I thought I'd never get addicted to my phone but here I am

Knowing my way around technology was easy for me; I was born in the late 90's and grew up in the Silicon Valley. My dad was a software engineer with a hobby of collecting the latest and greatest tech, and my mom was an academic who sparked my interest in research and just lokking things up. I was using a desktop around 8-9 years old to make “websites” in Word and trawl Wikipedia for fun articles. I was into technology, and while on a computer a lot, I felt like my childhood and teenage years were full of relatively healthy technology usage. I felt most of my time on my computer was building things, games, art, programs or reading, I was challenging my mind and growing with tech. I felt knew how to handle it, harness it and make it work for me.

Earlier this decade, when TikTok was becoming the zeitgeist, I decided to hop onto there, but soon deleted it after a month. Realizing how good their algorithm was to get me hooked to those reels, I thought to myself: “wow, I have a pretty good sense of these things, I won’t get addicted to short form reels, I'll delete TikTok and just just stick to Youtube and Instagram reels, their algorithms suck, I’ll just watch a few to be entertained, I won't get addicted, this is just entertainment”

But here I am in my late 20’s, scrolling away.

I feel my brain has created a link with my phone, if I step away for too long, I get a headache that doesn't go away until I'm on my phone or doing something else stimulating (cycling, programming, etc), but I can't stay still anymore. The only relief is that if I don't entertain it for long enough, it sometimes goes away. I think I still have a way out. I just removed both apps from my phone, I'm pretty good at not using mobile web versions due to poor usability. Let's see what happens now.