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

by Catherine Price

smartphones are causing people to think, feel, and behave in ways that are typically associated with narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Smartphones engage in disruptive and intrusive behaviors that have traditionally been exhibited only by extremely annoying (if not downright creepy) people.

“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.”

It’s also important to note that revolutionary technologies don’t just “come along,” as Jobs put it; they’re designed. As Parker pointed out, Silicon Valley insiders are quite aware of their products’ addictive qualities, because they’re engineered with the explicit goal of getting us to spend as much time and attention as possible on them.

Eventually, this association between phone and reward can become so strong that dopamine is released anytime our brains are even reminded of our phones. (Ever notice how seeing someone else check their phone can make you check yours?)

What we don’t talk about is how [the choices of a] handful of people working at a handful of technology companies…will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

In fact, the similarities between the two devices are so striking that Tristan Harris frequently refers to smartphones as slot machines that we keep in our pockets.

Put this all together, and it makes sense that spending a lot of time on social media in particular has been shown to cause depression, anxiety, and lower self-esteem. What doesn’t make sense is that we are actively choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school.

On social media, instead of having experiences with your friends—which will bring you closer in the moment and give you shared memories to look back on and treasure—you can only tell them (or post photos) about your own experiences. This is less satisfying than having experiences together and encourages comparison (is your life as fun as your friends’ lives?) instead of camaraderie. It also encourages us to interrupt our experiences so that we can take photographs to post to social media. We end up performing our lives instead of living them.

As Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (that is, the Harvard Study of Adult Development—aka “the Grant Study”), “The physical presence of another human being cannot be duplicated by a machine. There is no substitute for being together.”

“When our lived experience diverges from our projected image,” she writes, “we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we’ve created.” This disconnect between our true selves and our curated personas can lead to anxiety, depression, and even thoughts of self-harm.

While it’s possible that preexisting anxiety and depression might cause some people to seek solace on social media, numerous studies (not to mention our own lived experiences!) have demonstrated that the causality often runs the other way: spending a lot of time on social media can trigger (or worsen) anxiety and depression.

found that while a short-term break from social media can leave people feeling the same or even worse (likely because all of their friends are still on social media and they feel left out), “when people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves.”

These trends are so concerning that multiple health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. surgeon general, have declared a state of emergency for America’s youth mental health. (And it’s not just the United States: the trend lines are similar in many other countries, too.)

Dr. Vivek Murthy, who has called for Congress to mandate a warning label for social media platforms, similar to the warnings on cigarette boxes, stating that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” (As he wrote in a strongly worded editorial in The New York Times, “Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?”)

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from an internal presentation at Instagram. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Investigators from the Tech Transparency Project who were posing as teen social media users found that they were able to “find potentially deadly drugs for sale in just two clicks.”

According to a public service announcement from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pedophiles and criminals are using the chat features in multi-player video games (even those marketed toward small children) to extort naked photographs and money from children, which in turn has resulted in what the FBI calls an “alarming number of deaths by suicide.”

In testimony before Congress, Arturo Béjar, a former engineer at Facebook and Meta, described research he had conducted (while working at the company) showing that roughly one in eight teen users of Instagram between the ages of thirteen and fifteen had received unwanted sexual advances within the last week, leading him to conclude th...

When reporters from The New York Times posted a test ad on social media showing a five-year-old child modeling a necklace (with her face turned away from the camera for anonymity), “the ads got direct responses from dozens of [users], including phone calls from two accused sex off...

Internal documents, brought to light by whistleblowers such as former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, show that companies are well aware of these issues (both because of stories in the media and because of their own internal research). But, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, these companies’ responses are often “inadequate or nothing at all.” Instead, their primary focus continues to be on recruiting ever more people to their platforms and capturing more and more of their attention and time—ideally starting as early as is legally allowable. “Why should we care about tweens?” asked another leaked document from Meta. Because “they are a valuable and untapped audience.”

For younger kids and teens, a flip phone, smartphone alternative, or family loaner phone (see this page) can help you give them independence and allow them to communicate with their peers while keeping them safe from addictive design features, online predators, inappropriate content, and other threats. (If you ever feel your resolve wavering, remember: when you hand your child a smartphone, you are giving them access to the entire internet—and you’re also giving the entire internet access to your child. Not ready for either of these things? Then say no.)

Thanks to partnerships with other sites and external data-collection firms, companies may know details about our offline lives, too, including (but not limited to) our income brackets, what type of cars we drive, our Social Security numbers, and many of our credit card purchases.

The result, as we’ve seen, is an increasingly polarized society in which extremism and cruelty are rewarded, disagreements are amplified, compromise is seen as weakness, and we no longer have a shared definition of the “truth.” Put this all together, and you might come to the same conclusion as former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya: “Social media is destroying how society works.”

But our phones aren’t just distracting us; they’re damaging our ability to focus to begin with. This is because most of the hours we spend on our smartphones are not spent in concentrated thought.

In other words, we’re spending hours a day essentially training ourselves to be distractible. If you feel like your phone has killed your attention span, you’re right.

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. This in turn makes it harder to absorb the content of what we’re reading—let alone to think about it critically or remember it later.

The result is that, the more we read online, the more we teach our brains to skim. This can be a useful skill to hone, especially when we’re constantly faced with information overload. But it becomes a problem if skimming becomes our default—because the better we become at skimming, the worse we get at reading and thinking more deeply, and the harder it is for us to focus on just one thing.

Instead, when we think we’re multitasking—which is technically defined as attempting to process two or more attention-demanding tasks at once—we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching.”

