Before we dive in, if you want a real read on where you are in your body’s detox sequence (and whether your terrain is open enough to absorb the work that comes next), take my free Detox Phase Quiz before reading. It takes 3 minutes and will make everything below much more personal.
Most of my work centers on clearing the body, including drainage, the colon, the liver, the lymph, the kidneys, and the deeper layers of toxic burden that have been silently accumulating in tissues for decades.
But, the more I do this work, the clearer it has become that the body is downstream of the rest of your life.
You can clear your body, but if your daily inputs are still toxic — your phone, your relationships, your mental load, your home — then your body can keep re-accumulating.
Your terrain stays open for a moment, then closes again because the systems around it never changed.
This is why I have started talking more often about an idea that runs through everything I do: subtraction, not addition.
Your body has been asking for less for a long time. So has your nervous system. So has your mind.
Most people have been taught to add more supplements, protocols, peptides, biohacks, wearables, apps, tracking, and information.
When what their body (and their life) actually needs is less.
Less to clear, to process, to carry, to respond to, and to manage.
Today, I want to walk through six detoxes that aren’t about the body.
Or rather, six detoxes that aren’t just about the body, because every single one of them shows up in the body eventually.
If your colon is moving, your liver is open, your drainage is supported, and you still feel exhausted, foggy, depleted, and like you cannot fully come back online, this post is for you.
Let’s get into it.
1. Phone Detox
This is the one most people will skip. It is also the one most likely to silently undo every other detox you do.
Your phone is a sustained sympathetic nervous system activator — every notification and every scroll is a small stress response, and the background process of tracking what’s pending never stops running.
Willpower is absolutely the wrong tool for this, even for me (trust me on this one). The apps were engineered to capture your attention against your will. You need the right system, not more discipline.
What to subtract:
Social media apps off your phone. A 30- to 60-minute daily limit enforced by Opal (MEGHAN30 for 30 days free).
Notifications off across the board (badges only for text or WhatsApp messages, emails, calendar, phone calls, and potentially social apps if work is involved).
Airplane Mode from the start of your evening routine until after your morning routine the next day. Opal can block a bunch of apps for you automatically if your phone’s Airplane Mode feels too blunt.
36 hours off your phone every week, from Friday evening to Sunday morning. The first weekend is hard. The third weekend changes you. (I’ll be writing about my experience the past few weekends soon.)
Phone out of the bedroom at night. Charge it in another room.
An out-of-office for any block longer than 48 hours away. Even a weekend.
Phone-free hours: first hour of the morning, last hour of the evening, all meals.
2. Substance Detox
That evening glass of wine has been doing a quiet job for years, and removing it feels like removing a coping mechanism. Which it is…which is exactly the point.
Alcohol acutely suppresses parasympathetic tone and HRV, with effects lasting multiple nights. THC blunts vagal tone and disrupts the sleep architecture that does the actual repair work. That sleep gummy you cannot fall asleep without is not solving a sleep problem; it is masking the underlying signal. And, caffeine has a 10-12 hour quarter-life, so a 2pm coffee is still active at midnight, shallowing your sleep without waking you.
I will say this from personal experience: I am almost 5 years alcohol-free. I am (mostly) caffeine-free, and have been coffee-free for probably 4 years now. I did not arrive at this by adding more discipline. I arrived at it by removing each substance for long enough to understand what it had actually been doing in my body all along.
I’ll say that you can’t fully understand your relationship with a substance until you remove it altogether. Not for a weekend or until your next vacation ends. Long enough that your body has fully cleared it, the rebound has settled, and your initial baseline you have been living against returns. That’s when the real information shows up.
What to subtract:
Remove alcohol for at least 30 days. (Seriously…try it. I did this for 30 days, and here we are, nearly 5 years later.)
Remove cannabis, including sleep gummies, for 30 days.
Cut caffeine off at 10-11am, or pull it out entirely for a week and watch what your HRV does.
3. Relationship Detox
We’ve been taught that draining relationships are character problems to be solved with patience and better attitudes. They are not; they are autonomic problems with structural solutions.
Your nervous system tracks every relationship in your life — the ones that expand you, the ones that drain you, and the ones that have been quietly depleting you for years that you have been calling loyalty for whatever reason.
The chronic stress activation shows up as elevated cortisol, impaired digestion, disrupted hormones, impaired thyroid conversion. It is biological, not just emotional.
I have shed many, many friends over the years. As I have grown and evolved, the relationships that no longer matched the version of me I was becoming have either evolved with me or fallen away on their own. I stopped grieving every loss. Some of them were the actual subtraction my body had been asking for.
What I have learned to look for instead is a small number of high-quality expanders. People with depth and range who challenge me, who inspire me, who expand me, who have lived enough to have something real to say, and who do not require me to shrink, please, or perform. Quality over quantity, always.
What to subtract:
Obligations that drain you without expanding you.
A friend group (or a particular friend) that has not felt expansive in months or even years.
A partner or relationship that does not feel in alignment with the person you are becoming.
A board, volunteer commitment, or role that was a yes from a different version of you.
Over-explaining, over-apologizing, over-accommodating. That’s exhausting.
