Who Asked? // Is it really the damn phones?

For my Human Interest Stories for Broadcasting class, our final big project is to make a documentary, so I decided that I’d vastly limit my phone usage for a couple of days and record my progress. Screen time has always been a problem for me. In middle school, my parents tried to set all kinds of limits on my phone — which I continually found ways around, probably to my own detriment. There’s just something so satisfying about being able to scroll mindlessly for an hour or two and let your brain dissolve into mush. 

We hear all the time that phone usage is a problem. Social media is making us depressed. Texting makes us lazy. Our brains are rotting, and we’re doomed to waste years of our lives bleaching our eyes with blue light. And there’s some truth to these assertions. Excessive phone use correlates with increased depression, anxiety and poorer-quality sleep. People are spending an average of five hours every day on their phones. If you started using a phone at 12 and now you’re 20, then you’ve already spent around a year and a half of your life on your device. 

So could cutting back on our phone usage really make things so much better? Were our parents right all along? Can our biggest struggles with anxiety, depression, insomnia and procrastination be boiled down to one culprit — that damn phone? 

The parameters of my experiment were simple. 15-minute time limit on my Instagram app, plus no looking at my phone right before bed or immediately after waking up. Oh, and no bringing it into the bathroom. And I wasn’t allowed to replace Instagram scrolling with YouTube Shorts or a game, either. 

It was strange to break the patterns I’ve grown so used to. I couldn’t remember a night where I went to bed without at least a half hour of mindless Reels and trying not to go check everyone’s stories when I woke up felt odd. I still checked my messages just to make sure no one exploded in my sleep, though. It even felt weird to go to the bathroom without my phone. What am I supposed to do — stare at the wall? A couple times, I’d be answering a text and then go straight to opening Instagram without even thinking, realizing only a couple minutes later. 

It was most difficult when I was waiting for something else to happen, and on the first day, I definitely felt this itchy boredom. If I had 10 minutes before leaving for class, that obviously wasn’t enough time to start a new book or pull out my knitting, but I couldn’t doomscroll either. I relegated myself to sort of just … existing. 

Despite the urge and habits remaining strong, a lot of it was also easier than I thought it would be. I actually locked myself out of my apartment when I took out the recycling because I forgot to bring my phone — AKA, where I keep my keycard. Slowly, I realized that my urge to check Instagram was never the product of genuine interest in what my friend or favorite creator was posting, but this sort of unnameable itch. I just wanted to turn my brain off. 

When I was feeling more annoyed or anxious, I wanted to check my phone even more. At some point along the line, I created the association for myself that scrolling mindlessly was a salve for my uneasiness. But the few times I have let myself check Instagram, I don’t feel waves of relief. I just feel kind of dissatisfied. 

The first night, I slept better than I had in weeks and didn’t wake up once — although I did have a weirdly vivid dream. Throughout the second day, I felt refreshed, and while I still had to stop myself from scrolling while waiting for my Chick-fil-A, it started feeling easier and easier to resist. I felt renewed, my spirits were high and my energy was up. Could limiting my phone use really be turning my whole life around?
And then I got my period. 

The second night, I tossed and turned, kept in a sort of half-sleep by painful cramps. All I wanted to do was look at my phone, especially because waking up randomly always makes me anxious. Everything in me craved the pretty lights and colors from a little square in the dark. But I refused to break my streak. 

On the third day, the day I’m writing this, I’ve felt crappy. Unmotivated. Hard on myself. I watched three YouTube videos on my TV, which I decided wasn’t cheating. My good mood evaporated, and I checked Instagram a couple more times. I still didn’t break any of my rules, but it felt like a much less inspiring end to the experiment. 

So here’s the true answer. There are things in our lives that suck, that will make us want to lay around all day and push off our homework, that have nothing to do with our phones. We cannot possibly discover a single solution to any bad days ever, because sometimes life means just having bad days.

But despite everything not becoming perfect in three days, I still feel that looking at my phone less made me feel better. I can’t even entirely describe how, but my brain just felt less muddy. And while it wasn’t totally easy, the accountability of the experiment kept me on course. As I round out the third day, I realize that I don’t want to just go back to how I was using my phone before. Maybe these new habits won’t cure me, but I think it’s worth it just to feel a little better.