Are you using your phone to check in or to check out?
Have you ever felt your eyes glaze over, smartphone in hand, trying to remember why you picked it up in the first place?
You know what I’m talking about: smartphones can snatch our attention away from the here and now.
Of course, phones do a lot of good, too: they help us learn, research, create, record, navigate, and connect. They keep us safe. They keep our relationships alive. They’ve even replaced our wallets.
Yet, in human history there has never been a tool that travelled with us, connected us, entertained us, informed us, distracted us, and tracked us every hour of the day.
The gifts smartphones offer come with some costs, which we can see in our own lives and in the lives of some of our students.
Various international research findings suggest links between mobile phone usage and
- sleep issues
- decreases in attention such as fragmented focus
- diminishment in the quality of our relationships, such as being “alone together”, a term coined by MIT professor Sherry Turkle
- lower mood
To be clear, the challenge isn’t that phones are bad. The challenge is that they are extremely effective at capturing human attention!
Mindfulness, or the practice of placing our focus on the present moment with kindness and curiosity, has much to offer us in the arena of improving attention and making good choices with our time.
A simple way of bringing a mindful attitude into how we use our smartphones is to begin asking the question, “What am I seeking right now?”
If you ask yourself that question, you might discover the why under the habit. Many phone behaviours we use are attempts to soothe, distract, numb, energise, or connect. These needs are very human.
Research by Shi et al. (2023) found that participants spent a significant amount of time using their smartphones for emotion regulation to cope with unpleasant feelings such as boredom and stress.
The research participants reported that smartphone-mediated emotion regulation is effective for attaining their desired affective states.
However, those self-reported effects did NOT hold up when the researchers performed lagged analyses predicting changes in momentary mood across a few hours.
This contradiction suggests that emotional benefits may be quite transient OR that the findings might reflect self-report biases. In other words, what people report about the effectiveness of emotion regulation via phone doesn’t line up with quantitative measures.
This disparity between our hopes when we reach for our phones and what we actually experience is something we can explore by becoming more mindful of our emotional and mental states and their connection to our actions.
After all, there are differences between short-term happiness, which’s fleeting, and happiness that supports wellbeing over time.
By getting clearer about what our actions provide for us, we can make more informed choices about what we do. And a way to get clearer about that is by practising mindfulness, because mindfulness is a practical life skill related to self-management and habit formation
Here’s a simple framework: am I using my phone to check in? or to check out?
Checking in might mean learning something; messaging a friend; reading or watching something beautiful, inspirational, edifying; practising a skill like a language or memory game; taking or editing photos of something in the world around you to appreciate it. We can also use the term “Self-regulation” for when we are checking in with someone or something beneficial for our hauora.
Checking out, in comparison, is scrolling; mindless viewing/consumption; checking on likes/follows; consuming junk content; distraction; losing track of time; rage watching; comparing your life to others’ online lives. Another term for checking out is “autoregulation.” Autoregulation means distracting or escaping from what’s going on, numbing out.
But how can we practice greater awareness about whether we are checking in or checking out with our phones?
Here’s a simple mindfulness practice to teach (and to use ourselves!):
Micro-mindfulness 10 second check-in:
- What am I feeling?
- What do I need?
- Is this likely to help?
- Take 3 belly breaths
Mindfulness doesn’t tell us whether to pick up the phone—it helps us notice why we’re picking it up, and whether it’s serving us.
What need am I trying to meet when I reach for my phone?
Our attention is one of the most valuable things we have—it’s what enables us to show up, experience life, connect, and do what matters most to us.
Every time we unlock our phones, we’re spending a small piece of our lives. Mindfulness helps us decide whether that’s an investment we want to make.
Try some Mindful Activities here.