What Makes A Detox Actually Work
Anyone can put their phone in a drawer for a weekend. The reason most digital detoxes fail is not willpower — it is that nothing was put in the space where the screen used to be. You go quiet, you get restless, and by Sunday evening you are back where you started, feeling worse about yourself than when you began.
What follows is the whole method, in the order it needs to happen. Know why you are doing it. Decide in advance what kind of detox you are doing, and for how long. Tell the people who will worry. Close the open loops that would otherwise pull you back. Build the list of things you actually want to do instead — before you need it, not during. Set up real accountability. Then begin.
Every session below is a short recording you can play right here, in order or on its own. This is the same material that sits inside Part 3 of the free course, where it is laid out step by step with everything around it. If you would rather just browse the sessions, they are all here.
The Twenty Sessions
The 3 Levels Of Digital Detox
Listen Or Keep Them
Every session above plays right here in your browser — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. To keep one, right-click (or press and hold on a phone) any session and choose Save link as… They are ordinary audio files, so they will drop straight into your music app and play offline.
First published 21 June 2018
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.