How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan

by Catherine Price

Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on the New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. —Aziz Ansari

Jobs—the man who introduced the iPhone—restricted his own children’s access to his company’s products. “They haven’t used it,” he said, when New York Times technology reporter Nick Bilton asked him if his children liked the iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

The same is true of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, who didn’t give their kids phones until they were fourteen.

Addiction can be defined as continuing to seek out something (for example, drugs or gambling), despite negative consequences.

“Addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.”

many of the same feel-good brain chemicals and reward loops that drive addictions are also released and activated when we check our phones.

the App Store initially refused to sell Space. “They rejected it from the App Store because they told us any app that would encourage people to use other apps or their iPhones less was unacceptable for distribution in the App Store,” said Brown. “They did not want us to give out this thing that was gonna make people less stuck on their phones.”*

dopamine-induced excitement is not the same thing as actual happiness.

Once that link has been established, it doesn’t matter if we’re rewarded only one time out of every fifty. Thanks to dopamine, our brains remember that one time. And instead of dissuading us, the fact that we can’t predict which of our fifty checks is going to be rewarding makes us check our phones even more. Want to know another device that uses intermittent rewards to drive compulsive behavior? Slot machines.

“When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got,”

our phones deliberately incite anxiety by providing new information and emotional triggers every time we pick them up. This makes us worry that any time we put them down, even for a second, we might miss something. The nontechnical term for this anxiety is FOMO: fear of missing out

We become convinced that the only way to protect ourselves is to constantly check our phones to make sure that we’re not missing something. But instead of helping alleviate our phone-induced FOMO, this actually increases it, to the point where our adrenal glands release a squirt of cortisol—a stress hormone that plays a large role in fight-or-flight responses—every time we put down our phones.

Let’s start with a question: have you ever wondered why social media apps are all free? It’s not because their creators are driven by a philanthropic urge to help the world share selfies. It’s because we are not actually the customers, and the social media platform itself is not the product. Instead, the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.

First, every time we encounter a link, our brains must make a split-second decision about whether to click on it. These decisions are so frequent and tiny that we often don’t even notice that they’re happening. But we can’t make split-second decisions and think deeply at the same time—the two acts use different and competing brain regions. Every decision, no matter how tiny or subconscious, pulls our attention away from what we are reading.

the more information your working memory is trying to handle—which is referred to as your “cognitive load”—the less likely you are to remember any of it.

And short-term sleep deprivation doesn’t require you to have one crazy night. Even just a week and a half’s worth of sleeping six hours a night (instead of seven to nine) can, according to the Division of Sleep Medicine, “result in the same level of impairment on the tenth day as being awake for the previous 24 hours straight”—which is to say that it can induce “impairments in performance equivalent to those induced by a blood-alcohol level of 0.10 percent, beyond the legal limit for alcohol intoxication in the United States.”

creativity is often sparked by boredom, which is another mental state that our phones are great at helping us avoid.

The moment you recognize that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your life—both on and off your phone.