Since 2020 I’ve always started my mornings by scrolling on my phone or watching some YouTube videos to wake myself up. I’ve tried multiple things to try and stop this by not having my phone in the same room as me, but it always found a way back into my life whether it would be by school work or because of my dependence on it. So through this week I tried my hardest to not pick up my phone in the morning and make it to the deadline which I set at 11 a.m.
The 2020 pandemic really messed up how much I spent time on my phone which picked up into my transition to high school. This usually causes my eyes to hurt in the morning because of the brightness of my screen and also leading to me getting out of the house late and nearly being late every single day because I always get caught up in scrolling through social media or watching youtube videos and lose track of time.
My plan for this challenge which was to stay off my phone until at least 11 am each day, and keep my phone put away as much as possible.This way, when I woke up i would just immediately put my phone in my backpack and for the periods i needed to get through i wouldn’t be bothered by my phone because its not on my desk, it would be in my backpack.
I had a pretty hard time with the challenge on the first day. I woke up and wanted to touch my phone but I managed to get out of the house and through the car ride without touching it. The problem was during classes my teacher wanted us to take out our phones to do some assignments, I couldn’t do this though because of the challenge. When it reached 11 I was pretty relieved because I almost used my phone multiple times and also because I got through the 1st day.
On the second day it was a little easier for me to ignore the pull of my phone since I had some experience doing it now from day 1.But it got very annoying that I had to wait until I got home to do the assignments, but I was determined to get through the challenge on day 2, so i just told myself that i would do my assignments right when I went home so i didn’t have to worry about them.That was basically my experience for day 2.
Day 3 was the easiest day since the experience from the past days kept stacking up
overall but the work online got really annoying since I had a lot of work to do as well as the honors assignments and it made me question if I wanted to keep going. The problem with this day was that I was feeling really stressed because of my assignments so even though this was the easiest day for me to ignore my phone the assignments started to make me wonder if i could really make it through the week.
On the 4th day I broke the streak but I only broke it because I didn’t want extra homework to do and I guess the feeling of going on my phone to relieve the stress from my assignments was too strong. On this day I kind of felt a sense of guilt that I couldn’t make it through the week but a very strong sense of relief that I could finally do my assignments early and not have the work pile up and do it all at home.
For days 5,6,7 I just continued to go on my phone since I felt there was no reason to continue the challenge since I broke it on day 4. I Felt pretty guilty doing this but I’m glad that I at least tried to fix the problem of me always going on my phone in the morning.
Some of the benefits of this challenge for me was getting out of the house early, increased focus in class since I don’t see my phone on my desk, and another benefit would be that my eyes wouldn’t hurt in the morning anymore as well as discovering that I’m very addicted to my phone and I should probably spend less time on it. Overall, what I took away from this challenge is disappointment in myself for not being able to complete this challenge and I’m not very good at sticking to the things I say I’m gonna do most of the time.
