Ideally, I would have found this book before I started on my smartphone/social media detox but I only heard about this book when it was recommended during the talk on the defence of self-help. But better late than never, and I was interested to see if this book could help in the post-detox month.

This book is divided into two parts: The Wake-Up and The Breakup. The Wake-Up is designed to persuade you why you need to break up with your phone – their design to addict us, why it’s killing our attention span (spoiler: we can’t actually multi-task), and that social media could be worsening our mental health. If you’ve read other similar books, like Digital Minimalism, or have read long-form essays about social media, lots of this won’t be new to you. But it’s a pretty nice summary of the whole thing.

The second part, The Breakup, is a four-week programme on how to break up with your phone. You actually only ‘break up’ with your phone for two days in the four weeks – the rest of the time is spent preparing for the breakup and how to continue this new relationship with your phone.

Looking at the thirty-day plan, I find that I really like the emphasis on preparation and the fact that you only do one small thing a day. This makes it easier to build momentum throughout the plan and to assess your habits even before you stop using your phone. The preparation phase involves tracking your phone usage and being more thoughtful and aware of the way you’re currently using the phone, which are all things that sound very sensible to me.

On the other hand, I’m not too fond of the fact that the actual breakup only lasts for two days. It is definitely more drastic than the programme in Digital Minimalism because you have to leave your phone to one side for the entire weekend. I like the idea of regular phone fasts when you’ve already established a new habit with the phone, but I don’t know if a sudden and short break is enough to totally realign your relationship – I suppose the preparation phase would help, but if you weren’t really invested in the first three weeks, it may just be an unpleasant shock.

Overall, I definitely took some inspiration from the book. I am definitely interested in a phone fast, but I’m wondering about the logistics of it – I’ll be having a vacation which would be the perfect opportunity to practice a fast except for a few things: I need my phone for camera and google maps. Perhaps I’ll use some of the tools recommended in the book (the Freedom app sounds good) to basically make sure my phone can only be used for these two functions and do a version of a phone fast during my vacation.