The predatory forces driving the attention economy have pushed many of us into unhealthy patterns of digital technology use. I believe the negative impacts on both personal and societal well-being are mounting. Clearly seeing these negative impacts points us directly towards an immense source of well-being—to the well-being that accrues from abstaining from detrimental digital tech use. Imagine getting off some drug that was wreaking havoc on your relationships, your emotions, your ability to get things done, and your basic sense of self-respect. This would bring a tremendous amount of well-being, would it not?

Let’s be clear: Most of us use digital technology for complicated reasons, and there are many affordances that it offers. What this article proposes is categorically NOT the rejection of modern technology or any particular prescribed set of digital behaviors or rules. Instead, I suggest there’s an urgency to each of us taking a deep hard look at our habits, and then deliberately aligning our tech use with our values. Because if we don’t do this, we’re likely to wind up as pawns in some Silicon Valley bozo’s grand plan to make another billion… not exactly where I, for one, want to be.

If you stick with me, I’ll explore a few things here: evidence of the negative impacts of unconstrained digital tech use, a basic primer on the economic model that drives companies like Google and Facebook, and finally, why this points us towards a powerful positive intervention that has been sitting under our noses all along—the 30-Day Digital Detox.

Digging into the research on digital tech use can be alarming. Let’s start with Lissak’s (2018) review of existing research on the physiological and psychological impact of screen time on children and adolescents. He found that increased screen time for young people correlated with reduced sleep quality and duration; increased sedentary behavior; cardiovascular issues, including high blood pressure and HDL dysfunction; chronic sympathetic nervous system arousal (that’s the fight-flight-freeze response); excessive cortisol and over activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (think constant stress); issues with vision and orthopedics, including lowered bone density and sharp rises in childhood myopia; heightened ADHD symptoms; and increases in depression and suicidal behavior. Yikes!

Twenge and colleagues (2018) investigated the final point, carefully exploring a sample of over half a million adolescents, ages 13–18, finding that increased depressive symptoms and higher rates of suicide are linked to increased time on digital technology. Their conclusion is as obvious as it is damning. Simply put, adolescents who spent more time on social media and electronic devices reported more mental health issues than those who spent more time NOT on screens (e.g., being with others in person, playing sports, and reading print media).

Ironically, the most connected generation ever is facing a crisis of loneliness. In a sample of 8.2 million high schoolers between 1976 and 2017, researchers found that adolescent feelings of loneliness spiked dramatically after 2011, right at the point when smartphones began to see widespread adoption (Twenge, Spitzberg, & Campbell, 2019). By 2016, high school seniors were spending on average one less hour per day interacting with friends in person than the cohorts in the late 80s. Those who reported low levels of in-person social interaction and high levels of social media use reported being the most lonely.

Kross, et al. (2013) explore the impact of Facebook on subjective well-being through experience sampling, the method of periodically pinging people throughout the day to get data about their subjective states. This method is widely considered the gold standard for measuring real-life psychological experience. They found that Facebook use predicted—drum roll, please—negative shifts in both how people felt moment to moment and how satisfied they were with their lives overall. Raise your hand if you’re surprised by any of this.

At a societal level, social media has a disturbing track record as well. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher (2022), is a tour de force of investigative journalism that explores how social media drives polarization, contributing to scenarios as diverse as the Muslim genocide in Myanmar, racial violence in Sri Lanka, and the corrosion of American democracy. Others, such as Flaxman, Goel, and Rao (2016), explore how personalized algorithms on social media contribute to filter bubbles and echo chambers, reducing exposure to diverse viewpoints.

Sorry to clobber you with all of that. But I think it’s worth reflecting on, then considering your own relationship with technology. How do you tend to feel after using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc? How is it to wake up and first thing in the morning to stick your face into your phone? How is it to scroll late at night? For most of us, our relationship to digital technology is complicated, and likely, there’s plenty of good these platforms have brought you. But in aggregate, what’s your overall experience with your smartphone and your computer? And furthermore, what’s the residue that these interactions with tech leave on the rest of your life? Maybe do a straw poll and ask the next ten people you connect with if they are happy with their relationship with their phone. These kinds of reflections and conversations can add a deeply personal lens to the big-picture statistics.

If you do find that you have habits with digital technology that you don’t like, that you find these technologies even mildly addictive or compulsive, know this is not by accident. Social media companies work hard, using so-called persuasive design (code for deliberately employing psychological vulnerabilities to drive specific behavior outcomes) to create their products. They want two things from you: your eyeballs and your data. And they’ll stop at nothing to get them. Human attention, i.e., your mind, is simply another resource to be mined. Billions of dollars are invested every year to hire massive teams (tens of thousands of programers at Meta alone) to create algorithms designed to carry out a vast extraction campaign (Gallagher & Demers, 2022) . The extraction of human attention, that is. Massive attention conglomerates driven by an obsession with bottom-line profits and powered by futuristic supercomputers, complex algorithms, and skilled teams all duking it out for your mind, is, in a nutshell, where the imperatives of the attention economy have delivered us.

