Effective Phone Usage Habits
Developing healthy screen time habits is now a crucial skill that all of us have to learn. Two months—that’s how much time the average person spends on their phone. So developing healthy screen habits is crucial because as social media use has skyrocketed, human misery and mental health issues have also skyrocketed in near-perfect unison. If we want to maintain our sanity and control over our own time and destiny then effective phone usage habits are a key skill we all need to have to be human and healthy.
But here’s some good news about reducing your phone usage and screen time:
- It is 100% free. It costs you nothing to put your phone down. You don’t have to sign up for a membership or pay any fees. In fact, all you have to do is do less.
- Second, it has a very wide impact across your life. Reducing screen time is probably one of the most powerful ways to make significant improvements in most areas of your life.
- Suffering from anxiety? Take two weeks and spend 50% less time on your phone and just see what happens.
- Feeling chronically depressed and unmotivated? Spend 50% less time on your phone for two weeks and see how you feel after that.
- Third, you always have your phone on you so you always have the chance to practice and get better. At any moment during the day you can take the opportunity to put your phone down and chill.
Why Do We Need Effective Phone Habits?
There is no world or existence where humans can spend two months of the year looking at a screen and expect to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. From an evolutionary perspective, humans are not designed to spend that much time in the world of social media. In fact, social media is explicitly designed—by other humans— to exploit our brain pathways for profit. We are made to be in nature and with each other as much as possible.
Because Screen Time Destroys Mental Health
If the correlation between lower mental health and screen usage isn’t enough, there is a lot of explicit and precise scientific evidence that more screen time leads to mental health suffering, along with poor sleep, and other health issues like obesity, anxiety, and depression.
So while broader population-level trends of mental health only correlate to the rise of social media, there is a large base of scientific evidence that screen time is actually causing all of this.
Your New Effective Phone Habits
Habit #1: Do Small, Easy Things Without Your Phone
The first thing you can do is to start taking small steps. When was the last time you wrote down your grocery list on a piece of paper and went shopping without a phone?
When was the last time you walked into a restaurant without your phone? When did you last fall asleep without having your phone next to you? Have you ever gone on a walk without your phone?
These are small things that you can do to start getting better at putting your phone down and living more of your life in the real world without the constant urge to check your phone.
Habit #2: Set a Timer for Phone Use
Right now, there is nothing stopping all of us from spending all of our free time on our phone. We can do that now and it is obviously failing us.
So one way to take back that time is to set limits and guardrails on your phone screen time. Maybe you say you can only use it from 5pm-6pm at night. Give yourself an allotment of phone time and stick to it. If you use up your time, you’re done.
But there has to be some kind of limit on how much time you use your phone.
Habit #3: Delete Some Apps
There are probably some time-wasting and doom-scrolling apps on your phone that you can probably live without. A great idea is to remove them from your phone so you’re less likely to use them.
Habit #4: Find Something Else to Do
One of the reasons we spend so much time on our phones is because we’re bored. Whenever we have a spare minute or two we pick up our phones because we’re bored, we don’t want to just sit and do nothing.
So a great idea is to fill your time with other productive and fulfilling activities. This is one of the things the internet is great at: connecting you to people and hobbies you may not have ever been able to do before.
Dive into some IRL activities that will fill your time and your life with positivity, balance, learning, curiosity, and health.
We’re Just Getting Started
All of the above is why I built Chinchillers. The whole point is to start developing a different habit with your phone. You don’t have to just quit it all together. You just use it differently.
So instead of picking up your phone and launching your social media app, with Chinchillers you can pick up your phone and launch the game and then just CHILL. You end up picking up your phone and then putting it right back down.
The goal is to interrupt the existing habit and give you time to process your urge, think rationally, and then have an escape route. So if you pick up your phone to check social media you can instead just launch Chinchillers, start a CHILL and then go back to what you were doing and enjoy reducing your risk of mental health.
The whole point of Chinchillers is that eventually you won’t use it and you will just not pick up your phone in the first place at all.
And if we can do that—phew, we can literally change the world and change the course of history.