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

by Catherine Price

We feel busy but ineffective. Connected but lonely. The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash—and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who’s actually in control. The result is a paralyzing tension: we love our phones, but we often hate the way they make us feel. And no one seems to know what to do about it.

The problem isn’t smartphones themselves. The problem is our relationships with them.

Smartphones have infiltrated our lives so quickly and so thoroughly that we have never stopped to think about what we actually want our relationships with them to look like—or what effect...

I began to notice that I often picked up my phone “just to check,” only to resurface an hour later wondering where the time had gone. I’d respond to a text and then get caught in a thirty-minute back-and-forth that felt more demanding than an in-person conversation and yet left me feeling less fulfilled.

This is exactly how I feel often.

There wasn’t anything inherently wrong about the things I was doing; what made me feel weird was how often I initiated them without thinking, how many real-life experiences they were supplanting, and how crappy they made me feel. I reached for my phone to soothe myself, but I often crossed the line from feeling soothed to going numb.

What’s more, far from relieving my anxiety, checking my phone nearly always contributed to it. I’d look at it for a second before bed, notice a stressful email in my inbox, and then lie awake for an hour worrying about something that could easily have waited until morning. 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?

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.

spending extended time on them has the power to change both the structure and the function of our brains—including our abilities to form new memories, think deeply, focus, and absorb and remember what we read. Multiple studies have associated the heavy use of smartphones (especially when used for social media) with negative effects on neuroticism, self-esteem, impulsivity, empathy, self-identity, and self-image, as well as with sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression.

The effect of phones and social media on our brain

Simply telling ourselves to spend less time on our phones is the equivalent of telling ourselves to stop being attracted to people who are bad for us: it’s easier said than done, and is probably going to require a good therapist—or at the very least, an extremely well-considered plan. But such a plan didn’t seem to exist. So I decided to create one.

Interestingly, the effects of the Sabbath seemed to linger for several days afterward—a sort of digital hangover that actually felt good.

By the end of the group experiment, I’d come to three conclusions. The first was that this problem is widespread: many people worry that they’re addicted to their phones. The second was that despite the claims of naysayers, we have the power to break this addiction. And the third was that breaking up with your phone doesn’t just have the potential to change your relationship with your devices. It can also change your life.

In other words, it’s the part of the breakup when your best friend pulls you aside at a bar one night and starts to itemize all the ways that your boyfriend or girlfriend is making you miserable, and at first you’re like, “Leave me alone! It’s my life!” but by the end of the conversation you realize that they’re right and then panic because you don’t know what to do.

As I write this, it occurs to me that there are two groups of people who will be reading this book: people who bought it for themselves, and people who had it given to them by a concerned friend/parent/relative/roommate/spouse and may not be entirely “appreciative” of this “gift.” Second group, I’m sorry: it’s never fun to have someone tell you they think you have a problem. But allow me to let you in on a secret: whoever gave you this book is probably addicted to their phone, too. And even if they aren’t too bad themselves, you certainly know other people who might benefit from reevaluating their relationship with their phones. So I encourage you to see if any of the book’s ideas resonate with you. Then, when you’re done, give it back to the person who gave it to you—maybe with a handwritten note that says, “Your turn.”

This is funny, because while I read it for myself, I thought of others whom I want to gift to, and this line cracks me up: I do have a problem.

OUR PHONES ARE DESIGNED TO ADDICT US 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

“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.”

Perhaps this is part of the reason that 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. Indeed, according to Bilton, many technology chief executives and venture capitalists “strictly limit their children’s screen time”—which he took to suggest...

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.”

The point is that 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 fact that so many tech executives limit their own kids’ exposure suggests that they don’t think the benefits always outweigh the risks—to the point that they feel the need to protect their families from the devices that they create. It’s the Silicon Valley version of the drug dealer’s adage: “Never get high on your own supply.”

Scary and dark

Dopamine has many roles, but for our purposes the most important thing to know is that, by activating pleasure-related receptors in our brains, it teaches us to associate certain behaviors with rewards (think of a rat that gets a pellet every time it presses a lever). 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 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 crave it. (Ever notice how seeing someone else check their phone can make you want to check yours?)

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.

On a certain level, we know that what we’re doing is making us feel gross. But instead of stopping, our brains decide the solution is to seek out more dopamine. We check our phones again. And again. And again.

“brain hacking,” this is essentially behavioral design based on brain chemistry—and once you know how to recognize its signs, you’ll see it all over your phone.

Dopamine Labs

Instagram, which he says has created code that deliberately holds back on showing users new “likes” so that it can deliver a bunch of them in a sudden rush at the most effective moment possible—meaning the moment at which seeing new likes will discourage you from closing the app. And when he says “you,” Brown means you.

But 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.”*

we’ll never get to the point of even considering dumping our smartphones, because phones (and apps) are designed to provide us with constant novelty—and as a result, constant hits of dopamine.

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.

we have lots of control over features that make us more likely to spend time on our phones, and very little control over those that don’t.

“The closer we pay attention to the options we’re given,” he writes, “the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.”

the flip side of wanting to feel pleasure is the desire to avoid feeling bad—ideally

“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.”

the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.

The mind cannot have two thoughts at once. See if you can think two thoughts at exactly the same time. Well? Is it possible?

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.

satisfy another evolutionary quirk: our desire for information.

I found the root of my addiction - Veny

ONE OF THE REASONS OUR brains prefer distraction to concentration is that concentration requires our brains to do two difficult things at once. The first is to choose what to pay attention to. That job falls to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for so-called executive (or “top-down”) functions, such as decision making and self-control.

Under stressful conditions, it tends to freak out and hand the reins to more primitive areas of our brains—which is not a good thing, considering that we often reach for our phones out of stress.)

The second task required for concentration doesn’t get as much, well, attention. But it’s just as important—if not more so: we need to be able to ignore distractions.

man-made distractions like phones (or interior distractions like thoughts).

Unsurprisingly, ignoring distractions is tiring work, and the less we practice it, the worse at it we become. When our strength is exhausted and we can no longer block extraneous information, we lose our focus. We go back to our default state of distraction.

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.

online distractions are embedded in what we’re trying to focus on. This makes it very difficult for our brains to distinguish between what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Trying to absorb the meaning of a word without noticing its link is like trying to count a dog’s whiskers while the ...

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 o...

the more we read online, the more we teach our...

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.