Be your own parental control.
Minute For Your Health #42
Recently I decided to spend less time on Instagram.
First I thought I would just ‘do what I decided’.
I quickly realised I was still spending just as much time as usual.
So I got serious and used the parental control function on my phone to set a time limit after which the app would become unavailable.
Then came the excuses. Each day I would find a reason why I needed a little more time on instagram - so day by day I increased the timer.
Until eventually it was set to 45 minutes, which wasn’t really reducing my time spent on instagram at all 😂
So I got really serious and decided to turn Instagram off for a month.
I noticed huge changes within just a few days:
I’m sleeping faster, deeper and longer
I feel more rested during the day
I feel like I have more mental clarity or mental space
I’ve been able to get back into a routine of quiet time and prayer
Not surprisingly - this is exactly what the research tells us about reducing screen time. But knowing the studies and feeling the changes is so different.
It’s actually almost mind blowing to me what a difference this has made 🤯🤯🤯
Summary:
Reducing screen time can improve mood, mental clarity and sleep.
Set up a parental control limit on your phone to limit the time on apps that you spend the most time on. Then don’t do what I did and actually follow your timer 😅
Or maybe do what I’m doing and stop using the app completely for a while - see what happens and maybe comment on this post to let others know!
Know someone who’s trying to reduce screen time? Share this article with them.
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References:
Smith et al., 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382341/
Christensen et al., 2016, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=screen+time+adults+sleep&oq=screen+time+adult