In my 21 years of life, I have sucked public restroom toilet water out of my phone’s charger port not once, but twice. This is my public confession and apology.
The first time occurred when I danced with utter stupidity in my sophomore year of high school. As I prepared to use the facilities, my phone made a kamikaze leap into the toilet bowl, accompanied by a summertime-swim cannonball splash of water.
The absolute only option was to reach into the water and fish out the phone.. In my pure panic, I placed my mouth up to the bottom of my phone and siphoned out the water for the next minute. It is a burden that I carry every day. How I did not contract any illness truly amazes me.
This isn’t an invitation to a support group: “I’ve been there, and you don’t want to, so get your life right, kid!” but it hopefully establishes my credibility on how addicted to my phone I once was.
Here are some helpful tips to become more detached from your phone that are a tad more plausible than stomping on it and chucking the wretched thing off the closest cliff.
Tip 1: Put everyone on do not disturb.
On my phone, unless they sign my paycheck, or if I, at the time, absolutely need to know if they text me about something, I will put people on do not disturb, which simply means my phone does not flash a notification when they text me.
This makes me sound like a terrible human being, I understand. Still, I suffer from sensory overload and acute anxiety when people text me every second of the day. According to a Healthline article, “Experts say the barrage of text alerts on our smartphones can take a toll on our mental and emotional health.”
I’m also terrible at conjuring the energy to respond to messages in general. I find myself physically groaning and making the same face a baby forms when eating their first lemon any time I get a text message.
If you silence notifications on your phone, you will feel less of a need to open it and respond to the messages, allowing yourself to do something productive for once.
Tip 2: Only download social media apps when you want to post.
It is much less overwhelming to simply post on social media and then delete the app rather than have the distraction as a constant option.
Help Guide’s article, Social Media and Mental Health, stated, “This round-the-clock, hyper-connectivity [to social media] can trigger impulse control problems.” It also said the constant alerts and notifications affect concentration and focus, disturb sleep, and make you a “slave to your phone.”
What other people are doing on social media should not concern you so much that you take a hiatus from what you are working on for your life. Looking at their lives will not aid you in your journey to success or give you anything meaningful to jumpstart your productive capacity. You are simply wasting your time.
Deleting the apps whenever there is no need to post gives you a healthy balance of engaging with others and saving time for yourself.
Tip 3: Turn your phone off entirely for a few hours each day.
Something is freeing and beautiful about being unavailable. It astounds me that people expect you to be available at the snap of the fingers. If I had to choose between an afternoon of answering my long list of work emails, or the ridiculous number of hourly texts I get, work emails win out each time.
There’s a level of disconnect that we have lost with texting. If I see an email that I don’t care to respond to right away, I ignore it. Unanswered texts, however, are accompanied by at least one follow-up text within the same hour.
Shutting off your phone is like closing the shade of a window that looks down on New York City’s Times Square. There is no need to subject yourself to various distractions when in the process of something important.
So, please allow yourself to disconnect from a false reality.
If my toilet water cocktail escapade happened during this current season of life, I would more likely stare at it and then proceed to flush the toilet. I have matured and evolved enough to realize that a light-up rectangle is not worth ingesting eau de toilette.
