2020 has resulted in an increase in smartphone usage, considering how most tasks have moved online. For example, before 2020, parents would scold children for looking at smartphones, even if it was for 20 mins, but, nowadays, hours of usage go unnoticed. This however is not good, considering too much of anything is harmful.
A lot of people might be battling this issue, so, we thought about listing out six ways to De-addict yourself from smartphones.
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6 Ways to De-addict From Your Smartphone
1. Purchase a Feature Phone
If you have some extra cash and can afford a feature phone, it is the best way to de-addict yourself from smartphones. A feature phone lacks social media applications, and has support for a few games, which are not appealing to the millennial crowd and, the basic use case of a feature phone is to make calls. This will greatly help combat your addiction since you will not be able to do most of the tasks that you do with your regular smartphone.
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When you are going out, try to make use of the same since this is one of, if not the most, effective ways of combatting smartphone addiction. Another possibility of this is to go back to using an older phone that you might be owning, since that too will lack some applications and, considering the downgrades when compared to your smartphone, it will result in less usage since you will feel awkward in doing so.
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2. Make Changes to your Notifications
Notifications are one of the most annoying distractions that might cause addiction. You finish your work and wish to keep your phone away, but, the notification pings start coming in. This leads to doom scrolling, endless tweets, and more. If you can control your notifications, your smartphone addiction can be minimized to an extent.
The best way to do so is to shut off or mute notifications for all distracting apps, such as youtube, social media applications and even messaging apps. Keep just the most important apps for notifications, so that you do not miss out on important stuff.
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3. Remove Unnecessary Applications
Whenever somebody sets up a new smartphone, they download their favourite apps. In doing so, sometimes one downloads separate apps, some of them being addicting. These applications might not be of your need, but, you wish to keep opening them. This is a problem that can be addressed and, if one feels like it, they can delete the unnecessary application.
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This will greatly help combat screen usage and, will also lead to clearing up of space in your smartphone. This usually works best on games that one does not feel like playing but ends up playing regardless. In doing so one will be able to de-addict themselves from using their smartphone as often as they would if the app would be present on their device.
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4. Turning Off your Phone while going to bed
This might seem familiar. You wish to go to sleep, you get into bed and, ten minutes later you are on your phone. This is not an uncommon sight and, it is one that is worrying. This is a sign of smartphone addiction. To combat this, one can take a very easy step of turning off your smartphone before going to bed.
This will be very helpful to you in the long run in more ways than one. First, turning off your smartphone leads to better sleep, which will have many health benefits for you in the long run. Second, if you do not use the smartphone while trying to sleep, it will be a help to your eyesight as well.
Usually, when one goes to bed, they are not wearing their glasses. Using a phone without your glasses might result an increase in the power of your glasses, which is something that no one likes. By eliminating the use of a smartphone whilst in bed, you can avoid getting glasses or increasing the power of your spectacles.
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5. Use Applications for help
Sometimes, you need a little bit of enforcement to reduce your smartphone usage. To do this, there are applications available that can help you limit your smartphone usage. There are many apps available in Google Play Store that lock the applications that might be distracting and you will be able to use these apps after a certain amount of time.
Some of these apps are ActionDash, StayFree – Screen Time Tracker, YourHour – Phone Addiction Tracker, etc. All these apps track your smartphone usage habits and keep a track of the apps that you use the most. You can set a predefined time for each individual app or a category of apps, which when exceeded will lock the app for the day and you won’t be able to access the app. These apps help in maintaining your ideal smartphone usage balance and can help curb smartphone addiction.
In case you use a smartphone that has stock Android then your device would have come with Digital Wellbeing functionality, which is a feature included on most new stock Android smartphones. These help one target and combat their smartphone addiction including checking the number of hours they have used a particular app and, limiting usage of these particular apps.
It also shows you the number of hours you have spent on your phone and keeps a log of the total usage over the last few weeks and months. This is a helpful feature in knowing how much you use your smartphone and tracking your usage pattern.
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6. Using a Smart Watch
Sometimes you use your smartphone to look at the time and other aspects. To reduce your smartphone usage, if you have some extra cash lying around, you could probably buy a smartwatch. This is not a bad thing to do and, this is a sort of delegation.
By buying a smartwatch, you can use it to track your time, check the notifications of your phone and, if you splurged on a premium model, even make calls. This includes the regular smartwatch features of detecting steps, heart rate and more. This feature can help most people out in tackling their smartphone addiction issue.
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