I did the impossible - I spent a week living my day–to-day life without a phone.
I’d had this crazy idea for a while now: spend seven days without my phone. Not a week on vacation. Not a week off the grid. A week in my everyday life. The one that includes jobs, and kids, and schools, and errands, and to-do lists. The life that we all have some version of, if we’re lucky. And I wanted to make it harder on myself? Why?
First of all, I just wanted to see if I could do it. I’m stubborn. Willful, even. I live up to my Taurus sign. For everyone who listened to my idea and said it couldn’t be done, I needed to prove that it could. But as the idea took further shape in my mind, I realized that there were three things I wanted to get out of this experiment. I wanted to find out what the effect would be on my emotional wellbeing. I wanted to see how putting the phone away would affect my productivity. And I wanted myself and those around me to be forced to use our resources rather than relying on the phone as a crutch.
I’m far from alone in undertaking this technology detox. A recent New York Times article chronicled the growing movement among 20-somethings acknowledging the deleterious effects of smartphones and promoting a regression to stripped-down phones without internet capability. I made it a little harder on myself, by not just giving up apps and maps and texting. I gave up my phone entirely.
And guess what? After just one week I didn’t want to turn my phone back on. I dreaded it. I put it off as long as possible, until I needed to power it on just to function as an alarm for an early Saturday-morning wake up call. Now I’m shopping for an old-fashioned, analog travel alarm clock.
Emotional Wellbeing
No surprise here: my emotional wellbeing soared. We’re all aware of the studies linking smartphone use to depression and anxiety. And indeed, I was a happier, calmer person without my phone. Literally the only thing I missed about it was being able to use it to talk. Imagine that: a phone’s primary use is for talking! (My teenagers can’t understand this.) I missed talking to my sister. I missed talking to my 92-year-old “other mother.” I didn’t miss texting. I didn’t miss feeling obligated to respond all the time. It was liberating to rest in the knowledge that if something truly awful happened, I would find out about it another way. And guess what? Nothing truly awful happened.
Let me repeat that: nothing truly awful happened because I didn’t have my phone. Awful things happened, sure - our government is untrustworthy and climate change is real and we’ve lost our humanity as a nation - but absolutely none of those things happened because I didn’t have my phone.
What did happen? I slept better. I’ve always been cautious not to use my phone close to bedtime. But just having my phone turned off and shoved in a corner downstairs helped my mind to relax. During the day, I reaped the benefits of walking with my head up, enjoying nature around me, and engaging in actual face-to-face conversations with people. I felt a little bit of FOMO at the beginning of the week, but that feeling quickly faded as I recognized that, mentally and physically, I just felt better. Without a doubt, my emotional wellbeing was enhanced by getting rid of the phone.
Productivity
I did some advance work letting people know I’d be without my phone for the week. Obviously everyone at work had to be on board with the idea, and thankfully I got no pushback. I made a list of friends and family to notify ahead of time, and made sure my husband was available in case of emergency. I changed my outgoing voicemail to a message saying I was unreachable and offering two other numbers to call in case of an urgent matter, one for work and one for personal issues. In other words, I went into the week prepared.
As a result, my productivity did increase in measurable ways. My to-do list definitely got shorter without the distraction of the phone. Instead of staring at my phone while I waited for my name to be called at the doctor’s office, I organized my thoughts for a meeting that afternoon. However, this experiment also pointed out to me just how reliant I am on using my time in the car to make phone calls. I spend a lot of time in the car - an average of two-and-a-half hours each weekday - and so I try to use that time as efficiently as possible. Was this efficiency affected by the lack of a phone? Absolutely. But, if people know they can’t reach me on the phone, there aren’t any calls to return. And if I’m not on the phone, I’m paying more attention to driving. And if I’m paying more attention to driving, I’m safer. And not being dead definitely improves my work efficiency.
Use of Resources
And then there’s forcing myself, and those around me, to use our resources. What do you do if the phone is taken away? What do you do if you have to live like it’s the…90s? First of all, you make sure you’ve got plenty of hairspray at home. But what else?
You do things like looking at the road instead of Google Maps. You pay attention to the traffic in front of you to decide which exit to take. You make decisions, instead of GPS making them for you. Recent meta analysis of multiple studies points to the detrimental effect on sense of direction among users of GPS. Even one of the four co-founders of Google Maps acknowledges that overreliance on GPS might be affecting the structure of the human brain. I’m guilty of this overuse of Google Maps, even on my daily commute. Why? Because I want to know if there’s a traffic jam ahead of me and I need to take an alternate route. Was I lucky this week, in avoiding getting stuck in traffic? Maybe. But would I rather hit an avoidable traffic jam a couple of times a year, or consistently shrink the size of my brain? I’ll choose doing everything I can to preserve my brain.
I didn’t just need to take a break from my phone. My family needed it, too. I am very much the default parent in our household, to an entirely unnecessary degree. Although my husband is fully capable as a parent, my children turn to me for everything. It’s long past time to break that pattern of behavior - my three children are 18, 14 and 14 respectively (yes, I have twins. If you’re saying, “I always wanted to have twins” that’s because you never had twin infants. Or twin toddlers. Or twin teenagers.) This means that all five members of my family have phones, and the only phone that was turned off was mine. The four of them could still communicate with one another. And they could solve their own problems.
Were they entirely successful? No. I was in a work meeting, at my office, with my boss, late one afternoon when someone called the corporate line and left a message for me. This was followed shortly by my boss receiving a text from one of my family members, asking how they could get in touch with me. The emergency? I needed to stop and get Gatorade on the way home.
I will not bore you with the details of what happened next. Suffice to say, when I told my family to “use their resources” while I was without a phone, this is not what I intended. And honestly, the ugliness when I got home that evening was worth it, because my family needs to face facts and acknowledge that their dependence on me is unfair and unsustainable. Being without a phone forced a reckoning that was long overdue.
Did anyone die from lack of Gatorade? No. I told you nothing terrible happened.
The Upshot
You’re probably reading this and thinking you couldn’t possibly give up your phone for a week. And some of you probably can’t. You’re on call at work. You have loved ones facing acute health concerns. Your sister is about to have a baby and you’ve promised to care for the older kids. But many of you can experiment with being separated from your phones. You don’t really need them. They make life easier, yes. But do they make life better? I don’t think easier necessarily equates to better. Amputation is easier now than it was on a battlefield during the Civil War, and definitely better. Doing high school homework assignments is easier now with the help of AI, but is that necessarily better? I’m not so sure. Hitting home runs is easier with the help of PEDs, but I don’t think anyone would argue that’s better. So I encourage you to take a week, or even just a weekend, to give up your phone and see how it affects your life. Just stock up on Gatorade beforehand.