I didn't think I was addicted to technology — until I tried giving up my phone for a week by Áine Cain on Jul 28, 2016, 3:47 PM Advertisement
 To paraphrase Robert Palmer, I might as well face it. I'm addicted to my phone. I tried to give up using my phone for a week and it really didn't work out. I'm an intern on the Careers team at Business Insider. I'd like to tell you that I'm dependent on technology because I'm always scouring the web for scoops and article ideas. But the reality is, I'm just easily distracted and I enjoy listening to music as I walk around. I wasn't always this way. I had a sweet "Star Trek" flip phone throughout high school. It was wonderfully dysfunctional. You couldn't use it to access the internet. It couldn't really receive photos. When I joined the student newspaper, I would record interviews in Garageband on my laptop. Heaven help the person who tried to add me into a group chat. Once I got an iPhone toward the end of my freshman year of college, I never looked back. Still I thought it might be interesting to see if I would be able to give up my phone for a week, now that I've become so dependent on it. I figured that laying off the technology for a while might make me less distraction-prone. To clarify: I was able to make work and emergency calls. But I had to put all other phone functions on the back burner. I thought it would be easy. Before this, I didn't really consider myself to be someone that's glued to her phone. However, due to circumstances, my technological dependence, and my bad memory, I turned out to be a less than ideal subject for the experiment. Here's a breakdown of my phone-less (sort of) week: SEE ALSO: The terrible piece of career advice I got over and over again as a college student Day 1: Sunday  The first day of the no-phone experiment was a total cakewalk. I'd spent the weekend at the beach with my extended family. The day mostly consisted of rushing through my beach read and then driving back home to Westchester County. My phone sat at the bottom of my backpack the entire time, forgotten. I figured the rest of the week would be like this — because I'm chill and not at all dependent on technology.
Day 2: Monday  Obviously, I was totally wrong. It became clear on Monday that the halcyon days of the weekend were over. The trouble started when I had to restrain myself from looking up some sweet Alexander Hamilton fun facts on my iPhone first thing in the morning (that day, July 11, was the 212th anniversary of his death). Things got worse once I got to work. Sitting down at my desk, I remembered that I hadn't posted anything on social media for my mom's birthday. After desperately trying to message my sister on Facebook to get some pics (she never checks her Facebook), I gave up and texted my other, more technology-savvy sister for assistance. I didn't actually use my phone to reach out to her — I used the Messages app on my desktop. It still felt like cheating.
Day 3: Tuesday  By Tuesday, I knew when that hotline bling ... that it was going to drive me crazy because I couldn't use my phone. On the third day, I accidentally grabbed my phone and typed in my passcode three times during work. I wasn't trying to cheat. I wasn't even bored. It's just such an ingrained habit, the action was almost mechanical. That night, I watched "Jeopardy!" (I lead a wild and dangerous life). It was pretty exciting, because the final question was on Hamilton. I wasn't able to look up interesting facts about the different categories, though. So that was a bit of a nightmare. Fun facts are my life's blood.
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