I recently deleted my email client (Outlook) from my phone. Not my work email account, the entire app! I deleted Twitter too. I deleted Facebook and Instagram a long time ago. I have a computer at work and in my home office to check email. I don’t need it on my phone. I really don’t need more distractions in my life. So I’m trimming back on the apps on my phone and going on a digital diet. I’m working on some permanent changes in my digital (dietary) habits.

A digital diet is a metaphor that I think is particularly apt for our times.  Our diet is a quantitative and qualitative description of the food we consume.  Not only what we consume but how much and how often.  As a clinician who’s worked with a lot of people living with diabetes, I get a 24-hour diet history to better understand someone’s eating habits.  What they ate, and how much. When they ate.  What was happening before they ate. Was it prompted by boredom or something emotionally stressful?  Did they feel hungry?  Many people can recall these kinds of details when prompted to reflect on the previous 24 hours.  But not everyone.  Some really aren’t very attuned to their eating habits. Some minimize how much and how frequently they eat due to shame. For some, this is a very helpful exercise – helping to uncover some of the barriers to achieving a healthier life.

There are lots of parallels here.  We now consume digital products, in a wide variety of forms, every day.  Indeed, they’re perceived as “essential” to our lives.  Perhaps not as essential as food or shelter, but most of us wouldn’t function very long without our digital devices. They interface and control so many facets of our lives, it’s hard to imagine life without them.

Consuming digital content and using digital devices isn’t inherently good or bad. Indeed, there are so many ways they can enrich our lives and make things more efficient, convenient, and engaging.  But like food, indiscriminate and mindless consumption of poor quality, highly processed, and empty calorie digital content isn’t adding value to our lives.  When it’s not making you healthy, wealthy, or wise, it’s time to consider a digital diet.

There are lots of ways we use our devices in unhealthy ways. Sometimes we use our digital devices to ward off boredom.  Sometimes we use them to avoid negative emotions.  Sometimes we gorge ourselves on digital “stuff”, like eating a big Costco-sized bag of a salty/sweet snack, that leaves us feeling queasy. And like a 24-hour diet history, it can be an eye-opening exercise to analyze our digital habits. Many people simply have no awareness and couldn’t accurately recall all of the digital content they’d consumed in the past 24 hours.  And others can’t admit to themselves or others, perhaps due to shame, how unhealthy their habits have become.

Distraction Generators

...the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.
 
  -Andrew Sullivan, in I Used to Be A Human Being (The New Yorker, Sept 19, 2016)

I’ll admit that I’ve been lost in a digital vortex from time to time.  I’ll start by watching a Youtube video on how to unclog a drain and then, an hour later, I’m watching a video about how to set up Kanban boards in Asana.  What can I say, I’m prone to watching productivity videos and those clever folks at Google know it! One of my colleagues at work quips that computers are $1500 distraction generators.

Hopefully, this isn’t news to you but “free” services available on the Internet make their money on advertising. Thus, capturing and maintaining our attention is critical to their business model.  And that’s the Faustian deal we’ve made with Google, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook ... you name it. They provide us with a service and we give them our attention (and our data). These systems are designed to keep our attention as long as possible. We all have a negativity bias - it's hardwired into us. So what enrages, dismays, or provokes fear, will keep our attention. We might intellectually understand that our emotions are being manipulated but, nonetheless, we can’t easily turn away from something that outrages or frightens us.

Psychological and Physiological Consequences

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
 
-Cal Newport, in Digital Minimalism

Social media capitalizes on our need for connection. And yet, ironically, the apps are putting more distance between us and the connections we seek. It quickly becomes a vicious cycle. We feel stressed. We feel disconnected. So we turn to Facebook or Reddit to escape and to be a part of something.  But instead, it elicits social comparison, envy, outrage, and loneliness.

Our smartphones all too often pull us away from reality –— what’s tangible and right in front of us. In his book Stolen Focus: Why We Are Distracted and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari recounts a visit to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s opulent home in Memphis, Tennessee. For more than a decade his nephew had longed to see it. It was a dream trip. There were no tour guides at Graceland - everyone was given an iPad. As the visitors walked from room to room, pictures of each room appeared on the screen. When they got to the infamous “jungle room” (Elvis’ favorite), a couple, each with an iPad in hand, looked in amazement at the jungle room on their screens, swiping between images. Not once did they look up to actually look at the room. Off in the corner, his nephew was fully absorbed Snapchatting (is that a word?) with friends. No one was present, experiencing the moment. Perhaps you’ve witnessed similar scenes in your life — friends, family, students, colleagues so absorbed with their smartphones they aren’t present.

