Renew Your Relationship with Your Phone and Take Back Control of Your Life

Wellness is something we are all slowly moving towards. This emphasis on mental health in our increasingly busy and complicated world is a great thing. If you focus too much on pushing yourself, you will find that you break. Chronic stress is a killer, and it can permeate throughout your life if you are not careful, and this is especially true if you take your work home with you. We are living beyond our retirement savings already, meaning we will all collectively work longer and retire later. There is no need to race to the top, and there is no need to take on work and stress you cannot handle. If your employer insists on pushing you to your brink, the problem is with him, not you.

At home, you should relax. You should do the things that you enjoy, and not continue to work beyond your contract. You should also stay away from stressful habits that do nothing to help you relax, like scrolling your social media or checking your email. Your phone can do so much. It can help you achieve your goals on the go, it can help you learn, and it can help you relax, but you need first to redefine your relationship with it using these tips:

 

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Be Free of Expensive Contracts

Your phone is your tool for the 21^st century. It has absolutely everything that you need on it, from maps, to messaging, to the internet. It is not an option for many people not to have a phone in this day and age, but that also doesn’t mean that you need to get caught up in the race to have the newest, shiniest phone. Opting to keep your old, but still perfectly functional phone over starting a new contract has many benefits and can help you take back your life.

To start, you won’t be saddled with an expensive phone plan. You can instead get the best SIM-only deal for yourself from this list by HandsetExpert. Do this, and you can decide how much data is right for you. If you want to force yourself to spend less time online, opting for a cheap SIM-card plan is an excellent choice. Not only will you be spending a fraction of the cost of what you were paying before, but you can also actively choose only to have, 1 or 2 GB of data a month. This small amount will mean you’ll have to save your data for messaging and for directions, and social media for when you have Wi-Fi again. Alternatively, you can get a lot of data if you want to stream music on the go. With a SIM-only deal, you will pay for the service, not for the phone because you already own it outright.

Beat Social Media Addiction

We have an increasingly short attention span and have a harder time focusing. We scroll through news feeds so fast we barely have time to process what we see. Take Instagram, for instance, and how little you truly spend looking at one photo. Then compare it to how long you would look at it in, say, a gallery or when you are in someone’s home. The more you see, the more you analyze, the more you take in and appreciate the work at hand.

The world is moving at a hyper-fast pace, and social media keeps up with that. The only issue is that you can easily spend hours upon hours scrolling through content that holds no value to you when that time could be better spent. You don’t need to get off your phone to do this.

We need to beat our social media addiction not because it is ruining our lives, but because it is holding us back from our potential. We need to disengage and re-train our brains to sit still and focus on singular tasks at hand. We need to become more productive, and we need to diversify our media intake to become better-rounded individuals. You need to break up with your unhealthy relationship with social media by:

1.    Deleting Apps

If you do not like how much time you spend on an app, and more importantly you don’t even like the experience and how you feel while you are scrolling, delete it. You can even take it one step further and change the password to something new and difficult to remember off-hand so that you cannot re-install it. It will mean you can get it out of your system quickly. In time you can download the app again and create a healthier relationship with it, or you might find that you don’t need that app in your life at all.

2.    Schedule Productivity  

For those who want to quit social media, but find it very hard to do, there are apps and companies out there that will block your access to the app and its website. It can be the perfect solution for those who want to get more work done during the day, as you can schedule when your access to social media is blocked. That way you can schedule productivity blocks and still enjoy the beautiful pictures, stories, and videos found online.

3.    Create Your Own Platform

Content creators have it hard because they want to create but their ability to share their creations with an audience is dwindling. That is why when social media is failing you, turn to your own platform. Instead of investing a lot of time into social media, you can turn instead to the more fulfilling method of creating your own website. Use social media to market your blog, but rather than try to post every single thing about your day through public social media, write it instead in a more thoughtful, creative outlet.

Using Your Phone to Retrain Your Brain

To practice wellness, we need to retrain our brains to think slower, so that they can focus more easily on given tasks at hand. It doesn’t mean you need to chuck your phone away, either. Once you have used the previous tactics to help limit your social media usage, you can start using your phone for tasks that will help you be a better person.

1.    Read eBooks

Reading is the best activity that will help you not only break away from the stress of the day, but also engage your creativity and help you retrain your ability to focus. By choosing an eBook, you also help the world at large. Each year over 30 million trees are cut down specifically to print books in the United States, and many of these trees are cut down without any thought to where they are sourced or the impact this will have on the environment. Though the industry as a whole is moving towards more sustainable practices, you can help a lot by simply reading on your handiest tool, your phone.

2.    Listen to Audio

For those who drive, or simply don’t enjoy reading, other alternatives will similarly help you learn to focus and help you learn. Audio files come in many forms. You can listen to audio books or podcasts for a strictly audio-only experience, perfect for any commute as they can be downloaded and listened to offline. Then, of course, there are also documentaries and videos to help round out the experience. If you want to gain the most, opt for content that teaches you something every day. That way not only are you learning to focus on one thing again, you are also learning and bettering your mind.

3.    Music Changes Your Brain

Music therapy is a widely regarded practice that can help everyone. For those with attention deficit disorders or other learning disorders, music therapy can be a godsend when implemented by a trained professional. For most, however, we don’t need to see a music therapist to gain the benefits of music, you simply need to know how music affects your brain.

Slow music calms us, its beats slow our brain waves, and this can help us slow down and focus. The same can be said for white noise sounds that are repetitive. Examples include the white noise of a radio or the sound of falling rain. Sleeping with this sound can help you sleep infinitely better, as can turning it on to help you work. For brains that need a bit of a boost in the morning, energetic music with a sharp staccato beat can help improve brain activity.

Your phone can do so much for you, but unless you use it right and you use it to better support your life, it can easily take over. That is because social media is the empty calories of the digital world, and there is so much you can do to better your life that doesn’t involve scrolling past the same shared content. Once you have reconfigured your relationship with social media, and more importantly, once you have rounded out how you use your phone so that it better supports your life, the happier you will be. 

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