When the alarm on my phone starts to screech each weekday morning at around quarter past seven, I reach over, bleary-eyed, to switch it off and then, without fail, I succumb to the urge to scroll.

Twitter, Instagram, email, WhatsApp – within moments of waking, I’m bombarded with information: sad news story, a meme, the holiday photos of someone I went to school with and haven’t seen in more than a decade. And, of course, reminders of everything I need to do over the coming 12 hours or so.

Surely starting the day with this onslaught of stimuli can’t be healthy, and yet I’m far from alone in kicking each morning off in this way. In 2013, a study found that 80% of smartphone users reached for their phone within 15 minutes of waking, and bear in mind that was 10 years ago, when we were all still using chunky borders on Instagram and updating our Facebook statuses. Our phones have surely become an even bigger part of our lives since then.

It’s not just first thing in the morning that digital dependency can be a problem. You might find that your work-life boundaries have been blurred thanks to a steady stream of work-related WhatsApps lighting up your home screen when you’re off the clock. You might feel compelled to check your work emails last thing at night – even though part of you knows that you’ll spend the next few hours mulling any particularly stress-inducing messages over again and again, rather than sleeping. Or maybe you just feel under pressure to respond to missives from your friends almost instantly, because they’ll keep assailing you with memes until you do so. 

So how can we break out of this cycle when we’re hooked on the dopamine rush of seeing a new message, a new notification, a new piece of digital affirmation? When grabbing your phone every couple of minutes is built into your muscle memory? We’ve asked experts to share their top advice on building a better relationship with your phone by putting better digital boundaries in place. Time to turn your notifications off, put aeroplane mode on, and breathe…

Start off with your screen time

It’s the number that none of us want to face up to, telling us in black and white just how many minutes (or, let’s face it, hours) we’re spending staring at our screens and scrolling. But, according to Alexis Powell-Howard, founder and managing director at Fortis Therapy and Training, getting to grips with your screen time is a good place to start if you want to be more mindful about your phone use.

“Setting digital boundaries is just like setting any other boundary,” she says. “You need to think about how much energy and time you want to put into something or someone and then work out how different that is to the actual output.” When it comes to phone use, this output is our average screen time per day. She suggests that you “reflect on how much of that [time] you think is reasonable” and use that to inform your new goal. 

Go gradual

It’s near impossible to break a habit overnight, and if you put too much pressure on yourself too quickly – by deleting all your social media accounts, for example – you’ll likely end up falling back into your old ways. “Going cold turkey often doesn’t have the desired effect in the long term when it comes to stopping perceived bad habits, so take your time and try a more gradual approach,” Powell-Howard suggests. “Try spending five minutes less on your phone each day until you’re at a point where you’re happy.”

Give your home screen a shake-up

Habits are difficult to break or change, explains therapist Juulia Karlstedt. “Our brain is often not making a conscious choice to engage with them: we just pick up our mobile phone, and before we know it, we are scrolling.” If we do want to make changes, it’s important to create “mindful choice points”, she adds. “Rather than just automatically doing an action, we choose the action we want to do.” One simple way of doing that is to change where our most frequently visited apps are on our home screens and devices are, so that we can’t rely on muscle memory to find them, Karlstedt says. Instead, we have to “consciously choose” to select them.

Think about how your phone makes you feel

“Reflection is another great way to change habits,” Powell-Howard suggests. “Try thinking about how spending an evening on your phone makes you feel. How does it affect your mood or your sleep quality? What would you like to be doing with your time instead? How does it affect your day when you wake up to your phone?”

It’s also important to grapple with the question of why we feel like we need to get back to that email or WhatsApp thread instantly. Summer Jupp and Zinzi Miller-Blake, holistic practitioners and co-founders of Ark, recommend asking yourself: “Does this need to happen now or can you offer yourself time before sending the response?” And what would really happen if you didn’t reply quickly?

“As soon as you respond to something outside of your chosen hours, you give people permission to do the same thing,” Powell-Howard adds. “Remind yourself: nothing truly bad comes from creating that boundary and delaying a response.”

Put time limits in place

Dr Elena Touroni, consultant psychologist and co-founder of The Chelsea Psychology Clinic, recommends deciding when and how you will use particular apps, then sticking to those rules. “It can be easy to get sucked in to social media and lose track of time, as it’s been developed to trigger the brain’s reward system,” she says. “If this is something you’re struggling with, set yourself clear boundaries around how often you use it. Be specific, eg on the commute to work or for one hour between 5-6pm.”

Schedule a device-free evening

It might be weekly, it might be monthly, but once you’ve decided when you’re going to embark on a mini digital detox, write it in your (paper) calendar, and stick to it. And if you’re worried that people will be wondering where you are? Jupp and Miller-Blake suggest letting loved ones know you are digitally disconnecting, so you can enjoy the time without worrying if someone is trying to contact you.

Consider what you want to do with your newfound time

“Once we’ve gotten off our devices, it is important to think about what we want to do with the time we spend not checking our phones,” Karlstedt advises. “The more we can develop alternative coping strategies and feel connected to our personal values, the less of a hold our mobile devices will have on us.” So, if you’re trying not to grab your phone first thing in the morning, it’s worth thinking carefully about what you want your new morning routine to look like. Could you fit in a speedy online workout class or an extra chapter of your book? And, as Karlstedt puts it, how does this routine fit more with the person you want to be and the way you want to start your day? 

Images: Getty