I quit my smartphone for two weeks to see if I’d have a better life | Canada Voices

I’m standing at a corner in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., with a scribbled map in one hand, a cheap handheld compass in the other. I go over the directions I had printed out: From the subway station, I need to walk west, past the Shake Shack, down a leafy street lined with brownstones and then under a bridge. If I reach the East River, I’ve gone too far.

It’s straightforward, and yet on this final leg of a six-hour journey – which started at 5 a.m. in Toronto and involved a plane, train and subway – I still get lost. And I don’t have a smartphone to help me find my way.

Let me explain.

Earlier in the summer, I started worrying about my relationship with my iPhone. In the 12 or so years I’ve used a smartphone, I’d become dependent on it in ways that seemed unhealthy.

I found it impossible to fall asleep without mindlessly scrolling first, and whenever I became overwhelmed with my never-ending to-do list, instead of doing something on the list I’d escape into social media or a podcast. If my phone died while I was out, I’d feel a wave of panic. What if I needed to get a hold of someone? What if I needed Google Maps?

Sometimes, in the evening, I’d sit down to watch Netflix and in the five seconds it takes to load on my TV, I’d open Slack and find myself weighing in on work decisions that could’ve waited until the next day. Other times, I would spend what seemed like 30 minutes on TikTok only to find when I closed it that several hours had passed while I was transfixed by the lives of strangers, rather than living my own.

In a regular week, I spent the equivalent of a part-time job staring at my phone, clocking between three and five hours a day of screen time. According to Statistics Canada, which puts the Canadian average at 3.2 hours a day, I’m a pretty typical smartphone user.

But rather than feeling at peace knowing my habits are ordinary, I wondered what I could be doing with that time instead: finally learning Japanese, my mother’s native tongue, training for another half-marathon or just reading a few more books. If a life consists of what we choose to give our time and attention to, what did it mean that I was giving so much of mine to my phone?

My own re-evaluation arrived against a backdrop of increasing backlash to smartphones and its addictive appendage, social media.

Almost every province has banned smartphones in the classroom, with educators blaming the devices for distracting students and contributing to cyberbullying. Among young people, social media has been linked to increased anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation. U.S. Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy has said social-media platforms should have warning labels, like cigarettes.

Since the iPhone hit the market in 2007, smartphone use has increased every year. And yet, more recently, some people have tried to give them up. Tech startups and traditional phone manufacturers are releasing “dumbphones,” which come without all the addictive bells and whistles – and some of which look nearly identical to the original flip phones of the early 2000s. Surprisingly, some dumbphone companies cite Gen Z as their biggest customer base.

I began to think, if even the most online generation, some of whom are younger than the iPhone itself, are pushing back at the idea that this addictive machine needs to be a part of our lives, then perhaps I could, too. How dramatically would my life change if I gave up my smartphone?

So, I decided to ditch my iPhone for two weeks and use a basic flip phone instead. I would allow myself to use social media for work, but only on my laptop. When that was shut down, so was TikTok and all the rest of it.

During part of that time, I had a trip planned to New York, so that’s why, nine days into the experiment, I’m standing outside in a plaza in Brooklyn Heights, trying to navigate with the map I’d made with pen and paper. I can’t find the actual intersection where I’m supposed to meet my friend.

“My map is bad,” I finally type out on my new flip phone. “I am in the plaza. What are you standing near?” The message takes me two minutes to compose.

“Stay there!” she replies almost instantly. A few minutes later, I see her waving from a street over.

At the beginning of the two weeks, when I pick up a TCL Flip at a local phone store, I ask a sales associate if he’s seen a lot of people buying flip phones lately. “Mostly old people,” he says, before noting the $89 phone is also popular because it’s “untraceable.”

Before officially putting away my iPhone, I plug 30 contacts into my new phone, and tell my core group chats that they should not be alarmed when I stop replying in these conversations. (Along with no emojis, there is also no group-chat capability on the TCL Flip). On Instagram, I explain the experiment and tell my followers to text, e-mail or call me if they want to get in touch. I receive a number of replies from friends saying they should “really do something similar” or that “they could never live without their phone.”

A study from the University of Toronto Mississauga surveyed 50,423 participants aged 18 to 90 across 195 countries, finding that one-third of people around the world are at a high risk of smartphone addiction.

To measure this, the researchers used the Smartphone Addiction Scale. First created in 2013, the self-reported survey includes questions such as “I feel impatient and fretful when I am not holding my smartphone” and “I have a hard time concentrating in class, while doing assignments, or while working, due to smartphone use.” (I score 42 out of 60 on the survey, which it alarmingly informs me is higher than 89.5 per cent of Canadian women in their 30s.)

Although there’s debate over whether phone overuse should officially be recognized as an addiction – it’s not included in the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual of mental disorders – experts including Jay Olson, the lead author of the UTM study, says it has similarities to other behavioural addictions, such as gambling.

