Change These Phone Settings NOW

Did you know the average person spends four hours and 37 minutes on their phone each day? That's 70 full days every year. Now, over a lifetime, that's over 14 years. Well, it's digital fentanyl in the sense that it's highly addictive. The average teen gets more than 200 notifications on their phone in 24 hours.

These days, screen time seems to be all the time.

Every one of those moments quietly chipping away at your sleep, your health and your focus. In that context, it makes sense that changing how you use your phone is one of the biggest levers on improving your health. This is a step by step guide on how to protect yourself and retake control. Your phone is like the frog in the pot of the slow boiling water, quietly ruining your sleep. Staring at the blue light from your phone suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin and it spikes the stress hormone cortisol. This makes it harder for you to fall asleep. Even if you do fall asleep quickly, the quality of your sleep will actually be worse. Here is the first fix. Activate Night Shift or Android Bed mode. This shifts blue enriched light to warmer tones, pushing light below the 30 lux thresholds, which preserves melatonin. But this doesn't eliminate blue light completely. To totally eliminate the blue light, you want to activate Red light mode. Now this is helpful if you need to check your phone for something urgent at night. So here's how you can set it up on the iPhone. Go to Settings, Accessibility Display and Text Size Color Filters Turn on Color filters, then choose Color Tint. Set the intensity and hue sliders all the way to the right to make the screen red. You can also engage this again with a triple tap on the side button. Go back to Settings Accessibility Accessibility Shortcut Select Color Filters as the shortcut Red mode now activated. The next problem is how most of us hold our phones. And just the way you're holding the phone could be causing you some serious pain. If your neck feels sore after holding your phone, that's your spine screaming for help. A 2014 paper showed that tilting your neck at 45 degrees increases the load on your cervical discs from around 10 pounds to around 49 pounds of force. Doing this routinely caused a 46% increase in reported pain fixing. This is kind of hard because we're not naturally acclimated to holding our arms up. Now this also applies to laptops. You want to have your screen at eye level. You do not want to be looking down. Friends, this is what I do. It doesn't draw any attention. Men avoid stashing your phone next to your boys.

You might have heard that carrying your phone in your pocket can reduce your testosterone levels and sperm count. And guess what? That is true.

A lot of men carry their phone in their front pocket, not realizing that it may affect their fertility. A Meta analysis of 18 studies showed that proximate phone RF lowered sperm motility and viability. Just a little distance lowers your exposure by orders of magnitude. Next, you want to cap your volume at 80 decibels. I hear you. Sometimes you just want to crank it up because it feels so good. Or you're listening to music and you want to override the street noise or a crowd. But what you may not realize is you're entering the danger zone for hearing loss. Sound is measured in decibels and for 40 hours a week you can safely listen up to 80 decibels. Now push that up to 90 decibels and the safety zone reduces to four hours. That's when you start risking hearing loss. Earbuds can easily hit 100 decibels on max volume, meaning just 15 minutes of that exposure can cause hearing damage. If you're doing this, you'll notice your hearing getting worse and worse until one day you get a ringing in your ear that just won't go away. Okay, so here's some solutions. In your phone settings, you can enforce an 80 decibel cap. Now for external noise that's going to exceed those safe levels. Some earbuds and headphones have noise cancellation. Next, when you get in the car, switch on do not Disturb Driving is probably the most dangerous thing all of us do on a daily basis. When your phone is notifying you as you drive, that makes things sketchy. Sending or reading a text takes your eyes off the road for as much as five seconds at 55 miles an hour. That is the equivalent of driving the length of a football field blind. Even glancing at a notification increases your crash risk by 4 to 6x. In 2022 alone, over 3,500 deaths were related to these distraction related events. So the solution here is to turn on Do Not Disturb with CarPlay and Android Auto. Alternatively, you could put your phone in the glove box, in the bag, or somewhere where you can't see it. Next, text with both thumbs or use voice dictation. Here's a quick one. Case reports suggest using one may give you tendonitis. So the options are use what evolution gave you two thumbs, your voice, or don't text. Next, you dirty animals wipe your screens daily with microfiber and 70% alcohol. Phones are pretty disgusting Researchers at the University of Arizona found that phones have 10 times more bacteria than toilet seats. Just like you've learned to wipe your ass, learn how to wipe your phone with microfiber and 70% alcohol. Now, if you haven't heard of the 202020 rule, you're only missing out. An easy solution is to adopt the.

