Study: Switching the smartphone to gray screen mode helped reduce the time some people spend in front of the screen by 18% (Shutterstock)
An American writer in the New York Times called Kashmir Hill spoke; About her experience with changing her smartphone to a primitive phone for a month with the aim of reducing her addiction to the phone that she used to spend more than five hours a day using.
The writer stated that her biggest regret in 2023 was her relationship with her smartphone, which regularly recorded more than five hours of screen time per day, which is time she spends on many important activities such as: work, family text messages, reading the news, and messaging distant friends...but this activity was... Increasingly accompanied by a kind of nagging remorse associated with unhealthy behaviour.
The writer said that she decided to make a complete change in December 2023, by giving up the iPhone 15, which is worth $1,300, in exchange for the Orpic phone, which is worth $108, which is a foldable phone that can only make phone calls and send text messages.
The more boring the better
The writer noted that this change was neither easy nor quick, and it is clear that the decision to “upgrade” to a foldable phone was so unreasonable that her telecommunications company did not allow her to do so by phone as she had to go to the store.
The writer said that her primitive foldable phone's battery life was not only laughably short, losing connection when you were on the go and having to be restarted to reconnect, but it was the only phone of the lower end supported by a low-budget carrier. Therefore, the writer advised inquiring from your telecommunications company about the models it supports if you want to have a similar experience.
The writer reported that there are premium options with reliable service available, some of which have mapping capabilities, a music player, and converting audio to text. The market for minimalist phones has expanded in recent years, said Jose Briones, who created the “Dumb Phone Finder” to help people choose from 98 models he tried.
“People are tired of digital devices after the pandemic, after having to be online all the time,” said Briones, 28, who is still online enough to run the Dump Phone subreddit and post device reviews on YouTube.
Briones uses a smartphone during work hours, but switches to a $299 LitePhone 2 at night, on weekends and vacations.
This device was designed to be used for as little time as possible by two founders who were dumped by technology developers who measure success by the number of hours users spend glued to their apps. The credit card-sized phone can text, make calls, keep a calendar, and play music and podcasts, but it doesn't do much more than that.
The duller the screen, the easier it is not to get addicted to it (Shutterstock)
The writer stated that both the “LitePhone” phone and the “HiSense A9” Brionis smartphone, which is worth $480, are equipped with digital screens such as Kindle screens. “I've personally found that the more boring the screen is, the easier it is not to get addicted to it,” Briones said.
The author pointed out that research confirms this, as one study showed that simply switching the smartphone to gray screen mode helped people reduce the time they spent in front of the screen by 18%.
She added that the level of boredom in her primitive foldable phone was reassuring, as its main screen was small and boring, and she also faced a problem in converting the service from the electronic communications chip card of the iPhone to the actual service of the foldable phone, but soon she began writing texts and emojis slowly. Using only 9 keys.
She added that writing anything longer than two sentences required an enormous amount of button pressing, so she replaced messages with calling, which was a problem because most people did not want their phone to function as a call phone. And when friends and family answered the phone, the conversations were much deeper than just exchanging text messages, and the emotions were all clear and direct - there was no complicated emoji you needed to decipher.
Cons however
A 2021 Pew Research poll showed that 31% of adults reported being “almost constantly online,” something that was only possible because of the smartphone.
The writer responded to a colleague’s question, “Do you feel less informed?” by saying: This is not true, as the information reached her, but less quickly, through her computer, which displays news websites, newsletters, and social media.
The writer acknowledged some of the negatives of being deprived of a smartphone and its applications at times, such that she was unable to charge her electric car without the smartphone application. Advance planning was necessary without Google Maps because I usually use it to get anywhere more than 15 minutes away. She had to research routes in advance, memorize directions, and reactivate the navigational part of her mind that had been neglected for so long.
She also couldn't set up a robot vacuum cleaner that only worked using an iPhone app, and she couldn't monitor her bank account on her smartphone app that would enable her to transfer money from a high-yield savings account when it ran low.
She was also unable to log in to several of her online accounts, including the New York Times account, which allows her to log into its content management system to craft news stories; It requires two-factor authentication via the smartphone application.
Despite these challenges, I was able to give up the smartphone within the month. It was a relief to disconnect her mind from the Internet on a regular basis for hours at a time, which enabled her to read four books and take long trips with her husband, and talk during them instead of continuing in separate audio worlds with the AirPods. She felt like she had more time and more control over what to do with it.
After about two weeks, she noticed that she had lost her “thumb twitch.” It is a physical desire to check the phone in the morning, or when standing at traffic lights, or waiting for the elevator, or at any other free moment.
The writer said that her husband noticed that “her face became less tired.” As she suffered from waking up in the middle of the night, while her flip phone did not carry any temptations in the middle of the night; So her sleep improved dramatically.
The writer quoted a professor of movement sciences at Arizona State University, Dr. Matthew Bowman says, “Our health competes with many of these services and companies that compete for our time, energy, and attention.”
Dr. Bowman has just completed a National Institutes of Health-funded study on strategies to get people off screens and moving more with motivational messages when they stay on a screen for an extended period, by awarding screen time based on meeting exercise goals.
Bowman hopes that smartphone giants Apple and Google will work to make screen time and wellbeing apps more effective by incorporating strategies that have been proven to work. The program helped Dr. Bowman reduced the time spent in front of screens by 110 people in the two-year study, but he is still evaluating the results to see which strategies are most effective.
Commenting on the writer’s experience, Dr. said: Bowman says it may have made her mind feel freer and like she had more time (both are true), but "in our society, it's hard to maintain that over the long term."
In light of the writer’s experience using a primitive phone, it was difficult for her to send a large group of text messages (Anatolia)
Break bad habits
The writer mentioned that her 7-year-old daughter expressed her love for the primitive foldable phone, as it made her mother not look at her phone as much and spend more time playing with it.
The writer added that her desire to share every sweet moment with her daughters on Instagram faded over the course of the month; She can just enjoy those moments instead of trying to take pictures for others, and her social circle has shrunk for the month, as she has not sent a large group of “Happy New Year” text messages, as it was too difficult to do that with her primitive flip phone.
The writer explained that as much as she loved her life using the primitive foldable phone and the mental reset it provided, she thought she might be fired from work if she failed to respond in a timely manner to Slack messages and emails as often as she did during the month.
The writer quoted Laura Zimmerman, assistant professor at IE Business School in Madrid, as saying: What does not help people control the time they spend in front of the screen is simply tracking it. She added that much of our use of smartphones is arbitrary, as we open the phone to do one thing, then end up checking five apps in a continuous loop, and then do it all again a few minutes later. “You really want to address the habit formation process,” Laura continued.
The writer mentioned that she allocated a place for her phone at home (a small coffee table with a plant and a charger on it), as she keeps it there when she is not working so that it is not within her reach all the time, and she puts it there all night, so it is not next to her bed so that it does not disrupt her sleep.
The author quoted Camille Carlton, policy director at the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit organization in California founded by former technology employees to raise awareness about the negative effects of the types of products they work on: “More and more people are starting to see that these platforms, these products "Intentionally designed to be addictive." Camille Carlton compared smartphones and social media apps to fast food and tobacco, and suggested that lawmakers should regulate the design of these products to protect our health.
Source: New York Times