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

by Catherine Price

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.”

“Addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.”

What we don’t realize is that technology designers deliberately manipulate our dopamine responses to make it extremely difficult for us to stop using their products. Known as “brain hacking,”

Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention. —Tristan Harris, ex–Google employee and design ethicist

But what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something could happen—but not knowing when or if that something will occur. Psychologists refer to unpredictable rewards as “intermittent reinforcements.”

“When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.” Harris’s observations are particularly disturbing when you realize that slot machines, which are specifically designed to deliver rewards in a way that drives compulsive behavior, are one of the most addictive devices ever to have been invented.

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.

The more this happens, the more we risk creating a society in which we no longer have a shared definition of the “truth.”

W]e must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”

WEEK 1: TECHNOLOGY TRIAGE Day 1 (Monday): Download a Tracking App Day 2 (Tuesday): Assess Your Current Relationship Day 3 (Wednesday): Start Paying Attention Day 4 (Thursday): Take Stock and Take Action Day 5 (Friday): Delete Social Media Apps Day 6 (Saturday): Come Back to (Real) Life Day 7 (Sunday): Get Physical WEEK 2: CHANGING YOUR HABITS Day 8 (Monday): Say “No” to Notifications Day 9 (Tuesday): The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Apps Day 10 (Wednesday): Change Where You Charge It Day 11 (Thursday): Set Yourself Up for Success Day 12 (Friday): Download an App-Blocker Day 13 (Saturday): Set Boundaries (No-Phone Zones and Wake-Up Times) Day 14 (Sunday): Stop Phubbing WEEK 3: RECLAIMING YOUR BRAIN Day 15 (Monday): Stop, Breathe, and Be Day 16 (Tuesday): Practice Pausing Day 17 (Wednesday): Exercise Your Attention Span Day 18 (Thursday): Meditate Day 19 (Friday): Prepare for Your Trial Separation Days 20–21 (The Weekend): Your Trial Separation WEEK 4 (AND BEYOND): YOUR NEW RELATIONSHIP Day 22 (Monday): Trial Separation Recap Day 23 (Tuesday): Phast Day 24 (Wednesday): Manage Your Invitations Day 25 (Thursday): Clean Up the Rest of Your Digital Life Day 26 (Friday): Check Your Checking Day 27 (Saturday): Digital Sabbath Life Hacks Day 28 (Sunday): The Seven Phone Habits of Highly Effective People Day 29 (Monday): Keep Yourself on Track Day 30 (Tuesday): Congratulations!

“When you’re out to dinner with friends and everyone else is on their phones, try taking a photo of them on their devices and then texting it to them with a note saying, ‘I miss you!’” —NATE

Not only can getting lost in a book be a very relaxing and restorative experience, but it’s also exactly the type of mental exercise that strengthens our attention spans and encourages deep and creative thought. Why? Because extracting meaning from symbols requires your brain both to maintain focus on those symbols and to simultaneously ignore everything else going on around you. 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. As Maryanne Wolf writes in her fascinating book about reading, Proust and the Squid, “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, calls this a “state of non-doing”—and if that sounds easy, trust me: it’s not. Even people whose attention spans have not been weakened by their phones will find that it’s nearly impossible to maintain their focus on anything without their minds wandering. Not only is that completely normal, but it is what our minds are built to do. As one of my meditation teachers liked to say, “Your mind wanders because you have a mind.” The trick is not to fight your mind when it wanders. Instead, once you notice that your attention has drifted, gently bring it back without criticizing yourself. You’re likely to have to do this multiple times during your practice—possibly every few seconds, depending on how quickly you notice that it’s happened. And that is totally fine. The very fact that you noticed that your mind has wandered means that you’re doing it right. If you have been using your phone a lot recently, you’re likely to find this type of exercise to be particularly difficult. But the harder you find it, the more important it is to do—and the more you do it, the better at it you’ll become.

Exactly how we refocus ourselves during our five prayers!

Far more likely is that you’re going to see something that upsets you or stresses you out. Once you realize how unlikely your best-case scenario is to happen, it becomes a lot easier to stop checking your phone.

We need to start having conversations—both individually and as a society—about what we actually want our relationships with our devices to be. And we need to demand that tech companies stop surveilling and “brain-hacking” us and live up to their ostensible missions to do good.