How To Become Unplugged
INTERVIEW ON THE PRICE OF BUSINESS SHOW, MEDIA PARTNER OF THIS SITE.
Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed Richard Simon.
On a recent Price of Business show, Host Kevin Price interviewed Richard Simon, author of UNPLUG: How to Break Up with Your Phone and Reclaim Your Life.
Richard Simon shows that it is—through his own experience and many others’, including but not limited to: an anesthesiologist, a software engineer, a social media marketer, a school principal, a law partner, a financial analyst, a chess grandmaster, and a Major League Baseball player who credits dropping the phone with big improvements in both his game and his family life.
Of course, professional commitments are just one piece of the puzzle. When Simon first decided to go phone-free for a year as an experiment, the toughest sell was his wife. What if one of the kids got sick, or she needed to reach him in an emergency? What about shared grocery lists, the banking app, and all the little ways that our smartphones seem to make family life run more smoothly? Spoiler alert: she came around to it. And like all the other subjects of this book, Simon reports that his personal relationships blossomed in the absence of screens.
After a year of detox, Simon relaxed his personal smartphone ban, but still keeps his phone off by default. Almost all of the other subjects he profiled resumed their smartphone use in some capacity. Many were able to enforce the boundaries they set during the detox; others are back where they started. But there are valuable lessons to learn from each, including:
- Why Hacks Don’t Work: Putting a rubber band around your phone, deleting social media apps, or going grey scale is not going to cut it.
- Break-Up Styles to Explore:
- Simplify Your Phone
- Off-by-Default
- Getting Rid of It Altogether
- Quitting with Someone Else
- Managing Withdrawal (because it won’t be painless at first)
- The logistics: i.e., learning to live without GPS
- What to do with all of that newfound time? Tales of deepened relationships, improved focus, creativity, and peace of mind
- Reintegration after a screen cleanse: pros, cons, and pitfalls
Simon is not an anti-technology activist—on the contrary, he directs the website strategy for Georgetown Law. He does not insist that everyone get rid of their smartphones altogether. The goal is to help readers reset their relationships with their phones to regain something even more valuable than entertainment, convenience, or constant contact: the startlingly finite resource of their time.
Whether you’re screen-free-curious or ready to take the plunge, Unplug offers practical ideas and inspiration for envisioning a life where your smartphone serves you, not the other way around.
HOW TO BREAKUP WITH YOU PHONE
Most people are trying hacks to form a more effective relationships with their phones. The most common ones include digital sabbaths, deleting social media, turning the phone to greyscale and wrapping the phone with a rubber band. But as Richard Simon points out in the book, the allure of the phone is too strong to simply hack. That is why we need to do something comprehensive: a reset. That’s where the detox comes in, and the first step is to turn off your smartphone for at least 60 days. Below are the four approaches outlined in the book:
Breakup Style 1: Simplify your phone
Put away your smartphone and get a basic phone. You can transfer your SIM card so you keep your number and all of your contacts, or you can only enter contacts you actually WANT to call. (Conan O’Brien recently did the latter.)
Breakup Style 2: Off by Default
Keep your smartphone with you, but you only turn it on if you need to accomplish a critical task. Examples include getting lost on the highway or a medical emergency. Then you turn it right back off.
Breakup Style 3: Get Rid of Your Phone.
This one requires the most coordination, but it’s doable. Think about life before cell phones: You were still able to meet up with people, reach them in a true emergency, go camping, etc. (But if you’re going this route, see Quit Tip #4.)
Breakup Style 4: Quit with someone else
This can be a great motivator, especially when you consider that quitting your phone will deepen your connection with that other person. It’s helpful to set shared goals, schedule check-ins, and plan fun, screen-free activities that you’ll do together.
Quit Tips
- Optimize your home for success by designating one specific area for high-dopamine activities like the computer and the TV, and making sure it’s at least a little bit separate from the rest of the house.
- If you want your detox to stick, invest in the process. Buy a digital camera and subscribe to a newspaper. With a physical newspaper, you will feel less anxious and just as informed if you only read your news once a day. With a camera, one source told Richard: “I find that there is a sweetness to be found in the process of taking photos, then coming home and loading them into my computer to view and edit however [many] I feel drawn to. . . . I’ve kind of let this become a process of self-discovery, just like with any other art form.”
- Remember that you are modeling healthy behaviors for loved ones.
- Recognize that you are the exception and be transparent. Explain to your friends, loved ones and colleagues what you are doing and why.
- Get comfortable without GPS. Write down directions in advance, or consider getting a paper map. Richard spoke with people for the book who used both of these tactics.
- Let people know how they can reach you (email, landline, knock on the door), but don’t take it personally if they push back.
- Write down your grocery list and if you live with someone, work on it together. This turns out to be much more efficient and relaxing than texting back and forth from the supermarket.
- Don’t substitute one high-dopamine activity for another. Several months into his smartphone detox, Richard noticed that he was streaming a lot of YouTube on his home computer and refreshing his email inbox constantly. In researching the book he learned from mental health experts like Dr. Anna Lembke that it’s natural for your brain to seek a dopamine replacement while you’re going through a smartphone detox. Schedule other activities for times when you used to scroll.
- Rediscover the experience of listening to music without doing anything else at the same time.
- Embrace boredom. Breathe. Experience the moment.
Richard Simon directs the website strategy at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., and is a former reporter and webmaster at Baltimore’s The Daily Record. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and three children. To this day, he leaves his smartphone off by default.
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