A Guide to Reducing Your Compulsive Phone Usage

Or How I Learned to Stop Doomscrolling and Love the Pause

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes. It’s a little bit longer without flashy headers on purpose. Reclaim your cognitive capacity for doing things that take time.

“I know reading the news all day is bad for me - I really need to stop.” “I wish I could quit instagram, but I just don’t have the willpower.” “I gotta stop getting lost in TikTok; I need to work harder on that...”

Lately I keep hearing some version of: “My phone is hurting me, but I can’t make myself put it down.” People respond to these self-observations with criticism, resignation, or some fantasy about how their future self will definitely find a way to do what they have thus far been unable to.

But friends, you cannot will yourself to use your phone less. You cannot will yourself to check the news or instagram or TikTok, etc., less. This would be like a smoker sitting next to a lit cigarette, smelling the familiar smoke that promises nicotine, and saying “oh gosh if only I had better self-control, I could quit smoking and not pick that up.” We wouldn’t ever ask that of someone addicted to cigarettes but it’s exactly what we’re asking of ourselves when we keep our highly stimulating phone in our pockets or on our desks and think we can will ourselves out of using them.

We’re addicted to our phones and these apps. By design. The more you open these apps and the more you get lost on them, the more money they make for their executives and investors. The more you can’t imagine a world without your smartphone, the more they can sell you needing the latest release.

That said, you can change your behavior if you set yourself up for it. You don’t break addiction through willpower. You do it with external supports that help you disrupt compulsions. You do it by removing the triggers/cues for urges. You do it by recognizing the purpose the usage is serving and finding alternative responses to meet your needs or shifting your needs. In this substack, I’m going to breakdown how I did all these things and got myself out of a compulsive phone habit - okay, addiction.

And let me be clear, I was addicted. If I had a mere minute of free time, I picked up my phone. I would close an app only to immediately compulsively open it up again. I took my phone with me to bed. Looking at it was the first thing I did in the morning. I would lose hours a day to screen time. And I was engaging with content that I actually didn’t want to be spending that much time with. Going through news headlines that were dysregulating over and over again. Checking my email compulsively - all the more ridiculous because I didn’t reply right away and am awful about losing things in my inbox - but I needed to see if something new had come in. Watching reel after reel on instagram of stuff I might be fine to give 5-15 minutes of my day to, but was watching for huge chunks of time repeatedly. I struggle to understand how I had time for all of that.

Here’s what I did.

I started by identifying the sources of my behavior. Most of it was dopamine addiction. If you’re putting your phone down only to pick it right up; closing an app and immediately reopening it or moving to the next thing you can scroll through… these are signs of dopamine addiction. Seeing the notification of the like, the new headline you hadn’t seen before, the email sitting there after you refresh - these give you a hit of dopamine, especially because our phones and apps deliver this all in bright colors, attached to intermittent rewards, and/or connected to micro experiences of social validation. So our dopamine-seeking system gets hijacked, and our brains are honestly constantly looking for that next hit. (This is attached to patience, pacing, urgency, etc., as well. When my household quit using Amazon I was worried about losing my overnight delivery and having to wait for things to come in the mail. My baseline had been so shaped by these profit-driven entities that much of what I did was motivated by avoiding any delays in gratification.) And then part of what happens when we are dopamine-addicted and using apps and phones that exploit that is we lose the power to ask ourselves if we really want to be doing that behavior (e.g., opening the app, swiping over or up to the next video). There’s no chance to pause and reflect, to engage in metacognition about goal-oriented or values-aligned behavior. We are passengers in a bus being driven by the rewards system of our brain.

I also figured out what needs my behavior was meeting or what purposes it was serving. I won’t get deep into this process, but will just share what I recognized was going on beyond my dopamine addiction: With much of my scrolling and consumption of joyful or humorous or meaningful media, I was escaping difficult emotions and looking for ways to feel positive. With my social media in particular, I was feeling connected to people. With the my reading of the news, I was feeling like I was doing something (staying aware) in a sea of feelings of helplessness.

Importantly, I recognized that my phone and some of the apps can be beneficial. I didn’t want to get rid of instagram or get a “dumb phone” or stop reading the news entirely. But I did need to change how I engaged with all of this.

