Fact Check: Managing Phone Addiction and Social Media Habits

Cell phones are everywhere these days, right? I'm spending more than half of my time awake. The

>> social internet might really be quite bad. [Music]

Hey, sorry for fearongering in the intro to this video. I just needed an intro and I was feeling zesty. This is a

little bit of a special video because I was in desperate need of an intervention. I've been doom scrolling

so much lately and that is personally to me a personal recession indicator in my 2026 vision board. Even though it's not

2026 yet, I'm just thinking ahead. Support women in the arts. The word that I chose is presence. Trying to move away

from devices and social media. I decided that I wanted to break up with my phone. However, I didn't want to do just like a

purge detox. I want this to be like a habit. And I ended up finding two habits, pretty simple, I think realistic

that I implemented into my life. I looked at my screen time before all of this. It was 6 hours and 42 minutes, 12

hours on Tik Tok, 10 hours on Instagram. That's not okay. Compared to that baseline till now, I was actually able

to get specifically my social media screen time down. I did the math. Feel like a finance bro. I got it down 75%.

And it's been like a sustainable permanent kind of decrease. I really just try to monopolize on something that

I already have in my schedule, which is reading. try to find ways to get my reading habit to completely replace my

phone and doom scrolling habits. There are these two wonderful, wonderful TED talks that I saw. Wonderful but scary.

How to get your brain to focus by Chris Bailey. This man cut down his total screen time to 30 minutes every single

day. The other TED talk is battle for your time exposing the cost of social media. Showed it like visually how much

of your free time in your entire lifetime you're going to be spending staring at a screen instead of living in

real life. If you want a bit of a more like thorough like scientific robust understanding of social media and how it

rewires our brains, I really recommend that you read The Anxious Generation. This is the book that I really dug my

teeth into. Um, and not to fear monger again, just read the book. The first habit that if you take anything away

from this video, please let it be this. Probably the thing that single-handedly changed the game for me. If you're

entrenched and shackled into the Apple ecosystem like the rest of us, did you know that there's already a dumb phone

setting built into your phone? And it's called assist of access. pretty much makes your phone into a dumb phone

without like the commitment of having to like actually toss out your phone and like get like a flip phone or something.

With assist of access, you can choose what like applications are available to you and you can only go on to those

applications. So for me, I have like calls, messages, WhatsApp, camera, basic things to be able to like call and

contact only specific people. And then I have music and podcast for listening. I have Kindle and Goodreads for reading.

And then I have the weather and Google calendar cuz those are essential. It's like child safety obviously, no social

media. So, we're going to lock in with my baby phone. You can find it under accessibility in your settings. Scroll

all the way to the bottom. I think what makes this the best like dumb phone version of my phone that I've seen more

than any other apps is that you can really customize what apps you're able to use. I was riding that dumb phone

flip phone wave like the rest of us. But, I still need to be able to read on my phone. And it's not permanent. If you

don't want to compromise everything on your smartphone or you just want to dip your toe, you can switch it back to your

regular phone anytime that you want. Crap. I did finish the book that I was reading and it was so so so good and I

had to I needed to see what everyone else was saying to go on the socials cuz for me like so much of the fun of books

is like being part of these fandoms where you can see everyone else who's also part of it. That's what makes it so

fun. So much of it is on social media. I'm going to put myself in assisted access jail. Not jail. We're going to

invite it in. An even softer alternative is downtime on your screen time. Chris Bailey talked about a 8:00 p.m. to 8:00

a.m. disconnection ritual. So, I scheduled mine for 8:00 p.m. and 8 a.m. Every single app except for calling and

messages is unavailable unless you manually override the time limit, which is pretty easy to do. So, I overrided

Kindle app, the camera, but sometimes when you're stuck in these loops of like the same muscle memory pattern, you just

need a complete wall being like, oh, and a time limit. Oh, I am doing this thoughtlessly. And I feel like that's

mostly what it's helped me with. The second habit was create a reading feed to look at every single morning in

routine just like a social media feed. But what does that really mean? I did this in two ways. The first one is that

