Seven years ago a group of kids met on Monte Bondone, in the province of Trento, to detox from social media. Those were still the times when “if you hadn’t shared your evening on Facebook, then you had never experienced it”, therefore an early era to break away from the phone, at least in general terms. Today, however, more and more people are talking about their intolerance towards smartphones, so much so that they talk – obviously in a rather risky way – of 2026 as the year of the “return to analogue”.

I understood the effect of the telephone on my free time for the first time this summer, when, during a business trip, I found myself with a dead cell phone in my hotel room, on the seafront of Salerno: I won’t stay here to tell you that for the first time in a long time I found myself looking poetically at the sea, but – forced to stare at that very flat, apparently very boring, expanse of water without any “technological filler” – I felt in my brain my neuronal circuits reactivate like embers. In short, instead of spending an hour passively undergoing Instagram reels, my creativity was becoming active again: in those minutes, therefore, I wrote, designed, imagined. Overall, I felt better. So – this time on purpose – in these last few weeks I decided to try to detox from the phone, and now I’ll tell you how it went (spoiler: very well) and what advice I would give you.

We complain about having little free time, but we waste it watching reels (of which we will remember nothing)

More and more people on their lunch break talk about how to make up for lost time. The problem, basically, is the following: the phone tends to swallow up every free minute. And it started doing it years ago, without asking permission, and without us having time to develop weapons to defend ourselves: it’s called the “attention economy”, that is, the million-dollar strategies developed by platforms to attract our attention and make money from it. The phone is now a reflex, a compensatory mechanism whereby, if you have an hour of free time after the shower, you don’t think about cooking a good dish to improve your dinner, but you start scrolling through the reels of other people’s lives to make your mood worse (studies say so, but we’ll talk about this in another article). In short, free time, or what little remains of it, is dead. And it’s a paradox: we complain about not having enough, we go to claim the short week at work, but then we waste it like this. One reel after another.

Now, we certainly won’t sit here and demonize an instrument that – to use an expression dear to the most nostalgic – “has also done good things” (cit). We are, in fact, neither nostalgic nor neo-Luddites with pitchforks engaged in resistance to the smartphone. But, more simply, the invitation is to make “conscious use” of it and no longer passively. To “navigate informed”. Not to end up like Luca, who a few weeks ago told me: “What did you do last night? I spent an hour scrolling through TikTok. And, in the end, I realized that I don’t remember a thing about those 180 videos.” Time wasted.

What are the 5 problems of “reels”

And that’s the whole problem. And it’s different from years ago. Follow me briefly for a moment longer, then let’s move on to practical advice, I swear.

In recent years, “social networks” have transformed before our eyes: they have become “social media”. If before, to be clear, they were social aggregators, who pushed us to share photos and posts of our lives for the benefit of our friends, today they are video aggregators, who push us to be more spectators than actors. It’s something more similar to television, in short. And this generates various results. Two, more immediate: we invest more time in it and are more passive (i.e. more dazed) consumers. Three more, more long-term. First, nothing remains of those videos: they are evanescent stimuli, useful only to give us a momentary rush of dopamine, since our brain is not made to process concepts at such a speed (to be clear, of the reel “I’ll explain the war in Ukraine in 30 seconds”, nothing will remain, except the emotionality of taking one side or the other). The second problem is, then, that we are not really choosing HOW to spend our free time, it is instead the algorithm that does it for us: sure, we are the ones who followed the jumping flea influencer in China, but it is not a given that the algorithm will choose to show us, rather it will show us what is most convenient for it; and three, finally and as a consequence of the “two”, that of social media is a “commercialized escape”: the transition from TikTok to the shopping app is very short. And here none of us are rich enough.

How to get away from the phone: the rules for the morning and evening

What to do, then? There is a lot of advice online. Above all, there is a proliferation of indications regarding the use of the telephone in the bedroom: it is no coincidence that the analog alarm clock – called “Hatch alarm clock” – has been one of the most popular Christmas gifts in America in the last year, especially among kids. The goal? Make sure that the smartphone is not “the first thought that wakes us up in the morning and the last that lulls us at night”. The invitation, implicitly, is therefore to fall asleep between the pages of a book or between the folds of the script of a TV series: this allows us to fight smartphone insomnia and, at the same time, helps to invest in a more constructive way the hour or so we have available before going to sleep. Or maybe even two.

