Do you want to use your phone less, but find it really challenging to do so? It’s very difficult to reduce your phone usage because the apps you interact with have been carefully designed to trap your attention for as long as possible. You are not at fault for spending large amounts of time on your phone; the entire system has been designed to capture your attention to turn a profit. Fortunately, there are ways for you to take your attention back.

Uninstall apps

Uninstall the apps that are consuming your time and attention. While it may feel daunting to remove YouTube or Instagram from your phone, remember, you are not losing access to these services. For instance, you can still check Instagram and see what your friends are posting on your phone’s browser. By uninstalling a social media app, you have added additional friction between opening your phone and doom scrolling. This extra friction gives you a moment to consider whether you really want to doom scroll right now. Additionally, when you no longer have an app it can’t send you notifications.

Disable notifications

If you are not ready to uninstall an app, you can always disable the notifications for that app. While this isn’t the most effective strategy for reducing the amount of time you spend on an app, it will stop the app from sending notifications to try to bring you back into the scroll.

Stay in touch with friends without the Instagram app

In some cases, you may feel like you can’t uninstall an app such as Instagram because you would lose the ability to communicate with friends. However, if you want to continue communicating without having the Instagram app, there is an application that can help you achieve that. Beeper is a free app that brings all your messaging apps into one inbox. When you connect Beeper to Instagram, you can communicate with all your contacts on Instagram without giving yourself instant access to the infinite scroll. Now, if you need to send a message to a friend, you can do that easily without risking being distracted by the rest of the content on Instagram.

Don’t quit, create limitations

In my experience, limiting your access to distracting services is more effective than trying to quit them altogether. When I tried to completely quit a service like Instagram, it often felt like I was missing out on media that I cared about, and I ultimately came back to the service. If you really feel the need to check something or watch a YouTube video, don’t redownload the app; do what you need to on your phone’s browser, then close the tab.

Make YouTube boring

I personally found that removing the YouTube and Instagram apps did not provide me with as much separation as I wanted, and that I still found myself scrolling YouTube on my phone’s web browser more than I wanted to.

This problem led me to discover a nifty browser extension called Unhook. You can install Unhook on any browser that supports extensions and use it to disable various parts of YouTube to make it less distracting and remove YouTube Shorts, etc. You can disable YouTube Shorts, recommendations, and even the home page. You can even just have YouTube show you a chronological list of videos from the channels you subscribe to. This means that if nobody has posted anything interesting lately, then you don’t have any videos to watch right now and can do something else.

Using this extension has personally helped me not spend hours after school each day watching random videos. I now find myself doing more productive things instead.

If YouTube isn’t the thing taking up all your time, but rather another platform, I would highly recommend seeing if you can find an extension that “de algorithms” the services you find yourself spending too much of your time on.

Turn your phone black and white

I will leave you with one final idea that I have stolen from my friend Nate. Most of the ways I have found to use my phone less involve making my phone less fun to use. One way to do that on an iPhone is to set a color filter that turns your screen black and white. The color filter will not restrict you from doing any of your normal phone activities, but it will inherently make them less fun to do. You can take this as an extra step by creating a shortcut on your phone that turns on the color filter every night. That way, even if you do turn it off for whatever reason during the day, you will always start the next day with a monochromatic phone screen.

Using your phone less shouldn’t be about restraining yourself from opening Instagram or YouTube, Rather, you should not want to interact with your phone as much. If you can make Instagram or TikTok more annoying and less gratifying than getting out a good book or practicing an art form, you won’t have to try to use your phone less; you will.