Digital Spring Cleaning: Digital Detoxing

By Melony Roy and Ian Bush

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- If you spend most of your time -- free and otherwise -- on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, you might do well to disconnect.

We're always on, constantly staring at screens, scrolling, tapping, typing, screenshotting. Feeling phantom vibrations, or that ringtone-induced endorphin rush.

Is it time to check yourself in to digital detox, switching off those glowing devices?

"Freeing ourselves from these manufactured-in-our-mind connections is difficult but it can be very empowering."

Matthew Ray is creative director at Chatterblast Media, and is a professor of social media at Temple.

"I recommend that people occasionally say, 'you know, I'm going to sit down and watch a movie and not check my Twitter feed or my Facebook feed.'"

We're not talking 'going cold turkey' here. Try scheduling your social media browsing, just as you might other events in your daily diary.

"Be thoughtful about our approach to them: I'm going to have a dinner with my friends and I'm going to not look at my phone."

That will improve real-life interaction, but Ray argues it also can increase the value of what you do online.

And if your energy is drained or your ire is raised by what appears on your social feed, consider a monthly culling.

"There are a lot of people we accumulate on our social media sites who live in our home rent-free. And it's OK to cut them. Because they're honestly not part of my authentic world."