I’m tired of being bombarded with an onslaught of color.

To back up, I work a 9–5 office job doing marketing and illustration. Working in social media and, to an extent, with tech has helped nourish a desire to keep a healthy distance from some of the unhealthy things in life: social media, time-sucking apps, trust in corporations, and too much time spent on a laptop. (Considering that for the entirety of my adolescence I spent the majority of my time on the internet, this was much needed.) I still love playing videogames, and I still spend a lot of time making digital art. I also feel it’s incredibly important to my own health and well-being to continue texting my close friends and family because that is how we communicate and how our relationships function. But at the same time, I like to think I know when to put my phone down and when to get up and take a walk. Also, I go to the gym now.

I read about one person’s experiences with changing their iPhone’s display to black and white and decided to try it—I even figured out how to create a shortcut so I can swap back and forth if and when needed.

Trying to use my phone in black and white at first was mostly a failed experiment. I’d forgotten about it until my regular weekly rant about smartphones and tech. ($2000 for a phone? Seriously? We peaked at touch-screen + qwerty button keyboards. Let’s go back to that) Every icon on my dock seemed painfully bright, and I felt irritated that they were all screaming for my attention. I decided to retry my black and white phone experiment—and try the same thing with my Mac at work.

Although I wasn’t able to find a monochrome option on my work mac, I did find a display option that I ended up liking. [UPDATE: monochrome options are under accessibility in System Preferences. I still prefer a desaturated option because monochrome takes away some contrast, which tires and hurts my eyes after a day at work.] Here’s how you can change your display, too:

  1. Open System Preferences
  2. Head to Displays
  3. Click the “Color” tab
  4. Mess around until you find one that’s lower in saturation (unfortunately, black and white isn’t an option that I can find). I found I liked DCDM X’Y’Z D60 Gamma 2.6 best. It muted the colors but didn’t take away from the functionality of using a computer (for instance, red notifications still look red-ish).
Untitled design(1)
Before/After

From here, I’ll be recording my experiences with changing my displays and attempting to reduce my screen time.

Week One

Day One

  • Within the first ten minutes of switching my displays over, my eyes feel vaguely itchy, as if they are craving some stimulation I can’t otherwise provide. At the same time, they feel like they’re getting a much-needed rest. Feels like there’s a thin film over my eyes when I look up and around at the non-screen world.
  • My eyes are tired from trying to add color where there is little color.
  • I tried to make a shortcut to change displays and found out that wasn’t actually a thing I could do, so now I’m grumpy. This is going to be harder than I anticipated.
  • The office looks a lot more yellow than I realized. It has been about two hours. Are these walls actually white?
  • I turned my display back to the standard iMac display to take before and after photos with my phone and it’s like my eyes are drinking up Welch’s grape juice which claims to be 100% juice but is at least 50% concentrate. What I’m saying is, I am feeling a lot of endorphins from a big blast of colors. It’s been less than three hours. What the fuck are our screens doing to our brains.
  • My screen looks so… Blue. Everyone praises apps like f.lux which add a yellow/orange filter over your computer screen to minimize the blue light that’s harmful to both the health of your eyes (say goodbye to all your vitamin A!) and your circadian rhythm (good luck sleeping after staring at a bright, blue screen). Am I doing the same kind of thing by simply turning down the saturation on my display? I have no idea. But I feel the urge to turn down screen brightness again.
  • Ouch, my eyes.
  • I went home and tried messing with my laptop’s display settings and I don’t have the same options as on my work computer. Hey Apple? Why, though?
  • I went with Wide Gamut RGB for my laptop’s display. It’s pretty good!

Day Two

  • First thoughts starting up my computer: What the heck is wrong with my screen.
  • Have you ever noticed how bright traffic lights are?
  • My screens look normal to me now!
  • I left my phone on my desk during an hour-long meeting at 3:30. I only thought about checking it twice.
  • Can someone tell me why there aren’t semi-smart phones? Like those phones with touch screens that you slide up to reveal a qwerty button keyboard, but still with access to a GPS.
  • I realize I can create something like this simply by deleting apps. My first response was panic. That’s no good.

