By: Lawren Miller

The Daily Lawr

I don’t know about you, but some mornings I start my day off with a little Instagram to wake up, and tell myself I’ll just be on it for about 10 minutes. The time inevitably turns into 20 and then 30 minutes. Then I notice for the rest of my day, all I want to do is be on my phone instead of doing the necessary things that come with being a human in college. My mind is constantly craving distraction and release from responsibility, stress, and frankly real life. 

Little did I know that I was setting myself up to be distracted on purpose without even realizing it. How can we stop this from happening, or at least be better at spending less time on socials like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and so forth? 

What I’ve found is this little app called Opal. It is designed to block your apps more effectively than what is already built into your phone. You can set up study sessions or just time to be blocked from certain apps. You can set time limits on apps that distract you the most. You can also block offensive content that you don’t want to see on your phone at all. Another thing that helps is taking your phone and putting it in a completely different room all together, removing the distractions from your mind in the process. 

At first this is hard to do, but as time goes on, you start remembering what’s important to get done and realize you have less distractions, less stress, and ultimately more time to do homework and other important things. You realize friends and family are more important than how many likes you have on your most recent post and put face to face communication first.

Isn’t that what’s truly important? Real connection?