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

by Catherine Price

I reached for my phone to soothe myself, but I often crossed the line from feeling soothed to going numb.

I found myself glancing at my phone in the middle of conversations (a habit that’s so common that it’s coined a neologism: phubbing, short for phone snubbing), conveniently forgetting how annoyed I felt when other people phubbed me.

I’d reach for it to give myself a break, and then end up feeling exhausted and wired. I claimed not to have enough time to pursue interests outside of work, but was that true?

“Your telephone in the 1970s didn’t have a thousand engineers on the other side of the telephone who were redesigning it…to be more and more persuasive.”

“When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got,” he explained in an article titled “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind.”

Engagement is sometimes referred to as “the currency of the attention economy,” and advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money for it.

The result is what seems like should be an oxymoron: an intensely focused state of distraction. As it turns out, this type of frequent, focused distraction isn’t just capable of creating long-lasting changes in our brains; it is particularly good at doing so.

When you’re in flow, you’re so present in the moment that you feel as if you’re outside of time. The line between your experience and your mind gets erased. You’re un-self-conscious. You’re entirely absorbed. You’re in the zone. Flow leads to the sorts of moments and memories that make life seem rich.

Mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly”—including ourselves.

The moment you recognize that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your

If you start feeling like all you’re doing is saying “no” to yourself, then take a step back to regroup. Our goal isn’t abstinence; it’s consciousness.

Indeed, the mere presence of a smartphone on the table has been shown to have a negative impact on closeness, connection, and the quality of conversation—not

Far more likely is that you’re going to see something that upsets you or stresses you out. Once you realize how unlikely your best-case scenario is to happen, it becomes a lot easier to stop checking your phone.