I Was Addicted to My Smartphone, So I Switched to a Flip Phone for a Month

This time of 12 months, everybody asks what you want least about your life, however they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”

My largest remorse of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time studies repeatedly clocked in at greater than 5 hours a day.

That’s solely an hour greater than the common American, however I nonetheless discovered it staggering to suppose that I spent the equal of January, February and half of March that tiny display screen (April too, if we solely rely waking hours).

Sure, some (a lot?) of that point was gainfully spent on actions that enrich my life or are unavoidable: work, household textual content threads, studying the news and maintaining with far-flung pals. But I reached for the machine greater than 100 instances every day in line with my report. And that greedy was more and more accompanied by the type of queasy remorse that I affiliate with unhealthy habits — that feeling I get after I drink too many glasses of wine, end the entire bag of bitter gummies or keep on the poker desk once I’m on tilt.

So this December, I made a radical change. I ditched my $1,300 iPhone 15 for a $108 Orbic Journey — a flip telephone. It makes telephone calls and texts and that was about it. It didn’t even have Snake on it.

It could seem unusual to go retro within the age of ChatGPT, synthetic intelligence-powered private stylists and Neuralink mind implants. But with superior expertise poised to embed itself extra deeply in my life (not my mind, although — please, by no means my precise mind), it appeared an ideal time to right course with the prevailing tech that already felt out of my management.

The More Boring, the Better

Making the change was neither straightforward nor quick. The resolution to “upgrade” to the Journey was apparently so preposterous that my provider wouldn’t enable me to do it over the telephone. I needed to go to the shop.

My 7-year-old stared in disbelief on the technological relic on show beside a set of sleeker units with contact screens. “That’s the phone you want? Are you joking?” she requested, rubbing her fingers over the Orbic Journey’s plastic keys.

It wasn’t my first alternative. The Journey has been panned by “dumbphone” connoisseurs. Not solely is the battery life laughably quick, it loses service when it’s on the transfer and needs to be rebooted to reconnect. But it was the one so-called minimalist telephone that my low-budget provider supported. (Ask your personal provider about what fashions it should help if you happen to embark on the same journey.)

There are superior choices with dependable service accessible, and a few even have mapping capabilities, music gamers and voice to textual content. The minimalist market has expanded in recent times, mentioned Jose Briones, who created a “dumbphone finder” to assist individuals select from 98 fashions he has tried. (The Journey didn’t make the record.)

“People are digitally fatigued after the pandemic, after having to be online all the time,” mentioned Mr. Briones, 28, who continues to be on-line sufficient to handle the Dumbphone subreddit and repeatedly publish critiques of the units on YouTube.

Mr. Briones nonetheless makes use of a smartphone throughout work hours, however at night time, on weekends and through holidays, he switches to a $299 Light Phone II.

That machine was “designed to be used as little as possible” by two founders postpone by tech builders who measure success by what number of hours customers spend glued to their apps. The credit score card-size telephone can textual content, make calls, hold a calendar, play music and podcasts, however doesn’t do far more than that.

Both the Light Phone and Mr. Briones’s smartphone, the $480 Hisense A9, have e-ink screens, like a Kindle’s.

“I have found personally that the more boring the screen,” Mr. Briones mentioned, “the easier it is to not be addicted to it.”

(Research bears that out. Simply switching a smartphone to grayscale mode helped individuals scale back their display screen time by 18 % in one research.)

The Journey’s stage of boringness was reassuring. Its essential display screen was tiny and uninteresting; a smaller one on the surface displayed the time. When I acquired it dwelling, I had hassle switching my service from the iPhone’s eSIM to the flip telephone’s bodily one. But quickly, I used to be slowly typing out texts and emoticons utilizing simply 9 keys. :-/

Texting something longer than two sentences concerned an excruciating quantity of button pushing, so I began to name individuals as an alternative. This was an issue as a result of most individuals don’t need their telephone to operate as a telephone.

