I found a way to make my life so much more interesting
JUN 06, 2026

I am getting ready to go to the birthday dinner of the Playboy model who is my neighbour. I’ve neatly wrapped a set of three handprinted cosmetic bags in various sizes in brown paper tied with cotton string, decorated with fresh flowers. Far too organic for her tastes, I’m sure, but she wants me there and I feel obliged due to the proximity of our unlikely friendship. The dinner starts at 8 which my Californian habit to stop eating before 7 baulks at yet here I am.
The evening is warm, but on the back of the taxi-bike later it will be cool so I put a light grey velvet jacket to the side and look at my bare face and the new bangs I cut on the full moon in Sagittarius as some kind of sign to myself that I was ready for something. Exactly what I don’t know, but there’s a feeling in my chest that at any moment my life is about to take a brand new trajectory, unknown even to myself. There’s a taste of sweet grass meadows, wildflowers on cliffs overlooking a wild ocean, ylang ylang in my mouth whenever I get this sense that my world is about to shift on its axis. Maybe tonight needs something more on my face to face the parallel universe I am about to enter.
Inside a small pouch, I find a brown felt-tip eyeliner and sweep it from the side of my right eye out into a tiny wing. I look back, pleased with the effect and repeat on the other eye. I curl my eyelashes but leave them bare and glide a thick coat of raspberry-coloured lipstick onto my lips that I press my fingers into to blend. I wipe the residue onto my cheeks. It’s funny how makeup instantly gives you that “I’ve just had hot sex’ look. Maybe that’s the point of it. I slip into a soft black silk mini slip that I thrifted in NYC last summer and slide on black leather sandals that are handmade in Bali and feel like a cloud on my feet. My small brown grass-woven handbag from South Africa fits my purse phone and keys.
Bali is weird because there’s an entire fake world being built up alongside a very natural organic world and the contrast is so extreme that it feels like living in parallel worlds. I slip in and out between the two, though mostly am in one more than the other because by nature I’m more naturally oriented. The stronger the AI maxxing superficial plastic universe grows the more I want to retreat from it because it makes me feel unwell. Everything is transactional and has lost its authenticity and creativity, everyone speaks the same, looks the same, thinks the same and there are no individual ideas left in that universe. It seems like a compressed way to live, to have to fit into these tiny boxes. I feels dangerous and scary.
But it makes me so happy because I know where I belong. I know how to participate in the world. The only way to participate in the world is to opt out of everything that destroys the essence of life. You might be wondering what all this has to do with the title: how I get psychological relief from being addicted to my phone.
I’m getting there now, I promise. Being on my phone feels like the plastic world. Being off my phone feels like the natural world I want to participate in. All this is to illustrate the great divide that is happening and the choices we get to make every day. We know by now what being chronically online is doing to our brains. It’s not good.
Study after study links excessive phone use with poorer attention, disrupted sleep, higher levels of anxiety, depression and stress, increased feelings of loneliness, and a reduced capacity to tolerate boredom or focus deeply on a single task. Researchers have found that the more compulsively we reach for our phones, the more fragmented our attention becomes, the more difficult it is to enter states of flow, and the harder it becomes to distinguish genuine desire from algorithmically engineered distraction.
We are becoming accustomed to living in a state of perpetual interruption. Our minds rarely get the opportunity to wander, reflect, synthesise, imagine, or simply be. Our phones offer a constant escape hatch from discomfort, uncertainty, loneliness, grief, boredom, confusion, anticipation, and waiting. Every feeling can be immediately soothed with a scroll.
The problem is that many of the capacities required for a meaningful life are built in exactly those spaces we are now avoiding. Creativity requires boredom. Intuition requires silence. Self-awareness requires reflection. Original thought requires enough distance from the crowd to hear yourself think.
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If I am going to be completely honest then I have to consider myself a phone addict. I grew up alongside the digital age and ended up embracing it. I have worked online my entire career, I use my phone to do most things that are life-admin and work-related. I have, at times, deleted all social media from my phone only to log on in Safari or be trapped by YouTube’s shorts. It’s clinical.
I have tried so many ways to set a clear distinction between myself and my phone, but it exists almost like an invisible limb that I miss when it is not close by. I’ve always had all the notifications off except for phone calls and messages. I limit the apps on my phone to the bare minimum; the screen is set to grey-scale to make it less enticing and more boring. I have done everything on this list of ways to break up with your phone. Some of which work. Generally, my daily phone use hangs around the four-to-five-hour mark, which includes me using it for work, but it still feels like too much.
