I am addicted to my phone.

I am so addicted that sometimes I unlock my phone just to look at it – opening no apps – countless times an hour. I am so addicted that, even when I haven’t got it on me, I feel phantom vibrations, as if I’ve got a message.

I am so addicted, that for this week I even considered carrying around a wooden block of roughly the same shape and size in order to feel a phone-like solid in my pocket. This week’s task was to go a whole week without looking at my phone and it seemed damn near impossible.

One thing that always strikes me about study and lifestyle vloggers is that they never seem to get distracted. If you watch a study-along livestream, they are focused on their work for pretty much the entire time. It baffles me that they don’t take a social media scrolling break every five minutes. Sometimes, and this is the scariest part, I can’t even see their phone on their desk. It’s as if they don’t need to see it out the corner of their eye just for the comfort of knowing it’s there. What if they get a call from someone in a desperate situation who for some reason trusts them more than anyone else and can’t remember the number for the emergency services?

The daring investigative journalist that I am, I wasn’t going to rest until I found out how they do it. I was going to live like they did in the 1800s, or the 1970s – without a mobile phone … (only a laptop).

It was impossible. On day one, all the electricity in the house fused and my laptop was out of battery. Equipped with nothing but a phone to watch lectures, I had to ruefully use the Zoom app. Touching my phone was sweet relief from the five minutes I’d gone without it, between waking up and realising that there was no electricity.

Electricity restored, day two began. My screen time plummeted, and my looking-out-the-window time soared. The leaves on the bushes outside became apps and the falling of the rain became the endless scroll of Twitter. However, inspired by Chris Whitty, in the spirit of the regulations I did not use any social media, apart from messenger, on my laptop.

“One of the hardest phoneless tasks was going for a walk.”

I am aware that lifestyle and study vloggers probably spend a lot of time on their phones. A lot of them are influencers, so social media must take up a large part of their lives. But I am not trying to be who they really are, rather like the image of themselves that they present online.

One of the hardest phoneless tasks was going for a walk. Walking alone for an hour and a half with no phone is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever struggled with. Normally, every waking hour of the day I am either working (rarely), talking to someone, on my phone, or listening to a podcast. God forbid I hear my own thoughts for a change. So, zig-zagging between people in the park to maintain social distancing with no Louis Theroux talking to me in my ear was a challenge. Then I thought to myself, why can’t the world be my podcast? The sound of the wind in the trees, the crunch of feet on littered crisp packets, the conversations of passers-by:

“I tell him that the locks are broken and then a week later nothing’s been done.” “I’ll actually be quite interested to see how she gets on. She’s made a lot of money doing this, so it won’t be long before she gets on the property ladder.” “I walked through the airport and nobody even checked my temperature.” “Why doesn’t she sort out the locks herself, the lazy sod?” Needless to say, Louis Theroux is more entertaining.

Going to the toilet without my phone was another challenge. This time, I didn’t even have the mundane discussions of strangers to keep me entertained. I think that walking without my phone might benefit my appreciation of nature and my fellow humans if I continue with it. I don’t think the same can be said for a phoneless poo.

Will I be continuing without a phone? No. Did I fail this task every day? Maybe. And is there a motivational message hidden between the lines despite this failure? Of course not.

And yes, I did in fact fuse the electricity on purpose, just so I could feel the weight of my phone in my hand. Maybe I’ll have more success next week where I’ll be trying...“getting up with the sun”.