Two friends in Virginia, Amber and Amanda, spent a month earlier this year on a digital detox. Amber started thinking about going offline for a month, she writes, when

I realized that there were many things I didn’t like about how I was using social media. The social aspect seemed to be missing, and I was sinking way more time than I’d like to admit into the enemy of productivity – the infinite scroll (embarrassing confessions to come later in this post).

I brought up my thoughts with Amanda, and she had similar concerns about how she’d become attached to her iPhone. We shared frustration with ourselves that we couldn’t stand in line somewhere for even five minutes without looking at our phones. Why were we doing this? And what were we doing in line for all those years before we were constantly consuming information all day long?

She adds in a later post,

We both agreed that as hardcore iPhone and social media addicts, just cutting back a little bit wasn’t going to suffice. We would have to make some pretty drastic changes if we were going to treat this like the elimination diet it was.

We each abused the internet in various and sundry ways, so we had different changes we wanted to make.

Amanda tells her side of the story:

Remember the Instagram TOS disaster of not-that-long-ago? (Probably not.) I think that is when my yearning for a digital detox began. My reaction to all that hullubaloo was uncharacteristic. I was …concerned? Normally a change in privacy setting for an app would not even register on my radar, but I found myself irked in a strange way. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was brewing…. Without realizing it, I had become preoccupied with everything shiny and new. I’d been drifting in the ether, bobbing along on any new technology that surfaced, but where was it getting me?

And then later,

It became clear that we were dealing with an addiction, not a habit, and the detox process would be be intense. The start-small protocol for instilling good habits is a great approach, but not the right fit for a digital detox. How can you cut back slowly on a complex compulsion? It would be like telling a gambling addict, “Hey, why don’t you try spending $5 less at that one craps table today?…” No dice.

We faced the fact that, for a set amount of time, we’d be disconnecting cold-turkey style. Thirty days may seem brutal but I think it’s the perfect amount of time to really reset your brain and instill (or ditch) any behavior.

Their rules are really interesting: the explanations of what accounts they completely deleted, what apps they took off which device, and in what rooms iPhones were off-limits, makes for pretty good reading.