Do you ever get the urge to just check your email, and then ten minutes later you realise you’re ‘doing the rounds’, checking your email and social media in a non-stop cycle? It’s obviously a terrible idea to be doing this, but I guess that’s what happens when the smartest brains in the world are incentivized to work at such companies. And it gets worse.

You have minimal control over what you get to see on these sites, especially with the advertising, and it’s possible that something that disrupts your thought patterns could turn up. The other night I was ‘doing the rounds’ and I came across something that got me really worked up. It got me so worked up I could hardly sleep. When it gets to that point, you need to stop and think, is this really worth losing sleep over? The answer is always no.

And so I’ve started to charge my phone in a rather inconvenient location a few hours before sleep, which incentivises me not to touch it until morning at least. This coupled with a rule that you can’t touch your phone until you’ve been awake for 30 minutes I find is a good way to detox.

And I’m starting to think I should only allow myself to use my phone for within 12 hours a day, a sort of phone fast. Have you tried something similar?