iPhone Addiction
It’s 11:30PM and I’m sitting in bed on a Wednesday night. I have to go to work tomorrow so I’m feeling a little glum. I don’t want to go to sleep yet because of this. I want this evening to last a little longer and delay the morning grind.
I need some serotonin. I need something to cheer me up and at this hour it’s hard to find, especially when you’re alone. I reach for my iPhone almost instinctively. I know I shouldn’t as it’s late but I do it anyway. I press the home button and the screen blinds my eyes with burning white light. I turn the brightness down to a dim glow.
My finger moves subconsciously to the YouTube app. I can’t control it. I touch the red triangle icon and up pops videos that interest me. Hoards of them. My taste according to Google is varied. There are tech (MKBHD, Unbox Therapy) and music (The Needle Drop) reviews as well as vlogging (Casey Neistat) and wrestling (What Culture Wrestling) videos to choose from. I choose Casey. I spend a lot of time there.
YouTube is the best way to kill time but it also makes me stay up unhealthily late. I watch one video and think to myself:
that’s enough you should go to sleep now.
But then I see another recommended video and another one and another one… I know my eyes will be hanging out of their sockets at work tomorrow morning yet I still do it. I succumb to the addiction of my black mirror.
I look at the clock and it’s 12:30AM. Fuck! I turn the light off and usually fall straight to sleep. Then the alarm goes off at 7:45AM. I grab my phone and see notifications on my socials from Australia. I deal with all of these before I jump in the shower. I guess I still get around 7 hours of sleep but that’s only because work starts at 9 and I live close by. It’s a lucky occurrence.
I should be training myself to get better sleep. I should be doing more productive things with my time. It has become a constant routine on weekdays.
The next night it’s Twitter that I spend my bedtime hours on. I scroll through my feed going deeper and deeper until I reach a point of no return. I usually end up on an article I have no interest in or a heated comment war. Lately, it has mostly been political right verses left. I skim and in doing so I don’t actually consume. It’s almost like soma in that I’m in this kind of daze. But it’s no drug I’m ingesting it’s just my phone and perpetual distraction.
I remember reading a few chapters of Nicolas Carr’s book at university and I guess I still believe in most of what he is saying. However, back when he wrote that iPhone’s weren’t that popular yet. A lot has changed. My brain is wired to the internet. My attention span sucks.
It’s now 12PM and I switch to Snapchat. Got to watch all of my friends stories. Got to catch up with all the news from Mashable and Bleacher Report. Then it’s scrolling through my Instagram feed half an hour later. On and on I go, constantly questioning why I’m staying up but never stopping myself. I feel gross when I wake up but then I feel okay at work. Maybe not so good from 3PM onward.
The cure
I think my solution needs to be hiding my phone at 11PM. Away from me where I can’t reach it from my pillow. This might also be good when my alarm goes off in the morning as I have to automatically stand up and walk across the room to turn it off.
What I’ll have next to my bed instead is my Kindle. I’ve been reading it often but I need to read it more. Reading classic books are of way more value to me than viewing some stupid live snap story. I need to be addicted to my Kindle like I’m addicted to my phone. The problem is that currently reading feels more like a chore. It’s not something that relaxes me; like how I feel when using my phone.
But I can train my brain to treat it as such. I can train it to crave reading a chapter today. To smash out a book in a week not a month. And when I’m feeling like I need to do something apart from reading Netflix is the next best option. I personally don’t binge on heaps of shows like most people I know. And I’ve had a Netflix account for over a year now. I should watch interesting TV shows because the stories they tell are also useful to me. To my creativity and to my well-being.
