Social Media Detox: How to Take a Break from Digital Overload and Get Your Focus Back

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Erik Fisher: So years ago, over Christmas break, I decided to delete every app off my phone except for four. The phone obviously texting, the camera and maps. That's it. No email, no social media, no news, nothing that had a feed. No notification. Badges obviously, other than if someone called or texted. I called it my 21 day Internet break and I want to tell you what happened because I think it's relevant to almost every single one of us. The first couple days were weird. I'd pull out my phone to do a thing, look at the home screen and realize there was nothing there to look at. So I just put it back in my pocket. By about day five, I noticed I was less fidgety and by day ten I was less distracted. And at the end of the three weeks I felt like I had my brain back. Not a different brain, just my brain. Steadier, quieter, less busy when I wasn't doing anything. I'm Eric Fisher and this is beyond the To Do List. A uh, podcast about productivity and today I want to talk about taking a break from constant digital stimulus. Not just social media, but the always on world that we've built or has been built around us and how to actually do it without making it weird or preachy or impossible. And I know you don't need another put your phone down episode, but that's not what this is. First, a story about how we ended up here, what the research actually says about what constant stimulus is doing to us and try not to be too alarmist about it. Then I want to expand the conversation past social media because again, I think we're underestimating how much productive stimulus, email, slack, the news is doing the same as social media. Then I'm going to give you a five level detox ladder so you can pick where you want to start. And then we'll close with a healthy framework, a parenting note, and one very specific piece of information or advice that has actual research behind it. So here's the thing about how we got here. I don't think most of us sat down one day and decided, I'd like to spend five to seven hours a day on a screen, get interrupted every 47 seconds and check my phone over a hundred times before bed. Nobody chose that, but we slowly did. Without knowing it, we drifted into it. And that's the boiled frog metaphor. You drop a frog in hot water, it jumps out. But you drop it in cool water and turn the heat up slowly and supposedly it sits there until it's cooked. The metaphor is not actually true biologically, I think, but it's true behaviorally because we did not notice this. The phone got a little better, the apps got a little stick, and email moved from desktop to the pocket. We were already checking our email all the time anyway, but then it was always on us. And then Slack showed up and push notifications and short form videos, you could easily scroll. And we all started saying things like, sorry, I had to check something many, many times over dinner and here we are. So I'm not gonna make anyone or anything a villain out of this. There's not a single app on your phone or a single phone proprietary company out there. Who in and of itself is the problem? The problem is all of us all at once that never stopped to ask, is this what I actually want my day to feel like? So let's walk through a little bit what the research actually says. And I want to be careful here because I don't want to use fear based content in this space because I think that does more harm than good. But researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has been studying this for over 20 years. And in 2004, when she started, the average time someone spent on a single screen before switching was about two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. In studies from 2016 onwards, it's been averaging about 47 seconds. And half the time our attention on any given screen is shorter than 40 seconds. This has been replicated by multiple labs. Using objective tracking. She found Something else that after interruption, even a small one, it takes about 23 minutes on average to fully return to your original task. So if you're getting pinged four times an hour, you're mathematically incapable of doing focused work. There's no version of you that's doing both these things. Well, at least that's my experience. Also, here's what's interesting and honestly, a little uncomfortable Notifications mess with your attention even when you don't act on them. There's a 2015 study from Florida State that found that just receiving a notification but not even looking at it significantly disrupts performance on a focused task. And other research has shown that the mere presence of your phone face down. Many guests have said this on this show that your phone in your presence, even face down and silenced in your peripheral vision, reduces your available cognitive capacity. Your brain is partly listening for it whether you want it or not. So a randomized controlled trial out of the University of bath in 2022 had people take a one week break from social media and compared them to people who kept using it. The break group reported significant improvements in well being, depression and anxiety. A bigger 2025 study at Beth Israel Deacon used actual phone data, not self report, and found similar effects, roughly about reduction in anxiety symptoms, a uh, 24% reduction in depression symptoms and uh, a 14.5% reduction in insomnia. After just one week, one of the researchers said it usually takes eight to 12 weeks of intensive therapy to see those kinds of changes. One week, that's a huge deal. Now here's where I think most digital detox conversations go wrong. They focus on Instagram and TikTok and the others and they call it a day day. But the