HAPPILY IMPERFECT

Your phone is making you bored

a silhouette of a man using a cell phone

It seems that, no matter where I turn, I can’t escape the talk about how we use our phones. It’s understandable they are an inescapable part of our lives, and for many of us, myself included, I can’t imagine life without one; the ability to contact someone anytime anywhere is a given of modern life.

It wasn’t always such but I won’t bore you with tales of my childhood, of arranging pub meets via answerphone messages, of not having the internet at our fingertips and learning by doing or reading.

Ultimately, many people are baulking at the amount of time they spend staring at their small screen and are trying to find alternatives or at least an option or two to help them regain some balance.

I am such a person.

Dumbing us down

I removed all my social media apps from my phone at the start of the year. They have crept back on but my usage of them is far far below what it was as I doom scrolled my way through 2025.

It’s worth remembering that social media apps are very very good at what they do, namely turning us into the product by keeping us scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So there we sit with our attentions glued to absolutely nothing of consequence or note (not really), liking this, sharing that, and when we finally tear ourselves away we feel nothing. Sometimes we feel worse, rarely do we feel better.

Fixing the symptoms

For the first few months of 2026 if I was bored I tried to notice that and do something other than pick up my phone —tidy up, wash some dishes etc— and if I did end up on my phone invariably I’d skim the news (Particle) check out some blog posts (NetNewsWire), or read a book (Apple Books).

And it worked, but it still didn’t feel like enough. There were still notifications coming in to distract me, and my usage of the phone still didn’t feel wholly intentional, plus I was still reaching for it when ‘bored’ and then remaining distracted from the moment, something I’ve mused on before.

Looking around there are a variety of ways you can dumb down your smartphone, from turning off all notifications, for iPhone users you can go further and create a Focus mode (which has it’s own issues) all the way through to apps that will make your smartphone a dumb phone, apps that will limit distractions, apps that will block apps… so many apps —there is a lot of money to be made in this growing space.

But ultimately you are only solving a symptom, and I think you know it.

The Real Problem

So you’ve decided to go with a dumb phone, or you’ve installed an app to change your smartphone into one. What now? What happens when you get bored?

Sidebar: There is a correlation between this and the theories of keeping attention that I read about when I was a technical communicator, trying to make sure people got the right information as quickly as possible —a very hard thing to do in light of the instant results via internet search and worse now with AI doing the ‘work’.

Boredom is not just “having nothing to do.” Psychologists generally see it as a signal that attention, meaning, stimulation, and agency are out of alignment.

General thinking accepts that boredom largely boils down to one of five reasons:

  1. Bored with routine. We spend less energy on things that are familiar and predictable. It’s why most car crashes happen within 10 mins from home because you drive that way so often you often times don’t fully register what is happening.
  2. Not being present in the moment. We tend to think ahead, to plan, to ponder what’s next. With that mindset established, the ‘now’ can become very boring set against the excitement of a potential future.
  3. Not doing something meaningful. Doomscrolling occupies our brains but not with anything stimulating and it requires very low engagement.
  4. Being bored can push you to move on, learn something new, or do something different. Your brain makes boredom uncomfortable on purpose to push you into action.
  5. Modern life is built to induce boredom, we move less, have fewer social interactions, fewer challenges and consequences, all things that would normally have stimulated our brains —I am old enough to remember a childhood that was screen free and vibrant with fun and learning and moving and hanging out with multiple friends.

All of these can combine and drive our own internal thinking into negativity —I’m wasting time, why am I not happier?— and in a sense it’s our own intelligence that we are fighting against.

It’s why watching a child totally immersed in play can seem to simple and freeing. They haven’t yet developed the intelligence to be aware that they might be bored, it just doesn’t occur to them.

How do you fix it?

I don’t have any guaranteed answers, only what has worked for me. Obviously removing social media apps —or whatever apps you aren’t comfortable spending lots of time on— is step 1.

After that you need to consider what you’ll do when bored. Recently I’ve turned to my blog, writing drafts, capturing ideas, all on my phone, feel at least somewhat creative and stimulate my brain enough to quell that uncomfortable boredom feeling.

And it will be different for you, so if you can learn to sit with your boredom a while, let your mind wander and note where it goes.

Do you daydream? Do you imagine new projects? Do you find yourself reflecting on something from your past? Do you start pondering a problem you’ve not been able to solve?

Let your mind wander and it will guide you to what it needs, and once you start to understand that, maybe that will help you step away from the small screen a little more.

Rather than having your life filled with meaningless inputs from social media let yourself be bored, if you can do that you might find ways to deal with it that will alter your relationship with your phone, and yourself.

Further Reading

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