Are You Addicted to Your Phone?

I have never been someone that would consider myself addicted to my phone or social media. I mean, I’m not one of those people who are constantly checking their phone; I can make it a whole 5 minutes before realizing I left my phone on another floor of the house.

After years of ignoring it, something that eventually caught my attention was the “screen time” recap on my iPhone. You know what I’m talking about. The notification that pops up each week and tells you that you spent an average of 3 hours per day staring at a 3×6″ screen. If you’re like most people, you don’t event remember what you were pointlessly scrolling through.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find a credible or well known source that shares statistics on smart phone screen time for the average user. Not to be a total conspiracy theorist, but it could be due to the fact that most well known sources profit off of people’s non-stop use of their smart phones through ad revenue.

According to this article the average American spends about 3.5 hours per day on their smart phone. On average people check their phone 58 times per day. If you’re awake 16 hours per day, that averages checking your phone nearly every 15 minutes!

When I started at my first corporate America job out of college, I was bored out of my mind. This was 10+ years ago, so we didn’t have phone settings that would stop us from our own demise, but fortunately I had enough self discipline to realize that I was addicted to looking at my phone constantly as an escape from work. I made a rule for myself that I would only check my phone every 20 minutes. This really helped me to stay focused.

I decided to try a new experiment again recently. After some research, I found a setting on my phone that would allow me to set a specific time limit for a group of apps on my phone. I selected all of my social media apps and set a 15 minute per day time limit. To be real, I don’t actually spend only 15 minutes on social media most days. There have been days where I realized I hit the 15 minute limit before I had even gotten my lazy butt out of bed. But what setting this limit did was help put me back into control.

You may have heard the saying, “if it’s free; than you’re the product.” Social media can be a great tool and way to stay connected, but it can also be addicting and lead to unproductive use of time. It’s no coincidence that you have a new notification of some type every time you look down at your phone. Every minute we spend using social media and news apps leads to more ad revenue for the companies that provide these “free” platforms.

Now, when I reach for my phone and open a social media app out of habit, due to looking for an escape or look at some pointless notification pop-up, I have to knowingly give permission to a for-profit corporation to take any more of my precious time.

I highly recommend using these settings on your phone. When my kids get phones someday, they will definitely have these settings pre-set before they get even get their hands on it. Thanks for reading!