Being in the moment

You have probably experienced that feeling when you are in the restaurant with someone, and there is some chatter before you order, but as soon as the waiter takes your order, there is this period of pause. Nothing is happening, and so the first natural thing that comes to mind is to fill this pause.

And as our constant experience have shown us, phones are the way to do it(not saying it is good, just a reflex we developed)

As your friend without a second thought grabs his phone, that leaves you.

You sit there, not really in the mood to check Instagram like your friend is doing. You also don’t want to check emails as you have finished a hard day at work want to take your mind off.

There are 2 ways this can end:

First is what ends up happening is that you initially get annoyed and then later take the phone yourself. Start surfing and the whole evening feels light not really interesting.

The second option is that you start looking around, to take your mind off it. Maybe even try to strike a conversation with your friend, to get a throwaway reply. That probably will annoy you even more.

The whole point of this situation is how some people do busy work all the time. That is one of the main reasons that people get burned out and get tired all the time.

Not being in the moment is the cause of seeking money, alcohol, and drugs and other quick ways of getting dopamine hits for cheap.

How to not become an addict of your phone

The first step would be to turn off all buzzing and ringing notifications. Put a dnd mode on.

When you do that you are free to focus on one task during the day without an option for a message to interrupt your flow, multiple studies have shown how bad multitasking is for your productivity, so of course, as long as you don’t get disturbed everyone is a winner.

You might worry that you will miss some important message or a call, but believe me, people have no problem waiting 30 minutes for a reply. If they have something urgent, they will get to you by calling through DND mode.

Also, that allows you to not be paranoid with the feeling that you got a new message because you felt some vibration. You have probably done that multiple times, either when walking or when just idly waiting somewhere.

Next thing that you can do is whenever you feel like taking a picture with your phone to capture a moment, first capture the moment with your eyes. It might seem crazy but actually imitate shatter of a camera and say click looking at whatever you wanted to take a photo of. Most of the time we are doing pictures to prove ourselves and whoever we show the photos how cool our life is.

If on the other hand, you want to capture this moment for yourself, doing this photo with your eyes will peg this picture to this action, and it will feel even more real and amazing. Also, that will make you ask a question yourself. Why am I taking this photo? Maybe I should fully embrace myself at the moment.

The last thing I would recommend you do is every time you take your phone out, critically think what you are going to be doing and for how long and why. It has become too easy to focus on phones in every situation; it is something that our brain wants and asks for more. It is a drug for our brain as it can go into relaxation mode, just like when we are watching TV.

Please don’t give your brain some easy hits of dopamine; it is not worth it in the long run.

Either way, if you would like to be more interesting for other people to strive to hang around you, you have to learn to be in the moment. Do whatever you need.

Take a digital detox break, go camping, or maybe do daily meditation. The most important thing is to not annoy everyone around you about how much time you spend on your phone.