If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through an app on your phone for sometime only ask yourself,
wait, when did i pick up my phone, **** I’ve been on here for an hour already? You’re not alone.
While smartphones certainly have their benefits. They also come with a lot of potential downsides.
Now the main downside I found with smartphones
is…they ruin your ability to focus. They can interrupt your TV binge with a text message,
or keep you scrolling through a feed when you’re trying to work, or even tempt you to
look at your phone while driving. Now, what all of these situations have in common is
they're causing your brain to rapid task switch, and studies have found
that the more we rapid task switch, the faster we’ll deplete our mental reserves.
So what can you do to help regain control of your focus and conquer your smartphone
addiction? Well, the first step I think is a notifications cleanse.
Now often when we install apps on our phone we just click OK to allow notifications
without really thinking about if these notifications are going to be important.
So from time to time, I think it's worth doing a notifications cleanse by going into your phone
settings and then going app by app and disabling notifications that are unneeded or unwarranted. On
iOS select notifications, on Android, select notifications, and then app notifications,
and then manually go through each app’s notification settings and turn off notifications.
This process will force you to one, recognize how many apps you've enabled notifications for
over time. And this is probably going to be more than you expect and two,
it's going to force you to ask the question: “Will my life be negatively affected if don’t
get notifications from this app?” If the answer is no, turn off notifications for that app.
Now, as you go through this process, you'll likely see critical system apps
like an Android for example, that you'll want to keep on or
other communication apps like the phone app or text message app, and that’s totally fine.
And if you're unsure about an app, disable its notifications anyway.
If later on you find you miss notifications from that app, you can always re-enable them.
By going through this exercise. I found that I picked up my phone less often,
but when I did, the notifications I received were actually important.
But there are going to be times when you just don't want any notifications,
like, when you're driving. For that situation,
you can use a driving mode on both iOS and Android which will mute all incoming
notifications and will not allow you to get into distracting apps while you're behind the wheel.
On Android to enable this go into settings, Connected Devices, Connection preferences,
Driving Mode, and turn it on. On iOS, tap Focus, driving, and there you can let people see you
have notifications turned off, auto reply to your favorite contacts that you’re driving right now,
and under Turn on Automatically, I’d set it to either turn on automatically or when
connected to your car Bluetooth and also check when connected to CarPlay as well.
For other times throughout the day when you don't want to be distracted by your phone,
you can use what's called a focus mode.
iOS lets you set up multiple ones in settings under focus. For example, for the work focus mode,
I select the contacts and apps I want to see notifications for while I’m working,
you have the ability to notify others when you’ve silenced notifications,
you can hide notification badges on the Homescreen,
and you can set a schedule to automatically turn on and off particular focus modes. And
the really cool thing about Apple’s focus modes is they’ll sync across all of your Apple devices.
On Android, you can see focus mode settings by going to settings and searching for focus mode.
You don’t have the ability to set up multiple ones like you do in iOS, but you can select
which apps you want to disable notifications for and create a schedule for your focus mode.
Now, if you find yourself outside of your normal schedule, but you still don't want
to be distracted by any notifications on your phone, on both iOS and Android,
you can enable what's called Do Not Disturb. And what Do Not Disturb will
do is mute all notifications on your device until you turn this feature off.
On both phones you can do this by swiping down from the top and hitting the do not disturb
icon and on iOS you can tap and hold the icon
to bring up more options like only turning it on for an hour.
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Now, another negative impact smartphones can have on your life is with your sleep.
The blue light from their screens can keep you awake longer, notifications and dopamine hits
from scrolling through feeds before bed can also do this as well. And trust me,
I know, I've had these bad habits for over 10 years before I was finally able to break them.
So here's how you can do what I did to get some better sleep.
First, adjust your phone display to a warmer tone at night, it’ll make the display a bit easier on
your eyes and not emit as much blue light. In Android settings, search for Night Light,
and you can set a schedule for when you want it to turn on and off as well as adjust its intensity.
On iOS you can do the same thing by searching for Night Shift and enabling that feature.
