When was the last time that you looked at your phone? 15 minutes ago? 10? 3? Maybe you’re reading this on your phone right now. And, even if you’re not, would thinking about your phone right now make your heart rate go up and your fingers itch? Just a little bit?
As I write this, my phone is next to me, because that’s where it always is. If I can’t see it, I feel ever-so-slightly anxious and I check it every few minutes on impulse. I also find it almost impossible to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time, from reading a book (formerly one of my favourite things to do) to writing this piece (part of my job).
Ten years ago, I could finish a medium-sized novel in a weekend, no problem, and crack out 800 words of lucid copy in an hour. But 10 years ago, I didn’t have a smart phone. I had a mobile that received calls and texts which lived in my handbag when I wasn’t using it. I often forgot to charge it, I frequently left it at home.
Today, I sometimes feel like I exist more on my phone than I do in real life. That pocket-sized composite of of aluminium, plastic and glass tells me what I’m supposed to be doing that day, what the weather is going to be like when I’m deciding what to wear, I pay for my morning coffee with it, it tells me which train to get, and then runs me through the overnight headlines from any news outlet I care to follow. And that’s only in the first in the first 90 minutes of my day.
And, did I mention that it also feeds me a constant snapshots of thousands of other people’s lives - which have now become the spirit level against which I judge own achievements?
I suspect you feel the same, because there’s been a lot of chat about the new book How To Break Up With Your PhoneHow To Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price (even if you haven’t read it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, because I have a sneaky suspicion that most of your Instagram feeds look almost identical to mine).
In it, Price explores how and why we are so addicted to our smartphones, as well as setting out a clear, iterative 30-day plan for breaking up with your phone (not completely – Price is all about teaching you to spend less time on your phone and more time on your IRL life, rather than totally ditching it).
I’m certainly intrigued by what she has got to say because my lack of focus, fuzzy head, inability to just sit down and complete a task is getting me down. As is the constant feeling that my life isn’t quite good enough. But, for me, it’s going to be a week of total, cold turkey, no phone.
I want to start focusing on what’s actually happening in front of me, IRL, rather than the alternate reality that lives in my pocket. I feel like cutting my phone off completely is the only way I’ll notice a marked difference in a week. Plus, I’m kind of intrigued and excited – like I’m taking a holiday from my own mind for a bit.
THE PREP
Obviously I can't go into this without notifying everyone I've ever met. I send a Whatsapp update to the half dozen or so friends who might send me a text requiring a prompt reply in the near future. It tells them they can reach me on email over the next week, which I’ll be able to read during office hours, and the same thing to my parents and my sister, with the extra suggestion that they text my husband if they really need to get hold of me in the evenings or at the weekends (is this cheating? I can’t decide). I then spend 23 minutes looking for a cute picture of me as a kid to post on Instagram with a caption that announces my intention to go phone-free for the next seven days. Don't worry, I think I'm a dick too.
Oh, then I remember to let my husband know what I’m doing, write his mobile number up my arm in biro in case of an emergency. And that’s it - I’m off the grid.
DAY ONE
I feel a bit twitchy for the first 20 minutes or so and keep going to pick up my phone as a reflex. Then I realise it’s currently utterly useless, so chuck it in a bag. Suddenly it’s gone from being a living, breathing thing that needs feeding (charging) and constant attention, to an inanimate object. From baby to bus pass in less than half an hour.
The day passes without incident, mainly because I’m in the office with my laptop and WIFI, so I’m not really missing out on much. I’m going for dinner with a friend from work and our husbands that evening, but just as I switch my laptop off, I realise I’ve made zero plans for this other than booking a restaurant, so I switch my laptop back on, dash off a quick email to my husband and colleague suggesting a pub near the restaurant in 30 minutes time and switch my laptop off again, hoping everyone reads it. I’m now running late, so I decide the best thing to do is just get to there and worry later if I can’t find them.
