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

by Catherine Price

You make it possible for my avoidance strategies to be construed as thoughtfulness, and for this I am grateful.

In the words of 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.”

It’s the Silicon Valley version of the drug dealer’s adage: “Never get high on your own supply.”

But phones and most apps are deliberately designed without “stopping cues” to alert us when we’ve had enough—which is why it’s so easy to accidentally binge.

Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.” I call them “the reason we date jerks.” Regardless of what term you use, this unpredictability is incorporated into nearly every app on our phones.

According to Larry Rosen, a psychologist at California State University, Dominquez Hills, our phones deliberately incite anxiety by providing new information and emotional triggers every time we pick them up. This makes us worry that any time we put them down, even for a second, we might miss something.

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.

Instead, the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.

In the words of Dopamine Labs founder Ramsay Brown, “You don’t pay for Facebook. Advertisers pay for Facebook. You get to use it for free because your eyeballs are what’s being sold there.”

Engagement is sometimes referred to as “the currency of the attention economy,” and advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money for it. Global ad spending on social media in 2016 was $31 billion, almost double what it was just two years before.

The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. It’s attention that we didn’t spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back.

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.

And even though we know that we will never “finish” our feeds, we keep scrolling, in pursuit of the dopamine hits that we get from every new post.

“We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.”

In other words, our brains both prefer and are programmed to seek out and be distracted by new information. And that’s exactly what our phones encourage them to do.

But just like a muscle, the prefrontal cortex can become tired if we ask it to make too many decisions—a condition known as “decision fatigue.” When our prefrontal cortex becomes tired, our focus wavers and our minds wander. We lose our ability to distinguish between what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not.

But we can’t make split-second decisions and think deeply at the same time—the two acts use different and competing brain regions. Every decision, no matter how tiny or subconscious, pulls our attention away from what we are reading. This in turn makes it harder to absorb the content of what we’re reading—let alone to think about it critically, or remember it later. Second, unlike a dog barking in the background, online distractions are embedded in what we’re trying to focus on.

Focus isn’t profitable. Distraction is.

Not only does this reduce the likelihood of those memories becoming permanent, but the weaker our schemas become, the less likely we are to have insights and ideas. We lose our capacity for deep thought.

The moment you recognize that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your life—both on and off your phone.

“[W]e must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.” —Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants

Instead, simply describe your current reality: “I do not keep social media apps on my phone.” This simple shift can make a surprising difference.

Push notifications turn our phones into slot machines, and reinforce the very habit loops that we are trying to change. They are evil and must be destroyed.

They are designed to addict us—and from what we know so far, the consequences of this mass addiction don’t look good. Just take a look around you. Phones are changing the experience of being human.