actual problem is broader. Email is a constant stimulus. Slack and teams are a constant stimulus. They were talking about notifications. Any of them. All of them. The news app on your phone, that's constant stimulus. Even the responsible version of being on your phone when you're checking work, you're staying informed, you're keeping up with work tasks. It does the same thing to your brain that scrolling does. The pattern is that you're checking. The pattern is letting an outside ping decide what you think about next. The platform, it doesn't matter. Your brain doesn't know the difference between Instagram and Outlook. It just knows that novelty has just arrived. The dopamine hit has happened and attention has shifted. And by the way, that's not a metaphor. The pull to refresh gesture on every social app is is mechanically identical to pulling a Slot machine lever. It was designed that way. B.F. skinner figured this out in the 1950s, that most addictive rewards aren't a guaranteed reward. It's an unpredictable one. You never know what you're going to get when you press and hold and swipe down to see what else is going to come up next. It's that variable ratio reinforcement, and it just, it produces behavior that is resistant. Tristan Harris, who used to design at Google, calls phones the slot machines in your pocket, and he's not trying to be poetic. It's honestly a description that better fits the engineering of the phone. Email works the same way. Most messages, let's fit it. Are nothing, they're not important. But every once in a while, there's a real one. So you keep checking slacks the same way. And let's face it, the news works the same way. And most of the time, we don't want to know what the news is. So when I'm talking about taking a break from constant stimulus, I'm not just saying Instagram, I'm talking about all of it, back to that experiment I talked about. So Christmas break a few years ago, deleted every app off my phone except the phone capability, texting, the camera and maps, music I kept, but it was hidden because then I could find it and open it up and, you know, we were traveling. So, you know, maps and music, those come into play when you're using CarPlay and driving. And I kept maps because, honestly, I wasn't going to not use gps. I used it for a tool and that was it. And then I didn't use it anymore. It wasn't like I was scrolling, ooh, what's this new location that just came up on my phone while I'm sitting at my mom's house? You know, and the camera stayed because I was with people and I wanted to be able to capture things still. So again, like I said, day one through three, it felt weird. You pull that phone out by reflex, you look at the home screen and. Because I'd. But this time it was different because I had removed everything, so there was nothing to do. There was no red badges, there's no apps at all, except those that bottom dock. There's no feeds, there's no scrolling of anything. And I'm like, oh, there's nothing here. And I'd put it back in my pocket. So it was kind of like I was doing the slot machine, pulling it out of my pocket, looking at it and saying, oh, there's nothing there. And I was retraining myself to say you know, there's never anything there. Put it back, put it away. Stop reaching for it. And then I noticed I was reaching for it way less. And then by day four through 10, I was less fidgety, I was more present. And this is exactly what I thought would happen and what I wanted to do on this trip to New York State to visit family. And this is the part you don't want to hear. I didn't feel like I was less informed. I didn't feel like I was disconnected with my friends, but I did feel like I was less fidgety. And I did feel like there wasn't this low background hum in my brain that I hadn't realized was there before, and it now was gone. And I could sit through a meal and just eat and talk. I could sit through a conversation. And honestly, as someone with ADHD who wasn't taking meds at the time, this was a relief. It sounds like a trivial thing, but honestly, before that, I hadn't noticed how hard it had become. And honestly, by like, day 11 or so, moving forward, I felt less busy even when I wasn't doing anything. You ever feel that you're not doing anything, but you feel busy? You feel like you're wired? Sitting and doing nothing started to feel like a real thing again. Boredom was okay, and it wasn't a failure. And I didn't even have to reach for podcasts. And, you know, some of it was the family and Christmas environment. Being around people who were also unplugged to a certain extent, made it easier. And my kids were younger, so they didn't have phones, so that helped. And again, I'm not pretending that you can replicate this easily, but I'm saying this was my experience. My brain calmed down, and my brain was capable of calming down. I just didn't realize it or know it. So to be honest, I came back from those 21 days, and this is a long time ago, I didn't stay perfectly disciplined. I re downloaded apps. Some of them I needed some of them. I didn't go do it all at once, though. I kind of let it, oh, I need that app. And then I would go and I would grab it and I would download it, and then it would start the whole process all over again of accumulating digital, uh, clutter. And, you know, since then, I've done different things at different times, different resets, like turning most or all notifications off or turning my phone silent, which honestly, for the most part, was already a thing. But one of the other esthetic things you can do that I did and still do now more intensely to this is my whole phone is in grayscale unless I'm inside the app and I really do need it. Because sometimes, you know, taking a photo where it's just grayscale is kind of hard. Or get it exactly right. But I only have the essentials now on my home screen, and I have very minimal things on my home screen for my phone. Everything else I kind of have to search for it. I make it a little bit harder to use. So I made it more intentional and less compulsional. And practically, uh, I'm not telling you to go do what I did. Starting something new has a way of waking up every possible what if in your brain. When I started podcasting, there was plenty of excitement, but there was also that other voice. What if this goes nowhere? What if I'm building something nobody wants? And that's why tools that remove friction matter so much. If you're building a business, Shopify gives you a real head start. 