A couple of years ago, I started an experiment: I left my phone at home when I went out. The weekly screentime notification that my iPhone was sending me had started to feel more like a warning, and I wanted to see what it would be like to go back to a simpler way of life. Did I simply have nostalgia for an earlier time of my life, or was there really a different quality to things before the arrival of the smartphone? What started as a scary, phoneless ten-minute trip for gas gradually expanded into longer and longer periods away. Ultimately, I made the bold decision to get rid of my smartphone completely.
I know that most people wouldn’t really consider the kind of change I made. But you may be wondering, dear reader, what benefit you might get from cutting back the kind of mindless digital consumption that the smartphone has made so easy to get lost in. You may be thinking of trying out a digital detox, or wondering what the benefits of such a project might be.
Why bother?
Put on your nostalgia goggles and think back to those heady days of 2007. Skinny jeans are all you can buy, and people are still excited to move to the Bay Area. On a special day in January, a black-turtleneck-clad Steve Jobs unveiled one more thing on the stage of the Macworld keynote address that would change the world forever. And while the iPhone and other smartphones have undoubtedly given us much to appreciate, they’ve also brought with them side effects that we could never have guessed fifteen years ago.
The fact is, digital exhaustion and overexposure to social media are forces we are either finding a way to live with or actively protecting ourselves against. It turns out that just having a phone in a pocket makes students worse in the classroom. And even when controlling for age and other demographic differences, the highest-frequency users of social media are also the most likely to report feeling lonely.
While it may be alluring to book a phone-free Swiss mountain health retreat to “get your mind right,” it’s also possible—and potentially more rewarding—to try a digital detox in the midst of your regular life. If you’re interested in simplifying your digital life, here are some of the bigger issues to think through before getting started, according to Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.
Get Clear: Intentions and Parameters
Just as with any undertaking, your digital detox is more likely to have a lasting, meaningful impact if you spend some time getting clear on what you are really doing it for. Have you started to notice that you can’t spend even a minute waiting for something without scrolling your stories? Do you have a list of hobby aspirations that seem to get put off in favor of streaming junk-food TV on Netflix or Hulu? Having a clear “why” will help keep things in scope as you decide on the guidelines you set for your detox period.
Next, decide on your parameters. How long are you going to abstain for? Dr. Newport recommends 30 days as a minimum amount of time to really see what life can be like on the other side of your present habits. What technologies or behaviors will be off-limits, and which are essential to your daily life?You may not have a difficult relationship with your microwave, but maybe your Candy Crush habit really deserves a more critical evaluation. Only you can decide what is a problematic technology and what isn’t; your gut will serve as your guide.
One final point for deciding on parameters. Newport suggests not to “confuse convenient with critical. It’s inconvenient to lose access to a Facebook group that announces events in your neighborhood, but this lack of information in a thirty-day period won’t cause critical damage to your social life.” Likewise, you can’t stop using your work email—but maybe you can let your colleagues know that you’re testing out a stricter protocol for when you’re going to check it and respond.
Remember that the point is to be inconvenienced—to see what you might really be missing if it left your life and what parts of the digital world were only of illusory importance.
Get More Quiet Time
It’s undoubtedly a miracle that we have a machine in our pockets that can easily and seamlessly communicate with our loved ones, no matter where they are on the globe. But we increasingly live in a world in which those same technologies are hijacking our attention away from what’s important to us. We never get to really disconnect, and for some of us, it’s having an impact on our well-being.
One of the benefits of choosing to engage in a digital detox is to reward yourself with more precious opportunities for quiet reflection. As anyone who has gone on a weekend in the woods could tell you, once the external world quiets down, our quiet inner voice starts to become easier to hear. Solitude is also how we can get unbroken time to get deep work done—the kind of work that makes a meaningful contribution, rather than just shuffling digital paper from one inbox to another.
What can you do to get more quiet in your life? Try leaving your phone at home when you go out. You don’t need to do this all the time; pick a time to take a long walk and to be alone with your thoughts.
Take Back Your Free Time
In some ways, this is the whole point of engaging in a digital detox—the time you free up by cutting out Netflix and doomscrolling can be put to whatever other, more meaningful projects you’ve had on your list. Prof. Newport frames it as the difference between high- and low-quality leisure activities. He found that high-quality activities have a few things in common:
- They involve making things
- They involve active doing rather than passive consumption
- They form meaningful connections with others
Consider making a plan for how you will spend your free time. If you’ve already decided how to spend it, you will be much less likely to turn back to your default when you get home from work or finish your Saturday errands.
Thoughtful Reintroduction
At some point, your detox period will be over, and it will be time to reintroduce technology back into your life. The point was never to become an anti-tech luddite forever. Here again is an opportunity to be thoughtful: what should make the cut, and what should stay out of your life? Here are a few things that Digital Minimalism suggests that you think about:
- Any technology we adopt should serve something we deeply value—offering only SOME benefit isn’t enough
- It should be the BEST way to use technology to serve that value
- It should have a role in your life that can be constrained by an operating procedure you choose
Final Thoughts
As for myself, my smartphone-free journey continues. The ideas presented in Digital Miminalism had a strong impact on how I think about the choices I make with my attention. I hope that this brief overview has given you the push you may have needed to try a digital detox for yourself. May it be an instructive and supportive opportunity for reevaluating your values and how to best be aligned with them!
If you are interested in reading to further your personal growth and change your daily habits, here are a few valuable resources:
- Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism. Penguin.
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- James Clear, Atomic Habits. Penguin.
Ph.D. Classical Studies, LPC Associate, Supervised by Murphy Foster, LPC Supervisor