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

by Catherine Price

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.

smartphones are causing otherwise mentally healthy people to show signs of psychiatric problems such as narcissism, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

instead of helping alleviate our phone-induced FOMO, this actually increases it, to the point where our adrenal glands release a squirt of cortisol—a stress hormone that plays a large role in fight-or-flight responses—every time we put down our phones. Cortisol makes us feel anxious. We don’t like to feel anxious. So, in order to relieve our anxiety, we reach for our phones.

Infected by FOMO, we keep checking and touching and swiping and scrolling, trying to relieve our anxiety by doing something that, by reinforcing our habit loop, actually only increases it.

What doesn’t make sense is that we are deliberately choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school.

In a 2017 article in the New York Times, Matt Richtel reported that there’s been a decade-long trend toward less alcohol and drug use among teenagers. Great news—unless kids are just replacing one possible addiction with another. The title of the article was “Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs with Smartphones?” and the conclusion among most of the experts quoted was that the answer is likely yes.

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.

install a Facebook demetricator browser plug-in—it removes all the “scores” from Facebook so that instead of saying “57 people liked your post,” it will simply say, “People like this.”

But that’s not to say that we only casually focus our attention on our phones. On the contrary, they completely absorb us. The result is what seems like should be an oxymoron: an intensely focused state of distraction.

The very fact that you noticed that your mind has wandered means that you’re doing it right.