This article was written by Stephanie, 24 yrs.
Here’s a how to guide to reducing, controlling and moderating your personal screen time and social media usage.
Some of the benefits you may find from doing this include increased attention span, improved mental health, productivity and taking control of the type of media you’re consuming.
You’ll get some practical tips on how to reduce your screen time ranging from ways you can use built in features of an app/operating system to help you, as well as things you can do for yourself to change the way you engage with your apps.
Reasons for Reducing Screen and Social Media Time
- Depth over Breadth is Good for your Attention Span: There are benefits to exploring longer form content as well as short form social media content. In school, uni and the workplace you will be required to deal with longer/bigger pieces of text and information so it’s good to get used to thinking in this way in your free time.
- Improving Mental Health: Lots of time on social media can increase anxiety, make you feel more self critical and lead to fear of missing out. Cutting down social media time can allow you to focus more on yourself rather than on others and help you feel more comfortable in your own skin.
- Get More Things Done: I’ve found that by reducing my screen time and avoiding mindless scrolling I feel more productive and better about myself for having done other, more concrete things at the end of the day. It also helps to focus more on school or uni work or even just getting things done around the house. My time feels better used and more purposeful as a result.
- Feeling in Control of/Making Conscious Choices about the Media You’re Consuming: A lot of content on social media can perpetuate harmful, biased or untrue ideas and by taking back control of how you’re spending your time online and on screen you can avoid this type of content.
Practical Tips to Manage Time on Screens or on Distracting Apps
- App Timers and Bedtime Mode: Many modern phones allow you to set up app timers to reduce screen time and bedtime mode to help you sleep. This can be useful, but isn’t always realistic as sometimes you need to go into an app for a specific purpose after bedtime or after the timer has run out. Read on for some tips that might be more achievable.
- Managing your Apps: Deleting an app from your phone but still using the website version on a separate device or on your phone’s browser can help you reduce rather than quit your social media usage. Even just a few extra steps to get onto the site will make going on social media more of a conscious choice. This means you can still stay connected but kick the habit of mindlessly opening the app when you weren’t intending to.
- Moving an app’s location on your phone to a more hidden place can help. You could try replacing the app with another app in the same location on your homescreen that you’d rather be spending time on such as a mindfulness or meditation app like Headspace, a news app to stay informed or a reading app if you’re wanting to read more books rather than going on social media.
- Tailoring your feed: One example could be following body positive creators if body image is something you struggle with. Another example might be if you are looking for content about mental health you can make sure you're following genuine and reputable mental health professionals or organisations. On a more personal level, muting people whose posts make you feel insecure or upset can be useful if you feel like unfollowing them is too drastic a step.
- Archiving Chats: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger allow you to archive chats that are stressful or distracting. You can still view the chats in the archive and will be able to see a number of archived notifications so you are not completely switched off, but sometimes just the time it takes to open the archive is enough for you to remember why you’re avoiding that chat for a while.
- Take your Time Responding to Messages: This can allow you to stay focused on other things you need to get done, take more time to take care of yourself and do the things you like. Real friends who are emotionally mature will understand that you’re busy and slow replies with people who you may have once talked to everyday are a natural part of growing up. Train yourself to prioritise messages that need a response immediately and others that can wait.
- Set Rules for Yourself: Eg. having a designated time each day to check an app and not look at it at other times, or keeping track of how much time you spend on an app and setting a cutoff time for when to stop using it. This is especially useful if your phone doesn’t have app timer settings.
Be kind to yourself
Controlling your screen and social media time is an ongoing process which takes some getting used to it and it’s ok to slip up. Remember: everyone is unique and your way of engaging with the internet and your phone is unique, so feel free to try things out and then change it up again if it doesn’t work for you.
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