Mercifully, she agreed to be my phone coach for the month of January, and walk me through her plan, step by step. Together, we would build a healthy relationship with my phone, and try to unbreak my brain. Digital wellness is a budding industry these days, with loads of self-help gurus offering miracle cures for screen addiction.

The 20 best apps to improve your smartphone | Technology | The Guardian

Others focus on cutting out screens entirely for weeks on end. Instead, her program focuses on addressing the root causes of phone addiction, including the emotional triggers that cause you to reach for your phone in the first place. When we started, I sent her my screen time statistics, which showed that I had spent 5 hours and 37 minutes on my phone that day, and picked it up times — roughly twice as many as the average American. Catherine encouraged me to set up mental speed bumps so that I would be forced to think for a second before engaging with my phone.

Why now? What else? I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted. Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness.

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I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate. If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing. On the subway, I kept my phone in my pocket and people-watched — noticing the nattily dressed man in the yellow hat, the teens eating hot Takis and laughing, the kid with Velcro shoes. When a friend ran late for our lunch, I sat still and stared out the window instead of checking Twitter.

She also said paying more attention to my surroundings would make me realize how many other people used their phones to cope with boredom and anxiety.

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Sign up for the Smarter Living newsletter. For me, that meant deleting Twitter, Facebook and all other social media apps, along with news apps and games. I kept messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal, and non-distracting utilities like cooking and navigation apps.

I pruned my home screen to just the essentials: calendar, email and password manager. And I disabled push notifications for everything other than phone calls and messages from a preset list of people that included my editor, my wife and a handful of close friends.

The 20 best apps to improve your smartphone

Where you keep your phone is also important. Catherine charges her phone in a closet; for me, she recommended a locking mini-safe. And I pursued activities that could replace my phone habit. On the recommendation of my colleague Farhad Manjoo, I signed up for pottery classes. As it turned out, pottery makes a perfect phone substitute. It gets your hands dirty, too, which is a good deterrent to fiddling with expensive electronics.

After a pottery class, I updated my wife on my progress. I told her that while it felt great to disconnect, I still worried that I was missing something important. I spent more time listening to her, and less time distractedly nodding and mumbling while checking my inbox or tapping out tweets. Studies have shown that excessive phubbing decreases relationship satisfaction and contributes to feelings of depression and alienation. I had dreaded this idea at the outset, but when the weekend actually arrived, I got giddy with excitement. The same thing can happen if the app itself is glitching.

Many factors can cause online apps like Twitter to experience downtimes like bad updates or server errors. Oftentimes, problem occurs as minor error hence can easily be remedied by clearing the app.

That said, clear Twitter app and other background apps on your iPhone 7 with these steps:. After clearing Twitter and other background apps, perform a soft reset or restart your iPhone 7 to dump cache and data from apps and iOS for smoother operation. To do so, turn off your iPhone for about 30 seconds and then turn it back on. When the iPhone reboots completely, launch Twitter and see if it is already working properly this time.

Updates can be the ultimate solution if the underlying cause of the problem is a software bug or malware. Aside from new and enhanced features, updates also contain fix patch to get rid of any existing bug and malicious software that might have caused the app to become erratic. Hence, keeping apps up to date is highly recommended. App developers periodically release updates as part of maintenance routine for their respective apps.

Then relaunch Twitter to see how it works. Aside from updating apps, updating your iPhone software to the latest version available can likewise be a potential solution if the problem is attributed to bug-inflicted system errors. Like app updates, Apple also releases periodic updates to keep iOS devices at their best possible state and performance. And for that reason, keeping iOS up to date is also recommended. To check for new software update on your iPhone 7 via over-the-air, follow these steps:.

A notification typically shows up if a new iOS version is available. The new update brings in new features and security enhancements to deal with system bugs. To download and install the new update over-the-air, your phone must be connected to the Internet and must have enough power and storage space.

I Tried to Limit My Screen Time

Reboot your iPhone 7 when the update is finished installing to make sure things are properly implemented and to prevent your device from acting up. Invalid settings on your iPhone may also affect certain apps functions. If the problem occurs after modifying some of your iPhone settings, then it likely has something to do with the recent settings changes. The same thing can happen if it occurs after installing a new software update.

Some updates would automatically override settings on the device when implemented. To rule this out, you can reset all settings on your iPhone 7 to restore the default or original values and by then you can configure necessary options individually and properly.