Time To Detox Your Phone: 5 Steps To Control Your Dopamine
In today’s day & age digital wellbeing is key: I’ll share with you how you can get a grip on it by changing a few settings in your phone.
Want to read the steps directly? Scroll to the bottom of this article, and you will find the 5 Steps in bullet points.
Want To Watch & Reflect about your habits & systems with me?
I recorded a free youtube course-unit about this topic, see you there.
Introduction
You propably hear a lot about what’s going on in the news… predictions of the future, GTA 6, along with the countless opinions that are out there.
Every day you may imagine a hundred scenarios and opportunities to move forward considering the new information you have gained from your feeds.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I switch on the news or scroll through linkedin for a bit, I feel overwhelmed very quickly. Safe to say our brains and bodies are not made for all this input, especially while living in a capital city; And quite frankly, I’m not sure if our brain will ever adapt to the age of indulgence.
This is why I've developed strategies that place control back in to my hands. Those strategies and interventions are informed by my professional background which is a mix of digital design and fitness training. With my blog and my youtube channel, I’m starting to share those strategies that helped me a lot in the last 9 years (basically my 20s..).
Not Just Our Apps. Our Operating Systems Are Also Designed To Hook Us
How AI-Assistants could revolutionize digital wellbeing
This article explores the potential of AI-powered, task-oriented interface design for mobile operating systems to…medium.com
If you've read my article on How AI Assistants Could Revolutionize Digital Wellbeing, then you will know why it is impossible to resist our digital devices and apps once we start engaging with them. The article is 20+ pages long, so I'll keep it short here:
Reason being is that most platforms are designed to be addictive and end up draining all your energy contrary to your intention before tapping the app icon.
Detoxing your phone means redesigning it from scratch as if you were a UX Designer that had your best interest at heart:
Start at the operating system level by changing your default launcher. Your current one makes it easy to explore mindlessly whereas minimalist launchers help you get tasks done and stay present. In the end, the phone is supposed to be a tool so it’s necessary we redesign in a way that serves our intentions. Minimalist launchers only show you boring app-names as text instead of colorful app icons and it takes some getting used to. But they are gaining popularity! I’m so stoked that Fairphone’s latest model “6" actually ships out of the box with both types of launchers. a minimal one and the traditional explorative one.
If you want to go even further, you can combine this with changing your screen colors to gray-scale mode. This will influence how exciting the content of your screen look. The tradeoff is that as you can imagine, this will drastically change your video watching experience amongst others… I would actually switch it off for those purposes.
After redesigning the operating system’s interface, it’s important to redesign your apps and social media platforms as much as they allow you to. In most cases, all you can do is block sensitive content and use screen-time restrictions. But at your most extreme, you can just uninstall your apps. I’d say go for it and see if you miss out on anything..
As I said, in practice there’s various degrees of trade-offs with regards to your redesign.
Some of you might not want to give up your usual interface just yet and prefer a "more convenient" level, while others are fine with turning their smartphone into a dumb phone today. Here are the 5 Levels written down in easily readable bullet points:
5 Levels Of Detoxing Your Phone
1 (weak) Grayscale Mode
- Change your screen to not display colours anymore. This instantly makes your phone’s contents and app-icons less interesting, and will save you from one or the other impulsive interaction.
2 (average) Focus Mode
- Whenever you enable this mode, your custom selection of apps & notifications will be blocked. If you want to open one of these apps while in focus mode, you will be asked to confirm your action. Focus mode is amazing because it puts triggers out of sight and gives you time to think about your bad decisions so you can actually do what you know is best for you.
3 (good) App Restriction Blocker
- App or website blockers are amazing and even better than focus mode because they restrict your default browsing behaviour and enable you to permanently block some websites or apps. It’s like a child-lock but for your inner child. Set yourself up for success by permanently blocking porn sites, gambling, gaming apps or whatever else you have a toxic relationship with. Be careful though, I once accidentally blocked linkedin on my computer for 80 years using a software called “cold turkey” (in retrospect a very reliable blocker). There’s also options for your phone.
4 Fairphone 6 / Minimalist Launcher
- A minimalist launcher takes away all the explorative features from your usual home screen. No more browsing and mindlessly clicking on app icons because you recognize their promise of dopamine. Why? Because all you see is text and from a mere cognitive perspective, text takes longer to process anyways. The Fairphone 6 has a built in switch to turn your interface into this kind of style.
Curious why and how this works scientifically? Download my 24 page article
5 (superior) Nokia / Dumb Phone
Yup! The ultimate productivity hack is not owning a smartphone in the first place. A natural way to focus on what is important because even sending a 50 character message costs effort with a dumb phone. Your brain will level up, your attention will be undivided and the amount of people you talk to will be cut in half. Quality > Quantity. Would you dare? And who could you truly count on to still check on you? Maybe it’s not so bad after all..
Download these 5 steps as a pdf from my website for free
Implementing these interventions will make you feel drastically more at easy and less anxious about those things happening in the world that you can not change. Mind you, this is not about being ignorant but moreso about choosing your overwhelm carefully, so you can still live an intentional, sober minded life.
We are change makers, and with each one of us being uniquely gifted, we want to be able to make your contribution to improve the world, driven by that informed realism to then address the anxieties, fears or worries that align the most with our circle of influence and core values.
With Groundedness and Clarity,
Jim
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