4 Practical Boundaries You Should Set Between You and Your Phone
And how ditching all of my phone’s meaningful features for a week has changed my life
The world has a technology problem. As Cal Newport so beautifully put it in his book Digital Minimalism:
“It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.”
Everywhere you look, people are on their phones.
I think one of the saddest places I’ve seen this happen is airports. I can’t imagine what airports looked like before cell phones were a think. I can imagine the slowness, the calm, the human interactions that happened with people who wouldn’t otherwise get to meet.
“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others.” — Brene Brown
Rather than worrying about likes on Instagram, updates about their destination, or how quickly they could get back to their remote work, they could just be — patiently waiting to get to where they need to go.
Oftentimes I crave going back to a world like that, where people didn’t know any different.
If you’re like me, and have become more acutely aware of the assault on our minds that the digital world is taking, you might want to use these three practical tips to set up some boundaries for yourself:
#1: Disable raise to wake and tap to wake
I didn’t think that this tactic would have as much of an impact as it did.
However, having to more firmly press the button on the side of my phone in order to turn it on has but a miniscule but very impactful pause between the desire to check my phone and the completion of the action.
By the time I wake it up, I usually realize that I’m just bored, or anxious, and have something better to do than look down at a screen now mostly disabled off all of its features.
#2: Make the screen black and white
It wasn’t until turning my phone to gray scale for longer than a day that I realized the power that the beautiful saturated colors of my iPhone have over me. They make everything interesting, and shiny, as if I’m a toddler seeking out whatever kind of stimulation I can find.
Turning the screen to black and white helped my phone to become much less interesting to me. This caused me to look outside of the screen in my hand at the beautiful and colorful world around me.
“The Internet promotes compulsive overconsumption not merely by providing increased access to drugs old and new, but also by suggesting behaviors that otherwise may never have occurred to us. Videos don’t just “go viral.” They’re literally contagious, hence the advent of the meme.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
This made it easier to only use my phone for specific tasks, rather than a source of entertainment in times of boredom or anxiety.
#3: Get rid of social media
This was going really well for me until today.
The first three days of the challenge, consequently the first three days of this year, have been some of my most focused, peaceful and productive. However, starting yesterday afternoon and into this morning I have truly felt like I’m addicted to my phone.
While on a car ride with some friends this afternoon, sitting in the passenger seat, I allowed myself to open Instagram on my laptop and quickly felt silly for doing so. The words that came to my mind were simple but indicative:
“What in the world am I looking for?”
I’ve found similar results in times when I’ve gone off of social media and then returned to it. I suddenly feel like a drug addict, unable to resist the tantilizing flavor of the infinity pool that is scrolling online.
In order to have a better relationship with your phone, get social media off of it. I promise, it isn’t making you a better or happier person.
#4: Disable the download of apps and Safari
I won’t lie, this one was probably the hardest boundary that I’ve implemented this week. There have been so many times when I’ve wanted to look something up, or download a new app to try.
However, I knew from the get go that these thoughts were distractions from my purpose — hindrances from the goal that is being largely off of my phone this week.
“In the pre-digital age, people hid their embarrassing thoughts from other people. In the digital age, they still hide them from other people, but not from the internet and in particular sites such as Google and PornHub, which protect their anonymity.”— Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Not being able to download apps or look things up has caused me to sit with my questions more, and realize how little I need new apps or to be able to look things up.
(I also found that most of the time I wanted to look something up was while driving in the car, so really disabling Safari improved my driving safety…)
These are some serious steps, I know. But they were worth it for me.
I found out, at the end of a challenge of disabling my phone from most of its functions for a week, how much of a life I have without it — one that I had really left behind, all in the name of a “digital presence” that didn’t mean that much to me at the end of the day.
“If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done.”— Thomas Jefferson
I must say, implementing these boundaries won’t be easy — and they’ll be even harder to keep up. But I think they’ll be worth it.
You deserve your life. You deserve autonomy, and the thrill of being truly fulfilled by something that isn’t scrolling through an infinity pool app online.
If you’re not sure, just try it for a week. If you really dig in, it won’t be long before you see it changing your life in so many ways.
Best of luck!
