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

by Catherine Price

In the first experiment, volunteers received a mild electric shock, and then were asked whether the experience was unpleasant enough that they would pay to avoid being shocked again. The researchers took the forty-two people who’d said that they would pay to avoid another shock and left them alone in undecorated rooms, without access to the internet or any other form of distraction, and instructed them to entertain themselves with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. They also told the participants that, if they wanted, they could press a button and receive another electric shock—as in, the same shock they’d just said they’d pay to not have repeated. You’d think that no one would have taken them up on the offer, right? Wrong. Out of the forty-two participants, eighteen chose to give themselves a shock during the fifteen-minute experiment. Eighteen. (And not just once. In what is undoubtedly my favorite detail of the study, one outlier shocked himself 190 times.) “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.”