Personal Experiment

Leaving your smartphone alone or even keeping it out of reach for a specific amount of time is hard. Now it was very hard in my sense. As I am apart of the schools Marching Band, I use my phone for my music as well as seeing my placement on the field through two different apps. The apps I use are call flipfolder and UDBapp. These allow me to see what our director sees as well as what to play and where to move at specific times. So leaving my smartphone out of reach was hard since I was constantly practicing my music. I decided on a day when rehearsal got canceled the night before that I would leave it at home for an entire day. To ensure that I didn’t use it, I had my roommate hide it for me in my room somewhere and told her not to tell me where it is. I asked her to do this around 9am. As I went to class throughout the day to about 2:30pm, I was extremely paranoid that something had happened to a friend or family and I would never know about it because I did not know where my phone was. I was also caught up in the fact that I could be socializing with people but I was not able to. It was almost if my phone was my security blanket. At around 5pm I headed to work where I am a server. I worked from 5:45pm — 10pm and in those 4ish hours, I completely forgot about my phone. Even driving home I didn’t think about it. I picked up dinner for myself and when I got home, my friend who hid the phone asked when I was going to ask her for it. I was baffled because I had forgotten about it after stressing out about it for hours in the beginning of the day. When I got my phone back which was hid under my mattress all day, I was sad to find out that I had 0 (zero) notifications. I had been worried all day that I would have missed out on something when in reality, I didn’t miss anything. This taught me a valuable lesson as I found a way to function without my phone. From doing this experiment, it motivates me to convince other people to do the same and to stay away from my phone more now that I definitely know that I can do it. To conclude, for the first 5–6 hours, it was absolutely dreadful but once I became unattached and not fixated on it, it was extremely relieving and I would highly recommend doing this if you or someone else you know is severely attached to their phone.