How To Create A Digital Minimalism Practice And Protect Your Mental Peace

I roll over in bed to a technicolored screen littered with emails, texts, and news notifications, jolted awake by my phone’s alarm. In this vulnerable moment between sleep and consciousness, I’m confronted with a thousand ways the world’s on fire and a million to-dos sprinkled in between. 

“In this vulnerable moment between sleep and consciousness, I’m confronted with a thousand ways the world’s on fire and a million to-dos sprinkled in between.”

Like clockwork, I sink under the reminder of how little control I feel.

Slumping from bed, I slip in my earphones. Partly there, but mostly not, I move through my morning in a state of what professor Sherry Turkle describes as “forever elsewhere.” I choose any form of media to fill the quiet, opting for someone’s well-articulated thoughts instead of the unformulated chatter of my own. 

“I choose any form of media to fill the quiet, opting for someone’s well-articulated thoughts instead of the unformulated chatter of my own.”

My earphones remain in as I eat breakfast, get ready, and walk to work. They’re plugged right back in at the end of the day, filling my head with music, audiobooks, and videos. So commences my daily cloud of digital input — an ongoing rejection of attending to my inner world.

After months of this as my norm, I realized I was stuck in a cycle of habitually ghosting myself, using tech as my aid. Unable to sit with my own thoughts, I relied on digital noise to drown them out. To both my rescue and my detriment, my devices offered me infinite pacification in an existence that, more often than not, felt too heavy to deal with. 

But technology isn’t the enemy in this story. My unchecked relationship with it is. 

How to begin interrogating your relationship to tech

The slope of screen-induced numbness is slipperier than many of us might realize. Excessive screen time and a lack of boundaries with technology are proving to change the landscape of our world and our brains, and for generations of adolescents, these effects can have life-altering consequences. 

Nevertheless, ​it’s clear humanity is running a million miles an hour toward becoming more tech-dependent, not less. With the rise of AI tools, it’s simply unrealistic to think we can escape it. Not to mention, for the majority of us, our livelihoods, communities, and everyday responsibilities are too intertwined with tech-based tools to afford the privilege of eliminating it completely. 

“​It’s clear humanity is running a million miles an hour toward becoming more tech-dependent, not less.”

And maybe we shouldn’t try. 

The question is then: How do we function in a tech-obsessed world without being consumed by it? How do we engage with products of an industry that are designed to “colonize every minute of your life,” as filmmaker and comedian Bo Burnham describes? Is there an equilibrium that can be struck where we can both enjoy technology’s undeniable benefits while also protecting against its potential harm? 

Customize your tech relationship

Cal Newport’s book, “Digital Minimalism,” urges us to create a “philosophy of technology” — a personalized relationship to screens, devices, and media with a set of boundaries we respect each day. Newport elaborates, “A digital minimalist starts with a well-formed vision of what they want their life to be. What do they value? What do they want to spend their time doing? They then work backward from this vision to figure out what technology they want to use.” 

“A digital minimalism practice is about being in conscious control of your technology and how much attention you allow it to ask of you.”

While the idea of “minimalism” might evoke feelings of restriction and lack, the intent isn’t to pressure you to delete every app, throw your devices in the sea, and communicate only by smoke signal. The regressive approach isn’t necessarily better. That’s for you to decide. 

Instead, a digital minimalism practice is about being in conscious control of your technology and how much attention you allow it to ask of you. As tech ethicist Tristan Harris notes, “If something is a tool,” like many of us were sold to believe technology to be, “it genuinely is just sitting there waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you” with pings, notifications, and nudges. 

By being selective about the screens you allow into your everyday life, you ensure that if a piece of technology is active in your world, it’s for a calculated reason, and that reason is to bring you closer to the life you want to live, not further from it.

Read on for three ways you can begin to create a fresh relationship with tech and build a customized set of guardrails that uniquely fit you. 

Put your screen time into perspective 

How much of your life are you giving to screens? Let’s find out.

Type into your smartphone’s search bar, “Screen Time” and you’ll be brought to a feature that gives you insight into the main apps that hold your attention and for how long on average. Take that number of hours and add it to your best guess of how long you typically spend with your computer, gaming system, streaming platforms, and other screen-based tech per week.

“How much of your life are you giving to screens?”

Next, plug that total into Randy Ginsberg’s Screen Time Calculator to get a better sense of how many years of your life, at this rate, will be spent in front of a screen. 

Dive into the following prompts to investigate what this number means to you.

• How do I feel about the number of years that could be consumed by screens? Do I want to feel different or the same? 

• What percentage of my screen time is not optional (school, work, financial management, etc.)? 

• For optional screen time, what media consistently makes me feel lighter, more connected, and more joyful after using it? What doesn’t?

• For the amount of years I’m projected to spend in front of a screen, what could life look like if I gained back that time? What could I spend it doing? Where would I go? What could I experience? 

Whether we realize it or not, time with screens is an exchange of attention and energy, and sometimes the benefit is worth the investment and sometimes it’s not. But whichever camp this falls is not black and white. Tech use is a nuanced part of each of our lives, which makes designing your personal relationship with it all the more imperative. 

As you move through these prompts, ground yourself again and again in the question: “Is this piece of technology supporting or diminishing the kind of life I want to lead?” 

