Reclaiming Screen Time – Mindful Tech Use, Boredom, and Delayed Gratification

In this insightful solo episode, I take a deep dive into one of the most pressing challenges of our modern age—managing our phone use. As we welcome a new year, it's the perfect time to reflect on how we spend our most precious resource: time. Through actionable advice and personal anecdotes, I explore the often-overlooked impact of excessive screen time and its ripple effects on our productivity, relationships, and overall well-being. This episode is all about reclaiming control and using technology intentionally to enrich, not detract from, our lives.

From turning off non-essential notifications to curating a minimalist home screen, I share practical strategies that have transformed the way I interact with my phone. Drawing on my own experiences with ADHD and the challenges of staying focused in a hyper-connected world, I offer tools and techniques to reduce distractions, enhance presence, and cultivate meaningful connections. I also highlight powerful apps like One Sec and Opal, as well as lesser-known hacks to make your phone a tool for growth rather than a source of constant interruption.

This episode is a call to action for anyone looking to break free from the cycle of mindless scrolling and instant gratification. Together, we’ll explore the importance of boredom, the value of delayed gratification, and how intentional phone use can lead to a more fulfilling and purpose-driven life. Tune in for a fresh perspective on managing your tech habits and starting 2025 with clarity, mindfulness, and focus. Let’s take back our time and use it to become the best versions of ourselves.

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Key Points From This Episode:

[00:00:24] Managing phone use intentionally.

[00:05:35] Managing phone addiction effectively.

[00:11:21] Importance of being bored.

[00:13:45] Delayed gratification over instant pleasure.

Apps:

1. One Sec
   • A mindfulness app designed to interrupt impulsive phone use and promote intentional behavior. Mentioned as a highly recommended tool to manage screen time and reduce distractions.
2. Opal
   • An app that helps block distractions and improve focus by managing app usage and promoting mindfulness.

Chapters

• 0:24 Managing phone use intentionally
• 5:35 Managing phone addiction effectively
• 11:21 Importance of being bored
• 13:45 Delayed gratification over instant pleasure

