Reducing Screen Time

How to Reduce the Time We Spend Looking at Screens

As finals are quickly approaching, we might find ourselves with an addiction to our phones. As too much screen time could actually be physically unhealthy for your eyes. It can also be academically stressful as we find ourselves with less and less time to study. Our phones can be an easy way to distract us and eat up a lot of valuable time. Here you can find 3 strategies/tools to help you reduce your screen time. 

1. Track the time you spend on apps

• Tracking the amount of time we spend on certain apps can give us some perspective on how we spend our time.
• Most smartphones have a built-in tracker that records the amount of time we spend on each app.
• If you own an iPhone, you can head to your settings app and you should see a tab for "Screen Time"
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• Clicking it will lead you to a group of statistics of time spent on each app or type of app and the time of day or the days of the week you spent on each app.
• If you have an Andriod, don't worry. Most androids have this feature and the path is very similar. If you can't find the specific settings on your phone, there should be a search option at the top of your settings

2. Turn off notifications

• This might be one of the most helpful things to help one could to help with our phone addictions. 
• Turning off your notifications will help distractions as you try and focus on other things.
• When you get a social media notification or text, we might tell ourselves it will just be to reply and get off and then you find yourself in a 45-minute binge scrolling through your feed. 

3. Turn your phone on grayscale

• This might seem like a very weird approach to reducing our screen time. But if you remove some of the enjoyment of using our apps, it could help a lot. 
• Just use the search function in your settings app to find "grayscale" settings.