By: Camden Baucke, MS, LLP
As a therapist, you always hope to practice what you preach—but we’re human too. We feel nervous, make mistakes, and have our own challenges.
I also like to take on the specific challenges I assign my clients, just to know what it’s like to be my client.
A common challenge I’ve assigned is boundaries with technology—screens and social media.
As a taste of my own medicine, for 2 weeks I went on a digital detox. It was difficult given most of my work is done on devices, but my experience was fascinating. There were highs and lows, but I now understand the result of what I’ve been prescribing.
Here is what I learned from a 2 week digital detox, as a therapist and researcher.
It Felt Impossible to Escape
Only when you try to disconnect, do you recognize just how deeply technology is integrated into our lives.
Devices are everywhere. A digital detox first felt intimidating just by the sheer logistics of it—finding ways to get away from my phone without needing it for work or errands. It especially became difficult when considering how often I would need to put the phone away, with the constant thought that someone will need me right as I put it down.
I recognized, throughout those last two weeks, that if someone struggles with digital addictions, the boundaries of modern work, society, and relationships may make it nearly impossible to get away from.
It Made Me Less Accessible
Only when you put your phone away, do you realize it’s the conduit in which anyone across the world can grab your attention.
When you put your phone away, there’s plenty of people and things that can no longer access you—inflammatory social media posts, distressing news from family, someone trauma-dumping on Facebook.
It also means that anyone who struggles with crossing boundaries, especially communication-oriented ones, has no way to cross your boundary.
While mostly positive, being less accessible also made me alert for all the important notifications I could be missing—notifications about local events, news of a grandparent’s death, or anything I might actually want to be accessible for.
A digital detox showed me the freedom of being less accessible when I desire, but also the balance it requires to be accessible when you need to be.
My Days Felt Quieter
When your phone is no longer pumping information into your brain, you suddenly have much less stimuli in your day.
You literally deal with less information—after examining what information I was missing out on, I didn’t feel too bad. I wasn’t benefiting from knowing what Dave eats for breakfast, the top ten ways to maximize my productivity, or why gratitude is the magical cure for mental health.
I realized processing information actually costs cognitive resources.
Upon further research, I discovered that social media is the worst of this—switching between videos actually strains the brain, causing mental fatigue while promising relief from it.
While I loved that my days were quieter, it also caused me to reflect on the importance of social media and related news—it allows people to be informed of important information and topics. I wanted to stay involved in what matters, to be appraised on important situations in the nation or my community. However, I was able to substitute for it by reading books on related subjects.
Additionally, plenty of difficult emotions, thoughts, or memories linger in the noise that technology makes—when the volume lowers, unresolved issues can become noticeable and momentarily distressing. However, if they’re still distressing, that’s your brain calling for you to deal with them.
Quieter days are objectively more healthy for the mind, but it’s hard to balance it with wanting to be aware of current events and/or managing unresolved emotional issues.
I Felt More Effective
It’s amazing to take inventory of the problems you are exposed to on a daily basis.
If you scroll Instagram, you will watch thousands of videos with people’s negative opinions on thousands of problems—most of which you can’t do anything about. You can become aware of a million problems you don’t have the resources or time to directly address.
There are plenty of social issues that are important just to be wary of, but there are plenty of problems that are posed in an alarmist and overwhelming way, leaving you to feel more helpless than before.
When I started limiting the problems I was confronted with, I was noticed I was able to solve more of them—sounds simple enough, but it emphasized my locus of control.
When I did accomplish those things, I also noticed the reward circuitry in my brain was more responsive.
Solving problems felt rewarding, even the daily ones I usually don’t like to do.
Boredom Enhanced Memories
When your brain is constantly flooded with the neurotransmitter dopamine, your brain can feel fuzzy.
Screens of all sorts help release this chemical, which is typically known as the “pleasure” chemical, but dopamine is much more than that. Dopamine is actually more oriented around work than anything—it’s the “do this, receive this, and do it again to receive more” chemical. It drives and sustains behaviors and habits.
I’ve noticed most people describe it as a pleasure chemical because of how it makes you feel better.
A digital detox is taking away a primary source of something that makes you feel better, just by looking at it. There were times in my digital detox where my brain craved that feeling, and had gotten so used to having it that my hand automatically reached for my phone to experience it.
That’s when I noticed boredom was substantially more difficult to regulate.
Any moment of unproductive time could be directed back to my phone, affecting my dopamine levels—the neurotransmitter to make me feel like I’m doing something real and reward me for it. In reality, I was being rewarded like a sponge absorbing water.
So for two weeks, I stared at stuff instead.
Instead of draining my brain by uploading it with thousands of forgettable facts, I decided to take in the world around me.
Every bus was decorated with ads, ads I hadn’t seen before. Rooms had details on the walls I had never noticed.
