Recently, to combat my compulsive use of the internet on my phone, I hid Safari from myself. Honestly, I can’t find it anymore. I disabled it somehow, and I can’t figure out how to get it back. Sometimes it’s really frustrating.

I was at my aunt’s house and needed to turn on her Instant Pot. I couldn’t figure out how to secure the lid! Such a silly problem. I thought I was stupid for not being able to figure it out. I searched for videos on YouTube to show me how, but none of the lids people were using were like the one my aunt had left out for me. Long story short, I called her and she helped me, but when I went back later for dinner, there was still something wrong. It wasn’t my fault, though! It was just some miscommunication.

Anyway, that’s the type of problem I’m not sure how to fix yet. Being out and about and not being able to solve my problems through a Google search.

There’s another problem I encountered, too. I felt the benefits of spending less time on my phone slipping a bit. The clouds in my mind, which had parted, had started to return the smog to my brain. I wasn’t even totally aware of the smog. It wasn’t until I looked at my screen time on my phone that I discovered why.

It was better, but it was still higher than I felt it should be.

During the week of the 14th-20th of September, I had an average of about 4 hours and 36 minutes of screen usage. A chunk of it was also spent on Safari because I hadn’t yet hidden it from myself, but most of it was YouTube. The most time I’d spent on my phone was on Saturday. I spent about 7 hours watching YouTube or Disney. I was actively doing something during those hours, but I was still watching something while I was working on something else. I started to wonder if I was still using my phone too much. I started to wonder what other boundaries are out there in addition to the Reddit ones I had started determining for myself.

So I talked to my therapist about it. And even as we were talking, I felt it. The smog vanished so quickly, but I hated to know that the reason for it hanging around was my watching YouTube videos while doing other projects or tasks. It always just felt so nice to have someone talking to me while I work. I always feel so alone when I work on something without someone talking to me over YouTube. It made working on laundry, painting the house, or other chores so much easier to manage.

I almost felt like I was in denial about it. This felt like the final boss of this journey or experiment (that phrasing makes me feel like an Instagram post or a reality show). I didn’t want to believe that watching YouTube while working on other things was a problem. But now, realizing that it is, I had to determine what my boundaries with YouTube were going to be. My therapist suggested that whenever I begin a task, I start with nothing going on in the background. Just let my mind wander. If after 10 minutes I need some company, I can turn something on.

I think it’s a decent solution. I can also watch YouTube if that’s the main thing that I’m doing. I just need to be more intentional with how I consume media and give myself some quiet time for just thinking.

One of the main reasons I want to do all this is to learn who I am without my phone. I’ve been hiding behind it for so long that I no longer know how I would handle certain situations without it. How do I solve problems without a search engine in my hand? How do I conduct myself without my phone in my hands when I’m out in public? How do I fill the silences, and do I even need to?