How To Keep Your Cellphone From Ruining Your Vacation

For most people, spending time on social media, checking emails or replying to texts isn’t exactly mood-boosting. If anything, it can feel like wasted time or even a disruption during social events. What’s more, when you’re on a vacation, whether solo, with friends or with family, time spent on your phone is even more of a waste.

In fact, Ulko-Tammio, a Finnish island, announced that it’s a “phone-free island” for the summer months, according to CNN. The move is meant to help people make the most of their vacation.

“We want to urge holidaymakers to switch off their smart devices and to stop and genuinely enjoy the islands,” Mats Selin, an expert in island tourism at Visit Kotka-Hamina, which encompasses the area of the island, said in a June press release published on the Visit Kotka-Hamina website.

Experts say this small island is getting at something that’s actually really important: Our phones have the potential to totally take away from a trip.

“If we’re just completely consumed by our device, then we’re not really being present. We’re somewhere else, you know … we’re having a virtual conversation with our friends, and we’re back in that drama, or, we’re just constantly being pulled back with work email,” Hilda Burke a psychotherapist based in London and author of “The Phone Addiction Workbook,” told HuffPost.

“We’re not getting that really vital change of scene and different stimuli that I think is really the whole purpose of a holiday,” Burke said.

You’re also not getting the part of a vacation that makes it refreshing, exciting and rejuvenating. “The whole purpose of changing our environment is to be exposed to something new, something different and to have those different neural pathways engaged,” she added.

Instead, you’re stuck in your non-vacation life pattern. Carder Stout, a psychologist based in Los Angeles and the author of “We Are All Addicts,” stressed that the entire point of a vacation is to experience something new.

If people are glued to their phones, “then it’s really just confirming that we don’t have the ability to expand ourselves and evolve and grow and have a new experience,” Strout told HuffPost. “And, also, the experience of being on vacation is really about enjoying one another, enjoying the experience.”

But just because we know that being glued to our phone isn’t great, doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult to ditch it altogether. To help with that, the experts…