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

by Catherine Price

Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we’re beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective. Connected but lonely.

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 effects these relationships might be having on our lives.

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). I

Tristan Harris, a former Google product manager who’s now working to raise awareness about how our devices are designed to manipulate us, “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.”