There are times at which it’d serve you better for your smartphone to not be, well, so goddamned smart. Does it need to have its finger on the pulse of every TikTok dance, every fashion trend, every viral video? Must it ping you every time your friend posts a picture of a goat playing an electric keyboard? Should it really give you unfettered access to the internet’s attention-stealing, time-wasting frivolities?

Not if you know yourself well enough not to trust yourself with such digital freedom. Bravo on you for knowing when you need to just cut yourself off from social media apps and internet browsers in order to keep your attention on real life, on your work, on the party, on your vacation. Whatever it is, your phone should be at your mercy, not the other way around.

All are valid reasons to take advantage of a device that can turn your smartphone into a temporary dummy, cut off from the attention-hogging apps that plague you. We’ve highlighted the Unpluq and the Brick, two of the most popular choices out there. Here are the best ways to turn your smartphone into a dumbphone, short of striking it in the head with a mallet, Three Stooges-style.

devices to dumb down your smartphone

Lord knows there are plenty of good devices out there that are dumbphones through and through. You just have to take a gander through our Best Dumbphones Guide to see that. And there are more being introduced all the time. But as some dumbphone converts find out, there can be a time and a place for a smartphone.

Perhaps it’s too tempting to have a wide-open, unlocked smartphone during the workday, but you could really use one to help navigate London on your vacation. Or you want to dip a toe into the big, dumb dumbphone waters before committing to a new device that costs several hundred dollars. Or you just don’t want to fork over more money for a dumbphone when you spent a bundle on a smartphone not that long ago.

The Unpluq Tag is a device that allows you to keep your smartphone and set limits around accessing certain apps. You get to choose which apps are inaccessible when your phone is “locked.” If you want to unlock the phone to allow those apps—Instagram, YouTube, whatever—you need to have the Unpluq Tag physically near the phone. What happens if the tag is at home and you’re out and about? Exactly. That’s the point. If you don’t have the tag nearby, you can’t be tempted to just unlock your phone. When I checked one out, I was impressed at how it didn’t just rely upon willpower, the way some app-only alternatives do.

Like with the Unpluq, The Brick lets you designate which apps to stay available, rather than which ones to block. The overall effect is similar, but think of The Brick as opt-in and the Unpluq as opt-out. Likewise, you need the physical The Brick tag present in order to restore your smartphone to its full functionality. It’s an alternative that similarly lets you choose smarts for when you need it and a dumbphone for when you need your peace of mind.

Unlike the Unpluq’s $78-per-year annual subscription, you only need to buy The Brick once. There’s no ongoing subscription cost to use it.

dumbphones worth buying

Still not convinced an Unpluq or Brick will do the trick for you? Do you know that you can’t be trusted with an iPhone in your pocket, no matter how many whacks to its melon with an anvil you take? Our Best Dumbphones Guide has a bunch of alternative dumbphones that take no special tinkering to make dumb. That’s just how Mama Phone Company made ’em.

I was so impressed by the Light Phone III, that I said it felt “suspiciously like a smartphone” in my review. Its build quality was as nice as anything from Apple or Samsung that I’ve ever held in my hand.

The only major downside of the Light Phone III, aside from its smartphone-like price of $899, is that you have to wait a few months to buy one because they’ve been consistently backordered since Light Phone debuted them. If you want a lightning-fast dumbphone with a large touchscreen right now, check out the Wisephone II. I gave it a hands-on test, and thanks to it being based on the hardware of a Samsung smartphone, it’ll be the most familiar dumbphone available to those who’ve only used smartphones in recent years.

the bottom line

Some of the finest companions I’ve had were dogs that were not all that bright. Fine, they were less capable than their smarter analogues. The dimmest of them would never guard the house or go fetch specific things for me, but they were certainly less exhausting to be around than the smarties that made constant demands on my attention.

So it is with phones. Dumbphones won’t keep you apprised of all the latest trends or what your friends are doing on Instagram, and they won’t let you look up whether that book you’re holding in the bookstore is cheaper on Amazon, but that’s the point. With the right gadget, though, you don’t have to commit to your phone being dumb all the time. Just when the timing is right.