Few people spend a few hours daily on Instagram and are satisfied with this work. When Apple launched its first smartphone in 1992, people only bought 50,000 units. At that time, most people thought they didn’t need this luxury item, but today, more than 8 billion smartphones are active worldwide. The smartphone is no longer considered a luxury item and has become a part of human daily life. With the help of this device, we earn money, plan our work, have fun, save the information we need, and of course, we waste our time! This article offers suggestions for your free time that will benefit you much more than checking your mobile phone. Stay with us.
Why shouldn’t we spend a lot of time checking the phone?
If you think spending hours in cyberspace and checking yellow and low-quality content does not harm you, this part of the article is for you. In the following, we present the reasons for doing valuable things instead of checking the mobile phone. Of course, note that the disadvantages of mobile phones are more than these and you should also pay attention to their other penalties.
- The contents of virtual space keep you away from real life.
- When you check your phone, your mind is busy with things that have nothing to do with you and have no impact on your life.
- There are many exciting things to do, and you don’t have enough time to get to your favorite items and check your phone for a few hours daily.
- When you spend too much time on your mobile, you will become socially withdrawn, not talk to anyone, and you will be distant from your loved ones.
- Social networks are programmed to control the minds of others. When you spend too much time on these networks, you allow them to influence and control your mind.
- When you’re used to checking your phone, you’re constantly worried that you might have a missed call or message. These small stresses will make you sick over time.
- Checking the mobile phone promotes a sedentary lifestyle, resulting in diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and blood pressure.
- Checking your mobile phone before bed disrupts your sleep stages and prevents your brain from recovering.
The contents of virtual space have no end. The more time you spend checking your mobile, the more addicted you become.
What should we do instead of checking the mobile phone?
1. Time spent with loved ones
- Visit your family or friends.
- Cook food with your loved ones.
- Go for a walk together.
- Play group games with your family members or friends.
- Look through the family photo album together.
- Teach your loved ones one of your skills.
- Visit different environments such as libraries, art galleries, or exhibitions and make new friends.
- Start planning the party and invite your loved ones at the right time.
- Play with the kids.
2. Movement and exercise
- Go to the park near your home, run or walk.
- Go to the pool and swim.
- Register in the club.
- do yoga
- Ride a bike or skate.
- Bowling, billiards, tennis, and golf are also fun sports.
- If you have a pet, walk or run with your little friend.
3. Doing creative things
- Draw a picture.
- play an instrument
- Make something with online tutorials.
- Do origami.
- Buy some clay and try pottery.
- Buy a notebook and start journaling daily.
- Make a collage with your photos.
- Start blogging.
- Lie on the grass and look at the clouds.
- Please write a letter to anyone you want and tell them what you want in the letter. Later, decide whether to deliver the letter or not.
4. going out of the house
Instead of checking your mobile phone, you can visit these places:
- Library;
- Art gallery;
- massage center or jacuzzi;
- Market;
- the cafe;
- Museum;
- Zoos or animal care centers.
Spending time in a place you love is one of the best options for an ideal afternoon.
Some people do these things instead of checking their mobile phones:
- Sitting on a bench in the park and watching the flow of life;
- Planning a short-term trip around the city;
- playing with children;
- Storytelling, story writing, or story reading;
- planting trees or flowers;
- doing voluntary work and helping others;
- buying or making favorite foods and eating them;
- I played various mental games to engage the mind correctly and prevent Alzheimer’s and other cognitive diseases in older age.
5. Restoring peace
- take a shower
- get some sleep
- Take care of your skin.
- Massage your feet.
- Eat different fruits and take vitamin therapy. You can even make yourself a fruit salad.
- Lie down where you like and read your favorite book.
- meditate _
- Do mindfulness exercises.
- Light candles and incense in the environment and enjoy the good smell. You can even try making candles at home.
- Please make a list of your worries and find ways to overcome them.
- Go to nature.
- Sleep early at night. ( We discuss the importance of sleep in the best time to Sleep article.)
- Please write down your dreams and visualize them. Visualization improves your mood.
- Give the things you don’t want that are still useful to people in need.
- Spend some time with your inner child; Do things you enjoyed as a child, like watching your favorite cartoon.
6. Do the backlog
Like everyone else, you probably have a backlog of things that you are looking for time to do. Why don’t you put your phone down and care for these things right now? If you don’t remember what you did, we have suggestions for that too!
- Take your car to the car wash.
- Organize your wardrobe.
- clean the house
- learn something
- Please write down what you need to do and plan to do.
7. doing nothing
Today’s people think they should always have something to do and be involved. When they sit still and do nothing, they imagine that a job is lagging, or when they are alone, they constantly look for a hobby and finally check their mobile phone.
Have you ever tried doing nothing? Just sit back and let whatever happens happen. Let the thoughts pass through your mind, watch your feelings and pay attention to your surroundings. If you think it’s pointless, you’ve probably been influenced by media games and believe humans are only helpful when they’re busy doing something. Doing nothing will calm your mind and help you be more empathetic and productive.
How to implement these solutions?
You probably plan to do other things often instead of checking your mobile phone. For example, you decide to put your mobile phone aside and read a book 1 hour before going to sleep, but one week later, you realize that you don’t read a book anymore and have returned to your old bad habit. In this article, we will not say why this happens and its psychological causes, but we want to provide solutions to change the bad habit of checking the mobile phone. These solutions include:
- Put the mobile away from sight and oblige yourself not to reach for it. Start with a quarter and gradually increase the time.
- Do not use the alarm on your mobile phone. Buy an alarm clock and wake up to its sound in the morning.
- Set a time limit for yourself. For example, force yourself to use your mobile for only 10 minutes every hour. Stick to the rules you set for yourself.
- Use innovative phone software. By installing this software and entering the desired time, you will not be allowed to access social network applications until the countdown of the program is over. Some of them even limit the overall access to the phone!
- Designate home areas as “no-technology” zones, such as the bedroom or dining room table. None of the families in these areas can have a mobile phone, tablet, or any other digital device.
- Remove unnecessary software that takes up a lot of your time. Many of us have problems with Instagram’s explorer section; Does deleting Instagram from mobile make a notable change in your life? (Let’s face it, the answer to this question is no for most of us.)
- If you can, use a push-button phone instead of a smartphone, or at least turn it off when you’re not using it.
Last word; Take a step forward every day
According to a study conducted at the University of California, when you are distracted, it takes approximately 23 minutes to refocus on your desired subject, and the mobile phone is a distraction! Have you ever paid attention to your parents or grandparents? They check their phones maybe every 2 or 3 days, and in many cases, they even remember to take them out. So life without a mobile phone is not that impossible!
According to statistics, people check their mobile screens 334 times a day on average; Sometimes, they only look at the clock or notifications and sometimes do a general check. Our intention in this article was not to reduce these 334 times to zero at once. Replace checking your mobile phone with what we have taught you in this article and try to prevent it even 1 minute less every day. You will see the effect of this resistance and replace a good habit with a destructive one in your life a few months later, and you will thank yourself for this decision.
