I just sat down with one scientist who studied what happens to your brain when you reduce your screen time. Their research found that lowering phone usage reversed cognitive decline by about a decade.
A decade.
I shared my system with them and they thought it was worth putting out into the world. So here it is. Not perfect. Not for everyone. But it works for me and it has changed my life.
1. Seven days off, every month.
The first seven days of every month, I do a full digital detox. No social media. No work. No TV. No movies. My phone is allowed for texting, calling, GPS, and music. That is it.
The rest of that week is handwriting, reading physical books, playing board games, playing piano, being outside, being bored. Boredom is the point. Your brain needs silence the way your body needs sleep. We just forgot that.
I have been doing this for over three years now. The first two days are always uncomfortable. By day four, I do not want to go back.
I understand that seven days is not doable for everyone. Start with one day. Or two. It took me years to build up to this. The point is not the number. The point is creating a regular rhythm where your brain gets to be offline.
If you are a business owner, here is something I learned the hard way. The first time I left for three days, I came back and a bunch of systems in my company broke. So I built systems to fix what broke, and then I left again for seven days to stress test it. I came back and fewer things broke, but some new things broke. So I built more systems. I have done this over and over again, every single month, for three years. Today, as long as my podcast is recorded ahead of time and I show up for my group calls with clients every two weeks, I could technically leave for four weeks and just come back to pay my team. Not that I am going to, because I love what I do. But I need that balance. And building the systems that allow for it took time and patience and a willingness to let things break so I could fix them properly.
2. No social media on my phone. Ever.
During the three working weeks of the month, I have zero social media apps on my phone. No Instagram. No YouTube. No email. No Slack. Nothing.
If I need to use social media for the business, I use it on my laptop. And my laptop stays in my office. Social media is a laptop activity. The laptop does not come to the couch. It does not come to dinner. It does not come to bed.
I also use an app called Freedom on my laptop that blocks every distracting website during my deep work blocks. So even on the laptop, social media only exists in a specific window of time.
3. Email is a Friday activity.
I check my email once a week. Friday. Thirty minutes.
My assistant filters through everything during the week. She unsubscribes from junk. She answers what she can answer. If there is an actual emergency, she tells me what it is and I tell her how to reply, and she handles it over email until Friday.
She has a folder in my inbox called “to address Friday.” Anything that needs my personal attention but is not urgent goes in there. On Friday, we do a 30-minute call and I work through the folder. I am also teaching her how I think about email so she gets better at handling things without me over time.
People think they need to check email every hour. You do not. The world does not end. Nobody has ever died because I replied on Friday instead of Tuesday.
4. Social media gets 30 minutes a week.
I block off one 30-minute chunk in my calendar each week to open social media, respond to DMs, reply to comments, and check messages. That is the target. I am not perfect with it. Some weeks I go over. But having the block in the calendar forces me to treat social media like a task with a start and an end instead of a background hum that runs all day. The intention alone has massively reduced my time on the phone.
5. My phone does not exist in the morning.
My phone sleeps on airplane mode. When I wake up, it stays there. My morning is reading a physical book, writing in my journal (I have done this every single day for almost three years), drinking my coffee, and spending time outdoors.
No notifications. No news. No scrolling. Just me and the morning.
The phone comes off airplane mode after my morning work block. By then, I have already done three hours of my best thinking. The day is already won.
6. I bought a film camera so I could stop using my phone to take photos.
This one sounds small but it was huge for me. Every time I wanted to capture a moment, I would pull out my phone. And then I would check one thing. And then 20 minutes would disappear.
So I bought a Fujifilm Instax. Now I take photos without ever opening my phone. The photo prints instantly. No screen. No cloud. No algorithm. Just a moment on a piece of film that I can hold in my hand.
7. Every notification is turned off.
I have zero notifications on my phone. No banners. No badges. No sounds. Nothing. My phone does not buzz, ping, or light up unless someone is calling me or texting me. That is it.
If you do nothing else from this list, do this one. Notifications are not information. They are interruptions designed to pull you back into an app. Turn them all off and watch how much calmer your brain gets within a week.
8. I never post on social media myself.
I live my life, I take photos, and I text them to my assistant with a caption. She turns them into a weekly post. I never open the app. I never see the feed. I never get pulled into the scroll.
This was the single biggest change I made. I realized that posting was my gateway drug. I would tell myself I was just uploading one story and then 45 minutes later I was deep in the explore page. So I removed myself from the process entirely.
That is the whole system. Eight layers, and none of them require willpower. That is the key. I tried willpower for years and I failed every single time. What works is building an environment where the phone simply cannot reach you.
Charge it in another room. Delete the apps. Block the websites. Give the posting to someone else. Buy a camera that is not connected to the internet.
Stop trying to be disciplined around the thing that was engineered by thousands of the smartest people on earth to be impossible to resist. Just remove it.
I am not anti-technology. I run an online business. I record a podcast. I write this newsletter on a computer. Technology is a tool and I use it during work hours for work things.
But outside of that window, I want to be here. With my wife. With my book. With my journal. With the sounds of whatever city we are in. With my own thoughts, which turn out to be pretty interesting when I give them enough silence to show up.
The scientists told me that the research is clear: less phone time does not just make you feel better. It literally makes your brain younger. It reverses damage.
I believe them, not because of the data, but because I have lived it.
Three years of this system and I am calmer, sharper, more creative, more present, and more in love with my life than I have ever been.
Your phone is not your life. It is a tool. Treat it like one.
And if you do not know where to start, start with one thing: charge your phone in a different room tonight.
That is it.
Keep it simple.
I hope this helps,
Sincerely,
Maxime
Solid advice, brother. 🙌🙌