Day Three

  • Last night I deleted maybe three apps. Damn it.
  • Part of what’s making this a little easier on me is the fact that my phone and computers are all synced. All my messaging and task managing apps are accessible through all my devices. So I’m going to attempt to finish tasks before I check messages. Or at least wait until I actively decide to take a break.
  • This was my brain after I spent a few minutes checking messages and catching up on some things: I was going to do something important… I needed to do something for work… What was it… Anyway, this has been my life for months or maybe years because smartphones eat brain cells to live.
  • My desire to re-read text conversations I had the previous day is decreasing about 5%.
  • My god, it is hard to ignore that little red bubble when it pops up while I’m in the middle of a task, even if that red bubble is less saturated than normal.
  • Bonus: I finished this particular task in 5-10 minutes, which may normally have taken me 20-30 minutes if I’d gotten distracted halfway through.
  • 11:38 AM: I took my phone out of my backpack for the first time today because I need to post to my work’s Instagram. Its presence on my desk is stressing me.
  • I opened my phone to download the images I needed and headed straight for Tumblr. Damn it.
  • As a true test to my impulse control, I am going to poo without the presence of my phone.
  • Remember when we were kids and straight up spent hours of our lives staring at doors and patterns on walls and the ceiling? I just had some intense nostalgia in the bathroom.
  • My brain feels like it’s full of warm water. You know?
  • Holy moses my phone is bright. I am going to get diabetes from looking at the Instagram icon.
  • A good friend is awake and active which means now I have thirteen unread iMessages in the span of five minutes so ignoring messages until I’ve finished a task is going to be harder.
  • At lunch, I read a book for half an hour, got bored, turned the colors back on in my phone, and played Two Dots for half an hour. My brain went from warm water to static electricity. Damn it.

Day Four

  • It’s 5:57 PM. My phone is at 81%.

Day Five

  • I think people under-appreciate staring at their surroundings as opposed to scrolling their phones while bored. Not trying to be “holier than thou”, it’s just a nice and calm activity to do.

Day Seven

  • Yesterday I was out and about all day so I didn’t really have much to say on the topic of my phone.
  • Looking at my fully saturated screen is kind of nauseating now.
  • Here’s a rendition of what it looks like to me when I have to turn my phone screen off black and white for whatever reason:
IMG_5408
When I was making this, I had trouble increasing the saturation because it was already SO MUCH.
  • I woke up this morning to a long email from my supervisor, who is reading How To Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price. We’re constantly in discussion about social media being evil, politics being terrible, and now, smartphones being unethically designed to hook you. I spent an hour and a half writing back.
  • The urge to online shop as soon as I get in bed has decreased by about 90%.

Week Two

Day Eight

  • In my response to my supervisor yesterday, I basically said that smartphones are supercomputers and we should absolutely be taking advantage of the access to tools. We should be taking advantage of checking our bank accounts when we need to, using Google Maps when we’re lost, or using a period tracker to save time. I just read an article on reliance economy that’s maybe changing my mind.
    • A quote from the article: “As technology advances, we have begun offloading more and more of our cognitive functions and skills to our devices.” Ouch.
  • Personal question to myself: How many of the apps on my phone exist to help me, and how many of them are being used as a crutch?

Day Nine

  • Last night I realized that when my mind wanders, it tends to wander into the realm of thinking about what I need to do or planning for the next day/week’s events. I don’t daydream anymore. Where did that go? Is that just a part of growing older, or can I find that again?

Day Eleven

  • I picked my partner up from work and had some time to kill, so I walked across the street and sat down in a park. I looked at the grass and a tree. My mind is actually quiet lately.

Day Twelve

  • I think I’m starting to daydream again.
  • The first daydreams in a really long time are clunky and choppy. My mind is stretching out from the realm of “here are things I need to do” and tip-toeing into actually imagining things.
  • For instance, I’d been sitting down and wanting to daydream, so I’d ask myself, “What do I want to daydream about?” Big surprise, this prompt doesn’t work.
  • The other night, I was in the shower, and I caught myself daydreaming. Then again in bed. The one in bed followed a monster walking through the city. More to come.
  • I’ve started to catch myself when I get caught in thought-trains and pull myself back to the present, just kind of naturally. As someone with anxiety and PTSD, let me tell you: THIS IS A FEAT.