On my first afternoon, I wanted to ask a dad or mum good friend for an advanced logistical favor, so I known as her and defined the state of affairs to her voice mail. I didn’t hear again and realized why once I opened my private MacBook that night. She had texted me, however Apple had routed it to my iMessages quite than my telephone. (Clawing again my communications from Apple required signing out of FaceTime on each one among its units.)

At least she had listened to my voice mail. Others I left have been by no means acknowledged. It was practically as dependable a technique of communication as placing a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea.

When family and friends did choose up the telephone, the conversations went far deeper than a textual content change would have. I had a heart-to-heart with a school good friend one morning whereas strolling my canine. She despatched me a prolonged textual content afterward thanking me for some recommendation I had given her.

I replied with a easy <3. On a dumbphone, your feelings are all simple — no sophisticated emoji shrimp-meets-smirk-meets-crown to decipher.

Flip Phone February?

Colleagues, pals, and family members who noticed the machine in my hand or observed my textual content bubbles go inexperienced have been equal components skeptical and envious. “I wish I could do that,” was a chorus I heard so usually that I now suppose Dry January needs to be adopted by Flip Phone February.

My black clamshell of a telephone had the impact of a clerical collar, inducing individuals to admit their display screen time sins to me. They hated that they checked out their telephone a lot round their kids, that they watched TikTok at night time as an alternative of sleeping, that they checked out it whereas they have been driving, that they began and ended their days with it.

In a 2021 Pew Research survey, 31 % of adults reported being “almost constantly online” — a feat possible only because of the existence of the smartphone.

This was the most striking aspect of switching to the flip. It meant the digital universe and its infinite pleasures, efficiencies and annoyances were confined to my computer. That was the source of people’s skepticism: They thought I wouldn’t be able to function without Uber, not to mention the world’s knowledge, at my beck and call. (I grew up in the ’90s. It wasn’t that bad. ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

“Do you feel less well-informed?” one colleague requested.

Not really. Information made its way to me, just slightly less instantly. My computer still offered news sites, newsletters and social media rubbernecking.

True, being deprived of the smartphone and its apps was sometimes highly inconvenient:

• I’ve got an electric vehicle, and upon pulling into a public charger, low on miles, realized that I could not log into the charger without a smartphone app.

• Planning ahead was a necessity without Google Maps because I typically use it to get anywhere more than 15 minutes away. I had to look up routes in advance and memorize the directions, reinvigorating a navigational part of my brain that had long been neglected.

• I received a robot vacuum for Christmas … which could only be set up with an iPhone app.

• Midway through the month, I got an “alert” email from my bank: I’d overdrawn my checking account. I usually monitor my balance on the bank’s smartphone app, and move money from a high-yield savings account when it’s getting low. I’d forgotten about this, and had also been procrastinating on a trip to the bank to deposit a paper check — something I usually do by snapping a photo of it in the mobile app. Whoops!

• Many of my online accounts, including the New York Times one that allows me to sign into its content management system to draft stories, require two-factor authentication via a smartphone app. Since you are reading this story, I clearly cheated on this one by turning on my smartphone and using it on Wi-Fi to get the code I needed.

Despite these challenges, I survived, even thrived during the month. It was a relief to unplug my brain from the internet on a regular basis and for hours at a time. I read four books. I did a very cool, “magic” jigsaw puzzle. I went on long runs with my husband, during which we talked, rather than retreating into separate audio universes with AirPods. I felt that I had more time, and more control over what to do with it.

After about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my “thumb twitch” — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.

“Your face looks less stressed,” my husband observed, when I asked him if he’d noticed any changes in me.

I struggle with middle of the night wake-ups. The night before the switch to the flip phone, I woke up at 1 a.m. and reached for my iPhone. I was then up until 4 a.m. holiday shopping and reading a long yarn about the mysterious deaths of two mountaineers in 1973.

But the Journey held no midnight enticements and my sleep improved dramatically. I still woke up but regularly fell back asleep within a few minutes.

“Our health is competing with many of these services and companies that are vying for our time and our energy and our attention,” said Matthew Buman, a professor of movement sciences at Arizona State University.