To exercise this muscle as often as I can, I go without my phone. Going out without your phone is like not wearing underwear under your clothes. No one knows your secret. Unless you want them to. I have taken to going for walks without technology at the cost of beautiful moments that will never be shared.
A few weeks ago I did exactly that but the truth is I wished I had my phone. A half moon and a rainbow hung in the sky on my sunset walk. Existing in the rare rectangular airspace that a camera could capture, I regretted not being able to steal that moment from the sky. I wept at the natural beauty of it. This one’s just for me, I whispered to myself.
I love taking beautiful pictures of things that I find beautiful. Is that I inherently bad? I don’t think so. It’s art. It’s presence. It’s being in the moment of beauty. It’s appreciation. So it’s less about the phone and more about the hold I let it have over me. It’s about how conscious I am with it, and with everything in my life.
Am I living in a sleep state or am I awake to it? Turns out it’s not really about the phone at all. It’s about me being present to my life. Every second of it. On and off screen. I notice that when I am truly present and on my phone, I can’t take it for long. It loses its draw when I’m not inside the dream-like hypnotic state with it. Consciousness amplifies the phone’s ugliness.
We have been taught to approach addiction like a war. We try to remove the thing. Restrict it. Discipline ourselves into better behaviour. We create rules and boundaries and systems and then feel ashamed when we break them. I have never found shame to be particularly transformative.
What I have found transformative is becoming genuinely interested in my own life again. There’s a concept in nutrition psychology termed ‘crowding out’ where you crowd out the bad eating habits with good habits. It’s the same in life. When life is so full of good things, the lifeless things lose meaning. What works is making my life more interesting than the addiction.
The times when I forget my phone even exists are not the times when I have the most discipline. They are when life has completely captured my attention. When I am surrounded by people I adore. When I am learning something new, building something meaningful, falling in love, travelling, creating, hosting, rearranging my home, and reading books that alter my mind.

In other words, when I am fully participating in my life.
I think this is why the conversation around phones often feels incomplete. We spend so much time talking about what we need less of and almost no time talking about what we need more of. More beauty. More friendships. More creativity. More purpose. More embodiment. More connection. More meaning. More moments that remind us we are alive.
Our phones are incredibly effective because they offer a diluted version of all of these things at once. Connection without vulnerability. Entertainment without effort. Novelty without risk. Validation without intimacy. But no amount of scrolling has ever left anyone feeling nourished. Only temporarily distracted.
There are two apps (lol, I know, but they actually work for me!) that have helped me get back into my life more fully.
One helps me practise holding more spaciousness in my mind so the phone slowly becomes less interesting by comparison, like it is no longer the most textured thing available to me in a given moment. The other interrupts the automatic reach, the muscle memory of picking it up and drifting into the same familiar loops of checking and refreshing and disappearing into apps I didn’t consciously choose to open.
My point here is that it’s not about taking a binary approach to addiction. The part of us that is always looking for an escape doesn’t disappear, it just needs somewhere else to go, something else to work with, something more alive to connect to.
The first is a meditation app called Waking Up. I used to meditate a lot and then last year, when my nervous system became too dysregulated to sustain it in the way I was used to, I gave myself a break and then needed something to help me find my way back. That’s when I discovered the Waking Up app, which is the most intelligent and non-performative introduction to meditation I have come across in over twenty years of practice. They were kind enough to offer me a free 30-day trial to share with you, so you can explore it for yourself if you want to. The daily meditations don’t “fix” anything as such, but they do create a kind of spaciousness in my mind that makes the pull of my phone noticeably weaker, because being with myself is something that I enjoy.
The second is an app-blocking tool called Foqos. It’s free, and I have two simple settings that I’ve named “day” and “night”. I am literal when it comes to self-management. During the day, Substack and Instagram are blocked from 8am to 8pm, with two short ten-minute windows where I’m allowed to check in. At night, from 8pm to 8am, everything social, browsing, and work-related is blocked, which essentially turns my phone into something close to a dumb phone, except for clock, calls and messages.
I try to keep a no-screens-after-8pm rule most nights, which I only really break it if I am watching a really good film, which is rare. Those evening hours have become some of the most important of my day, where I read, journal, and return to myself without interruption.
That’s it. That is how I get psychological relief from being addicted to my phone. Not through force. Not through purity. Not through becoming someone who never reaches for it. Through small structures that make it easier to choose something else when I can feel myself drifting. Through practices that give my attention somewhere else to land. And through a fairly gentle acceptance that I am, and always will be, very human.





















