10 smart ways to ignore your smartphone

At least 16 percent Americans feel the need to sleep with their smartphones, a staggering 89 percent check their phones a few times a day, and millennials check every 5 to 10 minutes. Studies also show that the human attention span has declined to 8 seconds, one second shorter than that of a goldfish. Perhaps, it’s finally time to disconnect.

1. Realize that we all are addicted

The word ‘nomophobia’ has been coined to describe the fear people encounter when they lose contact with their mobile phones. The condition first raised eyebrows in 2008. In a study of 1,000 participants in the UK, sponsored by SecurEnvoy using OnePoll, two-thirds of the people interviewed experienced fear on being stranded without their phone and 41 percent kept two phones to make sure they always remained connected to a cellular network.

It’s possible you too feel anxious when your phone’s battery nose-dives and you don’t have access to a charging station close by. Or you feel something’s gone wrong if you don’t see cell phone towers on your screen for more than half an hour. If you want to regain control over your mind, before smartphones hijacked your life, start by admitting that you might have an addiction problem. The good thing is—you are not the only one.

2. Realize why staring at your phone is not helping you

Smartphones have made our life simple, but they are also perhaps the reason why we play peeping Tom on social media, trying to find out how someone inconsequential to our life, might be spending their summer vacation. Or they’ve facilitated consuming news as soon as it’s tweeted, inciting us to react or share instantly, without verifying the authenticity of the facts. They’ve also passed on the itch to want to share everything we do in our personal lives on social media.

Smartphones are also responsible for health conditions that did not exist a decade ago. Our fingers now suffer from what is being loosely called a ‘text claw,’ to describe when they become cramped and sore because of nonstop texting or swiping. Continuous downward staring at phones pressures the muscles of the neck, which are forced into an awkward angle that affects our natural posture, in what is called a ‘text neck’ or ‘iPosture.’ People also experience what is called a ‘phantom pocket vibration syndrome,’ which describes a feeling of anxiety that their phone might be vibrating, when it’s lying still in their pocket.

3. Keep your phone away before going to bed

Your phone might be the reason why you’re falling out of routine habits like falling asleep at night. Neuroscientist George Brainard was amongst the first to study how different wavelengths of light affect the release of melatonin, a hormone in our body that helps control sleep and wake cycles.

According to Brainard’s study conducted in 1990 on more than 700 participants, human beings were found to be more sensitive to light emitted by devices like cell phones. These devices emit short-wavelengths of light or light that has higher doses of blue light than natural light. Studies conducted by neuroscientist Anne-Marie Chang in 2013 showed that exposure to blue-light increased melatonin suppression. Individuals exposed to blue light right before sleeping found it more difficult to fall asleep, took longer to wake up, were sleepier upon waking, and had less REM sleep or cycles of sleep that allows the human brain to dream.

One practical way to ensure that blue light doesn’t steal your sleep is by keeping your cell phone away an hour before going off to sleep. If you need to set an alarm to wake up, do it on a traditional alarm clock. In order to cut off the supply of blue light, don’t read books on your smart phone, don’t work on your laptop, and avoid watching TV late into the night.

4. Stay away from the phone when you wake

Chances are if you keep your smartphone away from the bedside table, your phone won’t be the first thing you’ll reach for when you wake up. Staring into your phone first thing in the morning means you’ll open your eyes to work emails, will scan social media for new updates, will search news sites for articles that made headlines—before you have time to organize thoughts in your head.

Start a new morning ritual instead, which involves at least half an hour of doing things such as exercising, taking a bath, preparing healthy breakfast, and perhaps talking to your family members—before you occupy your mind with work. This way you won’t snowball into your day without any plan or focus. You will also end up using your time more efficiently than getting distracted with a tweet while planning for your day.

5. Make eye contact than screen contact

We have all slowly but surely converted into people that hide behind cell phone screens than talk to one another. Think of moments in an elevator when you meet strangers, think of the cashier at your local grocery store that you see every other day, and think of your building concierge who wishes you good day when you see him.

