Intermittent fasting applied to the use of phone

AlexFightsAlex

AlexFightsAlex

Fapstronaut
I'm reading quite a lot lately about nofap, rebooting, self development, etc. and I came up with the following idea: The practice of intermittent fasting is quite common nowadays, but why not to apply it to the phone usage?

So I started at the beginning closing some social networks, then all of them, then watching my mobile twice day, and now just once. The idea is to be as far from the screen as possible, with the exceptions of phone calls, of course.

It is too soon to say that it's working, but so far I'm very happy with the result. Advantages:

- The day seems to stretch, because no more stupid time of phone use is involved.
- Less chances of looking at porn, hot girls, fantasize or similar.
- Increased the contact with people, because now it's a better idea to have a phone call, listen to the voice of the people and catch up.
- Another source of dopamine artificial boosts is closed.
- Less technology-saturated environment.
- I just don't want to be the guy that is stopping real conversations and interactions because of the phone.

Well, those are my thoughts, I hope it helps.
 
AlexFightsAlex said:
I'm reading quite a lot lately about nofap, rebooting, self development, etc. and I came up with the following idea: The practice of intermittent fasting is quite common nowadays, but why not to apply it to the phone usage?

So I started at the beginning closing some social networks, then all of them, then watching my mobile twice day, and now just once. The idea is to be as far from the screen as possible, with the exceptions of phone calls, of course.

It is too soon to say that it's working, but so far I'm very happy with the result. Advantages:

- The day seems to stretch, because no more stupid time of phone use is involved.
- Less chances of looking at porn, hot girls, fantasize or similar.
- Increased the contact with people, because now it's a better idea to have a phone call, listen to the voice of the people and catch up.
- Another source of dopamine artificial boosts is closed.
- Less technology-saturated environment.
- I just don't want to be the guy that is stopping real conversations and interactions because of the phone.

Well, those are my thoughts, I hope it helps.
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These days I had involuntary fasting of my phone due to a malfunction in the battery. It's been in the technical service for about a week or more, and I can confirm what you just say. It's pretty relaxing and empowering to not being comparing oneself with everybody else, less time wasted, more contact with my feelings, and realizing them (which has been pretty more stressful than expected), like the fact that I do have social anxiety as I prefer text messages over calls, it's weird, I like them but at the same time I'm looking forward to them to end, so there's something interesting to analyze there. I have been checking my social networks at home on the computer but since 3 days ago, as I ran out of wifi connection too, someone cut the telephone wire in pieces in the next block. But it's pretty different to check them out once a day like just messages and important notifications than being there scrolling endlessly for hours.
 
Just Rose said:
These days I had involuntary fasting of my phone due to a malfunction in the battery. It's been in the technical service for about a week or more, and I can confirm what you just say. It's pretty relaxing and empowering to not being comparing oneself with everybody else, less time wasted, more contact with my feelings, and realizing them (which has been pretty more stressful than expected), like the fact that I do have social anxiety as I prefer text messages over calls, it's weird, I like them but at the same time I'm looking forward to them to end, so there's something interesting to analyze there. I have been checking my social networks at home on the computer but since 3 days ago, as I ran out of wifi connection too, someone cut the telephone wire in pieces in the next block. But it's pretty different to check them out once a day like just messages and important notifications than being there scrolling endlessly for hours.
Click to expand...
I understand what you say about social anxiety over calls. And this is the fact: The phone calls are a little more challenging. The texts are way more comfortable because you can think about the answer, when to answer, whether to answer or not... but at the same time we tend to miss all of the beautiful things of interacting voice to voice, so to speak. So yeah, I tend to become lazy with this, but I want to change that as well.
 
Remove anything for the phone except for SMS and maybe WhatsApp.

Pick up the phone every morning, see the messages, turn it off and put it back, far away from you somewhere in some closet maybe.

I lived a half-year free with no phone and it was amazing.

But now we are forced to use it for banking, government services because they want u to have SMS control or some two-step verification! What the hell...

We are all made slaves to phones, even when we don't want to.
 
A few years ago I really enjoyed Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. He talks a lot about dopamine addiction, and the benefits of leaving the phone to do it's job - as a phone - and to leave social media behind.

Now that the phone got me to lay aside PMO after 40+ years in order to save my 20+ year marriage, I can say I'm rediscovering all the benefits I had when I did the digital minimalism route. The phone is turned off for hours during the day, and at night sits in my office. Highly recommended.
 
AlexFightsAlex said:
I understand what you say about social anxiety over calls. And this is the fact: The phone calls are a little more challenging. The texts are way more comfortable because you can think about the answer, when to answer, whether to answer or not... but at the same time we tend to miss all of the beautiful things of interacting voice to voice, so to speak. So yeah, I tend to become lazy with this, but I want to change that as well.
Click to expand...
You're right, also, I'm not that skilly to hide my feelings in my voice, it's pretty much harder than hiding them with nice written words and emojis.
 
I was blessed in my life to had a month of being phone and technology free. After that, I felt literally disgusted to use technology one more time, and my focus started to decline. Technology should be used in wise manner, otherwise it will be next addiction, and possible doorway to screwing focus ability. Meditation is helping me to balance my focus after using technology.

Recently I found that because of having computer since 14 yo year (2000), this contributed greatly to deficit in attention, school marks and overall greatly distorted self-esteem - also my connection with friends started to decline. I was thinking that I was too stupid to learn many things in school while in fact it was problems with concentration, not lack of ability to learn. Lack of consciousness in technology usage (paired with PMO addiction) screwed up my life much, now being 34 I'm literally learning from the scratch how to use my focus, how to concentrate and start and end tasks, especially long-term tasks.
 
indeed. use a phone only to call, or to message any friends or anyone else.

That is it.

Nowadays everybody uses it primarily for games, social media.

If you simply remove that from the phone, then what is the point of having it on u all day, and why the heck would u spend 700EUR on a stupid phone. If u just simply use it for calls, max 100EUR is more than engouh.

I do anything on my laptop, also for privacy reasons. I can control ads and traffic, privacy a lot better on a Linux os.
 
As someone else said, check out digital minimalism. Its pretty much an entire book on applying essentialism to our digital lives. Its not about get rid of this or get rid of that, its about managing what you use and how you use it. Phones are powerful tools and like any powerful it tool, that power can be used against you too. Nothing wrong with having games or social media and things of that nature on your phone as long as you manage it properly. Ultimately, its about what YOU value, not what you're supposed to value.
For some, they find a simple flip phone is all they need. For me, I like apps because they provide different benefits to my life like tracking my health and workouts, habits, how much time since I last pmo'd, journaling, the list goes on. I even use my iPhone as a remote for my fire tv because I lost the remote and don't feel like paying for another when there's a free app. It might be helpful to just dedicate a certain amount of time to no phone use which would be similar to an actual fast, and ideally this time would be to focus on harder tasks important to you. I usually suggest people don't use their phone for the first hour of being awake because the light can mess with your body's natural waking process. And beyond that, what phones do is basically borrow our attention, even if all you do is make phone calls. So we gotta be deliberate with when we let it borrow our attention and how valuable that attention is.
 
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