Turn your phone to grayscale to break addiction

[stand@desk]

I came across some artciles yesterday saying changing your phone from color to grayscale can stop your phone addiction.

https://lifehacker.com/make-your-smartp ... 1789747192

Like many of the articles on the internet, there are several articles on the same topic recycling the message so there are other sources as well.

I just changed my phone yesterday and I am looking forward to seeing how I feel about this change in the days and weeks to come. It certainly feels different to use it so far, like there is nothing keeping me attached to it, nothing keeping me using it longer than I need to. It also makes you work a little harder to use the thing which I think is a good thing.

I wanted to change my desktop computer screens to grayscale but on my windows 10 update that functionality has been taken away. Previous versions of windows 10 have allowed for it (as I've seen on youtube tutorials) but I can't find out how to do it now. Does anyone have advice on how to do it? Also, I think changing my desktop to grayscale could help our toddler break away from demanding to watch all these colors, shapes nursery rhymes youtube videos she is very addicted to.

It seems intuitive that these color screens are what is making us addicted to devices. Take away the color and take away the addiction?

[bryan]

I'll give it a go. Then again, I mostly just check twitter and my RSS feeds addictively (so I'm skeptical it will change anything). Already a bit annoyed that youtube isn't in color

[Lucky C]

While bright colors like red and yellow catch our eye, we are programmed to pay attention to light and motion regardless of color. Colorblind people watch TV. Dogs watch TV. Everyone watched TV when it was all black and white, fuzzy, and there were only four boring shows to pick from. Take away the color and people will still stare at screens for hours. Leave the color and take away the light and motion and you have a static picture, which people may enjoy looking at, but they will not become fixated on it.

Beyond the bright moving colors that engage our reptilian brain, we watch screens because it's a way for us to feel like we are accomplishing an activity without having to do any work, but of course afterwards we don't feel so good because we didn't accomplish anything and there was no growth. Better than TV and movies are the internet and video games, where at least some learning and skill-building can be had, but often this learning is not applicable to our real world goals so we are just tricking ourselves into feeling productive. We are not actually accomplishing important tasks / producing anything tangible / reducing entropy. But in the short term we still get that dopamine hit and the nice feeling that we are making progress in our life through completing one more episode/article/level.

This grayscale idea reminds me of wearing blue tinted glasses to make food less appealing so you don't overeat. Maybe it works for some addicts but I feel like the best way to break a habit is just to actively think of the consequences and build up the skill of willpower. Understand why you want to look at your phone so much and what it may be preventing you from accomplishing.

[bryan]

Well, after a couple days my initial reactions:
- I hate it! Especially when using twitter, reddit, youtube, and websites that have pictures/video.
- I could get used to this! Primarily when reading my RSS feeds (more like a newspaper) or when it's dark (no bright blue lights or whatever reason we all use something like f.lux)
- am I using it less? How the heck would I know (I don't keep track of time spent on the phone)! Certainly it hasn't stopped me, yet, from doing the twitter->reddit->facebook->craigslist->twitter->RSS->facebook->reddit->facebook->twitter->RSS->twitter dance

[Farm_or]

My pre-smart phone addiction was black and white newspaper, so I am skeptical. My particular affliction seems to be information addiction?

[Gilberto de Piento]

(no bright blue lights or whatever reason we all use something like f.lux)

Are you sure this is correct? I could be wrong, but I think setting the screen to grayscale would result in a lot of white which is actually a combination of red, green, and blue pixels. This is way out of my area so maybe someone who knows displays could let us know.

[bryan]

Er, yeah.. sounds like we need (to find?) a controlled experiment! Certainly a white pixel on a typical display will be full RGB. But honestly I'll probably just disable the greyscale since it hasn't done much for me and try to find a f.lux type app for my phone (I think it's built-in to latest versions of the OS).

I wonder how f.lux would interact with greyscale enabled?

[NPV]

Thanks for the idea! I switched it on and will see how it works.

[vexed87]

I reduced my phone use by simply muting notifications of apps that I don't care about. So I still get calls, but not the annoying reminders to look at facebook, ebay or whatever. Working through your apps and disabling background data use has a similar effect.

This stuff makes you less present in group chats etc, but more present at the task in hand. Schedulers can be useful for restricting this stuff to certain times of the day if you don't want to go the whole way.

[Sclass]

I tried this. Thanks for OP.

It worked so well I had to turn color back on. The withdrawal was too intense.

I really cut down for a day till I just couldn’t stand it anymore and turned everything back on. Maybe I’ll try again.

If I’m not running my device I might have to actually do something real. Something to reduce entropy - I like that description.