A review by emilyinherhead
How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price

challenging hopeful informative inspiring fast-paced

5.0

This is a short work of nonfiction split into two parts: first, “the wake up,” in which Catherine Price details how smartphones, though helpful in many ways, have also become harmful, mentally-damaging time sucks; and then, “the break up / make up,” her plan for gradually dismantling and rebuilding your relationship to your device.

I cannot overstate just how immediately intrigued I was when I heard Traci Thomas talk on The Stacks podcast about working through this book with her husband. My feelings about my phone have been a subject of personal reflection for quite some time now, and I’ve long known somewhere deep in my bones that I needed a reset like this. Price’s book sounded absolutely perfect for me, and listening to Traci and her husband talk about it made me want to get a copy right away.

So I did.

I started reading on a Sunday evening and finished the next morning, beyond ready to launch into the phone break-up process—which, incidentally, Price recommends beginning on a Monday.

The first few days involve some usage tracking and reflection questions. The first bigger step is to remove all social media apps from your phone. Yes. Whoa.

The idea here is not to completely stop using things like Instagram and Twitter, but to reduce the effects of the ingeniously devised features that the apps rely on to suck you in and keep you scrolling (which, as many of us know, often leads to feelings of anxiety, disappointment, and where did the last hour of my life go? once we finally emerge). Having to check socials via browser ideally means that we’ll be doing so much more intentionally, and that we’ll be free from the onslaught of ads, recommended posts/reels, and other tactics that usually keep us stuck in the apps.

To be clear, the end goal of the book’s 30-day program isn’t to become completely disconnected, unreachable, or anti-technology. (It’s always so hard to talk about subjects like this without sounding preachy or holier-than-thou, too, and let me go ahead and assure you here that I am a piece of garbage, indeed, holier than none.) It’s just to encourage us to figure out a healthier way to engage with our smartphones, to utilize the aspects of them that make our lives better but to resist the ones that are sucking away our joy and completely trashing our mental health.

Reading this little book and working through the recommended exercises was absolutely revelatory for me, and I foresee repeating the process whenever I feel myself sinking back into a social-media-induced anxiety hellscape.