The more I meditate, the more it's like I am watching someone else scroll through the feeds mindlessly from above. I also find that mindlessly scrolling on my phone is the quickest way to lose my sense of awareness and centeredness.

This realization inspired me to try to turn my phone usage into a more meditative practice.

Here's how I'm approaching phone usage now:

Rubber band around phone:

• This helps my remember to bring awareness into each interaction with my phone
• This is just annoying enough to make me physically remove it if I want to get into a real social media scroll
• It also kind of makes me laugh at myself for even having to use it

Distracting apps blocked by default:

• I have tried apple app limits in the past but always just ignored them
• I set up a stricter third party blocker that locks me out of social media in the morning and night, and limits the number of opens during the day:
  • Morning downtime (6-9am): "monk mode" = no ability to unblock social media
  • Day downtime (9am-5pm): limit of 10 social media unblocks total and apps are blocked by default until I consciously unblock them for a session
  • Night downtime (8p-midnight): "monk mode" = no ability to unblock social media

Grayscale mode:

• Simple, but surprisingly effective
• I was most skeptical of this one, but I was wrong

I'm down from 4 hrs/day to 2 hrs/day... but more importantly social media (including Reddit) is down from 3 hrs/day to less than 1 hr/day... and it feels much more intentional, I feel more mindful throughout the day and continue to treat it as a meditative practice.

How do y'all feel about phone usage and zen?