Do You Need A Distraction Detox? Here’s What I Did.

The Wake‑Up Call

Let me tell you about something that happened to me recently. I developed this habit, and it started out innocently enough, just a little extra scrolling during a difficult time. But quickly I realized that I was reaching for my phone instead of a book, or before I would make my first cup of coffee in the morning, I was checking in to see what happened in the world while I was sleeping.

And so, after a month of these shenanigans, I realized something was off. I felt empty, I felt scattered, not like my usual focused, happy and life-loving self. And then, I saw that weekly screen time report that comes out on Sunday and it mortified me. I knew that I needed to fix this ASAP, and so I put myself through what I’m calling a distraction detox. I took my attention back, and I’m going to share with you how I did it in this episode, so let’s dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where our motto is simple: elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger, she lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

Why Distraction Isn’t a Personal Failure

If you feel distracted in your life, here’s what I need you to understand first. There is nothing wrong with you. So if you find yourself reaching for your phone without thinking or scrolling when you meant to be working or consuming other people’s content when you said that you would create your own, you’re not broken, you’re not undisciplined, you’re not even weak. What’s really happening is that you are up against your brain’s primary mission, which is to keep you safe, and here’s how the brain decides what’s safe and what’s dangerous. Your brain is operating on a very simple system. It is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. That’s it, that’s the entire operating system. And your brain has decided that anything that is potentially uncomfortable, whether that’s uncertainty or visibility or vulnerability, it registers that as pain, so it gets an immediate no.

And here’s how this plays out. Scrolling, well, that’s instant dopamine, so you get pleasure. Binge-watching Netflix, more dopamine, more pleasure. Procrastinating by organizing your entire office, well, it still feels productive, so dopamine, pleasure. Your brain loves this, it’s getting rewarded constantly with zero risk. But think about it. Writing that book, that is unfamiliar territory. That is facing the blank page. That’s sitting with the discomfort of not knowing if it’s going to be good. It’s the potential rejection or criticism or visibility, and the brain registers that as pain, pain, pain, pain. So your brain does what it’s designed to do, to protect you. It offers you something that gives you pleasure now so you can avoid discomfort and potential pain later. Why don’t we just scroll on Instagram just for a minute? That feels good. Or let’s watch one more episode, even though we said we were going to get a good night’s sleep. We can start tomorrow, we can write tomorrow. How about we spend the afternoon on Pinterest curating our dream home? That’s fun and productive.

This is the pain-pleasure principle in action. The unfamiliar and discomfort terrifies your brain, so in the moment, it will always tempt you with some cheap pleasure. The truth is, distraction feels so much easier than discipline. Consumption feels so much easier than creation. And here’s what makes this even more complicated, consumption isn’t the enemy. I want to be very clear here because it matters. You need to consume, it’s absolutely necessary. You must have input to have output. You have to eat to perform. This is how creation works. So the problem isn’t that you’re consuming, the problem is what you’re consuming, why you’re consuming it, and more importantly, what is it feeding inside of you?

When you consume low-quality content, whether it’s drama or comparison or doom-scrolling, or maybe even the carefully curated highlight reels of someone else’s life, you’re feeding a self-image that probably keeps you small. It might keep you scared and anxious or doubtful. Maybe it keeps you stuck in comparison or scarcity. The key is consuming intentionally, high-quality, on purpose. The women who are building extraordinary lives, they curate their inputs as carefully as they curate their closets, they know exactly what they’re feeding their minds, because what you consume either moves you toward who you’re becoming or away from it.

So remember the story I started with? Let me give you a few more of the details. I was staying at my parents a lot before my father passed away last year, and it was a very difficult, emotional time, and that’s when I noticed I was scrolling more than usual, significantly more. It was my way of numbing out, of escaping the discomfort. It was a way of distracting myself from the reality that I was about to lose the first man I’d ever loved. Now, at first, it felt innocent. But then, I noticed it became a habit. When I would come back home from those visits, I was reaching for my phone automatically first thing in the morning. When things started to get a little bit uncomfortable, I’d reach for my phone, not a book, not a walk, not my journal, not a conversation, but my phone.

