Cut your screen time. Get your life back. (how i broke the cycle)

If you spend five hours a day on your phone, that comes out to over six days a month, about 76 days a year, and if you live to 80 years old, 16.6 years of your life. Think about that. It's so easy to get stuck in this endless cycle of switching between this app and this app and this one and scrolling away for hours getting those quick dopamine hits, but all of that comes at a cost. You, your dream life, your happiness, your peace, your productivity, your goals, your mental health. But if you're ready to break the cycle and your phone addiction and get your life back, then keep on watching. Because if I can do it, someone who loves a good late night scroll, then you can too. Hey friend, welcome back. If you're new here, my name's Jills and I help women step into their power, tap into their divine feminine and become their best self, live their dream life. So if that's something you want to do, you should subscribe and stick around. And in case you want more from me besides just my YouTube videos, you can check out my deep dive feminine energy course or any of my other digital products, like my bestselling notion templates. They are all linked down below. We all know that excessive screen time is not good for us. It's well documented, but yet we're all doing it. The average American spends four hours and 37 minutes a day on their phone. And that is the average. So for the younger generation, unlike Gen Z, it's a lot more than that. But is that really where you want all of your time going? Is that really the type of life that you want to live? You know, there really is nothing inherently wrong with our phones and social media and all of that. And honestly, there's a lot of good that can come from that. I never wanted to like cut all of that out completely. I mean, obviously I'm on social media, but almost everyone struggles with phone addiction and like social media addiction and all of that at some point. And a while back I had to break out of this cycle too. It happens to the best of us, but I'm going to tell you the things that really helped me the most. And I'm going to break this video down into two different sections. So first I'm going to start with all of the tech related tips that you can use on your phone to help reduce your screen time. And then I'm going to move into the more general life tips because your phone addiction is not just because of this thing right here. It goes a lot deeper than that. And honestly, I think that these are the most important. All right. So let's start with the tech tips. One reason why we can become so just like addicted and enamored with our phone is because of like this magical light that comes from this box, right? Like our eyes like receive satisfaction when we're scrolling on Instagram, scrolling on TikTok, and we're looking at all of these different colors and we can see all of these images and these videos so vibrantly and so clear. So an incredible trick to help you reduce your screen time is black and white mode. It works phenomenally well. I've used this trick for a while now. And what I do specifically is I turn on black and white mode on my phone about probably like three hours or so before bed. And it really makes it so that your phone becomes a lot less appealing. Like if you don't believe me, just try it when you're scrolling on social media or you're scrolling on TikTok, like when it's just in black and white, it's just not as enticing. And it doesn't like pull you in as much when there's that vibrant color. And it doesn't quite give you the same amount of like dopamine hits. It feels different. So there's a setting that you can do to turn off the color and either just reduce the color a little bit or just turn it on black and white mode completely. And then there's a shortcut that you can use where basically you click the side button three times and it'll turn it on black and white mode. So every night I turn it on black and white mode. And then in the morning, I leave it on black and white for probably an hour or two so that it just makes me like less inclined to want to like go on my phone and scroll on my phone. This tip right here has single-handedly changed the game when it comes to the way that I interact on my phone. I'll find directions online for how to turn it to black and white mode and how to set up that shortcut. And I'll put it in the description box below because I'm sure some people are going to ask. Now, another tech tip that you can do is that on iPhones, at least there's a little section where you can check your screen time, right? And it'll tell you how long you've been on your phone every single day and like what apps you're using and all that. But there's a good little trick that I found. So you know how you can add widgets to your homepage, right? So it's basically like a little box that shows a little peek into the app. Well, at least with iPhones, you can add a little screen time widget and it'll show you as of that moment, how much time you've spent on your phone. And so basically it acts as like this little thing on your homepage that just kind of keeps you in check and reminds you of how much time you are actually spending on your phone. It's right there. It's right there when you open your phone and like, you can't miss it. And once you see that number starting to get high, you're like, Oh, okay, I need to put my phone down. So all you do to get that on your homepage is that you edit your home screen and then you click add widget. And then you can search for like all the different widgets that you can add and just type in screen time. It'll come up and then you can add it to your homepage. And it just, it keeps you in check. It really, really does. The third thing that I do is that I silenced notifications for all apps on my phone, like 99% of the things on my phone, except for texts and calls, which is what a phone should, you know, mostly be used for the way our phone just operates. If we allow our phone to behave the way that it wants to behave is it wants to constantly be sending you notifications. This person liked this Instagram post, this person commented here, Oh, this new podcast is out or this notification, that notification, like there are just so many. And once you start really getting like a lot of apps on your phone, it just can turn into so many