Make your phone less addictive — Tip #27
A tiny setting change that protects your eyes and attention 😵💫
Since the last tip leaned into the “spiritual” side, this week we’re back to the practical. Regardless, even if you don’t think you’re anxious or stressed, give this a try 👇
If you pick up my phone you’ll notice it’s always in “black and white” (or more precisely greyscale). Why? As a knowledge worker, I spend about 10–12 hours a day on screens. On days packed with back-to-back calls, I would reach night time with my eyes feeling burning and dry, like my eyelids were glued to my eyes 😵💫. That pushed me, years ago, to try something I saw randomly online: disabling color on my phone.
When you turn your screen from colorful to colorless, all the visual stimulation that goes into your eyes is suddenly gone, making the screen less interesting. Have you ever noticed how cats are fascinated by moving elements on the screen and can be fixated on them for long? It’s such a thing that the Blue Man Group dedicated an entire track to the phenomenon. We humans are not immune to this dynamic 🤓.
What shocked me the most was an app like Instagram, which is highly visual, going from super addictive to almost “boring” with this basic change. Judge for yourself 👇
This reminds me a bit of a friend of mine who can’t stand black-and-white movies. He finds them extremely boring, maybe he has a point 😅.
For work sometimes I do need to see things in color, this is where creating some form of shortcut is helpful to quickly switch colors back and forth. You can easily create them on both iOS and Android.
Initially I tried greyscale from 9 PM to 7 AM, basically trying to reduce evening/night eye strain, but then realized how effective it was for me, so I now keep it on 24/7. My phone usage wasn’t that huge before this change, but I can tell it’s much lower now. I used to binge-watch reels on IG when I was doing cardio; now I don’t. I just sit with myself and my thoughts (scary in 2026, I know!).
Your weekly tip: To reduce visual stimulation and phone addiction, turn on greyscale: your eyes will be grateful (iOS, Android). If you don’t want to commit fully, enable an automation for the evening hours, and if you like it, double down for the entire day like I did.
Don’t forget to share this tip with a friend whose eyes may be strained 🫰
See you next week, until then…
Don’t Panic 😱
I'd heard about the black and white thing and it's true it makes Instagram and other visual platforms way less interesting. I even have a monochrome E-Ink phone that I have used exclusively at times, but guess what: my screen time is about the same on it as on a color phone.
My problem is that these are not the apps that keep me glued to my phone. It's the browser! I look things up, I read articles, I go down Wikipedia rabbit holes… I start reading and can't stop reading until I feel I've understood something to my satisfaction. That might be just a minute for a topic that ended up not holding my interest, but might be 15 hours for a more gripping one. 😅
The kind-of solution for now is an app called Freedom that let's me block the internet on a schedule across all my different devices, leaving only websites I need to do my work.