Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes!

Today marks the beginning of a new series of posts. In here, I will give out small but easily applicable pieces of advise that made my own life ever so slightly better and talk about why for a bit. Usually, things like these have just a small effect on your life, but if you apply some of these in conjunction with one another, you can feel the impact on your life quite well.

I am 28 years old in 2018. Why am I reminding you of that? Because it helps to put things into perspective when I tell you that I got my first smartphone ever in 2016. Yeah, yeah, I am late to the party, I am a Neanderthal and I don't know how I was able to get by until then. Guess you can't really miss anything that you never had. For a job I took in 2016, I needed to have a smartphone though, so I grabbed a friend who has some knowledge about these things and bought one. This one.

[Picture found on www.gsmarena.com]

Your smartphone is a despot of the scummiest kind!

My life changed for ever. Overall, it made my life simpler and more pleasurable. This doesn't mean that my life has gotten better because of it. Turned out that I was prone to being addicted to that small piece of tech. There was always someone I really wanted to chat with on Whatsapp, always something felt the sudden urge to look up quickly. It was horrible. Felt like a cat I wear around in my pocket. Always demanding my attention and here I was, a fool happy to comply.

Taking your problems with you into your bed

You probably heard this phrase, haven't you? That you shouldn't ever take your problems into your bed with you. Nothing good ever comes from that and let me tell you: It's true. Since I had the smartphone, my sleep quality went down the drain. Not that it was good before. It got even worse. At times, I laid awake for hours in my bed, not because I had difficulty falling asleep but because I used to grab my phone like I was in trance. This carried on for a long time. Of course, after the novelty wore off, this became less and less, but the overall damage was done. I was an obedient servant to my new cyber overlord.

The aftermath

The worst part isn't even me having a hard time falling asleep because of it. No, it get's much worse than that. The real problem was that the smartphone wasn't only the last thing I saw before I finally fell asleep. The true problem was my smartphone being the first thing in the morning in front of my eyes. Have some reasons, why:

1. Alarms are the worst

There aren't a lot of feelings more troublesome than having woken up because of your alarm. It leaves you sluggish and exhausted. Usually, you want to feel the exact opposite after having slept for a while. I will talk about this topic in another post like these in the future as well.

2. Just five more minutes....

And then there is the snooze button! Clearly, we humans have not an inkling of self-respect. Not only let we allow these smartphones to destroy us by disrupting our delayed sleep (delayed thanks to them of course), destroying us in the process, no! We are also allowing them to do it again! Every five minutes if we so desire thanks to this malevolent invention called the "snooze button"! Oh, how I loathe thee!

3. New messages!

Seeing new messages first thing in the morning gives me a dopamin rush that I did not deserve. This is an important topic, not only when it comes to smartphones but when it comes to any kind of internet related addiction. It devalues the effect of dopamin over time while making you more and more addicted to the swift kick the internet provides. And me getting that fix first thing in the morning? Oh, my....

4. And some just suck

Now imagine following this impulse and the first thing you see is something you actually do not enjoy seeing. Great way to ruin your entire day first thing in the morning.

So there is a problem.....

People say that the first thing one has to recognize in order to solve a problem is to recognize the problem as such. Being a smart man, I got to that point. Eventually. Since I let the smartphone overlord in my life, it has gotten difficult to entirely get rid of him and I doubt that I will ever get rid of him entirely. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing because while not always healthy, our symbiosis is, in most cases, beneficial for both.

STILL!

The nighttime is a holy time that belongs to me and me alone. I had to come up with a solution, so I decided to take the simplest and easiest round.

The actual lifehack you've been waiting for

I decided to keep my smartphone somewhere else than in my bedroom. Usually one to two rooms away. That does sound simple enough, right? But that is the key, there is a lot of beauty in simplicity. Keeping my smartphone in other rooms has a lot of advantages, some I haven't even covered in here yet.

1. Because the night belongs to me!

Leaving my smartphone in a place where it isn't just an armsreach away from me means that I can't just grab it while laying in bad. No more distractions.

2. Shine on, you crazy smartphone!

And destroy my eyes in the process! Real talk, you don't need me to tell you that staring at a bright smartphone screen in the dark is one of the worst things you can do for your eyes. Keeping your smartphone away from you in these dark times will definitely make your eyes happy.

3. Get lost snooze button!

Keeping your smartphone in another room means that when the alarm does ring, you are forced to stand up unless you are willed to let it terrorize you for minutes to come. And once you have stood up, there isn't much point in laying down again, so you have no reason to hit this diabolic contraption within your smartphone in the first place.

Going the extra mile

So today we learned that we shouldn't let ourselves be enslaved to our smartphone overlords unconditionally. So let us take this even further. After having a fix position for your smartphone dictator to rest for the night, far enough away from you, force it to sleep there about half an hour, maybe an hour even before you want to go to sleep yourself. It will help you fall asleep easier later, especially if you find some calming activities to do until then that do not involve looking at a shiny screen.

Let me know if you like me posting about these things.

Thank you all for your loyalty and support!

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