The battle that we constantly fight our entire lives, is the one between our shoulder angel and shoulder devil.
I never forget those cartoons like the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry where you see the shoulder angel and should devil quibbling about what the character should be doing.
Fascinating. That’s exactly the battle we face every day.
We may train ourselves to listen mostly to our shoulder angel, but there will always be moments where the shoulder devil triumphs.
We are not perfect.
Take those moments where the light bulb above your heads turns on, which leads to aspiring ideas such as reducing your social media time or cutting the daily Fanta consumption.
In those moments you tell yourself: “I’m going to delete Facebook!” or, “I’m going to quit social media for a week!”
A few hours later you’re on social media without a trace of those thoughts.
We’re good at convincing ourselves not to follow through.
That shoulder devil knows what to tell you. It knows how to say: “it’s okay, use social media for 10 minutes, your friends are waiting for you, it’s fine”.
That’s why you may want to use an accountability partner when you’re serious about reducing your screen time.
If you have a partner or someone in your household who has the same aspirations as you have when it comes to screen time, you can help each other drastically.
Make an agreement and be clear about your objectives.
Don’t just say you want to reduce your phone use or Instagram use.
Be more specific, agree on how much time you allow yourselves to use Instagram for the next 5 days for example.
You are a powerful “shoulder angel” for your accountability partner and vice versa.
It will be harder for your shoulder devil to convince you to let go of your promise to stop entering the Youtube rabbit hole.
Another benefit of an accountability partner is that if he or she is succeeding and keeping his or her promise, you will be motivated to do the same.
“If my accountability partner can do it then surely I can too!”
Such motivation will help you to face your obstacles and challenges and above all, it will help you to listen to your own shoulder angel more who at the end of the day wants you to live a fruitful life.