Rosa Ellen’s morning routine was, for many years, one that will be familiar to a lot of people.
“I’d wake up and the first thing I’d do was check my text messages, then I’d move over to my personal email, and while I was at it I’d be tempted to check my work email … and then maybe Instagram, and then I’d scan the news sites,” she says.
Soon after, she’d start her work day where, for around eight hours, she’d flit between her computer and smartphone screens.
But a sense of disquiet was growing within her and, in January, it reached a crescendo.
“I had this ultimate feeling that I was wasting my precious life,” Rosa tells ABC RN’s Life Matters.
So, she replaced her smartphone with a dumb phone — a mobile phone with little or no internet capacity.
Since then she’s made some huge personal gains, but she’s also encountered some significant challenges.
Here’s how she’s managing them.
An opportune accident
A move to a smartphone-free life had been gradually approaching Rosa, a producer and presenter of ABC RN’s The Art Show.
For a couple of years she’s been switching to a dumb phone at the end of a working week for “a bit of a weekend detox”, she says.
“I’d feel so good afterwards.”
Her neck pain would recede and she’d read more books, something she’s always loved but had found herself doing less and less in recent years.
She began wondering if her weekend detoxes could be a more permanent arrangement, when fate intervened.
“I was camping and my smartphone broke, which was the ideal situation, because then I got out the dumb phone and I was offline,” she says.
Suddenly it was just Rosa and nature, without any pings of distraction.
‘I had to find a solution’
Rosa ran with the gift of the broken smartphone and decided not to replace it.
She was not, at that time, imagining what it might feel like to live a life without a maps app.
It would prove to be one of her first hurdles of smartphone-free living.
“My most egregious stumbling block was on the side of the West Gate Freeway in Melbourne,” she says.
Rosa was lost while driving on the busiest urban freeway in Australia.
“I had a total meltdown because I didn’t have Google Maps,” she says.
When she could eventually pull her car over, she opened the physical street directory she’d invested in — only to learn it was no help to her.
“I’d lost my map-reading ability,” she says. “I don’t know how to do that anymore.”
But she didn’t let the situation defeat her.
“I had to find a solution to the fact that I do sometimes need the internet when I’m out and about,” she says.
“My solution was I bought a tablet that is wi-fi enabled. So if I’m on a long car trip and I want to listen to a podcast or I need maps, I have that, but I don’t take it around with me.”
The process of educating friends
Another challenge Rosa encountered was social rather than directional.
Messaging apps are still where most of her friends connect with each other. Very quickly she felt the impact of disrupting that online connection.
“So I missed someone’s birthday. I fell out of contact with a group of friends that I then had to remedy,” she says.
She’d had to educate the people in her life about how they should contact her now — that is, rather than sending a WhatsApp message, to text, call or email her.
“It’s a matter of people around me getting used to the fact that I’m not online all the time,” Rosa says.
People have come on board quickly.
And while she admits to missing a couple of large, fun group chats, or photos of someone’s new baby or overseas holiday, these are micro-sacrifices she wouldn’t turn back for.
Plus, Rosa not interacting online about a new baby or holiday doesn’t mean it’s not discussed with the friend or family member; rather, the interaction is different — and likely to be voice-to-voice or in person.
“I’ve always been someone who likes having long chats on the phone,” she says.
“And you put some of those conversations off when you send people photos; you think you’re updating them fully on their life, but you’re not.”
She’s also glad to not have a “kind of cloud museum” of thousands of photos taking up digital space on her phone.
An unexpected boredom
In the first weeks of being smartphone-less, Rosa read. A lot. Sometimes (in the holidays, at least) she’d read a book a day.
“I was just sort of voracious,” she says.
“Then I felt a bit bored.”
She realised her mental appetite had previously been sated with the smartphone by “dipping in and out of a whole lot of little things that didn’t take much commitment”.
“Whereas I’ve learned that I can commit to one thing. And sometimes that requires being bored.”
In that boredom, she’s experienced something wonderful.
“I’ve been returning to some hobbies, like drawing,” she says. But that’s not the biggest plus.
Rosa says she’s lost the “constant temptation” and “physical itch” to pick up her phone, and with that, she says, “my focus returned”.
“The number one thing I feel that has changed in my brain is an ability to concentrate.”
She likens it to “a stillness of mind … an ability to focus on something calmly”.
Why boredom = good thing
In 2007 Apple launched its first iPhone and soon afterwards, smartphones — including the Nokia and the Blackberry — began to sweep the world. By 2013, smartphones were outselling traditional phones.
Since then, one of the criticisms levelled at the technology is the distraction embedded in its design, and its command over our attention.
Arguably, it’s not technology conducive to boredom.
But Trevor Mazzuccelli, associate professor of clinical psychology at Curtin University, says boredom is a useful “skill”; one that helps us to reflect on our actions and our surroundings.
And it’s not just adults who stand to benefit.
Dr Mazzuccelli explains that boredom helps children develop important skills, including: The ability to tolerate less-than-ideal experiences, and to manage frustration and regulate emotions; creative thinking; problem solving, planning, and organisation; and independence and self-sufficiency.
With social media companies increasingly targeting children, and extended amounts of screen time associated with atrophying parts of children’s brains, dumb phones might present an options for parents, too.
‘Very liberating’
Brad Ridout, associate professor of cyber psychology at the University of Sydney, says we spend, on average, about five to six hours a day on our smartphone.
It’s a “constant distraction” that can become “very stressful”.
“People are actually reporting something we’re calling ‘variable attention stimulus trait’, which is kind of culturally induced ADHD, that is really starting to affect people … in ways that our brains just aren’t designed to cope with,” he says.
But, perhaps an indication of a growing hunger for solutions to this, there’s been an uptick in interest in dumb phones — online searches for dumb phones have risen worldwide over the last few years.
While ditching a smartphone for a dumb phone isn’t the only way to improve your “digital nutrition“, for Rosa, the arrangement is working — and she’s “absolutely” going to continue it.
“There’s been some hiccups, but it’s been very liberating,” she says.
“The truth is I’m still online all day at work, as most of us are. This is really not having the internet in my pocket.”
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