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

by Catherine Price

We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad.

Cortisol makes us feel anxious. We don’t like to feel anxious. So, in order to relieve our anxiety, we reach for our phones. We feel better for a moment; we put them down—and we feel anxious again. 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.

“A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation.”

THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND about our attention spans is that distraction is our default. Human beings are naturally distractible, because in nature, things are often trying to kill us.