After a holiday season with so much everything, I love curling back into my house and hibernating until spring comes and the sunlight returns. Well, not exactly the spring equinox. March is a long way off! But for 31 days, I turn inward and dwell on the early sunsets when I can close the shutters of our house at 4:30 p.m., grab a soft blanket, light a candle and watch a movie while doing a puzzle with my family – no expectation to go anywhere or do anything.

We choose to start the year with less. Our household makes the most of No Spend January, as we have for many years. Funny enough, food is a focus of daily spending. Instead of going out to eat, we cook at home from our well-stocked freezer and pantry. Instead of shopping for groceries and HelloFresh boxes, we get creative with what you can do with the links of kielbasa we’ve collected (delicious with pineapple, tossed in Japanese BBQ sauce). And if we’re eating at home with food we already have, it’s easy to avoid spending on other things because, well, we’re home. It’s a month of well-planned fiscal conservation, and I love seeing what it does to our credit card bill.

January is also the month when I unplug from social media. I log out of the apps and delete them from my phone for the entire month. And once I let go of my FOMO, this digital detox makes me feel better. The commitment to reduce my screentime removes the temptation to mindlessly check what others are doing. It’s cold and dark in January. Daylight hours are short! And without social media on my phone, I don’t feel the constant need to check it. Although my Wordle streak gets really high, since it’s one of the only things I do on it. I recognize the constant reach for my phone as an addictive behavior, because even though I can’t check social media, my brain keeps telling me to check something on this little device, permanently glued to my side.

And not all of us can – or want to – delete social media from our lives. There are productivity tools out there that can help us turn it off temporarily every day. If you want the basics, you can always turn off the wifi at a certain time every night (we’ve done this to help our 9-year-old make better decisions about how much YouTube he should doomscroll). There are apps that can be very helpful as well. Personally, I use a free app called Flora to help me focus for 25-minute blocks of time, where my phone sits uninterrupted and grows a tree – and the tree dies when I use my phone. This helps me stay off my device (no matter who is texting me or commenting on Facebook) while I work on my to-do list.

This unplugging behavior is becoming more trendy. A Business Insider story published in January featured one of the tools you can use, called the Brick. If you’re interested in seriously committing to a digital detox, this tool helps you temporarily relieve your phone of all the distracting social media apps and retain the basic phone functions – a dumb phone. The physical brick requires you to tap your phone on a tile to enable the features – and tap back when you want to return to full function. While enabled, the brick blocks those pesky distracting apps for a time you determine. The idea is you can retrain your brain to reduce screen time and get away from your phone.

I find that without social media, I have the ability to occupy my attention on other things I want to do more of. We’re 15 days into the year and I’m already on my fourth book (gotta get to 50 for my Goodreads goal!). Plus, I created a book log journal to reflect on the characters and messages I’m reading about. Being fully present instead of constantly distracted is a gift I give myself during this social media break.

Back in November, I was invited to be a guest on a podcast to talk about mental wellness and happiness. I couldn’t talk about this without discussing the idea of a digital detox. If you’re interested in hearing more from the marketing professional perspective I offer, give it a listen.