Techssocial | In a digital world, it’s no wonder that a lot of people cannot live without their mobile phones. Speaking of mobile phones, it has indeed evolved from simple and portable calling machines into small, pocket-sized gadgets you can easily navigate through at a touch of your fingertips.
Gone are the days where children would go outside and play with other kids their age. Instead, many children as young as two can be found clutching their phones where they mostly learn their ABC’s and nursery rhymes. For many adults, “quality time” means watching their favorite shows online instead of talking to their friends and family face-to-face.
With that said, the digital age has indeed consumed our time and seeped into our daily lives. While technology is not generally bad for us, too much of it can be actually harmful to the point of addiction.
Thankfully, there are some people out there who realized the consequences of too much phone usage and thought of ways to lessen our obsession with it. Ironic as it seems, why not use your phone to your advantage?
Here are some mobile apps that can help with mobile phone addiction:
Table of Contents
1. Forest App
Available on iOS App Store and Google Play Store, Forest is a mobile app where users can plant a virtual seed and grow your own virtual forest. Simply open the app, plant a tree, and let your virtual forest grow slowly but surely. This can work best if you don’t want to be constantly checking on your phone. Seems easy right?
Here’s the catch: if you use other mobile applications such as Facebook or any other mobile application on your phone, your virtual trees will wither and die. Sooner or later, you will find yourself engrossed with this little app. In other words, you will be addicted to your phone in a good way, thanks to this interesting mobile app.
Benefits of using this app include:
- That sense of accomplishment not only from growing your forest but also being able to resist browsing your phone out of boredom
- Unlocking other tree species you can virtually plant
- Staying focused and increasing productivity in the “real world”
- This is a free app you can download anytime!
2. Offtime App
This app can help you find the perfect balance between your virtual and personal world. This is an award-winning app that enables you to monitor your smartphone usage in real time. It can even have specific digital timeouts that you can use individually and with others.
With Offtime, you can control what goes to and from your phone. You can limit access to not-so-important apps and even block calls or texts that can distract your productivity.
Benefits of using this app include the following:
- Can help you “detox” from using electronic gadgets
- More time to focus on the more important things
- Spend more valuable time with your loved one
- Provide peace of mind
- Improve your self-control
- Lessen digital chaos (ex. receiving unnecessary notifications and spam texts, etc.)
- Downloadable via Google Play store or Apple iOS App Store
3. Quality Time App
This mobile app can help you track and monitor your overall smartphone activities. It allows you to display an app’s total usage and screen unlocks. It will also determine the usage duration per app – all of which can be accessed through this app’s summary reporting option.
Other features of this app include setting your own restrictions where you can choose to have “alerts” and “scheduled breaks”. These control options can help you curb and manage your daily phone usage. Aside from that, this app can also enable you to block or limit unnecessary notifications or phone calls via auto text reply. Likewise, you can only choose accepting calls from important contacts or apps you need for your specific task.
Benefits of using this app include the following:
- More time to focus on the important daily tasks
- Spend more valuable time with your loved one
- Improve your self-control by not excessively using apps that can distract your task
- Lessen and manage digital chaos (ex. receiving unimportant calls or spam texts, etc)
- This is a free app you can download anytime!
In Summary
Using mobile phones is not completely bad, as it can even help with our daily tasks. However, excessive use of it can ultimately ruin our quality of work and even our lives. True enough, smartphone addiction is real and should be treated the soonest.
Several luxury drug rehab centers can help cure various kinds of addiction, including smartphone addiction. Likewise, smartphone apps such as mentioned above can help provide a solution to prevent excessive mobile phone usage.
Charles L. Watson is a freelance health and addiction writer working for https://www.eliterehabplacement.com. If you don’t catch him at a local Detroit Tigers game, you will find him catching up on updated material from his favorite author Tim Ferriss. He can reached directly on Twitter at the handle @charleswatson00.