What are your hands doing now?

Let me start with an intresting statistic of my phone usage that I’ve seen from the digital wellbeing app on my phone. My average phone usage varies between 3 to 4 hours per day. 4 hours x 7 days a week x 52 weeks in a year results in 1456 hours, that literally 60 days - two months of constantly oogling in to the small screen I posses. Imagine what I could have achieved in those two months!

I imagine the situation would be somewhat similar in your case as well.

India has 1.2 billion mobile phone users. Thats B with a billion! Amongst those, 700 million of them are smart phone. one of the articles that I was looking into suggests that an average Indian spends 4 hours and 5 minutes on their smart phones everyday, which is 1 hour more than the global average. Now, image the 2 months I spent scrolling and extrapolate that number to 700 million people. Give or take a few hundered months of useful work and recreational usage on the phone, rest of them would be towards mindless scrolling. Imagine the man months lost to the addictive scrolling of the social media apps!

Ironically you would be scrolling through this article on a screen! 🤨

My Problem

The moment I get bored or I face a difficult situation, I’ve observed my left hand going into my pocket to pull out the phone unconciously and open a social media app.

Its become second nature to get your phone and start infinitely scrolling a social media app. We don’t require somebody to shove the phone at us all the time, all we need is a small poke in the form of a “ping” notification for us to lose a couple of hours.

More you observe, more you realize that you are constantly switching between one screen to another screen and scrolling continues! On the phone you were using your thumbs, now you are using the scroll wheel on the mouse.

In retrospect, I have been inclined to scrolling- first it was Quora, then Medium and now on to Reddit. Thankfully, early on I moved away from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like with constant switching amongst these apps.

take a breather! look away from the phone!

What have I done to prevent this?

There are two ways that I tried tackling this problem, one is to be concious whenever you do this; other is to make your environment in such a way that you are forced to not use the social media sites.

In the first approach, as its stated in Bhagvad Gita - “There is no greater enemy than an uncontrolled mind”; Try to control your mind, be mindful of the activities that you are involved it. But this takes a toll on your will power, which is finite. There is an interesting article from Nir Eyal on Harvard Buisness Review on will power. Do read it.

In the second approach, you get plenty of external support - where you have apps like Freedom, Forest, Stay Focused, that’ll prevent you from opening certain sites, or allow you not to use your device for a certain amount of time.

My approach

Previously I used to own a OnePlus phone which had this app called “Zen Mode”, man I miss that app so much. If you are on a android its basically Forest + Tide combined. You had a timer during which your phone is locked and you cant use it. And the Tide integration gives you soothing sounds that’ll help you focus.

Since I’ve moved on from the OnePlus device, I’ve dabbled around a few apps, but none coming close to what I expected coming from the Zen mode.

I settled with Forest and Headspace app combination. Forest gives you the lock to use apps including the timer, Headspaces has few interesting focus music. The one that I like the most in Headspace is composition of Hans Zimmerman.

It’s been a roller coaster ride- from realizing how much you are addicted to your screen to questioning when were you last time bored to figuring out how to control the urge pull your phone out of your pocket.