Digital Detox

Posted on 09 May 2025

I’ve been wanting to open up more on this website and talk about my personal experiences. I thought this post would be a good place to start since it’s a fairly easy topic to talk about and later on I can open up more and discuss bigger aspects of my life.

I think everyone in cybersecurity or tech has some form of issue with the amount of technology in their life. I have not the best relationship with my phone and the messages on it, many of my friends have joked about me not being fully in conversations when we’re around playing board games together or out watching a film.

I think a “digital detox” as much of it being a meme and a very buzz wordy topic on YouTube is actually quite important. Although, I do find a certain irony in the fact that I use speech to text a lot more these days and I’m currently using it to write this blog but that’s all by the buy…

I am by no means a expert in the subject of digital detoxing but here are a few things that I have found have helped me greatly.

Silent Notifcations

According to my digital well-being section on my phone, I receive on average 250 notifications per day! Which is a stupidly high number, Messaging Apps such as Telegram, Discord and WhatsApp are the highest offenders followed by my calendar which is constantly reminding me of what I need to be doing.

It’s a lot of messages and my phone is usually buzzing :( pulling me way from the moment.

Going through the notification history on my phone, selecting certain applications or notifications types and either denying them outright, or switching them to silent notifications has honestly been a real game changer for me.

LinkedIn is a primary example of this. It’s constantly pushing “news” and “work updates” to me which frankly do not care about. They can wait until later on in the evening, or even the next day.

Setting certain apps to silent just allows me to take a break and process those notifications when I have the time.

Last Seen

Whatspp has a feature called “last seen”. Where depending on the app version and whether it’s Android or iPhone will tell you the last time that they have opened WhatsApp or unlocked their phone.

When I was going through my dating period, I found this feature incredibly frustrating and generated a lot of anxiety over sending people messages and them not reading when or opening the App and updating their “last seen” but not checking my messages. Which led to feelings of me being ghosted, and kept me in a cycle of constantly checking my phone. I’m a lot better at this in recent times and consider messaging a be a very aync action.

People are busy, people are doing things. You get round to messages when you get round to messages.

Changing that “last seen” setting OFF, so it always says they were last seen at some time “soon” made a really big difference to me. If you haven’t tried it or if you’re in a similar situation to me and find yourself obsessing a little bit over message times I’d highly recommend giving it a go.

Adicitive Apps

Some applications are just designed to be addictive and hold your attention as long as possible. YouTube shorts are a perfect example of that.

I really enjoy normal YouTube, it’s where I get most of my news from and how I keep up to date with my favourite creators, but the shorts content is so vapid and so attention-seeking that every time I look at it, I feel like I’ve just wasted a bit of my life.

During lockdown I used app timers on my phone to limit the amount of YouTube that I was watching. This has been very beneficial for me because that little reminder that it’s been two hours of YouTube using usually prompts me to go and do some programming or do something else. However, having the shorts button at the bottom of the screen in the YouTube app is far too tempting. Will power can do a lot, but sometimes a technical solution is really favorable.

I’ve recently switched to a YouTube alternative application “new pipe”. Which only has YouTube and doesn’t have the shorts feature, this has been highly beneficial for me. It removes that quick fix dopamine hit whenever I want to watch some shorts content. It focuses me on long-form content and doesn’t give me a way to just quickly pull out my phone and burn a few minutes while I’m at the train station. It keeps my mind a lot clearer and focusing on what’s currently happening in the moment.