One example of a vulnerability social media companies exploit is negativity bias, the well documented tendency of negative information and experiences to exert greater influence and impact than positive ones on cognition, emotions, and behavior (Baumesiter, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Rozin & Royzman 2021). Our tendency to find emotions and states such as anger, outrage, and fear more viscerally motivating than ones like forgiveness, tolerance, and serenity means that an AI model trained to get as much of your attention as possible will naturally elevate things that trigger these negative emotions and states. This is just the physics of the attention economy.

To make matters worse, in the near future AI will no longer simply sort and present human-created content to you. Increasingly, it will generate content itself and then analyze your responses to create ever more personalized and addictive material. We should expect a significant escalation in the AI-driven arms race for our attention and ought to prepare accordingly. So, how do we reclaim our lives, and how do we prepare for what’s coming next?

One of the most elegant solutions is what’s called a Digital Detox or Digital Declutter. I first discovered the intervention in Cal Newport’s (2019) seminal book on technology, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. For some set period of time—Newport recommends thirty days—you put aside all non-essential digital technology and invest heavily in meaningful analog activities. This can be an especially catalytic positive intervention because it gives us the time to actually do all the other positive interventions we’ve been meaning to do. It creates the space to really invest in things like high-quality relationships, exercise, time in nature, meditation, service, sleep, education, getting things done, or whatever else it is that lights you up.

While I haven’t come across a lot of research on the 30-Day Digital Detox, specifically, there’s plenty of evidence that can be collated to indicate its effectiveness. To begin with, Anna Lembke (2021), a Stanford psychiatrist and authority on addiction—including behavioral addictions (like smartphone and video game addictions, etc)—and recovery, extols the benefits of abstinence to reset the brain’s reward pathways. She cites one month as the typical minimum amount of time needed to see real results (Lembke, 2021).

Furthermore, Perloff (2014) explored the negative impacts of social media use on young women’s body image and suggests that taking a break from social media can reduce negative body image and improve well-being. Hunt, Marx, Lipson, and Young, (2018) at the University of Pennsylvania found that limiting social media decreased feelings of loneliness and depression and led to an overall sense of relief and increased well-being. Rosen, Carrier, and Cheever (2013) explored how media multitasking damaged academic performance and cognitive abilities. They found that taking breaks from digital distractions tended to improve productivity, focus, and you guessed it, overall well-being. Exelmans and Van den Bulck (2017) found that bedtime mobile use reduced sleep quality and that a Digital Detox led to both better sleep and improved well-being. Are you starting to see a trend? A Digital Detox = more well-being!

It feels somewhat silly to cite all these studies. To me, most of them read somewhat like someone ran a study on people who stab themselves with needles constantly and then found that when they stopped stabbing themselves with needles their bleeding decreased and their well-being improved. What fascinates me about the Digital Declutter that Newport recommends is that it pairs removing damaging stimuli with simultaneously doubling down on positive ones. A compelling one-two punch making Digital Detoxes one of the best ways to reestablish personal agency amid a swirl of distractions and temptations.

Last winter I created an online community, From Love, devoted to helping people understand the effects of digital tech and connect with others also on a path to a more examined life and healthier digital habits. A big part of what we do at From Love is run free, cohort-based 30-Day Digital Detoxes to provide the oomph needed to tackle what otherwise may be a rather daunting challenge. Leveraging community, we help people stand up to the attention merchants.

Perhaps you’ll join me for one of those detoxes or find some other way to collaborate or participate? Or maybe you’ll find your own way to join the attention resistance and reclaim your life and or help others do the same. In any case, I wish you the absolute best!

References

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.

Exelmans, L., & Van den Bulck, J. (2017). Bedtime mobile phone use and sleep in adults. Social Science & Medicine, 206, 134–140.

Fisher, M. (2022). The chaos machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. Little, Brown & Company.

Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(S1), 298–320.

Hunt, M. G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768.

Gallagher, J., Demers, L. (2022, September 4th) Facebook software engineer salary and benefits. Kareer karma. https://careerkarma.com/blog/software-engineering-salary-facebook/

Kross, E., Verduyn, P., Demiralp, E., Park, J., Lee, D. S., Lin, N., ... & Ybarra, O. (2013). Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. PloS One, 8(8), e69841.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Penguin Random House.

Lissak, G. (2018). Adverse physiological and psychological effects of screen time on children and adolescents: Literature review and case study. Environmental Research, 164, 149–157.

Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Penguin Random House.

Perloff, R. M. (2014). Social media effects on young women's body image concerns: Theoretical perspectives and an agenda for research. Sex Roles, 71(11–12), 363–377.

Rosen, L. D., Carrier, L. M., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task-switching while studying. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 948–958.

Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296–320.

Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among US adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–17.

Twenge, J. M., Spitzberg, B. H., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Less in-person social interaction with peers among US adolescents in the 21st century and links to loneliness. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(6), 1892–1913.

About the Author: Miles Bukiet (C’18) is a meditation teacher and therapist. He is the Director of Meditation Content at Madrona Meditation, a co-founder of Dharma Gates, a non-profit that brings meditation training to young people, and the founder of From Love (an organization devoted to digital well-being).