Most of us put off making this simple lifestyle choice but it changed Mel’s life

Chances are, you’ve already heard a story like Peta Sitcheff’s.

As a sales rep working in the medical device industry, the 50-year-old worked when her neurosurgeon clients worked. So, non-stop.

“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 sites such as Instagram or LinkedIn and find herself feeling even worse. Then, eight years ago, she reached a point of acute burnout. “I started to fear my phone ringing,” says the Albert Park, Melbourne, resident.

It wasn’t enough to quit her job. Sitcheff also found herself needing to extricate herself from her phone, 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 client emails on her phone. She has blocked all social media and has a curfew of 8pm for phone use.

We know we spend too much of our days looking at our phones, and that we feel bad comparing ourselves to others.

It’s why 35 per cent of people reported wanting to get off the internet entirely in a 2025 study by NordVPN, and why there’s now an entire genre of content creator dedicated to “anti-doomscrolling influencing”. On TikTok, people like Cat Goetz make content that helps “get you off your phone”.

There are retreats where you can spend thousands to have your phone disconnected, and go away to tiny cabins where you’re able to select locations that have no service. Not to mention the popularity of analogue culture among younger generations that points towards a desire, at least to an extent, to get off the damn phone.

There are plenty of celebrities who have shunned socials. Jacob Elordi doesn’t have a public Instagram, nor does Jennifer Lawrence. George Clooney told The Hollywood Reporter he actively encourages young actors to stay 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 said.

But for the rest of us who don’t employ teams who can manage our lives, knowing how addictive our phones are, and how intertwined our phones feel to our daily lives, is it even possible to go fully offline in 2026?

According to Dr Luke Martin, a Beyond Blue clinical psychologist, the findings from studies into reduced device usage are so mixed that the advice isn’t actually to go cold 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.

A company whose reason d’etre is to add that friction is Brick. Founded in 2023 by TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz, it’s a phone lock that uses NFC technology to block access to certain apps. You “brick” your phone by tapping it against a small cube, which cuts you off from the apps you’ve determined to be unnecessary or too distracting. You can “unbrick” it only by tapping the cube, which you’re encouraged to place somewhere that is easily accessible. Like your kitchen fridge, for example.

“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 best when incorporated into a routine, rather than an occasional solution. “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 certainly makes a more sustainable relationship possible, but at $93, it’s not the cheapest option. And still, there’s something enticing about the idea of being able to get off socials altogether.

If you ask Dr Brad Marshall, the notion our lives are irrevocably linked to our phones is a bit of a myth. “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 testament to that.

The hair salon owner from Maroubra, Sydney, was on the apps for anywhere between four and five hours a day. She’d been monitoring her usage, and she even tried to set screen time limits on her phone. 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 ago, she deleted her Instagram and Facebook accounts and she hasn’t looked back since. “Zero social media time and it’s fantastic,” says Corthine, who employs someone to manage 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 things she might miss by not being on socials any more. “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 set up a fortnightly in-person catch-up with her friends and she regularly meets with a group to go ocean swimming every 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 point to raise, given social media has been moving away from the “social” element for a few years now. During the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that between 2023 and 2025, the proportion of time spent on Instagram viewing content from friends went from 11 per cent down to 7 per cent. At a Bloomberg event a few months later, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said “posting to your feed is just not the primary way that people express themselves any more”. Instead, he said, they connect via sharing content such as reels with each other.

Read between the lines, and it’s clear social media in the traditional sense – where we post snapshots of our lives for friends and family to see – is no longer profitable to these companies. People are wise to this. In 2022, there were over 336,000 signatures on a Change.org petition called “MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN”, which pleaded “we just want to see when our friends post”.

But people like Corthine and Sitcheff, who says she will often call friends during long car trips and make a concerted effort to see them in person, prove that our lives don’t stop when our scrolling does.

“My life is very peaceful,” Corthine says.

Sitcheff feels similarly. “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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