Your Phone Is Not Your Friend! Fix it with these 3 tips.

Modern life can be lonely for a lot of people. We work long hours, live in isolated communities, and struggle to find meaningful connections with other people. As of October 2018, nearly half of Americans reported feeling lonely or alone.

And it’s not just our connections with others that are suffering. Our connections with ourselves, too, are strained--strained by lack of downtime, lack of quiet, lack of intentional moments to just sit and enjoy our own company. We’ve lost the ability to be alone and comfortable with ourselves.

So it probably makes sense that, increasingly, we’re turning to our phones to fill in the gaps. 

The average person now spends over four hours per day on their phone or a similar device. That’s not surprising. We have the constant stimulation of social media, which can give us the illusion that we’re keeping up with our friends without having to do the hard work of real friendship. Our phones are full of apps, like Twitter and newspapers. We can watch endless hours of TV on our phones and play games until our thumbs hurt.

It’s an illusion, and it’s coming at the cost of real connection to each other--and ourselves. It’s keeping us from feeling the true urgency of our need to be with other people face-to-face. It’s a distraction technique to keep us from sitting quietly and connecting with ourselves, thinking about the hard things we’ve been avoiding. We need to break out of it. 

Your phone is not your friend. Your friends are your friends.

3 tips to fix your unhealthy relationship with your phone

1. Use your phone as a tool, not a place.

   Instead of using your phone as the place where you connect with your friends, use your phone to facilitate meeting up with your friends in person. Set a date, time, and place. Send an invitation to an event or mail out an E-vite. Then, go see your friends, even if it means you need to schedule things far in advance.

2. Use your phone to check-in.

   If you have apps that you find useful, don’t let yourself fall into the mindless scroll when you use them. Set a timer on your phone, check-in quickly, and close the apps. Then go do something. 

3. Use your phone with the internet turned off.

   If there are things you use your phone for that are more productive than just scrolling half-aware of what’s in front of you--say, if you use your library’s e-reader app on your phone or like to listen to music from it while you work--then save what you need to your phone and then turn off the internet connection. That will help keep you from spending more time on your phone than you had planned to do.

Above all, the goal is to get away from using your phone as a constant distraction and start making real connections with people around you--the people who can give you a hug when you’re sad, stop by with a pan of pasta when you’re sick or have had a death in the family, and help you move. They’re the people you can do those things for, too, when they need you. 

Life is built from groups of people of different sizes interacting with each other. Our modern world is heavily individualized, but if we make an effort, we can build space for each other where we can gather in smaller and larger groups on a regular basis. We just have to put down our phones, first.

Have you ever found your phone was getting in the way of real connections? What did you do about it? Drop a comment below--we’d love to hear from you. 

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