Identify the root cause

As you work to create a digital minimalism practice that’ll serve you in the long run, it’s vital you ask yourself why you typically reach for technology in the first place. Outside obligation to work, school, or other responsibilities, what emotions precede jumping online or tuning into a piece of media?

“Outside obligation to work, school, or other responsibilities, what emotions precede jumping online or tuning into a piece of media?”

Until I dug into why I felt the need to constantly drown myself in digital noise, I easily justified the habit. After all, I was listening to books, podcasts, and video essays most of the time. It had the appearance of education on the surface, but in reality, I simply couldn’t tolerate a moment of quiet. The silence made me vulnerable to the rumbling of thoughts and feelings inside that I felt too unequipped and too tired to navigate. Digital noise became the perpetual snooze button I clicked on my inner turmoil.

But in doing so, the lack of quiet detached me from the present and myself, illustrating in real time Pascal’s quote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Consider journaling through the following prompts to dig further into what emotional role technology might be playing in your life. There are no right or wrong answers; only honest ones. 

• Why do I gravitate towards screens in the first place? 

• What feelings or situations typically precede my need to escape with technology? Do I want to continue with this pattern? Why or why not? 

• What does screen time give me that I’m not getting elsewhere, or perhaps, getting in a healthier way I feel better about? 

• If my go-to media were wiped from existence tomorrow, what vacancy would it create in my life? How would I feel about the loss?

A layered understanding of what makes us reach for our devices, and what those reasons might reveal, is essential in building a relationship to tech that goes beyond the surface of behavioral management. 

Detox and notice

Consider doing a digital detox of any or all optional media to investigate which pieces of technology are worth having in your life and which are not. 

You can go cold turkey or eliminate one app, streaming service, or digital habit at a time, taking note of the effects you feel. Try detoxing for a day, a week, or a month — whatever duration feels best for you. 

“Try detoxing for a day, a week, or a month — whatever duration feels best for you.”

Another detoxing method is selecting one moment in your day when you know you typically engage with a screen out of habit. For example, if you always scroll through TikTok while you eat lunch, set aside the first 15 minutes of your break to mindfully eat instead. Give yourself to the experience of what your food tastes like, how it feels to fill your body with fuel, and where your mind wanders. Do this for a week and take note of how you feel.

At the end of your detox period, reintegrate the tech back into your life as you had it before and sit with these questions:

• Do I feel more or less at peace with this piece of technology back in my day-to-day? 

• Was there anything surprising about taking a step away from this tech for a time? 

• Is there anything about these apps, platforms, or services that I didn’t notice before my detox? 

• Does this device or service make living every day easier for me? Why or why not? 

Experiment with as many detoxes as you’d like to get a better sense of how each go-to piece of technology is affecting your life, and observe how its elimination either adds to or subtracts from your joy. 

Live the life you want

Creating your unique digital minimalism practice begins with taking an honest look at what role screens are playing in your day-to-day and returning to the question of, “Is this expanding or diminishing the life I want to lead?”

“Creating your unique digital minimalism practice begins with taking an honest look at what role screens are playing in your day-to-day.”

For months, I buried myself under a dogpile of digital noise, using screens to mask and delay the uncomfortable emotions I felt inside. Technology itself was never the root issue, but until I learned to adjust my relationship to it, it would’ve happily continued to pacify me into numbness. 

A digital minimalism practice puts you back in the driver’s seat of your consumption helping to create a conscious relationship to technology that you mindfully design. 

What role does technology play in your life? How do you balance your digital consumption? Is it possible to live fully embodied and present in an ever more digitized world? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments! 

A few digital minimalism tips:

• Unsubscribe from newsletters, brand emails, and news alerts you never read. The two seconds it takes to unsubscribe now will save you tons of time deleting later.
• Turn off all notifications that are not of time-sensitive importance. 
• Go on an awe walk each day without headphones (and your phone if you feel safe to).
• Have an Analog Hour each day where you engage only with analog-based activities.
• Make temptation easy to avoid by keeping your phone in a designated drawer while you’re working, studying, or spending quality time with loved ones. 
• Check out The Guardian’s Reclaim Your Brain Challenge — a free email series to help you systematically “reset your screen habits.” 
• Have a Digital Ditch Day once a month where you leave your phone at home and engulf yourself in an activity that requires no tech. 
• Determine a time each night for a house-wide device shutdown, keeping all screens out of the bedroom.
• Use a sunrise or old-school alarm clock to help you break the habit of the morning scroll. Take it from marriage and family therapist, Maris Loeffler who “cautions us not to pick up the phone after the alarm goes off in the morning. She explains that looking at our email or social media on our phones while still in bed jolts the nervous system and can trigger the fight-or-flight response since we aren’t fully awake yet.”
• Take this tip from Elizabeth Gilbert and put a permanent expectations-setting reply on your email. Here’s one of hers: “Please forgive delayed responses or none at all. I’m trying to gain liberation from the robot overlords and not spend my life looking at screens, and that means I can’t respond to everything…If you don’t hear back from me, please be cool.”

Cheyanne Solis is a copywriter relieving entrepreneurs to rest and invest more in what they love. She writes on practical wellness and mindful productivity from the perspective of sustainable work-life balance. Explore her work and connect here.