Hard places and bad weeks

The rule is easy to keep by a kettle. There are places where it's harder, and there are weeks when the whole habit comes back. This chapter takes both.

Start with bed, morning and night. For many people the first reach of the day happens before their feet touch the floor, and the last one ends when the phone slips out of their hand. The phone is there because it's the alarm clock. Buy an alarm clock. They cost a few pounds, and they let the phone spend the night in its home in the hall. This one change removes the two longest reaches of most people's day. If you need to be reachable at night for a parent or a teenager, leave the ringer on and the door open.

Then there's the loo. I'll say only that people managed before, and that the phone's home is not the bathroom.

Public transport and waiting rooms are long gaps, often twenty minutes or more, and the five-minute guideline doesn't cover them. I wouldn't ask anyone to stare at a wall for forty minutes on a train. A long gap is a fair place for a sitting, or better, for something with some length to it. A book, a podcast, an album or a long article can absorb you in a way the loop can't, and chapter 6 explained why that's the better bargain. The thing to avoid is the default, where the phone comes out because you sat down.

With other people, the difficulty is that they're on theirs. You're at a table, your friend picks up her phone, and you've got an empty gap and a social excuse. I'd leave yours where it is. Sometimes that draws the other person back, and sometimes it doesn't, and either way you've had a minute to look round the room. With children, I'd only point to chapter 7. They notice where your eyes go, and they'll copy it.

If your work comes through the phone, the home still applies, with one change. Decide which channels count as work and urgent, let those make a noise, and treat the rest like everything else. Being on call means you can be reached. It doesn't mean looking every four minutes to see whether you have been.

There's one place where this book's tolerant tone stops, and that's the car. Using a phone while driving isn't a habit to manage. It's dangerous and in most places illegal. The phone goes in the glovebox or the boot before the engine starts.

Now the bad weeks. At some point the reaching will come back in force. The usual occasions are predictable. You're ill and on the sofa for three days, or a big news story breaks and you follow it hour by hour. Holidays do it, when every routine changes. So does a new app that everyone's on, or a stretch of worry or grief, when any distraction is welcome. Afterwards the phone is back in your pocket and the tally is back at eighty.

This isn't a failure, and it doesn't mean the earlier weeks were wasted or that you didn't understand the book. An old habit sits underneath a new one for a long time, and unusual weeks bring it up. What helps is a small response, made soon. Put the phone back in its home tonight, and name the next errand. There's no need to start again from day one, because nobody was counting days. I'd advise against counting them, since a streak turns one bad Tuesday into a collapse.

It's also worth asking what the bad week was about. If you were ill and bored, the answer is nothing much. If the phone came back because something painful did, that's information. It may have been a useful painkiller for a few days. You can thank it for that and still put it back on the shelf.

That brings me to the point I raised before chapter 1. For some people the reach isn't a habit laid over an ordinary life. It's holding something down. Here are some signs that it would be worth talking to a GP, or referring yourself to a talking therapy service if your area has one.

• When the phone is away, what comes up is dread or a persistent low mood, more than boredom, and it doesn't ease after a couple of weeks.
• You're using the phone to avoid nearly all time alone with your thoughts, and have been for months.
• Your sleep, work or relationships are suffering badly and you can't change the pattern even with the methods in chapter 12.
• The time is going into gambling, or spending you can't afford, or pornography that you've tried and failed to cut back. Those have their own forms of help, and a gambling helpline or your GP is the place to start.
• You have thoughts of harming yourself. That needs urgent help the same day, from your GP, an emergency service or a crisis line.

None of those means you've done anything wrong. They mean the problem is a different size from the one this book was written for, and that better tools exist for it. Keep taking any prescribed medication, and raise any changes with whoever prescribed it.