‘My kids see me relaxed and resting’ … Anna Mathur. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘My kids see me relaxed and resting’ … Anna Mathur. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian The one change that worked Life and style The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media – and my children have never been happier I used to think my phone helped me to relax. But setting strict limits on my usage has improved my mood and my relationships
Prefer the Guardian on Google I am a psychotherapist who works with frazzled, snappy parents, and spend my days writing about why we struggle to find calm. I also used to pick up my phone hundreds of times a day, failing to realise that it was making me a snappier, more irritable, less present mother.
My phone was my office, my income, my means of communication. Every time I checked it, there was something to action, a notification of something new, something that told me I was useful and productive, giving me dopamine hits that motherhood didn’t offer. It had become my coping mechanism.
The phone was also where I went to decompress, to have five minutes that felt like mine. But while social media appears to be the most stimulating thing in the universe, what felt like rest was actually just a further demand on my already stretched mind.
When I thought about how much time I spent on my phone, I felt ashamed. That number wasn’t just data; it signified the gap between the available mother I wanted to be and the one I was in those moments.
It was only when I started paying attention to what happened in my body when one of my children (aged seven, nine and 11) interrupted me mid-scroll that something shifted. I felt the spike of irritation and heard a sharpness in my voice. I had been treating my snapping as a patience problem and a character flaw, but what I realised is that reaching for your phone more than you want to is not weakness – it’s biology.
View image in fullscreen ‘Now I’m fully present’ … Mathur with her children. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian Research shows that for those of us with ADHD, or tired from chronic stress and poor sleep, the pull of the phone is really strong. Impulse control is a frontal lobe function, and that part of our brain weakens when we are tired or overwhelmed. I was going through perimenopause, which makes it harder still as oestrogen declines and the brain becomes more reward-seeking.
I promised to limit my use, but I’d break my own rules every time. So I stopped relying on willpower and downloaded an app called App Block. I cannot access social media or my email during the hours my children are home, and I have 15 minutes to check in once they’re in bed. If I need to do something for work, I go to my laptop, which feels far more intentional.
What I didn’t expect was how much calmer I would feel. The low hum of overstimulation I had normalised turned out to be costing me more than I knew. My nervous system finally had room to breathe. I was less irritable, more present, in a way that didn’t require effort.
One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.
Read more Now, when the kids settle in front of the television in the evening, I laze with them and read a book.…