Put the beeping device down

The average person checks their cellphone about 60 times per day.

offers some tips on how to stop the constant checking.

into categories.

Your co-workers, for example, could have a different ringtone than your friends. Phones also have options to silence certain contacts or to mute chat conversations temporarily.

When it comes to applications, most ask the user directly after download whether they’d like to receive notifications or not. Saying ‘‘no’’ can help, though many apps are constantly adding new features that result in a flood of notifications anyway, he said.

‘‘In order to keep you on for as long as possible, they send you a notification to have you use it when you might not otherwise,’’ he said. ‘‘If you’re pruning those notifications properly and your phone’s not buzzing every five seconds, it’s about just filtering the stuff that’s actually important.’’

Laramie said he works with many of his patients on how to decrease their screen time, whether it means putting the phone in another room or even just in another pocket.

‘‘It becomes draining to always be on call, to always be concerned with the phone,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s just perpetual awareness.’’

Another solution, Rosen said, is to put yourself on a schedule, such as allowing yourself to check your phone for a few minutes every hour on the hour.

He also suggests an attention span test. Set a phone alarm for 15 minutes. Put your phone face down, somewhere near you. Get engaged in another task and keep doing it until the alarm goes off. Check your phone. Start over.

‘‘Keep doing that until you get to a point where your alarm goes off and you say, ‘Wait, I want to finish what I’m doing,’’’ he said.

‘‘Then you know you can focus for 15 minutes. The more invested you are in these apps, the more you’ll struggle. It may be that the best you can get is 15 minutes of attention, and that’s a sad thing to say about our attention spans.’’ – TNS