I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my phone and I know I am not the only one. Just like most people, I spend more time on my phone than I would want to, all the while feeling that I have too little time for other things in my life. And I don’t even feel better when I emerge from my phone dives. For the longest time, I thought this was a `it’s-not-you-it’s-me’ situation; I thought I wasn’t good enough at managing my phone use, my willpower wasn’t strong enough, it was all just me, etc etc. But that wasn’t really getting me anywhere. I would vow to spend less time on my phone (and break my promises), put in app limits on the usual offenders (just to promptly ignore them), even uninstall apps (just to reinstall them embarrassingly soon, or install another app that would suck me in instead). It always worked for a bit, but I would always come crawling back, telling myself that I just need to be better and then everything will be fine.

Well guess what, I found out that it’s not just me. And it’s not even just the social media. Having all of the internet in our pocket puts us in a completely unprecedented situation that changes how we focus, spend our time and think. It’s a difficult thing to fight. Knowing we are being affected doesn’t stop us from being affected, just like knowing a magic trick isn’t real magic doesn’t stop us from being tricked. But, if nothing else, I find it easier to manage my phone use knowing what I am up against and what it is about the smart phone that makes it difficult to moderate. So here are the three ways in which the smartphones mess with us.

1. The illusion of ’not-a-thing'

I realised this one only recently, and it was the biggest game-changer in my relationship to my phone. Imagine you are sitting at a cafe talking to a couple of friends, the conversation takes a turn to a topic that maybe isn’t super interesting for you, so you take a quick look at your phone, maybe check for any notifications, maybe emails, maybe have a quick look at Insta… Not the most polite thing to do, sure, but we have all done it, right? Now imagine doing the same, but on a laptop. Most of us wouldn’t; that would just be plain wrong. Yet while the hardware is different, the activity is just the same.

Somehow, whatever I do on my phone doesn’t feel like a ’thing’. It feels like I can engage with it but still keep my attention on whatever I was doing in the real world. It doesn’t feel like a real activity, not quite. But whether I am reading emails, or scrolling social media, or doing a ‘quick’ web search, they take my full attention, because, as we know by now, there is no such thing as multi-tasking, only fast and inefficient attention-switching. But the phone, with its small screen and bite-sized bits of content creates the illusion of multi-tasking, of not really engaging in anything substantial, of just having a quick look. The illusion of whatever we are doing being ’not-a-thing’.

And so we find ourselves staring into our phones while talking to friends and loved ones, while trying to get work done, while playing with our kids, while exploring new places, while trying to fall asleep, … We are disengaging from our surroundings and from whatever we were doing, but we don’t even see that we are doing that.

What can we do with it? Honestly, I don’t think we can change how we perceive our gadgets anymore than we can change how we see optical illusions. I think a phone will always make my brain think that whatever I am doing on it isn’t that substantial, and of course I can do it and keep my full attention on the people and things around me. As if. But knowing that my mind works this way makes it easier for me to stick to my plans (and not reinstall my apps), because I won’t convince myself that I will moderate better this time. When I noticed this ’not-a-thing’ illusion for the first time a few months ago, I deleted the apps that were the biggest time-sucks for me. I didn’t give myself any limits on them, the only rule was that I would engage with them on the computer only. Funnily enough, I think I have been on them once in those months. I have since installed some different apps that became a new time-suck, and deleted them later. It’s a work in progress.

2. Always there, always entertaining

When I find myself having a moment of time, I almost instinctively reach for my phone. I know there will be something there that can occupy my mind for whatever length of time I have available. The completely unprecedented thing is that you don’t even have to decide what to do. Something will be there.

I used to just do the rounds - Instagram, Facebook (even though it has sucked for years now), Twitter, Pinterest, whatever. Honestly, it feels like gambling. With each scroll I hope to see something good, and when I do, I feel satisfied for a split second, then scroll again to try my luck anew. Isn’t it wild, spending so much time looking at things we didn’t even ask to see? Sure, we choose to follow certain people, but that is far from the only content we are being served, and in many cases, if those people don’t pay for ads, their posts won’t reach their followers anyway. And so we scroll and scroll and scroll and fill up our free time with things we didn’t decide to watch and didn’t decide to read.

What does it do to us, to always have this distraction machine readily available within reach? What does it do to us to rarely, or never, be faced with the bare insides of our heads? When was the last time you were bored and ended up doing something cool? Once again, I have no answers. What I know is that I often find myself feeling like I have a backlog of thoughts, a few dozen open tabs in my mind. Many of them I can’t even consciously reach, they are just feelings and impressions left behind by the medley of posts on my ever-changing feed. I know I am exceptionally slow at processing things, and my mental filters allow for more input to come in than they should, but I don’t think anyone was made to be exposed to all of the internet, all of the time.

3. All exploration, no play

There are two stages in which kids interact with toys: exploration and play. Exploration is the first stage, in which the child asks themselves: “What does this do?”. Play comes later with the question of “What can I do with this?”. When surrounded by too many toys, children will get stuck in the exploration mode, pick up one toy after the other, interact with them for a little bit, to see what they do, then toss them aside. As a parent, I have seen and tidied up the results of this many times; as an adult, I feel a bit called out. I don’t think we grown-ups are that different from kids in this.

There simply has to be an exploration stage before anyone can engage in a creative play, but exploration requires less effort, feels inherently more exciting and more urgent. While there is plenty of what I would call ‘play’ that can be done on our devices, from gaming, through digital art, music, writing, and all the way to coding, a smart phone is not particularly well suited for these. If you are to seriously engage in almost any digital creative endeavour, a computer, or at least a tablet, is a much better option. And so it’s that much easier to fall into the habit of constant exploration on our phones, of going with the easy, pleasant and ultimately dissatisfying option of consuming only, and rarely creating. And since they are always there, always available, we don’t often find ourselves asking what we could be doing instead.

Getting out of the rut

For me, realising that some of the characteristics of smartphones make them inherently a bit tricky, helped me change my relationship with mine. I spend less time thinking about my stupid inability to control myself, and more time setting up rules that help me keep my agency in this relationship.

Among the practical things I have done is

1. Black and white mode Adding a shortcut to put my phone into a black and white mode, and keep it there as much as possible. The lack of colours really drains the appeal out of most of what’s on it.
2. Uninstalling social media apps I decided to only use them on the computer instead.
3. Fewer notifications I muted or completely disabled notifications on most of my apps. There is simply no need for every single email to make a loud blip, and for many of the other apps, it’s quite OK for me to only see the notification once I open them.

I would be very interested in hearing about your experience with your smartphone; whether you are happy with how much time you spend on it, or what kind of precautions you use to keep it that way.