Musings | Be Mindful of Your Phone
“Don’t miss out on your life because you’re too busy scrolling through someone else’s.”
Mindfulness is defined as “the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” We can be mindful of many things in our lives, including how we use technology and, specifically, our phones. Our phones may be so omnipresent in our lives that we might not be conscious of how we interact with them. Below you will find questions and tips to help you bring awareness to how you use your phone and the ways you are connected to it.
Question Why
A New York Times Meditation of Real Life excerpt suggests asking yourself these questions before or as you reach for your phone:
Am I checking for information I need?
Am I seeking to make a connection?
Am I looking at my phone out of boredom?
Do I need to escape the present moment?
If you don’t need to check your phone, you can just leave it alone. Over time, your urge to get online and check your phone will subside.
Adjust Settings and Create Rules
You can adjust your phone and apps settings and create rules around how you use your phone. We recently reviewed a short video (5-minutes) from Tim Ferris called “How I use my phone and prevent my phone from using me.” Below is a summary of what we learned:
Remove your email from your phone. Check your email at specific times or intervals from a laptop. If you have to check it from your phone, you will need to use the browser, which will take longer and force you to log in and check, versus just randomly checking your messages.
Remove social media apps from your phone. Just like email, you will need to be deliberate about logging into them. If you want to post to social media without seeing your feed and the posts of others, check out Onlypult, an app that lets you do just that.
Use airplane mode or silent mode so you are not distracted by notifications, and you can decide when and how you want to engage with each app, notification, and message. Doing so can also aid with focus on other tasks as you will not be distracted by the sounds your phone makes when you need to be concentrating on something else.
Social media apps are designed to be addictive and drive us to compulsive checking and engagement. Being mindful of how we engage with our phones and technology helps us gain control over them and use our phones effectively, so we are not controlled by technology. For additional information on mindful phone use, check out the resources below.