How to break social media addiction and actually start living

When you're on the bus, waiting at the queue, or simply walking down the street, do you often find yourself taking up your phone? Constantly looking at your phone will prevent you from being aware of what's happening around you, and this is not only physically but also mentally. When you're constantly stimulating yourself with the short-term dopamine that comes from your phone, you start to fall into the rabbit hole of social media consumption.

Think about the last time when you told yourself that today is going to be different, as if you were going to become a different person in your sleep and magically transform into someone who you aspire to be. Chances are you probably spent another day, the majority of your day, on social media consuming content you don't even enjoy. The influence that these devices have in our lives is huge. If you feel active but inefficient, we are connected but alone. The problem is our relationship with our phones, not the phones themselves.

These phones are addictive because they're designed to be that way. Using them for a little bit is fine, but letting your phone usage snowball can become problematic. Curing your phone addiction isn't as straightforward a thing to do; it requires self-reflection and resolution. So today, we're going to discover some basic psychology and science behind phone addiction. Using that knowledge, we will discover how to build a better and healthier relationship with our phone and technology more generally.

Just take a look around you: on public transport, in restaurants, on the street corners—whichever way you look today, you will find people, including even children, glued to their phones. According to a 2016 survey conducted in the United States, the average American checks his or her phone on average 47 times a day. In the 18 to 24 age bracket, this number shoots up to a whopping 82 times per day. What that means in terms of time was clarified with research published in 2015 on hackernoon.com. Americans spend an average of four hours a day with their phone.

Let's check our screen time. So mine is eight hours, maybe a little bit more, so I'm much worse than the average American, apparently. If you're using your phone like the average American, like four hours a day, that's 28 hours per week—basically the same as having a fairly busy part-time job. In my case, it's like having a full-time job plus a part-time job. If those numbers didn't make you realize that you have a phone addiction, let's take a test to figure out whether we have a phone addiction. It's called a smartphone compulsion test; it can be found online and was designed by the University of Connecticut's Dr. David Greenfield.

Let's answer some of the questions together. Do you occasionally spend more time with your phone than intended? Of course! Let's say I open Google Chrome for something I want to research. I click on the website, I read the article, and while I'm reading it, I see the Spotify app logo down there. So I click it, and I find out that my favorite artist released a new song. Of course, I click it and listen to the song.

Then I wonder if they released the music video too, so I open YouTube. Fifteen minutes later, I find myself in the rabbit hole of YouTube, as we all probably experienced. My answer to the next question is an obvious yes: Do you scroll without any sense of direction? Hell yeah! Another question is: Do you find yourself communicating more with people via your phone rather than in real life? Ninety-five percent of the time, I talk with my friends online, not in real life.

Do you tend to stop when you are doing something so you can respond to something on your phone? Yes! If you find yourself answering yes to those questions like I did, then chances are you have an addictive relationship with your phone. In order to fix this problem, I read a book called "How to Break Up with Your Phone." Let's begin by looking at why checking your phone really is a form of addiction and what it means for you. If this is not the first time you have tried to break the phone addiction cycle, you probably know the reason why our brains are so addicted to our phones: yes, dopamine!

For those who know nothing about dopamine, let me explain. Dopamine is basically a neurotransmitter released from our brain. While dopamine has many roles, regarding the subject of addiction, it triggers the pleasure-related receptors in our brain and urges us to associate a specific behavior with rewards. Once you associate that behavior, such as picking up your phone, with pleasure, your brain starts to crave more and more.

Don't get me wrong; dopamine is not our enemy. Our ability to foresee fulfillment is essential to survive. Dopamine motivates us to do many things. The reason you crave food when you get hungry is that your brain already associated food with pleasure. Your food cravings subside naturally when you feel full. But when it comes to our phones, especially social media, they are intentionally designed in a way to not alert you to stop.

They are designed for you to binge. The world's smartest people studied our brain's behavioral patterns and created services to make people get addicted to them. If you have ever tried to limit social media consumption and if you're still watching this video, you probably failed because just relying on willpower is extremely hard for a long-term fix.

So we need an exact plan to change our behavior pattern. In the book "How to Break Up with Your Phone," it provides a 30-day challenge to cure your phone addiction. But the challenge is quite long—30 days—and realistically speaking, I don't think anyone is going to do it step by step. So I summarized it and turned it into a five-day challenge for those who are interested. To do the full 30-day version, I'll put a free Notion template which you can give a try.

So here is my version of the breakup with your phone addiction cycle challenge.

Day one: Bring awareness. You should use an app or the simply screen time feature on your phone to track how often you are on your phone. This step is all about increasing your awareness and bringing your attention to it because if you don't know what to fix, we can't start. So do it!

Day two: Swapping old habits. Change your lock screen wallpaper to something that reminds you why you wanted to start in the first place. It can be maybe because you wanted to read more books, or you want to exercise more, or socialize more—anything that reminds you of your goal would work. Whenever you intend to pick up your phone, try to swap it with something you actually love and benefit from, such as reading books, exercising, podcasts, or actually socializing in real life.

