Practice Mindfulness to Break Free from Digital Addiction

There are mostly two types of people nowadays. The ones that see no problem with overusing their devices and thus spend hours daily using them and there are the ones that realize that there is a problem but really struggle to keep their phones at check.

Sadly, only a few people really managed to set up rules and systems that made them have a healthy relationship with their digital devices. But with the right tools and tricks you can become one of them.

Most of what I teach about this topic is about setting up a system that helps you manage your screen time, because I firmly believe that those devices are so addictive that we can not just withstand them by mental power. We want to make it easier, for example, by just leaving your phone in a separate room. Still, it does additionally make sense to increase our mental ability to observe and control upcoming desires and urges.

That is what this post is about, mindfulness is a technique you can add to your arsenal that helps you to be more conscious in your actions. To be mindful is simply to be more aware of everything around you and inside of you. The power it has is that the more you train it, the more you will realize how certain feelings, urges, or desires arise in you and that you then consciously decide if you want to follow this desire or not.

Also, it helps you to realize in which moments you’re most prone to wasting time on screens, and then you can adapt accordingly.

Understanding Digital Addiction and Its Impact on Mental Health

Here comes the mandatory part where I tell you how bad all of your devices are, if you overuse them. If you, by chance, have heard this a thousand times already, feel free to skip this part. Truly no hard feelings if you do.

If you, however, are not so sure what negative effects too much screen time might have on you, keep on reading, you might learn something surprising.

Digital addiction isn’t just about spending too much time on your phone, though that’s definitely part of it. You see, addiction for many is a term only reserved for hard drugs and similar. I would advise you to adopt a different view on it. Some of addiction’s main criteria according to DSM-5, are spending more time than intended, losing control over how much you use the substance/behavior, or neglecting important parts of your life.

Now, if you’re truly honest with yourself how much of that is true for your relationship with your devices?

If you are not a crazy exception, you are at least to some extent addicted to your phone, PlayStation, or similar. (I think phones are the worst) So then what is the matter? Here are some reasons why it absolutely sucks to be addicted to your phones/devices!!

• Your attention-span will gradually decrease
• You basically sabotage your own reward (dopamine) system, conditioning yourself to only search for instant rewards. Making it extremely hard to put time and energy into projects for the future.
• Your sleep might suffer from it to the point of insomnia. Especially if you are used to scrolling / playing video games in the evenings.
• Digital addiction has also been linked to various forms of anxiety and even depression.

All that you need to know is that, you will 100% live a happier and more fulfilled life if you’re not addicted to your phone.

Foundational Mindfulness Practices for Digital Detox

The best defintion of mindfulness that I ever heard was: The practice of being fully present and aware of your current experience—without overreacting or getting lost in thoughts. It is a powerful technique if you have mastered it.

I mean, think about this: most people are either very present but tend to overreact as they lose conscious control of their actions, or they are more distant and do not get lost, but also are not really present in the moment. Mindfulness helps you to combine the two and thus enable you to enjoy life while still obtaining conscious control.

Now, I hope you see how this ties into digital addiction. This is exactly how I imagine the perfect relationship with your digital devices. To be fully present when you use them for whatever task (fun or work). But always keeping control never, getting sucked too deep into the rabbit hole so that you completely loose sense of time and waste hours scrolling feeds or similar.

So, how do you practice mindfulness and how does it actually look in action? Here, it makes sense to divide mindfulness practices into two parts. For one, you can try to practice being mindful in different specific situations, or you can do some exercises like mindful meditation, where you sit down and practice your mindful skills, but then you need to translate what you have learned into life.

Of course for best results you combine the two.

Mindful meditation

Many have tried meditation, many do not know what it really is, many do not like it… That is why I try to make this as simple as I can: The practice of mindful mediation can easily be described in a four easy points:

• Search yourself a quiet place where you are not disturbed.
• Sit down in a position where you can be comfortable for 5 to 30 min. You choose how long, start short and work your way up.
• Set a timer and close your eyes. Now try to concentrate on particular aspect of the moment. The simplest is your breath, it is always there flowing, but it can be anything: body feelings, sounds, observing your mind, stillness…(try out what works best)
• Anytime your thoughts start wandering gently take them back to whatever you are focusing on.

