How To Stop Your Phone Addiction

Are you like these people?

According to some studies and polls, 49% of Americans admitted to being addicted to their phones. If we round it up to 50%, it means 1/2 person are addicted to their cell phone. Just know, on the other end of the 50%, some are addicted but they probably didn't even have the balls to admit it.

If you clicked on this article, you're probably one of them. Phone addiction touches the entire world because our phones have become so significantly important for us: they enable us to keep in contact with our loved ones, close business deals, and check our workout programs, it's like a small "all-in-one" gadget that can help in every walk of life.

Quite frankly, if I'm totally honest, I do use my phone often too throughout the day. I check messages, speak with my loved ones, read and learn on it, it's a truly helpful device for our everyday lives, and some studies have seen that social media use, if used correctly, could help improve mental health instead of affecting it negatively.

However, for the majority of the population, too frequent phone usage rhymes with negative consequences. It rhymes with procrastination. I might use my phone quite often, but when I do the work, I do the work. And when I go and read, I read. And when I'm speaking to someone, I'm speaking to someone. But just take a look around the street, the workplace, or the parties: all of those weak men playing video games or scrolling on their phones like children while they could connect with their friends next to them.

Sure, social media is important, and a phone is important, it's a magical instrument that our ancestors would have exploited too, and that I recommend exploiting, this thing is super useful.

But, you probably developed a phone addiction, and if you did, this sounds bad. Your brain has made neurological changes that push you to come back to your phone habits all the time. This is addiction, the repetition of a behavior that you can't quit because it started a huge dopamine spike.

How addiction works, explained simply

When you eat junk food, smoke cannabis, or a cigarette, or when you check your social media notifications excessively, your brain rewards you. Junk food, cannabis, cigarettes and your phone's notifications are hyper stimulant: they provide a hyper stimulus of pleasure.

Your brain hasn't adapted, in your ancestor's past, to deal with a notification that makes you feel important, and socially accepted. It can't deal with a huge spike in pleasure when biting into a burger for the 4th time this week. I mean yes, it deals with it by making an addiction.

You see, Junk food, cannabis, cigarettes, and your phone's notifications spike up your dopamine: the hormone of pleasure. Once your dopamine is "spiked up", after some time, it goes down, even going down a little bit each time below baseline, setting a new "baseline". In other words, each time your dopamine spikes heavily in an addiction phase, it then drops significantly, dropping even under the baseline of dopamine you had in your day-to-day life, which makes life look mundane and boring.

This often reinforces the addictive behavior. Since you dropped in dopamine, your brain wants to seek more. It seeks more and more pleasure because once you've tasted this dopamine spike, it doesn't like being low dopamine. That's why some people can't pass a single day without smoking cigarettes or eating junk food: they're stuck in this addictive loop.

Luckily for you, we can get out of that, but it's not easy. You see, the way to break an addiction is to increasingly restore your dopamine system so it's "balanced" and healthy. Basically, we want to erase the addictive behavior from your daily life. We want the neurological paths (the paths that affected your brain and "installed" the addiction) to disappear. However, there are two ways of doing this: step by step and once and for all.

The problem with the step-by-step is that sometimes the slow process makes people fall back into the addiction and it never really ends, the change wasn't aggressive enough.

The problem with the once and for all process is that often it's too abrupt and people can't handle a few days without it: the withdrawal symptoms are too strong.

Ah... yes. The withdrawal symptoms. When you stop any addiction, your brain is confused, it doesn't like what you're doing. It's like "Hey man, where's my cannabis!" so it screams at you to get it back into your system. It wants the dopamine spike, it craves it so intensely, that it's going to try to trick you into falling back into the addiction.

Withdrawal symptoms can be a heightened emotional state, sadness, depression, fatigue, insomnia even in some extreme cases, lack of sexual desire, I mean you know the rest, only bad stuff. Sometimes some very specific things can happen to your body. Sometimes you will have abdominal pain, stomach issues, diarrhea, you name it! Sometimes you'll crave some stupid stuff, it's just your brain throwing things at you hoping you fall into the trap.

If you manage to stay strong, after a few months, the withdrawal symptoms will become less and less important, until they are completely removed. Your dopamine system will reset itself to be healthy, your addiction pathways in your brain have changed, and you're starting to live a new life.

To come back to what I was saying, the step-by-step method and the once-and-for-all method don't always work effectively. Sometimes you need to dive deeper and study your addiction, or simply work on yourself for months or even years before being able to really quit it. And I found that the BEST method to break through addictions is to have a breakthrough. "But how do I have a breakthrough, that's just luck right?" Well no.

If you're addicted, you need to get slapped in the face.

This is a real breakthrough. For example, you can find an interesting, feminine, polite girl you love, but you know she's not going to put up with your cannabis addiction. You've been trying to quit, quit, quit but you never managed to, and so now you feel desperate. However, if you really, deeply want that girl, if you love that girl, or if you're very interested in her, this gives you a real reason. This highlights an important addiction truth, at least in my opinion: IF YOU HAVE A REAL REASON, BEATING YOUR ADDICTION BECOMES WAY SIMPLER.

