More thoughts on how to release yourself from phone addiction

You guys I'm begging you to get off the phone and back into the real world

I had a hypnosis session recently where the client wanted to address phone addiction, and some important frameworks came up that I wanted to share. For years now, we’ve all known that our phones are destroying our attention spans, our connection to our personal passions, our collective critical thinking, and our sense of community in the real world. But we can’t stop using them to excess.

It has become about information — an addiction to up-to-date, constant information, which fueled by the endless scroll, a technique for receiving information that the human brain is not equipped to handle, and by the constant horrors happening in our neighborhoods, in the courts, on the global stage. It makes perfect sense that we try to gain control over our powerlessness around global and political horrors by keeping tabs on the news, all the news, including the news they tell you and the news they try to hide from you. There is a huge amount of information circulating out there, available for us to catch it. However, when we catch it, what are we doing with it? Are we actually able to do anything about it?

Because how we learn information through the phone is disconnected from our actual lived experience of our days, there is a built-in disconnect between what we know and what we are able to take action on. It is not a lack of our own agency that makes us powerless, it is the fact that we are learning information about strangers to us, from strangers to us. The clutter of the internet and different platforms has created an online world that is full of people and things unrelated to our lived experiences; instead of a mirror of our lived world, it is a constructed one that lacks any type of actual connection. This actually feeds into our addiction though: occasionally we see a post from a friend, or a flyer for an event happening in our town, and we get hit with that dose of connection and community. Most of what we see is decided for us, not by us, but there is just enough that is related to us to keep us holding on. The next post, the next article, the next pull of the slot machine lever will be something good, something relevant, something that makes it all worthwhile. We are trapped in a loop of hoping for something that we know is not really there.

We know this is true when we catch ourselves picking up the phone and opening apps almost without consciousness, without deciding to. We cycle through all the apps, hoping for just one good thing, and when we get to the end of our app train without getting it, we don’t put our phone away and go do something real, we start all over again, still hoping. We only stop when we realize we are trapped, our bodies curled into themselves, and throw the phone away in disgust. This is addiction, not a choice. Our brains are addicted to everything the phone contains because everything outside of the phone has become dull, scary, uncomfortable. This is a big problem: life should not be lived online just because our brains believe it is less uncomfortable than real life. The online life, the tether to the phone, is actually the discomfort. We know this. We know this in our bodies, when we feel ourselves aching from looking down, our necks sore, our eyes burning, our shoulders clenched. We know this in our emotional selves, feeling like shit after doom-scrolling, feeling shame and guilt and confusion, as if we have been on a bender, losing time and not feeling like ourselves. We know this in our minds, as cluttered thoughts and rage and other people’s opinions begin to crowd out our own imaginations.

We know it's bad but we keep doing it. Whenever there is a behavior like this, in hypnosis, we look for what is the intention underneath it. What is the protection or support that we are trying to offer ourselves? The action of looking for more information, more and more, endlessly, instead of proactively acting in our lives, for our own purposes, is a protective measure. There is so much bad happening in the world right now, of course we want to know what’s going on. But simply knowing what’s going on is not a complete action.

Our minds want to complete actions. Previously, pre constant media availability, when we took in information, we also had opportunity to resolve and process it — to address it, think about it, move it through our emotional, energetic and nervous systems. We learned something, and then thought about it, had conversations about it, came to a conclusion about it, changed or didn’t change our lives in regard to it. Now, if we look at our phones for 10 minutes, there are hundreds of pieces of information coming into our consciousness, but without any opportunity for our systems to respond and resolve to any of it. Our natural desire for resolution did not disappear just because the endless scroll was invented. We still crave resolution, but without the opportunity to get it, we turn back to the very thing that created the problem to try to get resolution of the problem. This is not healthy behavior and this is why we feel so bad when we get stuck in the phone loop. We feel unfinished, we feel powerless, like we have no agency, because within the phone world, we don’t. The only possible response is more phone activity and this will never help us.

If we can turn our attention to, and prioritize, our natural desire and ability to resolve problems, we can escape the loop and feel better. The things we can actually resolve live in the real world, not on the internet.

Our minds work in a certain way naturally, and the endless scroll is antithetical to it. We don’t experience reality in a such a repetitious way, in such a packaged way. We also don’t experience reality by always looking for what’s next. If something is in front of us in real life, we address it, we cannot simply swipe it aside and it disappears, something more exciting taking its place. Whenever I do a phone cleanse, I am always astounded at how much cleaning my house takes priority. On the phone, I can ignore cobwebs, piles of clothes, dog hair dust bunnies, old food in the fridge, because I can just look away from it, and look at 1980’s interior design photos on my favorite 1980’s interior design IG account. Off the phone, that stuff becomes unbearable and I must clean it, organize my space, maybe get inspired to rearrange things. We are using the phone as an escape from things in life that are reasonable to want to escape from, but also from the things that we could be taking pleasure in.

We also move through real life often without the most up to date information, and without hearing constant hot takes on everything that one could possibly have a hot take about. We interact with people and events and environments that are actually around us. Obviously, expanding that can be beneficial, and it was, in the early social media days. The monster that is media now is no longer an extension of real life, it is trying to replace real life, with something that feels terrible and takes us away from our personal lived experiences of life.

We do also need to move through real life with rest breaks, with moments of downtime. We need to recognize when our minds need this, and offer true rest, not internet rest. I’m currently listening to Enya like she is Valium, because I am overwhelmed with work work and school work. I do not need a podcast on right now, but believe me, it was on earlier. We are overstimulating ourselves constantly, and then wondering why we are exhausted. When we take more and more in, and nothing gets shaken out, nothing is released, we are in overload and the only outcome is burnout. Overloading our minds with more and more information does nothing to resolve anything in reality or within our own consciousnesses. How could our brains possibly relax when we are adding more and more information without offering any type of resolution? Give yourself a chance to find resolution, by stepping out from the phone information loop and doing something in real life. It feels good to resolve, no matter what we are resolving. On the phone, we are depriving ourselves of that process, and trying to convince ourselves that more and more information is what will feel good. Once you realize that our minds work differently than the internet, and that the internet is trying to adapt our minds to it, instead of adapting to us, it may become easier to reject it. Our minds will never function better inside of the news information endless scroll environment, they function better in the environment it has always co-existed with, which is other people, nature, the physical world, which is slow and varied.