You might think that you’re able to simultaneously listen to your friend and respond to that text. But you can’t.

“We were absolutely shocked…. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.” And they’re also not very self-aware. “One would think that if people were bad at multitasking, they would stop,” said Nass. “However, when we talk with the multitaskers, they seem to think they’re great at it and seem totally unfazed and totally able to do more and more and more.”

A famous 1956 study on short-term memory was titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” suggesting that we’re able to hold between five and nine items in our short-term memory—but more recent estimates put the capacity closer to two to four. (This is why phone and Social Security numbers are presented as three separate chunks rather than as uninterrupted strings of digits: they’re easier to remember that way.)

The limited capacities of our short-term memories explain why our interactions with our devices so often leave us feeling mentally exhausted and overwhelmed: we simply cannot handle the fire hose of information we encounter every time we look at our phones.

Whereas short-term memories are generally formed by strengthening the connections between neural circuits, long-term memories require our brains to create new proteins. (This likely accounts for the physical differences that were observed in the brains of the London cab drivers who had passed The Knowledge.) Importantly, the process of creating these new proteins can be derailed if we are distracted or interrupted. This means that the more often we allow our attention to be stolen or scattered, the fewer long-term memories our brains will be able to record—not just b...

In short, just as our ability to cook a good meal depends on the ingredients we have in our pantries, our capacity to think deeply and generate new ideas depends on the content and complexity of our schemas. But schemas cannot be formed without long-term memories, and long-term memories cannot be created when our brains are distracted and overloaded. Instead of being filled with quality ingredients, our mental pantries become poorly stocked. The quality of our lives suffers, and so does our capacity for creativity and deep thought.

“Because of phones, we always have the ability to jump out of ourselves. But unless you learn how to be in your head, you’ll never learn how to create,” he told an interviewer for GQ. “I remember when I was a kid, I was in a three-hour car ride with my best friend, Danny. Before we got in the car, he grabbed a stick from his front yard, and the entire drive home he made up games with this…stick. Sometimes the stick was a man, sometimes a piece in a larger game, or he’d give it voices, pretend the stick was a telephone. I remember sitting there next to him with my Donkey Kong, thinking, Dude, you just entertained yourself for three hours…with a twig. And I thought to myself, Wow, I have to raise my imagination game.”

In their quest for happiness, people mistake excitement of the mind for real happiness.

In the past, if a person described themselves as feeling happy, sad, excited, anxious, curious, frustrated, ignored, important, lonely, joyful, and existentially depressed within a five-minute span, they likely would have been advised to seek professional help.

In short, if ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to look at your phone.

Phones’ effects on sleep are particularly concerning when you consider the long-term health consequences of chronic fatigue, which include increased risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and even early death.

the more sleep-deprived people are, the more vigorously they may insist that they are not—possibly because their ability to judge their own mental state has been impaired.

In short, if you’re constantly interrupting your experiences to perform and curate your life, you’re not living it.

It’s also worth noting that while, yes, time flies when we’re on our phones (or when we’re binge-watching movies or television shows on the couch), that’s not true flow. Instead, it’s what Csikszentmihalyi referred to as “junk flow,” which is a state of hypnosis rather than of active engagement—in fact, he described it as the feeling that results when you are “becoming addicted to a superficial experience.” While these things may produce a sense of flow at the beginning, “after a while [they] become something you [are] addicted to instead of something that makes you grow.” (I think of activities that produce junk flow as being like junk food: they’re super tempting and easy to binge on, but they leave you feeling gross afterward.)

True Fun describes the joyful, effervescent, sunshine-like feeling that we get when we’re playful and fully present and engaged, usually with other people. (I define it as the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.) True Fun is involved in many of our most precious memories; the more regularly we experience it, the more we will feel like we are fully alive. Fake Fun, on the other hand, describes activities and products that are marketed to us as sources of True Fun but that do not produce exuberant joy; rather than invigorating us, they leave us feeling empty. (Anything that qualifies as mindless passive consumption—including scrolling through your feeds or binge-watching movies or TV shows past the point of enjoyment—is Fake Fun.)[*]

Here’s a thought experiment for you: run through your day, start to finish, and identify everything you did, and all the decisions you made, that were in some way influenced by an algorithm.[*1] For example: When did you wake up today? Was it in response to a sunbeam hitting your pillow, or was it because an alarm tied to a sleep-tracking app on your phone decided that it was the right moment in your sleep cycle for you to get up? What clothes are you wearing right now? Did you discover those brands independently, or did you notice them in a sponsored post that showed up in a feed (and then followed you around the web)?

our daily lives are increasingly being shaped—one might even say controlled—by algorithms. Sometimes, their contributions are positive, even welcomed—I don’t see anything wrong with an app that helps you avoid a traffic jam. But a lot of the time, they’re operating under our radars, influencing our behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, and decisions (and decisions that are made about us) without our being aware that this manipulation is taking place.

“what might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”

this suggests that, collectively, humanity is spending more than 1.3 million years’ worth of attention on social media platforms every single day. How could we possibly believe that this is not having an effect on how we behave and think?

The conventional narrative is that algorithms will make faster and better decisions for all of us, leaving us with more time for family and leisure. But the reality isn’t so simple. In this brave new world, many of our choices are in fact predestined, and all the seemingly small effects that algorithms have on our decisions add up to a transformative impact on our lives. Because who we are, ultimately, is the sum total of the various decisions we make over a lifetime.

We must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living. —Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants