Week 4 of the February Phone Breakup Challenge
How to better curate your digital life
Friends: Welcome to Week 4 of the February Phone Breakup Challenge. It’s the final week of our challenge and I’m so glad you’re here.
As a reminder, The February Phone Breakup Challenge is your opportunity to do the 30-day plan in How to Break Up With Your Phone with other people (and me!). Paid subscribers get access to a private support group chat where we’ve been sharing experiences and offering each other support.
Congratulations to Those of You Who Did The Trial Separation!
Last weekend was a big one for the Phone Breakup Challenge: from Friday to Saturday nights, many people took me up on the challenge of taking a full 24-hour break from their phones. (I know: they are very brave!) I’m extremely happy to report that for many of them, the experience was as wonderful as I’d hoped it would be. Here are a few anonymous snippets of people’s reflections, which made me very happy to read:
I haven’t been able to write a song in months, which I had blamed on being a busy parent. But during the phone fast, lyric and melody ideas started to bubble up to the surface.
It really wasn't that hard - in fact, the main feeling I noticed was relief.
On Sunday morning . . . I just sat outside and drank my coffee. And noticed that there were so many different birds chirping. I NEVER ever ever just sit down outside and do nothing. Why not?
In general, this whole challenge has been a practice in weaning myself from social media and mindlessly checking my phone, and it might just be working!
Bonus points if anyone dream-journaled. (Photo by Haley Powers on Unsplash)
Intrigued? Suffering from FOMO? Don’t worry: you could try your own Trial Separation/Digital Sabbath this coming weekend. And if you want to do it with other people, great news:
The Global Day of Unplugging is March 7-8!
The Global Day of Unplugging is exactly what it sounds like: a chance to join other people around the world in turning off your phone for 24 hours and tuning in to real life. I’ll be telling you about it more in next week’s newsletter, but here’s their site if you want to look into it and invite friends to join you.
This Week’s Assignment: Curate Your Digital Life
The first week of the Phone Breakup Challenge was focused on establishing a baseline and setting goals for yourself. The second week was about setting boundaries. The third week was about rebuilding our atrophied attention spans. (If you missed my Substack live with meditation expert Dan Harris, paid subscribers can watch the whole thing here.)
Our goal this week is to begin to lock in some of the changes we’ve made and start to better curate our digital lives, with the goal of creating a customized, positive relationship with our devices that keeps the good stuff while reducing and eliminating the bad.
Clean Up Your Digital Life: Prune Your Accounts!
By this point in the breakup challenge, my hope is that you have a much clearer sense of how you use your phone, how you want to use your phone, how you want to interact with the virtual world in general, and how you want to be spending your attention.
That’s why I'd like you to use this week to start to "prune" some of your digital life. For example, if you open social media (or, er, Substack) this week, and you see something that stresses you out unnecessarily, or that you don't WANT to see, or that makes you start to compare yourself to other people, take a moment to unsubscribe or unfollow the account. (You can do the same thing with email: instead of deleting unwanted emails, take the time to actually unsubscribe.)
If you do this every time you open the apps between now and the end of our breakup next week, you may be amazed by the difference it makes in how you interact with these apps—not to mention your overall stress and anxiety levels. It's a great way to continue to identify/preserve the parts of technology/your phone that make you feel good, and reduce/eliminate what makes you feel bad.
Give it a go and report back!
Need some new bedtime reading?
If last week’s discussion about mindfulness and meditation piqued your curiosity and you want to go deeper on how meditation can help you relate to technology with more joy and less guilt, I have a new resource for you: my colleague Jay Vidyarthi’s new book, which is out today:
I love the idea of recommending books regularly in this newsletter, specifically so that you can read them during the time you might otherwise have spent swiping around on your phone. I might just have to make this a regular thing!
Reflection Questions:
No matter where you are in your phone breakup journey, I encourage you to reflect on these questions (feel free to share some of your responses in the comments):
What have you tried? What have you noticed, observed, or learned? What’s working? What’s not? What are you curious about? What would you like to change? What have other people in your life (including your kids, if you have them) noticed about how you interact with your phone? What do you feel proud of?
Here’s to scrolling less, living more, and curating our digital lives,
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Get the Book:
The February Phone Breakup Challenge traces the steps in the book’s 30-day plan, so for maximum effect, it’s best to have a copy. (And if you haven’t done the phone breakup challenge with us this month, but want to do it on your own, the full 30-day plan is in the book!)
Announcing the Updated Workbook:
Over the years, many people have requested a workbook for How to Break Up With Your Phone — so I created a printable PDF workbook (delivered as a digital download) designed to be used alongside the book. I’m happy to say that it’s now fully revised and updated to reflect the changes in the new edition. It’s certainly possible to go through the plan without the workbook, but if you think it’d be helpful, here you go.
Paid subscribers get a 50% discount! (The code is in the footer of the email.)
Questions? Issues? Start with the FAQ!
I’ve tried my best to address your most common questions in the FAQ (including how to use the chat feature).
Hi Catherine, Really impressed by your work. Great Name of your newsletter How To Feel Alive. If we can connect would be amazing! I have a great mission to serve the people on Substack! Thank you so much in advance.
I didn’t expect a “phone breakup” to feel this human.
But the moment I took that 24-hour digital Sabbath, it hit me: I’d outsourced my attention to an algorithm. And what I got back in return—quiet, clarity, even creativity—was worth infinitely more.
This challenge isn’t just about phones. It’s about reclaiming agency in a world that profits from our distraction.
Thank you for leading the way, Catherine.