The Twenty-Four-Hour Fast

Episode 91: The Twenty-Four-Hour Smartphone Fast Welcome back to Get Deaddicted. We have arrived at phase four. The first thirty episodes of this practical series built the foundation. We changed your settings. We changed your habits. We changed your environment. Now we go further. The next ten episodes are about fasting from the phone in longer and deeper ways. The first one is the twenty-four-hour smartphone fast. For twenty-four hours, the smartphone is off. Fully off. Powered down. Out of reach. Not used at all. Phone calls are received on a different device — a landline if you have one, a feature phone, or simply through the people you live with — or they wait. Messages wait. Email waits. Social media does not exist for one full day. This is different from the digital sabbath in episode eighty-two, in two ways. First, on the digital sabbath, you may still have used the phone for emergency calls or basic functions. On the fast, the phone is entirely off. Second, on the digital sabbath, you observed it weekly. On the fast, we are doing it as a discrete, named experience, with the explicit goal of recalibrating your nervous system. Here is the practice. Pick a date. Plan for it. Tell anyone who might need to reach you that you will be unreachable for twenty-four hours. Write down any phone numbers, directions, appointments, or information you might need on paper. Charge the phone fully the night before. Then, at a specific moment — let us say 8 p.m. on a Friday — you power it down completely. You put it in a drawer in a room you will not be entering. And you do not touch it again until 8 p.m. on Saturday. For the duration of those twenty-four hours, you are an unconnected adult living an unmediated day. You wake up to a real alarm clock. You eat without checking anything. You read or walk or work or rest. You navigate by memory or by paper or by simply not going anywhere that requires navigation. You communicate, if you communicate, in person, or by handwritten note, or not at all. The day proceeds at the pace it proceeds at, with no external inputs and no external interruptions. What you will experience over those twenty-four hours is, for most modern people, a series of strange and important moments. The first few hours feel itchy. You reach for the phantom phone. You feel a low-grade panic about what you might be missing. You feel slightly bored, slightly anxious, slightly restless. None of this is wrong. It is exactly what is supposed to happen. Your nervous system, addicted to constant stimulation, is going through a small withdrawal. By midday, the itchiness eases. The mind starts to settle. You notice the world around you in a way you have not in years. The light. The temperature. The smell of food. The sounds outside the window. The expressions on the faces of the people you live with. The richness of the -- 62 of 85 -- unmediated world begins to land. By evening, you may experience something even more important. Calm. A particular kind of calm that has been missing from your nervous system for a long time. You did not check anything all day. Nothing was asked of you, beyond what was in front of you. Your mind, freed from the constant management of incoming inputs, has done something it has not done in years. It has rested. At hour twenty-four, the fast ends. You turn the phone back on. The screen lights up. Notifications cascade in. You see, in a single glance, all the things that have been "waiting" for you. Almost all of them are nothing. A few are small. None of them required your attention while it was happening. The world handled itself fine without you for a day. You handled yourself fine without the phone for a day. You both survived. That experience, lived once, is permanently clarifying. You now know, in your body, that you can live for twenty-four hours without a phone. The fear of being unreachable, of missing something, of falling behind, has been tested directly, and the fear was wrong. The world will wait. You can step out of it whenever you choose, and step back in unharmed. Here are some practical notes that make the twenty-four-hour fast easier. Plan an active day. Do not just sit in the house. Go somewhere — a hike, a museum, a long meal with friends. The day flows easier when you have a small structure. Cook something that takes time. Read a book you have been meaning to read. Do something with your hands. Sleep more than you usually would. The day is for restoration. Bring someone with you, if you can. A partner. A friend. A child. Doing a fast with another person is easier and more memorable than doing it alone. You become accountability for each other. You also share an experience that very few people share anymore. Tell people in advance that you are doing it. The communication itself is good practice in setting expectations about your availability. You will find that everyone you tell is supportive, sometimes envious, and that almost no one actually needs to reach you within the twenty-four hours anyway. After the fast, write down what you noticed. The reaches. The feelings. The insights. The moments. The pages of notes you make about a single twenty-four-hour fast will be among the most valuable you ever take. They are evidence of who you are without the device, which is the person you have always actually been, who has been buried for years. Many people, after one twenty-four-hour fast, choose to make this a monthly practice. Some make it quarterly. Some only do it once. Any of these is valuable. The point is to have done it at least once, to know in your bones what it feels like, and to carry that knowledge into the rest of your life. -- 63 of 85 -- This is episode ninety-one. One full day. No smartphone. Tomorrow we extend the fast to seventy-two hours. -- 64 of 85 --