Ten Tips to Break Cell Phone Addiction

By Naomi Nechama Klapper, LMHC

Cell phones have long ago moved from luxury to necessity. But the immediacy of connection that smart phone technology affords can have a dark side. Just like alcohol or gambling, texting and social media can easily become addictive. Here are ten tips to break cell phone addiction:

1. Don’t carry your phone in your hand. Keeping your phone in your hand, or even in your pocket, creates a subliminal message that it should be checked. Instead, treat your phone like your land-line. Leave it in one spot in your house and only go to that spot to use it.

2. Put your phone away at least an hour before you go to bed. Charge the phone in a different room to prevent the urge to check in while in bed and stop using your phone as an alarm clock. Thankfully, battery-powered alarm clocks are inexpensive!

3. Have set times when you are away from your phone. There are apps that can help with this such as OFFTIME, Moment, and Flipd. Tell people you will not be reachable during certain times to help set expectations among your friends and reinforce your plan. Doing this will help retrain your mind to not be anxious that you are not on the phone.

4. Establish routines that create balance. Trying an extreme yoyo diet of “no phone/all you want social media” can set you up for failure. Instead, find balance in how you interact with your phone. Use it to make plans and keep in touch, but not as an activity in and of itself.

5. Make phone calls! Call someone to make plans or check-in. Doing this doesn’t feed into a phone addiction the way texting does. It also helps us create deeper connections with our friends and family.

6. Find a texting allotment that is right for you (i.e. 40 texts/per day) and stick to it. Tell friends and family you may be slower in replying so they can support you. You can even give them a heads up: “I am trying to text less, so please understand if I don’t reply immediately.”

7. Remember that you don’t always need to be in touch. In our overly stimulated lives, it’s a healthy to be able to disconnect every once in a while and read or work without multitasking. To break the association “that it only counts if it’s posted,” practice doing activities without sharing it online or texting friends.

8. Change your access to social media and texting on your phone. Deleting social media apps from your phone removes your ability to constantly check-in. Tell yourself you will have a chance to check social media once an evening from your computer for a set amount of time. Use a kitchen timer to remind yourself of your allotment. If you can’t switch it off, there are apps that can limit your access to social media to help you reset your behavioral patterns. You can also change your phone plan to have less data or turn off your cellular data to force you to use your phone less.

9. Enlist the help of others. Perhaps you make an agreement with a spouse or parent that you pay a certain amount per text sent and use those monies to fund a big purchase.

10. Disable notifications. Removing the ping of alerts takes away that constant reminder to check your phone. These sounds can become a conditioned response, creating a constant desire to check our phones and feeding into the dopaminergic reward pathways.

Bonus tip: If you’re concerned about your teenager’s smartphone use, ask the following questions to assess if there’s a problem: Is your teen’s technological life taking priority over in-person interactions or judgment? Is he or she staying up all night on social media, but missing real-life social opportunities? Is he emotionally removed when out to dinner with family and constantly checking his phone? Is she unable to attend an event without sharing the experience on social media platforms? When teens can no longer be fully present without worrying about an incoming text message or anxiously awaiting a chance to post a photograph to Instagram, their behavior is inching towards addiction.

Breaking a phone addiction can be challenging. Following even a few of these tips regularly should go a long way toward helping you change long-standing negative habits. If you find you can’t break your phone addiction on your own, it may be time to reach out to a professional for treatment.

Professor Naomi Nechama Klapper, LMHC, is chair of the department of psychology at Touro’s Lander College for Women and a licensed psychotherapist with a private practice on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She can be reached at naomi.klapper@gmail.com