I unlocked my iPhone screen at the precise moment that my weekly screen time notification appeared – accidentally dismissing it before I could take a screenshot – and promptly erupted into a rage. I had spent an excruciating week resolutely not looking at my phone, part of a month-long effort to whittle my daily screen time down from more than four hours a day to less than an hour, with the hope of improving my mental wellbeing (and possibly carving out a career as an inspirational speaker). But my efforts felt futile without being able to post evidence online about how offline I had become. I frantically Googled how to retrieve notifications (you cannot) and – briefly – considered re-creating my screen time report in Photoshop.
Over the past decade or two, my efforts at self-improvement have taken various forms: the year where I read 105 books; the period during which I gave up all forms of sugar including, misguidedly, fruit; and a dalliance with shamanism that, I’m sorry to say, included interpretive dance. Some might suggest I would be better off learning to cook, or drive, or type with more than one finger, but they can’t reach me because I no longer look at my phone.
“Project Screen Time” began after I listened to a podcast in which a comedian claimed that you shouldn’t look at social media within two hours of waking up, because it messes with your dopamine, or something. This is my favourite kind of advice: uncited, from the mouth of a layperson who can’t remember how they acquired it. But I gave up opening Instagram first thing in the morning and … it worked. Miraculously, choosing not to sandblast my brain with pictures of other people’s abs before I was fully conscious did improve my mood. Even better, I found that if I didn’t look at my socials first thing, I could often resist until after lunch. As is typically the case when I embark on a new regime, this brief moment of clarity quickly became a frenzy.
I traded one obsession (looking at my phone) for another (not looking at it). In my second week, I was down to two hours of screen time a day. By my third, it was an hour and a half – and I became determined to get it below 60 minutes. Part of me was impressed that I could appear normal while quietly (nobly?) wielding this superpower. However, I was unable to keep my gift a secret. I soon began boring friends, acquaintances and service workers with tales of my herculean discipline.
Before long, my quest was disrupting my day in new ways. I resented having to open Maps on my phone, so I found myself getting lost while cycling to appointments. If I wanted to show someone a picture or a meme, I would ask to Google it on their phone, rather than my own. I refused to order Ubers after nights out (the painstaking process of watching a cab crawl towards my location while the minutes of screen time racked up was torturous) and instead offered to transfer the money (later, on my laptop) to whoever did.
I became increasingly frustrated that my screen time wasn’t lower. I would get to 2pm having barely glanced at my phone and yet the data would claim I had used it for 36 minutes. I began to think conspiratorially. My screen time was displayed in a graph split into blue (social), turquoise (entertainment) and orange (productivity and finance). But the vast majority of the chart was made up of undelineated grey. What was the grey?!
Eventually, screen time was added to the list of subjects (including the music and lore of Taylor Swift and my attraction to Ron DeSantis) that I was forbidden from discussing at home. My lowest point arrived as I was showing a friend my weekly stats, which gives you a breakdown of how long you’ve spent on each app. He queried why “Settings” was my third most-used application – and I had to admit it was because that was how I compulsively checked my screen time.
My tantrum over being unable to memorialise my lowest-ever screen report (51 minutes a day!) was a wake-up call; reducing my screen time had become its own form of phone addiction. Rather than escaping the need to seek validation from strangers online, I had happened upon a new way to earn their approval. But all was not lost. The realisation nudged me towards acceptance that I will probably never be a moderate person; I can’t rely on any form of self-regulation (my latest regime – skincare – revolves around an LED mask that automatically switches off after 10 minutes, otherwise I fear I would be wearing it to the office like a DayGlo Hannibal Lecter).
In the end, I stopped trying to recapture my screen-time report, instead screenshotting the less aesthetic chart in my settings to post online. Within minutes, DMs flooded in from people congratulating me on my self-restraint and asking how I had managed to quit my phone. I replied to them all, dopamine flooding my brain’s starved reward centre. That day, my screen time was three hours and 36 minutes.
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• This article was amended on 13 August. A photograph taken in Kefalonia, Greece, was previously captioned incorrectly as having been taken in Tenerife, Spain.
