The notification lit up my dark apartment at 11:47 PM. Another match on the dating app. Six months after my divorce was final, I’d been swiping through variations of the same profile for months, and I stared at that glowing rectangle for a long time.

Maybe you know that glow, brother. After divorce, the house gets quiet in a way you can’t describe until you’ve lived it. No voices down the hall. No kids’ sneakers by the door on your off-weeks. Just you and the hum of the refrigerator. So you reach for the phone, the remote, the laptop. One YouTube video turns into twelve, and somewhere around 2 AM you’re watching a stranger restore a rusted cast-iron skillet you will never own. Doomscrolling, late-night rabbit holes and hours on dating apps become the escape hatch we use to avoid the silence of our new life. Every hour spent in that hatch is an hour we aren’t spending rebuilding.

Pascal wrote that in the 1600s. In 2014, a team of psychologists at the University of Virginia put it to the test.

Timothy Wilson and his colleagues published a study in the journal Science titled “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind.” They asked people to sit alone in a room with nothing but their thoughts, for stretches ranging from six to 15 minutes. Most people hated it. Then the researchers raised the stakes. They gave participants a button that delivered a mild electric shock, one the participants had already said they would pay money to avoid. Two-thirds of the men pressed the button at least once during the 15-minute thinking period, compared to a quarter of the women. One man shocked himself 190 times.

Let that sink in. Two out of three men would rather get zapped than sit still with their own minds for fifteen minutes.

Now picture that same man after a divorce, alone in an apartment on a Tuesday night. He doesn’t have a shock button. He has something far more comfortable: a phone with infinite scroll.

Men rarely walk around announcing, “I’m lonely.” Our loneliness wears a mask. It shows up as irritability. It shows up as staying at the office until 8 PM because the empty house feels worse than the extra work. It shows up in the third beer, in the cynical comment about “how women are,” and in four hours of screen time we barely remember.

The numbers say a lot of us are carrying it. The Survey Center on American Life’s 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that 15% of American men now report having no close friends, compared to 3% in 1990. And among men who are unmarried and not in a romantic relationship, one in five has no close friends at all.

Many of us lost friends in the divorce. Couple friends picked sides. The guys we used to see at our kids’ games now feel awkward around us. That leaves a hole, and the screen rushes in to fill it. The screen is always available. It never judges. It also never shows up with a casserole when you’re sick.

Here’s the thing: the phone takes more from us than the hours we spend on it.

In 2017, Adrian Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin published a study known as “Brain Drain” in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Nearly 800 smartphone users took tests of mental capacity with their phones placed on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. The people whose phones were in another room clearly outperformed the people with phones on the desk. Whether the phone was on or off, face up or face down, made no difference. And the people most dependent on their phones took the biggest hit.

Social media works on us the same way. Melissa Hunt and her team at the University of Pennsylvania published “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression” in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. They assigned 143 students to either cap Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat at 10 minutes per platform per day or use them as usual for three weeks. The group that cut back showed significant drops in loneliness and depression.

Read that again. Less “social” media made people feel less alone.

And the dating apps? A 2024 Forbes Health and OnePoll study of 1,000 Americans who had recently used a dating app found that 78% felt emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted by the apps at least sometimes. Among men, the burnout rate was 74%. If swiping at midnight leaves you feeling better about yourself, you’re the exception.

I have a confession. One of my favorite ways to get away from the mental strain of work is my PlayStation. One day my PS4 quit on me. I was upset. I spent hours researching, calling customer service reps and trying every fix I could find. What finally worked was a hard reset of the entire system.

That got me thinking. When my own life locks up, the fix usually comes from resetting the hardware between my ears: the way I think and the habits I run on autopilot. I call it Factory Reset Thinking.

Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport lays out his own version of a reset in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. He recommends a 30-day “digital declutter”: step away from optional technologies, rediscover offline activities that satisfy you, then bring back only the tools that truly serve what you value. Newport also gives a name to what many of us are living with. He calls it “solitude deprivation,” a state where you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts.

Singer Ed Sheeran ran a reset of his own. On a June 2024 episode of Jake Shane’s talk show Therapuss, he revealed he hasn’t had a phone since 2015. By then he had about 10,000 contacts texting him constantly, and his explanation was simple: he was “losing real-life interaction.” He switched to an iPad and email, which he answers once a week. He also described sitting at a restaurant while his wife steps away from the table. Years ago he would have flipped through Instagram. Now, sitting there doing nothing, is when a lyric or melody comes to him.

That’s what happens when you stop running from the silence. Something useful shows up in it.

A detox without a plan is a white-knuckle grip, and willpower fades by about 9 PM, right when the apartment gets quiet. That makes this a job for Organization, the fourth of the 5 Steps to Power. You build a structure that closes the escape hatches before you ever have to fight them.

Think of your day in four zones:

The Launch (first 30 minutes after waking). No phone. Coffee, a walk, a stretch, prayer or meditation if that’s your thing, a few lines in a journal. Your mind belongs to you before it belongs to the algorithm.

The Work Zone. Use the phone as a tool. Turn off nonessential notifications. When you need deep focus, put the phone in another room. Adrian Ward’s research says you’ll think more clearly.

The Danger Zone (roughly 7 PM to bedtime). This is where the rabbit holes live, so schedule it like an appointment. Monday is the gym. Tuesday is a call with your brother or an old friend. Wednesday is your project: the book, the guitar, the woodworking, the side business. Thursday is cooking a real meal. Your off-weeks from the kids need this plan most of all.

The Landing (last 60 minutes before sleep). The phone charges in the kitchen. Buy a $10 alarm clock if you need to. Read a physical book. Write.

Let me tell you about writing. After my divorce, with child support taking half of my take-home pay, I lived in a Salvation Army shelter. I didn’t have a quiet apartment to escape from. I had bed bugs and a notebook. That notebook gave me the most prolific poetry-writing period of my life. I processed my pain on paper, one page at a time, and what I learned there is now in everything I share through The Rebound. The silence I was afraid of turned out to be a workshop.

The silence in your new life will feel uncomfortable at first. Remember the men in Timothy Wilson’s study. Discomfort is normal. Staying in the escape hatch is a choice.

Every evening you reclaim from the screen is an evening you can invest in your health, your children, your friendships, your craft and your future. The phone will still be there in the morning. Your second half of life is happening tonight.

So put the phone in the kitchen. Pick up the notebook, the dumbbell or the number of an old friend. Your move, brother.