It's not you, phones are designed to keep you hooked up.

” I can’t stop looking at my phone “, and I am not alone, over 2.5 billion people have smartphones and a lot of them are having a bad time putting them down. The problem is, these devices are designed to keep us engaged, they’re intentionally designed to be addicting. But if we understand the tricks that grab our attention, we can learn to have a healthier relationship with our phones.

It starts with turning off all notifications, except for when a real human is trying to reach you. When you get a call, a text or a message, it’s usually because another person wants to communicate with you, but a lot of today’s app simulate the same kind feeling, to get you to spend more time on their platform. If Facebook sends you a push notification that a friend is interested in an event nearby, they’re essentially leveraging your desire for social connection so that you use their app more.

When push notifications were first introduced for email on Blackberry in 2003, they were actually designed to as a way so that you use your phone less. Anyone could see emails, as they came in one go and they don’t have to check their phone again but today you get notification from all apps.

In future, we might see a healthier way to see notifications example of this is bundle notification.

Many marketing experts understand that “addiction is money” and they exploit this human weakness, they design their phone not to help us but to keep us hooked up.

 Then you have to Greyscale your screen, the easiest way to attract human eyes attention is through colors. Human eyes are sensitive to warm colors like bright red that’s why many apps have changed there colors to red like instagram and google, this is also the reason why notification bubble is default red in color.

 

Another way is by restricting your Home screen to everyday tools only.

Infinite scrolling is also a tool which is used by many apps, it always loads new material, so there’s no built-in-endpoint, Video autoplay works in the same way. This makes the user harder to stop. Research shows that people rely on Visual cues more than Internal cues to stop consuming, and so apps don’t have an endpoint.

But for now, this is the question everybody should start asking  “Am I addicted to my phone”.