How To Escape Your Phone’s Toxic Grasp In The Next 5 Minutes
In an article titled Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain, tech columnist Kevin Roose describes how smartphone addiction feels:
I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing weren’t helping.
Quoting the article, Youtube star Casey Neistat admits to spending nearly two hours a day on Twitter and Instagram alone. He, too, wants to quit.
“A significant amount of my day is spent on that mindless scrolling. And that’s just the time part, forget about the health implications of it. […] There’s just no way that’s making me a better person, or a better father, or better anything.”
If you ask Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, Neistat is on to something. Newport’s readers claimed they were exhausted not from any one app, but from losing control over the collective impact they had on their lives.
Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an…
