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Chances are, you’ve already heard a narrative like Peta Sitcheff’s.
As a gross sales rep working within the medical machine business, the 50-year-old labored when her neurosurgeon purchasers labored. So, continuous.
“For 14 years, I was on-call 24/7,” Sitcheff says. “A surgeon could ring me any time of day, wanting to book equipment for a surgery that they needed, and I would have to be available. My phone essentially became an extension of my arm. If it wasn’t on me, I would panic. If it rang, I’d jump.”
To cope, she’d scroll social media websites corresponding to Instagram or LinkedIn and discover herself feeling even worse. Then, eight years in the past, she reached a degree of acute burnout. “I started to fear my phone ringing,” says the Albert Park, Melbourne, resident.
It wasn’t sufficient to give up her job. Sitcheff additionally discovered herself needing to extricate herself from her cellphone, get offline. “I had to visit my grandmother in Queensland and I remember deciding at that moment to leave my phone at home,” she says. Now, Sitcheff doesn’t even have her consumer emails on her cellphone. She has blocked all social media and has a curfew of 8pm for cellphone use.
We know we spend an excessive amount of of our days our telephones, and that we really feel dangerous evaluating ourselves to others.
It’s why 35 per cent of individuals reported desirous to get off the web solely in a 2025 study by NordVPN, and why there’s now a complete style of content material creator devoted to “anti-doomscrolling influencing”. On TikTookay, folks like Cat Goetz make content material that helps “get you off your phone”.
There are retreats the place you’ll be able to spend hundreds to have your cellphone disconnected, and go away to tiny cabins the place you’re capable of choose areas that don’t have any service. Not to say the recognition of analogue tradition amongst youthful generations that factors in the direction of a need, not less than to an extent, to get off the rattling cellphone.
There are loads of celebrities who’ve shunned socials. Jacob Elordi doesn’t have a public Instagram, nor does Jennifer Lawrence. George Clooney informed The Hollywood Reporter he actively encourages younger actors to remain off apps. “I said to all these actors, ’Get the fuck off of it. Get off of all of it. Because if you’re not on it, you have nothing to be compared to,” Clooney stated.
But for the remainder of us who don’t make use of groups who can handle our lives, realizing how addictive our telephones are, and the way intertwined our telephones really feel to our each day lives, is it even doable to go totally offline in 2026?
According to Dr Luke Martin, a Beyond Blue medical psychologist, the findings from research into diminished machine utilization are so blended that the recommendation isn’t truly to go chilly turkey.
“A lot of the research looks at what’s a sustainable relationship with my device. Often that involves strategies that are more about creating zones when you do and don’t use it or adding friction to your usage so that it’s not so easy to use, and also building self-awareness around your usage,” Martin says.
An organization whose purpose d’etre is so as to add that friction is Brick. Founded in 2023 by TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz, it’s a cellphone lock that makes use of NFC know-how to dam entry to sure apps. You “brick” your cellphone by tapping it towards a small dice, which cuts you off from the apps you’ve decided to be pointless or too distracting. You can “unbrick” it solely by tapping the dice, which you’re inspired to position someplace that’s simply accessible. Like your kitchen fridge, for instance.
“When unlocking certain apps requires physically returning to the device, it creates a pause where people can decide whether they actually want to reconnect or stay present,” says Driver, who says it’s used greatest when included right into a routine, quite than an occasional resolution. “A lot of people stay ‘bricked’ for large parts of the day and switch between different modes depending on what they’re doing – work mode during focused hours, family mode in the evening, and sleep mode at night,” he says.
Brick actually makes a extra sustainable relationship doable, however at $93, it’s not the most cost effective choice. And nonetheless, there’s one thing engaging in regards to the concept of with the ability to get off socials altogether.
If you ask Dr Brad Marshall, the notion our lives are irrevocably linked to our telephones is a little bit of a fantasy. “The idea that we are being socially disconnected if we don’t have social media is not true,” says Marshall, a psychologist and director of The Screen and Gaming Disorder Clinic. “Do you miss out on things and communications? Yes. But is it real communication? No.”
Mel Corthine, 45, is a testomony to that.
The hair salon proprietor from Maroubra, Sydney, was on the apps for wherever between 4 and 5 hours a day. She’d been monitoring her utilization, and he or she even tried to set display closing dates on her cellphone. Then Charlie Kirk died.
“The algorithm was just blowing up with really graphic images of a man getting shot,” Corthine says. “I just had enough. I was like, ‘I actually don’t need this in my life’.”
Six months in the past, she deleted her Instagram and Facebook accounts and he or she hasn’t appeared again since. “Zero social media time and it’s fantastic,” says Corthine, who employs somebody to handle the social media accounts for her hair salon.
“If my friends go on vacation or whatever and I don’t see their pictures on Instagram, that’s fine by me,” she says of issues she may miss by not being on socials any extra. “They can show me if they want, or they can text me. I do have more real face-to-face time with my friends now.”
Corthine has since arrange a fortnightly in-person catch-up along with her buddies and he or she repeatedly meets with a gaggle to go ocean swimming each week. “It’s just more like, ‘why don’t we just see each other in person and chat?‘. I don’t really need to see the social media version of my friends’ lives anyway.”
It’s a prudent level to lift, given social media has been transferring away from the “social” ingredient for a couple of years now. During the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial towards Meta, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that between 2023 and 2025, the proportion of time spent on Instagram viewing content material from buddies went from 11 per cent right down to 7 per cent. At a Bloomberg occasion a couple of months later, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri stated “posting to your feed is just not the primary way that people express themselves any more”. Instead, he stated, they join through sharing content material corresponding to reels with one another.
Read between the strains, and it’s clear social media within the conventional sense – the place we put up snapshots of our lives for family and friends to see – is not worthwhile to those firms. People are clever to this. In 2022, there have been over 336,000 signatures on a Change.org petition known as “MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN”, which pleaded “we just want to see when our friends post”.
But folks like Corthine and Sitcheff, who says she is going to typically name buddies throughout lengthy automobile journeys and make a concerted effort to see them in particular person, show that our lives don’t cease when our scrolling does.
“My life is very peaceful,” Corthine says.
Sitcheff feels equally. “I used to feel like I had to keep up with everyone on social media, but I don’t want to,” she says. “I know what I love. I know what my purpose is, and I’m focused on that.”
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