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Turn off notifications

We covered this approach in the last chapter, so I won’t go into detail
again here, but turning off your notifications is a classic way to ease
your reliance on that little box in your pocket that’s always vying for
your attention.

Alter says turning off notifications is a way to take back control:

“
Turn off the “ding” sound when you get a text
message so that instead of your phone saying,
“Hey, check me now,” you decide when it’s time to
check. You’re removing the control from the phone
and you’re bringing it back to yourself. You can
also take the apps that are most addictive for you,
and bury them in a folder on the fourth page.

Replace your phone with something else

It sounds easy to keep your phone further away so it’s hard to get to,
but in practice that’s quite difficult. The trick, according to Alter, is to
replace your phone with something else:

What you want to do is you want to find a behavior that is a stand-in
for the behavior that you don’t want to be doing. You replace the bad
thing that you shouldn’t be doing with something good that you should
be doing.

So you start leaving your phone in your home office or in your entrance
hall. When you’re in bed or chilling on the couch, what do you do? Here
are some ideas to get you thinking:

• Leave a book on your bedside table
• Leave another book or a stack of magazines next to your couch
• Keep a bag of knitting or crochet, a coloring book, or a sketchbook
and pencil next to the couch
• Leave a deck of cards or a puzzle toy on the table by your couch

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