Scrolling through my mobile sittings, my curiosity was raised at the moment I saw the iPhone’s Screen Time function, I took few seconds to have a look at it, and here comes the scary moment that initiated this blog: the average daily usage of my mobile phone was 11.75 hours per day!!!!! I was spending half of my day looking at my mobile screen?!!! This means I was wasting 352.5 hours per month and 4288.75 hours per year doing nothing but scrolling through social media.

Searching in some statistics, I read that the normal average usage of mobile phones is between 3 and 4 hours per day. That made me realize that I was too far from normal, I was addicted to my mobile phone. If you over-use yours too then you are in the right blog. 

After noticing my issue, I started to spend more time analysing and identifying my addiction. That led to some conclusions. First, this addiction started since I moved out from my country for study and this was because of the transition and my homesickness feeling that made me spent most of my time trying to hold on to my old zone as much as I can by chatting with my friends, scrolling to my old networks social media and trying to run away from my uncomfortable feeling of getting out of my safe zone. Second thing I noticed was that most of my time was wasted due unconsciously scrolling through social media without any certain objective behind it. Moreover, I was excessively picking up my phone whenever I was feeling bored instead of enjoying the new environment and living in the present moment. In addition, , once I picked up my phone , I got into a zombie mode, became ungrounded and I went through an unhealthy escapism. This took me to one conclusion, I NEED TO STOP THIS ADDICATION. So, I decided to start a detox from my mobile phone. You will ask me, “what did moving to Sweden have to do with beating your addiction ?”, the answer implicitly stated in the rest of this article. 

My plan was to start a  two week detox by eliminating using my mobile phone and cutting out social media. This was done by putting some rules to myself: –

  1. keep my mobile phone away from me when going to bed, so that I don’t look at it before I sleep and when I wake up. 
  1. No mobile phone for the first hour of my morning. However, this was a little bit hard as I needed to look at the clock and the alarm. therefore , I had a new small clock beside my bed and I made a small exception for the alarm. 
  2. Delete the social media apps from my phone like Twitter (on which I spent most of my time), Facebook and Instagram . At the beginning, I knew that it would be very hard for me to cut off social media suddenly. So, I made a restriction to check my accounts for 40 minutes on the first week divided between two days each 20 min. For the second week, I cut them off completely. 
  3. Each day I was allowed to check my contacts twice (WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram). This required me to turn off all the notifications and tell my close family and friends about the times I was able to call them or check their messages. 
  4. I started using my laptop more, so instead of picking up my phone to use a calculator, search for something, write an email, check up the weather, watch the daily episode of my favourite show or write my notes, I started doing all these small tasks on my laptop. 

These rules I created were effective, but here comes another problem. I had so much free time that I didn’t know what to do to fill in it.

Actually moving to Sweden was a great chance to set new habits and activities to do in my free time which built my new life after these two weeks. And here is a list of the things I added to my day to fill in my free time :-

  • Visiting Linköping library: reading could be a great thing to enjoy in your free time. The city library was a fabulous discovery for me to read in a cosy environment or to borrow books and read it at home or in my favourite café shop. The great thing about this library is that it contains hundreds of thousands of books in different languages, so I challenged myself to read all the Arabic books there, which was a great motivation for me to read more in my free time.
  • no-Destination walk: Linköping is a perfect city if you love walking for long distances. Whether you love walking in the forest or walking in the city streets, for both you have a lot of natural places here and amazing streets in the city centrum or Gamla Linköping. 
  • Starting a new sport : a good thing to be busy with is having time to practice a sport that you love. In Linköping, there are many options to choose from. For me, I was really interested in ice skating and I easily found a place that offers training in Saab Arina. Besides, I started joining squash training in Linköping squash center, which has wonderful offers to students. 
  • One more thing that really makes me enjoy my time here, is the events and activities that is happening here in the city. ‘“Visit Linköping ” is a cool website that shows you all the events that are happening in Linköping( and Norrköping sometimes). Almost everyday you will find an event to join.
  • Joining Liu language cafe: having a cup of caffe, meeting new people and practicing some Swedish, is my favorite combination of activities.
  • In addition, I started making puzzles, which is a great mind-sport to do with a group of friends while talking or listening to some music. 
  • The Student corridor life here can add a lot of fun to you. Having friends from different cultures can fill your day with quality time in which you will enjoy small talks in the kitchen, eat new international dishes, or play board games together. 

All these habits became part of my new life here, they filled my free time and made my experience more enjoyable and healthy.  I can grantee that there are still more things to do here that needs to be discovered . Two weeks of cutting off social media and creating your new routine from the activities that your environment offers is a life-changing action. 

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