I Have Never Once Survived a Digital Detox

Why a few phone boundaries will do more for you this summer than any detox, especially now your phone is more useful than ever.

I am writing this from Mexico City during a very football-heavy month.

My laptop is open. There is football on in the background.

My phone is close enough to keep checking the group chats every time something happens in the match, which is apparently every 18 seconds.

Technically, I am working.

Technically, I am also watching the football.

Technically, I am also keeping up with friends commenting on the match, because apparently none of us can simply experience one thing at a time anymore.

And this is the annoying part: every screen has a decent excuse.

The laptop is work.

The match is fun.

The group chat is friendship.

The phone is maps, bookings, messages, match commentary, photos, travel plans, family updates, work notifications, weather, tickets and restaurant links.

So when someone says “just use your phone less”, I want to ask: which part?

The useful part?

The social part?

The admin part?

The “I need the address” part?

This is why detoxes have never worked for me, and I’ve tried, with full ceremony, more than once.

I announce it (usually online, which in hindsight was the tell). I picture some calmer, slightly smug version of myself emerging phone-free with better posture.

Then real life turns up. I need a boarding pass, or a bank code, or to actually reply to a human being. I pick the phone up, and 40 minutes later I surface from a comment war between two strangers about a restaurant I will never go to, having achieved nothing and learned less.

The detox was always going to lose. The setup was the problem, every time, however much willpower I threw at it. A detox treats your phone like a vice you give up. Fair enough for some of it.

But the phone is also where half of modern life is actually run, and that’s never more true than in summer, when the plans multiply and the routines go soft around the edges.

There’s a 2017 study, led by Adrian Ward at the University of Texas, that I think about a lot. People were given tasks that needed real focus, with their phone in one of 3 places: on the desk, in a bag or pocket, or in another room.

The further away the phone, the better they did. The ones with it on the desk did worst, even with it face down and switched off. It didn’t need to buzz or light up. It just had to be there.

That’s the uncomfortable bit. Your phone doesn’t have to be in your hand to be in the room. It can be face down on the table and still be in the conversation, or sitting by your bed and quietly setting the tone of your morning before you’ve properly arrived in it.

Which is also oddly freeing, because it puts the whole thing back in your hands. The lever is the room: where the phone sits, what it can reach you through.

And moving a phone into another room is a much smaller ask than overhauling your character into the tidier, more disciplined person who, let’s be honest, was never going to show up.

That’s the idea behind the way I coach this, the MAKE SPACE Method™: you change the setup, not the person. It’s also why I start by clearing what’s in the way before adding anything new.

A few boundaries worth trying this summer

None of these needs a 30-day challenge, or deleting every app, or becoming the kind of person who says “I’m not really online much” while replying to everything within seconds. They’re boring on purpose, and a boring boundary is the kind that survives a real week.

None of them touch what’s actually on the phone, which is its own rabbit hole. I went into that side, curating your feed so the scroll is at least worth something, in an earlier piece on becoming the curator of your own attention. This one stays one level simpler: where the thing physically sits, before you even get to what’s on it.

• Put the phone in another room. This is the one I’d start with, because it does the most for the least effort. When you sit down to do the thing that actually matters, the phone goes in another room. Not face down, not on silent, not tucked under a notebook (adorable, fools nobody). Give it a real shape too: “when I sit down to write, the phone lives in the bedroom until the timer goes” beats “I’ll use my phone less”, because a boundary needs a moment, a place and a thing you actually do. Without those it’s just a good intention in nicer clothes.

• Let one screen win at a time. If the match is on, watch the match. If you’re with someone, be with them, not your notifications. One thing gets the room for a defined stretch: one half, one work block, one meal, one walk. Most of us aren’t really multitasking, we’re switching fast enough that we can’t feel the cost until the evening ends and we’re oddly tired and not actually satisfied by any of the things we were half-doing. The group chat will still be doing the most at half-time.

• Give logistics a window. The phone is genuinely useful, so the smart move is to give the useful stuff a slot of its own and let it stay there. The booking, the address, the score, the “where’s everyone meeting” message: batch them. 10 minutes before you leave, one check at half-time, one afternoon planning block, instead of 47 tiny checks that leave your attention looking like it’s been through airport security. Logistics stops leaking into everything else.

Your Unwritten experiment this week

Look at where your phone is right now. Like for real, actually look.

On the table, in your hand, on the bed, in your pocket and quietly available. Then put it in another room for the next hour. Not as a personality transplant. Just an hour.

Then notice what happens. Maybe it’s calmer. Maybe you go a bit twitchy and produce 4 urgent reasons you need it back immediately, one involving a delivery, one a family emergency, and one a thing you have genuinely never cared about until this exact second. Notice that too. Either way, you’re getting a clear read on how much of your attention an object can quietly claim while it sits there doing nothing at all.

Because this was always about the thing underneath screen time, which is what the screen keeps pulling you out of. The meal you’re half in, the walk you’re barely clocking, the match you’re watching through everyone else’s commentary instead of just watching the match.

Your life is happening in the room you’re actually in. So this summer, see if you can let yourself be properly here for more of it.

The phone will still be there in an hour.

With love from Mexico City,
Noemie x

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P.S. If you’d like to actually do this rather than nod along and forget by the weekend, I made The 7-Day Phone Boundaries Reset. It’s a $17 practical guide for people who want their phone to stop running the room, without pretending it isn’t part of modern life.

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Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.

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Source: Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154.