I Hung My iPhone Up on the Wall, and It Was the Brilliant Reset I Needed

I recently found a button at a Brooklyn flea market that seriously spoke to me. It said, “She turned off her phone and lived happily ever after.” Of course, I would love to live this life. But in reality, as someone who works in news, social media, and editorial strategy, turning off my phone is not really possible. My job pretty much requires me to live in a constant dance with the internet — refreshing feeds, scanning headlines, catching micro trends before they bloom into macro ones. Staying plugged in isn’t a cute habit I can gently shake off. For me, it’s the golden ticket to crafting stories that feel timely and resonant.

And yet, if I’m being honest, being “plugged in” has also morphed into “Velcroed on.” Between AP News alerts, TikTok rabbit holes, and the compulsive need to know what’s going on at every second, my screen time has hovered somewhere between four and seven hours a day for months. Not ideal. Hardly sexy. Certainly not flea-market-button energy.

So when a TikTok creator (@livingmadly) I follow shared that she literally hangs up her phone to create a physical boundary between herself and her device, I figured this might be exactly what I need.

Her setup is simple and surprisingly charming: a small handcrafted phone-sized dock that’s mounted on her wall. At the end of the day, she drops her phone into it the same way you toss your keys onto a hook. The physical act becomes a ritual moment of choosing presence over doomscrolling. And for her, it’s helped break habitual phone reliance in a way that feels doable. So I decided to try it myself.

Because I am not a person who handcrafts anything (no judgment, I simply know my strengths), I skipped an elaborate DIY in favor of pure efficiency. I placed two Command hooks side by side on a wall near my dresser and rested my iPhone on them like a tiny silicone hammock. It looked makeshift, borderline sad, and honestly a little hilarious, but it worked nonetheless.

For three full days, my phone “lived” on its perch. The rules were simple: When I was home, I could retrieve the phone only if someone called, texted, or if a work message came in. Once I handled the message, the phone went right back up. And when I was away from home and the phone came with me, I wasn’t able to do any “quick checks” — no scrolling in line at Trader Joe’s, no tapping through Instagram stories while waiting for my coffee to cool. Emergencies, of course, were allowed. But, spoiler! None happened.

This timing was, in hindsight, catastrophically ambitious. I was just a few days away from my first-ever solo vacation, and my itinerary was still more “concepts of a plan” rather than a “coherent plan.” I had excursions to book, dinner reservations to make, and at least an hour of Google Maps sleuthing left to do. Normally, I chip away at this stuff from my phone in little bursts like on the train, in line at the grocery store, or while pacing on the treadmill.

But during the experiment, those little bursts were suddenly empty. Instead, I found myself hunched over my MacBook Pro with approximately 15 tabs open — cross-referencing reviews, mapping neighborhoods, toggling between three nearly identical hotels in a neurotic frenzy. It was productive, sure, but also wildly inefficient. Setting aside big blocks of laptop time for tasks I usually do in tiny in-between moments made me feel like the world’s least glamorous travel agent.

The surprising twist? Those empty in-between moments were kind of lovely and shockingly intimate. Without my phone on the train, the small details of daily life resurfaced: the book someone next to me was reading, the trees turning color outside, the couple sharing a pair of wired headphones.

And yet, multitasking is one of my superpowers — or at least one of my coping mechanisms. So focusing on singular tasks at singular times often felt like a waste of precious minutes. My internal monologue often scolded, “I totally could’ve booked that restaurant by now if I had just used my phone.” 

What I had anticipated was how much I’d miss the casual, tiny communications throughout my day, and I did really feel it.

I missed:

• Sending my boyfriend a photo of my moka pot latte and declaring (as always) that it was the best coffee ever crafted.
• Calling my dad to ask what kind of gas I should be pumping into my car, despite the fact that I’ve been driving for years.
• FaceTiming my best friend at the end of the day to debrief absolutely nothing of consequence.

All those little connections — the emotional equivalent of poking your head into someone’s room  — disappeared. And as someone whose relationships often survive on long-distance wavelengths, the silence felt pretty significant and noticeable. My world didn’t just get quieter — it felt slightly lonelier.

But there was something beautiful hidden in that quiet. Without the impulse to share every funny sign or passing moment, I started experiencing things purely for myself. I took a walk without posting a single thing about it. I made dinner without texting anyone a photo. I existed without narrating or broadcasting my existence — even to the people I love most.

At times it felt grounding and peaceful, and at other moments the challenge was more inconvenient and occasionally boring.

By the end of the three days, my screen time had dropped dramatically. My weekdays felt slower, calmer, less reactive. The constant urge to check my phone shrank from a reflex to a thought I could observe and ignore.

But I also realized that my phone is one of the main ways I connect with people throughout the day. As a remote writer, I don’t bump into coworkers in hallways or decompress over lunch with friends. My digital world isn’t separate from my “real” world — it’s a pretty blurry line.  

Still, the experiment showed me that my phone doesn’t need to be a fourth limb. I don’t need to cradle it like a newborn. There are moments when putting physical distance between us actually gives me back pieces of myself I didn’t know I’d misplaced.

So here’s what I’m taking away:

• I need a few designated “phone home” moments every day — times when my device is nowhere near me.
• Not every micro-pause in life needs to be filled. 
• Presence is a muscle, and mine got a little stronger.

Will I keep a Command-hook phone hanger on my wall forever? Probably not. Will I continue putting my phone in a specific spot when I want to be more intentional? Absolutely.

Even small rituals can shift your relationship with your devices and with yourself. And while I didn’t exactly “live happily ever after,” I did live more quietly, more consciously, and a little more like the version of myself who could one day live happily ever after. It also made me realize that my phone is something I need — just maybe more mindfully than before.