notifications. And what that is is just so many tiny little distractions throughout your day. One incredibly simple way to reduce your screen time is to just turn off all of those notifications. You don't need to be alerted when someone likes your Instagram post, you don't need to be alerted for every single email that comes through. I only have notifications for texts and calls. And then a few apps that I think are really important, and you can actually set up things in your phone so that you only get notifications for those apps during certain times of the day. So there are some things like some work-related apps that I use that I have time limits on. So it only alerts me during like typical work hours or like during the day. It's just a lot easier to stay off your phone when you're not notified all the time of what's going on in here. Now, the fourth tip is to buy yourself a real alarm clock. Stop using your phone as your alarm clock. I have the hatch, which I love, and I actually bought it because I wanted to stop using my phone. And I wanted to stop using my phone specifically in the morning. When you're on your phone just like immediately in the morning, right after waking up, it really just sets you off on the right foot and it gets you immediately like on that habit of sitting on your phone. But if you just wake up to an alarm clock, it's a lot easier to like continue to stay off your phone for those first like important moments in the day. Those moments set you up for the rest of the day. So don't start your day off on the wrong foot. Now, the next tip is to take intentional breaks, short breaks away from your phone. And let me tell you why this helps in the long run with your screen time. So for example, if you just put your phone in a drawer on silent for like three hours, you decide that you're going to do it for three hours. Three hours is not that much time. Like anyone can do that. What it does is it gets your brain used to not always having your phone be right by your side, not always having your phone be this like extension of yourself. And once you start doing this, even in just short little chunks, short little breaks, you start to detach your brain. It starts to mentally detach away from this, this little box with a screen. So yes, like if you put your phone in a drawer for three hours, yes, you won't be on your phone for those three hours, but it's more than that. You're breaking that disconnection that your brain has that is so attached to the phone. Just do this ideally every single weekend for like at least a few hours. And you'll notice that connection, that addiction will start to fade. Next tip is simply just to clean up your phone a little bit and get rid of as many apps as you possibly can. Like you do not need six, seven pages of apps. I try to keep mine all the time to no more than two pages. And basically what you can do is put apps that you don't really need to use that often away in little folders together. And that really helps to like clean it up, but really just go through everything that you don't need. You don't need all of these apps on your phone. You don't even need these apps on your home screen. You can actually still have apps on your phone, but not have it on your home screen. So basically if you don't want to go to Instagram that much, you don't actually have to delete to the app itself. You can just delete the app from the home screen and then you just have to search it. So you just go and like search Instagram and it'll still pop up because it's still on your phone. It's just not on your home screen. I've noticed that when you clear your phone, it really helps to like clear your mind. And so just make sure it never gets like too out of control. There's not too much stuff on there because then that can kind of suck you in as well. And lastly, this tip can be helpful for everyone, but especially if you are a content creator like me, use your computer to check social media. Use your computer to check Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever other social media apps there are. When you check that kind of stuff specifically on your computer, it's just not as enticing because all of these apps are built for the phone, right? And so they work on your computer, but they don't grab you in like the way it does when you watch things. And when you scroll things on your phone, like everything just becomes a lot less interesting, but you can still check like your Instagram messages and respond on there or respond to comments on there. You can like check in on all that kind of stuff. But trust me when you're checking on a computer, like you don't want to be on there for more than a few minutes. It's boring. All right, now let's get into the life tips. And like I said, I think honestly, these are the most important. Like you can implement all of these tech tips. You can implement all of these things, but at its core, you're still going to feel like you want to be on your phone all the time if you don't start changing the way that you live your life. For example, so many people try to minimize their screen time and like delete social media and get off their phone and they decide that's what they want to do. They are done. They are done with these apps. They're done with TikTok, yada, yada, yada. But what happens is that the minute they get bored, they start feeling that craving again to go on their phone and scroll through all these apps, right? And it's so easy to just like re-download it and go back on. And it's because you're not truly addressing the roots of the issue. In order for you to be successful at minimizing your screen time and ending your phone addiction, you have to have other things in your life going on. You have to have other things that you want to do and that you enjoy doing. The reason why we instinctually grab our phones when we're bored is because we want that satisfaction. And if you're taking the phone out of your life or you're trying to minimize it a lot, then you have to find that satisfaction elsewhere. But here's another thing that people get wrong, okay? This happens all the time. When people want to get off their phone a lot or stop really any sort of addiction, what they do is they say, okay, I'm going to not use my phone anymore. I'm not going to go on social media. And what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go for long