Huge fan of your blog for a good while now! Struggling with similar problems. In regard to the bad habits discussion:
1) In one of your last posts you talked about the hair tie around the phone. This helped me a lot in two ways: I try to perceive and almost visualize it as a "protection barrier" against the phone. And when i then use my phone, i put the, intentionally very thick, hair tie around my wrist, as a reminder. Especially the reminder part helped me a lot to put it back on and to consciously use my phone
2) I agree that changing the environment is more important than to use sheer willpower all the time. 100%. But: it is also important to remind oneself again and again that we have agency in all of this and the phone doesn't control us. We are not passive and we can choose with willpower to do something, for example to change the environment. So the quesiton is not environment vs willpower, but how those two can work together in my opinion :)
Ah, so good to hear that you tried the hair tie method and found it helpful. It really is nice to have a reminder to pause and be conscious about your phone use, because really you could just take off the hair tie, or uninstall the app blocker, etc. So yeah we still have to commit to not being on our devices mindlessly and exercise that willpower/agency/self-control, but using these tools and methods to nudge us towards better phone habits is a nice add-on.
Hey :)
Huge fan of your blog for a good while now! Struggling with similar problems. In regard to the bad habits discussion:
1) In one of your last posts you talked about the hair tie around the phone. This helped me a lot in two ways: I try to perceive and almost visualize it as a "protection barrier" against the phone. And when i then use my phone, i put the, intentionally very thick, hair tie around my wrist, as a reminder. Especially the reminder part helped me a lot to put it back on and to consciously use my phone
2) I agree that changing the environment is more important than to use sheer willpower all the time. 100%. But: it is also important to remind oneself again and again that we have agency in all of this and the phone doesn't control us. We are not passive and we can choose with willpower to do something, for example to change the environment. So the quesiton is not environment vs willpower, but how those two can work together in my opinion :)
Ah, so good to hear that you tried the hair tie method and found it helpful. It really is nice to have a reminder to pause and be conscious about your phone use, because really you could just take off the hair tie, or uninstall the app blocker, etc. So yeah we still have to commit to not being on our devices mindlessly and exercise that willpower/agency/self-control, but using these tools and methods to nudge us towards better phone habits is a nice add-on.