How I cured my phone addiction and got four hours of my life back every day

As Meta is ordered to pay out millions for endangering children on its addictive social media platforms, Victoria Richards realised she was as addicted to screentime as her kids – so she took drastic action
M y 14-year-old daughter is pretty much glued to her phone, like every other teenager we know, so I’ve been taking in the news that Meta has been forced to pay out $375m (£279m) by a court in New Mexico for misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children with some interest – and some guilt, too.

A jury found that the tech giant – which owns Facebook , Instagram and WhatsApp – endangered children, allegations its CEO Mark Zuckerberg denies (the company now plans to appeal).

As a parent of a child who uses all of these platforms (except Facebook , which I am told – with the kind of withering stare only a teenage girl can truly perfect – is for geriatrics like myself, only), my guilt centres around whether I’ve done enough to protect her from their addictive algorithms .

In fact, I’d say that until recently it was a pretty close tie for who used their phone to scroll more: me or my daughter, despite knowing of the potential harms (such as the fact that smartphone addiction can affect our sleep, our social interactions, our emotional wellbeing and even our memory).

I’ve known of the risks for years, but the trouble was...

I just didn’t seem to be able to stop.

At the tail end of last year, I’ll confess I was on a “daily usage” of somewhere around five hours – sometimes six.

Until, that is, I discovered a secret weapon in January and cured my phone addiction overnight (and brought that daily screen time down to just two hours a day – much of which is calls, work emails and using the “notes” app to write on my commute).

And it was breathtakingly easy.

In just a few, short months, I’ve kicked my addiction to scrolling idly through Insta, as well as the strange desire at midnight to find out what happened to a girl I never even spoke to at school by trawling through Facebook, plus the short-lived dopamine hit of tapping one button then watching reel after reel and story after story of friends, friends of friends, and celebrities.

I now realise that I have wasted hours, even days, when I could have been reading an actual book – or getting some much-needed sleep.

Because I have “Bricked” Amazon and Vinted, any online shopping I do has to come from physically going to, often independent, shops.

It’s better for my wallet, for the future of our high streets – and for the environment.

And I feel better for no longer lining the bloated pockets of controversial tech giants like Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos .

Sure, there will be those who say, “just stop using the apps!” and who will scoff at the idea that we don’t have enough willpower to do it alone; they’ll ask why I didn’t “just delete them” (spoiler: tried that, but I just ended up downloading them again), or “just turn off your phone” (when you have young children, the “what if” worry about missing calls from school makes this impossible).

Yes, I could have left my phone upstairs – or downstairs when I was upstairs and I did that all of that too; but just like the tell-tale heart throbbing beneath the floorboards in the Edgar Allan Poe short story, I knew it was there.

They say the first step of recovery is admitting you’ve got a problem, and thanks to the false intimacy of having Insta so readily available as an app on my phone screen, I was left asking myself some pretty uncomfortable questions.

Did I really just say “shush” to my nine-year-old son in the kitchen, because I was halfway through discovering “the truth” about Nicole Kidman’s “beauty secrets”?

Had I seriously justified being late for the school run because I simply had to find out what Lily Allen had said about her twatty ex (David Harbour) , when I don’t know them “IRL”, at all?

And how is it that I know Lena Dunham’s birthday (13 May) and star sign (Taurus) off the top of my head, when I’m not even sure I could say the same about my cousin?

I’m now a born-again Brick zealot who’s seen the light (and who wishes her friends would stop taking pictures of our food to post them on socials, before we are allowed to eat it).

Now, with the news of Meta ’s fall from grace and social media bans for under-16s being seriously considered by governments across the world, I’m even more grateful that I’ve kicked the habit.

You only need one Brick per household – so now my teenager is on it, too.

Today, I can happily report that my current “Bricked” streak is 195 hours, which would revert to 0 if I ever unbrick my phone.

Before that, it was 300 hours (I had to unbrick to reply to someone on Vinted).

What is curious now is how anxious I feel when I’m not “Bricked” – there’s a kind of tetchy, irritable panic that I could be sucked back into scrolling at any time.

I don’t like that feeling, so I’m staying “Bricked” for the foreseeable.

I’d rather be addicted to not scrolling, than scrolling.

To paraphrase Mary Oliver (whose poetry collection, “Devotions”, I’ve had time to read again), what is it you want from your “one, wild and precious life”?

I’d hazard that for most of us, the answer would be “time” – and Brick has bought me lots of it.

Or, to be more accurate, it’s given it back.

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