This method of substituting old habits into new habits is actually proven by data. For example, one organization that uses this method to great effect is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which has helped more than 10 million alcoholics achieve sobriety. AA asks participants to list what they exactly crave from drinking; usually, factors like relaxation and companionship are far more important than the actual intoxication. AA then provides new routines that address those cravings, such as going to meetings and talking to sponsors for companionship.

The idea is to replace drinking with something less harmful. So in our case, we want to replace our phone addiction with something actually useful, such as reading. You want to make it easy for you to pick up the book and actually read instead of scrolling. I like Kindle for this purpose. I used to scroll on my phone and watch YouTube videos when commuting. One day, I thought, "If I read during that time I commute, I can actually read a lot of books."

So every time I wanted to watch a YouTube video or scroll on Instagram while I was commuting, I picked up the Kindle I put in my bag and started reading. After a couple of tries, it turned into a habit, and now whenever I'm going somewhere else, I just pick up my Kindle. That alone allowed me to read so many books.

Books are an amazing way to entertain yourself and find new information and grow as a person, but it's not the only way to do so. Skillshare is another option you can give a try. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes across its members in 150 countries worldwide, who came together to find inspiration and take their creativity journey to the next level. If you have a specific skill you want to learn, I'm pretty sure that you can find a class on Skillshare about it, from productivity to making YouTube videos to storytelling, or art classes, cooking classes—everything you can find on Skillshare.

If you want to find a new hobby outside of social media so you can enjoy your time more offline, you can check out art classes; there are so many of them. And if you want to make YouTube videos like this, there are tons of classes that will help you out. Now is the time to do the thing that you always wanted to do. If you want to give it a try, with Skillshare by using my link, you will lose nothing because the first thousand people who click the link will get a one-month free trial of Skillshare. So just give it a try; just use the link and try for a month. You'll probably like it, and you'll end up using it. So I highly recommend Skillshare.

Now let's get back into our video. Day three: Environmental change. Environment plays a huge role in our day-to-day habits. We perform most of our habits on autopilot. Most of us don't think or question when picking up the phone. The habits that are already built are very hard to break.

So rather than relying on our willpower, what we can do is design our environment to help us achieve our goals. One thing I quite like is setting up a charging station that is not in your room. If you don't have that much space, just place it somewhere else that is far away from your bed. Buy an alarm clock and use it instead of your phone. Also, put a couple of books you always wanted to read instead of your phone next to your bed.

Not only does this prevent possible scrolling before going to bed, it also reduces the chances of meaningless morning social media consumption in your bed. If you really want to consume something that bad before going to bed, you can either read a book or, if you want to, you can open Netflix and pick a show that you want to watch.

The difference between meaningless scrolling and picking something that you actually want to watch is the intention behind it. When you open Netflix with the intention that you want to watch something before going to bed, it is really different than opening Instagram and meaninglessly scrolling. With one thing, you have an actual goal of watching something entertaining, so it will satisfy you, but the other one is meaningless; it doesn't have a clear goal.

So it's not that always scrolling is a bad thing, but picking something that you want to consume with intention is far better than consuming meaningless media. Also, don't forget that blue light is entering your eyes from your screen, which not only damages your sleep quality but reading before bed prepares you for a better night's sleep. So kill two birds with one stone!

Day four: Turn off notifications. Disable all YouTube, Instagram, or whatever app you're addicted to. Your notifications—not only turning off individual app notifications—but also whenever you're using your phone, put it into Do Not Disturb mode. I put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode about 80 percent of the time.

The great thing about this mode is that you can choose people and apps that can give you a notification. Also, your favorites and contacts can reach out to you even when you turn this mode on. If you're scared that you will miss emergency calls, there is a section where you can allow repeated calls. When you turn on this feature, a second call from the person within three minutes will not be silenced.

If you're living abroad like I do, apart from your family, and if you want to make sure that you won't miss anything urgent, but also don't want to get distracted by unnecessary phone notifications, give this a try.

Day five: Try some mindfulness. One thing I have noticed is that our phones are designed to make us less mindful about our behaviors. These companies know how to trick your brain and make you so addicted to those apps without you even recognizing it. So I feel like our ability to be mindful seems to be decreasing day by day.

I'm pretty sure that using your phone less is going to allow you to have more headspace, but why not try some meditation exercises to give yourself a full break? You can use apps like Meditopia, Headspace, and I'm sure there's a lot of meditation apps you can look for, so just give them a try.

So this is the five-day challenge. Just by finishing this five-day challenge, it's probably not going to completely cure your phone addiction immediately, but the more you repeat a certain action, the more it becomes a habit.

As James Clear says in his book "Atomic Habits," every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

So if you want to become someone who reads a lot and scrolls less, you need to vote for your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.

I hope this video helped you and inspired you. If you want a video where I actually follow the steps, let me know in the comments down below, and see you guys in my next video! Bye!