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If you wanna use your phone less, discipline won’t do it. You gotta rig your phone to lose so you can win. Here’s how to do just that while overcoming the four most addicting features of smartphones—solitude, bottomlessness, speed, and teasing.

1. Resist harmful solitude. That’s where habits like phone addiction (among so many others) go unchecked. So use your phone in public or shared spaces, say your intent out loud to someone, and keep your screen time visible with widgets or reports, because behavior changes fastest when it’s seen.

2. Cap your scroll. To counter infinite scrolling, you must build and plan your own stopping points. Cap sessions at 10–20 minutes, consume finite things (articles, saved clips, newsletters), and follow a hard “one unit then quit” rule—one post, one video, done.

3. Add speed traps. Friction is a smartphone’s worst nightmare. To use your phone less, you must slow it down on purpose. Turn on grayscale, log out after each use, bury addictive apps off your home screen, deep within folders, or add a delay tool. Even a few seconds of friction can snap you out of mindless scrolling.

4. Stop chasing rewards. Turn off all audible and visible phone alerts unless they come from your spouse, children, and maybe your boss. Even then, consider emergency notifications only (such as voice calls only), only check apps on a schedule, and replace feeds with intentional bookmarks or subscriptions. Make sure you control what you see, not your phone.

To beat your phone, you must change your intrusive and addictive default settings. Simple acts like removing social apps from your home screen (or better deleting them), disabling notifications, setting 15-minute time limits, and keeping your phone out of the bedroom and out of sight can neutralize much of the problem.

Outside of a few periodic smartphone stumbles (I’m human too, people!) I’ve lived a mostly sober life for the last 16 years. And it’s a wonderful life. You can too, but only if you adopt most of the above.

You got this.