After a couple of hours, we felt compelled to explore the area, so we drove to Finchingfield for a Guinness at the Fox Inn which we had spotted on our drive in. During our pint I noticed the couple on the table beside us, glued to their devices without pause. I raised my right eyebrow twice to bring Olivia’s attention to them. We smiled, for we had a dark secret, we were offline, and it felt like we were winning at life in some way. But were we?

What the experts say

Some argue that going on a short-term ‘digital detox’ serves no purpose whatsoever. In 2019, a team of psychologists including Dr Andrew K Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, conducted experiments to assess the benefits of signing off from social media for a day. Their hypothesis was that there would be a positive effect on wellbeing, but they found the opposite.

“Contrary to our expectations based on literature linking lower social media use with higher well-being, we did not find any evidence that abstaining from social media for one day had significant positive impacts on psychological well-being,” their report says. In fact, the results showed that “some models showed significant deficits on social relatedness and satisfaction.” Perhaps that couple, glued to their phones, were happier than us after all?

There were times through our micro digital detox where it did feel like a phone would have aided, rather than detracted from, the quality of our experience. While at the pub, we discussed what to do the following day, but without knowledge of the next day’s weather, the proximity from the cabin to the sea, or a quick Google search for nearby things to do, we were missing some key pieces of information. 

In another study, Theodora Sutton, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, explores this very idea. She analysed the wellbeing of attendees at the Camp Grounded digital detox in San Francisco over a three-year period, and her findings suggested that self-moderation, not going teetotal, was the most effective way of managing screen time.

She concluded: “Quantifying an arbitrary number of hours of recommended screen time is unhelpful; it is far more useful for each of us to recognise digital use within the context of our own lives, where we may be under social pressures which technology enables, or hold aspirations which digital use compromises.”

So did a detox make a difference?

Back at the cabin, under a darkening early spring sky, our entertainment was the fire pit. I constructed a decent enough pyramid of wood and we sat back, quietly enjoying the peace as a couple of lanky hares gambolled across the field. We watched the sun set, something we haven’t done for too long, and found ourselves hypnotised by the endless queue of planes coming in to land at Stansted Airport, a form of television which felt cheatingly ‘digital’, somehow.