walks. I'm going to read self-development books. I'm going to learn a new language, right? Like we immediately start thinking of all of these other productive things that we could be doing. But here's the thing and here's the trick. You have to have other things in your arsenal, in your toolbox. Things that you can do that are entirely unproductive, that are just purely for relaxation, just for fun without your phone. Because if we don't, the minute we want to relax, the minute we want to zone out, we immediately want to grab this thing again. We have to have other things that we enjoy in our life and we specifically have to have things in our life that we know that we can do when we're tired, when we're feeling a little burnt out, a little stressed. Going to the gym is great, right? Reading a self-development book, that's great. But we can't function like that 24-7. We have to have relaxing things to do. So that might be coloring, that might be taking a bath, that might be reading like a steamy fiction novel, that might be knitting, that might be doing those like paint-by-number things. For you to really be able to get off your phone, you need to have hobbies that are entirely unproductive. Now next, I want you to think about and remember what your life was like when you were like seven or eight when you like didn't have a phone. I don't know how old you were. I didn't get my first phone until I was 12. But think back to that time in your life when you were a child, when you didn't have a phone. And do you remember what it was like when you got bored? You didn't have a cell phone and TikTok that you could immediately turn to to fix that. We had to think of things to do. We had to be creative. But there was really so much beauty and fun and satisfaction in that, right? Like we got so much satisfaction from, okay, we're bored but oh then we think of this like cool game that we can play or oh we do this cool creative activity, right? Like it felt so rewarding to do those things and we always did those things with so much presence. Okay, so when you are living your life and you notice that you are getting bored and you want to grab your phone and solve that and just scroll on social media or whatever, I want you to pretend that you are like that child again. What would that eight-year-old version of me do right now? She didn't have access to a phone. What would she do right now? And once you allow yourself to get bored and actually sit in that, you will notice that you will just start naturally doing like cool things. You will start naturally doing better things with your day and you will start naturally getting those dopamine spikes from better activities. Let yourself get bored and try not to resist it. So when you notice that you are starting to feel bored, even just give yourself a timer. I'm going to sit with this for 10 minutes and I'm just going to see what happens. Like what kind of things do I come up with? There's so much beauty and so much creativity that comes from boredom. Now another reason why we can become so addicted to our phones and specifically social media is because we get social connection through social media. Now it's not the same as like in real life connection, but we get a sense of community and a sense of connection through social media. So if you do not have real social connection in your life, you will still always want to turn back to that phone. You will still always want to turn back to social media because as humans we need that connection. When you start making new friends or when you start seeing your friends in real life more or when you actually start calling your friends to actually talk to them and have real conversation, you will notice that social media is not as appealing anymore because you're filling that void off of the screen. I remember I was talking to this man one day and he told me that his wife, who is a stay at home mom, was on Facebook like a lot, like on Facebook throughout the day. That's like what she did throughout her whole day. And sadly, I don't think he realized this, but the reason why she wanted to be on Facebook all the time is because as a stay at home mom, she was home a lot. And she, I'm sure a ton of other like stay at home moms can attest to this, but you really lack that like community and that social connection. And you're only really talking to like your four-year-old child, right? And you don't have that adult connection, that social connection that we all need. And so if we're not getting it in real life, we are going to turn to our social media apps to get them. That woman was not addicted to her phone. She was not addicted to Facebook. She needed real social connection. And that was the only way that she was getting it at that time. The more you have that in real life social connection, the less you need this to fill that gap. And lastly, sometimes we all just need a little bit of a perspective shift. And sometimes we just need to zoom out a little bit. Do you really want to live your life attached to this screen? Eventually one day you're going to die. And are you going to be like, oh my goodness, I'm so glad I watched those TikToks. Maybe, probably not. Our life is what we make of it. And if we choose to live our life totally unconscious, just unconscious to all the things that we're doing, living our life on autopilot, then we are not the creators of our life. If you want to be the creator of your life, if you want to live a life beyond your wildest dreams, then that takes conscious effort. That takes conscious focus. That doesn't happen there by accident. We have a choice every single day. What actions we take, what thoughts we think, what stories and beliefs we choose to believe about ourself. Most of these things are a choice. So sometimes we just have to choose wisely. I hope you guys got value from this video. This is something that affects way too many people. And again, like these phones have been a blessing for sure. You know, now I can just turn on Google Maps and it tells me where to go. I don't have to print out directions. Now I can call for emergencies in case I need it at any time. Now I can connect with my friends from all over the world and see pictures of their lives, but all of that comes at a cost if you're not careful. But besides that, thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time in the next one. Bye.