What do you get when you’re challenged with a 5-day digital detox for a grad school project? Fine, easy, fabulous, and unexpected overtime during an Ebola outbreak. (For context, I’m a graphic artist at the CDC.)
Beyond My Control
I chose Instagram — my main social squeeze — thinking it would be a tough 5-day detox. Together with Claude, I built a mini web tracker and daily journal capturing mood, focus, anxiety, urge, pickups, one word per day (hence the “fine, easy, fabulous”), and qualitative notes.
The week arrived with unexpected and consuming Ebola response projects and a planned houseguest — the former turning the experiment on its head because informing citizens outweighs Instagram any day.
On day 1, I signed in to work to see RUSH and URGENT social media requests for the Ebola response. What started as a simple request quickly devolved into hours of edits and multiple projects spanning the week and evenings.
What the Data Said
The data showed that social and overall screentime were down. Productivity screen time increased, likely because of my work on the response. The urge to check Instagram decreased during the detox, as well as phone pickups. Half of which were work-related, double the week before.
Instagram was the first-used app 31 times the week before and 0 times during the detox. And even though the data says it was “fine” and “easy” to stay away, I still had the urge to post 6 times in the 5 days.
The Honest Outcome
Choosing Instagram as my digital detox felt daunting in the beginning, but the data, and well, the real-world chaos showed me otherwise. What I can’t know is if the detox had anything to do with my Instagram abstinence, or if life intervened so much that Instagram wasn’t even on the table.
Use of productivity apps went up because of the outbreak — making work responsible for the reaches, not the habit. And back to my houseguest on days 4 and 5, could it be that human presence also put social media urges on the back burner?
The detox, life’s unpredictability, and life in general happened simultaneously — something the data wouldn’t be able to distinguish. And that’s just the honest outcome.
Who’s Responsible?
Hartford and Stein describe digital distraction as a structural problem, not a personal one. And comparing it to other harmful behaviors, most people don’t know how to manage their relationship with digital technology — personally and professionally. The data show that while I stopped using Instagram, the urge to pick up my phone was unfazed.
In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari describes how technology ethicist Tristan Harris realized that the apps we access from our phones were designed for distraction, not the smartphones themselves.
This detox week left me with more questions than answers. Is digital distraction really our fault? Would a quieter week have told a different story? And if the detox reveals the system is built for our distraction, regardless of the tools we use, who is responsible for changing that?
AI tools supported research, additional source identification, and editing for this post.