4 Techniques to Curb Your Phone Addiction

Reflection, detachment, intentionality, and human connection may be key in taking back control of your attention.

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Many of us are stuck in a constant cycle of spending hours on our phone, feeling guilty about it, and then doing it over again because we feel as if we have no control.

Yet, I refuse to believe that we have to be ruled by our devices, which were originally intended to be useful tools. Our phones can be positive instruments for work, social connection, personal productivity, and even a little bit of free time.

Yet there is a growing problem with technology addiction.

It’s why I consulted my former professor, Clark Chilson, from the University of Pittsburgh to gain more insight into this problem and discover potential solutions. Chilson teaches religious studies at Pitt, yet ask any one of his students, and they’ll probably tell you they were personally impacted by his teachings, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof. Every time I stepped into his classroom, I knew I’d be learning much more than what was on the syllabus.

Here is some of the advice he gave me on how best to foster a healthy relationship with technology.

1. Confront your screen time 

One way that we can break our technology addiction is to make ourselves uncomfortable. Go into your device’s settings, and check your screen time. How many hours are you really spending online every day?

This confrontation is similar to Naikan therapy in Japan, a structured self-reflection practice, sometimes used to treat addictions, in which participants are faced with a series of questions.

Chilson invites you to print out your screen time, or write it down somewhere that you will see every day. What are the consequences of spending that amount of time on your phone? How many hours do you want to spend on your phone today?

“The answer for most of us is I'd like to spend a little less,” Chilson says. “I'm giving a tremendous amount of my precious life to this object.”

Perhaps asking yourself a series of these questions can make you more aware of the ways in which your excessive technology use could be harming you.

2. Intermittent fast from technology

Have you heard of the recent trend of dopamine detoxing? It’s when you go a period of time without engaging in things that are instantly gratifying, like browsing the internet, checking social media, watching TV, playing video games, or engaging in any other kind of entertainment. Detoxes can last days, weeks, or even months.

Intermittent fasting may be a less drastic, more reasonable approach to help you release your attachment to your device. It can be hard to go without some form of dopamine for a whole week. But what if, every day, you set aside a certain amount of hours in which you refrain from going on your phone?

In a battle between his willpower and the internet, Chilson acknowledges that “the internet wins every time.”

“The best way not to get sucked in is just not to turn it on,” he says. “And because I can't live completely without it, I just don't turn it on before noon.”

Find a time frame that works for you (ie. 9am-9pm, 10am-6pm, 12pm-4pm etc.), and see if you can find the willpower to stay away from technology or a particular device during that time.

You’ll likely be engaging in a lot of urge-surfing, a mindfulness technique that promotes awareness of one’s own thoughts in order to avoid acting on impulse. Urges usually take the form of waves, where intensity increases and eventually subsides.

3. Use technology in a particular, intentional way

Chilson encourages us to leverage technology by using it intentionally. He suggests finding a podcast or video series that focuses on a hobby or skill that will lead you away from your phone. You can also use it to deepen your understanding of or connection with a particular tradition.

“Pleasure is a source of pain,” he says, drawing on a main tenet in Buddhism. “That's what we're doing on the phone and the internet. We're looking for pleasure.”

This access to pleasure is often constant, immediate, and well… exhausting.

We then experience a sense of wasted time, and perhaps a sense of guilt for using the internet in a bad way, or a sense of unease after engaging in negative online discourse with internet strangers. 

“If we want a wholesome mind, we have to put wholesome things in it,” Chilson says.

The major problem is that many of the things you may stumble across on the internet are not wholesome. They certainly exist but aren't as eye-catching as negative headlines.

Chilson believes it is essential that we monitor the kinds of things we put in our minds, by choosing what we watch or what we think about.

4. Have quality time with other human beings

“What being human entails is the need to be loved and to love and to feel like you belong to other people and they belong to you,” Chilson says. “And that is what we are losing.”

We are cultivating pleasure, not relationships, through technology. Instead, go out into the real world, find a like-minded community of people around you, and start cultivating genuine connection. 

Volunteer at the local church, food bank, or pet shelter, or start a new friendship with a person from the office or the classroom. Join a gym or a book club or sign up for an art workshop or cooking class. If you work from home, maybe even spend some of your time working at the library or the coffee shop down the road. There’s so many ways in our day to day lives that we can increase our social interactions.

So…what now?

Breaking technology addiction requires habit building. It’s best to wean yourself off. It’s impractical to jump from constantly looking at your phone to never touching it at all. 

“The formation of a habit is what is really most important,” Chilson says. “With any discipline, though, it becomes easier once you get in the habit.”

Little incremental improvements are the most valuable because they are the most likely to be maintained in the long-term. We don’t need to be perfect or great - just better than we were before.

Chilson encourages us to use the time that we aren’t on technology to really think about our purpose. This is a lifelong quest that takes years to solve. So he leaves us, instead, with three more specific questions we can try and answer to get just a little bit closer:

What's your purpose for the next week? Are you bringing other human beings into your life? And how can we best live as a human being?