My Plan for an Algorithm-Light August
How a single long break can reset a problem routine.
BACK IN 2019, I wrote an article about the health benefits of taking a month off from alcohol.
This was around the time Dry January and other month-long “detox” campaigns were really becoming popular. An editor of mine had offered me the assignment, and I remember I accepted it a little reluctantly. In most cases, doing or not doing something for 31 days is unlikely to bend the arc of a person’s health or longevity. It felt like the type of assignment where the headline would attract attention, but the piece itself would be lame.
I interviewed Aaron White, a senior scientific advisor at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. At first, the things White told me seemed to confirm my assumption that a month off from alcohol isn’t much of a health game-changer.
“One of the criticisms of these campaigns,” White told me, “is that if you don’t sustain it, there is no benefit.”
He also highlighted a potential risk I hadn’t considered: That drinkers who manage to abstain for a month might be prone to a harmful rebound effect. Researchers have found that people who give up junk food for a week tend to overindulge afterward, and White told me this same phenomenon could crop up among those who give up alcohol temporarily.
But then the focus of our conversation shifted, and I quickly realized I was looking at Dry January all wrong.
“One of the reasons we’re excited about these campaigns is that every person who does it is going to reevaluate their relationship with alcohol,” White told me. “Sometimes you don’t realize you have a problem until you take the problem away. I think that, at the very least, taking a break allows you to see your alcohol habit through a clearer lens.”
I didn’t know this at the time, but the benefits of breaking away from a routine behavior would become a major focus of my research and writing.
In The Habit Trap, my forthcoming book, I describe a phenomenon researchers have termed the “fixating effect” of habit. Due to changes that take place in the human brain as a behavior is repeated again and again in the same context, people with a strong habit gradually lose the ability to view their behavior objectively or to identify better alternatives.
This fixating effect helps explain why, as I put it in a recent piece, it’s so hard for us to see our own self-defeating habits. It’s also the reason most of us know someone who is struggling due to a problem behavior but is convinced that either a) nothing’s wrong, or b) some other issue is to blame. It’s obvious to everyone around the person that their problem is X, but they’re convinced it must be Y or Z. These people aren’t stupid or oblivious or “in denial.” They’re the unwitting victims of neural mechanisms that evolved in a far less addictive world than we live in today, and that make it difficult for us to assess the benefits and harms of our own habits.
This is why Dry January-style resets can be so helpful.
When you take a lengthy break from a routine behavior, you weaken all those habit-perpetuating mechanisms. Rather than coasting along in behavioral autopilot, you climb back behind the wheel where you can steer for yourself again. This is easier said than done, of course; the longer you’ve had a habit, the harder it is to do things differently. But the beauty of a month-long break is that it’s only a month. That may not be long enough to meaningfully improve your health. But it is long enough to restore some lost perspective.
“Some people may go through this and say, you know what, I like my glass of wine. I’m cool with my drinking,” White told me. “But I think others are going to be shocked by how much they were dependent on alcohol.”
With all this in mind, I’m planning a reset of my own this August. But rather than give up alcohol, my goal is to give myself a month-long breather from algorithms.
As I talked about in another recent newsletter, the internet has become an attention-gobbling compulsion for so many of us because almost everything about it is geared toward maximizing engagement by encouraging strong digital habits. As the former Google engineer and technology ethicist Tristan Harris put it in the 2020 film The Social Dilemma, “We’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment.”
I’m not all that keen on being addicted or manipulated, and AI-powered algorithms have become the primary weapon digital platforms deploy to shape our habits and to capture our time and attention. I’m hopeful that, after a month away from them, come September I’ll be able to reevaluate my online behaviors with a greater sense of control and clarity.
My plan, first and foremost, is to avoid all social media or algorithm-driven news sites in favor of books, magazines, and even honest-to-God newspapers. I’m giving up podcasts in favor of media-free walks and exercise. When I want to listen to music, I’ll be choosing bands and listening to whole albums, rather than allowing a music app to DJ for me. I plan to do all my shopping in real-world brick-and-mortar stores.
Basically, my goal is to go analog this August. When I do venture online, which is a necessity for my work, I aim to do so with explicit intentions and as little algorithm-mediated interaction as possible.
Of all the months of the year, August is the one when I tend to have the most time to relax with friends and family. For me, it’s an ideal time to rest, reflect, and, hopefully, reset. This year, I plan not to waste it.
A sad postscript: While I was working on this piece, I learned that Aaron White, the source I spoke to about Dry January campaigns, passed away unexpectedly late last year. He was only 55 years old. Apart from our call to talk about Dry January, I interviewed White a half dozen or so other times, and these were memorably enjoyable conversations. I found Aaron to be funny, forthright, and a transparently decent human being. I was sorry to hear of his passing. I’m sure he’ll be missed.