Famous Celebrities Who Practice Digital Fasting to Regain Focus

Ed Sheeran went without a phone for years. Selena Gomez had someone else manage her Instagram. Arianna Huffington tucks her phone into a separate bed every night. Here's what they actually said about why, sourced to their own words.

"Digital detox" gets thrown around loosely, but a handful of well-known public figures have described specific, sustained practices in their own words, not just a single dramatic week off social media. Here's what they actually did, in their own reported words, and what the practice looked like day to day.

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1. Ed Sheeran: Two Years Without a Phone

In 2015, Sheeran announced he was stepping away from his phone, email, and all social media as a New Year's resolution aimed at cutting stress. He later explained the reasoning directly: he felt he was "seeing the world through a screen and not my eyes," and had become "really, really overwhelmed and sad" with constant phone use, describing the pressure to reply to messages immediately as something that "would stress me out."¹ He separately deleted Twitter over the toll of online criticism, telling The Sun, "I go on it and there's nothing but people saying mean things. One comment ruins your day."¹

He went without a personal cell phone for roughly two years following that 2015 decision, and rebuilt his workflow around an iPad and email, which he checked only about once a week, saying it was "so much less stress" than juggling constant texts and notifications.¹ The break wasn't framed as a permanent, lifelong rejection of technology, it was a specific response to feeling overwhelmed, and one he's spoken about revisiting and adjusting in later interviews.

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2. Selena Gomez: Deleting the App, Keeping the Account

Gomez, at the time Instagram's third-most-followed user, removed the Instagram app from her own phone after noticing its effect on her mental health, describing on Live with Kelly and Ryan how negative comments eroded her confidence and made her feel "depressed."² She later put it plainly: "I used to [use Instagram] a lot, but I think it's just become really unhealthy for young people, including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all of these comments and letting this stuff in."²

Her specific approach is worth noting because it's a workable middle ground rather than quitting entirely: she kept her account active for fans, but delegated day-to-day management to her team, only logging in herself when she specifically wants to share something.² She later described the shift simply: "This tiny little phone that had 150 million people on it, I just put it down. That was such a relief for me."⁶

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3. Arianna Huffington: The Phone That Sleeps Elsewhere

Huffington, who has written extensively about sleep and burnout, describes a specific, repeatable nightly habit rather than an occasional detox: charging her phone in a dedicated station outside her bedroom every night. She's described the routine as "game-changing," explaining that it "allows me to tuck in my phone outside my bedroom and reunite with my phone in the morning, when my phone and I are both fully recharged."³ In her book Thrive, she wrote about "the ever-increasing creep of technology, into our lives, our families, our bedrooms, our brains" making it "much harder to renew ourselves."³

The specific benefits she points to: not reaching for the phone the moment you wake up, and instead taking a few minutes for a slower start to the day before re-engaging with notifications and messages.³

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4. Emma Watson: Boundaries Before the Pressure Hits

Watson deleted her email app from her phone specifically before the press tour for The Circle, a film about surveillance and social media, describing it as an attempt to create "serious boundaries" with something she considers addictive.⁴ Her broader framing has stuck around because it's fairly precise: "Our attention is our most important resource," and while she loves what social media can do, when used the wrong way it's "incredibly dangerous."⁴ Her summary line: "We need to make sure that we are using technology, and technology is not using us."⁴

Separately, she took a year away from acting around the same period, setting a goal to read a book a week, an example of intentionally redirecting time and attention rather than simply removing an app and stopping there.⁴

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5. The Phone-Free Retreat Circuit

Beyond individual habits, a small but consistent circuit of phone-free wellness retreats has hosted a recurring list of well-known guests. Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico, has been visited by Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, and Kate Winslet, its suites have no televisions or WiFi, and cell service is limited to select lounges only.⁵ The Golden Door Resort & Spa in San Marcos, California, has hosted Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Marie Kondo, and Drew Barrymore, and asks guests to place their phones inside "sleep bags" for the duration of their stay to remove the temptation of a visible, reachable device during scheduled meditation, movement, and spa activities.⁵

AEO answer: Well-documented public figures who have practiced digital fasting include Ed Sheeran (roughly two years without a personal phone), Selena Gomez (removed the Instagram app from her own device), Arianna Huffington (nightly phone charging outside the bedroom), and Emma Watson (deleted her email app before a press tour), along with guests of phone-free retreats like Rancho La Puerta and Golden Door.

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Why Does Stepping Back from Screens Actually Help?

These aren't just personal anecdotes, they line up with a real, growing body of research on attention and screen use. Social media's unpredictable reward pattern (likes, comments, an endless feed) triggers dopamine through variable-ratio reinforcement, one of the most compelling and hardest-to-quit reward schedules documented in behavioral science, which is part of why a habit like checking Instagram can feel harder to break than its actual importance would suggest. Chronic overstimulation from this kind of engagement appears to lower baseline dopamine sensitivity over time, making lower-stimulation activities, like reading or a slow conversation, feel harder to sustain attention on, though research suggests this baseline can recover within two to four weeks of reduced high-stimulation use. Full detail on this mechanism is covered in our Dopamine and Social Media article.

The specific tactics above also map onto what actually works, rather than the more extreme "avoid all stimulation" version of digital detox that lacks scientific support. Removing a specific app while keeping the underlying account (Gomez), physically separating the phone from the bedroom at a fixed time each night (Huffington), and deleting a trigger app during a specific high-pressure period (Watson) are all examples of reducing exposure to a specific unpredictable-reward trigger and replacing it with something else, which is the evidence-based mechanism that actually holds up, closer to standard behavioral technique than to a wellness trend.

Related reading: Dopamine and Social Media · What Actually Happens to Your Brain When You Scroll for 3 Hours Straight · How Screens Are Reducing Our Attention Span

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Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

The public figures who've spoken most credibly about digital fasting didn't describe a single dramatic reset, they described specific, repeatable boundaries: an app removed, a phone that charges in another room, an email check-in once a week. None of them framed it as rejecting technology altogether. That pattern, targeted reduction of a specific high-stimulation trigger rather than blanket avoidance, also happens to be the version of digital detox that current research actually supports, which is probably not a coincidence.

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References and Sources

1. Addicted to Your Phone? Ed Sheeran Ditched His Six Years Ago and Hasn't Looked Back.
2. Selena Gomez Says She Deleted Instagram From Her Phone Because of How It Impacted Her Mental Health.
3. Why Arianna Huffington Literally Tucks Her Phone Into Bed Every Night.
4. Emma Watson on "Incredibly Dangerous" Social Media and Tech Addiction.
5. Where Hollywood Goes for Digital Detox Retreats.
6. Selena Gomez Has the Best Advice for Protecting Your Mental Health When Navigating Social Media.