[HN Gopher] How I'm successfully overcoming smartphone addiction
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How I'm successfully overcoming smartphone addiction
- Every time you feel the urge to check your phone, don't do it
immediately. - Count to 10 so that your higher self is engaged.
Now ask yourself "do I need this to achieve my goals?" The answer
can be yes or no, of course. - You don't have to avoid using the
phone completely. You can answer yes at times if it's justified.
Just be able to intervene between the phone and your intuitive
addictive self, and make a conscious decision.
Author : SnowHill9902
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-06-26 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| A great help is to decide on a productive alternative. So, let's
| say, you have an urge to get the phone then reach for a book and
| read a few pages instead. Or, do a few push-ups, or what every
| you decide.
|
| Having a replacement activity helps a lot.
|
| It's interesting. It used to be that some addiction programs with
| the same idea but for drug addicts was to have them smoke a
| cigarette if they had an urge to do drugs. Yes, it helped with
| the drug addiction but they got hooked on cigarettes. You sort of
| wander if it was a solution.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Let me speedrun for you the results of all these technical
| "solutions" to the quite real biological problem - after banning
| for yourself "fancy_thing_A" you will get distracted on the
| "fancy_thing_B" and so on and so on. It is literally impossible
| to run out of thing to distract you. At various points in my life
| I was distracted reading some absolutely shitty and uninteresting
| books, reading an introduction tutorial to the absolutely
| unnecessary tech for me at that time, watching a very interesting
| and educational video, cleaning years old stuff in the storage,
| organizing Documents dir on the laptop, sharpening a knife,
| writing a todo list (the fiftieth one), and so on.
|
| PS: I don't know a solution. Maybe meds, people suggest visiting
| a doc, but since I'm a professional at distractions I've yet to
| try it.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| The smartphone is just an example. The same applies to any
| other addictive stimulus.
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| For me, it's not smartphone addiction but video addiction which
| can consume hours of my time, just watching on sites like Twitch.
|
| I was inspired by the recent Hacker News thread that talked about
| decreased attention span
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874846 (My awakening
| moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span)
|
| My hypothesis is using phone for reading books is much better
| since it can be done in chunks at a time and is less addictive
| than watching video so I'm using my smartphone for long-form book
| reading.
| night-rider wrote:
| Can you share some of your goals? I use my phone to seek for
| information that would help me achieve goals. Train your feeds to
| be nothing but positive and high signal and bookmark anything you
| find useful going forward. Ignore the Internet Hype Machine and
| reframe FOMO as JOMO / Joy of Missing Out.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| One thing I've tried is switching the display to greyscale. (On
| some phones, it's a built-in option under "Bedtime mode.")
|
| The idea is it makes everything less _attractive_ on your phone.
|
| And of course, turn off as many notifications as you can.
| (Sometimes I'll even power it off, and only power it back up when
| I need to do something.)
| d--b wrote:
| > "do I need this to achieve my goals?"
|
| Will you stop it with your "goals"?
|
| Is calling your mom helping you achieving your goals? Is drinking
| with friends moving you forward in any way? Should you sing in
| the shower, or should you listen to the latest "how to get vc
| funding" podcast episode?
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| > Is calling your mom helping you achieving your goals?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Is drinking with friends moving you forward in any way?
|
| Possibly not.
| gwnywg wrote:
| A few years ago I started developing addictions and as a result I
| just uninstalled everything. That is, LinkedIn, Youtube,
| chess.com, even personal gmail (I don't have facebook or any
| other 'social' app).
|
| I was still tempted to waste time on my laptop, so I turned off
| every functionality (i.e. javascript) on pages I was visiting,
| and I added custom rules on adblock, so it's too many steps to
| enable everything again. On pages I wanted to visit (Linkedin due
| to messages from recruiters) I added restrictive custom adblock
| rules that only allow accepting invites and replying to messages.
|
| I noticed I was becoming badly addicted to reading news and
| watching videos, also to chess. And somebody here adviced just to
| cut it off. It was good piece of advice.
| musicale wrote:
| > I was becoming badly addicted to reading news and watching
| videos, also to chess
|
| Chess is the first step toward delinquency and madness.
| gwnywg wrote:
| I'm asking out of pure curiosity as I'm not native English
| speaker.
|
| Chess leading to madness - I think I get the joke here, and
| well, who knows, some grand masters have gone mad (although
| I'd guess some will dispute if there is clear link between
| madness and chess).. but delinquency? I'm not native English
| speaker so maybe I'm missing the full meaning of this word
| but translator tells me this word is clever way of saying
| 'crime', how on earth would chess lead to crime :) (other
| than, if played on paid time it is, well, crime of a sort,
| but same as browsing through social media).
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Honestly I find I check my phone mostly when I'm bored. So I find
| productive or healthier but fun things to do.
|
| Also, IMO, phones aren't worse than what my parents' generation
| did to waste time which is watch TV.
| tharne wrote:
| > Also, IMO, phones aren't worse than what my parents'
| generation did to waste time which is watch TV.
|
| I'd argue phones are much worse. The TV stayed in one spot in
| your house and you had to share it with others. You didn't put
| your TV in your pocket and take it to work with you then put in
| on your desk. You didn't take you TV with you on dates or
| social outings and check it when you where bored. You didn't
| fiddle with your television while you where driving, etc.,
| etc., etc.
|
| If you knew someone who watched _a lot_ of television in the
| 1990 's, they perhaps where in the presence of a television 8
| hours a day. That's a lot. However, by contrast, if you had
| your phone with you 8 hours a day and locked in a drawer the
| rest of the day, that you put you among the lighter phone users
| among us.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah "phone addiction" is just the new TV.
|
| Though there are some dark patterns used by social media to
| promote it, that's kinda true. In that sense it's more like
| social media addiction.
|
| Of course TV also had its dark patterns. Like the cliffhanger.
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(page generated 2022-06-26 23:02 UTC)