If you have the TRUE reason, the real reason to do it, be it the girl, or the job offer, or the relationship issues (she wants to quit you because of your bullshit), or whatever that is impactful enough and which provokes a fear in you (the fear of losing the girl, the fear of not getting her, the fear of missing the job opportunity etc), then it's going to be way, way, way easier to quit your addiction.

This is where the "once and for all" technique can really work: get slapped in the face, and quit it once and for all. But for this, you already need to have a sort of masculine side of aggressiveness, the "fuck it I'm quitting that now!". You also need the self-improvement habits and mindset to propel you to healthier habits. What I'm trying to say here is that not only should you work on quitting your addiction, but you should also work on improving every single aspect of your life outside of it, especially your mental health since addiction springs from bad mental health.

Change your environment, and make it favorable to quitting your addiction. But now, how can we apply this to phone addiction? Let's see.

How to quit your phone addiction

Okay, so we've established that the best way, at least in my opinion, to quit an addiction is 1) to quit it once and for all or to reduce it little by little, 2) to have a real reason and 3) to get slapped in the face.

For example, if you wanted to quit smoking drugs, you could read an article on all the crimes perpetrated for the drug dealing business (murders, crimes, assassinations, torture, etc).

If you wanted to quit eating junk food, you could read an article on estrogenics (artificial estrogens, present in junk food and other products) and the impact it has on male fertility in the next and next generations (estrogenics can lead to infertility in fishes across at least 3 generations after the original estrogenic exposure). Therefore, knowing the danger of your actions on your family tree offspring will be one big slap in the face.

For phone addiction, you need to realize that 1) you're destroying and rewiring your brain and you're affecting your social relationships, 2) you are not as productive or like-minded as you could be so you're wasting money, opportunities, and relationships, and 3) you might pass next to a relationship with your future wife or your future man because if you have high standards, he or she won't put up with your bullshit of phone addiction.

Sure, it might be less convincing compared to other "more serious" addictions such as drug addictions, but if you're really addicted to your phone, this increases the risk for depression, and this is also a slap in the face. Phone addiction also increases suicide risks. Wow. We're getting quite serious now.

Since this addiction is less dangerous than a drug addiction in the majority of cases, for example, I suggest quitting it step by step. You cannot totally erase your phone usage, so a once-and-for-all technique is not that useful. So, start step by step. We only want to lessen the impact it has on our lives and the time we spend on it. To do so, start with this actionable step.

Actionable step: find an app you spend time with for fun and not for speaking to people (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, video games of all sorts) and erase it NOW.

Did you do it?

Are you sure you did it?

Yes?

Perfect.

Now we can move on. If you didn't do it, no need to continue to read this article. You don't have the balls to take responsibility for your life. There is something I didn't precise since I thought you would already know that: quitting an addiction is composed in the majority of WILL. You need to have the WILL, the WANT, the GUTS to fight. If you do not, then I don't think you would be reading this article.

If you actually WANT for REAL to quit your addiction, you'll make it. It's when you stop bullshitting yourself with excuses that you can do it. So, begin by erasing an app, and then, begin reducing the amount of time you spend on your phone.

I recommend checking your phone's statistics, and seeing how much time you spend on Instagram for example. If it's 4 hours and 22 minutes, next time reduce it to 4 hours and 20 minutes. Then 4 hours and 10 minutes. Then, 3 hours and 40 minutes. Our goal is to rinse and repeat and get "addicted" to this positive feedback loop.

Even the slightest progress is progress, so if you're moving in the right direction, it's only a matter of time. But remember, the two main most important things are a real reason and a WILL to quit. If you lack a real reason by the way, especially if you're a man (men are often motivated by women), I recommend trying to get close to a woman: a very powerful motivating factor.

Remember: you have nothing to lose. So, give it your all. But ultimately, even tho I can give you every single idea and actionable steps in the world, which will probably help, remember that most of the time it's a question of will, of consistency, and of actual, real reasons.

If you are consistent at trying to quit, making even the slightest progress, and you have the WILL to win, and you have the GUTS to give up your addiction, and you have ACTUAL REASONS behind to push you to victory, I can assure you you'll get out of that rabbit hole. I also recommend having like-minded people around you who could help you quit that stuff.

One final lesson that I originally learned from Alex Hormozi (if you read the other articles you probably know about him already), an entrepreneur and co-founder of the Skool platform which amasses millions each year, the biggest motivator in life is FEAR. So if your real reason is backed by FEAR, it's even more motivating.

Fear can help you so much in achieving your goals. If I put a gun to your head and tell you to stop going on Instagram, you'll stop. So, if you can find a tangible form of fear, maybe perhaps missing the opportunity of a great relationship or a great job or business opportunity, this can help you motivate yourself enough to quit the addiction.

