Breaking away from your phone is one thing. Staying away is another.
Dr. Clifford Sussman, a developmental psychiatrist, has a surprising piece of advice for some patients trying to break their screen addictions: Join a rock band.
Not because playing music is therapeutic, but because you have to put your phone down to do it. Then the magic happens.
After a few days without social media, endless scrolling, or gaming, many people sleep better, feel less mentally scattered, and notice just how much attention their screens had been eating up.
Then real life creeps back in, and you might find yourself standing in line at a store and suddenly scrolling without even thinking about it. Your phone sneaks back into bed with you. You open a news app for just a second, and somehow lose the next 45 minutes.
That whiplash helps explain why digital detoxes often don’t last. The challenge is not just removing the screen; it’s changing the habits and rewards that pull us back to it.
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Why Willpower Often Fails
“Detoxes treat the screen as the problem and abstinence as the solution,” Dr. Judson Brewer, an addiction psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author of “The Craving Mind,” told The Epoch Times in an email. “But habits aren’t really about the substance. They’re about the reward-based learning loop underneath.”
Many people pick up the phone whenever they experience boredom, loneliness, or uncertainty. Over time, the brain learns to associate those feelings with the quick relief a phone can provide.
“Your brain has already learned that picking up the phone reliably delivers a hit of distraction or stimulation,” Brewer said. “You’re not weak-willed. Your brain is well-trained.”
Learned habits become even harder to overcome because people return from a digital detox to environments that are saturated with digital cues. Notification pop-ups, vibrating phones, autoplay videos and endless feeds don’t merely remind people to check their devices; they continually reinforce the habits they’re trying to break.
Unlike many other addictive behaviors, digital cues are nearly impossible to avoid because phones and screens are embedded in daily routines.
“These addictive cues themselves release dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, making it that much more difficult to abstain.”
The tendency to slip back into old habits does not mean digital detoxes are useless, Sussman, who is a pioneer in recognizing and treating internet gaming disorder, told The Epoch Times.
Even a few days away from highly stimulating digital content can create enough distance for people to recognize how automatic their screen habits have become.
However, unlike approaches built around complete abstinence, most people eventually have to return to screens for work, school, and everyday life. What then?
Experts say that’s where the real challenge begins—and where lasting change is made.
Get Curious About the Reward
When Brewer works with patients who want to change their screen habits, he encourages them to approach the behavior with curiosity.
Instead of trying to white-knuckle through an urge to scroll, he asks them to pay closer, non-judgmental attention to the reward they expect the behavior to provide—and whether it delivers.
“They often discover the reward is much less satisfying than their brain predicted,” Brewer said. “That mismatch between expected and actual reward is what updates the learning.”
For example, someone might reach for their phone expecting relief from boredom or anxiety, only to realize 30 minutes later that they feel more distracted, emotionally depleted, or overwhelmed than before. Noticing that gap—what triggered the urge, what they hoped to get, how they actually felt—gradually loosens the habit’s grip.
“The habit loses its grip not through force but through clearer seeing,” Brewer said.
Fill the Empty Space
Awareness can weaken the pull of a habit. But awareness alone doesn’t fill the time and attention that scrolling once occupied.
One of the more disorienting parts of a digital detox is discovering how much empty space screens routinely absorb—waiting for coffee, sitting alone at lunch, pausing between tasks, or lying awake at night. Once those habits are interrupted, many people find themselves with hours of unstructured time they no longer know how to occupy.
Hence the idea behind Sussman’s unusual rock band advice. He encourages patients to build on interests they already have rather than trying to reinvent themselves entirely. The goal is not simply to remove a source of stimulation, but to find other activities that feel genuinely rewarding.
The alternatives that work best, he said, are not ambitious self-improvement projects but activities that are socially engaging, physically present, and structured enough to compete with the passive ease of scrolling. That might mean joining a sports league, volunteering, taking an art class, cooking with friends, or simply spending more time around other people without devices at the center of interaction.
Borrow Self-Control
Even people who successfully change their screen habits find that willpower alone doesn’t hold. The same person who ignores social media all week may lose an entire evening to scrolling after a stressful day.
That’s why Lembke recommends “self-binding”—practical barriers placed between people and their most compulsive digital behaviors. That may mean charging phones outside the bedroom, removing social media apps from the home screen, limiting social media to specific times of day, or creating device-free spaces around meals and sleep.
“We need to create a world within our dopamine-overloaded world that insulates us from the constant triggers to use,” Lembke said.
Support from other people also matters. For many people, that support starts at home. Family members or partners can help by setting shared boundaries, such as device-free meals or keeping phones out of the bedroom. Parents can also model the habits they want to see in their kids, since family norms tend to be more effective than rules aimed only at children.
“The people around you have to know that this is a struggle,” Sussman said. “Otherwise you’re going right back into the same environment.”
Support systems for problematic technology use remain far less developed than those available for issues such as alcohol or gambling.
“There aren’t many places where people can practice what happens after the detox,” Sussman said.
Sussman works with patients in group settings to help people navigate what can be the harder phase of behavior change, such as his DigiMotor Game Therapy, which combines gaming with physical activity to help children transition back to screens without slipping back into old patterns.
“It’s designed to help kids work on transitioning to lower dopamine activities by strengthening their executive functioning skills and exercising that prefrontal cortex.”
Expect the Slip
People trying to change their screen habits often slip back into old patterns. Deleted apps get reinstalled, evenings are lost to scrolling after a stressful week, and they fall back into familiar routines they thought they had left behind.
“Relapse is part of behavior change,” Sussman said. “The important thing is understanding what triggered it and how quickly you recover.”
A healthier relationship with technology does not emerge from a dramatic weekend detox alone. It develops gradually: through greater awareness, better routines, supportive environments, and repeated course corrections along the way.
The goal is not a phone-free life, but to build a life in which the phone is no longer the automatic answer to every empty moment.
