Are You Struggling With Your Own Screen Time?

Five steps adults can take to create a better relationship with their phones

As the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone and a parent of a nine-year-old, I often lie awake worrying about how technology is shaping our world and affecting the experience of being human. That’s why I’ve been so relieved and excited to see The Anxious Generation ignite a global movement of parents, educators, and lawmakers who are calling for an end to the phone-based childhood, and who are advocating for more independence, responsibility, fun, and real-life friendships for our kids.

But as many adults are beginning to realize, it’s not just the phone-based childhood that’s the problem. It’s the phone-based life. While children and teenagers are suffering the most from the negative effects of social media and too much screen time, their parents—and frankly, all adults—are as well.

Indeed, it was my own personal struggles with my smartphone that led me to write the original 2018 edition of How to Break Up With Your Phone. One night about ten years ago, when my daughter was just a baby, I had a moment when I noticed that she was gazing up at me, while I was gazing down at my phone—and it broke my heart. That was not the impression I wanted her to have of a human relationship, let alone with her own mother, and that was not how I wanted to live my own life.

Source: Penguin Random House

I realized I needed to change, but I couldn’t find a book that provided me with a practical solution. So I decided to write that book. I designed How to Break Up With Your Phone to combine an exploration of why our smartphones and apps are so compelling (and what our screen time is doing to us) with a step-by-step, evidence-backed, 30-day plan for how to take back control. The goal isn’t to dump your smartphone completely (unless you want to). It’s to create a healthier relationship with technology in which your phone makes your life better, not worse.

In the seven years since the first edition of How to Break Up With Your Phone was published, I’ve heard from thousands of people around the world, from teenagers up to septuagenarians, that “breaking up” with their phones has helped them feel like they’ve regained control—not just of their screen time, but of their lives.

I recently had the opportunity to fully revise and update the original edition of the book, and in celebration of the release of the new edition, Jon and Zach have invited me to share with you some highlights from the book’s 30-day plan.

Here are some of my top suggestions for how to build a healthier relationship with your smartphone, support others who may be struggling with their phone use, set a positive example for your kids, and be kind to yourself along the way.

So gather your teammates (phone “breakups” are best when done together!) and get ready for a healthier relationship with your phone.

Step 1: Define What You Want

The top reason that most people’s attempts to cut back on screen time fail is that they jump straight to “hacks” and “tricks” without first identifying why they’re trying to change their phone habits or what they want to be doing with their time. They set an arbitrary goal (my daily screen time must be one hour or less!) and attempt to achieve it by relying on their willpower.

But relying on your willpower is a reliably bad way to change a habit. Eventually it will run out and you’ll end up back where you started, with the added bonus of feeling like you’ve failed. The point is not to restrict your screen time arbitrarily; it’s to reconnect with your life.

Also, keep in mind that the people who design our most time-sucking apps make money from stealing our attention from us. And that’s a big deal, because ultimately, our lives are what we pay attention to. We only experience what we pay attention to. We only remember what we pay attention to. When we allow app-makers to steal our attention, we’re allowing them to rob us of our lives.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you take the time to identify your motivation and your goals. Why do you want to change your screen habits? What do you want to spend your time and attention on? What would a healthy relationship with your smartphone (and other devices) look like?

In my book, I encourage people to answer these questions by writing a “breakup letter” to their phone. It sounds silly at first, but it can be a surprisingly powerful way to clarify your motivations and goals. For example, here’s a sample breakup letter that I included in the book:

“Dear Phone: You fill my head with so much stuff I can’t hear my own thoughts. That’s the thing I resent the most. Why should you get to dictate what I think about, and when? I want to go back to a time when I had to entertain myself, to experience the way boredom breeds creativity, to learn the contours of my own mind and allow it to work at its own pace. . . . I want the ability to stand still in a silent room . . . as silent as I can get with a three-year-old, anyway. As for my boy, I want him to see me, and know he is seen. What’s best for me is what’s best for him, too.” —C

It also can be useful (if upsetting) to calculate how much time you’re currently spending on your phone, and to consider both how this total compares to the amount of time you’re spending on the things you just said you wanted to pay attention to, and what the consequences will be if you continue with your current habits. Here’s a calculator that can help.

1 hour per day ≈ 15 full 24-hour days per year

2 hours per day ≈ 1 month per year

3 hours per day ≈ 1.5 months per year

4 hours per day ≈ 2 months per year

5 hours per day ≈ 2.5 months per year

6 hours per day ≈ 3 months per year

If those calculations aren’t sobering enough, consider just how much of your conscious life is being consumed by your smartphone. If you’re awake for 16 hours a day and spend 4 hours a day on your phone (which is pretty typical), that means you’re spending 25% of your waking life on your phone.

