How The Hell Did I Spend My Time?

before I spent 7 hours on my phone

I’m sure we all have those moments where we get the rid-mist with our rotting brains and subsequently delete all of our social media apps. I think I do this on a bi-monthly basis, but then, the allure of scrolling traps me again and I am once more a slave to my device.

I’m going to make it my mission to cut down my screen time again.

I had actually made quite a bit of progress with this at the start of the year but somehow have ended up getting pulled right back in where I left off. My screen time was over seven hours the other day and it’s like Christ, what on earth am I doing?!

It’s not even necessarily social media apps that keep me on my phone, it’s generally just the internet. Having access to unlimited information, instant gratification and entertainment, and, let’s not forget the ease of everything. I have contemplated buying a dumb phone so many times over the last few years but in the same breath I always come back to the question - why make my life unnecessarily hard? I think the reality is that I just need to find a more interesting way to spend some of my free time.

My husband and I have been together over 10 years, from our uni-years to our thirties. We’ve spent our whole adult lives together, growing into the people we are now. We reflected last night on what we used to do with our spare time back when we were a lot younger and when our phones weren’t such a HUGE part of our lives. I say this as the Royal We - my husband barely uses his phone as over the years has found addiction in gardening, not that I’m complaining. To be honest we were scratching our heads a little and ironically it took me to searching ‘WUU2’ in my old Facebook Messenger chat logs, to work out what the hell I was actually up to.

There was quite a common theme that came up as the answer to almost every time someone asked me that question pre-2020. It was either “going out with x tonight” or “hungover”.

Ahh I see … So is scrolling is the new drinking?

I stopped drinking the same way I had always done (excessively) when the COVID pandemic hit. Magically a lot of my anxiety disappeared, I started running regular 5ks because I was so bored and was in the best shape of my life. There was also a lot of scrolling in lockdown because I mean what else was there to do, but there is probably something to be said for when exercise became a lifestyle choice, things really took a turn for the better.

Perhaps there is a lesson in all of this? If I can replace drinking with scrolling I can definitely replace scrolling with exercise. So now when I’m bored shitless aged 40 I can search ‘WUU2’ in my WhatsApp messages and I’ll find “Just ran a 5k” or “Been for a swim”

TBC …