With so much attention focused on young people’s social media use, and calls to raise the minimum age for accessing social media to 16, perhaps it’s time we adults got our own house in order too.
Once again this morning, having picked up my phone to find an old email, I found myself an hour later still scrolling, the email I was looking for long forgotten.
And I’m far from alone. A study published earlier this year found that more than a third of our phone time has no clear purpose.
I’ve tried putting my phone on Focus mode, turning the screen grey, and setting daily limits, but they’ve all failed. Self-policing, it seems, is not for me.
Advertisements for physical app-blocking devices had been appearing on my timeline for months, and I’d quickly scrolled past them. But, finally, with the same excitement I felt signing up for Allen Carr’s How to Stop Smoking course many years ago, I pressed ‘buy’.
Social media is important to my life, and my screen time wasn’t completely outrageous – although, like my weight, not something I’ll be sharing with you. I moderate a couple of local community pages, and there’s always a missing dog or a set of car keys to find. With my daughter and two of my grandchildren in Australia, it’s an important part of family life too.
But neither of those gives me an excuse for the amount of time I spend watching videos of golden retrievers while ignoring the two at my feet, taking virtual walks through meadows while slumped on the sofa, and reading about Donald Trump’s latest escapade – followed, naturally, by scrolling through some of the thousands of comments underneath.
My phone comes to bed with me – justified by the thought of one of the children needing me – and it’s my alarm clock too. So it’s the first thing I reach for when I wake, checking the time before being sidelined by a woman in Texas making bean burritos, another telling me she didn’t know who needed to hear this, and a third who was ‘today years old’ when she discovered the drawer beneath the oven.
I check Instagram in supermarket queues and Facebook while I wait for the kettle to boil, picking up my phone while ‘watching’ the television – one eye scrolling, the other half – watching the programme I’d looked forward to all day.
Exhausting!
The blocking device took a week to arrive, a package I tracked by refreshing the shopping app far too often, well aware of the irony of using an app to free myself from other apps.
But so far, so good. This small round device, which I tap to get in and out of the apps I’ve chosen to block, has been a game changer.
My screen time has halved during the day, and tapping out at night has been transformative. I block myself for an hour before bed and don’t tap back in until I’ve been up for an hour, made several mugs of tea, fed the dogs and generally behaved like a person, not an addict.
I’m no longer always ‘on’ and feel far less tired. I sleep better and have rediscovered the joy of reading.
I still enjoy dog videos, and FaceTime with my family will only ever be a joy, but using my phone less has made it far more pleasurable – now I am using it and it is no longer using me.
In the interests of full disclosure, I went to Allen Carr three times to stop smoking. It wasn’t that they weren’t good at what they did; it was simply that I was better at finding ways around it. But, so far, I’m optimistic that this little device and I might live ‘appily ever after’.
Be warned, though, and swerve if you see me coming, because, like all good converts, I have become an evangelist for app-free time, boring anyone who will listen.
But not, you’ll be glad to know, by posting about it on Instagram.
Well, not before breakfast, anyway.