Obviously, it’s all fine and the evening passes without incident. However, it makes me realise how little I make firm plans well in advance and stick to them. ‘Meet outside the bus station at 6pm,’ used to be the standard Saturday night plan with my friends when I was a teenager, and even the most flakey of us made it on time. But now I constantly adjust my plans and arrangements depending on how my day’s worked out – pushing a meeting time back my 30 minutes, changing venues or cancelling all together when I’m just not feeling it. My phone definitely makes me flakier.
DAY TWO
Drank more wine than I should have last night but feel surprisingly OK once I’m up. The slightly anxious, paranoid feeling that normally accompanies several glasses of wine these days has totally gone… this is basically how I used to feel ten years ago after a night out – you know, before age and my iPhone took hold. Could all that blue screen time, all that information constantly being pumped into my brain be making my hangovers worse?
My good mood lasts all day – in no small part because the sun is shining. I feel more positive and focused than I have done in ages, and go for a very lovely walk along the canal at lunchtime. I reach a particularly picturesque corner and my first instinct is to get my phone out and take a picture, and send it to half a dozen people. After all, if you can’t share an experience with a whole bunch of people in real time, as it’s happening, did it even happen? But no phone = no camera so instead, I just take in the view and enjoy it. Me, on my own. I go back to the office feeling more Zen than I remember feeling in ages.
That evening I read a record three chapters of my new book. I KNOW.
DAY THREE
In momentous news, I get up early and go to the gym before work, for the first time in about six months. Getting out of bed before I absolutely have to is one of my pet hates, and I always suspect I’d be a better human being if I could master the art of getting out of bed before 7.30AM. But today it felt strangely easy. I hadn’t slept amazingly well, but the fuggy headache I’m normally used to waking up to had gone entirely.
In the evening I’m going for drinks with my team and have arranged to meet my husband there – but no-one can decide where they want to go, which starts to make me feel anxious. At about 4pm the venue is announced, and I email him where we’ll be and what time. I end up running about 15 minutes late, and I momentarily panic that he’ll get there before I do, will assume he’s in the wrong place and leave. Then I realise there’s not a lot I can do about it either way – and I'm back to feeling Zen again. I do make sure I have his number written up my arm again in biro again though, just in case.
DAY FOUR
I wake up on Saturday morning and realise that four days in, I don’t miss my phone at all and, more than this, I can’t really imagine what it would be like to have it back. Again it’s just the logistical stuff that I need to think about more – I’m meeting a friend at a yoga class and I’m not sure if she’s still planning to come along. But then I realise that it doesn’t matter – there’s no way of checking so I might as well just go with it. And that feeling, of not being able to control every element of my day, of not having every scrap of information to hand, of not feeling compelled to constantly multi-task, or read something, or respond to something feels amazing. And for the first time in a long time, my weekend feels like a proper holiday for my mind.
DAY FIVE
It’s a beautiful day, and I go for a very Instagram-worthy walk. I still can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s less value in a lovely moment like this if I’m unable to share it with the 600 random acquaintances I have on the app, but I can’t really unpick why. Is it just a good, old-fashioned desire to boast about something? And if so, what does that say about me?
I realise that I haven’t heard from my mum all week. We normally have a quick chat at the weekend, punctuated by several WhatsApp messages during the week. I ask my husband if I can borrow his phone to call her, and he casually mentions that she’s been messaging him instead to see what we’ve been up to. Wow five days without a phone is all it takes to cut me out completely.
Unbelievable.
DAY SIX
My Zen vibes are slightly ruined when I wake up to end-of-days news stories on the radio about the impending snow. How will I get into work if all the trains are messed up and I don’t have a phone? What happens if I get stuck somewhere random and I DON’T HAVE A PHONE? A feel sufficiently panicked about this that I sack off my gym class and head home early as it starts to snow, only to have another minor panic when I get back and realise that my husband – who was working from home – has gone out in the car. I’m half concerned that he’s had a car accident and no-one has been able to get hold of me and half anxious that he’s driven to the tube station to pick me up because of the bad weather, and I’ve missed him because…I don’t have a phone!