So after a couple of months went by like this, I started to feel so empty. I was just living on the surface of my own life. I was there, but I wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean, I wasn’t being present. And that’s when I got my weekly screen time report, and it showed me that I was on my phone for four hours a day, average. And again, that number mortified me. I started to think about all of the things that I could have done with that time, the walks, the workouts, the content that I’d been wanting to create, the closet that I’d been wanting to organize, all of the little things that I was telling myself I wanted to do, and yet I was reaching for a phone.

The Creator Class vs. the Consumer Class

Now, this is me we’re talking about, someone who has built a very successful business, someone who teaches women how to transform their lives, someone who prides herself on being intentional, and I was spending four hours a day on my phone. But here’s what really shook me, I could see the trajectory. If this is what one month or two months does, what will a year do? What will five years do? Because I wasn’t just wasting time, I didn’t like the story that I could see written on the wall. And this is when I started to see something clearly. We are moving into a new era where there are two distinct classes of people. We are going to see the creator class and the consumer class.

Now, the creator class curates their inputs. They decide what deserves their attention, what gets access to their attention. They consume with intention and they create with focus. But the consumer class, well, they’re fed by algorithms. They scroll what they’re served. They love quick hits of information. They react instead of create. They rent their attention to whoever designed the best dopamine loop. And here’s what’s becoming crystal clear to me, the creator class, they’re going to be the ones that build wealth and influence and a legacy. The consumer class will follow trends, they will create little and wonder why they feel so empty. This isn’t about being better than anyone. This is about recognizing that we’re at a fork in the road here, and the choice you make about what gets your attention will determine everything about your future.

Now, let me tell you something, being in the creator class, it takes more effort, significantly more effort. We’re living through the greatest attention heist in human history, and every tech company, every social platform, every news outlet has one singular goal, to capture and monetize your attention. They even employ neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists whose entire job is to make their platforms irresistible, and they’ve succeeded. The average person, this is shocking, the average person checks their phone 144 times a day. That’s every 6.5 minutes of your waking life. You’re not living your life, you’re interrupting your life with these brief moments of presence, and your brain loves this dopamine, it craves that instant hit of pleasure. And guess what gives you dopamine immediately with zero resistance? Scrolling, checking your phone, consuming content, reacting to whatever the algorithm serves you. It’s going to require that you resist that call of distraction when your brain is screaming for an easy win.

So when you sit down to write the email to your list or you start that project or you have that difficult conversation or you work on something that really matters to you, your brain immediately offers you an out. So the creative class isn’t special, they’re just willing to do the harder thing. They’re willing to sit with boredom instead of reaching for stimulation or face uncertainty instead of numbing out. They’re willing to feel the discomfort of not knowing if what they’re creating’s going to work. They resist the dopamine hit of cheap pleasure and choose delayed gratification of building something real. And let’s be honest about something else, all the best stuff in life is often the hardest stuff.

Think about it, the best relationships, they require you to show up even more when it’s uncomfortable, to have hard conversations, to be present when you’d rather escape. Think about the best work, it happens in those hours when you’re in deep focus, when you’re pushing through the resistance, when you are creating something that didn’t exist before. Think about the body you want, that happens when you choose the thing that really serves you over the thing that’s easy in that moment. Even think about the life you dream about, it is on the other side of a thousand small moments where you chose and focused your attention instead of giving into urges and impulses. Easy is seductive, easy feels good in the moment, but easy doesn’t build anything. The consumer class takes the easy route. The creator class takes the often harder, but more meaningful route, and that route, it is harder every single day, but it’s also where everything you want is actually waiting for you.

