How to make your smartphone dumb — and get back your time and focus

This is the last in a four-part reader challenge on creating a healthy relationship with social media.

My phone used to shout at me. Now it whispers.

To reclaim my attention from the buzzing box of light I perpetually keep in my pocket, I quieted my notifications. I took the cute photo of my 2-year-old off my home screen. I traded the buffet of bright, colorful bubbles for a grayscale list of apps.

Sure, I still found myself mindlessly scrolling Instagram. But less than I had before. Instead, I focused more of my attention on that real-life toddler.

You could switch to a flip phone. You could quit social media. But there are also ways to make your smartphone dumber, with apps and hacks and old-fashioned mindfulness.

First, you have to understand why social media is sucking you in. Studies show that engaging with social media can produce oxytocin and trigger tiny releases of dopamine, said Kit Breshears, an instructor with the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. Apps feature a pulldown refresh mechanism that functions a lot like a slot machine.

Breshears teaches a one-credit online course called “Implications of Social Media on Mental Health” that fills each semester. In it, he and his students discuss strategies — from mindfulness to self-compassion to spending time outdoors — to reframe and rethink their relationship with social media.

But one of the most effective strategies is also the simplest, he said:

Given the chance, Facebook and Instagram would inundate you with pleas to check in, to pay attention, to scroll, scroll, scroll. By turning off those notifications, you take back your power, Breshears said.

Catherine Price, author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone,” calls notifications interruptions, “because that’s what they actually are: interruptions that pull you out of your actual life and toward your phone.” She only allows notifications for the important stuff — phone calls, text messages, calendar reminders and navigation alerts.

Pick places within your living space or specific times of day for phone-free zones. Your bedroom might become phone-free. Your dining room table, too.

Or maybe you want to make a night of it. Breshears has “tech-free Tuesdays,” staying off his phone after work Tuesday evening until Wednesday morning. Four of his students who lived together adopted the idea, using the weeknight for a communal activity instead, such as cooking dinner together.

Tech can help, too: Brick, for example, is a $59 physical device that creates such a zone, temporarily blocking distracting apps from your phone.

My screen had been packed with bright icons, just tempting me to click them. Then I downloaded Minimalist Phone, an Android app. It transformed the baubles into a gray, boring list. Now, when I want to open Instagram, I don’t click on the pink icon, which tempts me with a little red notification badge. (Two new things! Two new things!)

Instead, I scroll through an alphabetical catalog of apps. It takes a minute, which is the point: Friction is your friend.

“In general, if you’re trying to change a habit, you want to add friction to the behavior you’re trying to cut back on,” Price writes in her guide, “and reduce friction for the behaviors you’re trying to spend more time on.”

Early in his class, Breshears has students do an eight-hour social media log. They note what apps they use and for how long — then write down how they feel afterward. If you’re on TikTok for an hour and then reflect, “Wow, what a waste of time,” then next time you pick up your phone, you might think twice about clicking that blue and pink icon.

Or, better yet, that gray word within a long list of gray words.

That’s part of what inspired my own effort to make my phone dumber. I’d open my phone for one purpose but end up someplace else — Instagram, probably — and, 20 minutes later, wonder what it was I meant to do in the first place. Those 20 minutes would leave me groggy.

But 20 minutes with a book, on a walk, with my toddler? I’d end them with energy.