I became a magazine person. Magazines were the original media feed because new issues would come out every single week,

except instead of doom scrolling, you're going to be consuming Mindful Media. I didn't know this, but if you have a

library card, there's a really good chance that your library holds subscriptions to popular magazines or

newspapers. I went with The New Yorker. I got the notification the new issue of The New Yorker has just become available

on Libby. I'm in Canada. I don't really know what exists outside of Canada. There's this one writer at the New

Yorker who is actually my woman crush Wednesday, Gia Talentino. Some of the sections are very specific to living in

New York. So for those ones, I normally just read the book currents section and their little book reviews. I don't read

the entire magazine throughout the week. I'll get through bits and pieces of it, but for the most part, I just pick one

article that I feel like interests. Could be the fiction section, critic section, book review section,

television. So it looks like the current cinema section, someone wrote about weapons. So, I think today I'm going to

go into page 70. I feel like I've been hearing non-stop things about that movie and I want to read what someone else

thinks about it. And the second way I created my own reading feed is by going on to Substack. If you don't know what

Substack is, I feel like it's kind of a niche thing. Not that niche, but like kind of niche as in if you don't know

it, you don't know it. But then if you do know it, I feel like you're really in deep and you can't live without it. It's

almost like a blog post. People can start whatever blog or newsletter about whatever topic they want from personal

development, science, art, tech, business, anything that you want. And it basically feels like a mini magazine

except um support small businesses. To me, I feel like they actually read like long form social media posts and then

you just have an ever refreshing feed of super thoughtful substack articles. People are so good and it feels like

you're picking the brain of these people on the internet who are like all thought daughters and thought sons. Morning. The

article that I was just reading is from the prism and it's called how social media shortens your life. Very

interesting read. Basically talking about how our perception of time is warped based on what event we're

remembering. People tend to underestimate the amount of time they spend scrolling on social media even if

they are told to keep track of the time and it's because we're consuming so much of it that it's desensitizing our brain.

I like having a mix of these kind of articles and then having a mix of like girls in their 20s. They kind of write

about like thought daughter things daily journal entries and it's like super casual but it's still like mindful media

to me that is so much better than just like mindlessly going on social media. Probably my top recommended substack

articles are from this substack. a lot about like the neuroscience of attention like how to stop scrolling. So instead

of the urge to scroll, you can just open your Substack. I open it on my laptop. There is an app version. This feels more

like intentional and more like academia study vibes. Me feeling like an actual academic when I'm reading on Substack.

You can make this your habit for getting feed in a way. I can see how it will totally totally replace Zoom scrolling.

Go on social media first thing in the morning. [Music]

So that's it. Those are the two habits that I actually swear by. Even though my like social media screen time is still

more than I wish it would be and I feel like I will in the future keep trying to whittle that down and really robustly

replace those habits with habits that I know will benefit me. I feel like personally this was such a good start

for me. My two biggest takeaways from this to tell to you guys. One, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to

experiment with, just do it for 8 days. It takes eight days for your brain to reset. I feel like if you stick it out

for the eight days, your body readjusts its like little homeostasis stimulation state and it just feels normal again.

And then two, you don't need to cold turkey plunge into something crazy. Exile your phone straight off the bat. I

think it's about making manageable steps consistently and then slowly upping the ante until who knows, maybe you're at a

30 minute screen time total all day like that man. For example, I feel like a good place to start is trying the 8:00

p.m. to 8:00 a.m. disconnection ritual. That's something that really works for me. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this

video. Let me know if there's anything that you guys have done or if any of you guys have gone completely analog. I

mean, I guess maybe you wouldn't be watching this video then. Subscribe down below if you haven't already. You can

follow me. My socials are all linked in the description and I'll see you all in the next one. Goodbye.

[Music] birds. Just let a little more sweet