If you measure an addiction to a smartphone by the number of downloaded apps, I should probably be in rehab. I have three full pages. And that’s after bundling at least a third of them in subject folders in groups of six and nine. I so often ask Siri to set reminders and alarms for me that I am, pretty much, beeping all the time. And I supplement all that connectivity with an Apple Watch, where I track steps and workouts and time a lot of things that probably don’t need to be timed.
When I found myself yearning to go to one of those silent meditation weekends, primarily because I’d also have to surrender my iPhone, I saw this as an inner red flag. I began each day with a smartphone alarm and ended it with a podcast. I listened to music via Spotify when I woke up and audiobooks when I walked or drove anywhere. I texted. I emailed. I googled throughout the day. Basically, there was never any silence in my brain.
Smartphone owners interact with their devices an average of 85 times per day, including immediately upon waking (check) and just before going to sleep (check). Nearly everyone, a whopping 91 percent, report never leaving their homes without it (double check). This dependency on smartphones, according to a 2017 study published by the Association of Consumer Research takes a significant slice of our limited cognitive processing power, just by being within sight.
In other words: even when we aren’t using the smartphone, our longing for, all that 24/7 information and communication damages our ability to pay attention to what is right in front of us –like people and tasks. In an effort to change some of my bad habits, I decided to give up my smartphone for a week. Or rather, because a week is too short an experiment to invest in a flip phone, I decided to give up all the functions of my smartphone except telephone calls, which frankly, is its least-used capability. I sidelined my iPad and my Apple Watch, too, just to be safe.
I allowed myself access to the internet via my laptop, but only for work and essential communication. For good measure, I banned myself from all social media. It was only a week, right?
Day One: Sunday
Although I bought an electric alarm clock, I forgot to bring it when we went to Martha’s Vineyard for the long weekend. Because I power through my last audiobook to finish it by my midnight deadline, I fall asleep without shutting off my smartphone. The bird chirping alarm woke me at 7:15 a.m. So I begin my experiment by technically cheating.
To compensate, I shut the phone down completely and left it at home when we drove to Squibnocket Beach and the Gay Head Cliffs in Aquinnah. I can’t take any photos of our friends who are visiting, but they take photos and promise to send them to me when my week of exile is up. I am hardly deprived.
Day Two: Monday
To avoid temptation, I keep my phone shut down unless I have to make a phone call. I leave it behind when we go to Chappaquiddick.
It’s 3 p.m. and wow, I haven’t Googled anything all day. Not the kinds of turtles we see in the Mytoi garden pond, not the brand of the French chocolate I can’t recall, or the title of the sea rescue film set in Chatham that we all saw and can’t remember.
Box turtle. Snapping Turtle. Valrhona Chocolate and The Finest Hours—in case you were wondering. The last two answers were produced by human recall, only slightly delayed. The turtle images were Googled, but not by me.
The first two smartphone-free days are not much of a challenge because I’m off my usual routine. I feel a bit more silence in my brain, but I might be imagining it.
Day Three: Tuesday
That afternoon, I have a doctor’s appointment a few towns away. I print directions from the internet that morning and it estimates a 25-minute drive. That afternoon, I hit truck traffic that I’m 99 percent sure would have caused my real-time Waze app to reroute me. I almost turn around because I think I passed a right I need to make, and am annoyed that Roger Federer, who voices my Waze directions, isn’t on hand to reassure me. I’m almost fifteen minutes late for the appointment.
Day Four: Wednesday
In the morning, I look dejectedly at my Bose micro speaker that so wirelessly connects to my Spotify account. I go downstairs and contemplate our elaborate stereo system. It has speakers in nearly every room that I can never activate. There is an index card of instructions I wrote down soon after we bought the house. There are eight steps and it looks like the cable to the turntable is missing. I go upstairs, make the bed, and put away laundry in silence. That’s the point, right, more silence?
Day Five: Thursday
Texting is both the biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage of the smartphone. The advantage is that grown children, who are busy working jobs and raising families, communicate more frequently by text than if they have to call.
