Our digital lives can often get in the way of our physical ones, and digital detoxes feel good at the start, but often fall short of the goal. You go in with the best intentions, a clean home screen and a bit of smugness, and a few days later you're right back where you started wondering what happened.

It's hard to disconnect and then feel like you're missing out on keeping up with friends, family, your favourite brands and skit videos. But then it's easy to get lost in scrolling and comparing your life to everyone else's. Both of those things are true at the same time, and that's the part nobody really warns you about.

If you're anything like me you might delete Instagram, Threads or whatever flavour platform you prefer, and end up on Pinterest boards for a project you'll never start. Delete the apps, watch endless YouTube on your laptop instead. It's easy done. The app goes but the habit stays, and it just finds another door to come in through.

Our attention is finite, but scrolling isn't 'wasting time'. I think it's more of a soothing technique to get us through the hell scape that is modern life. We have busy brains, anxious minds and we need to switch off. Nobody picks their phone up at eleven at night chasing personal growth, they pick it up because they're wrung out and they want the noise to stop for a bit.

That's why detoxing doesn't work, and why we replace it with something else that's similar or doesn't get such a negative rap. Swapping the feed for a podcast queue, or four hours of a documentary you're not really watching, is the same shape of thing with better branding. The urge was never really about the app.

This is where the 'detox' industry does more damage than good a lot of the time. It sells you the idea that you're the problem and that willpower is the fix, then leaves you feeling like a failure by day five. We need to remove the shame and help each other get out of the doom scroll, going cold turkey can set you down the exact same path.

Coping mechanisms are needed, let's be honest. If you need to replace an unhealthy one with a healthier one, that's a good thing. Taking something away and putting nothing in its place is just leaving a gap, and the gap always gets filled by whatever is closest to hand. Which, nine times out of ten, is the phone.

We need to stimulate our brains, occupy our hands and give yourself somewhere to go. Not somewhere impressive, not a side hustle, just somewhere that isn't a screen. Something with a bit of friction in it, where you're slightly rubbish at the start and get slowly less rubbish over time.

That's where hobbies, crafts and community comes in. In a world that's increasingly digital, analog is sometimes the way to go. A shed, a sketchbook, a five-a-side team, a Tuesday night class full of people you'd never otherwise meet. Something that puts a thing in your hands and other people in the room, so that switching off stops being something you have to force and starts being somewhere you'd rather be.

So don't delete anything this week. Just pick one analog thing and give it an hour, badly, with your phone in another room. That's it.

If you do, I'd love to know what it was. Reply and tell me, or leave it in the comments, because the answers are usually far better than anything I'd come up with on my own.

And if this is your kind of thing, there's more of it at andotherthings.me, and I post the shorter bits over at @andother_things. No detox plans, no five step systems, just notes on staying human in a world run by software.