My Name is Anastasia, and I am Addicted to my iPhone

Separating myself from what harms me

About a week ago I transformed my iPhone. Before I tell you what I did, I’ll tell you what I’ve been struggling with.

I don’t know how many of you are Gen X— officially, I think, I’m an elder millennial, but I grew up spending a lot of time alone, and I watched a lot of television. I also read a lot of books; many of them pulpy YA books with rigid gender ideals and many beautiful and popular characters.

Media has been influencing the way I think since I was very young, and I have, for a long time, thought of myself as someone who has an addiction to television and media. As a kid, television kept me alive. As an adult, it can be fun and even intellectually stimulating, but I can get sucked into vapid reality TV more easily that I’d like to admit.

For me, television is beer. A nice, cold beer at the end of the day. And my phone, with its social media apps and constant pinging and ringing, is like little bumps of cocaine and vodka, all day, every day.

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Anyone who knows me well knows that I struggle with phone addiction.

It’s not so much that I struggle more than others. Almost everyone I see and know is addicted to their phone, whether they realize it or not.

But as a former heroin addict (I got clean when I was 21) and recovered alcoholic and recovering bulimic, I know how to spot addiction. In order to get sober and healthy, I had to become embodied. That means I’m in my body, which means I can feel it when I dissociate.

I first learned about my constant dissociation after my mother’s suicide, which ripped me out of my body and at the same time heightened all sensation. It was after my mother’s death, when I was a walking open wound, that my addictions and coping mechanisms stopped working.

Up until then, everything I used to cope with life involved dissociation. I drank. I ate. I threw up. I watched TV. I had sex. With a lot of people. While drunk.

All of these methods of coping had served me for nearly two decades. I had my first drink when I was nine and did crystal meth for the first time when I was thirteen. From there I became someone who would consume any substance at any time as long as it promised me relief from my pain. And my pain was massive. My pain is written all over this newsletter.

My mother’s suicide woke me from my trance.

“Woke” is too gentle a word.

My mother’s suicide immolated me. To survive, I had to regenerate from the most elemental parts of myself. Everything superficial was gone. The process has taken over a decade, but I can finally say that I feel like myself. Like I don’t need to be anybody but myself.

Me, a week ago, in a field of Florida flowers which grew after a burn.

Yet there’s still this addiction— this thing called a phone that I’m supposed to have, like everyone else.

On this phone is the entire world. Thousands of emails each day. Texts from friends and acquaintances. Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. Reddit. The New York Times. The abyss of Safari explorer, which is available anytime I have a fleeting thought or idea for something.

My phone is fucking killing me. It’s killing my attention. My presence. My elemental self.

It’s killing everything I have worked so hard for.

There are a ton of books written on how terrible being constantly connected is for our brains. I’ve written about some of them in this newsletter. My favorites are Stolen Focus, Digital Minimalism, How to do Nothing, and any book written by Thich Nhat Hanh, who never wrote about the internet, really, but wrote about attention and gratitude.

Throughout the past fourteen or so years, I’ve cycled through having an iPhone, not having one, having a Nokia, etc. etc.

Like almost everyone, I am not in the position to live without my iPhone. This is primarily because of iMessages and how difficult it is to text with a Nokia or a flip phone. Plus, I like taking picture.

But since my back injury, and especially since being in the PhD program, I’ve noticed that my phone addiction has reached some sort of crescendo. I found myself, last autumn, in the deepest, darkest corners of the internet, looking at images I didn’t want to see. (Don’t worry, nothing illegal. Just Reddit). I have always had a morbid curiosity about death, and it turns out you can find all sorts of terrible things on Reddit to satisfy those curiosities. This is especially harmful because I have witness more than one violent death in my lifetime.

The combination of my back injury and the Phd program seemed to be the perfect storm. My phone became a vortex. Only about 5% of what I did on my phone could be considered unusual or harmful. Mostly, I just scrolled Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, news sources, and whatever else I could find. Because the PhD has required so much of my brain power and left me so exhausted every day, my phone stood in for actual rest.

And guess what? Scrolling isn’t resting. Scrolling is dissociating.

