Why You Should Do A Digital Detox - Cal Newport

Georgetown University professor and author Cal Newport explains why you should unplug from your electronics and take a 30 day "digital detox."

In a single day, we'll touch our smartphones 2,617 times, check email 74 times, and receive 46 notifications, research firm Dscout found. We'll spend more than three hours on our phones and tablets, 40 minutes on our home computer, and almost five hours watching TV each day, according to Nielsen.

Altogether, that means we're spending about half of our waking day looking at one of our personal devices, not counting the time we spend on screens for our job.

And that's if we're a light user. People who really love their smartphones touch them 5,427 times a day, adding up to more than 225 minutes a day, or almost four hours just on that one device alone, Dscout found.

But our continually growing usage and dependency on smart devices may need a rethink.

Research suggests that the more time we spent on our screens the less happy we feel and that may increase our odds of developing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. While the exact impact remains a hotly debated topic, 54% of teens and 36% of parents admit feeling like they spend too much time on their cellphones, a survey from the Pew Research Center found.

Likely because even if they aren't feeling a negative mental toll, they are noticing that all their free time keeps disappearing and they can't leave their phone for five minutes.

"What's making people uncomfortable is this feeling of losing control. Their sense of autonomy is being diminished. We've allowed our phones to change what we pay attention to, to actually take us away from the things we really care about as opposed to making those experiences richer," says Georgetown computer science professor and best-selling author Cal Newport.

But cutting back on our screen time can be incredibly hard.

"People don't succumb to screens because they're lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable," says Newport. He spoke with CNBC Make It about how to break that cycle — or at least cut back.

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Why You Should Do A Digital Detox - Cal Newport