Books To Help Your Digital Detox

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious — and overdrawn — resource we have, and argues that we must actively choose how we use it. Once we start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from a simple anti-technology screed or back-to-nature meditation, How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

In this timely book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us — the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones, get lost in a good book, and have fun with friends without the obsessive urge to document the experience. Now Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement and makes a persuasive case for its urgency. Common sense tips like turning off notifications don’t go far enough, and unplugging completely is complicated by the demands of family and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Drawing on examples from Amish farmers to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and shares strategies for integrating them into your life — starting with a 30-day digital declutter that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed. Technology is neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals, rather than letting it use you.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only 65 seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device was a diminishing way to live. He tried all sorts of solutions — even abandoning his phone for three months — but nothing worked. So Hari went on an epic journey to interview the world’s leading experts on human attention, and discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. We think our inability to focus is a personal failure of willpower. The truth is more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces determined to raid our attention for profit. In Stolen Focus, Hari introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, explores an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore productivity, and uncovers 12 deep causes of the attention crisis — from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution. Crucially, he shows how we can reclaim our focus — as individuals and as a society — if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and show us how to get it back.

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most importantly, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two — and why finding that balance is more essential now than ever. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, Facebooking, YouTubing, tweeting … The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke explores the new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain — and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients form the gripping fabric of her narrative — their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction — an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; and we spend an average of three hours each day on our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction and explains why so many of today’s products are irresistible. Their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident — the companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for good — improving how we communicate, spend, and save money, and set boundaries between work and play — and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being and the health and happiness of our children.

Sherry Turkle, long an enthusiast for the promise of digital technology, now investigates its troubling consequences: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. At the dinner table, children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. At work, we retreat to our screens and home offices, forgoing the water-cooler conversation that once made us more productive and engaged. Online, we post opinions that our friends will agree with, avoiding the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. When we turn to our devices instead of to one another, the cost is our own humanity. But there is good news: conversation cures. Face-to-face dialogue builds empathy, friendship, and creativity; it’s the cornerstone of democracy and good for the bottom line. Drawing on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle makes the paradigm-shifting case for conversation.

After more than a decade of stability, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s and was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s — and presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, from sleep deprivation to addiction, loneliness, and social comparison. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys, and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual one, with disastrous consequences. Most importantly, Haidt issues a clear call to action, proposing four simple rules that might set us free and describing steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to restore a more humane childhood. We cannot afford to ignore his findings.

We all feel it — the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive pull toward the wrong things. Something has changed utterly. For most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, with the help of a few tech firms, “we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of a transition whose only parallel is that of labor in the 19th century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours, doing the bidding of the most valuable companies in history — vast empires built on harvesting human attention. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need: the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

If you’ve ever caught yourself doomscrolling headlines or quietly envying strangers’ highlight reels, this book is your unapologetic intervention. Social media has become an omnipresent part of our lives, and one thing is crystal clear — we have a problem. It can turn toxic, feeding your worst impulses and breathing life into your darkest corners. Things to Do Other Than Social Media offers a much-needed break: 101 simple, mindful tasks to unplug from virtual noise and tune back in to the real world. It’s also the perfect gift for friends and family who just can’t look away from their screens. Give this book to anyone ready to break the scroll addiction and take control of their reality.

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Clear draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible, drawing on true stories from Olympic gold medalists, business leaders, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to vault to the top of their field. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success.

Our attention — that essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world — is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. The heedless exploitation of this vital capacity by a handful of tech companies is harming us all, reducing our very selfhood to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold — and shaking the foundations of our democracy. In this radical, first-of-its-kind guide, The Friends of Attention show us how to join the fight. We meet welders, nurses, poets, and surfers, all of whom are engaged in attentional practices. We learn to seek out sanctuaries — theaters and museums, houses of worship, dance parties — where together we can take refuge. Attention Activism takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and reveals new vistas of human flourishing.