Have you ever heard of screen detox? No? 

Okay, but I am sure that we are aware of what a detox is. We do everything to keep our bodies healthy. People consider quitting smoking, drinking, and using drugs, and then using antioxidants to improve their health. But have we thought about giving up on spending too much time on screens? How about a screen detox? Screen detox is a healthy way of cleaning up your mind and body.

We are all having a difficult time being caught up in the Covid era. We work from home, and our children study from home, as well. We work on laptops and, in our free time, we are busy scrolling through our phones. At times, we pick up our phones and scroll through social media just to kill some time, and that ‘some time’ turns into hours. 

Speaking of kids, they are also learning everything virtually by spending time on tabs or mobile phones and, in their free time, they are playing on tabs, again! Earlier, parents were worried about their kids when they spent too much time playing games on-screen or watching YouTube. But, now that they have no choice but to spend more time on screens, will kids develop a fear of waking up in the morning, getting ready, carrying tiffin and school bags, and physically going to school, where they will be surrounded by 45 other students?

We can’t deny the fact that life has become easy and everything happens with one click. Nowadays, our phones have everything in one place. Be it banking apps, food delivery apps, e-commerce apps and not to forget social media accounts. We have everything on our phones. This leads to spending more time on screens. 

I miss those days when we were going to the office, meeting people in person, taking those coffee breaks and now it is all replaced by screen time. Working from home has resulted in fewer breaks from screening. The training/meetings that we were having in the office are now replaced by all online meetings. Which leads to spending even more screening hours.

Considering the lifestyle that we are living and its effects on our bodies, now it is time to take a break and think about how we can go offline, at least for some hours of the day. Since work and schooling are impossible without screens, let us keep it that way. But we can surely work on the rest of the things. How? Well, here are my thoughts about how we can avoid screen time by adopting easy moves in our day-to-day activities.

To come out of the toxic relationship with screen time, we need to be a little more reorganised and we have to reprioritise our activities. Currently, work is everywhere. It is in my drawing-room, it is on my phone through office apps when I am driving or it is there even when I am logged off during office hours. But it is in my hand not to let my work enter into my time. Now that office apps are installed on my phone, I continuously get notifications of office emails. I opened that email out of curiosity and eventually responded to it by re-logging into my laptop. But we’re forgetting one thing: the person who must have sent you an email has written his last email of the day and shut down his laptop screen, and I’m still responding to that email after hours. Someone can call me if there is an emergency. I can speak on the call, but that still allows me to spend time looking at the screen, and I simply turn off office notifications during my non-working hours.

How about organising our time? I try to avoid using my phone, laptop, or tablet, especially when I’m spending ‘me-time’. Taking out some time from a busy schedule is like therapy for me. I recently decided to follow the simple rule of not checking my phone for the first one hour after I wake up and one hour before I go to bed because, in my experience, looking at my phone as soon as I wake up makes me less productive. There may be some sad news in WhatsApp chats or on social media, and I don’t want to start my day with bad news. So I wake up and I plan my schedule. 

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