Using Your Phone First Thing Can Ruin Your Day

Morning media habits can sabotage your productivity, but some simple hacks can boost your mood and focus throughout the day.

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Key Points

• Checking our phones before we’re out of bed can drain our mental energy and leave us unprepared for the day.
• Starting the day with negative content can lower our mood, creativity, productivity, and confidence.
• Social media can be a positive experience when its use aligns with our goals.

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Do you look at your phones before you’re even out of bed? It’s easy to do. Our phones are portals to a world of information, people, and conveniences. They may also be our alarm, weather forecaster, sleep tracker, and meditation guide.

Yet, we feel a little guilty –even ashamed—if we admit to being a “first-thing” device user. While the impact of using a phone first thing in the morning depends on what we use it for, it’s way too easy to slip from utility into random scrolling. Checking the time or the weather can increase our sense of agency—we aren’t late, and we remember the umbrella. However, if we launch into the news, email, or social media, we are using up the cognitive energy from a good night’s sleep without direction or purpose. We jumped right into the pressures of the day without taking the time to reflect on the day’s goals and demands and have lost the chance to be purposeful or ‘anchored.’

Once the phone is open, it seems harmless to spend a few minutes scrolling. But it’s easy to get distracted by something negative that impacts our mood. Anger, frustration, and envy can cast a negative halo effect over the start of our day, undermining our self-confidence and making us more irritable, impatient, or depressed.

If we intentionally seek out dopamine-boosting content, such as something that makes us laugh or feel moved, we may feel energized and more open, but it comes at a cost. Relying on a hit of adrenaline or dopamine from social media to get going does not serve the same function as reflection and planning.

Times to Avoid Social Media Use

Morning isn’t the only time you should be aware of how knee-jerk device use can get in your way. Here are some good rules of thumb:

• Don’t use social media when you’re supposed to be paying attention to the people you care about at home—your kids, partners, family, or friends.
• Don’t use social media right before bed. One study found that blue light from devices not only suppressed the nocturnal melatonin that helps you sleep, but increased the production of the stress hormone cortisol (Figueiro & Rea, 2010). Beyond the blue light effect, content that attracts our attention activates our brain, making it harder to fall asleep. Good sleep hygiene says to step away from things that trigger our emotions and allow our brain and body to relax.
• Don’t use social media while eating, especially if you are trying to diet. Like when we watch TV, we do not pay attention to what we eat when we use social media. We tend to eat faster and more because we don’t tune into the sensory experience of eating that helps us notice the satiety signals. Media can also distract us from our initial intentions about what we plan to eat (or drink.)

First-Thing Phone User Hacks

Looking at our phones first thing in the morning deprives us of the time to prepare mentally for the day. The never-ending dump of information leaves us vulnerable to emotional triggers and can create feelings of dread or being overwhelmed.

Experiment with small hacks that alter your morning behaviors. For example, wait to check your phone until you:

• Leave the bedroom
• Step outside or open a window and look around
• Take the dog for a walk
• Have your morning coffee
• Spend 5 minutes reflecting on the day ahead and what you want to accomplish

Anything that gets us outside before we pick up our phone, like walking our dog, has multiple benefits (Brockis, 2024). Devices are conduits to a busy, demanding world. Connecting with nature, even for a few minutes, reduces stress and is restorative. If we are so hooked to our devices that we enter that world upon rising, we cheat ourselves of a chance to enhance our well-being and remember what matters most.

An activity like going outside not only makes us move but focuses our attention away from our devices and into our physical environment. Embodiment theory says our feelings and thoughts are linked to our posture and facial expressions (Hackford et al., 2019). Consider the difference between being hunched over using your phone in bed versus standing up straight, smiling, and striding purposefully toward the door. Believe it or not, good posture can improve mood and make you feel more capable of taking on the day.

Take Charge and Find Your Compass

Everyone is different, so it should come as no surprise that our goals are not the same. We each use tools—like phones–in a way most likely to help us achieve our aims. Behavior reflects the goals we set (or don’t). Before you design behavioral hacks, spend a little time examining your goals so you can make choices that align your media behaviors with your intentions and desires.

