5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Screen Time
As a student, screens play a big role in your life. If you’re not working on an assignment on your laptop, you’re likely using your phone to chat with friends, check social media, or play games. Whereas devices are certainly useful — and keep you from feeling bored — too much screen time may be detrimental to your mental and physical health. Reducing your screen time will help you feel happier and less lonely and improve your sleep. There are some simple things you can do right now.
1. Set Screen Time Limits
Check how long you’re spending on the apps you use most. This will help you decide where you should cut down. In your phone’s settings, you can set a time limit for individual apps. Your phone will let you know when you’ve reached your limit for the day. Although it will allow you to override this limit if you want, you should, of course, always avoid doing so.2. Delete Apps
You may even like to delete some of the apps you use most. You could delete them temporarily to train yourself to have better habits or cut them out of your life permanently.3. Make a Conscious Decision to Look at Your Phone
It can easily become a habit to take your phone out and look at it whenever you have nothing else to do. Start only using your phone when you consciously decide to do so. To help you remember, you may like to set your phone to grayscale whenever you don’t need colour — this will make it instantly less appealing.4. Reduce Your Notifications
It’s easier to avoid looking at your phone if you’re not constantly receiving notifications. For non-essential apps, it’s worth turning off notifications entirely and just deciding when to check. For others, be more selective about what kinds of notifications you receive or change the type from alerts to banners.5. Keep Your Phone Away from Your Bed
When you go to bed, put your phone out of reach. You’re more likely to stay up past your bedtime if you have your phone and to start looking at it the moment you wake up. Plus, exposure to blue light before bed keeps your mind active and makes it more difficult to sleep. For this reason, it’s especially important to avoid screens an hour or two before bedtime.5. Call Instead of Texting Your Friends
To avoid sending messages back and forth all day, ask your friends to call you when they want to arrange plans or catch up. Scheduling video calls may even be a better way to stay in touch with hometown friends.It’s important to fill the time you usually spend on your phone with other activities. At university, this is not too difficult because you’re surrounded by other people — especially when you’re living with other students. You can find Kingston student housing rentals at Foundry Mack. When you want to socialize away from screens, you can head outdoors to the recreation area, fire pit, and BBQs. You can also spend time with your roommates and friends in your spacious suite. Book a tour to see why you’ll love living here.