LIFE SAVER

Obsessed with your smartphone? Anna Whitehouse went phone-free for three days to see if the world would end

Apart from the occasional Hobnob binge (and those stress-inducing moments of trying to get screaming toddler/buggy/snacks/nappies/sanity out of the house), I'm vaguely in control of things. That was until I got an iPhone – the love-hate 'communication' device that had me looking at my daughter's first steps through a screen.

Instead of looking ahead, I started to look down; while others were meeting up, I was scrolling up. Likes, followers, shares and posts became my second language and my daughter's first 18 months on this Earth were banked as filtered images, not memories.

I started to use emoticons ;) Selfies started to seem normal. Clicking that tantalising 'follow' button on Bruce Jenner's Instagram was the final straw.

With low-level tech addiction hampering my every move – quite literally it would take me longer to get from A-B – I decided to go cold turkey for three days over Easter. Here's what went down.

The problem

Was I addicted to my iPhone? In my mind, no. It's a necessity, right? We need contact with the outer world and this is the modern-day means. I'm not sure, however, if someone had taken the old dog and bone off me in the 90s I'd have felt the panic that seized me as I stuffed that social lifeline into my knicker draw.

I instantly felt like I had nothing to do with my hands – something nicotine-riddled ex-smokers say. OK, so perhaps I had a problem. I’ll also admit, I’d occasionally linger near my knicker draw and consider a quick swipe to see what was going on in the world. I even cheated a couple of times and found my finger gently brush that alluring screen for any small updates. And breathe.

The time

Posting, clicking, liking, linking, following and swiping is a massive time drain. By not being in my iPhone's mesmeric clutches, I suddenly had time. Time to breathe. Time to look up at birds. So many birds. Time to realise my daughter had worked out how the clip on her Peppa Pig bike helmet works. Time to write a letter to Granny Whitehouse who regularly sends me spidery scrawls of affection to which I selfishly always think 'I don't have the time to even write'.

But that's not to say there's anything wrong with the occasional tech down time. I love a good scroll with my cuppa and I'm an avid follower of everything the brilliant Mothers Meeting is up to. If used carefully, the Daily Mail mash-up of fake tan and typos can offer genuine 3am (and pm) breastfeeding solace. I just don't want Lady Gaga's Instagram account to get in the way of the bath/bedtime ritual – a time that's more precious than every app lumped together and flogged on eBay.

And she noticed it. My daughter stopped whining as much; she had my full focus. It made me happy, yet truly sad about all the times that those big brown eyes (think Shrek's Puss in Boots) had looked up at her mother slack-jawed and scrolling through other people's lives.

The FOMO

I weirdly never felt like I was missing out. If you don't know what other people are doing, how does it matter? There will be time to check-out that YouTube clip of a dancing caterpillar in a sombrero but not before you’ve crafted a ‘dinosaaaw’ out of bog roll and Quality Street wrappers with the urchin.

Perhaps the biggest relief was not being a part of it all. I love the What’s App group chats as much as the next mama – it offers closeness, friendship and comradery in some of your darkest maternal hours. But when I was steering the Bugaboo with one hand, pressing the lift button with another and balancing the weekly shop on every limb, it felt like a social challenge.

I didn’t want to be the one letting the What’s App team down. I didn’t want to be the silent party lurking in the corner. I wanted in and unlike Granny W’s spidery scrawl method, the response time is always NOW.

The old dog and bone

There’s a huge relief you feel when you don’t get pinged, dinged and tagged with those things that, in the long scheme of things, are white noise. That’s in no way meant to diminish communications from our nearest and dearest. But everything seems equally important when it’s coming through your phone in a flurry, and it creates this urgency to respond immediately, even if just to say, “LOVE” to a photo of your best mate (with requisite dancing girl emoticons).

Turns out, I can read that brilliant 'The Dirty Weekend' post from the Sisterhood Blog when my daughter has decided it's time for a nap. And while you can certainly set different ring tones and notification sounds to help you differentiate between friends and say, your boss, in some ways, just forcing people to call you when they truly need you stops the madness.

As much as I advocate the smartphone for making life easier for parents, and will continue to do so, it's a cruel mistress in many ways. When there’s one soul-sucking gadget for pretty much every single thing in your life - from kiddie-friendly recipes and teacher admin to showing your non-parent mates you still have time for them and the tsunami of play date socialising, it makes it hard for parents to live without it.

I don’t love having level of reliance on anything – it’s too easy for us to pick up our phones to snap a pic of our kids, then get sucked into a social media notification, or respond to a text that then becomes a ridiculously long What's App chat.

The only thing that helped after going off-radar? I pulled most of the apps off my phone onto my iPad, so its main function can be… a phone. Social media? Anti-social media? All I know is last weekend I got to see my daughter find her first Easter egg.