Technology changes so fast that we must continually redefine and reclaim our boundaries. We can forget that we own our phones; they do not own us. Back in the day when phones were just phones, it was hard enough to realize that a ringing phone didn’t HAVE to be answered. Now, with social media, algorithms, and notifications, it’s 100 times harder. Our innate social wiring makes us automatically want to respond to any social connection for fear of missing something or being left out. We ALL suffer from FOMO. It is not a personal shortcoming. It is a very human response for a species whose survival depends on getting along with others.

Media Use Journaling Exercise

• Cultivate self-awareness about your media habits by keeping a media journal for a few days. Note your media consumption habits, motivations for use, and moods. Keep it simple so you can sustain it for a few days or a week. People tend to over- or underestimate behaviors like calorie intake or exercise by about 50% to protect their self-esteem (Lichtman et al., 1992). Remember that this is information gathering, so the more accurate you are, the more you’ll learn.
• Look for patterns in your media behaviors to learn what works (makes you feel better or increases our productivity) and what doesn’t (makes you feel bad, cranky, or interferes with other activities, like sleep or visiting with family/friends.)
• Look at your goals. Social media consumption is usually for entertainment, so pay attention to when social media use moves you closer to your goals (like connecting with friends, taking a mental break, finding something new and exciting, or satisfying your curiosity) and when it interferes with them by wasting your time, damaging your self-image, or triggering anger, jealously or anxiety.
• Set boundaries! Look for ways to use your preferences to control your feeds. For example, you can turn off your notifications at night, be selective in who you follow, and develop your antennae to avoid clickbait. If looking at people with perfect children, fabulous vacations, or amazing abs triggers a negative response, block them and move on. Don’t feel bad about yourself when content triggers a negative reaction. Social comparison is a normal survival instinct—how we learn to navigate our social world. Human brains were designed to be sensitive to social behaviors as they were necessary for survival in a prehistoric Savannah. Our brains are not equipped for a world with social media, middle school, braggers, photo filters, or fakes.
• Use your media journal insights to adjust your behavior based on what you learned. You want to improve positive emotions and sleep quality and lower emotional drag, not avoid the digital world. If you are intentional about your media use, you can enjoy the good stuff and eliminate or lessen the bad. Be realistic, and don’t try to change everything at once. That never works. Make small, sustainable changes where you will see the benefits and be motivated to continue.

Social Media Hacks Can Improve Power, Confidence & Mood

Any hack we try is an act of intention. Nobody needs to start the day with self-inflicted pain. Negative emotions lower productivity, decrease perceptions of energy, diminish cognitive capacity, and make us generally less pleasant to be around. When we plan and try it, we increase our sense of power and confidence and lift our mood (Robinson et al., 2019). We are then ready to start the day with a cushion of positive emotions, which can translate into increased resilience, productivity, willingness to try new things, and being more open to experiences.

References

Brockis, J. (2024). The natural advantage: How more time outside reduces stress, improves health and boosts social connection. Major Street Publishing.

Figueiro, M. G., & Rea, M. S. (2010). The effects of red and blue lights on circadian variations in cortisol, alpha amylase, and melatonin. Int J Endocrinol, 2010, 829351. https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/829351

Hackford, J., Mackey, A., & Broadbent, E. (2019). The effects of walking posture on affective and physiological states during stress. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 62, 80-87. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.09.004

Lichtman, S. W., Pisarska, K., Berman, E. R., Pestone, M., Dowling, H., Offenbacher, E., Weisel, H., Heshka, S., Matthews, D. E., & Heymsfield, S. B. (1992). Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects. N Engl J Med, 327(27), 1893-1898. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm199212313272701

Robinson, S. A., Bisson, A. N., Hughes, M. L., Ebert, J., & Lachman, M. E. (2019). Time for change: Using implementation intentions to promote physical activity in a randomised pilot trial. Psychology & Health, 34(2), 232-254. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2018.1539487