How To Throw Out Your Phone On A Summer Road Trip

When you go on your summer vacation, can you also take a vacation from your smartphone?

Can you give social media a rest and enjoy conversing with the people around you rather than constantly scrolling, posting, and checking for comments from your legion of followers?

Technology is great in many ways but it can also lead to problems among family members too. For example, if you’re constantly on your device while at dinner, and ignoring your kids or your spouse, that will undoubtedly harm your relationship with them. In a situation like this, you may want to consider family counseling online such as ReGain.us.

Critics of chronic users of smartphones and social media doubt people can go without them for long. In today’s digitally consumed world, taking a “digital detox” is difficult for many to do. Vacation is the perfect time to disconnect  — and that it may change your perspective, and your life, if you do.

With this addiction to our smartphones, this obsession to be connected with the world, we fail to connect with the people sitting right in front of us. The disconnect in face-to-face interactions keeps growing; you can see it happening more as smartphones get ‘smarter.’  A smartphone has evolved into something that some people need to live on, like an external nervous system.

Imagine that you can ditch your phones on a getaway can better live in the moment while not being digitally distracted.

Be present. Turn off your device and really live. Vacations should be a real break from our technology-soaked lives.

Here are five tips on how to disconnect from your smartphone and enjoy vacation without it:

Use paper maps

This is the first big step to looking at what’s around you rather than looking at your phone. Using the old-school way, you won’t have to go to Google Maps for navigation and have an excuse to keep using your phone. Plus, using your brain, your imagination fires up like when you were a kid, looking at the back roads on an old map and wondering where they all lead.

Delete tempting apps

Addicted to Twitter or other sites? Delete the app from your phone before you leave on vacation and don’t reinstall it until you get back.

Buy a disposable camera or a real one

Rather than take selfies on your phone, and constantly posting pictures and agonizing over the perfect hashtags, you can capture memories the old-fashioned way. And this way you actually enjoy your surroundings without having your face in a screen most of the day.

Check hotels with digital-detox discounts

Yes, they’re out there. Some places offer room discounts for giving up your phone upon check-in. A reawakening starts with forced human interaction. We did that for thousands of years before.

Read

Remember that? Rather than being entranced on your phone, bring a good book. The act of reading a physical book quiets and calms us, incorporates the sense of touch and smell, and allows us to become part of the story in a way that no pop-up headline can.

We’re relying too much on instant technology. There can be life — a higher quality of life — without these devices.