This hidden iOS setting cured my telephone habit

My display screen time is a tough tablet to swallow. Between working on-line all day, studying my Kindle at evening, and going by the motions of being a Zillennial simply making an attempt to coordinate film evening with my associates, the hours I spend looking at a display screen are sufficient to make any modern-day optometrist a bit of dizzy.

And that is not even accounting for the social media scrolling that strikes each time I am ready for software program to load. It is unconscious at this level — ready for a single e mail to come back by all of a sudden turns into six Instagram Reels earlier than I regain management of my consciousness once more.

Muscle reminiscence and dopamine spikes are the culprits, certain, nevertheless it’s not like I put too many boundaries between me and the doomscroll. It’s miles too simple to entry my social media apps, and I can not simply delete them — I am a social media supervisor, in any case. So relatively than imposing closing dates I would just ignore, I tweaked two tiny settings that tricked me out of my scrolling tendencies: app look and labels.

Radical app look adjustments

As a result of the grayscale trick is not lifelike

Anybody I’ve ever identified who’s put their telephone in grayscale mode has lasted a few week earlier than flooding their display screen with coloration once more. Certain, it makes addictive apps much less interesting, nevertheless it additionally makes it borderline inconceivable to take (and have a look at) photos, watch movies, or do any form of on-line buying. It is true that grayscale can minimize display screen time, nevertheless it does so by making your machine depressing to make use of — and there is positively a greater approach to do this with out the distress issue.

iOS 18 launched the power to mass-change your telephone’s app look and create a cohesive, aesthetic house display screen with colours of your alternative. Most individuals I do know opted for brilliant electrical purples or serene sage greens — each screamed aesthetic — however brilliant colours are nonetheless attention-grabbing. If my Instagram app is all of a sudden turquoise, it is nonetheless going to catch my eye (and the subsequent half-hour of my time). Good begin, Apple.

However iOS 26 made the looks choices even higher with Liquid Glass, and at last tempted me sufficient to stray from the colourful defaults of my favourite apps. That is how I unintentionally found my anti-addiction repair: I used to be taking part in with totally different colours and transparencies for my apps after I realized I used to be late for an appointment. Within the panic that adopted, I did not have time to choose the proper coloration and actually ran out the door with my house display screen tinted a muddy gray-brown.

After a couple of hours, the colour had form of grown on me (it matched the autumn vibes) however I observed that my eyes weren’t getting snagged by the pinks, purples, and yellows of Instagram. I could not even discover TikTok’s well-known music-note icon. X vanished someplace within the chaos of my app hoard, and even Slack evaded my consideration for a couple of hours… sorry, boss.

The epiphany got here with a bit of frustration: I ended scrolling and began counting on the search bar as a substitute. However that motion alone made each app faucet an intentional transfer relatively than a unconscious reflex.

To vary your homescreen look, comply with these steps:

1. Click on and maintain clean area in your iPhone’s homescreen.
2. When the apps begin to jiggle, faucet Edit within the higher left-hand nook.
3. Choose Customise from the dropdown.
4. Choose Tinted, after which drag the sliders to decide on between colours and lightness.

I adopted this up with one other refined tweak, and it ended up being the cherry on prime.

Take away app names

An actual guessing recreation if you do not know all of your apps

To make discovering sure apps even more durable, I erased all of the labels from my house display screen. To take action, comply with the identical steps as above and discover the top-right toggle exhibiting a small sq. subsequent to a bigger one. This allows you to select between smaller icons with names beneath, or larger icons with no labels in any respect.

To begin with, I similar to the best way the larger icons look. However now, if I scroll to my third web page of apps (lots of which I obtain for articles and barely contact afterward), I can not even inform what half of them are with out opening them. It creates another impediment between my itch for a fast scroll and the app that would scratch it.

Different tweaks I discovered useful

There’s an alternative choice on the other facet of the icon-size toggle: mild versus darkish. I do not imply the system-wide Gentle vs. Darkish Mode — that comes later. This one adjustments the refined background tone of your property display screen. Whereas the distinction is minor, the darker model is less complicated on the eyes and dampens any visible noise behind your apps.

Then, I went to the underside of the customization menu to decide on Auto as a substitute of Gentle or Darkish. I appreciated the look of my tinted apps in the course of the day, however the slight shift when the solar goes down provides my display screen a complete new aura and makes my social feeds even much less tempting. It is simpler on my eyes and retains me from getting too comfy with the format.

These refined variations are sufficient that I’ve observed I’m spending much less time doomscrolling and extra time writing in my Notes app — my favourite (and way more productive) pastime.