Help! I’m Desperate To Reduce My Screen Time

So you have trouble paying attention, your screen time is increasing by the day and you don’t have the patience to sit through a movie anymore.

On the final episode of The Briefing’s Attention series, Jan Fran voices her digital dilemma with Jocelyn Brewer, a cyber psychologist, writer and educator, expressing her desire to feel take back some of her power focus and attention thats been hijacked by social apps.

Here are the best tips and tricks to reduce your screen time:

Dumbing down your phone

Deleting some of those social media apps will allow individuals to feel empowered, still having access without feeling like a slave to social media.

Ask yourself, What deserves my attention?

When I talk to young people about this, I often say to them, so are you getting paid to be on those social media platforms for three hours a day? Like, what’s your rate? They’re like No, I don’t get paid. I’m like, Well, if you went to work at one of the shops in the mall and they didn’t pay you, how would you feel? Oh, I’d be ripped off. That’s illegal. And I’m like, You understand you’re working for these companies and you’re paying them with your time.

Kids get really pissed off when I kind of reframe it that way.

Clean up your Instagram feed

Set up an Instagram feed for the particular thing that you’re interested in. I have way too many Instagram accounts, but they’re specific to the little business streams I have. Within that, like for my digital nutrition account, I only follow tech companies.

Jocelyn says being able to curate those channels allows people to feel more in control of the content they are consuming, whether it be on cooking recipes, sustainability or fitness, they are able to choose if they want to go down a rabbit hole rather than having content thrown at them thick and fast.