I’m 17 and currently on vacation, but honestly I’m just wasting it. Most of my day goes into using my phone (YouTube, scrolling, random stuff), and I feel bored all the time.
I don’t really have friends to hang out with right now, so I end up staying at home doing nothing productive. I want to improve myself and actually use this time well, but I keep falling back into the same routine.
I’m interested in things like space and science, and I’ve thought about starting something like a YouTube channel or learning new skills, but I don’t take action.
What are some practical steps I can take to:
reduce phone usage
stop feeling bored all the time
start doing something meaningful even without friends
I’m not looking for motivational quotes, just real advice that I can actually follow.
8 comments
My advice would be to start slow, pick one small thing you care about, do it for an hour with your phone on airplane more, and with consistency you will eventually replace the boredom. Hope this helps!
Doing things like watching movies, browsing your phone, playing games are self-ignorance behaviours.
Unless that action certainly benefits your life and causes you utter joy to the point you actually 100% want to do it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
You wanted real advice so here’s a real practical way to go about it.
If you don’t absolutely 100% want to do something because it makes you feel amazing. Do not do it. Follow that, build your self-care, life, career off it and you will never look back.
Eventually you get to then a point where you feel so good doing what feels good to you, you pursue it.
Life is about feelings. That’s the point of it. If you feel sad and you instead ignore it and scroll TikTok, you’re ignoring yourself and reinforcing that you shouldn’t get attention.
That then causes you to further ignore it even more creating a spiral of bad patterns. That’s why addiction exists.
Let go of the phone usage, look at how it is you feel, give yourself attention and take care of yourself exactly as you would a partner who felt that way.
Once you do that, you won’t want to use a phone anymore nor do anything that isn’t in-line with your feelings.
Why fight against it? Do what you enjoy. Life has cycles, you’re in this cycle right now, then the cycle where you grind will come, you will be missing these days. So don’t worry about that. If you want a quick mental relief go and enjoy nature.
Set a timer and say okay the phone is going to be put away when the alarm goes off.
Since you are 17 you could find causes that you may be passionate about. Animal shelters are always looking for volunteers. Red Cross also looks for volunteers.
If you are interested in space and science look for the NASA camps that may be available. Get a job during vacation. Help out an elderly neighbor. Help your parents around the house. Cook a meal for the family. Mow the lawn. You never know what your interaction will be when you are outside the house. Even going for a walk and nodding or saying hello to others who are out and about.
The map on your phone has a lot of recreational places you can search for. Go find them.
Take yourself to the movies, check out museums, go to bookstores, most of all make sure you feel confident and engage people around you. But be sure to be socially aware that not everyone is in the mood for conversation.
Well, you’ve got interests, so start there. Look up events or clubs going on near you that match those interests. If you are open to making friends or meeting people, going to places that match your likes will work for both of those concepts … you’ll be doing things that will be fun for you, and you’ll be there with other people who are easier to talk to because of the shared interests
If you have any interests or hobbies, then go for those. You could use your phone in a productive manner by looking up what you could do with said interests or hobbies while on vacation, perhaps even plan something.
Set a reasonable alarm, but place the phone far. Assign a noisy one that would make you absolutely have to get up and get it, like some kind of screamy Metal that starts blasting straight from second zero. Getting up and actually having to walk the distance to disable it can get you started on the right foot, at least.
Also, you could just refrain from charging your phone as much as possible — at some point, it will run out, and you will have to leave it to charge. That ought to force you to look to do something else (hopefully not just sit there and do things on it while it’s charging…).
Set more alarms for reminders for other things, or notes with sound alerts at least. Those ought to give you the memo that there are other things you could and probably should be doing, and get off your phone if you happen to get sidetracked anyway.