I began treating the dopamine addiction by making it less rewarding to engage with my phone. The colorful app icons themselves offer our brain little micro hits so even just unlocking our phone feels good and can get us trapped into that dopamine-seeking brain loop. I installed an app called Minimalist Phone that makes my home screen black and white with the name of apps (or whatever I want them to be called) listed. I have apps I use daily that aren’t risky exploiters of dopamine addiction listed as favorites on my home screen. Everything else I have to search for by typing the name of the app. My phone immediately became way less fun and stimulating to use. I also made my main problem app, Instagram, “hidden” — meaning I couldn’t even just search for it regularly. I had to click on a series of options to get to it. It is cumbersome and annoying.

My home screen using minimalist phone. Note that Kindle and Audible are holdovers from before I quit using Amazon. I still have audio books and ebooks I’m listening to and reading there. I intend to migrate to Libby for this in the future and encourage you all to do so, as well!

Minimalist Phone also removes designated notifications and logs them in a separate location you have to intentionally get to with a couple of boring click throughs. You should absolutely turn news alerts off full stop unless it’s totally pertinent to your job to immediately know when news breaks (and that’s almost never the case by the way). Other notifications might be helpful to still get but not in the invasive way that keeps us engaging with our phones inefficiently. And that’s where Minimalist Phone’s notification clearing can help.

I addressed the all-consuming dopamine-seeking loop by forcing myself to pause and really decide if I want to open problem apps. I used the app One Sec for this. Each time I try to open a flagged app, One Sec makes me breathe in and out, shows how many times I’ve already tried in the past 24 hours, and asks, Do you still want to open [app]? If I say yes, it asks how long I plan to stay. When the timer ends, it boots me back to the breathing screen. I went from trying to open Instagram 20+ times a day (I know) to 9 to less than 5.

Screenshots of the One Sec app

It became rewarding to choose not to open the app. To take a beat and realize I was acting compulsively and could disrupt that impulse instead. The timer also forced me to make my Instagram usage more goal-oriented. I might think “okay I want to go on Instagram and see what my friends posted today” and then would have to challenge myself to realistically estimate how long that would take and then stick to both the time limit and my purpose. How often have you gotten on Instagram to check a single thing like what specials a restaurant was offering that day or what time the group ride meet up was - just to get sucked into scrolling? That doesn’t happen to me anymore with One Sec.

I then made sure there were certain times where I couldn’t use certain apps at all. This largely came from recognizing that how and when I was taking in news was affecting my mood even beyond the impacts of just the awareness of shitty things happening. I read someone’s news “diet” (I can’t remember whose, I’m sorry) which explained that they didn’t read any news before noon because they wanted to have part of their day making decisions about their time and focus separate from acute awareness and reminders of bad things outside of their immediate life and tasks. As a therapist with clients who often want to talk about how they were impacted by recent events, I generally can’t wait until noon, but I can wait until after breakfast. And I certainly can stop in the evening. Any ol’ app blocker will work for this. There are many to choose from and I wanted one that could be paused but not easily. I hope to eventually designate a certain day each week where news and/or social media are blocked on my phone; I haven’t worked out the best way to set that up in my life yet.

I have also worked on expanding my attention span. I made a point to return to reading at the end of the evening, both as a replacement for phone usage, and because reading is one way of reclaiming our cognitive capacity for slower paced and thus richer information. I am retraining my brain to be satiated by less hyper-stimulating information gathering and story sharing. I’m trying to take morning walks and listen to audio books. I’m up to consistently two days a week, but I’d love that to be more like four or five. There are other opportunities for practicing delaying gratification and reducing my sense of urgency and need for fast-pacing: biking for errands instead of taking the car, mindful dishwashing and general efforts at being more present to the “boring” tasks of life, meditation, backyard birding.

And I am finding meaningful alternatives for the functions my unhelpful behaviors were serving. Because I recognized that my desire for joy, escape, connection, and impact were partially driving my app usage, I have been identifying and pursuing ways to meet those needs (or shift them) in ways that more align with my values and my overall sense of how I want to spend my time.

Finally, it has been easy to celebrate the true rewards of having more brainspace, which has further motivated me to maintain my approaches. The cool thing about breaking my phone habit is that it also gave me more time, energy, emotional freedom, etc., to do the things I really want to, including those alternatives to compulsive app usage. It’s an upward spiral! And what I’m really loving is the ways my ability to be still is returning. I can’t overstate how important stillness is for both peace and creativity. I’ve been so meaningfully generative in the weeks since I began this endeavor. And my mood and resilience in the face of some truly brutal circumstances is something I don’t take for granted and has been incredibly aided by this change in my relationship with my phone.

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Check out the apps I referenced, though you may find others that work for you:

• Minimalist Phone

• One Sec

• For a generic app blocker, just search your app store for app blocker and read the descriptions and reviews to find one that is trustworthy and meets your needs