How to overcome your mobile addiction?
We can't deny it, we’re all addicted to our mobile phone. And even though I have an iPhone 6+ I don’t like it when somebody sees me with it. When I quickly lookup what time my bus is leaving while I’m walking I always have the feeling that people look at me and think ‘yet another victim of modern society’. But instead I think I’m not that addicted as other people from my age. I always tell people, I’m addicted at the right time. For five years now, I travel the same route with public transport every week and I can tell, that quickly starts to get boring as hell. So while I’m in the bus I check my phone quite often, listen to music, read about certain topics on the internet. But when I’m among people I can easily ignore my phone for the rest of the evening. Recently I was on a weekend trip with school and I was the only person of 20 people from my class and probably 100 people who were also on that trip, that had left my mobile phone back home. The weekend was supposed to be fun and we sat around the campfire. But you know what? I wasn’t enjoying at all because 80% of the people were texting to their friends back home.
So how does one overcome a mobile addiction?
It’s really hard, I know, but do you really want to be lived by a product that small and annoying? Here are a couple of rules or tips I often use:
- Disable the read receipts in WhatsApp so you don’t get lived by a couple of blue checkmarks. Go to Settings > Account > Security and uncheck the Read Receipts option.
- Disable the Last seen option in WhatsApp. I don’t have to know when someone was last seen on WhatsApp. I give them the choice to respond on a message or not. If it’s really important, just call them.
- Disable lock screen notifications for WhatsApp. Hereby you make the choice by yourself to check WhatsApp and not vice versa.
- Always put your iPhone on Do Not Disturb. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see if you have received an email but this way your telephone won’t light up when you get an email or a Snapchat. It can be frustrating to a friend to see a phone lighting up and distracts you while he’s telling that his grandma passed away yesterday. You can choose for yourself if you still want to allow phone calls. In Settings > Do Not Disturb > Allow Calls From, you can choose if you still want to allow phone calls from your contacts or everybody.
- Leave your phone downstairs when getting ready to sleep. And don’t fool yourself that you need it as an alarm. The cheapest alarm is not even 10 bucks.
- Delete your Facebook account or at least remove it from your phone. I gotta admit that sometimes it’s really handy to have a Facebook account so you can login at many websites but I got so sick of that infinite scrolling when sitting in public transport. I already had removed the app a year ago from my phone because it’s saves a huge amount of battery but I still accessed my Facebook a lot through Safari. Recently I just changed my password and didn’t save it and logged out from it and I don’t miss it at all.
- So what do you need to do in public transport when you don’t have Facebook and don’t want to be tied up to your phone? I took a library subscription again and start to read real books. I read two or three books in 2016 but purchasing books every time is quite expensive compared to a library subscription.
“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” — J.K. Rowling
So what are your tips to prevent you from your mobile addiction? Or do you think this is all bull shit? Please let me know and if you liked the article leave a little 💚 for me😊
Oh and P.S. please help me improve my English by leaving a note if I made any mistakes.
