Want to reduce your screen time? This stupidly simple trick helped me so much

Which leads me to filter time. Mine was held about two and a half hours a day, but I noticed that I felt much better and happier when it was lower. Deactivate my notifications completely too drastic – I sometimes like to look at them en masse and take mental notes to whom I must answer – and the “brutally effective” tip to use gray mode (which runs everything on your gray screen) I felt incredibly depressing. I tried to put away my phone or turn it over against it, but I found myself asking myself if I would miss something important accordingly. Cue recovering it again.

But now, I found the thing (stupidly simple) that works for me to reduce my screen time: lower the brightness of my screen when I don’t use my phone. Listen to me. It sounds silly, but it allows me to keep my phone next to me – a strange emotional security cover – when I’m at work, let’s say, but now the notifications that come from my screen. When they did it, I found myself unconsciously towards them every time, but now I don’t see them. Then, when I take a break, I can intentionally watch my phone, slightly increase the brightness and chase what I need.

In doing so to reduce my screen time, have I already accidentally missed a telephone call? Of course, but I am a millennium that rarely speaks to anyone on the phone, and essentially all missed calls were spam calls from telephone or energy companies. Did I sometimes miss messages? Of course, but I saw them, an hour later. Usually these things are not the end of the world. I must also recognize a level of privilege here – I do not have, for example, children or parents that I take care of who may need to contact me for emergencies, or have a job where I constantly do telephone calls that I cannot miss. These things can happen in the future, but for the moment, I am actually able to put away my phone. If you are also in a position where you can, it is worth trying.

Now, my screen time is normally on average an hour and a half per day, a level which, for the moment, seems almost correct. I also pick up my phone with more intention, rather than out of curiosity. Sometimes this trick leads to fairly hilarious encounters: recently, a colleague saw me look at what looked like a blank phone screen and asked me if I was fine. (I now sometimes forget to increase the brightness if I look at something quickly.) But I am always grateful that these constant heads tilted from a laptop to the phone screen, most often to see a message transferred random or an unnecessary update, are (mainly) a thing in the past. And my mind feels quieter for that too.