“It invades all aspects of your life and sucks up all the free time you would normally have,” he explains. In the most extreme cases, Dr. Olson says, people who suffer from smartphone addiction describe their behaviour as compulsive, out of control, and damaging to their jobs and relationships.

On Reddit, I’ve come across users discussing how hopeless this addiction can feel, describing how they’re giving more attention to their phone than their newborn daughter or not completing schoolwork because they feel physically unable to put down their phones. One person said they thought being addicted to an actual drug would be better.

Among Canadians surveyed in the UTM study, women reported being more addicted to smartphones than men, mostly for social purposes, including instant messaging and social media.

This rings true for me. In a breakdown of my average daily screen time, Messages is usually on top, followed by Slack or TikTok. I have a group chat for nearly every configuration of my social life: a chat for university friends, university friends plus their partners, my parents, old work colleagues, current work colleagues, a book club.

While Dr. Olson says this type of use is more habitual, it may not be so bad as the word “addiction” implies. Although it’s hard to quantify the social value of my sharing of TikToks, debriefs on the latest Love is Blind episodes or holiday recipes, other experts describe this style of communication as a type of “virtual ambient presence,” similar to how bats and dolphins use sonar to determine the shape and locations of objects nearby. It helps us find our place in the world, and it can be disorienting when we’re disconnected. Some studies have shown group chats are associated with greater happiness and well-being among families and friends.

During my experiment, I do feel myself drifting from my friends and family. Texting on the TCL Flip using T9 – the predictive technology where, for example, pressing the numbers 4, 3, 5, 5, and 6 prompts “hello” – is so time-consuming that my correspondence is uncharacteristically utilitarian: no jokes or stray observations, and I’m wary of open-ended “how’s it going?” questions, lest they prompt a response that requires a continuing multisentenced conversation.

“Your new phone makes you text like a boomer,” a friend messages, after a string of one-word replies.

And then one day early on in the experiment, a torrential downpour hits Toronto, flooding downtown streets and knocking out power in my neighbourhood. I stay true to the rules I’d set, though, so I can’t go on Slack to explain my situation to my manager or hot spot to my laptop and continue working.

While the outage only lasts 12 hours, I feel an omnipresent sense of disconnectedness throughout the two weeks. Until they were gone, I hadn’t understood the degree to which text messages and social-media DMs are a glue for my relationships.

Before the experiment began, I envisioned deep phone conversations would replace them, maybe even making space for more meaningful catch-ups. Instead, nearly every time I phone a friend, they don’t pick up and then text me after: “Did you mean to call me?”

While the social aspect of smartphones could arguably be considered benign, or even beneficial, the science on its impact on our sleep has been more one-sided: Doctors, sleep specialists and countless medical articles say staring at our smartphone screens in the hour before going to bed disrupts the rest we need.

Despite these warnings, my iPhone had become what I considered an integral part of my nighttime routine, and something that I felt I needed to relax my mind. There’s a good chance you do this, too. Around 51 per cent of Canadians say checking their smartphone is the last thing they do before going to sleep.

For about an hour, I’ll play Wordle, check my e-mail one last time, and then scroll through Reddit threads before putting my phone on my bedside table. I would frequently wake up around 3 a.m. and, after tossing and turning for a few minutes, reach for my phone to lull me back to sleep.

You’re probably not surprised to hear that I rarely felt well-rested in the morning. But in my defence, new research has found that smartphones and their blue light-emitting, melatonin-suppressing screens can affect sleep, but not to the extent many people think.

A recent review of 11 studies published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews found no evidence that screen light in the hour before bed actually makes it harder to fall asleep. The idea originates from a 2014 Harvard University study, which asked trial participants to read for four hours before bedtime on an iPad at maximum brightness. Even then, it took participants an average of only 10 minutes longer to fall asleep.

Of course, some experts believe the sleep disruption is more tied to how our phones ramp up the mind. Judith R. Davidson, an Kingston-based psychologist who helps patients with sleep disorders, says her number-one advice for patients who are struggling with sleep is to not use their phone in bed. “We’re built to override sleep, so the mental and emotional arousal that comes with the content on our phones, like responding to things on social media, makes it less likely for us to fall asleep.” (I tried to explain to her how my phone really is helping me wind down. She didn’t buy it.)

The first few nights without the smartphone are challenging, but then I fall into a new routine. I read books until I can barely keep my eyes open, eventually falling into a comatose-like state. When that doesn’t work, I close my eyes and imagine what I would be doing on my phone: shopping for clothes at the Ssense website or Facebook Marketplace, like the consumerist’s version of counting sheep, until I conk out.

I have to admit, it’s the best sleep I’ve had in years.

