The original point of a detox was that if you literally have a toxic substance in your body, you need to get rid of it. Our bodies do not accumulate a substance called “digital,” so this concept does not apply.
A digital detox is more like a crash diet. You eat nothing (or, like, just juice) for a time, with the hopes that you get skinnier during that time. You may hope that you’ll get out of the habit of eating high-calorie food (or checking your phone all the time). But really, it’s just a way of assuaging guilt before you go back to your old habits.
In a sense, it is a hack to quit Facebook and leave all the emotional labor to your spouse/partner. But there is nothing you can discover during a digital detox that will change the fact that mega-corporations use your attention as fuel for stockholders. So take a “detox” if you like, but be honest with yourself if it’s just a vacation.
What has helped a bit for me (but more for saving battery screen time) is to disable pop up notifications for social media sites (I look at them later after work) but I still allow instant messenger notifications through. That separates the more urgent from the less urgent and halves the notifications I get every day.
See lifehacker.com/why-digital-det…
