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

by Catherine Price

Go ahead and do it. And then come back to this page and notice how you feel. Are you calm? Focused? Present? Satisfied? Or are you feeling a bit scattered and uneasy, vaguely stressed without really knowing why?

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.

We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We’ve never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. We’ve never stopped to think about what spending so many hours engaged with our devices might be doing to our brains, or whether a device billed as a way to connect us to other people might actually be driving us apart.

nearly two-thirds of American adults agree that periodically “unplugging” or taking a “digital detox” would be good for their mental health. And yet barely a quarter of those people have actually done so themselves.

Indeed, according to Bilton, many technology chief executives and venture capitalists “strictly limit their children’s screen time”—which he took to suggest that “these tech C.E.O.s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.”

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.

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.

Eventually, they will release dopamine any time they’re reminded of the experience. They’ll release it, in other words, in anticipation.

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

When we check our phones, we occasionally find something satisfying—a complimentary email, a text from a crush, an interesting piece of news. The resulting burst of dopamine makes us begin to associate the act of checking our phones with the receipt of a reward. Similarly, there are times when checking your phone out of anxiety really does leave you feeling soothed. Once that link has been established, it doesn’t matter if we’re rewarded only one time out of every fifty. Thanks to dopamine, our brains remember that one time. And instead of dissuading us, the fact that we can’t predict which of our fifty checks is going to be rewarding makes us check our phones even more.

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. (And even though we know that we’re curating our own feeds to make our lives look as exciting and fun as possible, we forget that everyone else is doing the same thing.) Put this all together, and it makes sense that spending a lot of time on social media could be associated with depression and lower self-esteem. What doesn’t make sense is that we are deliberately choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school.

Even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens.

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.

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.

As we’ve discussed, “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.”

There’s actually no such thing as multitasking (that is, simultaneously processing two or more attention-demanding tasks), because our brains can’t do two cognitively demanding things at once.* When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching.”

In fact, we’re often shifting the focus of our attention so rapidly that we never give ourselves enough time to get in gear to begin with. (When’s the last time you spent twenty-five minutes just doing one thing?) Not only is this making us unproductive, but it’s also affecting our ability to think and problem solve. It’s also mentally exhausting.

Not only does mindfulness help us get better at noticing and managing our invitations, but it also enables us to recognize the core emotions, fears, and desires that are driving our addictions—which is an essential step in breaking them. As Brewer explains in The Craving Mind, most addictions stem from a desire to feel better and/or to make a bad feeling go away. If you try to cut back on your phone use without first figuring out what you’re trying to achieve or avoid, you’re dooming yourself to failure. Either you’re going to relapse, or you’re going to find another, potentially more destructive habit that achieves the same effect.

For example, let’s say you catch yourself reaching for your phone. Practicing mindfulness means that instead of trying to fight your urge or criticizing yourself for having it, you simply notice the urge and stay present with it as it unfolds. As it does, you can ask questions about it. What does the craving feel like in your brain and in your body? Why are you having this particular urge right now? What reward are you hoping to receive, or what discomfort are you trying to avoid? What would happen if you reacted to the impulse? What would happen if you did nothing at all? The next time you find yourself tempted to look at your phone, pause instead. Take a breath and just notice the craving. Don’t give in to it, but don’t try to make it go away. Observe it. See what happens.

We’ve talked about how, both literally and metaphorically, our lives are what we pay attention to. So please take a moment right now to answer this question: What do you want to pay attention to? I encourage you to continue to come back to this question throughout the course of our 30 days together (and beyond). Use it to ground yourself any time you feel yourself reaching for your phone—or any other moment when you feel as if you’ve lost your way.