In the end I get my iPad out to see if he’s emailed me (is this cheating? I can’t decide). He hasn’t, but once I switch my iPad on, I find my finger hovering over the Twitter icon. I’m just trying to decide whether to have a quick scroll through social media before switching my phone back on and calling the police, when he walks through the door, having gone to get his hair cut.
DAY SIX
The penultimate day of my no phone week gets off to an inauspicious start because it’s properly snowing now. Before I leave the house, I keep trying to check the train times on my iPad as they keep stopping and starting and I don’t want to get stuck on the platform with no way of contacting anyone. I end up standing by the front door where I can still pick up Wifi, refreshing the train app every few seconds until it’s clear that the train has left the previous station and is on its way. Then I fling my iPad onto the stairs and run up the road to catch it.
I have to take a couple of detours to get to the office. I would normally refer to my CityMapper app at this point but, being phoneless, am forced to rely on my nose, my gut instinct, and the fact that I definitely know how the tube system works. I feel a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. Only in a pair of snow boots from Amazon.
Later that day, as the snow comes down harder, I have to get across London for a long-standing appointment, and then back home again. I consider cancelling several times, but I check the train website and everything seems to be running ok. I decide to consider it an adventure, print out google maps for every possible iteration of my journey, write the address I’m going to down (in actual pen, on the actual piece of paper I’ve printed the map out on).
The train journey is long and slow, and I become aware of how many people are staring at their phones (virtually everyone). We’re all in the same train carriage, and yet every single person is living in their own, individual, virtual world. They could be anywhere, with anyone and it wouldn’t make a difference.
Walking to my appointment I have to stop several times under a street light to read the map I’ve printed out – my eyesight has deteriorated rapidly since I last had to rely on a print-out map to find my way somewhere.
On the way home, my train gets slower and sloooooower and I realise I’m going to miss my connection. In a moment of weakness I switch my phone (which I have had stashed in my bag since it started snowing in case of an absolute emergency – which this clearly was not) to check what the train was doing (although refreshing the train app that confirmed that the train was in fact delayed didn’t really give me any more info that the train driver’s semi-regular announcements). As soon as I do this, I feel annoyed with myself and also far more agitated about the train being late than I did earlier when I had no access to information at all, so I switch it off again before I feel tempted to check my messages or click on Instagram. I instantly feel edgy and anxious about the train delay – something I can do nothing about. Yet my phone, full of up-to-the-minute station updates and tweets from fellow passengers complaining about the delays, gives me the illusion of control, and leaves me feeling frustrated.
DAY SEVEN
I cheat slightly and switch my phone back on first thing in the morning rather than waiting till lunchtime to make it to the whole week. Having already switched it on the night before, this doesn’t feel like the major moment it could have been and I certainly don’t feel excited about it – especially when I see that I’ve had a grand total of six Whatsapp messages in the intervening time, only one of which needed anything like a prompt response. If I switched my phone on once a week, replied to all the messages on there and switched it off again, it would make very little difference.
I realise now that all my phone-related dramas revolved around public transport and meeting up with people, and both of these things can be fairly easily resolved with a bit of forward planning. The thing I didn’t miss at all – not even slightly – was that feeling of being constantly connected to other people all the time. Instagram is a case in point. The minute I knew it wasn’t there to be looked at, I stopped thinking about it. And the minute I stopped thinking about it, it lost all of its power.
What’s most terrifying is how quickly I’m hooked again – within an hour of switching my phone back on it’s gone from inanimate object to overlord of my life once again. The fuzzy head is back, as is the inability to concentrate on one task for more than a few minutes. I’m not even enjoying the screen time – now I’ve spent some proper time away from my phone I’m aware of how much of a compulsion my attachment to it is. Switching my phone off completely doesn’t seem like a proper long-term option, but just cutting down how much I use it doesn’t feel like a transformative enough way to tackle something that has totally changed how we live our lives.
So the jury’s out on what I do next – but after this, I’m meeting some friends to go away for the weekend. Once we’ve met up at the train station and found our seats on the phone, my phone is going off again until Monday morning. Which sounds like exactly the sort of weekend I need.
**Follow Rebecca on Twitter **@rebecca_hol@rebecca_hol
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.