This is NPR's life kit, and I'm Maya Aina.

The first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone.

I just need to see how much time I have before I need to get to work.

But then I'll see a good morning text or a message from my buddy that came in over night.

He's a night owl.

It's usually a meme, so I gotta go see it on Instagram.

Naturally after that, I have to hop on Twitter to get caught up on latest drama.

I'll open up my email too just to see if there's anything urgent.

And after all that, I can finally start to get ready.

I'll probably keep flipping through each of those apps throughout the day.

In the marketing, I'll definitely keep flipping through each of those apps and more until it's time to go to bed.

It's hard to tell just how often people use their phones.

A recent survey claimed Americans check their phones once every four minutes.

It doesn't have to be that way though.

The less that I have these pings on my brain of like news articles, tweets, and that sort of thing,

the less that my brain feels like it's just constantly being activated.

The more that I realize I just want to sit and relax a little bit and like just be.

And that itself feels almost revolutionary.

I talked with Stamina Nichols.

She's the author of Log Off, self-help for the extremely online.

It's a workbook to reset your relationship with your phone.

But she says there's more to balancing your digital life than just logging off.

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