How to break and survive Phone Addiction
It’s an open secret that phones which were supposed to be an accessory now take an entirety of time due most likely to social media.
It isn’t common to find most students and sometimes SHS students on most of these social media and they spend most of their time just waiting for a WhatsApp message or scroll through Instagram photos of their celebrities in dressed they can never wear or using stuff they don’t have.
Honestly, the idea of social media seems very silly on paper yet racks huge amounts of money due to their ability to keep most people hooked onto the apps. At one point in time, you begin to question if the amount of time on your phones can be justified. If you’ve gotten to this point in your life, then this article is here to show you how best to minimize your screen time.
Self-actualisation
The first step to getting out of an addiction is self-actualization.
And by believing you are spending too much time on your phone we can work a path out. To solve a problem, we need to see how big a deal it is, so our beginning step is to find out how much screen time you spend and what apps spend the most time out of this.
There are third-party apps on the Google play store and the Appstore such as Usage time, screentime and Zen screen.
ZenScreen
ZenScreen has one of the best interfaces you will see with a whole variety of cool features such as calm night(turns the phone off at an appointed time) and quiet time (which turned off the device for a short period of time ).
It also has a feature to add other smartphones of your kids and regulate their screen on time. The downside is you have to pay for pro after a 3-month free trial but if you don’t have a problem paying 28 cedis a month($4.99) or 270($47.98) a year I guess it becomes the best for you.
Usage time has a subtle look to it with all the settings on one page and a pie chart of your time at the upper part. It only requests payment of 28 cedis to get rid of ads and to support the developer. Screen time is almost identical to Usage time but has multiple pages to view each function differently. Both of these can lock apps, have app time limits(self-explanatory) and down limits(only a few selected apps would work for a set amount of time).
All of these apps can help you get a general idea of your phone usage. One thing I found lacking on all these was the feature to know to save our app usage. It would really be of good help to track your usage overtimes and I expected ZenScreen to have such a feature looking at the price tag.
Because most of the apps mentioned have app limiters and other gimmicks, they are usually enough to manage your time, but there area other stand-alone apps that solely restrict your screen time without actually checking it out.
Flipd
My personal favourite is Flipd. It is honestly one of the most aggressive app locks you can ever use. It has a full ock mode where you cannot access anything apart from the app’s interface and its really tough to break out. It’s great for those who have little or no self discipline in using it. It also has a light lock mode if you feel confident enough.
The amount of time we spend looking at our devices is getting way out of hand. If you channel that time to the right stuff we will be better off in life. As you plan to spend less time on your phone, try and make a daily review so each day is better spent than the previous.
