Smart Phones & Digital Clutter

Are smart phone notifications making you overwhelmed, cluttering up your brain, and sending your system into high alert? I’m going to give you some tools to declutter your smart phone, which can go a long way towards decluttering your brain and providing much-needed relief, in today’s fast-paced society. 

Times Have Changed

Life used to be simpler, for those of us who remember the days before we had a mini computer in the palms of our hands. If we wanted to call someone, we had to find an available landline or pay phone. If we wanted send an email (when personal computers became popular), we had to sit down at a computer and type it out. We got plenty of junk mail, and it was annoying as heck, but that was usually in our homes or on our desktops. Fast forward to modern times. It’s pretty much expected that every teen and adult (and even some younger kids) has ready access to a smart phone…not just in their homes, but everywhere they go.

Electronic Overwhelm

Smart phones have allowed us some incredible freedom, for sure. But they have also caused some major problems. Technology has advanced far beyond the capacities of our brains and emotional centers. Now, we’re not just confronted by the physical clutter in our homes. We’re also confronted by electronic clutter, every single day.

People have much greater access to us than they used to, as well. We no longer have to be home to receive phone calls, emails, or messages from our friends, our enemies, and companies trying to get our attention. We get them everywhere we go. For better or worse. 

All of those extra notifications (plus news about all kinds of everyday horrors) can really clutter our brains and make it hard to hear, see, or think straight. That can create extra stress and a sense of overwhelm, which can lead to some sketchy (and sometimes downright dangerous) situations.

Also, the feng shui principle is that clutter can drain your life force energy, reduce your quality of life, inhibit you from manifesting what you really want, negatively impact your “luck” (yes, that’s a real thing), and more. That doesn’t just go for physical clutter. It’s for digital clutter, too, like excessive smart phone notifications.

Clear-Headed & Present

Is all of that enough incentive to spend a little time decluttering your smart phone? I hope so. Because the world needs more people who are clear-headed, present, alive, and putting safety and well-being first.

In this post, I’m going to discuss smart phones and four things to address, in order to begin clearing up your electronic clutter and therefore, your mind: 

• app notifications
• triggering news
• email notifications
• dings and buzzers

App Notifications

There are so many smart phone apps that we need, to do our day-to-day stuff, whether for business or leisure. Most of those apps come with notifications, a large percentage of which are not really necessary to our lives and our well-being. They’re just marketing junk and a very efficient way for companies to reach you, because you’ve got your phone glued to your hand, right?

You’ll have to go through your list of apps and make some decisions.

1) Are there apps that you don’t use and that can be uninstalled? I would get those out of the way, first, and just delete them. 

2) Are there apps that you want to keep, so you can benefit from them, but you don’t need notifications from them? Start a list. 

3) Are there apps that you want to keep and you want to make sure you get the notifications from them? Make a list of those, as well. 

For each app that you want to keep, but don’t want to get notifications from, you’ll have to go into your settings, find it in your list, and turn off notifications. There may be multiple places for notifications, within each app, according to what kind of smart phone you have. If you can’t find a way to turn off notifications, you don’t use that app, and it’s not essential to the working of your phone, you can use the “force stop” button. Or, at least you can on most Android smart phones. 

If you’re not sure about whether you should turn off notifications for an app, remember that you can always turn them back on, if you need them. 

Triggering News

I think it’s fairly well-known that most news is bad news. And that bad news can be really triggering, even for normal folks. For those of us who struggle with anxiety, depression, overwhelm, or PTSD, bad news (even if it doesn’t directly involve us) can stimulate a fight or flight response, making it hard to function, at all. 

Do you really need to see catastrophic news on Google, every time you go to search for something? Do you actually need those additional news apps, that came included with your phone?  News on phones can be insidious, but there are ways to avoid being confronted by it, all day, every day. 

I couldn’t find a way to stop the news from showing on my Chrome app, so I decided to install Firefox as my main search app, instead. There’s still a Google search bar, embedded on my phone, and I occasionally slip up and tap that, instead of Firefox. But, for the most part, I am no longer seeing news. Firefox uses Googles’ search engine, anyway. So you’ll still get the information you want, without the added junk. 

There are some news apps that came with my phone, so I had to go into the settings and turn off notifications for those. 

Email Notifications

Email notifications are a little more intensive, because they might involve going into your settings on a PC or Mac…basically sitting in front of a computer. Or maybe not. It depends on how you want to approach it and what kind of notifications you’re getting.