Both phone operating systems also have specific focus modes to mute notifications at bedtime.
On iOS you find this mode by going to Focus, Sleep, and there you can input
your different sleep schedules. On Android, go to settings and search for Bedtime Mode
and there you can set your bedtime schedule and Android goes even one step further and
lets you change the display to greyscale to make your phone even less enticing at night.
Now the last tip for helping you sleep better at night, and this was personally,
one of the hardest things I've ever tried to implement in my own personal life.
One, don't read on your phone at least one hour before bedtime and two, don't charge your phone
on your nightstand and do not have your phone within reach while you're in your bed. I’ve
been doing this for over the past few weeks, i read magazines and physical books before bed,
which I’ve found cause me to fall asleep around 30 min earlier, and I’ve started charging my phone
on my desk, which causes me to have to get out of the bed in the morning in order to check my phone.
Now, once I'm already out of bed, I find that I'm much more motivated to just go ahead and
get started with my day and overall, that'll just put me in a better mood.
Now, the last category of negative smartphone use I’ll cover is social media. Social media
is often designed to keep our attention for as long as possible with endless scrolling feeds,
and it can negatively impact our own mental health by causing us to constantly be comparing
ourselves to others and to check in to see content that we posted and how well that content did.
So, how can we lessen some of the negative effects of social media, without just
stop using it all together? The first thing I did we already covered earlier
is turning off notifications for all of your social media apps. The only time I ever get
notifications from a social media app are when someone sends me a direct message, that's it.
But even when you’re drawn into a social media app like Instagram because someone messaged you,
you might be tempted to scroll through your feed a bit or check a few stories,
which can still cause you to spend more time on a social media app than you want,
and that’s where app timers can come in handy.
Both iOS and Android have this feature and what this feature does is it'll basically
close out an app or group of apps once you hit a specific time limit.
To set one up on Android, go into settings, tap digital wellbeing,
dashboard, and then you can scroll through a list of all of your apps
and set timers for how much time you want to limit yourself spending on your social apps.
On iOS, go to settings, tap screen time, tap app limits, and you can either set a
limit for an individual app, or a category of apps like social,
and you can see what’s included in each category by hitting the drop down arrow.
After you make your selection, hit next and set your time limit, and click add.
If you choose to do a category or multiple apps at a time,
the limit you set is cumulative, so if you only want to spend an hour on social media per day,
select all your social media apps and set a 1 hour limit.
Now these timers can be overridden if you do actually need to access the apps,
but the friction that this feature provides should help you lessen the instances where
you're just going into a social media app purely out of habit. Now, to track how often you're using
your social media apps, how many notifications per day you're getting, and how often you're picking
up your phone every day and what apps you're going to as soon as you pick up your phone,
your phone can actually help you track all of these statistics and their trends over time.
On iOS, you can go to screen time in settings and on the following screen it’ll show you your daily
average phone use so far, and how that compares to the previous week. By tapping on see all activity,
you can view how much you’ve spent on your phone this week or today, the app categories and how
much time you allocate to each. You’ll also see your most used app for the week and you can easily
tap to scroll back to a previous week. You can scroll down further to see your daily average
pickups and the apps you use as soon as you pick up your phone which can help you see if anything
is drawing you into your phone that isn’t ideal. Finally scroll down to see notifications and you
can see all the apps sending you notifications and how many they send on average per day.
On Android these settings are under Digital Wellbeing & parental controls. At the top
it’ll show you your daily average so far and which apps are using the most time.
Tap the image to be able to see more like your screen time for the week,
how many notifications you’ve received, and how many times you’ve unlocked your phone.
So those are some of the strategies that I've used to help me curb my own negative effects
of smartphone use, but of course it's not everything. So if you have
any strategies or tips that you've used to help overcome your own smartphone addiction,
leave them in a comment below, and don't forget to enter for your chance
to win the Lake Tahoe Dream Home by going to omaze.com/sixmonthsreview,
hit that thumbs up button if you found this video helpful and subscribe to the channel to
see more videos like this one. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.