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I had a college professor who one time said something that really stuck with me. And I know this is simple and possibly trite, but he said, wherever you are, be there. And that stuck with me. All right, here's the practical part. I'm not gonna tell you to do what I did, but I am gonna give you those five levels and you can pick one to try as an experiment that fits your life right now. And basically, that's my point here. Try something. If it doesn't work, you try something else. I'm not saying commit to a 30 day silence in a monastery kind of a thing, but here's level one. So reduce the stimulus. So first and foremost, do an audit of like all the notifications that you have on your phone. Uh, maybe everything except the ph, your texts, and maybe your calendar, if that's something you do. And that's it. You don't need a single app to be allowed to interrupt your day. In fact, that's what do not disturb is for often as well. Move every social and news app off your home screen, bury them in a folder, and put your phone in grayscale. The research shows that grayscale reduces screen time by an average of 20 to 50 minutes a day with almost zero effort on your part. You do it once and set it, forget it. Because a lot of what really makes those apps sticky and rewarding is that color and that retina screen. So level two is pick one room or one time block that's phone free. The bedroom is the highest leverage choice I would pick from. Get an alarm clock, a real alarm clock. Charge the phone in another room. And if bedroom is too hard, if your bedroom is not where you use it because it's your alarm and you really need it for some, there's some. You're a parent and you've got it to where if that child or student or whatever is going to call you twice and then come through if it's an emergency, I get it, but set some sort of evening cutoff. No phone after like 8 or 9 is probably more realistic for most people. And Then set a m morning delay as well. Don't open that phone for the first 30 minutes after you wake up. Can you imagine doing that? Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism. His book makes a point that I think is right. He says, friction is your friend. The goal here isn't to make technology impossible. It's to make it compulsive and even slightly inconvenient. Make a gap of inconvenience so that your conscious brain has to catch up and say, wait, do I want to do this right now? Think about that. All right, level three. So this goes along with that 2022 Bath Study and the 2025 Beth Israel Study that found that measurable mental health improvements after just one week off of social media are possible. So if you want a meaningful experiment with low commitment cost, pick seven days. Delete those social apps from your phone altogether. You can reinstall them in seven days. This is not a permanent thing. It's just a test and see what happens. Gather some more data, notice the difference. And in fact right now I don't have any social media at all on my phone. And I'm doing it again. In prep for this. I was like, you know what, let's do it again. Let's do like seven days and let's just stay off and see what happens. And um, I think I'm on day two or uh, I'm on day three and I can tell you again, I already feel a lot better and I'm reaching for my phone a lot less. Level 4. So this is the 21 day reset like I did. All the optional apps, you have to decide what's optional. And I would say opt for most things being optional, delete them. Keep your phone, obviously I don't think you can delete that actually, but keep the phone and texting and keep maps and the camera and anything you literally have to for your job or for work, do that. Email Slack, but if you can batch them, open them at scheduled times and on a desktop, not your phone, if your job won't allow that, then get specific. When does email need to be on the phone and when can it not be? And then level five is a 30 day deep reset. Cal Newport's protocol that he has again from his book Digital minimalism. He says 30 days off all optional technology. Anything where the, the absence of tech won't seriously hurt your work or your essential relationships. Then, and this is the important part, at the end of 30 days, don't just go back. It's kind of like a whole 30. But for digital tech. You then evaluate each piece of tech against three filters. Does this serve something I deeply value? Is it the best way to serve that value? And do I have a clear set of rules for how and when I use it? And if it doesn't pass all three of those, it doesn't come back. This one is from Carlos Whitaker and his book Reconnected. He had seven weeks completely screen free, two weeks at a monastery, two weeks on an Amish farm, three weeks at home. And again, I'll link up to that conversation in the show notes if you want to dig deeper as well as the Cal Newport episode. But you don't have to go this far. But. But again, this principle scales. You take a break, you fill the time with something better and then you choose what comes back. And here's the trap. Most