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

by Catherine Price

We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad.

“Breaking up” with your phone means giving yourself a chance to stop and think.

But the fact that these behaviors and feelings are so universal does not mean that they are harmless or that this test is too dramatic. Instead, it’s an indication that the problem may be bigger than we think.

On average, Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones. That amounts to about 28 hours a week, 112 hours a month, or 56 full days a year.

Nearly 80 percent of Americans check their phones within a half hour of waking up.

Half of us check our phones in the middle of the night. (Among 25- to 34-year-olds, it’s more than 75 percent.)

I worried that my increasing tendency to app-source so many aspects of my life—from getting directions to deciding where to eat—might be causing the smartphone version of the expression When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail: the more I used my phone to navigate my life, the less capable I felt of navigating life without my phone.

We called the ritual a “digital Sabbath,” and by the second or third time we’d done it, we’d settled into a rhythm and worked out the kinks. Without our phones to distract us, time seemed to slow down. We went on walks. We read books. We talked more. I felt healthier and more grounded, as if I were getting back in touch with a part of myself that I hadn’t even realized had gone missing. Interestingly, the effects of the Sabbath seemed to linger for several days afterward—a sort of digital hangover that actually felt good.

We’re never going to break up with our phones unless we think it’s vitally important to do so. That’s why the first half of this book, “The Wake-Up,” is designed to freak you out.

Smartphones are also one of the first popular technologies to be specifically engineered to get us to spend time on them.

But not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol—we can get addicted to behaviors, too, such as gambling or even exercise. And addictions exist on a spectrum; it’s possible to be addicted to something without it destroying your life.

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

Not only are phone and app companies aware of their products’ neurological effects, but they pack their products with features that will trigger them—with the explicit goal of getting us to spend as much time and attention as possible on our devices.

Dopamine makes us feel excited—and we like feeling excited. Any experience that triggers the release of dopamine is therefore something that we’ll want to experience again.

If an experience consistently triggers the release of dopamine, our brains remember the cause and effect. Eventually, they will release dopamine any time they’re reminded of the experience. They’ll release it, in other words, in anticipation.

The ability to anticipate satisfaction is essential for our survival—it motivates us to seek out food, for example. But it also causes cravings and, in more extreme cases, addictions. If your brain learns that checking your phone usually results in a reward, it won’t take long before your brain releases dopamine any time it’s reminded of your phone. You’ll start to cr...

Sometimes we reach for our phones out of hope/anticipation that there’ll be something good waiting for us. But just as often, we reach for our phones to help us avoid something unpleasant, such as boredom or anxiety. It doesn’t matter. Once our brains have learned to associate checking our phones with getting a reward, we are going to really, really, really want to check our phones. We become like the lab rats, constantly pressing the lever to get food.

Thankfully, food cravings naturally subside when our stomachs feel full (otherwise our stomachs might explode). But phones and most apps are deliberately designed without “stopping cues” to alert us when we’ve had enough—which is why it’s so easy to accidentally binge.

It’s worth pointing out that dopamine-induced excitement is not the same thing as actual happiness. But try telling that to our brains.

Our phones are packed with subtle positive reinforcements that trigger dopamine spritzes that keep us coming back for more. Touch a link, and a webpage appears. Send a text message and you’ll hear a satisfying “whoosh.” Cumulatively, these reinforcements give us a pleasant feeling of control—which in turn makes us want to constantly be on our phones.

But what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something could happen—but not knowing when or if that something will occur. Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.”

“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.” “When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.”

we were protected from developing a full-blown infection by the fact that, until smartphones, there was no easy way to find out about all the things we were missing out on. Once you’d left your home (and your landline) to go to one party, you had no way of knowing that another party going on at the same time might be more fun. For better or for worse, you were just at the party.

Whether it’s ratings on Uber or “likes” on social media, many of today’s most popular apps actively encourage users to judge one another.

Those features aren’t there by accident. Designers know that humans have an intrinsic desire for affirmation, and that the more ways there are for us to be judged, the more compulsively we’ll monitor our score.

What’s particularly weird is that we don’t just care about other people’s judgments; we ask for them. We post photos and comments to show others that we’re lovable, that we’re popular and, on a more existential level, that we matter, and then we check our phones obsessively to see if other people—or at least their online profiles—agree.

“What is striking,” wrote the authors, “is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.”

From its deliberately addictive design to its surveillance-based business model, social media represents the epitome of “Trojan horse design”: it’s meant to manipulate us into doing and sharing things we otherwise would not—often with negative effects on our mental health and society at large.

a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. It’s attention that we didn’t spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back. This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.

“Like” buttons and comment features aren’t just there to help us connect with other people; they’re there because adding metrics to social interactions is a guaranteed way to keep us going back to see our “score.”

Imagine that someone knocked on your door and asked you to register the following information with the government: your full name, birth date, phone number, email address, physical address, education and work history, relationship status, names and photographs of all family members and friends, photographs and videos of yourself for as far back in time as possible, your political leanings, your travel history, your favorite books, your favorite music, and your favorite, well, everything. Would you? On social media, we provide this information (and more) voluntarily—and with virtually no thought as to what the social media company might do with this information.

we end up in a situation where the stories that show up in my newsfeed might be completely different from those that show up in your newsfeed—and where none of them have been vetted to make sure they reflect any version of reality. The more this happens, the more we risk creating a society in which we no longer have a shared definition of the “truth.”