Just keep going

Sometimes it's going to be hard. You're going to keep falling and falling back, having setbacks again and again, and I wish you wouldn't but in the vast majority of cases, realistically, it happens. Sometimes you learn from your mistakes, sometimes you don't, but overall it's very difficult. And until you stop lying to yourself and you get a real reason and a real motivation backed by fear and you shift your mindset, it's going to be very difficult to quit your addiction.

So, I suggest for your phone addiction to start small, and increasingly reduce time spent, and since we're at it, I wanted to speak about "external addiction blockers". You see, when you try to quit a phone addiction you might be tempted to say "I don't need phone time restricting or anything, I'm strong enough to quit myself!", but oftentimes, if you do not change your environment, your brain is going to go back to your old bad habits.

So make it a rule to buy a box that is unopenable where you can put your phone into for hours upon HOURS. You can keep an old cellphone where you can only call people for emergencies in case, but let your "modern device" be in a closed box for hours that cannot be opened. I recommend this one from Amazon since it looks to work fine and it's not very expensive (I don't get any money from making publicity for this product by the way).

You can also install apps to restrict the time spent on specific apps or on your phone overall, you can even tell your friends to stop answering your messages if you used your phone for more than two hours for example. I also suggest simply taking it out of your environment: after use, putting it not on your desk but in a closet or some places of sorts, and generally hiding it from your view.

I believe that if you use external blockers, such as "time-restriction apps" and/or "time-restriction boxes" and environmental change, it can help A LOT. Some people will say "Well okay but you're not building any kind of discipline so you're going to fall back into your addiction as soon as you stop using these techniques", and this might be true, this is why you need to practice self-improvement and learn to resist the temptation (you can watch Andrew Huberman or Hamza Ahmed guides on willpower) so you can build more resilience and discipline as to resist temptations.

As always, a real reason and motivation is what truly works.

Conclusion

If you have a phone addiction, here are the steps to follow. On a shallower level, try to quit once and for all many times. If you struggle doing so, reduce usage little by little, and use external blockers such as the product I recommended to you (the one where you lock your phone in a box) or time-restricting apps. You can even put time-restricting apps on your phone and type a password that you will purposefully forget so you cannot modify the restriction so you can't "cheat" on your restriction time.

On a deeper level, I suggest trying to find out what caused your phone addiction in the first place (often times it's deeply routed mental health problems or just mental health problems) and treat this alone or through therapy. I suggest always having a support group because it could help.

Stop having the mentality of a victim, and shift your mindset from "I'm addicted to this" to "I was addicted". Instead of thinking "I'm quitting", say "I quitted". Understand that it has no power over you and that you can quit it if you only have enough will. In reality, your addiction is rooted in your brain, but you can undo it with enough will, abstinence, and effort.

Then, find a real reason, back it up with fear, and as always you need to really have the WILL and the WANT to quit it. But even if you lost the "fire" for a while, CONTINUE QUITTING. Perform without purpose. Really, perform without purpose, even when the weather is bad and you're tired from walking all of this long distance, keep on walking. If you stumble and fall, forgive yourself and learn from your mistakes, get back up, and keep on walking.

Get people around you who help you and support you so you're not alone. Take cold showers, double down on self-improvement, meditate, and try to do practices such as these to reset your dopamine baseline.

You'll be faced with adversity: withdrawal symptoms, but if your reason is real and it breaks your heart or deeply frustrates you to ever go back to your previous addictive material (cigarette, phone, drugs, junk food, etc) then you'll persist. And you'll win. It might take months or years. But DO NOT GIVE UP. There is hope. Find people who support you, not being alone really helps. And if your mental health is declining rapidly, I suggest speaking out. Sometimes you need to. And also, don't take everything so seriously. Learn to see the positive. It also helps. Laughing is one of our greatest medicines.

Thank you for reading. I hope this article can help you. I'm not an expert but I try to help my readers, and so the one thing I can tell you is to have a real reason, apply what I told you here, be consistent, and with time you'll win. But be very patient. Turning to religion can also help by the way for some serious addictions, but for phone addictions, it's not that serious for most people, not all, but most. I also suggest consulting with a medical professional if you really feel it would help you.

Anyway, thank you for reading and I'll see you next time.

By the way, are you interested in losing weight? Well, I got what you need! Here is the weight-loss course I made! It's an effective and no-nonsense to long-lasting sustainable weight-loss, used by a 16-year-old to lose weight, change his life forever, and keep the weight off!

On top of that, not only is it cheaper than most courses and it provides EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WEIGHT-LOSS, it also has 12 FREE BONUSES, such as habit trackers, workout plans, guides to losing weight on vacations, bulking up after weight-loss to gain muscle or even optimizing your testosterone. For FREE.

If you're interested, click on the button below.