For example, you entered your email to receive a free gift from a coach that you admire. You wanted that gift and were okay with getting an email, here and there, but you weren’t ready to be bombed with emails from them. You can try going into one of their emails on your phone, scrolling down to the bottom, and clicking unsubscribe. Boom, done.

Super Squirrely Software

But, some of the email marketing software is tricky. Let’s say you had to create an account for a job searching company and suddenly, you’re getting stormed with emails from them. It’s annoying (and you didn’t realize you’d be put on an aggressive email campaign), because they’re not relevant to the one job you were interested in. You go to unsubscribe and it makes you enter your email address and password. Then, it says it can’t find you because you don’t have an account with them. Well, then, why the heck are you on their email list?! So frustating.

In that kind of situation, if unsubscribing doesn’t work, you can do one of two things on your side (using Gmail as an example):

1) Block the Sender

In the body of the email, you’ll see a “hamburger” of 3 dots, in the upper right corner. Clicking on ‘Block “___________” ‘ automatically directs their emails to spam. But, then you have to clean out your spam, every once-in-a-while.

2) Create a Filter

This only works on a computer, as far as I’m aware, but it’s very effective. Using that same hamburger in the upper right corner of an email from the company, you’ll click on “Filter messages like these”. It gives you different options to use the company’s name, email address, a relevant keyword, etc., to create a filter. You have the option to send it to a particular folder (which is handy, in case you might want to look at their emails, down-the-line), you can make it so that their emails skip your inbox, so you only see them when you manually look at “all mail”, or you can set them to skip the inbox and get deleted.

Creating a filter can require a bit of trial and error. Usually, just sending that address to deletion is fine, but if you’ve somehow gotten on multiple email lists for that same company, you’ll have to create a stronger filter. Or an additional one.

By the way, in Gmail, you can see a list of all the filters you’ve created, by going into your email settings.

If you have an email carrier other than Gmail, you’ll have to look up the settings, individually.

Why go through all of this bother? Because clutter is overwhelming. Yes, even digital clutter. It doesn’t have to be physical, to be junking up your head space, draining your life force energy, and preventing you from experiencing the quality of life that you really desire. So, even though this may seem tedious, it may be worth the effort to address each questionable or annoying or superfluous email in your inbox.

Dings & Buzzers

All of those dings and chimes and bits of music. Ugh. I’m sure they seemed fun, at first, and maybe they are still fun for you. But, all of them intermittently sounding from whatever is going through your phone? Can we say “sensory overload”?!

Also, those sounds should be for your ears only, not for everybody in the Starbucks or restaurant or office or the bus on your ride home from work. Yet, many people seem to have the volume set so loud that those dings and chimes and bits of music can be heard by everyone around them, way too clearly.

So, I guess this is a bit of a public service announcement. Please mind your dings. At the very least, turn the volume down on those things, if you can manage it (settings may vary). Use the buzzer option, if possible. Or just turn the sound and buzzing off, altogether, and look at your notifications on your own time. There’s nothing saying you have to be at everyone’s beck and call, every moment of your waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours. If you’re driving or cycling or scootering, it’s probably best if they’re off, anyway, isn’t it? Create some healthy structure and boundaries for yourself. You might feel less overwhelmed and make the world a more pleasant (and less distracting) place to live in.

By the way, you might have different sound settings for each type of notification, like phone calls, emails, apps, etc. So that could require adjusting multiple settings.

Sidenote: You know how your phone comes set to buzz when you type in a character? I gues it’s called keyboard vibration. That can (you guessed it) lead to overwhelm AND it can drain your battery. So, while you’re in there adjusting your sound settings, you might want to figure out how to turn that thing off, too.

It Sucks, But It’s Worth It

I know that’s a lot to have to do. Those companies want to make sure you’re getting notifications, as much as possible. But, that’s just not good for your brain, your chi, or your peace-of-mind. So, it’s up to you to set and hold some boundaries, in the name of radical self-care.

It might take 30+ minutes to go through all of these steps, the first time around. And yeah, that sucks. But, you might feel much clearer, on the other side. The notifications that you do continue to get will be ones that you actually want, more-or-less. Even just that can improve your mental outlook and quality of life.

You’re worthy of feeling good. So, I encourage you to start relieving yourself of the digital clutter and the overwhelm.