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

by Catherine Price

To drive home the point, here’s a super fun Phone Time Calculator (based on being awake for sixteen hours per day) that totally won’t freak you out at all: 1 hour per day = roughly 15 full days per year, about 6 percent of your waking life 2 hours per day = roughly 30 full days per year, about 13 percent of your waking life 3 hours per day = roughly 45 full days per year, about one fifth of your waking life 4 hours per day = roughly 60 full days per year, about one quarter of your waking life 5 hours per day = roughly 76 full days per year, almost one third of your waking life

also, pay attention to the number and frequency of your notifications and pickups. If you sleep eight hours a night and you’re picking up your phone fifty times a day (which would be relatively few), you’re being interrupted more than three times an hour while you’re awake. If you’re receiving, say, seventy-five notifications a day (again, that’s probably low), that’s almost five interruptions per hour.

stillness offers an opportunity for peace. As Pema Chödrön writes in her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “If we immediately entertain ourselves by talking, by acting, by thinking—if there’s never any pause—we will never be able to relax. We will always be speeding through our lives.”

Over time, regular reading causes physical changes to the brain in areas responsible for reasoning, processing visual signals, and even memory.

“Ignoring is an active process.” It requires our prefrontal cortexes to exert top-down control, suppressing activity in certain brain areas so that the object of our attention stands out. The better we are at ignoring, the better we are at paying attention. And it turns out that being able to ignore distractions is good for our working and long-term memories, too.

When you have the internet in your pocket, there is no room for serendipity. You’re much less likely to “stumble upon” a great restaurant or an unexpected experience, because, like most people, you’ve probably gotten into the habit of researching everything first, often exhaustively. Barry Schwartz, psychologist and author of The Paradox of Choice, refers to this as “maximizing.” Not only is it tiring, but it can also rob you of the wonderful feeling of discovering things by accident.

As U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy writes in his book Together, “Seemingly small interactions [are] an important part of what [keeps] us connected to the fabric of our local community. They [contribute] to our sense of belonging.” The more time we spend looking down at our phones instead of at the people around us, the fewer of these fleeting relationships we will have—and the less connected we will feel.

When I was researching my book about fun, I gathered thousands of stories from people around the world about their peak fun experiences, and to this day I have not read a single one that involved social media or scrolling through a newsfeed. If we focus our FOMO on the online world, we are going to miss out on the best parts of our lives.