How to Break Up With Your Phone and End Device Addiction

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Kristin:    00:00:30    Part of thriving in our digital economy is being the boss of our devices and not letting them control us. 

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin:  Today's episode is sponsored by me. Did you know you can now shop my favorite remote work tools, video production equipment, and travel accessories directly from your Amazon account? It's true. Just go to TravelingwithKristin.com/amazon to check out all the products I use and love.  

Kristin:    00:01:29    Allow me to paint you a picture. It's a beautiful, perfect 72 degree night in Miami. You are at a party with all of your closest friends under a full moon, at a luxury marina full of mega yachts. There's live music DJs, belly dancers, fire spinners, everything is happening around you, amazing food bottles of champagne. Like it's just a perfect night, a perfect party and you really wouldn't wanna be anywhere else. And you're looking around you and you see beautiful people. You see models, you see men dressed in suits, and it's just like some kind of Instagram dream. But then you notice not everybody is dancing and you notice that about half of the party is sitting down on their cell phones and you think to yourself, how is that possible? What could possibly be going on on your cell phone for like hours during this party when you're in a place that has everything that you would want on paper?  

Kristin:    00:02:50    And this happened to me a couple weeks ago, <laugh>, and I looked around and I thought, this is crazy. And that's when I realized I did it. I had broken up with my phone, maybe not for good. You know, we all have phone device addictions that are recurring because devices are made to be addictive and nobody is a match for all of the billions of dollars that goes into research and development of these products and marketing and the user experience of apps and everything else that comes from our phone. But in this episode of the podcast, I wanted to give you at least seven strategies that you can use tore in your phone use. This is something that I have been trying to do, it's been a work in progress over the past few years. I first decided that I was gonna cut back on my phone and social media use in 2015 during the No, 2016 during the election cycle because my ex-boyfriend told me that I was spending way too much time on my phone reading in bed, and I was probably spending hours a day reading about what was going on in the, in the political situation.  

Kristin:    00:04:14    And then when things happened differently than people expected and than was planned, I thought, I think I just wasted a year and a half, if not two years of my life wondering what was going on, analyzing what was gonna happen. And none of these predictions came true. So what did I just do? What was the point of reading all of those things and interacting and having all of these discussions with people and reading Twitter? And I just felt, I just felt so blah and I thought, I'm going to take a step back from my social media and cell phone use, and a few years later I've made huge gains. So here are some stats to start off with. In 2020, people check their phones on average for 50 times a day, for five hours a day. 82% of people don't think that they are on their phone that much.  

Kristin:    00:05:19    Okay? So probably all of us are in that 82% people tap their phones about 2,600 times per day. And it doesn't matter what age group you're in, what demographic you're in, everybody does it. So millennials, baby boomers, gen Z. So if you're listening to this, you've probably thought at one point or another that you're annoyed with your phone. You know, maybe it's just messages that you're checking them all the time or notifications, or maybe you have, maybe you're like me and you had a phone habit at night where you would bring your phone in bed and scroll Instagram or scroll Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Um, but everybody has, has felt at one time or another that they spent too much time on their phone. So I actually tracked how much time I spent in 2019 and it was somewhere around, I think at least 400 hours a year, just like wasting time <laugh> on social media that doesn't include messages, um, phone messages, messenger messages, WhatsApp messages and notifications and other stuff like that.  

Kristin:    00:06:35    So it's a lot, it's a significant amount of time, you know, if you're spending even one hour a day on social media, and it's okay if you're doing it for leisure or entertainment purposes, but it becomes a problem when it's interfering with your life and it's interfering with your productivity and it's interfering with your mental health. So the one thing that doesn't work when you're trying to break up with your phone is willpower, because we only have a certain amount of it per day. And I don't know about you, but I know for a fact that if I lay down on the couch and open my phone, I'm gonna be there for at least 30 minutes, <laugh>, if not an hour. And all of a sudden you can be on your phone at dinner or on your phone in the middle of this party with supermodels and yachts and DJs and just be on your phone looking for something better to do.  

Kristin:    00:07:29    I don't know, but this is getting, this is getting crazy, so I felt like I had to make a podcast about it. So Willpower Doesn't Work because we only have a fixed amount of it per day. So, uh, Ben Hardy, who's a writer, he says that we should focus more on controlling our environment, then controlling ourselves and our willpower. And you can do that by creating a quote unquote enriched environment or creating or putting into place what's called a forcing function. So a forcing function would be, instead of relying on yourself to only look at your phone for 15 minutes, when you sit down on the couch, it's saying, I am not going to look at my phone after 8:00 PM or something like that, or I am going to turn my phone off at this time. So that way if you sit down on the couch with your phone, it's off <laugh> or you can't use it.  

Kristin:    00:08:27    And so therefore you don't have to rely on yourself to get up after 15 minutes. You can just not be able to look at it to begin with. So likewise, another author named James Clear, he was the writer of Atomic Habits. If you've ever read that book, it talks about how to start really small with habits and how to make new positive habits very obvious, attractive and easy while making bad habits, really difficult to do. So if you are trying to lose weight or stop eating sugar or something like that, but you have a bunch of cookies and other stuff in your house, you're gonna be tempted to eat them all the time, <laugh>. Whereas if you don't have them and you have to literally go out to the store or order delivery food or something to get a dessert, you're gonna be less likely to do it because there's some sort of friction between you and the bad habit.  

Kristin:    00:09:23    So it goes without saying that overuse of a device is a bad habit. There's rarely cases where that's adding to your life. So I came up with a few different ways that have helped me over the past years to establish forcing functions to prevent me from using my phone. And in that way, over time, I've leaned myself off of social media and cell phone addiction. And so I think that at least one of these, if not multiple examples here are going to help you. And you know, you just start with implementing one, whichever one seems the easiest to you or seems the most accessible. If you feel like you have a problem with this, like most people, and then go from there. Because even if you can claw back 100 hours of your time per year, it's worth it. Or even 10 hours, like any amount of time that you can take back from apps and from the tech companies and from algorithms is a win.  

Kristin:    00:10:29    So the first thing I did after the 2016 election was I installed what's called a Timeline Blocker extension. So this actually wasn't even on my phone, it was on my computer. So that way, anytime I opened Facebook, whether it was for work or for Messenger or something like that, I never saw my timeline. So there's one Chrome extension that I use, it's called Newsfeed eradicator, and it replaces the newsfeed with an inspirational quote. And you can even put your own message there if you want to give yourself a reality check. And so that's a one option. You know, another strategy would be to block Facebook altogether or delete your account or something like that. But I don't know how realistic that is for everybody. So a really good start is just to delete your, your newsfeed and then you'll never get sucked into it. Likewise, if you want to have a similar effect on your phone, you can of course remove the Facebook app, but then you probably will reinstall it at a later date.  

Kristin:    00:11:35    But an app that I have on my phone that kind of takes care of all of that is called Freedom. And it works on both your desktop and your phone. So all you do is turn it on and you can block as many websites or apps as you want for a set amount of time, and you can even turn off your entire internet connection. So instead of trusting yourself to not look at your phone at night, or you know, if you have an Instagram habit or something like that, or maybe a Tinder habit and you're swiping for an hour a night and you're like, what is the point of this? Then if you install freedom and you block it, I think there's even a way to set it up on a schedule and then you literally can't access. It's like you're a drug addict, like you're trying to access this app or this website and you just can't.  

Kristin:    00:12:26    But be really careful with that because I've turned it on before when I was writing because I didn't wanna be distracted by other web pages and things. And then I ended up blocking my whole internet connection for like three hours and I had to look up something for my research and I couldn't do it. So it was annoying. But anyway, you can use Freedom App on your phone or on your laptop or your, uh, desktop and set up something that works for you. You know, maybe you turn it on so at 9:00 PM or 10:00 PM your app goes on and then you just can't get on the internet <laugh> at that point in time. Uh, it seems extreme, but you can even just do it for a while until you break your addiction and then you can like go back to some, uh, something a bit more normal <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:13:19    And then another thing that really worked for me was setting a nightly no phone time. So I would put my phone in airplane mode or turn it off or something like that. I I did it at 8:00 PM because I know that nothing productive is gonna happen on my phone usually after that time. So after I go to the gym and I come home and I eat dinner, maybe it's like eight o'clock, nine o'clock. Um, if I turn, if I go on my phone, I might not go to sleep until way later because the blue light will keep me up. And then I'll also just waste time at night reading stuff or whatever on, on social media. So I do have a no phone time at night and on the nights that I don't do it, I'll end up at midnight looking at my phone in bed or something <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:14:09    And on that note, my fourth tip is not to bring your phone into the bedroom. And if these stories about people looking at their phone while they're having sex don't scare you, then nothing will. Like, bringing your phone in the bedroom can be pretty toxic and it can disrupt your sleep patterns. And there's even studies saying that like if your phone is turned on and within arm's reach, or even if it's in the room, you can be like, I think it's like 17% less productive if you're working, um, more distracted and less present in whatever it is that you're doing. So what I started doing was I bought a $8 alarm clock on Amazon and I leave my phone in the living room on airplane mode and I go to bed and sometimes I'm annoyed because I'm like, I really wanna check Twitter <laugh>, or I really wanna see what's going on in the world and like unwind.  

Kristin:    00:15:01    But I decided that unwinding with my phone, like using my phone as a trigger to go to bed was counterproductive. So I had to stop doing it because I wasn't getting enough sleep. I was wasting a lot of time. And the worst thing before going to bed is to fill your subconscious with a lot of reactionary activities, like reacting to a bunch of stuff on social media or filling your head with a bunch of negative news or politics or something like that. Alternatively, you can journal for a few minutes. You can read a book, you can watch Netflix, like literally do anything else and give your subconscious a problem to solve overnight. Think about something you're grateful for. We just have to try to change this habit of just being on our phone all the whole time we're awake. And the fifth thing, which I kind of already talked about is going phone free at work.  

Kristin:    00:15:59    A lot of remote workers and people who work from home that I know, some of the most successful ones don't even look at their phone until after lunch. And I know that that sounds crazy and maybe your job won't allow you to do that, but if there's any possibility of doing it, see what you can do. I don't do this every day, but I usually try not to look at my phone until after I have had breakfast and read, because I read every morning or after I do my first work block, even if it's an hour or two hours, because I know if I check my email or I know if I look at my phone, it's just a downward spiral. And so the longer you can put off checking your notifications and looking at your phone, the better. So try to think of some way that you can do it or some off hours that you can set so that your coworkers or your boss or your clients or people know that you're not gonna be online until 10:00 AM or noon or something like that.  

Kristin:    00:17:04    And of course, if you can work from anywhere and travel, you can really play around with this because if you're living in Europe and all of your clients are in North America, then you can have the whole day to yourself before you have to answer to anybody during those business hours. The sixth thing that I've done is actually uninstalling apps from my phone. You can even take this to a next level and have one phone for social media and one phone that's basically a dumb phone, not a smartphone. So I actually have two phones 'cause one is an old iPhone that I have, Instagram and all those apps on and my Facebook pages and stuff like that. And then on my iPhone 10, I don't have anything. I don't have Twitter, I don't have Instagram, I don't have Facebook, or actually I think I do have Facebook now for my Facebook group, which you can join Badass Digital Nomads, but I'm not addicted to Facebook anymore because of the timeline newsfeed, eradicator and the other steps that I put in place before.  

Kristin:    00:18:05    So now I can actually have Facebook on my phone and not even remember it's there and not open it, just open it intentionally. If I want to engage with my group and not get sucked into the timeline. <laugh>, one of the things you might notice is that after you break your habits to certain apps, you might acquire another app habit. So after I cut back on my Facebook time, I spent more time on Instagram, and then after I cut out Instagram, I spent more time on Twitter. And then after I deleted the Twitter app, uninstalled <laugh>, uninstalled it from my phone, logged out and put an anonymous password. So I couldn't even log back in. Then I started reading on Google News <laugh>, I was like, what am I doing? And I took off the Apple News app too. It's just so addictive that, um, yeah, once you start, you're like, you just want to tap on an app and you wanna scroll.  

Kristin:    00:19:01    It's like a, a human, some kind of genetic thing that we wanna do. And I read an article about it on Medium by a guy who worked in the developing these types of apps in Silicon Valley, and he said that one of his tips was to turn your phone through the handicap or accessibility settings. You can turn the color off and put it in black and white, but basically they make it so colorful, so eye catching, like a bag of Skittles that it, it detracts our eye the same way that, um, slot machines and casinos and things like that, or any type of light, like our eyes attracted to light color motion. And these phones are like crack for our eyes because they have all the things that we are wired to perceive in our environments. So you can also put your phone into a black and white mode and you'll find that it's way less attractive and less addicting.  

Kristin:    00:19:59    But I didn't uninstall Instagram actually until about a month ago, and that was really life changing too. So now I mostly answer messages through a web browser or there's also an Instagram messages extension that you can add to Chrome. There's probably one for Safari. And um, you can also post from the web app. There's a way to go into the developer tools of your browser and show the phone app version of the page versus the website version of the page, and I'll find the instructions on how to do it and add it in the show notes because I didn't know you could do that. But you can actually post photos from the Instagram web browser if you do that. And there's even third party apps now that allow you to post photos or videos from your desktop computer if you need to use it for work and not have to do it from your phone.  