people who do a ah, digital detox, they feel great and then they slide all the way back within a couple of months. I've done it. The reset alone isn't enough. You need a cadence to come back to. So here are some things to think about. Number one purpose for each app and channel. What's the job that it has in your life? And if you can't answer that, that's a sign. Channels Email is for X. Texting is for Y. Social if you're keeping it is for Z. But don't just let one channel do everything. That's how those channels become 24. Seven windows. And I don't mean Microsoft Windows of time Specific times you check things. Email twice a day, not all day. Oh my gosh. Saying that out loud just made me think how impossible that is for most people when it comes to work. Right? News once a day and not on demand. Honestly, I think news not even once a day. I would rather not see the news every day. I'd rather see it once a week. Maybe slack during work hours, but not at 10pm and not in my bed. Cutoffs A real evening end time we're really saying here is boundaries. A real morning delay. Not grabbing the phone first thing. The phone is not the first thing or the last thing that your eyes see to start or end a day. Friction notifications are off by default on most things. The apps they're not on the home screen. Grayscale it if you can stand it. I'm m used to it now. I don't care. Again here you're just trying to make the easy thing be the right thing and then review every Sunday 15 minutes. You just ask yourself where did I drift this week? What pattern Did I slide into. And don't be a perfectionist about it. Don't dissect it, but just notice. Take notes, write it down. Take it one week at a time. Nir Eyal, who's also been on the show, about his book, Indistractable, he makes this point really well. He says that the opposite of distraction isn't focus, it's traction. Distraction pulls you away from what you actually want. Traction pulls you towards it. That's where the word traction comes from. When your car is stuck in the snow, you don't have traction. Most of us spend our days letting things pull on us, but we don't check to see whether they're pulling us in the right direction. All right, two last things. Number one first, this is an easy one. This is. This comes before everything else. Don't take your phone into the bathroom. I'm serious. There's a study from 2025 where they surveyed 125 adults undergoing colonoscopies. Two thirds of them admitted to using their phone on the toilet. And that group was five times more likely to spend more than five minutes in there per visit. And then after adjusting for age, bmi, fiber, exercise and straining, smartphone use on the toilet was associated with a 46% increase of the risk of hemorrhoids. I know a, ah, word I never thought I would say on this show. Again, this isn't a moral issue. It's not even a colon issue. Be bored, touch grass. I know, I hate that phrase, but I also love that phrase, kinda. And then here's the second thing. So here's a quick word on those of us that are parents or. And are in various stages of it because this comes up. We let kids on phones partly because it's the way the world works now. And I get it. I understand. But there's a question that I keep coming back to and it's are we better off than we used to be? And my answer is probably not. And I can say that without any judgment because I'm not better off either. And I'm a grown adult who chose this. The most important thing you can do for kids in your life is not rules that you set on their device. It's what they see you do with yours. They're modeling you. If your phone is your fifth limb, it will be theirs too. And yes, I've had guilt about this, and I confess it's annoying. So the hard part here is that setting the rule about something that they've watched you do every day of your life is Hypocritical. I'm, um, pointing a finger at myself as I say that, but I'm saying it without shame at this point. I'm saying do this without shame. Just notice. Try one small thing. Put the phone in a basket during dinner. Leave it in the car when you go to the park. See what happens. So, in conclusion, here's what I want you to do. If you take anything from this episode, start with that bathroom thing. But then also if you can't do that, pick a, ah, level, any level. Level one where you turn off notifications. Or pick something harder if you think you can do it. Whatever fits where you are right now. Try it. Give it at least a few days, ideally a week. Pay attention to how you feel and just be honest. Are you less fidgety? Are you sleeping better? Are you doing the things that you say you want to do instead of doom scrolling and pretending you don't have time for them? And then if it works, keep it. If it doesn't work, try something else. This isn't a religion. It's not a personality trait. It's not who you are. Now, this is an experiment. And the only failure here is not running the experiment in the first place and not being honest with yourself. So one last thing. You don't need an app, a course, a YouTube channel, or this podcast to do this work. You don't even need to listen to me, but you need 90 seconds, your phone settings and a little bit of diligence. All right? With that, I hope that you've enjoyed this talk and this lecture, so to speak. And uh, I want to say think about somebody that maybe will join you for accountability in doing this, picking a level together, doing it together. And then send them this conversation, this podcast episode. Share it on over to them by hitting that share button in your podcast player app of choice. Thank you for sharing, thank you for listening and I hope you weren't listening while you were scrolling and I will see you next episode.

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