How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan

By Catherine Price

Book Overview

Now fully revised and updated, this evidence-based, user-friendly guide presents a 30-day digital detox plan that will help you set boundaries with your phone and live a more joyful and fulfilling life.

"If you are a human being and you own a smartphone, you need this book."--Jonathan Haidt, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation

Do you feel addicted to your phone? Do you frequently pick it up "just to check," only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Does social media make you anxious? Have you tried to spend less time mindlessly scrolling--and failed? If so, this book is your solution.

In How to Break Up with Your Phone, award-winning health and science journalist and TED speaker Catherine Price presents a hands-on 30-day digital detox guide to breaking up--and then making up--with your phone. The goal: better mental health, improved screen-life balance, and a long-term relationship with technology that feels good.

Now fully revised to reflect advances in the technological landscape, this groundbreaking book features new expert advice and research on the science of addiction, with expanded chapters explaining how social media and algorithms are designed to addict us, impairing our abilities to focus, think deeply, and form new memories; and an updated section on the unique dangers social media poses to children, with brand-new tips on how to protect them.

Also newly expanded is How to Break Up with Your Phone's life-changing, evidence-based 30-day plan that will guide you--and your friends and family--through the process of creating new, healthy relationships with your smartphone, tablet, or other digital devices.

Whether you're seeking refuge from an exhausting news cycle or you're concerned about the negative effects of social media, How to Break Up with Your Phone offers practical solutions. It's guaranteed to help you put down your phone--and come back to life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593837169
• ISBN13: 9780593837160
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.9" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

This book is a gift that keeps on giving

Read this book if you know you want to shift your attention away from screens and onto your real life. The 30 day system gives you enough time to make real changes in your habits. This book isn't about never using technology again but it is about using technology more mindfully and not letting the apps decide how much time you spend glued to a screen. This is the only nonfiction book I ever loan out to people I've bought it more than once so I can continue to share it with my friends.

quick read, actionable items

The first half reads like a long form news piece, with lots of data. The second half is a 30 day plan to reclaim your attention. Despite the title, it's not about getting rid of your phone entirely, it's about recognizing unhealthy patterns and choosing what gets your attention. I have not done the full 30 day plan, but this taught me to pay attention to Digital Wellbeing, turn off app notifications, clear off my distracting home screen, etc. Lots of good tips. You have to be willing to set aside your defensiveness about addictive behaviors, though.

Too Condescending for Me.

Some of the facts were interesting, but I didn't like the tone of the book. In my opinion, it could have been a blog post.