We Need Help Breaking Smartphone Addiction

To reduce stress and stay healthy, we work out at the local fitness center several days a week. As we workout, others will come in, sit down to change shoes, but take out their smartphones, gazing at them for a while. When they head to a treadmill, weight machine, or exercise bike, their phone may still be in hand.
They walk slowly on the treadmill so they can read and text. There’s no vigorous effort. We watch as a person sits down at one of the weight machines, phone in hand, spending time dazedly gazing at it, then doing a half-hearted workout before returning to the phone.
At any one time, more than half the people there may be on their smartphones.
Go into a restaurant where friends or family are sitting and you see the stolen moments of meaningful time as people, sometimes several, at the table are on their smartphones.
Perhaps, the most startling example of the addictive power of the smartphone was earlier this winter. The wind was howling out of the northwest, whipping snow down the railroad tracks, with the wind chill a minus 15 degrees.
Yet, a person walking toward the tracks, turns her back to the wind, cell phone in hand and coat flapping in the wind, and starts texting.
There is daily proof of how damaging, and addictive online social media apps have become. They steal time. They steal physical fitness. They steal interaction with others. They rob our communities of participation.
We are talking about adults here, not kids.
“I often lie awake worrying about how technology is shaping our world and affecting the experience of being human,” Catherine Price writes. She is the author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again.” She is also the mother of a nine-year-old, a health and science journalist and founder of Screen/Life Balance.
“As many adults are beginning to realize, it’s not just the phone-based childhood that’s the problem. It’s the phone-based life. While children and teenagers are suffering the most from the negative effects of social media and too much screen time, their parents—and frankly, all adults—are as well,” she writes.
It was a sense of guilt that woke her up to her own phone addiction.
“One night about ten years ago, when my daughter was just a baby, I had a moment when I noticed that she was gazing up at me, while I was gazing down at my phone—and it broke my heart. That was not the impression I wanted her to have of a human relationship, let alone with her own mother, and that was not how I wanted to live my own life,” Price writes.
We cannot tell our readers the number of times we have seen a parent pushing a stroller with one hand while the other is holding a smartphone. Or the number of times we’ve seen two parents sitting at a table eating, both with their phones out, and their child on an electronic gadget of their own – all three fixated on the mindless, easily forgettable while the precious moments of interaction are lost.
Deeply troubled by her own experience with her child and her obsession with her phone, Price looked for a book that would help her break its addictive use. When she couldn’t find a book, she wrote her own.
Price says, the goal wasn’t to get people to entirely give up the phone, an unrealistic goal, but to get them to manage their time better.
She offers five steps to a healthier relationship with your phone and far healthier relationship with the meaningful people in your life.

Step 1: Define What You Want
Define what is most meaningful in your life and what the rewards that will come with less screen time. Relying only on willpower is “a reliably bad way to change a habit.” It’s not enough and when you fail, which you will if there is no higher purpose motivating you, you will feel guilty, Price says.

Step 2: Reconnect With Real Life
“We turn to our phones to fill an emptiness that we feel inside,” she says. However, we are also conditioned by the internet to seek constant dopamine hits, rewards, that are shallow and fleeting. They take up time but are not fulfilling.
“So what does nourish you? What feels fun? What (and who) makes you feel lighthearted? What are you curious about? What makes you feel alive?” she asks. Nurture these deeper rewards.

Step 3: Make Your Phone Boring
Our phone apps have been designed by experts in addictive psychology. They are exciting and constantly stimulating to manipulate our behavior. To break the addiction ask yourself what the practical apps are, such as maps, calendars and music, and what is a time-consuming black hole.
“Next, delete or hide any app that you know is problematic for you,” Price recommends.

Step 4: Create Phone-Free Spaces
No phones at meal times is a good start to reengaging with family and friends. Come up with ideas of what to talk about during meals that can be interesting. Take it a step further and plan a phone-free evening where you play a game, or watch a movie, together – no phones.

Step 5: Start and End the Day
on Your Own Terms
“Right now, if you’re like most people, your smartphone is probably the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you interact with before bed,” Price says.
Messages and alerts can wake you up, disturbing your sleep. They can also lead to wasting more time on it.
Many will say they need it for the alarm on it. Buy a “real” alarm clock and put your phone in a closet or another room – along with the phones of your kids.
Finally, have a support group that checks in on one another to keep to your phone-free commitment.