Have you checked your screen time stats lately? You can do so in your phone settings, where you’ll probably find a section dedicated to the way you use your phone. And when you do, you’ll see your screen time numbers laid out in full. 

Average daily hours, the specific amount of time you’ve spent on apps throughout the week, and even whether or not your screen time hours have changed compared to the week before. 

And once you do look at these stats, you might start to feel something along the lines of ‘This needs to change!’.

And you wouldn’t be the first person to experience that! But when it comes to reducing screen time and phone usage, you’ve got to be careful about how you approach it. 

You can’t just go cold turkey and try to cut out using your phone at all. You’ll be straight back on social media, doom scrolling through your feed, within a week flat. Instead, you need to think your way through your screen time, including where it comes from and what you can do to replace it. 

And with all that in mind, here’s how to lower your screen time numbers without losing any of the fun.

Understand What Screen Time Fulfills for You

It’s a pretty big question to try and answer, but it’s necessary if you want to reduce your screen time. 

What does spending time on your phone do for you? Does it fill the gap when you’re bored? Is it what you resort to when you’re tired and don’t feel like doing anything else? Is it something you can use to distract yourself when there’s too much going on? 

Once you work out what screen time fulfills and means for you, you can take the reason behind your stats and work out what else to do with it.

Set Yourself a Goal

And once you have this reason all laid out, it’s time to set yourself a goal. You need something actionable to work toward here, otherwise you’re just going to lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve. 

Make sure the goal is small yet significant enough to work on as well. ‘Reduce screen time’ isn’t going to fly. ‘Cut an hour off screen time’ is much better. 

With both your underlying reason and a proper goal to focus on, you’ll have so much less hassle to deal with in the process.

Don’t Scroll – Play Something Instead

If you’re always just resorting to scrolling whenever you pick up your phone, you’re doing it a disservice. It’s capable of so much more, and you can get so much more out of it. 

And it’s not even that hard to do either. You just need to find a game you like playing, whether that’s hearts or solitaire, or games like Bejeweled or Fruit Ninja, and get them installed. 

Once they’re there for you to play, you can spend your time on your phone doing something a bit different. Sure, it might not reduce your screen time as much as you want. But it’s actually doing something better for you overall. 

You’re not simply scrolling, taking in the world’s information and everyone’s problems, and feeling like you can’t even close out of the app in case you miss something. Instead, you’re just taking a quick 5 to 10 minutes to play a bit of a game you enjoy. 

Even if you do end up going back to social media, you’ve ended up spending less time on it that day. 

And in the end, you might find your overall screen time does, in fact, start to drop. After all, you’re sating the need to use your phone in other ways, and it’s ultimately preventing that cycle of ‘logging on’ and never leaving.

Be Genuinely Social

Being on social media all the time probably has you ignoring texts from friends. And even if they use the platform too, and are messaging you on there, you still probably take a while to get back to them. 

Even though they’re only a few taps away, it can be hard to convince yourself to head to the messages section. 

If that’s a problem you deal with, cutting down your screen time might be more of a relationship goal than anything else. You want to get back to your loved ones, you just keep getting distracted. 

But, if you use the energy you usually put toward scrolling and turn it toward staying in touch, you can channel screen time usage in a much healthier way. And if need be, try and start having some more fun conversations with friends too.

Use a Desktop PC More Often

Spend an hour or two on your phone before you go to bed? You can lock in for a long gaming session in the same amount of time you would usually spend on Instagram or TikTok in the evening. 

So why not do that instead? It’s going to be more fun, it won’t bombard you with all kinds of doom and gloom, and if you like multiplayer games, you might even make some new friends.

Lower Your Screen Time without the Hassle

A screen time reduction can make you ping pong all over your phone, with the aim of finding something else to do other than scroll. And that’s why you not only need a goal to hit, but you also need to understand what scrolling does for you, and how else you can get that feeling.

So get off social media, and actually be social with your phone contacts. Or if you’d rather, just download some games to play instead, or use your browser to access mobile-friendly online games.

And if the aim of lowering your screen time is to simply reduce the amount of time you spend looking at your phone, pivot your focus towards another screen instead. If you’ve got a computer or laptop that’s capable of running video games, load that up instead!