The disadvantage is that I would rather respond to their texts than focus on my work.
Although my husband agrees to carry his smartphone and keep it turned on while I conduct this experiment, in case of emergencies, normally, he’s determinedly untethered to it. The result is that our children, sometimes his sisters, and a few of his friends will text me when they need to get a message to him.
It turns out to be a bonus not being the one who has to carry a smartphone around.
Day Six. Friday.
The thing about not being on your smartphone is this: You notice how much everyone else is on it. At restaurants, in the grocery lines, waiting for the ATM. Basically, all the time people used to smoke cigarettes. I wonder when all the research is laid bare, which will be worse for our overall health.
My husband and I went to see the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie that evening. We are not huge fans, but the film is playing at the community theater we like to support. My husband is more taken with her performance and the production than he expected.
From my high perch of 139 hours without a smartphone, I am appalled to look over and see him Googling during the movie. Really? He swears it’s just to find out what time it ends because the local restaurants will be closing, but on the way home he knows an awful lot of the technical elements that went into the stage set.
Day 7: Saturday
I’d like to say that my lack of connectivity to Spotify motivated me to figure out those eight steps to our stereo system, but really it just motivated me to get my husband to hook it up. He puts on the first of our albums. Poco. A band I almost forgot. As I clean out closets upstairs and he does the yard work, we listen to six more albums. Orleans. Blondie. Phoebe Snow, Pure Prairie League. The Birds. Lee Michaels. These are artists that never come up in my algorithm. It’s a lovely morning.
My daughter comes over for a visit while I am cooking dinner. I have to make a printout of the recipe for her because I can’t send the link. I notice her scrolling through her smartphone for potential Halloween costumes for her kids. From my high perch of now 161 hours without a smartphone, I tell her that she spends too much time shopping on hers. Remarkably, she agrees and puts it down.
Conclusion: Sunday
When I powered up my phone for the first day of my return, I hoped to see a message from Apple that I’d reduced my screen time by like, a million percent, but no such satisfaction. Apple either couldn’t keep track because I so often shut my phone down, or didn’t want to reinforce my independence. I have fourteen missed text messages. There was nothing that couldn’t be responded to a week late.
I asked my husband if I seemed any less distracted, but he said, “not really.” Do I feel more focused? I managed to remember everything for a week without electronic reminders, does that count? Seven days isn’t an awful lot of time to make structural changes in the brain.
Will I replace my smartphone with a Gabb phone or another of the new generation of internet-free phones marketed as healthier options for teenagers, and interestingly, for people trying to break pornography habits? Not yet. For one thing, I’m not about to give up the convenience of GPS while driving, for another: they all come with texting and texting is pretty much my biggest weakness.
But, I did delete eight apps from my screen, and I broke some bad habits. Since I now have that electric alarm clock, I no longer keep my smartphone bedside. I put it in my office to charge overnight, so I can’t look at it upon waking up or right before going to bed. I’ve discovered that I sleep better without falling asleep to a podcast or audiobook since I don’t wake up when the timer shuts off.
I’m also keeping the smartphone in another room while I’m working—like right now, and, even though the studies say that powering it off doesn’t have any effect, I power it off anyway. I also ordered a new case to separate it from my wallet, so I don’t have to carry it absolutely everywhere. Because if there’s one thing I learned from my experiment, is that if you have it nearby, the smartphone, literally and figuratively, keeps calling out to you.
Jan Brogan has been a journalist for more than thirty years, working as a correspondent for the Boston Globe, a staff writer for the Worcester Telegram and the Providence Journal, where she won the Gerald Loeb award for distinguished business writing. She is the award-winning author of five mysteries, “The Combat Zone: Murder, Race, and Boston’s Struggle for Justice“, “Final Copy”, “Confidential Source”, “Yesterday’s Fatal, and Teaser”. She grew up in Clifton, New Jersey, and moved to New England to study journalism at Boston University. She holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She continues to work as a novelist and a journalist, and she teaches writing at the Boston University Summer Journalism Institute.
