Many people feel tied to their devices from sunrise to bedtime. Stepping back from constant notifications can give your mind a break and help you reconnect with your day-to-day life.
Whether you want a short break or a long-term change, taking a digital detox can lift your mood, help you focus, and make real-life moments count.
Choose a Detox Timeline
Decide how long you want to step back. Some pick a weekend, while others try a full month. Setting a clear start and end date can make it easier to stick to your plan.
Even a week away from screens can reset your habits and give your mind a break. Let friends and family know your plan so you don’t feel pressured to reply right away.
Skip Your Phone At morning & Night
Put your phone away first thing in the morning and right before bed. Let yourself wake up or wind down without email or social feeds pulling your attention. You’ll start the day calmer.
At night, you’ll fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Try using an old-fashioned alarm clock instead of your phone to wake you up.
Set Daily Time Limits
Give yourself a rule for how long you’ll spend online each day. There are apps that track your screen time and help you stick to time limits. Or, set an alarm as a reminder when your time is up.
Limiting your device use makes room for hobbies, exercise, and face-to-face time with the people you care about.
Use Your Laptop Only for Work
Keep your laptop for work tasks only. Outside work hours, close your laptop and put it away. This simple habit draws a clear line between work and personal time. It’s much easier to relax if your work device is out of sight.
Strengthen Real-Life Connections
Spend time with people in person as much as possible. Invite friends for coffee, meet family for a meal, or join a club or activity in your area. Ask how someone’s day went and listen without checking your device. These face-to-face moments deepen relationships and create lasting memories.
Embrace Bored Moments
Let your mind wander when you’re at the bus stop, riding in a lift, or sitting at a café. Resist the urge to reach for your phone right away. Notice the world around you or just let thoughts come and go. These quiet breaks help boost creativity and self-awareness.
Boredom is good, as it fosters creative minds!
Delete Apps or Accounts
Take a bold step and delete social media apps from your phone or, if you’re ready, close your accounts for good. Removing the temptation can free up hours each week. If you can’t delete them all, try logging out or moving them to a hidden folder. You might be surprised by how little you miss them after a while.
Ten Arguments To Delete Social Media
Jaron Lanier was born to a Nazi concentration camp survivor (as a blonde, she survived by pretending she was Aryan and walking out) and a father whose family escaped from Ukraine to avoid violent riots, he used to work in Silicon Valley.
Then for his mental health, gave up social media. He now spends his time offline as much as possible, which includes playing some of his collection of 100 ancient musical instruments.
Like most of us, he is concerned that our world now seems to be controlled by not just social media, but a few powerful people who use it: Trump, Musk, Kanye etc. Named one of the world’s 50 greatest thinkers, his take is very interesting:
He says that Trump may still have won the Presidency without his own Truth social media, but likely would not have won without Facebook support. Lanier believes that Trump is a narcissist and bully, who is so insecure he has a social media addiction, as it’s important to him to know that ‘people like him’. And that’s why he keeps posting lots of nonsense (in CAPITAL LETTERS!) whenever he has practically any thought.
And the only way to deal with this, is what you do with any narcissist (who is never going to change). You simply walk away:
Trump supporters seem nuts to me, and they say liberals seem nuts to them. But it’s wrong to say we’ve grown apart, and can’t understand each other. What’s really going on, is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing. So we have less opportunity to understand each other. Jaron Lanier
His ten arguments to delete social media are:
- You are losing your free will.
- You are not resisting world insanity
- Social media is making you into an arsehole
- It’s undermining Truth!
- It’s making what you say meaningless.
- It’s destroying your capacity for empathy.
- It’s making you unhappy.
- It doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.
- It’s making politics impossible.
- It hates your soul.
Celebrities Who Refuse to Use Social Media
There’s no rule that says you or even famous people have to use social media. There are quite a few celebrities who never use it all:
- Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said that social media is a place ‘where people either want to marry you or kill you’.
- Actress Olivia Colman has never used social media. She has heard there are people pretending to be her. But says as she is not on it, she can’t see it, so just doesn’t worry about it.
- Actress Keira Knightley once joined social media, and was so creeped out by it, she deleted her accounts within 24 hours.
- Sandra Bullock (the woman men love and women want to be like) simply says she has better things to do with her time.
- Mila Kunis (the actress wife of Ashley Kutcher) says no-one is interested in whether she’s visiting the bathroom!
- George Clooney does not use social media. He says he is always saying stupid things by accident, and doesn’t want to do this on a worldwide platform!
- Actress Cate Blanchett values her privacy, and also does not want to talk of her affluent life, as it could make others feel bad.
Liberate Yourself From Technology
The Power in Your Hands is a timely book, asking who you could become, if you put down your phone, and picked up your life? The average smartphone user spends around 61 to 80 days per year on their device. They have become the ‘fifth limb’ of the human body, moving from bathrooms to waiting rooms, and from kitchen sinks to bed.
But this is not just a physical attachment, phones are also an emotional attachment. There’s nothing wrong with using a phone for emergencies, and good conversation and the occasional text or surfing information.
But now they have become addictive to many people. Some can’t wait at a bus stop or sit in a restaurant for more than 5 minute, without having to scroll through their phones.
Turning to phones to soothe and distract us, numbs our empathy, diminishes the quality of our relationships, and drains the part of our brain, required for creative focus.
The more time we spend on our screens, the less time we spend engaging in our own life, with our own two hands. Digital detoxes are not enough. We need both personal and collective action, to recover from the tsunami of digital distractions we now face.
In this book, a psychotherapist and meditation teacher invites readers to take an honest look at their attachment to technology, including compulsive smartphone behaviour. He then guides through a journey of reconnection to real human relationships.
Shannon Algeo is an American and Irish writer based in California. He’s also a poet, yoga and meditation teacher, who leads ‘digital liberation courses’ to help people transform patterns of pain, into pathways of power and purpose.
