Ten small changes to phone settings or our behaviour with our phones can help curb smartphone addiction, say experts at McGill University in Canada

If you spend too much time staring at your phone you could try cutting back on your screen time. McGill University researchers found there are ten strategies to help you do that. They include: 1) reducing non-essential notifications; 2) enable screen time tracking and set time limits for particular apps; 3) keep your phone on silent (with vibrate off) while sleeping and out of reach when going to bed; 4) set your screen to greyscale—a study found this makes smartphones “less gratifying”; 5) hide social media apps in a folder off of your home screen (or even delete them); 6) keep your phone on silent, face down, out of sight, and out of reach when not in use throughout the day; 7) make it harder to unlock—disable Touch ID and use a password instead; 8) turn down your screen brightness and change the color warmth to filter out blue light; 9) if you can do the task on a computer, try to keep it on the computer, and 10) leave your phone at home when you can. Lead study author Jay Olson says, “Most of the participants spent four to five hours per day on their phones. The intervention reduced this by about an hour per day, sometimes freeing up the equivalent of an entire full-time work week per month.”