Even looking at a news site like the New York Times, we come across stories and images that are deeply disturbing. Stories and events that we have no power to change in the moment. For me, this left me feeling powerless and hopeless.

Scrolling, as an act, does not allow pause. No pause for processing. No pause for checking in with myself. No pause for looking away.

As I write this I wonder: why don’t these companies install a pause feature? So that, after each story or picture or video, the viewer is forced to pause for ten seconds?

We know why, right?

Because they’re predatory. All of them.

Once the school year ended, I noticed more and more that I was still scrolling my phone. Luckily my morbid curiosity period only lasted a little while, but I was still on my phone for hours a day, to the point where I could feel my brain changing.

There were so few authentically positive encounters on the internet and the sites I scrolled. Even TikTok, which can be full of good things, veers towards our own human negative bias— all algorithms do this, guided by our brains.

Not to mention the constant societal ideals of thinness, whiteness, beauty, and conformity.

I knew I had to do something drastic. So I did.

Through my own research, I figured out a way to make my phone almost useless.

I deleted nearly all the apps from the home screen.

I deleted Gmail and all social media apps completely, as well as any other apps that had potential for distraction.

I turned my phone to grayscale, and then reduced white point 100%.

I silenced all notifications except my calendar.

I deleted Safari. I deleted Chrome.

Really, all I have left on my phone is Spotify, maps, my Libby app, weather, bank apps, and healthcare apps I need for messaging my doctors.

My phone, this incredibly toxic, sophisticated device, is now essentially a heavy Nokia that can take pictures, navigate, play music and podcasts, and connect me as much as I want. Which, turns out, is very little.

Having my email off my phone feels like flying. I feel free. I added an email signature saying that my response time is 24-48 hours.

That is something I am allowed to do.

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My phone is no longer a bright and shiny thing. Its screen is dull and almost invisible from the wrong angle. I don’t have widgets or notifications that pop up on my screen or make sounds.

For the past week I haven’t scrolled on my phone.

A few days ago I noticed that I wasn’t as tired as usual. It took me a minute to realize why.

For several weeks I’ve wanted to get back into my best schedule, which is early morning wake-ups and early evening bedtimes.

For the past four days I’ve done just that, waking up at 5:30am, just like I want to. And it doesn’t feel hard, because I haven’t spent the evening scrolling my phone.

A side effect of this is that I am not as interested in TV. I realize that one of the things I liked about watching TV (really, my laptop) is that I turn something on and I scroll on my phone, only paying half attention.

Without scrolling, boring shows are boring.

Reality TV is vapid.

Turns out that a lot of the shows on TV now are made for the kind of half-attention that comes with also looking at one’s phone while watching.

I’ve been reading more. Which is good, because I have a lot to read.

This isn’t me telling you to get off your phone.

I am only sharing my experience.

But I’ve got to be honest, here. I don’t think social media is good. I think many of us construe dopamine hits for happiness and connection.

And these companies do not have our best interests at heart. Nor our children’s.

As we navigate the new world of AI, I keep asking myself, why?

Why did we need to create AI?

What is this drive to create something so unpredictable? It’s like we’ve taken our brains and put them into a shredder, but the shredder puts the brains back together in a way that’s interesting to us.

I think the drive for AI is short-sighted and narcissistic. We want to look ourselves and to create something bigger than ourselves.

Many AI creators keep saying we’ll save so much time. We thought washers and dryers would save us time, but really, they just freed us up for other demands. Like work.

If we save time, what happens to that time? It’s not banked. It’s not like a savings account. Time doesn’t accrue to be used later. This feels like a decidedly linear and capitalistic way to look at the world.

Save time for what? For more scrolling? Vacations with the family? While the earth is warming?

I don’t know. I don’t have these answers, but I do know that it feels easier to think of these things when I am not inundated with the thoughts and ideas of others 24/7 via social media and news sites. Something I love about Substack is that many of the writers here are thoughtful and critical thinkers. In that way, I think this is why it’s one of the apps left on my phone. Albeit, without notifications turned on.

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Tell me about your relationship with your phone and social media and the internet, or any other thoughts you’d like to share in the comments.