A Quick Guide to Healthy Phone Habits

Have you ever wanted to put your phone down, but struggled to actually break the addiction?

In this quick guide we’re sharing phone addiction statistics, practical ways to interrupt a phone addiction, plus specific healthy habits you can adopt when it comes to using your phone.

Why You Look at Your Cell Phone so Much and What to do About it

We’ve all been there--you decide to take a quick break, pick up your phone, and then find yourself scrolling social, emailing, texting, reading the latest news updates, or just checking to see what might be there.

If your phone is absorbing a little too much of your attention, you are not alone.

Phone Addiction Statistics

The truth is, a recent survey on cell phone addiction found that adults in the U.S. look at their phone an average of 3 hours and 19 minutes per day (and that’s not including any work-related tasks).

The same study also found that people pick up their phones an average of 262 times per day, which averages out to looking at their phone every 5-6 minutes, and an astounding 95,630 times per year.

Clearly the desire to pick up our phone has become a deeply ingrained, if not addictive behavior.

So what gives?

How to Interrupt a Phone Addiction

It turns out that tech companies know exactly how habits are formed, and have been leveraging this knowledge to keep us tethered to our devices, all day, every day. 

One mechanism they rely on to keep you reaching for your phone is something called a Cue (or a Discriminative Stimulus), which is a signal that triggers a behavior.

Long studied by behavioral psychologists, a cue is a powerful way to shape behavior and drive habit development, but it is often overlooked.

For example, every notification on your phone is actually a cue designed to trigger you to pick up and look at your phone.

So all those sounds, vibrations, little red dots with numbers of unread texts and emails, are cues that are training you to constantly be on the phone pick up train.

Knowing what a cue is and how powerful it can be in creating habits, gives you a chance to cut back on the amount of time you spend looking at your phone.

Tips For Healthy Phone Habits

Try these simple tips to quickly and easily reduce or eliminate the cues that have been training you to look at your phone over and over. 

1. Eliminate cues by turning off notifications

Do this for as many apps on your phone as possible. Go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Notifications’ and click on each of your apps and turn off “allow notifications.” 

2. Eliminate cues that tell you to open your email

Go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Mail’ and ‘Accounts’ and ‘Fetch New Data’ and then click ‘Manually’ so that your unread emails only show up when you go to look for them.

Bonus tip - move your Mail app off your home screen to one where it lives all by itself, so that you really won’t see it unless you specifically go looking for it. 

3. When at home try plugging your phone into its charger

Have it out of sight is best, rather than having it with you all the time. Just the sight or feel of your phone is a powerful cue to pick it up and check it.

4. put it out of site

When you arrive home or when your kids, friends, or partner comes home, put your phone away. Placing it out of sight for at least 5-10 minutes will help you set set this habit. 

5. Set your phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’

Go into ‘do not disturb’ mode when you know you don’t need to be available at a moment’s notice or when you just want to spend some time focusing on things in your life other than your phone. 

Spending less time looking at your phone does not require you to have more willpower or for you to delete all your apps and swear off social media forever.

You just need to eliminate or limit the cues that trigger your phone picking up behavior and over time you’ll have success.

You might even find yourself enjoying and reconnecting with other people and activities in your life that have been crowded out by those hours and hours of looking and scrolling.