Digital Detox: a Manifesto
By Fayla Gruye
I definitely have some concerns when it comes to my own reliance on technology and unhealthy internet habits, with the first concern being my levels of screen time. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, stay at home orders, and weeks of self-quarantine periods, my average daily hours of screen time have increased greatly within the past months, with my average daily screen time use being around 3 hours, and jumping to average around 5 to 6 hours a day per week. I find myself more often bored with little to do, which usually leads me to spending hours refreshing my Twitter timeline for news, and obsessively watching other peoples snapchat stories, and even my new favorite mode of technological obsession: spending hours on HOURS of watching Tik Tok videos (this is a cry for help). Tik Tok has been my newest and most recent obsession- I downloaded the app at the start of the pandemic, and have found myself using it nearly every single day since. Another concern going along with my high levels of screen time use, is that I have developed other unhealthy habits, most notable my sleep-schedule has been altered- I tend to wake up at least 4 out of 7 days a week during the middle of the night, and have the terrible habit of going on my phone when I am not immediately able to fall asleep. “Only five minutes…” I tell myself while scrolling through my Tik Tok “for you page”, which more often than not turns into hours (On the tik tok app, I am not able to see the time in the upper middle corner of my phone, which causes me to lose track of time, and disrupt my energy levels into the next day). In addition to these concerns, I have also definitely felt stressed and anxious with being over connected online — I feel like a lot of my time is not only spent, but WASTED being spent using my phone for usually unimportant tasks, and lead to me feeling a lack of production, which just increases my anxiety and stress surrounding what I do with my time in general. I remember feeling a lot of anxiety during election week, when a lot of my time was spent on twitter obsessing over the results and timeline of the election, and reading news and updates about the coronavirus as well.
Thinking about how I can reduce negative effects and concerns that come with using technology, as well as building healthy relationships with technology use, I can first look at my greatest concerns. To first limit my high levels of screen time and unnecessary internet use, I can look into different ways of doing a “digital detox”, as suggested in the Ghaffary article (https://www.vox.com/2019/1/28/18196379/digital-detox-fuss-about-and-how-does-it-actually-work). I can carry out the detox in a number of ways, but some ideas I especially liked and would want to try, are having app limits, or letting limits on your phone to remind you when you have spent too much time on the app in hopes to limit internet use of negative apps. Another way, posed by the Chen article, is to create a plan to reduce internet use, and by doing so, create a schedule where you can schedule in phone times when convenient, as well as break times, to ease the transitions between phone/relax and no phone/production times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/technology/personaltech/digital-detox.html%20). One way to specifically help combat my bad habit of checking my phone during the middle of the night and getting distracted for hours, is to keep my phone out of the bedroom at night, which is proven to help sleep better anyways. I think by doing these things, I can start to help reduce the negative effects the constant use of technology has on my mood and productivity levels, but it is definitely only a start.
