Why you can’t get rid of your phone.

BirdieChao
Jul 9, 2017
8 min read

Ths is Birdie's 16th personal article

The small little smart device that you bring with you everywhere is non-questionable the biggest distraction that all of us have. But have you wonder why is your phone that is the biggest distraction instead of your urge to improve yourself as a distraction?

My mom used to nag at me all the time with this sentence, “If only you can put as much effort into studies as you put into gaming. I will be so proud of you!” If you are or you were a game addict, I bet you have heard similar words before.

For the ladies, you can take it as your favourite drama series. If you can put as much time into studies as you put into watching your drama. Imagine the difference.

Now, you might think that I’m going to talk about discipline again. But no, today is something different. It’s something deeper than discipline.

I must admit that I have a handcuff that locked my hands to my phone all the time, to the extent that I bring my phone with me to the toilet even if I’m going to do a big business. Even though I wrote about the “Are you living in your phone” post, it is still very difficult for me to get my phones off my hand.

Therefore, it caused me to have this assumption that the root of my all distractions the existence of smart phones. With all the social media that we can scroll inside. It seems like we have a never-ending amount of feeds that awaits for us to find out.

So, I have tried to get rid of this bad habit of using my phones all the time. That’s also the reason why I wrote post “Are you living in your phone” as well. So, I started to force myself to stop using my phone all the time and I thought I have changed myself for the better.

However, I found out that even if I stopped using my phone. I would engage into other interesting things. Most of the time I will switch on my laptop and game or maybe watch movies. It’s rare for me to put that time that I took myself away from playing my phone, into reading or cultivating new good habits.

So maybe, phone is not the ultimate reason for your uncontrollable distractions.

Have you ever feel that you actually scroll your phone till an extent that you feel bored to scroll it any longer? You will just go other places to find something exciting enough for you!

That is the state that caused all the bad habits and the distractions. It’s the state of constantly pursuing high level of excitement.

The reason why you like scrolling your phone for social media, gaming or watching drama the entirely day off is only because it gives you a higher excitement level than all the other activities that is ready for you.

Just compare yourself, reading a book and watching a drama which one is more exciting. Of course, it’s watching drama. How about watching documentaries about Singapore history and watching Fast & Furious? I will put my bet the Fast & Furious. Why? Just because we all love to have higher excitement level things.

That’s why no matter how we change ourselves to go away from the “bad habit”. We will never go into any “good habit”. Because we only want to change the medium for us to get us the high excitement things, but not the desire for us to get the high excitement things.

Want to know how strong your desire for exciting things is? Very easy, imagine yourself to be at the peak of your excitement level. Maybe you are gaming halfway or watching your drama at its climax. Then, the internet lagged. What will happen to you? How frustrated you will be is how strong your desire is.

Why we have such strong desire for exciting things to happen around us? Blame the internet. It’s filled with excitement.

You are sitting in the bus and feel that you are bored looking at the sceneries. So, you draw out your phone from your pocket and indulged yourself into the world of social medias. However, not all posts and articles suits your excitement level, so you only choose to read those that you think is exciting enough for you to read.

This is how you feed your brain, so now, this is how your brain would like you to feed him.

So why do you keep have yourself distracted?

Because excitements are so within reach!

When you saw a post that doesn’t interest you, you can jolly well scroll to the next post. When you play a game till you are bored of it, you can immediately change to another game.

You are used to have the power of choosing what can get into your mind. And “Higher excitement level things win, lower excitement level things lose” is your criteria for choosing so, excitement almost become the only factor that affects your decision on what you focus on.

Why can’t you focus in class?

Because excitements are so within reach!

In most of the situations, all lessons that we have in class are all classified under the “low excitement level” and since most of the time we indulge ourselves into the world of excitement, our brain can’t stand this kind of dry and boring stuff.

So, when we are carry out this kind of low excitement activities, our attention will easily slide into places where we find our high excitement activities from. Which it turns out to be using phone in class.

