5 hacks to improve your self-esteem when you look at your phone

I’m a millennial, which means I have a so-so relationship with social media. I don’t use Twitter because the bad seems to outweigh the good and … well… too many politicians. I use Instagram to check-in with friends and family and to follow sports and activities I like — mainly surfing, kitesurfing and snowboarding. Facebook is now a place that seems equally funny/bizarre/depressing, so I scan through maybe twice a day, max.

My inner narrative tells me that because my obsessive-phone-checking (that we all do — 58 times a day according to the Guardian) is tied to more, shall we say, high-brow activities (your emails, your news articles etc.), it’s ok. But it’s not. I can categorically now say that my phone-checking was making me feel crap about myself.

By and large, I aim to have a positive inner narrative, but of late, i’ve noticed the insidious creep of self-comparison to impossible ideals inching its way into my brain. I noticed that whenever I flicked open various news apps, I would feel either anxious about the state of the world (in all honestly this took up less headspace) or like my achievements and accomplishments were insignificant compared to those I was reading about.

Taking a super objective view… they probably are… but that’s not the point. The point is that we don’t realise how much our inner narrative is impacting our outer actions, our behaviour and our energy. And inner negativity means external negativity, which means you’re probably not improving the days/lives of the people around you — your friends and family — and I’m pretty sure that most people want to send out good vibes rather than bad.

Because the apps I checked on my phone (emails, news) were ‘productive’, it was only when listening to Tim Ferris’s 4-Hour Work Week, where he instructs audiences to almost never check the news, that I finally felt I could stop doing so. Why, as an entrepreneur who prides themselves on their disobedience, I needed to wait until Tim Ferris told me to, I’m not sure. Perhaps something to unpack in another article. Or therapy session. I guess many of us feel that to be relevant, we desperately need to stay updated. We don’t.

So I stopped checking the news. Not cold turkey, just less and less over a few days until I moved the ‘news’ app off the home screen, and I started to feel better. It got me thinking about what other auto-pilot activities I was doing on my phone that weren’t actually improving the quality of my day, and it turns out, there were a lot. Over the space of a week, I totally overhauled my home screen until I actually started to get good feelings after I scrolled on my phone for three or four minutes. Here are my five best hacks to improve your sense of self worth when you look at your phone.

Stop all notifications on your phone apart from active messages from family and friends.

Overall, family and friends make you feel good. Not all the time sure, and if you’re thinking now that you have some friends that don’t make you feel good when you interact, review that relationship because they may not be a positive force in your life. I use iMessage to text my wife and nobody else. We both love this because it means that when I get a text, I know it’s from her. Or from Hermes telling me I was out when they tried to deliver my parcel.

I use WhatsApp for all other friends, and generally these interactions make me feel good, so I’m happy to keep the notifications. All other notifications make me feel stressed, overwhelmed and like I need to do something immediately. If you feel the same. Stop them. No bad will come of it, and you will immediately feel calmer.

Delete easy access to work emails.

I know, I know, this can be tough to do, and especially for those people with stressful jobs, you feel that you can’t possibly stop checking your work emails bi-hourly, but this was one of the most powerful moves I made. I cannot control my behaviour when it comes to checking work emails, and I do it way too much. My lack of self control means that I had to rid myself of ‘easy-access’ routes to my work emails. Just like getting rid of the cookies in the cupboard. Sure it can be frustrating when I have to go onto the server website to access emails, but I promise, this drawback is definitely worth the improvement in headspace.

The main issue is that when you check work emails on your phone you often can’t ‘action’ a response. This leaves you totally anxious, thinking about something you can’t do there-and-then, and takes you out of the moment you’re in. This is particularly bad if you’re with friends or family — they can tell you’re not that interested in hearing about the dream they had about being on a boat that was actually made out of ice-cream and really you just want to send that zip file to Jeff from accounting.

Change the location of your ‘go-to’ app on your phone. Make it way harder to access.

How many times have you picked up your phone, gone on autopilot and found yourself 3 minutes into a death scroll/read? I’m guessing a lot. We all have. Your thumbs have been conditioned to operate without you thinking — getting you right onto that app that you can’t stop checking, but that isn’t making you feel good. Make it harder to get access to it. It will give your brain a second to use rational thought, and to ask yourself ‘do I really actually want to look at this photo/read this article that is going to damage my self-esteem?’

In the place of your usual ‘go-to’ apps, put apps that make you feel positive.

Apps that make you feel good differ for different people. Just as everyone has their insecurities, everyone has different activities/experiences that make them feel good. I love meditation, working out, learning, pictures of my cute baby, and puzzles. In the place of the news and emails apps that were my autopilot (bottom right hand side of my home screen), I put Headspace, Calm, Headway, Elevate, and Truecoach, all apps that can consume a leisurely 3-minutes of my life, but apps that I come away from feeling refreshed and optimistic.

Treat yo’self — have one ‘guilty pleasure app’ on your home screen, but make sure the pleasure outweighs the guilt.

Life isn’t about punishment and guilt, the goal of these steps is to genuinely make you feel better after you interact with your smartphone. Put one app on your home screen that feels frivolous and fun, but isn’t linked to something that you’re struggling to feel confident about right now. If your body confidence is low, don’t put an app that focuses on other people’s great bodies in there.

I want to read about other people in the entrepreneurship space, but I struggle when I read about people absolutely killing it with seven start-ups before they reach their 21st birthday, so I got rid of my tech app, and replaced it with Medium, so I could read more balanced, honest articles that helped me feel motivated rather than demoralised.

Get feel-good vibes from your phone

You have a closer relationship with your phone than you have with your partner, kids or parents. That sounds crazy, but it’s true. My daughter would love it if I carried her around all day in my pocket, but I don’t. I carry my phone instead. It is so easy for your relationship with your phone to become toxic and to damage your self-esteem — humans really aren’t great at knowing what genuinely makes us feel good. I guess you could say we’re a little masochistic, but you can reboot your relationship with your phone so that those 58 check-ins leave you feeling good about yourself, more optimistic and more confident about your place in the world.