Kristin:    00:20:59    And then you can also hire somebody, you can hire a social media manager to post for you on all of your accounts. You can schedule stuff out in advance. Um, you don't have to be logging into these apps on a daily basis, especially if it's not giving you anything in return as far as fulfillment and happiness and joy and money. And of course you wanna stay connected sometimes with people. You wanna see what's going on in their life, you wanna support what they're doing. So there is I think a time and place and a positive use for social media and in our phones, which are magical devices. But, you know, seeing all of these people at this party and they didn't look happy, <laugh>, I was like, you guys would be way more happier if you were out on the dance floor and not slumped and slouched in your chairs in the back of this, uh, club.  

Kristin:    00:21:58    The other basic strategy is just to combine these in a way that works for you. So going cold Turkey and just deleting everything off your phone and deleting your accounts or something like that, it's not realistic. It's gonna be really hard to stick with that and you'll probably end up caving and and reinstalling everything again. But if you just pick one of those and see how it works for you, I guarantee that you can cut back on your device time. And just remember, if you save one hour per day on your phone, 365 hours per year, that's basically equal to one month of your life in a year based on a 12 hour day. So if you save three hours a day on your phone, that's 1095 hours per year. If you save five hours a day, that's nearly 2000 hours per year. So for those of you spending five hours a day on your phone plus TV, plus Netflix plus messages and email and all of the other stuff, you can literally get back half of your time if you just stop doing that.  

Kristin:    00:23:14    And this is really applicable to I think everybody who, who listens to the podcast because you guys either work from home or want to work from home, or you're tech savvy or you're consuming content that's enriching your life and you're probably really well connected because we're, you know, we're living in 2020, people are well connected. People have a lot of apps and tools and things on their phone, whether it's Slack or Instagram or a, a travel booking app or whatever it is. So this is just a way for you to reclaim your time and your autonomy and your personal life and be able to set healthy limits on your technology use because the al alternative is for a lot of negative things to happen, whether it's isolation or loneliness or depression or procrastination. And so part of thriving in our digital economy is being the boss of our devices and not letting them control us.  

Kristin:    00:24:23    So, you know, with an extra few hundred hours per year, you can make 10,000 extra dollars freelancing at $20 an hour. You could read a hundred books, you can complete 50 online courses, you can create five or 10 new digital products that can make passive income for you. Um, you know, you can change your life if you take this time back. And there's a study that came out in 2019 that ranked how people spend time on their screens on their phones. And the top two culprits for both millennials and boomers were Facebook followed by Instagram. So people spent between 60 and 70 minutes a day on Facebook and 45 to 52 minutes a day on Instagram, and then it splits up a little bit. Millennials spent about 50 minutes per day texting. Boomers spent the same amount of min of minutes on their email. So <laugh> the generational thing there.  

Kristin:    00:25:26    But yeah, and then it goes down from there. There's like Snapchat music, Twitter, YouTube, but even if you just cut out Facebook or you just cut your consumption of Facebook and Instagram in half, you're gonna get back about an hour a day. So that's worth it. So think about what you can do to implement some of these strategies and I really hope that it enriches your life and it helps you make the most of the time that we have left in 2020 and also in the rest of your life. That's all we have for this week's show. Thanks so much for listening and see you guys next week on Badass Digital Nomads.  

Kristin:    00:26:12    Do you love my podcast videos and writing and wanna get more involved? Now you can. Introducing the official launch of my new Patreon page, where for only $5 a month you can support my content and get a ton of cool benefits and value as one of my Patrons. You'll get to watch my new YouTube videos before everyone else attend Patron only monthly Live streams, vote on next videos and podcast guests or topics, get special discounts on merch and swag. Plus get access to exclusive content like unlisted video interviews, articles I haven't published anywhere else, house and apartment tours, personal updates, and of course plenty of behind the scenes footage and surprises throughout the year. Become a patron of Badass Digital Nomads and Traveling with Kristin today at patreon.com/TravelingwithKristin. That's P-A-T-R-E-O n.com/TravelingwithKristin. And thank you so much for all your support.  

Advertisement:    00:27:51    BP is working to bring more lower carbon energy to the UK, like designing two hydrogen plants and we're keeping oil and gas flowing from the North Sea. It's, and not all, that's how BP is backing Britain. While today we're mostly in oil and gas, we increased the proportion of our global annual investment that went into our lower carbon and other transition businesses from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023. bp.com/andnotall.