Now any meditation is sustained focus, the unique part of mindful meditation is that here the key moment is not the sustained attention but when you realize that your mind started to wander and then bringing it back in a loving way. Because this is the skill we want to have in real life. To be aware of when our mind starts going to places we did not intend it to go and then being able to decide whether we let it go there or bring it back.

That is all there is to mindful meditation against digital addiction. The key is obviously to practice it regularly. Important it does not have to be daily, anything you do is better than nothing, even five minutes a week but regularly. I try to get three 10-minute practices into my week. (especially when you are stressed from work, this helps you calm down as an added bonus)

Daily mindful practice

There are countless little mindfulness techniques to integrate into your life. It is impossible to do them all, thus I will only try to give you the most important ones.

1. The deep breath technique

This technique is the simplest one, but I would say it is also the most powerful if applied consistently to your life.

The technique goes as follows: you just pause whatever you are doing, take a deep breath, relax, and for a moment turn inward and observe. How do you feel and what is going on inside of you. You try not to judge, but to explore. The key here is to break the autopilot mode. Instead of just doing what you habitually would do, take this break, analyze all the needs and urges of your body, and then consciously decide what you are going to do now.

The power of this technique is that it is such a simple tool; you can do it anytime. It’s the easiest way to add more mindfulness to your day. The hard thing is to make a habit out of it. That is why I was looking for specific recurring moments where I could do it to make it a routine. For example, every time I come home, I stop, take a breath, and turn inward for a moment.

You’re gonna be surprised how much this little technique can teach you about yourself.

The three W’s

This is a technique specifically designed for your digital life. The three w’s stand for what for, why now, what else. These are three easy questions you can ask yourself before using your phone or similar, to be more mindful about your use.

So, next time you reach for your phone just ask yourself:

• What do I wanna use it for?
• Do I have to do this now? or was it just an impulse?
• What else could I do to reach the same outcome? (maybe you wanted to relax and thus grabbed your phone but maybe reading a book helps you relax more)

Many times, you want to use your phone to maybe check a text message, but in the end you spend up half an hour scrolling through instagram. These techniques help you to use your device only for what you intended, and if you only grabbed it out of routine, you will realize this and just put it down again.

The observation technique

This is a exercise that helps you to get used to observing more. Observing what is going on inside of you and around you is a key factor of mindfulness. We want to know what is going on before we engage with it.

To practice this we are going to … observe. Again simple and easy. When you’re sitting in the bus for example try to focus on one of your senses, and try to take it all in. What are you hearing? If you fully focus on only one sense you are going to dive deep and explore many things you did not before. Try doing this some times a day.

This just helps to make it a habit to observe with all our senses, because we tend to focus a lot on visuals. But every sense has its own world attached to it.

Mindful Alternatives to Compulsive Digital Behaviors

The thing about breaking digital addiction isn’t just about putting your phone in another room (though that helps). It’s about understanding why you’re reaching for it in the first place. Most of us grab our devices during what I call “micro-moments of boredom” – those 30-second gaps when we’re waiting for coffee to brew or standing in line at the grocery store.

Once you start to be more mindful about your digital use, you will eventually spot many recurring moments where you compulsively reach for your phone. Once you have identified some, you can also start implementing some barriers.

There are two approaches here: If you feel like there is an important need to be met. Like after work when you come home you need to laugh a bit, I would look for alternative ways to get that. If there is no real need, you feel like you just reach for your phone habitually then add a mindfulness technique there: take a deep breath, or observe your surroundings. (there are also many more complex breathing techniques you could do)

Conclusion

Let me be honest with you – breaking free from digital addiction isn’t something that happens overnight. You need to combine many different techniques and steps. Adding some more mindfulness can help you a lot on this journey, and it can greatly enhance other parts of your life as well. It is never a bad thing to be mindful of what you do.

The key with everything we looked at is to make it a habit. This takes some time. The more you do it the faster it will be habitual, but the first three weeks are hard usually. So set yourself some reminders and try to stay on it.

The compound effect of these small practices can be incredible. If you do not quit you can transform the relationship with your devices in a few months completely, but yea the first one will suck.

You do not have to do everything; some action is always better than no action and try having some fun on the way 😉