How did you get on doing nothing last week?
For this week’s Mental Sunshine I want to suggest an app for your phone.
I know what you’re thinking – I usually encourage you to spend less time on your phone, not more!
Well, the type of app I am suggesting can help with this.
We all know that spending time staring into a screen, doom scrolling through social media is not good for our Mental Sunshine.
But these apps are also specifically designed to lure us in, to be addictive, and to have us spend as much time on them as possible.
It can feel like we’re fighting a losing battle to keep our attention away from our phones!
I don’t have a magical app that will allow you to open social media, see a photo of your cousin’s cat or your friend’s family holiday and then get on with your day – sorry!
But there are apps out there which can help you to have more control over these things.
If I asked you how long you spent on your phone yesterday – or how long you spent on Facebook – would you be able to give an accurate answer?
These days a lot of phones have this information available, tucked away in the Settings menu under “wellbeing.”
With some phones, you can add a widget to your homescreen that will show your daily usage – that can be pretty confronting!
You can also download an app that will give you more control.
Some will let you put a daily time limit on your use of specific apps, and then lock you out of them.
Others will note how long you’ve spent in an app, and flash up on the screen every ten minutes or so to let you know. Stay Free is good for this.
Some will simply put an extra step between clicking on an app and it opening – an app called One Sec forces a moment of mindfulness or reflection before a social media app will open
Or you can set it up so that you can’t open certain apps during your normal work hours – Freedom is good for this.
You can get a notification at the end of each day to tell you how long you spent on your phone over all
It depends how strict you want to be around your use of social media and your phone as a whole.
These apps won’t make you instantly happier
But they can help us all to build better habits and boundaries around our phone usage.
Often we pick up our phones out of unconscious habit – and before we know it, we’ve spent twenty minutes scrolling through nonsense!
Using an app can help us to break this habit, and to be more mindful of our screen usage
And that has to be good for our mental sunshine doesn’t it!