Our digital devices are keeping us up at night. Not only does the light emitted from the screen fool our brains, but the stimulation from the content keeps those neurons firing. Our thoughts are still swirling away when we eventually turn the device off. Today, the average American sleeps 20% less (almost 2 hours less) than people did in the early 1900s. In addition to fatigue and a host of chronic illnesses, sleep deprivation further hinders our ability to focus.

Addressing the Problem

We’ll need to address this problem at the individual and system levels. Smartphones have only been with us for about 15 years; so it’s little wonder that we are only now learning about their true benefits and harms. There is now widespread recognition of the psychological harms that digital devices and social media apps cause, particularly adolescents.(Valkenburg 2002) Our devices make us always “on” and available to the demands from work, contributing to significant increases in stress and anxiety among working adults, particularly knowledge workers.(Mahalingham 2022) We’ll need to advocate for systemic solutions to address these widespread problems. This will require a cultural shift and perhaps even legislation to ban certain practices. For now, it’s up to individuals to take some measure of control over their digital devices.

Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
 
- Cal Newport, in Digital Minimalism

Since deleting email from my phone, I've felt less anxious about work piling up. And I’ve been reading more books - which is great. And I’m looking for other ways to be more intentional about the apps I have on my smartphone and my device usage. If you feel you would benefit from a digital diet, consider trying some of these strategies:

• Turn Off Notifications. This is an easy first step and can dramatically reduce the number of interruptions during the day. Do you really need to be alerted every time someone posts something on your feed? Or sends you an email? Or pings you? Or instantly alerted that something went on sale at Lululemon? Turn off notifications on your phone, tablet, and computer. Or, at the very least, block all of them when you are trying to do some focused work.

• Delete and Unsubscribe. Intentionally delete apps from your phone that you don’t really need on your phone. You can access email on your computer. Sure, it's convenient to have email on your phone, but do you really need it? Facebook? Instagram? Pinterest? Twitter? TikTok? Unsubscribe to services that don’t add real value to your life. Or only access them using your computer.

• Monitor, Track, and Block.  Becoming more self-aware of your device usage can be powerful.  There are a variety of tools available to help, and they also can be used to block certain apps during specific times of the day.  Apps like QualityTime, StayFocused, Space, and OffScreen.

• Charge Your Devices In Your Office, Not Your Bedroom. If you want to reduce the temptation to use your phone or tablet in bed, don’t make them readily available in your environment. Have a charging stand or table in another room (e.g., home office, guest bedroom) on the other side of your home. Create a ritual of putting your devices “away” when it's time for bed.

• Lock the Phone Up. The K-Safe or Kitchen Safe is selling like crazy on Amazon. These devices were originally designed to “lock up” foods, like cookies, to prevent people from snacking at night. The lock is set for a specified period of time (e.g., 10 hours) and can’t be unlocked. The only thing you can do is smash the container - which would take some significant effort and would be costly. This is a helpful commitment device. While it doesn’t totally eliminate the temptation, it helps you keep your commitment to not use the phone.

• Leave the Phone at Home. Going for an afternoon outing, a day trip, a weekend getaway ... or perhaps a 10-day vacation? Consider leaving the phone and other devices behind. This is going to be a hard one because you’ll probably feel unsafe without your phone. But if there is a real emergency, there will be plenty of people who will let you borrow a phone!

• A 30-day Digital Detox. This is dramatic, but it can be very effective. Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Life of Focus in a Noisy World recommends taking a 30-day break from your digital devices and apps (to detoxify your brain). Then slowly reintroduce your device(s) and very selectively download apps that truly support something that you value and can’t be achieved in some other way. As you reintroduce them into your life, carefully consider how you use your device(s) and apps in ways that maximize their value while minimizing their potential harms to your attention.

We all need to learn how to recapture our focus so that we can connect with the people we care about, get the work done we value, and experience awe and gratitude. These are the essential building blocks of wellbeing, a life well-lived.

What have you done to limit mindlessly consumption of digital junk food?  Are there nutritious apps that add value to your life?  Our devices and apps are tools.  It's up to us to use them wisely and advocate for policies in the public interest. Leave a comment. Share your successes and failures.

Cheers-

Stuart

References

Valkenburg PM, Meier A, Beyens I. Social media us and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Curr Opin Psychology 2022; 44: 58-68.

Mahalingham T, Howell J, Clark PJF. Attention control moderates the relationship between social media use and psychological distress. J Affective Dis 2022; 297: 536-41.