I started to tune into the sounds, the details of my surroundings, and the atmosphere of daily scenarios—as a result, my memories of these situations became more vivid.
It makes sense, as a memory is the accumulation of stimuli you paid attention to in a given situation—if your phone is distracting you from those details, they will not be in your memories, and your memories will be less vivid.
Boredom Sparked My Imagination
Our brain has this wonderful thing called the Default Mode Network (DMN).
It’s responsible for activating the brain when it is as rest—so your brain activates more deeply when you’re bored! All it takes is just 10-15 minutes of boredom before it activates, and boy did I feel this.
Every bus ride, every morning, every night—boredom was quickly rewarded with internally sourced entertainment.
The threshold of boredom sucks, don’t get me wrong, but once you break it, you feel it in your brain. Your mind lights up and all of a sudden thinking isn’t so demanding, it feels pleasurable. Your imagination sparks and suddenly your head is up in the clouds, pondering a vast array of ideas.
I also noticed the self-referential side of the DMN—your brain starts to consider YOU more often.
My mind would more easily consider how my day has gone, my life journey, my emotions, and my wants for the future.
Reading books felt rewarding again because of how my brain was able to endure the threshold of boredom, so I could engross my imagination into silent stories.
The DMN is crucial for narrating your life experience—the more external distractions you have, the more you’re observing life rather than deeply living it and considering your part in it.
My Direction Became Clearer
Because we’re neurologically rewarded with dopamine for simply holding a device and pressing buttons, our brain is numbed to authentic direction.
Oftentimes, we find passions and hobbies by how they make our brain feel—if we truly feel rewarded by how a specific task goes, we’ll be more likely to pursue that task and make it a more frequent occurrence.
However, after being inundated with technology, those very important pings of satisfaction can feel like drops of rain in an ocean.
My digital detox took away the ocean—it made me feel like there were more definitive moments of feeling rewarded and not. The moments of feeling unrewarded are always disappointing, but that’s an emotion we’re supposed to feel. It’s what informs us of what experiences didn’t match our expectations, and helps inform our next steps.
My direction became even clearer the more responsive my brain was to the difference between rewarding and disappointing experiences. It helped me have direction for my career, relationships, and everyday tasks.
My Mental World Got Smaller
There’s a feeling my generation has been pining for ever since the turn of the century, and I believe it’s the idea of a smaller mental world.
The idea that your focus is alerted to only what’s going on within your life circumstances. This is also described as mindfulness. It’s paying attention to the life happening around you.
Mindfulness means letting your “mind be where your feet are” and only focusing on stimuli that are in your current environment. There are evidence-based, highly-researched mindfulness based therapy treatments that help you attain this mental state.
Some might call this ignorance, and it can be true at times—but not all ignorance is bad.
Parents who ignore their child’s tantrum are teaching their child that an outburst of emotions isn’t how you get what you want. Narcissistic family members often want your admiration, which would require your attention, seeking to get it anyway they can—so ignoring them is setting a healthy boundary. My digital detox itself was a boundary—neglecting my screens and ignoring any information they would provide.
When I did, I realized that my daily routines remained the same, if not changed for the better. My physical world stayed the same, but my mental world matched that size and it simply felt like living.
The Moral Quandary of Knowing
In those two weeks, I realized the gravity of the internet—the weight of social obligations to know what can be known.
Know who across the world is suffering, how they’re suffering, and the context of the situation.
This can be positive in many ways—reading the narratives of other’s suffering often allows us to foster empathy and practice more prosocial behavior.
I also see how it could be negative, because it is overwhelming to know millions across the world are suffering, and all you can do about it is go back home and twiddle your thumbs.
As a therapist, this is a boundary my profession faces all the time—how easily we can go from being mentally engrossed in our personal lives into the minds of those suffering from extraordinary pain. However, my knowledge of other people’s inner worlds is important because I’m trained to treat it—I have the ability to implement changes and make a difference.
I’m not going to assume I have the golden ticket to the perfect balance between altruistic awareness and mindful ignorance, but it is a balance. If I learned anything from my 2 week digital detox, technology often forces you to learn towards the extreme of knowing too much.
Final Thoughts
Two weeks of a digital detox illuminated the “boiling-frog” movement of modern technology for me.
Only by abstaining from technology could I see how it creeped into every facet of my life, internally and externally. By no means it was a black-and-white experience and this isn’t a “technology bad” article.
Using technology is simply a decision, like most others, and it has consequences. Similarly, detoxing from it is also a decision, with consequences of its own.
I’m glad I got a taste of my own medicine—it’s allowed me to experience a different life for two weeks.
Using what I felt, and what I learned, I can find a balance of technology that better suits my mental health. By reading this article, I also hope you would choose to do the same.
Reflections 
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