How To Disconnect From The Digital World
By Sarah Lake
Phones are a marvelous invention. We can order our favorite food at the drop of a hat, check our emails, do our online banking, track health biometrics, consume entertainment, or stay in touch with loved ones. A huge number of our needs can be met through our phones, but not all of them.
Since phones do so much for us, it's easy to accidentally slide into living more and more of our lives in a digital world where we miss out on valuable real-life human experiences. Over investing our time into our digital lives can be a way of escaping real life, or it can simply be the result of the highly addictive nature of modern technologies.
Either way, the end result is concerning, and this societal issue only appears to be getting worse.
Why Should You Care About How Much Time You Spend On Your Phone?
If you're like most people, you probably spend upwards of 4.5 hours on your phone per day. This number sounds preposterously high, but when you consider that the average person checks their phone every 12 minutes it begins to make sense.
Apps are designed to keep us online for as long as possible, so it's no wonder a quick notification check can lead to minutes or sometimes even hours of scrolling. This problem is even more pronounced in young people who tend to spend an average of 6 hours on their phones every day.
No doubt there are better ways we could all be spending those hours, but what's much more worrisome are the ways it impacts our mental and physical health.
The Mental Health Impacts of Excessive Phone Use
Countless studies have taught us that social media addiction is a real and widespread problem. Time on social media causes a similar reaction in our brains to illicit substances. Namely, it causes a surge of dopamine, the "reward molecule", and this programs our brains to want to repeat this action.
Excessive time on our phones (and on social media in particular) is linked to higher anxiety, more depression, less intrinsic motivation, shorter attention spans, and lower self-esteem. This is true for both children/adolescents and adults.
Checking our phones incessantly is also a great way to inject a steady drip of cortisol (the stress hormone) into our days. Chronic stress is another rabbit hole worth delving into, but for now, it's simply worth noting it can be detrimental to our mental well-being.
The Physical Impacts of Excessive Phone Use
Spending hours each day on our phones doesn't just affect our mental well-being, but also our physical health. It encourages a sedentary lifestyle with fewer real-life experiences. This means we're less likely to reap all the health benefits of in-person social connection and moving our bodies.
Using phones into the evening can also disrupt sleep and leave us chronically tired. The blue light of phone screens interferes with the body's ability to produce melatonin, and this means we have a hard time getting to sleep and staying asleep.
What You Can Do About It
If you recognize any of the aforementioned issues in yourself stemming from excessive phone use, it may be worth assessing your phone habits. Just like anything else, choosing conscious habits that improve our well-being can be hard at first, but it gets easier in time.
Figuring out what works best for you will take some experimentation, but a good place to start could be a digital detox. This is a specified period with reduced time online. It could be a cold-turkey no social media approach, or simply a reduction strategy. It's up to you! This approach can help regulate dopamine and shake up your habits.
Another helpful technique is to put some boundaries in place that help you disconnect from the digital world. This could mean no phones out during mealtimes, no phones in your bedroom, no phones past 8pm, or any other rule that helps establish some sacred time where you can tune out of the noise of the online world and tune into your surroundings.
The bottom line is no one is going to prioritize your well-being better than you. As helpful as phones are, they're a tool that can end up doing more harm than good if we don't bring consciousness into the picture.
Get outside, spend time with loved ones, and enjoy all the amazing things this world has to offer beyond pixels on a screen.