It’s that time of year again: detox season. While many of us will be entering the new year embracing Dry January(to reduce alcohol intake) or doing juice cleanses (for weight loss), others will be performing “digital detoxes,” staying off of their devices more than usual or entirely to kick off 2026 with renewed energy and focus.
But what happens when the detox is over and the chorus of text pings, slack dings and social media notifications swells throughout the rest of the year?
Digital detoxes don’t work, says author Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara, because they’re temporary fixes that don’t address our underlying tendencies and tech habits. Which is concerning because we’re drowning in digital connectivity these days — to other people, to news and information, to online data — and that can lead to a condition known as “digital exhaustion,” as Leonardi calls it.
The symptoms? Drained energy, lack of focus, a sense of aimlessness when scrolling online and dread over returning “even just one more email,” he says.
That’s compounded by the havoc device overuse wreaks on our bodies: staring at a computer screen all day causes eye fatigue, scrolling on our phones endlessly can cause “tech neck,” the blue wavelengths from screens disrupt our circadian rhythms, leading to poor sleep quality.
But if digital detoxes don’t work, what does?
Leonardi’s new book, “Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life,” focuses on reshaping our relationship with technology in the long-term, helping readers develop healthier tech use habits so that breaking up with your phone isn’t necessary in the first place.
Think of Leonardi as a therapist and his book a couples counseling couch on which you sit with your partner, a hyperactive nonstop-chattering smartphone.
“A therapist doesn’t say, ‘here is the answer,’ right?’” Leonardi says. “A therapist tells you: ‘Here are a bunch of different things that you could do, and which one is going to work best depends on your particular situation.’ That’s really what this whole book is about.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do we know we’re suffering from digital exhaustion and how is it different from general burnout? General burnout, as we apply it to our jobs, is like: “I’m done with this job.” You know, “the job is killing me.” Digital exhaustion is a piece of burnout. It’s this overwhelming feeling that “there’s too much for me to process and it feels too overwhelming for me to constantly be paying attention to all of the tools, all of the information inputs, all of the requests that I’m getting from so many different sources.”
The first big symptom is apathy. “I don’t really care about doing this job very well. I don’t really care about returning this call.” A second one is a sense of hopelessness. Like: “No matter how much I do, there’s always going to be more. I could spend all day and my email would never go down.” It’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. The third is almost like the moth to the flame. “I know that this thing is really putting me in a bad mood and it’s making me feel fatigue and I should step away from it, but I also can’t.” It’s this constant, almost vicious cycle.
How is social media especially digitally exhausting? It’s a drain on our attention. Social media — all technology, but social media in particular — forces us to constantly disconnect our attention from one thing and place it on something else. And having to disconnect and reconnect constantly is a huge driver of exhaustion. Then there’s inference. Inference is the sort of effect that happens when we’re constantly trying to put all of the pieces together when we get little fragments of data and information. We’re like detectives putting the pieces together. That happens when we’re seeing somebody’s social post and we’re trying to figure out, implicitly, are they a good person? Are they being mean? Are they friendly? Is their life amazing? Also, when we’re trying to make inferences about what other people think of us based on our own social posts: “Do they think that I’m being haughty because I put this piece of information out there?” We never see the full picture, and putting those puzzle pieces together is exhausting. Finally: It’s a real conduit to our emotions. It creates feelings of anxiety in us, feelings of fear, feelings of anger, but also feelings of excitement. And the experiencing of all that emotion is a source of exhaustion.
You say that we switch between apps and online platforms about 1,200 times per day, on average. What does this “digital switching,” as you call it, do to our brains — and how can we protect ourselves? Disconnecting and reconnecting our attention is very cognitively taxing. As we move across apps and platformsand websites, we constantly have to reorient. Even if you’re switching [between] something as seemingly innocuous as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, that little switch means “oh, the share your screen button is in a different place.” And the fact that you have to think about that, there’s a little bit of stress associated with it.
“Tool auditing” helps. The more that we can reduce the number of switches we have to make, the better off we are. So if you can become accustomed to doing your video conferencing on Zoom and not have to use Zoom one time and Microsoft Teams another time and Webex another time, that’s an easy way of reducing the switching costs that end up sapping our attention. [Also], “single thread living.” The more that we can push things into one channel, the less switches we’ll have to do. And the more that we can stay in a trajectory of work — or in a set of similar tasks — the less switching we have to do. So if I’m a professor preparing for a class, and I’m doing research on a paper and I’m putting together a presentation and I’m creating lecture notes, I might be on different applications. But the fact that it’s all in service of the same general task, which is to prepare for my lecture, the research showsit reduces the fatigue associated with switching.
How is digital exhaustion changing family life? In the book, you talk about parents being overwhelmed by never-ending coordination on group chats, school apps, carpooling texts. Part of the problem is that because we have all these instantaneous connections, people feel like they can make more last-minute changes. So you can get on your team sports app, and ‘Oh, we’re going to change the color of socks for this game for our soccer team.’ We wouldn’t have done that 15 years ago because you couldn’t have texted and gotten a hold of everybody on the team so immediately to ask them to change their socks. We ask much more of people now, and then it requires us to attend more to all of these devices and apps and everything — which is really exhausting. There’s also the dread that many parents feel that they’re setting a bad example for their kids by being on their devices so much all the time.
What are some guidelines for raising healthy kids in the 21st century? One of the things I think is really important is to make sure that you’re demonstrating, and you’re role modeling, good behavior with your devices and platforms. So if you’re mindlessly on your phone, your kids will mindlessly be on their phones. And you’re also sending a signal to them that whatever’s on the other side of your phone is more important than they are. And kids watch that and they observe and they pick up on those signals. What really is important is the quality time that we’re spending as parents with our kids — that we’re with them and not on our devices. And that sends a strong signal about our values.
Does AI exacerbate digital exhaustion or is it a potential solution? At the moment, I think it’s mostly exacerbating it by giving us so much extra content to pay attention to. Just because it’s so easy for everyone to create content on a whim. Also, talk about technology is exhausting. We are constantly bombarded with reports about AIand all these predictions about how AI is going to take away our jobs and change our relationships. It’s exacerbating the problem of exhaustion. Where it could really help is, if the tools could make better predictions about what information we need to do [a task]. That stops us from having to pause in our work and get on another application or search engine to find something. That’s where it has real potential and promise for helping us to reduce our exhaustion.
Your book is full of practical strategies for staving off digital exhaustion. What are some of your favorites? On Zoom, turn off your self-view. We end up paying an undue amount of attention to ourselves and worrying about how we’re presenting ourselves to others. It’s like if we walked around with a mirror in front of ourselves all day long. Another one is to have really good intentionality around what you’re doing on your devices. So when you pick up your phone, have an end goal in mind — “I’m picking up my phone because I need to check the weather.” If you don’t, then it’s very easy to get sucked into the next thing and the next thing.”
A third: Treat coordination as a big problem to solve all at once rather than little problems to solve in the moment. A fourth: complementary opposites. Pair intense digital work activities with the use of your body, your hands and the physical world. The more people do that, they find that the less they want to get back on their devices.
One last strategy: Think about controlling your visibility. We’ve been conditioned to lead these very public digital lives by posting everything and highlighting all of our accomplishments. But the more we do that, the more things there are for us to pay attention to and the more worries we have about how other people are perceiving us. So turn off read receipts, typing indicators, analytics that make us feel watched. That’s how, partly, we control our visibility. And remember: Our technologies are not inherently good or bad. It’s up to us to figure out how do we orient to our tools in ways that are going to give us their benefits without wearing us out. That’s really the core message of the book.
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