We know it’s unproductive to waste time online, but the problem is growing. Disconnecting completely, even for short periods, can help you build better habits.
When David Erickson leaves his home in Long Beach, California to spend several days on Panama’s southern coast, he also reluctantly gives up his smartphone.
There’s no wireless internet where he’s going, and the phone’s data capabilities don’t work there, so there’ll be no checking social media or emails. He even has to walk to a certain spot on the property to make or receive calls. “My phone just becomes a clock,” says Erickson, the founder of a digital conference calling company.
We know it’s unproductive to waste time online. But many of us get anxious when we try to let go of these habits
For the first day and a half of what is typically a four-day-long holiday, he is anxious about being off the grid. He often scans the area for data service, debates driving to a nearby hotel for a slow wireless connection and attempts to call into his office on the off chance he has cellular service. Initially at least, it’s difficult to pull away: “It feels like the sky is falling – the separation anxiety is crazy,” he says.
Kris Dugan, chief executive of Betterworks, a software company in Redwood City in California, once used Facebook to decompress between work projects. That’s no longer the case, he says. “It was a little bit of an unwinding or a quick break for me,” he says. Now, with the current slew of political posts, he feels himself “getting distracted and agitated.”
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Although he remains interested in engaging in some of the content he sees, Dugan says admitting that the social media platform no longer helps him relax. That made it easier to log off without suffering feelings of withdrawal. Last month, Dugan’s firm conducted a survey, and found that workers spend an average of two hours per day browsing political posts and almost a quarter spend three or more hours per day.
To detox, or not to detox
Stopping social media use altogether can make you anxious about what you’re missing. Still, staying away completely – even for brief periods via a so-called digital detox – can help you to build new habits and control your impulses, says Crook.
“A digital detox actually reduces the amount of anxiety because when the parameters are so clear, it takes all of those individual choices off the table,” she says. Using tools designed to keep you offline, or uninstalling certain apps from your phone, can help keep your media use under control while limiting the anxiety-inducing effects of doing so. Since it can be most difficult to break away in the evenings, Crook puts away her smartphone after 20:00 each night.
But that’s not the only solution. For social media users that wish to cut back, Hofmann recommends they start by examining the core of why they go online, and identifying which types of browsing they find so addictive, in order to combat future impulses. It can be difficult. These platforms can bring people together and combat loneliness, but people start to feel that they are having artificial interactions online, he adds.
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Much of the time social media gives users a sense of belonging without the need for one-on-one interaction. “It’s simply a way of connecting with like-minded people to feel validated,” he says. The fix could be finding a way to get more in-person interaction around the same topics you care about, while weighing in online.
Being forgiving of your own failures can help too. Rather than blaming your own lack of self-control, acknowledge that many apps and social media platforms are designed to be addictive and to draw you back in when you’re not browsing – Facebook and Twitter, for example, send emails to users who haven’t logged on in a while. Ultimately, realising that these entrenched habits are hard to break – but not impossible – can be empowering.