In reaction to the worrying feeling we’re spending too much time – and too much of our lives – on our screens, the concept of digital detoxes has taken hold. Some people remove Instagram from their phones on the weekends, turn off notifications or even change the screen mode to greyscale so it’s less visually appealing. The most extreme version of detox, called dopamine fasting, involves abstaining from all stimuli that releases the body’s “feel good” hormone, including social media and video games, but also exercise, music and sex.

A small set of smartphone users, the ones who inspired my own experiment, have ditched their devices altogether, replacing them with “dumbphones” like my TCL Flip.

In 2019, as a recent university grad living in Colorado, Jose Briones was averaging around 10 to 12 hours a day of screen time. Some of that was work-related, but a good chunk was from Netflix and social media. His wife told him he was spending too much time on his phone, and he noticed that his mental health had started to decline. “I felt it in my brain. It’s like, you want to stop, but you also have this craving or reflex that’s like, ‘No, this feels good. I’m going to continue.’”

He started looking for alternatives to the smartphone, and stumbled upon a community on Reddit for dumbphone users and the dumbphone-curious who recommend devices, share reviews and answer questions like, “Any tips for getting fast at T9?” Mr. Briones became a moderator and watched the community grow from around 10,000 people in 2022 to more than 87,000 currently. “The postpandemic reality is that a lot of people got digitally fatigued,” Mr. Briones said. “More people started thinking about dumbphones as a solution.”

For his work in the charity sector, Mr. Briones uses the Jelly Star, which is essentially a miniature Android smartphone with a three-inch screen. When he’s not working, he’s on the Light Phone, a sleek device with a black-and-white screen that has no access to internet or social media.

Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, a graphic designer and product designer, created the Light Phone after working in Silicon Valley and hearing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs brag about how much time users spent on their apps. The phone is, Mr. Tang says, a reaction to that commercialization of the attention economy, in which companies purposely make addictive apps so they can make money from the time we spend on them, regardless of how it makes us feel.

The company’s revenue doubled from 2022 to 2023, and is on track to double again in 2024, Mr. Tang says. The biggest customer base is Gen Z. “My theory is that smartphones are less precious to this generation,” he explains. “It’s not like it was this huge breakthrough that changed their life forever, so it’s easier for them to realize that ‘Oh, TikTok made me feel bad. I’m gonna stop.’”

Mr. Hollier and Mr. Tang designed the Light Phone to be like a Swiss Army Knife, a utility device with only the essentials – used for one, completable task at a time.

In the two-week experiment, my flip phone feels like exactly like that. While an iPhone operates quietly and effortlessly, like an extra appendage, my flip phone is a clunky tool. Every button I press clicks and clacks. It snaps shut with a loud whack. Every task on the flip phone is deliberate, and as soon as I’m done, I put it away.

Sometimes, the absence of an infinite scroll brings a nagging sense of boredom. On the subway one day I forget to bring a book and so am left with nothing to do except watch every other passenger staring at their screens. But other times, it feels freeing. When I’m out in the city, I look up and out at my surroundings, noticing much more without the interruptions of a notification, an e-mail or whatever is happening in the news.

I start to feel like a different person, someone who is more self-sufficient and values quietude, someone who can navigate a city without Google’s help.

Despite sleeping better and being more in the world than on a screen for two weeks, on the last day of the experiment, I’m eager to get back to my iPhone. I miss reading the news whenever I want, and taking non-blurry photos. Most of all, I miss texting my friends in my own text voice, and being part of my group-chat communities.

I’m still in New York when the experiment ends, and the first time I go out with my iPhone, while I’m waiting for the F train, I catch up on everything I’d missed on Instagram, neglecting the book in my tote bag. When I arrive at the subway near where I’m staying, I reference Google Maps to make sure I’m headed the right way, even though I’d done the walk dozens of times in the previous five days without anything to guide me.

I begin ravenously consuming social media again, even though I had mostly lost all desire to check the apps during the experiment. I feel a bit defeated returning to my old ways, but can’t seem to stop either.

“You’re back to rat brain,” one of my friends told me.

In the weeks that follow, many of the good habits I picked up slip away. One morning I stay in bed for an extra 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, time I would have spent during the experiment getting ready to go out somewhere, or reading a book. I keep using an analog alarm clock, but my phone makes it back into the bedroom on most nights, at arm’s length for when I can’t sleep.

On my flip phone, I maxed out at 30 minutes of screen time a day. Back on my smartphone, it’s slightly lower than what it was before, but still five times more than during the experiment. I realize, however, that ultimately I don’t want to give up my smartphone. The individual benefits of using a dumbphone aren’t worth the cost of my leaving behind my digital life, and the meeting places where we all go now to connect, and consume culture.

I make one important change, though, which is to use ScreenZen, an app that alerts me when I’ve been on TikTok – or any app I choose to monitor – for more than seven minutes.

This makes it impossible for hours to slip by without me noticing. “Is this important?” the ScreenZen pop-up asks, prompting me to close the app. Sometimes, I do.