my phone with browsing it in the morning on my iPad worked a lot better. There’s a dedicated device that I can look at whenever I’m chilling on the couch, but I don’t need to access it every single minute of every single day. I’m really debating straight up deleting social media apps from my phone to help myself along.

Unfortunately, that’s also created some more free time, and I’m finding the boredom I so craved to be, well, boring? There’s two kinds of boredom (well, probably more) - the momentary boredom of waiting your turn in line to order something, and the fuller boredom of arriving home after a day of work and not sure what to do with yourself.

The former is absolutely brutal, and it’s so hard not to reach into my pocket and take out my phone whenever I have a couple seconds. This boredom is something I need to adapt to, to regain my ability to sit and just take the world in.

The second feels full of potential, but I have no great ideas on how to waste it. With fifteen to sixty minutes, I just don’t know what to do with myself. I could read more. I could make some music. I could medidate. I could sit and stare out the window. The possibilities are endless, and truly I do know what I could do, but I still find it a bit overwhelming. One downside of breaking an addiction means you’ll need to find other things to do. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.