Can't put down your phone? 7 easy tips to stop scrolling and enjoy a digital detox.

In the fall, Cagney Ortiz and his wife decided to go a month without using Instagram and TikTok. The pair have two kids, and they wanted to do less scrolling and be more intentional about how they spent their time at home. “[I] successfully did it for November and have definitely tried to stay pretty light on it since,” Ortiz tells Yahoo Life. Now the 38-year-old tries to use Instagram just once every few days to check his messages, and he rarely uses TikTok.

Overall, Ortiz believes this digital detox was successful because it helped him break the habit of mindlessly scrolling, and it decreased the frequency with which he uses social media in his daily life. He also doesn’t know how he could have changed his scrolling habit without going cold turkey. As someone who works in digital media, he knows that’s largely because social media apps are “designed to have you in it as long as possible.”

“A lot of apps are designed using what we know from psychology research to maximize our engagement and engage the systems in our brain that drive us to do things over and over again until they become habits,” Erin Calipari, the director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research, tells Yahoo Life. Getting an alert or seeing new content on an app like Instagram delivers a hit of dopamine that keeps us coming back for more. And more, and more ...

And once checking your phone or scrolling social media becomes a habit, it’s much harder to change the behavior, Calipari says. Introducing new "more adaptive habits" can help, she adds. "The key is to focus on creating routines and schedules that replace the behavior.”

If, like Ortiz and his wife, you're looking to be less attached to your phone — and, by extension, all the distracting apps on it — this year, experts have some tips to set you up for success. Here's what they recommend to help you be a little less available (and a lot more present).

Set a clear goal

What are you aiming for, exactly? To not use your phone after work? To get your screen time down to an hour per day on weekends? To not sacrifice sleep by scrolling in bed?

“Coming up with a specific goal as far as how you want to use your phone less is important,” Kia-Rai Prewitt, the director of outpatient psychology at Cleveland Clinic, tells Yahoo Life. This goal should be specific and purposeful, so it's clear which habits need to be altered.

For example, if you want to spend more time with your family, then you know that the habit you are trying to break is constantly checking your phone at home. In that case, you'll want to set new routines to support that, such as establishing phone-free mealtimes or leaving your phone to charge in another room so you aren't tempted to look at it. If your goal is to get better sleep, make it part of your bedtime routine to leave your phone away from your bed or to buy an alarm clock so you aren't dependent on having your device nearby.

Have an accountability buddy

Prewitt also encourages people to tell their support system — friends, family members, etc. — about plans to cut down on phone usage. This helps keep you accountable — your wife might call you out for pulling out your phone during dinner, for example — and can also help set some clearer boundaries, such as communicating that you're not available to text after, say, 8 p.m. during the workweek. It might also encourage others to follow your lead, so you spend your time together more mindfully rather than staring at your respective screens.

Treat your phone like a landline

Having a phone you can carry everywhere you go is handy — and makes it harder to put down. So what if you treated your cell phone more like a landline, so it's not always within reach? Consider leaving your phone in another room — say, the kitchen — when you're at home and only popping in to check it periodically (after dinner, when you're making breakfast in the morning, etc.). This can be especially useful for people whose phone usage is keeping them up at night.

Neda Gould, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, believes that putting your phone in a different room when you sleep is a “simple way to start to create that space from the phone.” She explains: “Otherwise, it’s the last thing we tend to use before we go to bed and the first thing we pick up in the morning. Just that separation from our phone can help us detox from the phone [and] get a little space from it.”

Weed out the apps you use

For a lot of people, the phone itself isn't the problem; it's the apps that keep us sucked in. When Prewitt wanted to take a break from social media a few years ago, she logged out of the social media apps on her phone. It seems like simple advice, but it makes a big difference. “I didn’t get alerted, so it was up to me when I wanted to go look at those social media posts,” she says.

Prewitt also encourages people to limit how many apps they use, especially for social media. “There’s always a new app or something coming out,” she notes. Focus on having just one or two apps as your primary source for connecting rather than feeling the urge to join the “next new thing,” she suggests.

Ultimately, the goal is to “limit how many things you allow yourself to be drawn into” by changing what apps you let yourself engage with on your phone. This technique worked for Ortiz when he wanted to spend less time playing games on his phone. He deleted over 100 gaming apps and limited himself to using one Sudoku app.

Choose a daily activity that you will do without your phone

Using phones can become so “habitual for us that we’re not even aware that we’re constantly connected,” Gould says. To counteract this, she encourages people to choose one or two daily activities to do without their phone. For example, she walks to pick up her kids from school without taking her phone along. Instead, it's become a dedicated time to be “mindful and present.”

Gould notes that many people feel compelled to bring their phone along everywhere they go, whether they realistically need to use it or not. While safety and the prospect of an emergency situation should always be considered — you might, in fact, end up needing your phone (or at least its map function on a drive — there are outings in which you can confidently go phone-free. Maybe someone will text while you're at the gym — but you can always respond when you're done, rather than interrupting your workout.

Put your phone on Do Not Disturb

If you still feel more comfortable having your phone around 24/7, going into your phone settings to turn on Do Not Disturb mode is another option. This way you can have your phone available "just in case" but also avoid any distracting — and unhealthy — notifications. This is also a good function to use during times when you really need to focus or rest, like when you're going to bed, have a work project you need to complete or are driving. You probably switch your phone off when you go to a movie theater; extending that habit to other parts of your life can help you be more present.

Remember that not everything is urgent

Once upon a time, people didn't get their messages until they came home and checked their answering machine. Now you have a constant barrage of alerts demanding your attention: confirm this doctor's appointment, download this app to book a reservation, respond to the funny TikTok your college roommate sent over, etc. Most of them aren't urgent, but they can feel like they are.

According to Gould, people must override “this automaticity of doing things with a sense of urgency.” It's true that using a phone to order groceries, respond to an email, book movie tickets and so on can be helpful. However, it’s also creating patterns that reinforce the message (and misconception) that everything needs to be done urgently. For example, your kid’s teacher may send directions for class valentines, and you feel like you need to order them immediately, so you pull out your phone to check it off your list.

Here's what Gould advises doing instead: "When you get that email that something else has to be done, I think the question to ask is, 'Does this have to be done right now?' And if not, maybe you have a block of time in your day [for] addressing home stuff.” Setting aside a set time to handle those things that feel urgent in the moment can help you use your phone less and be more efficient with your time.

Even with this advice, you might struggle to keep your phone at bay or resist the urge to check every new text or email that pops up. Just keep at it. Says Gould: "Initially, it might be challenging to do a digital detox because you’re breaking some patterns — but with practice it becomes more tolerable and perhaps even pleasant.”