I’m curious: How much were you using your phone each day before you gave it up for a week? And for what?

I set a 30 minute screen time limit for social media apps on my phone because I thought I was using social media too much. Then to my surprise I almost never hit that limit. I can consume all of my social media within well under 30 minutes each day and keep up with friends, family, and even HN just fine. I’m honestly curious about what people are consuming so much of that it deteriorates their mental health.

Not a direct answer, but I think a part of it is the general anxiety caused when the phone is physically present.

Maybe someone is sending me a message? Or maybe not, and of so, why not? It only takes 3 seconds to respond to a message, what are they doing that they can't respond? And Amy sent me a message four minutes ago and I didn't respond because I want to know what Dustin is doing first, but I don't want her to think that.... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA....

But if you are swimming or something then your phone is out of reach and there's nothing you can do so you just accept it and enjoy swimming and talking to whoever you are swimming with.

Also it mixes everything together, so if you just want to do something benign, you take out the phone and have a zillion other messages to worry about.

Yeah totally what worked best for me was leaving my phone in my trucks glovebox most the day, not having the phone even nearby seemed to make a big difference for me. I wasn't a huge phone user but even so the urge to just check if I had a notification or something was there even though I rarely had any. Now I try to compartmentalize my time better and at least for me it made a huge difference.