Do you really engage in a real conversation or make eye contact with people you meet in your day-to-day life? If not—force yourself to do so. Try to thank that guy at Starbucks, who makes you coffee just the way you like it, by trying to remember his name. Try to talk to your building concierge about football, cause you saw the T-shirt he was wearing the other day with the name of his favorite NFL player. Try to talk to your neighbors when you enter the elevator with them. Remember, at the end of the day we might try to behave like machines, but we are all really monkeys, who according to science feel happier when we interact with other monkeys. If not for anything, engaging in small talk might help you develop better interpersonal skills, which can help you be more social at work.

6. Change the notifications of your apps

If your smartphone keeps dinging—you’ll keep checking to see what’s the latest notification about. Think of your phone like a wailing child that always demands your attention. Reduce chances of it getting in your way by incorporating some discipline in the way you use it. Go through all the apps you’ve downloaded and delete all those apps you don’t ever use or don’t need to. If you have several chatting apps, get into their settings, and put them on silent. Perform the same ritual with all your social media apps.

A good strategy can be deleting Facebook and Twitter off of your phone, to restrict the time you spend on them. If you need to sign into these accounts from a laptop, may be you’ll visit them less often. Make rules for social media sharing in your life. For ex. You might decide that sharing food photos on Instagram is not fun any more. Or sharing anything personal, related to your kids or spouse is not for everyone to see. The less you post, the less you’ll feel like posting in general, and the less you’ll be addicted to your phone.

7. Try to rely on your memory than your memory card

Remember that time when you could easily remember telephone numbers of all our close friends? Or you could remember simple tasks like picking up dry cleaning on our way back home from work—without setting a reminder on our phone? That time was perhaps 5 years ago. What’s really changed since then is your dependence on an external machine.

Exercising your brain to remember day-to-day things than calendaring everything on a device can help sharpen your memory. Perhaps you can start by trying to remember the birthdays of some of your close friends and wish them the way you used to in the pre-Facebook era—by using your smartphone to make a phone call. You can also start memorizing numbers of some of your family members, just to exercise your brain. Each time you allow your brain to do any such activity, you gain more freedom from the tyranny of technology.

8. Don’t use your phone when you are behind the wheel

The use of a smartphone in some scenarios can come across as immature or downright rude. You don’t want to be staring at your phone if you are on a date. You don’t want to be distracted by your phone if you are at work attending an important meeting with your boss sitting right next to you. Other places that can wreck havoc for you is while driving a car. Use your phone for navigating, but say no to texting when behind the wheel. According to the National Safety Council, cell phone use leads to 1.6 million crashes on the road each year. If you really need to respond to an urgent message, make it a habit to stop the car, call or text the person you need to, and start driving once your phone is put away.

Understand that there needs to be an attitudinal change in your relationship with your phone. Remind yourself that the phone is for your use and not the other way round. If you feel that just having your phone in your pocket makes you want to use it, assign times of the day when you’ll lock it away. Start with small changes like keeping your phone at home and going out for a walk in the park. Or try keeping your phone on silent mode during weekends and force yourself to check it only once as a rule.

9. Get social in more social ways

Think about the time you spend on your phone texting your friends, trying to make plans to meet. Then think about the time you spend meeting them in real time. Also factor in the time you spend with them over a cup of coffee while staring at your phone on the side. Technology may have brought human beings one call away from one another, but it’s also the reason why we have become antisocial.

Try to use the time when you hang out with your friends to really forget your smartphone and talk to them about whatever’s going on in their lives. You can do the same with your family by deciding that the time you spend on the dinner table will be phone free. By doing so, you have created yet another zone in your life and house where you can start ignoring your phone, and really pay attention to people closest to you.

10. Get mindful through yoga and meditation

Yoga and meditation are other tools you can use to help focus on the here and now and to feel more in control of your mind no matter what your circumstances in life. Studies have shown how allowing your mind to focus on breathing exercises can allow you to grow more calm and focused in your daily life. Trying to hold still in different yoga postures can not only improve the strength and flexibility of your body, but also your mind.

Meditation is another exercise that focuses on reducing the noise in our life and helps us understand our innermost impulses, our underlying mood, and the way we as individuals respond to situations. Smartphones inject our life with noise from the Internet, inciting us to take every click bait seriously. Meditation can allow us to grow detached from such distractions and enjoy being present 100 percent in what matters in our life right now.