mobile away
Smartphone madness: five tricks against it
© Brogues Cozens-Mcneelance / EyeEm / Getty Images
Addicted to smartphones? Nonsense! Still, you always have the thing in your hand. Kind of annoying. We’d really like to leave it behind. These 5 tricks will help.
by Lena Selinger
On the train: smartphone instead of book. In the restaurant: write instead of talk. In the bedroom: surf instead of cuddling.
They are omnipresent, determine our social life and without them we somehow feel naked. We ask our smartphone for the time, for directions, check the news and our appearance. And secretly we find it scary, annoyed that we wasted another hour on the phone instead of worrying about our growing to-do list. Because actually we really want to leave the smartphone lying around and spend time consciously. With these 5 tricks against smartphone madness, we are now tackling the project.
1. In the corner with you – take time out
You may also know: Dinner with the family – you, your husband, the two children and four smartphones. Everything is silent and cybering instead of letting the day end together. Does that annoy you? Then mobile-free phases can help. It can look very different. Simply set periods in the evening or on the weekend when the cell phone is not picked up. Smartphone-free zones in the house, such as in the kitchen or bedroom, work in a similar way. So it may also be the partner to whom you say goodnight last and not on Facebook.
2. Rescue relics of the past from oblivion
What time was it? Zack: Smartphone out. Since the existence of cell phones, many wristwatches have eke out a shadowy existence in some drawer. But if you replace the clock with your smartphone, you look at your mobile phone much more often. That is why we demand: Save the wristwatches. The good old alarm clocks share a similar fate. If you let yourself be woken up by your smartphone in the morning, you are tempted to check Facebook, Instagram and Co. immediately after waking up. Incidentally, this also applies to navigation devices, MP3 players, notebooks and the like.
3. Back to the roots – reactivate the old Nokia
For the really brave: ice-cold withdrawal! Instead of a smartphone, simply take out the old Nokia again. Then the excuse of being available no longer works. Instead of what’s app, make old-school calls and text messages. And the best: Finally play “Snake” again!
4. Simply unsubscribe
Radical changes require radical measures. And one or the other certainly hurts almost physically just to think about it. Yes, it is hard, the way there is long, rocky and difficult, but if you really want to renounce the smartphone permanently, you either need a lot of self-discipline or simply click on “Uninstall”. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Co – Actually, you just want to check the news briefly, and bang, the newsfeed kills the next few hours. Social networks take a lot of time, often distract us from the essentials and at the end of the day we get annoyed that we just surfed our day.
5. Prosthesis – for the very tough cases
According to doctors, anyone who wipes and scrolls constantly for no reason, or looks compulsively at the smartphone, is already showing classic addictive behavior. There is therefore a prosthesis for the very serious cases of smartphone addiction. And this is what the substitute drug looks like:
The “Substitute Phone” was invented by the Viennese designer Klemens Schillinger. Wiping over the marbles is like the methadone of smartphone addicts. Unfortunately, the designer piece is not cheap at € 200.