I did not give up my phone for a week. That would have been difficult because I use it for work messages and train tickets. Instead, I tried one smaller change: no social media after dinner. I wanted to find out whether I would read more, not prove that phones were bad.
On Monday, I put my phone on a high shelf and opened a novel. Within ten minutes, I reached for the phone three times without thinking. There was no message I needed to answer. I simply wanted something to do when the story became difficult. I read only six pages, but noticing that habit felt useful.
Tuesday was easier until a friend sent a funny video. I watched it on my laptop, then realised that changing the device had not changed the activity. I added the laptop to my evening rule. I still allowed calls and direct messages from family, because being unavailable to them was not my goal.
By Thursday, I was reading for longer, but I was also going to bed later. I had chosen an exciting book and kept saying, “One more chapter.” My sister laughed when I told her. The point was to make deliberate choices, she said, not replace one endless activity with another. I started setting a time to stop reading as well.
At the weekend, I went back through the notes I had made each evening. I had finished more pages than usual, but that alone did not tell me whether I had rested better. Some evenings felt calm; others did not. I had not recorded my sleeping times before the experiment, so I could not make a fair comparison.
I am keeping the phone shelf and the reading time. I am not keeping a strict ban for every evening: sometimes a shared online game with a distant friend is exactly how I want to spend my time. The useful change is asking what I intend to do before I start, rather than letting one link lead automatically to the next.