How Distraction Shapes Your Self‑Image

So here’s something most people don’t realize about distraction. Every time you choose distraction, you’re not just wasting time, you’re feeding a self-image. When you habitually reach for your phone instead of facing the discomfort, you’re telling yourself, “I can’t handle this. I need to escape. I’m not capable of sitting with hard feelings.” When you scroll instead of create, you’re reinforcing, “I’m a consumer, not a creator. Other people’s lives are more interesting than my own.” When you obsessively check the news or dive into drama you can’t control, you’re feeding worry, anxiety and fear. And here’s what we know about self-image, what you practice you become. You’re not just scrolling, you’re practicing being someone who can’t focus, someone who needs constant stimulation, someone who avoids discomfort.

Your self-image determines what you pay attention to, and what you pay attention to reinforces your self-image, it’s a loop, and the algorithms know this. They know exactly what captures your attention. They study your behavior, they learn what triggers your dopamine responses, and then they feed you more of exactly that. If you want to know where your attention really is, don’t look at what you say matters to you, look at your feeds, because that algorithm is a mirror. It’s reflecting back what you’ve been giving your attention to, is it drama or outrage, other people’s content, doom and gloom, or is it curated with the things that mirror your values, whether that’s beauty or inspiration? Maybe it’s expansive ideas. Maybe it’s how you can create more of what you want. Just take a look at your social media feeds right now, really look at them. What story is it telling you about yourself, about what you care about, about who you’re becoming? And do you like that story? Because that’s the self-image you’re feeding every single day.

My Distraction Detox Framework

So back to my story. When I realized I was on that slippery slope of being in the consumer class, I gave myself a distraction detox, and it boiled down to four things. Number one, I did an attention audit. I tracked where my attention was actually going for three days, not where I thought it went or where I wished it went, but where it actually was going, and it became crystal clear why I wasn’t feeling like myself. And then, I created new standards. Standards are what you’re committed to living by, they’re non-negotiables. I became clear about the relationship that I wanted to have with my common distractions. I created three standards that I am still practicing to this day that’s helped me to stay focused and create far beyond the capacity that I once had.

The third thing I did is I designed my environment to make distraction harder. Here’s the truth, your environment is either supporting you or sabotaging you. I made scrolling harder and presence easier, because willpower is finite, but environmental design is permanent. And then, the last thing that I did is I created my life menu. This is one of the most powerful tools I’ve ever developed, and it’s what helped me become part of the creator class instead of the consumer class. This is a tool that I’ve used for many years, but I had somewhat abandoned it, but now I’m back to using it every single day, and it is the tool that supports me when I have an urge to abandon my desires or my goals or my intentions, when I want to eat something that doesn’t serve me or when I want to pick up my phone instead of working on what’s really important.

And here’s what’s changed since I took my attention back. I am feeling so much more energized, I’m working out regularly, I’m taking the time to plan my meals, I’m playing more. I’ve completed so many things that I said I wanted to do. My work has improved. I can drop into deep focus for hours because I’m not constantly fragmenting my attention. My relationships are better. When I’m with someone, I practice actually being there. But the biggest shift is I’m enjoying my life in a much deeper way because I’m paying attention to it.

Now, if you are listening to this and you’re thinking, “Tonya, I need this, I need all of this.” I want you to know that we’re diving deep into this exact concept in February inside the School of Self-Image membership, because here’s the hard truth, in most cases, it’s not a time problem that women have, it’s an attention issue. You don’t need more hours in the day, you need to reclaim your attention that you already have. And when you know how to channel your attention and what matters most, you become powerful, you become so creative, you become the woman who builds the life she’s dreaming about instead of consuming everyone else’s.

So if you’re ready to live an undistracted life, if you’re ready to join the creator class and protect your attention like the treasure it is, come and join us. I’ll show you exactly how. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/join to learn more. I want you to remember, where your attention goes, your life follows. The question is, where is it going right now? And more importantly, where do you want it to go? Have a beautiful week, my friends. I’ll see you in next week’s episode. Cheers.