This is a public service announcement.
Hello! My name is Rega, it's nice to meet you. About six months ago, I turned off all push notifications on my phone. Like, all. My phone now lights up exclusively when I get a call.
I got rid of notifications for a variety of reasons, most centrally that I was feeling pretty high stress levels, and would feel them spike when my phone lit up. I suspected this could help.
Now, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life, but I will tell you about a few things that've changed about mine since.
I'll be honest: initially, I was checking my phone WAY more often than I did with notifications on.
For my first couple of weeks after turning off notifications, I constantly unlocked my phone to see what was going on, assuming that I was being FLOODED by correspondence and just not seeing it. Eventually, after unlocking to a blank phone enough times, conditioning kicked in.
Now, a few months on, the total number of times I check my phone in a day is lower than when I had notifications on.
TLC
My phone use switched from being reactive to being deliberate.
Think about how you use everything you own – you turn on your TV when you wanna watch TV, you power up your laptop when you feel like using your laptop, you open your fridge when you... You get it. The one exception was my phone, which I used when a notification popped up, rather than when I wanted to use my phone. That's weird, right?
Now, I check texts when I feel chatty and I check Snapchat when I have time to kill and so on and so forth, instead of being drawn in through the day. Which means...
I stopped being app companies' dream consumer. Sorry y'all.
For obvious reasons, every company wants consumers to be addicted to their product. Like, Pepsi wants you to crave a Pepsi with every meal so that Pepsi can make a lot of money off you. But you're smart! You're informed! You know that shit's bad for you! So you don't have a Pepsi with every meal, you have one once in a while, when you really want to. Notifications are the equivalent of a Pepsi popping up and saying "DRINK MEEEEE!" every time you sit down for a meal. If that happened, I'd likely give in every time.
Anxious sucker that I am, I was being sucked in left, right, and centre, all through the day every damn day, even when it was to my detriment (I'll get to this in a bit).