Why Quitting Your Phone Should Be the New Vegetarianism

By Charlotte Harris

We’ve all been in this situation before. The work is mounting up fast, your house is a tip, and the incessant buzzing of group chats, emails and texts are leaving you with a sense of growing dread. Eventually the to-do list gets so long that it paralyses you, and you spend your time feeling stressed and miserable, failing to attack any of your worries at the root. The days pass too quickly and the intervals between sleep hurtle by in a blur. Getting up, going to work, working, going home, cooking, doing laundry, watching telly, all punctuated by scrolling through social media and failed attempts at getting it together. This was the boat I found myself in last week, and whilst I’m sure it’ll plague me again before long, for now I think I’ve found the easiest one step solution to the too-overwhelmed-to-do-anything conundrum.

I had just returned home after a long day of running around without achieving anything and the simplest of things happened: my coat got caught on the door handle and at the same time my phone buzzed twice in a row. However ridiculous it sounds, this was the final straw. I felt a desperate urge to throw the phone at full force across the room, snap it in half and stomp on it for good measure. Fortunately, my personal finances don’t allow me to be quite that impulsive. I took a deep breath, turned the damn thing off, and put it in a drawer. Immediately my sanity returned.

The pathetic woman who had been driven to vocal cries of agony at receiving two notifications was gone. The incessant nervous buzzing sound in my head had been switched off. I showered, tidied up and slept like a baby.

My cold turkey phone break lasted for three days. They were the best three days I’d had in a long time. The deadlines were still imminent, of course, but suddenly I had all the time in the world to work on them. Time passed like it did in childhood, slowly and thoughtfully. In an hour of work I could achieve what would normally take three. On the weekend, I cooked breakfast, went for a walk and read a book. My evenings were suddenly long enough to watch films, write diary entries and indulge in hobbies.

Whilst we tell ourselves that phones are a necessity in the modern world, I found that when I left the house without mine I was at no disadvantage. If you wear a watch and make doubly sure you have your house keys, there really is no need to take a phone everywhere you go. I didn’t even find myself missing out socially. If my friends made plans I knew about them, as I switched my phone on once a day so I could check for anything important and to respond to any stray messages. I was more than adequately connected to my social circles. In fact, the only point I missed my phone was when I needed to time how long to leave my dinner in the oven.

My conclusion? Constant phone usage was seriously damaging my quality of life. It’s no coincidence that Silicon Valley tycoons, who have made billions by selling us our devices and the vast numbers of accessories to go with them severely restrict their own childrens’ screen time. I was eleven when I got my first taste of the portable touch screen life, and from that bright blue iPod touch to my current phone, I’ve always had some sort of device glued to my hand. The most disturbing realisation I had in going phone free was how automatic I was in reaching for it. I found myself reflexively searching through my pockets before even realising what I was after. Why had I looked for it? No reason at all, just a quiet moment that muscle memory decided to fix before my head even registered I was bored. How many hours had I lost over the last decade to mindless scrolling?

This is where phones get dangerous. All those in-between moments in a day, that could be spent simply living in the present, just thinking or working on something that enriches our lives, all lost to scrolling. This is where all that time goes, why the days feel four hours long, and why we find ourselves looking back on the last week and struggling to remember what we did. I know it’s not just me, as being off my phone made me see just how much time everyone else spends on theirs. Being out for coffee and the conversation drying up is a slippery slope to screens out all round the table. If someone gets a text whilst you’re walking then suddenly the whole group slows to a crawl whilst a response is written. It’s not that phones are evil or the people who get them out at social events are being rude, but rather that we think of these devices as fundamentally necessary to every aspect of our lives. For three days at least, I showed myself that this simply is not true.