I once gave up food for 16 days, surviving exclusively on lemon water sweetened with maple syrup while camping out in San Francisco. I lived in silence for three days during a spartan retreat in central Nepal. I deactivated my Instagram for three years after the whistleblower Frances Haugen disclosed how young girls were not being protected from harmful content on the platform.
All of this is to say I have form when it comes to embracing an extreme. But removing all nonessential technology from my life for 30 days, which I decided to do this year in an effort to break my addiction to screens, is a genuinely scary prospect. The scale of the challenge quickly becomes clear by my complete failure on day one.
It starts well. I strap an analogue watch on my wrist and put my phone, already wiped of every news and entertainment app, in the back of the car for a three-hour drive north. My first week of freedom from my six-by-three-inch personal time sink is going to be spent on holiday in Donegal with my partner.
The roads are icy, and we travel in that dense silence specific to hazardous driving. With nothing to do other than look at the sparkling white snow lit up by the car’s headlights, I arrive at Lough Mardal Eco Lodge calm and full of a happy wonder that makes me wish I read poetry.
After an evening in front of a wood fire, reading, chatting and eating, my confidence in the viability of the 30 days stretching ahead of me is growing. Oh the hubris.
At about 11pm, a UTI, which has been niggling all day, hits me with full force. By midnight I have abandoned all efforts at nondigital distraction and given in to the numbing effects of the internet. I definitely won’t be writing about this, I think. With all of my apps gone, I resort to browsing American celebrity gossip sites until sleep finally comes, followed closely by pharmacy trading hours.
I write the day off as a practice round. My resolve is strengthened. At Lough Mardal the bedrooms are private off-grid yurts, with no electricity and a compost toilet. Its communal space is a magnificent cob roundhouse that is strictly screen- and gadget-free.
[ No Instagram, Netflix or YouTube: Can I survive a four-week digital detox?Opens in new window ]
Grateful for the policy, I lock my phone away in the provided box. It’s a perfect example of the concept of “situational agency” developed by Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. We can’t change the fact that phones and screens dominate in so many places, but we are in control of what enters our own personal space.
“Willpower is overrated,” Duckworth wrote in a recent essay for the New York Times. “Physical distance creates psychological distance.”
[ Saunas, cinemas and listening to albums: 25 ways to get off your phoneOpens in new window ]
This rings true as I read a book, The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, for hours, only breaking my focus to make coffee. I grew up reading voraciously, and of all the things I regret about my phone use, it’s the lost years of reading books. But it turns out my attention span was never really broken – I just needed to lock my phone in a box.
The Place of Tides chronicles a spring season in the remote Vega archipelago in Norway, just south of the Arctic Circle. The author shadows a woman who builds nests for wild eider ducks to lay their eggs in, eventually gathering the magically warm feathers they leave behind once their ducklings have hatched and the new flock leaves land for water.
As I read the last line of the acknowledgments, I’m not ready to leave the soft world of the ducks behind. I can’t follow my usual pattern of streaming interviews with the author or reading multiple reviews of the book.
So I write my own review in the slim blue notebook I carry with me now. I write down everything I like about the book, everything I don’t, and my pen moves for 30 minutes without stopping. I didn’t expect I’d have that much to say, and it feels good, both to form my own undiluted opinions.
After a few days, it occurs to me it’s not my phone that I’m freeing myself from with this experiment, but the ability to indulge every wandering whim. In the past I have found myself checking and rechecking the same apps, refreshing and toggling, still reading the internet 20 minutes after I found what I originally thought I needed to know. It sometimes feels like my fingers move of their own accord.
Dopamine never actually delivers a feeling of fulfilment, so we keep scrolling in search of satisfaction, yet never truly find it
“It’s a dopamine loop,” says Dr Brian Pennie, a neuroscientist and resilience specialist, explaining this apparent lack of agency. “People often think of dopamine as a pleasure neurotransmitter, but it is really more around motivation, to drive you to do something again. So if you pick up your phone and you’re rewarded, it feels good, you’ll repeat that. It’s insidious.”
Dopamine never actually delivers a feeling of fulfilment, so we keep scrolling in search of satisfaction, yet never truly find it.
Wary of having my phone in my eye line, I keep it tucked away even after we leave Lough Mardal and head farther north. My week continues like this, as I check and reply to my messages in the morning and in the evening. I read, I write, I go for walks without the extraordinary weight of the digital world in my pocket. I beachcomb and lick stones. I fight every instinct to take photos of the snow and listen to the silence of its fall instead.
[ This new year, embrace boredom as a temporary relief from mental slaveryOpens in new window ]
On an evening of restless boredom when I’m craving a high and there’s no screen to deliver it, I stand outside in a towel in the -2 degree night until I shiver. I take a prickling hot shower. I sing. I sleep. Time, it is stretching out.