The Grayscale Remedy: A Simple Tool Against Smartphone Addiction
Smartphone addiction, now recognized by some psychologists as a genuine behavioral disorder tied to FOMO, stems partly from the deliberately colorful design of apps that exploit our psychological reward systems. The writer proposes a straightforward intervention: switching your phone to grayscale mode to strip away the visual triggers that keep us compulsively engaged.
One of the biggest curses that technology brought to us with the emergence of smartphones is the addiction that comes with them. Too often, we go on dates or some other social gathering and we/other persons seemingly cannot spend 5 minutes without whipping out their phones to check on whether notifications have come in or not.
Our addiction to these objects around which our lives now revolves more and more is becoming pathological to the point that some psychologists are now considering it as a disease and have coined it FOMO i.e Fear Of Missing Out.
Sometimes, we take out our phones to check an information on Google and before we know we are scrolling through Facebook and then Instagram, and then Snapchat, and then WhatsApp. 30 minutes later, we have been absolved and the task we had at hand has been forgotten.
If you constantly experience this, then this article is for someone like you.
The truth is, it is not entirely your fault. The people who build the apps on the phone read a lot about human psychology and how our senses interact with our environment and with us. One of the way they do this is by trying to trigger the reward centers in our brain.
And how does that happen?
Simple. The answer is COLOURS.
Think of little children. What are they most attracted to? Colourful things, right? They always want to pick up that colourful thing lying around. That is why children’s toys and books are always so colourful.
We adults are nothing but bigger children. We don’t really grow up, we just have more responsibilities and our child-like instincts are still inside of us; albeit to a smaller extent compared to when we were 5 or 6 years old.
That is why app makers use so many colours. Take a look at your phone’s screen. See how colourful it is? That colour is partly responsible for the addiction.
So how do you deal with that? Simple. Set your phone to grayscale. Setting your phone to grayscale takes out the colour entirely from it and your phone now looks mundane and less attractive and becomes more of the farm tool that it is supposed to be; to help you achieve specific tasks.
Don’t take my word for it. This is a recommendation from a Google Designer by the name of Tristan Harris.
If you have an iPhone (iOS 10) here is how to set your phone to grayscale.
Settings > General > Accessibility >Display Accommodations >Color Filters. Switch Color Filters on and select Grayscale. To easily toggle between color and grayscale, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut > Color Filters.
Now, you just press the home button three times to enable grayscale. Triple-click again to go back to color.
For Android users, that will depend on the phone model. One of our readers ( George-Michael Nkamsi) has helped us with this information:-
For Android users (5.0 and above)
Go to Settings/General/About Device/Build Number. Tap Build Number seven times. You now have Developer Options turned on.
Go back to Settings/General, find Developer Options>Simulate Color Space and choose Monochromacy.
For inferior android versions you'd need a 3rd party app (Monochrome app works well)
- Wandji Wilfred
By 2018, smartphones had become ubiquitous and the social costs of their overuse—distracted social interactions, diminished focus, compulsive checking—were becoming visible to ordinary observers. The language of addiction and psychological design was beginning to circulate beyond academic circles into everyday conversation.
The piece offers practical resistance to a genuine problem without rejecting technology itself, a stance that remains relevant as app design has only grown more sophisticated in capturing attention. Its clarity and directness—grounding the solution in accessible psychology and step-by-step instructions—represents a moment when the problem felt newly solvable, before the arms race between user autonomy and design incentives became even more entrenched.