This also means that if you were to compress your whole year’s worth of screen time into one chunk, starting on January 1st (in other words, if you were to do nothing but sleep and stare at your phone), the rest of your “life” wouldn’t start until just after April 1st.

Step 2: Reconnect With Real Life

After How to Break Up With Your Phone, I wrote a follow-up book called The Power of Fun. In it, I write about how one of the main reasons we spend so much time on our phones is that we’re not experiencing enough fun or connection in our actual lives. We’re bored (even if we’re overwhelmingly busy) and we’re lonely.

We turn to our phones to fill an emptiness that we feel inside. Unfortunately, instead of nourishing us, the dopamine drip of our screens only leaves us feeling emptier and more alone as soon as we look away from the phone. The good news is that the more fun you’re having in real life, the less time you’re going to want to spend on your smartphone.

So what does nourish you? What feels fun? What (and who) makes you feel lighthearted? What are you curious about? What makes you feel alive? And also . . . what nourishing things can you do in quiet moments when you’re alone, either by choice, or because it’s 9pm on a Tuesday night?

Either on your own or with your breakup partners, set a timer for 10 minutes and make a list of:

• Things you love doing (make sure to include a few that you can do on your own in quiet moments, such as reading or crafting)

• Things you’re curious about trying. For example, maybe there’s a recipe you’d like to try, or a class, or a restaurant. Or maybe you’ve been curious about experimenting with a habit, like mediating or going for a regular after-dinner walk.

• People you’d like to spend more time with (and ideally whom you might be able to invite you to join you for some of the things on your list!)

Not only can it be motivating and reassuring to realize that you do actually have interests beyond your Instagram feed, but this list will be an extremely useful tool to have on hand for weekend planning, as well as for when you find yourself in a moment of downtime when you would usually reach your phone.

If you’re brainstorming with someone else, see if there are any things you could plan to do together—and then put those things into your calendars right then and there.

Also, notice how coming up with the list made you feel. Many people report that it can be hard, at first, to come up with non-screen-based ideas, but that once they get started, the floodgates open. They report feeling relieved and, in many cases, excited. (With that said, don’t worry if it feels hard and you only have a few ideas on your list. More will come. Give yourself grace.)

Step 3: Make Your Phone Boring

Part of the reason it’s so hard to look away from your smartphone is that its apps have deliberately been designed to feel exciting. The reason they feel exciting is that they’ve been designed to manipulate our brains’ dopamine systems (I recently contributed to a video for The Guardian that explains how this works).

SSome tech insiders refer to these dopamine-triggering tactics as “brain hacking.” So how do you fight back? Make your phone as boring as possible.

Start by asking yourself what you like about your phone and want to keep using. Focus on apps that serve a tool-like purpose, such as maps, or your calendar, or your music platform, or the camera, or the actual phone. Keep these and use them as much as you want. (I have been talking with people about their smartphones for nearly a decade now, and never once has someone told me that they waste hours a day staring at Google maps.)

Next, delete or hide any app that you know is problematic for you. You probably know the apps that are problematic for you—they’re the ones that make you feel gross or guilty after you use them, but which you find irresistible. But if you want me to tell you what they are, here you go: they’re probably going to be some combination of social media, the news, shopping, email, and gaming. (Not coincidentally, these are the categories of apps that have the most similarities to slot machines!)

If you’re hesitating about deleting anything, remember: you can always check these things from a computer or browser; it’s the apps that are usually the most problematic, because they have so many features that have been specifically designed to hook you.

And also: if you’re the parent of teenagers, you’ve likely scolded them for how attached they seem to their problematic apps. This is a great opportunity to role model the behaviors that you’re trying to encourage. (For added oomph, tell them what you’ve deleted—and ask them to hold you accountable. You could even have a family challenge to see who can keep their problem apps off their phone the longest.)

Tip: I highly recommend the use of app-blockers (that is, apps and devices that help you enforce your own boundaries by setting access schedules for yourself and limiting your access to technology). They are much more effective than the “screen time” features built into most smartphones. Popular options include apps such as Freedom, ScreenZen and Opal, and physical devices such as the Brick and Unpluq tags.

As part of the process of making your phone boring, you’ll also want to reduce your notifications interruptions. I call notifications “interruptions” because that’s what they really are designed to do: interrupt what you’re doing and make you pay attention to your phone.

So ask yourself: what is worth being interrupted for when you’re in the middle of a project? When you’re putting your kids to bed? When you’re watching a movie with your partner? When you’re laughing with your friends? Start with an absolute minimum; you can always readjust your settings. And don’t forget to also turn off those red badges that tell you how many things are waiting for you in an app. Those are “notifications,” too, and they’re there to get you to go into the app (note that they’re the same eye-catching color as a stop-sign, or blood—this is not a coincidence!).

