I Cut My 7-Hours-A-Day Screen Time In Half — & Got My Life Back

“Me when I put my phone down” reads the meme, the text superimposed on a picture showing an outline of a person filled with gold light, standing in a forest, arms outstretched. Whoever that figure is, they look tranquil. This is also me when I put my phone down, along with the 64,700 other people who liked the post. I like me better when my phone isn’t glued to my hand, though ironically I saw the post because I’d spent the previous 15 minutes fresh out of the shower, not even dressed, scrolling. I have no memory of when this became a natural, instinctive habit — to look at my phone before doing anything else. 

I’ve always tried to avoid making social media accounts. My Facebook was made by a friend who wanted my likes on her posts. My Instagram started out as a secret personal digital scrapbook but was discovered by friends so I started using it normally. I was told I needed X on an internship and dutifully downloaded it. After a year of successfully avoiding TikTok, a former boss asked me to get it so I sighed and let the algorithm learn what I like. I read that TikTok can become “addictive” after watching 260 videos, which can happen to some people in under 35 minutes given the short content format. Seeing that statistic on its own, it seems far-fetched, but in reality, once the app realised I like cats, music history, makeup and restaurants, it may as well have had me in a chokehold. I die a bit inside every time I say the phrase that’s become a mainstay in my personal lingo: “Shall we check out this place? I saw it on TikTok.”

I am sick of scrolling and seeing a video about an unsolved true crime, describing in gory detail how a person was found dead, then immediately after getting served a comedy skit, followed by a pet video, then a meme slideshow, then another story about how a woman’s rapist walked free. I worry it’s desensitising and, without getting too existential, I worry about what that’s doing to us as a collective.

You wouldn’t think I hate being on these apps given the amount of time I devote to looking at them on my phone. My weekly alerts tell me it averages just under seven hours a day, which puts me (a cusp baby) between the Gen Z and millennial averages of over seven hours and six hours 42 minutes respectively. Coming off social media completely doesn’t appeal, plus it feels a bit impossible and detrimental to my particular line of work. 

But something has to change. Professor Alessandra Lemma, a psychoanalyst and fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, tells me that you’ll know if your phone usage is problematic if you “find it hard to control how long you are online, even if you tell yourself you must use it less” and “if you feel uncomfortable if you haven’t checked it after a while”. Tick and tick. Even though social media can be used to cope with stress, often it amplifies the problem instead, she adds. We also use our screens to dull out what’s really going on in our minds. Often when we’re alone — maybe waiting for a bus, an appointment, or a friend to arrive — we automatically reach for our phones instead of sitting with our thoughts, good and bad. “In contemporary culture, we have eroded the experience of waiting,” Lemma explains. The chain of events goes: We look at the phone, we stop thinking. Lemma says we miss out on realisations about ourselves and our lives in that uncomfortability — maybe we feel lonely, unsatisfied about something or are avoiding a task. Ultimately we don’t figure out what needs to change in order to feel happy. “Is there anything that you’re not at ease with in your life, and is that why you invest more time in your phone?” she asks. 

I tell Lemma that I’ve noticed my screen time is always around 40% lower when I’ve been on holiday. “What that shows is there’s something about the way you feel in yourself when you're on holiday versus when you're at work that means you're not needing your phone,” she says. “So the first question would be: What's stressing you in one condition that is relieved in the other?” She thinks it may be because on holiday, I’m “away from interpersonal pressures” that exist normally. 

With this in mind, I think about the high esteem in which being offline is held — no one ever has the goal of being online more — and how it’s just a symptom of our phone overuse. It’s not a superior thing in its own right. If we could all temper our screen time, there’d be no need to come offline. Besides, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy getting likes on posts (the modern dopamine hit) and seeing my friends’ posts. I just don’t want to feel so beholden to my phone or at the mercy of an itch to scroll every time there is an empty moment. I think about what I could do instead: read a book, a magazine or, god forbid, sit with my thoughts for a moment. So I spent six weeks trying to cut down my screen time.

At first I kept getting frustrated with myself for not being able to pry my eyes away from the screen. Why was I even scrolling? I certainly wasn’t feeling better for it. In fact, I was feeling much worse now that I was fully aware of the minutes ticking by for the sole benefit of the people profiting from my doomscrolling. I actively began telling myself no each time I had a moment of mild discomfort, stress, procrastination or waiting. Still, habitually I’d pick up the phone and cling to it each time a wave of something unpleasant arrived. It took days of repeatedly telling myself no before the urge to pick it up lessened. 

I added time limits on my social media apps — 30 minutes each day. Honestly, I was shocked at how quickly those 30 minutes would pass. I was even more shocked when, after getting the “you have five minutes left” warning, I realised how much content I could get through in that small window. Set a timer and try it for yourself: It’ll be a wake-up call. These warnings helped me keep myself in check. If I ever chose to go beyond those 30 minutes (I could snooze or dismiss the limit), that choice would be considered. I’d ask myself: Do I actually need this? The answer was usually no, so when it occasionally was yes (to send a message, post a photo or indulge in more memes), I felt okay with it. I also started using the “close friends” feature on Instagram more. I enjoyed the privacy and faffed less over what I posted there (another time-saver), knowing the audience seeing it was tiny. Then I deleted Hinge (again); the app had drained enough of my time with no reward. Slowly, I gained minutes back and started to feel in control of my phone, rather than it controlling me.

Sometimes I do enjoy a mindless scroll and it can help me unwind at the end of a long day. Lemma says there’s nothing wrong with that — distraction can genuinely be good for the mind — so long as the content you’re consuming is relaxing, which is hard to control when the feed you’re seeing is curated for you, not by you. Six weeks in and even with my longer scrolls, which now feel like a “treat” I’ve had to earn, I’m happy to say I’m averaging between three and a half and four and a half hours of screen time a day.

According to one study, 40% of people want to reduce their screen time — but 27% don’t think they’ll manage. Understandable. Phone scrolling is an individual habitual behaviour, so while no one forces our fingers to swipe, no one is going to make us stop. It comes down to you. Although I want to keep whittling it down, my month of lower screen time has already seen me read more books (I read three over the Christmas week), my mood improve, my mornings start more promptly, and my battery last longer. I have better ownership of my downtime. And when I do choose to scroll for a while, it bothers me less. I don’t feel as pessimistic about my phone as I did going into this, and I’ve remembered that social media can be a source of joy. My phone isn’t the devil, it’s my learned behaviour. And if I can manage that, my screen time won’t feel like such a failure. Now, I’m going to spend five minutes spamming my friends’ DMs with kitten videos.