When we think we’re multitasking, 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.” Perhaps worse? “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.” Nass’s conclusion? “We worry that [heavy multitasking] may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.” That itself is alarming—especially when you consider that multitasking (or at least trying to multitask) is exactly what our phones encourage us to do (not to mention the fact that Nass’s research was published only two years after the first-generation iPhone was introduced). And it appears that, by weakening our attention spans and our memories, our phones are damaging our ability to single-task, too.

In 2000, a team of researchers led by Eleanor Maguire at University College London published a study in which they scanned London cab drivers’ brains to see how they compared to the brains of people who had not devoted months of their lives to memorizing the intricacies of the city. The researchers discovered that the area responsible for spatial memories (the posterior hippocampus) was larger in the cab drivers’ brains than in the non-cabbies’. The time they’d spent studying London’s streets had had a physical impact. Their thoughts had changed their brains. What’s more, the longer a person had been a cab driver—in other words, the more time they’d spent practicing—the more noticeable the change. Think about that for a second. And then think back to the fact that as of 2017, Americans were spending an estimated average of more than four hours a day on their phones. If you spend four hours a day doing anything, you’re going to get pretty good at it. If I spent four hours a day practicing the piano, I’d be able to accomplish my long-standing goal of learning to sight-read music within a month. If I spent four hours a day studying Spanish, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be able to have a basic conversation.

if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.

THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND about our attention spans is that distraction is our default. Human beings are naturally distractible, because in nature, things are often trying to kill us. We want our attention to be drawn to changes in our environments, because those changes might indicate a threat.

“Human beings seem to exhibit an innate drive to forage for information in much the same way that other animals are driven to forage for food,” write Gazzaley and Rosen. “This ‘hunger’ is now fed to an extreme degree by modern technological advances that deliver highly accessible information.”

when mental fatigue causes us to give in to our brains’ natural preference for distraction—whether it’s by falling for clickbait or swiping over to social media—we reinforce the same mental circuits that made it hard to sustain our focus to begin with. We get better at not staying focused.

our brains know that a traffic cone and a pumpkin have different purposes—and thus the two objects aren’t connected schematically by function. But traffic cones and pumpkins do share a different trait: they’re both orange. This means that they’re schematically linked by color, both to each other and to other orange things, such as tangerines. As this example demonstrates, every piece of information can exist in multiple schemas at once. Tangerines are linked to the schema for the color orange (and thus share a connection with a traffic cone) and the schema for citrus fruit (thus sharing a connection with a lemon). The number of connections is itself important, because the more you’re able to draw connections between seemingly unconnected things, the more likely you are to have insights. One thought triggers another thought, which triggers another…and suddenly, you’ve had a breakthrough.

when we overload our working memories, we make it harder for our brains to transfer new information to our long-term memories. This in turn makes it less likely that we’ll remember the experiences (and information) that we did manage to pay attention to.

when our working memories are overloaded and our cognitive loads are too great, our brains don’t have the resources necessary to connect new information and experiences to our preexisting schemas. Not only does this reduce the likelihood of those memories becoming permanent, but the weaker our schemas become, the less likely we are to have insights and ideas. We lose our capacity for deep thought.

When daylight, which is a blue light, hits the back of your eyes in the morning, your brain stops producing melatonin. You feel awake and ready to start your day. When blue light fades (and is replaced by darkness or the yellow glow of incandescent bulbs), melatonin begins to be released again. Guess what else radiates blue light? Screens. When we use our phones or tablets or computers before bed, their blue light tells our brains that it is daytime and that we should be awake. In other words, when we check our phones at night, we’re giving ourselves jet lag. Screen time, particularly in the hour before bedtime, both keeps us up later and harms the quality of our sleep.

Imagine how difficult it would be to doze off if all of the people you follow on social media were in the room with you, the television was blaring in the background, and several friends were having a political debate. That’s essentially what you’re doing when you bring your phone into bed with you.

If you’re distracted, you can’t immerse yourself in an experience—which means that you can’t, by definition, get into flow. And since our phones are tools of distraction, this means that the more we spend on our phones, the less likely we are to experience it.

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

First, Brewer taught the “mindful” smokers about habit loops. They learned to identify their triggers and practiced paying attention to their cravings (and reactions) without trying to change anything. This step alone was surprisingly effective—just paying conscious attention to the taste of cigarettes, for example, was enough to give one longtime smoker the resolve to finally quit. “She moved from wisdom to knowledge,” writes Brewer, “from knowing in her head that smoking was bad to knowing it in her bones.” Next, he taught them to turn toward their cravings, rather than to run away. Participants practiced recognizing their cravings and relaxing into them—that is, allowing them to happen without trying to stop them. They practiced paying attention to how their cravings made them emotionally and physically feel, and they used this practice as a way to “ride out” their cravings when they occurred. Brewer also taught participants formal meditation exercises that they were expected to do each day. When Brewer’s data were analyzed, it turned out that the people who had received the mindfulness training had quit at twice the rate of the Freedom from Smoking group. What’s more, far fewer people from the mindfulness group relapsed.

We’ll start by paying deliberate attention to our emotions, thoughts, and reactions without judging ourselves or trying to change anything. We’ll notice the invitations that our minds are sending us. And then we’ll practice deciding how—and if—we want to respond.

In other words, what we think of as irresistible impulses are actually invitations being sent by our minds. This is an important insight, because once you recognize this, you can ask your mind why it’s inviting you to such crappy parties. Why couldn’t a traffic jam be an invitation to a mobile karaoke session? Why couldn’t a solitary Friday night be an invitation to watch a movie that you can’t convince anyone else to see?