2020 Eye Care Habit 2020 Rule.

The 2020 Rule. 2020 Rule. Now, if you're staring at your screens for hours, you're focused on a close up object. It dries your eyes and leaves them irritated over time. This causes temporary near sighted blur. Okay, so here's the 202020 rule. For every 20 minutes you stare at a screen for 20 seconds, stare at something 20ft away. All of these things, of course, are a band aid on the wound, which is how much time you actually spend on your phone every day. So how can each of us stop or lessen our addictive compulsive use of our phones? Eliminate all notifications. They constantly interrupt everything we're doing. Did you know that it takes the average person 23 minutes to to regain focus after an interruption? Eliminate all notifications. X IG WhatsApp, TikTok. Although do enable Brian Johnson notifications on YouTube. Only allow messages from those who are actually useful to you in case of an emergency. After one week alone, you will feel calmer and at greater peace. Okay, now if you absolutely need to enable certain strategic notifications, don't do that either. Now, if you find that your compulsive addictive habits to the phone are stopping you from turning turning off notifications, there are actually apps that block entirely the apps. I think we all need this. There was a study that showed that addictive behaviors on checking it predicted mood disorders like depression much more than just raw minutes. So the way you engage with the phone actually is predictive of your mood. There are apps like Opal and One Sec which help you manage your access of these apps that you find addictive and compulsively compelling. There's also some other creative solutions, like this company called Brick. You have this device that sits somewhere in your home. If you want to get access to a certain app like Instagram, you have to go to the device and scan it. Then it opens up the app. So people are less likely to do that because you probably don't want to get up off the couch. Now this may sound extreme, but honestly, we all know it's kind of true. The simplistic solutions rarely actually change our behavior. And sometimes we need to resort to the more extreme versions to keep ourselves in check. Next, grayscale and low saturation. Now companies use colors to create dopamine loops that create more addictive and compulsive behavior. The way you can fight back at this is change the color to monochrome in studies that show that it reduced usage by 11% within one week. To do this on the iPhone, go to Settings, Accessibility, Display and Text Size Color filters. Turn on grayscale. You can also engage this again with a triple tap on the side button. Next, have phone free places. So put down that phone and listen up. First question is, have you fubbed your friends? Fubbing is when you phone snub somebody and you look at your screen instead of making eye contact. This makes everybody around you more stressed and erodes your relationships. A 2025 study showed that phubbing reduces relationship satisfaction by and it made conflict and jealousy much more likely. Be a good human and maintain eye contact. Put your phone away when somebody else is talking. You can also establish phone free zones at the dinner table, in the bedroom, in the front seat of the car. One solution is to keep your phone charger outside your bedroom, which prevents you from doom scrolling all night long, wrecking your sleep. Put it down. It's not worth it. Next, you can schedule phone free time.

Say the mere presence of our phones can cause brain drain. Whether they're on or even off, we.

All need long stretches of time without access to our phones. Do a small experiment, lock it in a drawer for 60 minutes and just see how you feel. With that small success, you can then try a half day. A good sleep hygiene practice is 60 minutes before bed. Shut that shit down. Next, let's do a screen time audit. Sometimes just seeing the horrifying information of how much you actually use your phone can actually lessen your usage. One way to approach this problem is to identify which apps you're spending the most time on. If Instagram is your weakness, try is the first step cutting that time in half. Once you've accomplished that and filled with momentum, check in weekly to see if you're on point or if you can cut it further. Friends, real talk now is the acknowledgment that we are all compulsively addicted to our phones. Children, parents, everybody. It is incredibly hard to not do this because on our phones are things that we love and care about. Our work, our friends, our family, entertainment. This creates a very complicated relationship for us to not use our phones and it creates a form of anxiety. When you step away from the phone, you don't know what to do with yourself. Honestly, we all know this. Our phones are really bad for us. They don't make us better people because of our excessive use. Also, the companies that build things on these phones, they build the things to addict you and me to their applications. They're asking us to exchange our life for their profits. It's really a nefarious situation. Now, of course, there are positive things. It's wonderful to communicate and to share and be part of a larger group of people. Also, they're corrosive and they ruin so many things about our health and wellness. So the goal here is to be aware of these dangers, take small steps to improve your life. Because if we do, it will make you and me a better human and we will build a better world.