Five ways to beat your phone addiction (that actually work)

March 29, 2026 — 3:29pm

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I pick up my phone roughly 80 times a day. I know this because I finally looked, and the number made me feel nigh on disgusted. I’m a technology journalist – phones are literally my job – but even I’ve reached the point where the reflexive scroll-check-scroll loop feels less like a habit and more like a pokie addiction I can’t shake.

If you’re reading this, you probably feel the same way. The average person now spends close to seven hours a day staring at a screen. This month, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for building addictive products that caused a young woman’s mental health problems – a landmark verdict with thousands of similar cases pending. The platforms were designed to keep us hooked, and the question is now, what we do about it.

Most of us have tried the obvious fixes: deleting Instagram, setting timers, placing the phone in another room. They work for a day or two. Then the FOMO kicks in, or you need Google Maps, or you just want to check one thing, and suddenly, it’s midnight, and you’re deep in a Reddit rabbit hole about second-wave emo bands from 1995.

The good news is that 2026 has produced a genuinely useful crop of tools designed around a simple insight: willpower alone doesn’t work. What does work is friction – making the bad behaviour slightly harder, slightly less rewarding, or slightly more annoying. Here are five approaches worth trying, plus a handful of rogue ideas that cost nothing.

The Brick is a small magnetic puck – a little bit bigger than your thumb – that uses NFC technology to disable whatever apps you choose. You tap your phone to the Brick, and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or whatever you’ve selected vanishes. No notification, and no option to override. The only way to get........

© Brisbane Times