Dry January, meet Flip Phone February.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Once a week I get that dreaded screen time report courtesy of my iPhone. How many hours did I spend on my phone each

day last week? I'd rather not say. I will say it is a number that I am not proud of.

A recent study found keeping track of our average usage

doesn't actually help us control our screen time all that much.

We're caught in the loop of screen time shame like so many of us are.

New York Times Tech reporter Kashmir Hill decided to actually do something about it.

Late last year she broke up with her iPhone and replaced it with a flip phone,

T9 texting and all, because she'd finally had enough. I would wake up in the middle of the night

and struggle to go back to sleep and inevitably reach for the phone and then I'd be reading articles or online shopping and I would be up for an hour, two hours, three hours in the middle of the night and it just was making me feel terrible.

You know, when I'm driving, when I got to a red light, I would just start thinking about my phone,

should I just quickly look at it, check if I have a message, have a notification,

and I just thought this isn't safe. I shouldn't, I just didn't like that my phone was kind of the first thing that came to my mind as this default activity that I should do in so many different moments.

Well, once you had your flip phone up and running, you finally go out and make this switch what kinds of changes did you

notice to your day-to-day so at first it was it was really hard one of the

hardest things for me was I realized how reliant I was on Google Maps to tell me how to get

anywhere more than 15 minutes away. That was hard but I actually had loved it because over the

course of the month I figured out a kind of mental map of where I lived, which I had not had. I'd outsource that to Google.

I had this actual physical urge to reach into my pocket all the time and pull out my phone or to stroke its screen.

I called it my thumb twitch.

And it was this impulse I had. It lasted for at least two weeks.

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