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

by Catherine Price

Multiple studies have associated the heavy use of smartphones (especially when used for social media) with negative effects on neuroticism, self-esteem, impulsivity, empathy, self-identity, and self-image, as well as with sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression.

I read about habits and addictions, neuroplasticity, and how 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).

The more you notice your interactions with your phone, the more aware you’ll become of the world off your phone—and of how much of it you’ve been missing.

Breaking up with your phone will allow you to reconnect with a part of you that knows that life doesn’t happen on a screen. And the faster you can get in touch with it, the better.

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.

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. On a certain level, we know that what we’re doing is making us feel gross. But instead of stopping, our brains decide the solution is to seek out more dopamine. We check our phones again. And again. And again.

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.)

And third, when mental fatigue causes us to give in to our brains’ natural preference for distraction—whether it’s by falling for clickbait or swiping over to social media—we reinforce the same mental circuits that made it hard to sustain our focus to begin with. We get better at not staying focused.

The result is that, the more we read online, the more we teach our brains to skim. This can be a useful skill to hone, especially when we’re constantly faced with such information overload. But it becomes a problem if skimming becomes our default—because the better we become at skimming, the worse we get at reading and thinking more deeply. And the harder it is for us to focus on just one thing.

when our working memories are overloaded and our cognitive loads are too great, our brains don’t have the resources necessary to connect new information and experiences to our preexisting schemas. 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.

A lot of the time, you’ll end up feeling stressed about something you truly cannot control, like politics or stock prices.

“Mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly”—including ourselves.

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?

Over time, regular reading causes physical changes to the brain in areas responsible for reasoning, processing visual signals, and even memory. In other words, learning to read doesn’t just enable us to store and retrieve information; it literally changes the way we think. It reorganizes our neural circuitry in a way that encourages creativity, problem solving, and insight. And it increases our ability to sustain attention. In fact, many scholars believe that the development of written language was an integral step toward the development of culture.

spending too much time on my phone was sapping color from my experiences. The more I pay attention to the actual world around me, the more vividness returns.

We have less time in life than we realize—but we also have more time than we think. Reclaim the hours you spend on your screens, and you’ll find that your possibilities expand. Maybe you do have time for that class, or book, or dinner. Maybe you can spend more time with that friend.

this is your life—what do you want to pay attention to?