Transcript

Andres Preschel:
Hello and happy new year. Hope all is well. So I'm going to keep this episode short and sweet. And to the point, I want to give you guys as much actionable advice as possible to start the year strong and. Today's theme is going to be all about managing our phone use. And a great place to start is, well, it's pretty simple. Go ahead and navigate, unless you're driving, go ahead and navigate to your phone settings and look at your screen time for the week. How does that make you feel? Let's be honest here. How does that number make you feel? And if you actually break that down into how many hours you spend in these different app categories, for example, social media, we're all guilty of, well, most of us, myself included, are guilty of excess social media use. How does that number make you feel? What if you were to take that number for the week, the weekly average, multiply that out for 52 weeks in the year and divide it by 24. How many days a year are you spending online? Now, what if you multiply that out for the remaining years in your life expectancy? How many months or years does that equal? A lot. What if you spent that time doing what actually gives you a sense of joy, connection, and purpose in your life? What if? What would happen then? How much of our phone use is a false promise? You know, we are under the impression that we're connecting in a meaningful way with all these people that we care about. that we're being inspired by people that we follow, that we are learning new things and enabling that knowledge in some meaningful way. How much of that time can you spend actually doing what you want to do with your life? A lot. And I'm here to help you. I'm not here to judge you. Like I said, I'm guilty of this too, except I have, in fact, I'm so guilty of this and have reflected on it in a deep way. And I've looked for. all of the advice and all the tools that are available to us to help me manage how I spend my time on my phone, which is one of the most incredible marvels of human ingenuity. Let's face it. I mean, what we have in the palm of our hands is plain and simply the most powerful tool that we have access to it. It has in every capacity to change your life as you know it. It changed mine. I do everything from my phone. I make a living through my phone. I connect with everyone I know through my phone. I learn most things on my phone, but I spend a lot of time doing bullshit on my phone too. So I've had to learn how to manage that. So here are a couple great strategies, things that I'm absolutely loving to make my phone use more intentional, more meaningful, more mindful. Number one is I have turned off like 90% of my notifications. I only have the bare essentials. All social media notifications are off. All of them. There are no exceptions. Mind you, I, I use social media for work. I need to be online connecting with people. I love it, but it's a requirement for work. Okay. So take it from me. I'm not just there doing scrolling, brain rotting for fun. I'm also working and connecting on there. But I know that if I have these instant notifications going off for social media, that when I'm in a deep, meaningful workflow around people that I care about, that it will distract me and it'll take away from the most important thing, present moments in real life. Turn those off. And now I'm not telling you're going to miss out on when someone liked your picture and when someone sent you a DM, you know, maybe maybe for a second or a minute or whatever. But now when you now you get to choose when you're going to tune into that, you get to choose. You get the power back. Get the power back. Turn off all the notifications. except the bare essentials. I'm also something that I did, and this has its pros and cons, and it can be controversial, but I only allow a handful of people to contact me throughout the day in my working hours. They are my parents, my brother, and my business partner. That's it. Everybody else, first time they call me, it goes to voicemail. The second time they call me, it's a silent ring. Most people will text me and if I have a minute, I'll call them back or at least I'll text them. I understand this can get some people in trouble for time and time, but I can't recommend it enough. Now, moving forward. How do we actually how do we how do we continue to manage this addictive nature of our phone? Let's diminish the blue light. Night shift mode should be on automatically every day on the warmest setting from sunrise to sunset. Try building a shortcut into your phone so that by tapping, for example, on the iPhone, the lock button three times, the screen turns red. So it's, you know, there's no blue light or you can set it up so that there's a gray scale setting. Now the phone is just more boring to use. Another recommendation, and this might seem, I don't know. I don't know how this will seem, but it's very effective. Look at your home screen and scroll to the right. So all these windows of countless, endless apps, most of which you probably don't use on a regular basis. Delete, first of all, delete all the non-essentials. and the ones that are somewhere in between, remove those from the home screen. So in my case, on my iPhone, I know this is all gonna be different for Android users and such, but you know, I think you get the point. On my phone, there's only one page of apps. I've got my QR code digital business card, I've got my notes, I've got Spotify, ChatGPT, And I have some widgets for my Google Calendar so I can actually see what I have to do throughout the day and I can stay on top of how I spend my time. And this deserves another episode, but it's something that I do prime myself in. Everything in my life is on my calendar. I'm someone that has ADD. I'm more susceptible to all this stuff than most people. I can get distracted and go into these doom scrolling modes that are endless. I'd say at a much higher rate with much higher probability than most people. Um, so I'm especially mindful of all this and I live on my calendar is helping manage my time, my focus, my presence in ways that I can't even, I just, that I'm extremely grateful for. Anyway, a couple of widgets on my home screen to make my management of time much easier. And then everything else is in the app library. So now when I go on my phone, I get to see and I get to measure and interact with things that are actually important to me. Anything else that is a distraction or something that I don't really do, too often, I have to manually search for it. So again, you're getting that power back. You're being intentional about what you're going to use rather than scrolling through endless pages of things that are distracting. Oh, I want to go my phone. What was the last time that I think most people can recall? Even even today, probably, you know, you're going. On your phone to do something important, right? And you're like looking for the app you have to use to do that important thing and then along the way You get this notification that notification or this app looks shiny you want to click on it because you haven't clicked on it a long time you want to I don't know check out a feature that you paid for months ago, and you forgot what it was for but you want to do I know what I mean How much? Raise your hand if you're guilty of going on your phone and forgetting why you got on the phone to begin with get distracted Frustrated and now you've wasted a bunch of time I'm, I'm super guilty of this. Okay. Which is why I've taken these measures that some people would consider extreme, but I consider them essential in today's age. So delete the non-essential, organize the rest, keep it off the screen. Moving on. Dark theme. Can't recommend this enough. Dark theme so that all the interfaces on your phone are black rather than white. You know, the backgrounds of the white backgrounds of Google and all these different websites and Instagram and such. Now there's less of this blue light stimulus, which is addicting, right? That white is made up mostly of blue wavelengths, which are very addicting and they keep you hooked on your phone. They also diminish sleep quality pretty significantly, especially into the evening. I also want to recommend a few apps that go above and beyond in helping you manage your time and your presence, your mindfulness on your phone. They are 1sec, that's one dot as in period sec, one dot sec. I can't recommend this app enough. It's changed my life. Recommend downloading it, checking out all the features and locking the settings permanently so that you are fully committed to more mindful phone use. There's a series of interventions that will pop up every time I want to use Instagram, for example. and have to go through the intervention. And it makes me realize how impulsive we can be about using these apps. It's like, it's like we've, we've, we've, uh, it's like we're attacking boredom. It's like, it's like, we can't be bored. It's like, we've totally criminalized being bored. I think being bored is so important. Being bored and having moments of really like nothing to do might seem like a waste of time in today's age. But I think what's a waste of time is lack of presence. And a moment of boredom is an opportunity to reflect, to think, to plan, to strategize, to connect with ourselves. And our phones rob us of that, unless you are consciously committed to managing how you spend your time and your attention on your phone, you're being robbed of your boredom, which I think is great. It has this negative connotation, but I think it's so important for quality of life. So anyway, um, OneSega has helped me save countless hours. I've locked the settings. They even have a porn filter. Not an issue for me, but it is an issue for a lot of people that I know. There's a porn filter. You can block porn and anything related to porn permanently on there. There's a bunch of other, you know, fun things you can do on that app to have a better time on your phone. I also like the app Opal. I've used it. I prefer One Sec because I feel that it's a little simpler, more practical. But Opal is another great app. And then there's a few accessories. You can invest in to help manage your phone use. I've been getting ads for The Brick. I'm not really sure how it works, but if you do a quick Google search on The Brick, apparently it's helping a lot of people overcome their phone addiction. I think that's great. I'm curious to try it. Outside of all this, look, I think it just comes down to that number, that screen time number. In the wise words of Peter Drucker, one of the wisest thinkers On management, what gets measured gets managed. And thank goodness, the apps that I just mentioned, they'll tell you how much time you're saving over the course of the week, month, and the year. And it's incredible how much we can get back. Awareness goes a long way. Get your power back. 2025. Use your phone as a tool, not as a crutch when you're bored or when you need a instant gratification dopamine spike. If we want to truly become and enable the ideal versions of ourselves, we have to fall in love with delayed gratification. Our phones, as it stands, our phones rob us of that. Because we can always choose these little moments of happiness. These little hits of pleasure that rob us of long-term satisfaction of who we are and how we spend our time becoming who we're meant to be. Let's choose long-term satisfaction over short-term pleasure this year. And that's all for today. Let me know how these tips and tricks have helped you. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to share more. Shoot me an email anytime, anywhere, undress at neurophysio.org. And here's to continuing to discover our science so we can optimize our lives. Much love. So that's all for today's show. Thank you so much for tuning in today and I'll see you on the next one. Have a lovely rest of your day.