The rules for the rest of the day (and for the rest day)

Yet, as I see it, morning and evening are just “symbolic moments”. The real problem is, if anything, the rest of the day. In fact, it is precisely during the rest of the day, and above all on our day of rest, that we must maintain high attention to avoid wasting our – therefore few and therefore sacred, we reiterate – free moments.

Inside “Digital Minimalism” – a real Bible on the topic written by journalist Cal Newport (imagine me typing these lines with one hand on my heart and the other on the keyboard, ed) – the author gives fundamental advice in this sense: that is, he proposes to “plan” your free time too, not just your professional one. As? Choosing which space to dedicate to “low quality activities”, such as wild scrolling, and which to “higher quality activities”, such as a sport, a new recipe, etc. It is a matter, very simply, of setting a maximum time for using the apps that “trigger” us the most – in most cases Instagram, TikTok and Facebook – and respecting it in the moments we have set for ourselves. In short: twenty minutes a day in which to lounge on the sofa in front of reels about kittens and “good morning Pescheria!” they are more than enough. I imagine you agree.

The important thing, Newport underlines, is to find a worthy replacement for scrolling, or a new quality pastime, otherwise it is all too easy to fall for it again. Do you want to spend half an hour on the tram every day scrolling? Ok, but then, once you get home, throw away the phone and do something else. Did you like to go running in the past? Well, it’s time to go back to being that person, better than the current version.

“Well, I’m tired in the evening: I can only watch the reels”

“Eh, but I’m tired in the evening: the only thing I can do is get numb in front of Newmartina’s TikToks”. This is, inevitably, the reaction of many when faced with the aforementioned indications. Yet, observes the journalist Arnold Bennet, “mental abilities above all need variety, rather than rest (with the obvious exception of sleep)”. And we believe it. In short: being solely on the phone “ends” the day immediately, giving the impression that it flies away in an instant, while varying the activities gives you the idea of ​​having lived more days, and this can only have positive effects.

Furthermore – Newport adds – for millennia we have known the world through our hands: it is therefore inevitable that sooner or later we will return to feeling this ancestral need, putting aside exploration with our fingertips alone. It is no coincidence – I add – in the last year many offline activities have spread: there are plenty of courses in ceramics, cooking, painting, painting on fabrics, painting on any imaginable surface. And even establishing relationships offline has become more frequent: this is demonstrated by the success of apps like Weemet, Comehome and others.

Two tricks to avoid falling into temptation (and not taking your phone back)

Well. Now that we have created the framework of our new house, let’s finally worry about finishing the walls. In fact, since “the devil is in the details” – and that temptation is the way in which the Evil One flatters us – it is advisable to devise some evil tricks so as not to give in, once again, to the reflex of looking at the smartphone and falling into the hell of reels and notifications. The rule is the most banal: out of sight, out of mind.

Some people recommend buying a watch, for example, so you don’t have to pick up your phone to check the time (in this regard, I recommend two readings: the newsletter “Il Carusello” by Eleonora Caruso; the posts on digital detox written by comedian Giorgia Fumo). It is also important to disable notifications from apps that are not strictly useful on that day: let’s face it, it is not essential to immediately see yet another “very cute” photo of your sister’s cat. Finally, for extreme evils, extreme remedies. If your digital addiction is anything but moderate, one piece of advice is to put your phone in the least frequented place in the house: for example, I happened to lock it in a drawer in the bedroom. It worked.

But the phone “also did good things”

If instead – taking a step back and to conclude – we decide that we do not want to give up the telephone and indeed we want to include it among our “quality pastimes”, then we must necessarily transform the way in which we experience our technological activity. That is, we must begin to select more stringently and consciously what we do on social media in our free time: create lists of creators to follow, for example, or a folder of sites that best represent our interests and that can enrich us. This, in short, avoids passively abandoning ourselves to the choice that the algorithm makes for us. Because the goal, in case it wasn’t understood, is not to throw away the phone, but to go back to consciously deciding what to let into our heads.

“The telephone makes us live like we live in a casino, drawing a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, only the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly. The past is gone, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are wide open to see an endlessly renewing present” – The New Yorker