Risk & Business Magazine JGS Insurance Winter 2019 | Page 15

REDUCE CELL USE know bright colors and flashing lights attract your eyes. Same with phones. So, turn your phone to black and white. All functionality is still there! You just aren’t attracted to it anymore. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings – General – Accessibility — Display Accommodations — Colour Filters — Grayscale. Yes, conveniently buried under six menu options! But you can do it. 3. ADD EXTRA SWIPES BEFORE WORK So many of us are merging our lives into one phone. Do you have your work email on the same phone you want to take out on Friday night? If so, my suggestion is to separate the accounts (for example, use the Mail app for your personal email and download the Gmail app for work, etc.) and then move the work app a few screens away. What do the extra three or four thumb swipes do? They give your brain a conscious one-second pause before you subconsciously check your work email at midnight after the bars. 4. NIGHT SHIFT MODE Recent research from Australia shows that exposing our brains to bright screens before bed reduces melatonin production — the sleep hormone. Bummer! What helps? Well, if you can’t stay off your phone then at least enable Night Shift mode. Mine is on from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It dims the screen and reduces that blinding brightness which makes your evolutionarily slow brain think it’s morning time. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Display & Brightness – Night Shift. 5. BUY AN ALARM CLOCK Any retailer will happily sell you an alarm clock for $10 or $15. If you’re using your cellphone as your alarm clock — stop! Consider the $15 an investment in your mental sanity as it will allow you to wind down and wind up without getting pinged with the latest Trump tweet. It’s much nicer when you get back to waking up with Roger and Marilyn. 6. DISABLE NOTIFICATIONS What’s the first thing every app asks you when you download it? “EatMoreDoughnuts would like to send you Notifications. OK?” You click OK because, well, you’d like to eat more doughnuts. And you just downloaded it. And the app never lets you forget it. Get intentional. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Notifications and scroll down your list of apps. Start by turning them all off and then cruise the list again combing for anything that might be crucial. When everybody has an addiction, it sort of looks like nobody has one, doesn’t it? We get in line for coffee… so it looks kind of normal. We keep our heads down and locked on our cellphones on the subway…so it looks kind of normal. But is it? Adam Alter, New York University business professor and author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, explained: “You only develop an addiction when there is some psychological motive that hasn’t been fulfilled for you: loneliness, that you’ve been bullied, or you can’t make good things happen in your life. It doesn’t actually matter what you use to soothe that addiction, whether it’s playing a particular game that lulls you into a distracted state or whether it’s taking a drug. In terms of soothing those psychological ills, behaviour and substance addictions are very, very similar.” Neil Pasricha is the New York Times- best-selling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which has been published in ten countries, spent over five years on best-seller lists, and sold over a million copies. Pasricha is a Harvard MBA, one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, and after ten years heading Leadership Development at Walmart he now serves as Director of The Institute for Global Happiness. He has dedicated the past 15 years of his life to developing leaders, creating global programs inside the world’s largest companies and speaking to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. He lives in Toronto with his wife and sons. GLOBALHAPPINESS.COM I’ve listed six tactical ideas that are slowly helping me, but the longer-term solution may be latching our minds onto something else. Like what? Buy some hiking boots and commit to a new uphill hobby. Check out my 3 Books podcast to get back into reading. Grab fresh trunks and sign up for swimming. I don’t have all the answers, but I know it’s time for an intervention. + *Reprinted with Permission 15