How I Stopped Worrying And Gave Up My Phone For The Weekend

You are cordially invited to separate from your phone. You’ll hate it. But it will bring you back to you, and that is 100% worth making giving up your phone — even if it’s just for the weekend.

I might not be addicted, but it’s definitely in the neighbourhood of obsession. My phone, I mean. And how much time I spend on it.

5 hours and 23 minutes yesterday.

6 hours and 57 minutes the day before.

4 hours and 39 minutes the day before that.

You get the picture.

My phone is the centre of my world. It wakes me up. It has my work email. It holds my social media apps. It stores my e-book reader. It is the bearer of the myriad WhatsApp groups I have been made participant to.

And between work, life, play, and everything in between – camera, delivery apps, online shopping, the rare phone call, the not-so-rare spam calls – my phone is attached to me like an additional appendage.

It is a parasite and I have unwittingly been drawn into becoming a host. I drain its battery, and frankly, it drains mine. Why is why…

…I Need To Break Up With My Phone

It all sounds like fun and games, but phones can have a genuinely negative impact on our mental and physical well-being. They devour and limit our attention spans, push relationships to the back burner, replace all leisure and moments of inertia, regularly trigger anxiousness, leave behind bothersome cricks in the neck, and on and on and on.

No need to get into the stats, just know that they back me up.

Something has got to give, and that something is me. Giving up. My phone, that is, not generally — although sometimes, the urge to just run away and retreat to a forest is disturbingly strong. (Feel the same way? Here’s my cheat code for when it gets to be too much!)

Nonetheless, here is how I – surgically, to be dramatic about it – stopped worrying and gave up my phone for the weekend. A 5-step program, if you will.

Make The Plan (And Follow Through!)

I decided to do the technological detox thing over a weekend to make this easier, because I thought being away from work and knowing I was on a break would make this easier.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t. I kept reaching over to get a fix: a quick little Instagram scroll-through, a few pages of a digital book, a sneaky peek at my messages…

Not. Healthy. At. All.

The conspicuous lack of notification pings had my ears ringing, like a phantom physiological response. It only served to drive home the point that I was experiencing a haunting and the exorcism I had forced myself to conduct was necessary.

Lock It Up

Out of sight, out of mind. And when you’re going out of your mind, it's best that the source of your madness is not in your line of sight.

So find a way to keep away from your phone. My big idea was to put my phone on extreme battery saver mode so that the only features I could use – if I had, had, had to – were calling, text messages, and the alarm.

And then I just put it away. In a drawer. That I locked. Pro tip: if you have a trusted human in your life and home who is supportive of your assignment to unhook up with your phone, then let them hold on to the key.

Make Alternative Plans

When your phone is your plus-one for near about every plan you make, you need something else to occupy your time, mind, and hands.

Me, I ran away and retreated to a forest for the weekend. Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about that. (Seriously, cop my getaway routine. It’s like a skincare routine, but chiller.)

First, I found a place where connectivity was an issue. Second, I made sure it was the kind of place where I didn’t need my phone to make things happen. Third, I packed to substitute it: physical books, the journal I had abandoned embarrassingly soon after New Year’s Day, and my <insert undisclosed hobby because that’s my business, just know that it’s crafty and doesn’t need my phone to be enjoyed>.

When in doubt, armour up!

Be Prepared For Grief

No one tells you how difficult it is to be phoneless when your entire life is essentially phone-more. Withdrawal is a nasty, painful process.

Be ready to reach for your phone and blow out a dozen frustrated sighs when it's not in your general vicinity, like a satellite orbiting you. Go through the stages of grief. Deal with the denial and answer to the anger and bear with the bargaining and drag yourself out of the depression and above all, appreciate the acceptance.

Personally, I hated it all but I disliked my urge to fill my every waking moment with a screen more. I had gotten used to relying on my phone to interrupt and avoid the linear ongoings of my life.

If I was watching or reading something and it got too lengthy — phone. If my companion at the moment was distracted by something — phone. If I wanted to avoid feeling awkward in a crowded lift — phone.

Here’s the deal though: The phone is many things, but a punctuation mark it is not. Willingly grieving as the sun sets on the device’s empire over your life is healthy, if not valuable and enriching.

Practice Detachment

When your phone replaces your ability to be still without doing something, it erodes your relationship with yourself.

We think of consumption as a physical act – eating, buying, wasting – but it is alarmingly possible to consume unsustainably in a virtual capacity as well.

We are meant to introspect, self-converse, actualise, and make existential meals out of our emotions and experiences. When we pick up the phone instead of just letting ourselves be for a single goddamn moment, we are developing a sneaky mechanism to cope with the likelihood of being alone with our thoughts.

To just be with yourself, to not want to replace that time with mindless browsing, to unlearn the mental fidget that drives the obsession — you need to dive into detachment. You may not achieve moksha, but you will stop living a partial life.

So you are cordially invited to separate from your phone. Expect the – well – expected. You’ll hate it. You’ll hate me for suggesting it. You’ll hate your phone for the part it has played in this dramedy.

But you’ll definitely see the lesson of it all. The indisputable bloom of good habits flowering into the fruit of better results. The value of swapping the window of a screen for a real window — yeah, they still make those and everything.

It’s your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Power down and unplug. Escape city life and head into the forest. Book a stay with Tenpy.