Why can’t you stay focus for long?

Because excitements are so within reach!

No matter is it carrying out a plan or designing a plan. Having a long time committed into one single activity means you have to tolerate the constant inflow of low excitement activities. However, with exciting stuff filling ever single part of your life, it is really tough to finish one single task without getting off track at all.

In order to finish one long task, you might have to avoid hundreds of traps that will get you into the world of high excitement. Let’s take doing research for example. You need to do a research about something for your project. But when you open up your browser, you have no idea how and when a feed from somewhere has gotten your attention for god knows how long.

Basically our life is filled to the extent that it seems that it’s hard for us to find a complete 60 mins, it’s hard for us to continue our plan for more than 2 days.

Why is your body clock screwed up?

Because excitements are so within reach!

When you are in the state of having high excitement activities, it is extremely difficult for you give up that high excitement activity and change it to a low excitement activity. Even though you force yourself to change, your brain will also need time to adapt to the change. So, during the change, your brain will find other things to fill up this gap.

The most common situation that we all face is like this. We like to scroll through our phone for all the different kind of things for us to read or watch before sleep. Until late night, you are still not willing to give up this kind of excitement. Even if you put down your phone one day and decides to be on bed early. You will still think about all sorts of things that prevents you from sleeping. Just because you are so used to being fed of excitement before sleep.

After all these, I hope you see the root of all the things that cause distractions to our life. It is not phone that is the culprit. It is actually your inner desire for excitement that’s being the devil.

Until here, most of you will definitely think that all high excitement activities are bad. Which might not be the case. And this is also the reason why I wrote this article today. High excitement activities can be modified to enhance whatever you want to achieve in life.

I personally think that there’s 2 ways for that we can work on to improve ourselves.

1. Increase the excitement level of the things you want but is under the low range.

I would like you to recall, do you have this kind of friend that just likes to study? It’s rare I know, but I have one friend like that. She was my secondary school classmate and one of the top scorer.

I remember I was talking with her about her studying method or something. Until I asked her, what do you normally do at you. She says, “study lah! What else, also nothing better to do!”. I’m like so shocked so I asked her, “ You don’t like to watch drama meh?” She says, “I like ah! But drama the plot is always the same, so after a few series, I stopped watching liao.” So I last asked, “do you like studying?” and her answer was, “not say I like studying lah, but there’s also nothing better to do, so why not?”

If you haven’t realise, she actually classified studying under the category of “medium-high excitement activities” So, she will have a bigger drive to study instead of scrolling through Facebook.

So, in order to do that, is to first start small and always be ready to give yourself prizes. This way, you brain will know that whenever you achieve something in the low excitement activity thing, you will get a prize for that. And that will unknowingly increase the excitement level slowly without you even noticing.

1. Make yourself used to low excitement level activities.

Sounds tricky but it isn’t that hard. We are so hungry for all the high excitement level activities because we were feeding our brains with that kind of activities all the time. So, what we need to do is to feed our brains something different.

There is a lot of activities that we can go for to practice this. Going out strolling without bring your phone along. Go out and play sports with your friend. Basically, any physical activity that is disconnected from the internet is good.

If you are not into physical activities. Then maybe you can try meditation. I just started meditating with 5 minutes each session. Meditation is really good to calm yourself down and just be disconnected from everything.

Trust me, it isn’t all about sitting there only. When I first do it, I feel like a million ants are crawling over my body, literally. That totally shows how “un-calm” I am as how much I indulge myself into the world of excitements.

But slowly, you will get better at it and you will realise you are no longer that hungry for the feeds in social media.

I know today’s article is a bit long, might be the longest I’ve ever written. But I really hope that we can understand ourselves a bit better deep down to understand who we are and why we do the things we did. That’s why I put a lot of effort into today’s post trying to deliver as much knowledge as I can.

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It's your choice

To live in your dreams or to be living your dreams

-BirdieChao