\unplu by Carly Wheeler
“Carly, are you serious? There’s no way you’re going to make it a full week.” Well Mom, I did it. I successfully completed a week-long phone detox. Now that I am past the TikTok withdrawals and the time spent wondering how many people’s snapchats I was leaving on delivered, I can easily say that logging off of my most used apps for the week was the best decision I have made for myself in a long time. When Apple introduced the Screen
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Time feature in settings as part of iOS 12 in late 2018, I was immediately startled by how much time I had been spending on my phone each day. It got me thinking: how do I even have five, six, seven hours in the day to be texting and scrolling through social media? I wasn’t the only one concerned about the amount of time I spend on my phone. “I’ve been using [the Screen Time feature] and I have to tell you: I thought I was fairly disciplined about this. And I was wrong,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview with CNN. “When I began to get the data, I found I was spending a lot more time than I should. And the number of times I picked up the phone was too many.” It’s pretty simple: every little bit adds up when it comes to the time we spend on our phones. Sure, most people don’t spend six straight hours engrossed in their screens (especially on weekdays), but we all pick up our phones throughout the day more times than
we might think. According to Business Insider and Apple, on average, iPhone users unlock their phones 80 times a day, or about six to seven times per hour. Take a second to think about all of the times you look at your phone during the school day alone. During passing period you respond to a few texts, there’s three minutes of screen time; during class you get bored and open a couple Snapchats, there’s three more minutes. Each Sunday, I dread the inevitable screen time report that pops up on my phone — essentially, it’s my weekly guilt-trip about the hours I spend scrolling through my Instagram feed and the ‘for you’ page on TikTok. The week before I started my phone detox, I got this notification: “Your screen time was up 10% last week, for an average of 6 hours, 37 minutes a day.” That’s when I knew I was making the right decision by cutting myself off. After countless weeks of receiving screen reports with daily averages of more than five, six, even seven hours, I had to do something about it. I was letting my phone consume my thoughts nearly every second of the day, and it was