Once you’ve deleted (or hidden) problematic apps and reduced your notifications interruptions, redesign your home screen so that it only contains apps that either serve a practical purpose, or that help support a habit you WANT to engage in, such as meditation or learning a new language or instrument.

By the end of this process, your home screen should contain only tools, not temptations. Your phone will then be less like a slot machine and more like a swiss army knife.

Here is an image of my own phone screen:

Caption: You’ll notice that I actually keep my home screen totally empty, and I launch apps by pulling down the search bar and manually typing in their names. This helps me avoid opening apps on autopilot. I also have made it easy to toggle rapidly between color and black and white. Here are instructions for how to set this up.

Step 4: Create Phone-Free Spaces

One of the main problems with smartphones and apps is that they infiltrated our lives so quickly and so thoroughly that we never even stopped to think about what we wanted our boundaries to be. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to find any space—or gathering—that does not include smartphones. This is destroying our ability to be present and fully connected with each other, and it’s also affecting our productivity, our memories, our creativity and, frankly, who we are as people! That’s why it’s so important that we begin to create boundaries.

Thankfully, an increasing number of schools are creating phone-free spaces for their students—but what about at home? One suggestion is to establish dinnertime as a “no phone zone” for your family (including you and your spouse!) and any guests.

To make device-free dinners feel less punitive and more fun, provide alternative things to do. For example, you could create a system where every person in the family takes turns coming up with a “question of the day.” (If this sounds too daunting, there are plenty of pre-made conversation prompt collections to use as fodder, such as the “Family Edition” set from Tales—you could simply take turns choosing which one to use.)

In addition to a bowl of conversation prompts, my husband and I also keep a “Jar of Delights” on our table with blank slips of paper. One of our favorite family rituals with our daughter (and, for that matter, with adult dinner guests) is to start dinner by writing down our daily delights and sharing them with each other as we add them to the jar.

Experiment with a Digital Sabbath

If you enjoy device-free dinners, I suggest taking the concept further and experimenting with device-free family nights (have a movie or game night instead)—or even an entire device-free day. In How to Break Up With Your Phone, I encourage people to try taking a full 24-hour break from screens—a practice sometimes known as a Digital Sabbath, and which is modeled after traditional religious sabbaths. While most people are terrified at first, many report that it was the most enjoyable and valuable part of the entire 30-day breakup plan.

Step 5: Start and End the Day on Your Own Terms

Right now, if you’re like most people, your smartphone is probably the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you interact with before bed. If you can get your phone out of your bedroom (and your kids’ bedrooms), you will reclaim both of those times—and probably sleep better, too.

If you are like most people I hear from, part of the reason your phone sleeps in your bedroom with you is because you use your phone as an alarm clock.

But think about it: in order to silence an alarm, you need to touch the alarm. This means that if your smartphone is your alarm clock, you are guaranteeing that your smartphone will be the very first thing you interact with each day.

So take a moment right now to get or find standalone alarm clocks for everyone in your family. Also—and this is essential!—create a central family charging station for everyone’s phones that is not in a bedroom. For example, my husband and I charge our phones in a closet.

Tip: To make your kids more willing to participate, offer them some kind of “reward” if they ever catch you cheating—such as some extra allowance money, or the pleasure of getting to assign you one of their chores. (But warn them that this system works in reverse, too!)

Next, make sure to put something that you want to engage with or do before bed in the spot where your phone used to be. For example, if you say you want to read more, put a book on your bedside table. That way, when you reach for your phone on autopilot (which you will, because it’s an ingrained habit), you will encounter a trigger for the habit you’re trying to establish.

This is part of our general strategy of making it harder to engage in the habits you’re trying to cut back on, and easier to engage in the habits you want to nurture. And as a bonus, reading a book for just ten minutes a day will help you rebuild your (probably atrophied) attention span!

In Conclusion . . .

“Breaking up” with your phone might sound daunting, but you also may be surprised by how quickly the benefits begin to add up. So I encourage you to grab a friend or family member and give it a try.

As you do so, keep in mind that no relationship is ever perfect, and changing habits is hard, especially when they involve apps that are deliberately designed to make boundary-setting difficult. Our relationships with our phones will likely always be works in progress — and that’s okay.

So make a plan to check in regularly with your “phone breakup buddy” about how things are going. And if you do fall back into an old pattern or habit (which, let’s be honest, you probably will), don’t beat yourself up. Instead, just notice what happened and decide how you want to move forward. The mere fact that you realized you slipped means that you’re succeeding.

Keep it up, and not only will you feel like you’re modeling the behaviors you’re trying to instill in your kids, but eventually you’ll find yourself with a new relationship with your devices that reflects what you already know in your heart: the best parts of life don’t happen on a screen.¹

1. For more suggestions and guided advice, I invite you to check out the full 30-day plan in the revised edition of How to Break Up With Your Phone and to subscribe to my own Substack newsletter, “How to Feel Alive.”