Dr. Buman just completed a study funded by the National Institutes of Health into strategies to get people off screens and moving more, from motivational messages when they’ve been on the screen too long (“You’re close to your goal. You can do this!”) to awarding screen time based on hitting exercise goals.

He hopes that the smartphone giants Apple and Google will make their screen time and well-being apps more effective by incorporating strategies that are proved to work. Dr. Buman’s program helped reduce the screen time of the 110 people in the two-year study, but he’s still assessing the findings to figure out which strategies were the most effective.

I told Dr. Buman about my own strategy — the flip phone. He said it probably made my mind feel more free and feel as if I had more time (both true), but that “in our society, it’s hard to sustain that in the long term.”

Dr. Buman, meet Logan Lane, 19. She first got an iPhone when she was 11, but came to hate how it made her feel so she switched to a flip phone. In 2021, when she was in high school in Brooklyn, she founded the Luddite Club for fellow students who wanted to distance themselves from technology and social media. Now a freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio, she is still a proud owner of a TCL FLIP. She told me that she hoped to remain smartphone-free for the rest of her life and to one day be a “mom with a flip phone.”

Breaking Bad Habits

I asked my 7-year-old what she thought of this “flip phone mom.”

“I like it better. You don’t look at your phone as much and you spend more time playing with me,” she said, making me feel both wonderful and terrible.

The part of my brain that wanted to Instagram every cute moment with my daughters withered away over the course of the month. I could just enjoy those moments rather than trying to capture them for others. I did take a handful of low-resolution, often-blurry photos with the Journey’s subpar camera. In this way, it reminded me of my own childhood. I have four good photos from Christmas this year rather than 100 or so.

My social circle shrank for the month. I didn’t send a blast of “Happy New Year” texts (too hard via flip) and I disappeared from Instagram (causing one friend to send me an “are you OK?” message). You might think I would have FOMO, but I didn’t — maybe because all the interactions I was having felt richer.

As much as I loved my flip phone life and the mental reset it provided, I think I might get fired if I failed to respond in a timely manner to Slack messages and emails as often as I did in the month. (Editor’s note: This is unfounded projection, clearly masking a deep and uncontrollable desire to return to the smartphone.) So I do plan to return to my iPhone in 2024, but in grayscale and with more mindfulness about how I use it.

What doesn’t help people control their screen time is simply keeping track of it, Laura Zimmermann, an assistant professor at IE Business School in Madrid, told me. She does research on consumer technology interaction and has been studying Google’s and Apple’s tools since they came out five years ago. Beyond tracking, the tools allow users to set time limits on particular apps, but these limits are easily overridden.

So much of our smartphone use is mindless, she said. We open the phone to do one thing, and then wind up checking five apps in a loop — and then do it all again a few minutes later.

“You really want to tackle the habit formation process,” she said.

With that in mind, I created a designated spot for my phone at home — a little coffee table with a plant and a charger. I’ll keep it there when I’m not working, so that it’s not on my person all the time and I can’t thoughtlessly paw at it. That’s where it will live at night, too, so it’s not by my bedside disrupting my sleep. I hope the sense of well-being this brings suffices as an enforcement mechanism.

Some tech critics, nevertheless, are skeptical that particular person methods are the way in which ahead.

“More and more people are starting to see that these platforms, these products are intentionally designed to be addictive,” said Camille Carlton, a policy manager at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit in California founded by former tech employees to raise awareness about the negative effects of the kinds of products they worked on.

Ms. Carlton compared smartphones and social media apps to junk food and tobacco, and suggested that lawmakers should regulate the design of these products to protect our health. Britain’s rules for tech products aimed at children, discouraging the use of infinite scroll, autoplay and addictive design features such as Snapchat streaks, were “fantastic,” she said. (Similar laws in the United States have been challenged by tech companies as unconstitutional.)

For now, though, it’s up to us.

And if you decide to do a February Flip Phone detox, I’d love to hear about it: kashmir.hill@nytimes.com. 🙂

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.