Day Thirteen

  • I’m the kind of person who brings a ton of things to do with me to long or boring events. I’m finding myself beginning to put these activities down in favor of just… spacing out.
  • I think I’m accessing secret emotions.
  • The other day I watched a plane fly across the night sky and I got sad. Today I spaced out and looked out the window of the restaurant I was eating in and felt a lot of things. I don’t know what to do with the extra emotions.

Week Three

This will be my last week of updates, since shareable thoughts have begun to slow.

Day Sixteen

  • I just got home from a stressful trip in which I had to keep my phone on me for group coordination. For the most part, I succeeded in keeping my attention away from my phone in favor of spacing out, remembering things, or looking at the scenery. But I am so tired and emotionally drained that I just want to spend ten minutes googling natural remedies for eczema before I sleep.

Day Seventeen

  • So I actually kept it at ten minutes and didn’t continue obsessing about it all morning today or over-researching or getting distracted about it. Yay!
  • Phone and computer screens are way too bright.
  • Over the weekend, many times I was one of the few people at the table not looking at their phone. I don’t mean this in a condescending way—more like, “hey wow! I didn’t need a distraction and was instead content with Staring At The Table.” Yay!
  • I took a long way home today that ended in a walk around an herb garden. I did not need to listen to a podcast the whole time.
  • My thoughts are no longer getting caught in my brain.

Day Eighteen

  • “What was I about to do… Oh yeah!” <- THIS IS NEW

Day Nineteen

  • I don’t know if this is related, but I’ve gone from having a drink once or twice a week to pretty much not being interested in drinking anymore.
  • Like, this is something I’ve been working on in my personal life for a while, but in the span of almost three weeks I’ve noticed my interest declining because real life is already interesting enough.

Day Twenty

  • I’m not using google maps as much as I used to. Before, I would use it to go to places for which I clearly already knew the route.
  • My partner and I drove all around today running errands and shared so many fun stories from our childhoods which we obviously wouldn’t have done had I been scrolling my phone. (This is kind of an obvious statement, but still astounding to me in some senses!)

Day Twenty-One

  • After sleeping in I decided to try and leave my phone alone for 15 minutes. It was kind of hell, which I think is just because my phone is still such an ingrained part of my morning routine.
  • Even still, I found it hard to focus on my phone after I finally did pick it up. I kept zoning out and staring at the wall instead. I think my brain wanted that downtime.

A collection of other updates, from even later:

  • I actually want to draw. Actively, and honestly, I want to draw. Part of this is due to the fact that I can’t while I’m in the midst of moving, part because I’m a part of a few online communities of artists that regularly inspire me. And part because my brain is stretching back out and remembering how to enjoy the hobbies I used to love. I finally had a few minutes to kill as I was waiting to head into therapy earlier this week and busted out my sketchbook and drew for a solid couple of minutes and it felt so good.
  • A friend sent me a reddit post and I felt stressed reading through it—the same kind of stress I got accustomed to in the never-ending string of scrolling that I would previously spend hours doing.
  • Here are some idle moment thoughts and ideas I recently had:
    • I stared out my bedroom window as I was relaxing and listened to the birds and thought, what if outside my window wasn’t other apartments and trees in the distance but in fact a large forest or open field
    • I ran through plot points of a story I’ve been trying off-and-on for years to write
    • I thought of a way better way to approach writing the story I mentioned above.
    • I want to draw reference sheets for two or three of my characters.
    • I want to make a bright, semi-abstract oil painting of my snake, Harvey and hang it above his tank.
    • I want to do a collection of other simple, abstract paintings for my living space.

In conclusion

Tech is messy. Life is more interesting than we give it credit for. And constantly needing to be distracted (from what?) is, to say the least, exhausting.