How to stop using your phone so much

I too have a phone.

I too have "made a deal with the devil" in the mornings:

"I'm just going to quickly check my messages - I may have gotten an important one."

"Just a quick peak."

"I'm for sure going to get off as soon as I check my messages."

And other excuses...

An hour later, after zero important messages, I have logged some cat video viewing, some stalking time and rewatched my own videos about 300 times.

If that sounds familiar, it's because you also have a phone, and a human brain.

Our brains are wired to release dopamine every time we get something required for survival.

Tasty apple? Dopamine hit! Aah pleasure - better get more of that later.

Cozy fire? Dopamine hit! Aah pleasure - better keep coming back to this when it gets cold out there.

This is a beautiful system. We get a dopamine hit, then later the dopamine decreases and we get an urge to get more of the thing, we seek it out, get more dopamine and the cycle continues. And we continue surviving.

Imagine if you didn't ever get the urge to eat; not much incentive for a caveperson to leave the cave and face the tigers out there.

But here's the problem: our brains never evolved for the concentrated pleasure that exist in the things we have manufactured today.

When we eat a chocolate cake, our brains get a bigger hit of dopamine, which later creates a bigger urge. And so we need to eat more, which creates more dopamine, ...

It's the same with connection and social media.

Our brains were never designed to handle the landslide of likes and badges and pings and tags.

And so our brains freak out -- so much dopamine! And then the next day when you are in bed reaching over for your phone, that urge is so strong, and you scroll through all the platforms looking for messages and likes and refreshing the app to get that next hit.

The next thing you know you're constantly checking your phone or thinking about checking...

It's not your fault - we weren't designed for this dopamine overdose, and the people who designed social media apps know this and use this to make these apps even more addictive.

So what do you do? Just quit social media?

That's an option, but if you run a business like me, that's maybe not the option you want to take, because you also see the benefits of having it.

Here are the strategies that I have worked for me:

1. Decide ahead of time how much time I will spend on social media and schedule it on my calendar.

2. Allow the urges to come up without reacting to them. Urges are uncomfortable, but harmless.

3. Understand that each time I don't react to an urge, I am deconditioning my brain to release dopamine and the urges will therefore keep decreasing. Each time I react, I will get the dopamine hit and strengthen the cycle.

On the other side of this work is so much more free time and control of your life.

You've got this, beautiful <3

Alana

PS: I know it's easier said than done. The urges are so uncontrollable. It's so hard. I've never been able to do it before. Don't listen to these thoughts your primitive brain is offering you. You can 100% do it, you survived a pandemic after all! If this is something you struggle with, you don't have to. I can show you how to allow your urges and how your mindset is contributing to you staying stuck in this cycle. In a 60-minute consult, we will create a personalized plan to get you out of dopamine addiction and redirect that time to the things that really matter to you.