The reflexive yes. Try “let me check and get back to you” for 30 days and watch how many of your “obligations” evaporate.
4. Mental Load Detox
What I like to call the “mental load” is essentially the constant background process of keeping track of everything, and the invisible labor of remembering, anticipating, coordinating, and managing.
Every time you switch tasks, your nervous system flickers into sympathetic activation. The body reads constant input as a sustained threat, even when the inputs are benign.
There is one intervention here I have come to think of as the most consequential lever on this entire list: the first hour of the morning belongs to you. Not to your phone, email, kids, or partner. A glass of water, sunlight, walking, meditating, journaling, sitting quietly. The morning hour is where you become a person again before you become a function for everyone else.
What to subtract:
Multitasking. One thing at a time, on purpose. Eat without your phone, or go on a walk without a podcast.
Eating standing up. Sit down for every meal. Hurried, upright eating drives sympathetic dominance and worse digestion.
Constant audio input (podcasts, music, and so on). Your brain cannot rest while it is being talked at all day.
News you can’t act on. The body can’t tell the difference between a real threat and a headline.
One small caveat: subtracting mental load does not mean white-knuckling everything in your head. The whole point is to get it out of your nervous system. Use a calendar (Google, Apple, whatever you like). Use a notes app or Notion for what you'd otherwise be remembering. Use Claude or another AI tool to draft a proposal you've been putting off for weeks. Use Claude Co-work to set up a daily scheduled workflow that checks your Notion business roadmap and prioritizes your daily tasks for you (this was a recent endeavor of mine this past week). The goal is not to be impressively organized in your own brain, but rather, to give the brain less to hold so it has room for the things only it can do — thinking, feeling, creating, being present to life.
5. Sleep Detox
You can’t detox in a body that is not sleeping. The liver does most of its repair work between 1am and 3am. The lymph drains during deep sleep. If you are running on five or six hours, the body is conducting a renovation with no time to do it.
What to subtract:
Screens off at least one hour before bed. Again, use Opal or Airplane Mode to block apps instead of relying on your own willpower, because we both know that doesn’t work.
In bed by 9:30pm. The hormonal repair window in women starts before midnight, and you cannot make it up with sleeping in.
Phone out of the bedroom. Your body knows it is there even when it is silenced.
Room temperature between 65 and 68 degrees, blackout curtains or an eye mask.
Read a book instead.
6. Home Detox
Your home is one of the most under-examined toxic exposures in your life and one of the most consequential. You spend more time in it than anywhere else, and the body’s response to home toxicity is slow and quiet.
What to subtract:
Synthetic fragrances. Candles, plug-ins, perfume, detergent, dryer sheets, fabric softener are some of the most underestimated endocrine disruptors in modern homes.
Conventional household cleaning products.
Plastic food storage, especially anything heated.
Conventional personal care products. The average woman puts 168 chemicals on her skin every day before leaving the house (!!!).
Fluoride and chlorine in shower water. A filter on the showerhead is one of the cheapest, highest-leverage upgrades.
Bedside EMFs. Phone and WiFi router out of the bedroom.
Visual clutter. The nervous system reads clutter as unfinished business.
You can find my full list of non-toxic swaps for the bathroom here and for the kitchen here.
If you’re ready to go even deeper, I highly recommend working with Lightwork Home Health for a full-spectrum assessment of your home.
They will test your home’s air quality, water quality, EMF exposure, light sources, water contaminants, mold, moisture, and more, giving you a full data-driven roadmap to detoxify and optimize your space for health, recovery, and performance.
Use my link below for a special friends & family rate.
The Throughline
All of these are connected. You can clear one and have the others quietly add the burden back. You can clean up your inputs, but you body will still be inflamed if you’re addicted to your phone. You can do the inner work, and your body will still be exhausted if your relationships are still draining.
True detox is environmental. It is biological, and it is everything around the biology.
Again, subtraction over addition.
Your body has been asking for less for a long time. So has every other system you live inside.
A note on sequencing: please do not try all six at once. Depleted systems do not have surplus capacity for six new variables, and you will fail by next week and decide you are undisciplined. You are not; you are depleted.
Pick two areas, hold them for two weeks, add one more every two weeks after that. By week ten or twelve, you will be living in a different nervous system, in a different body, with a different relationship to your own life.
This coming Thursday, I am sharing my Attention Audit I use with my clients — a broader self-diagnostic that helps you see where your attention is actually going across your whole life, not just these six layers. Paid subscribers will get the full audit as well as the protocol for working through it.
If you are not a paid subscriber yet, this is a good week to upgrade. You can do so below.
Take my free Detox Phase Quiz if you want to start with the body and figure out where your terrain is right now and what to clear first.
If this resonated, I’d love to know in the comments: which of the six is the hardest one for you to subtract from right now? What does the resistance feel like? Let me know in the comments. I read and reply to every response.
And, if you’re ready to address the actual terrain rather than layer more inputs onto a system that hasn’t been cleared, I’m currently taking a very limited number of new 1:1 coaching clients. Book your free Client Intake call.
And, if you have any other questions or comments, don’t hesitate to ask me any time in my weekly Q&A in my paid subscriber channel. If you’re not a paid subscriber, sign up below.
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Everything you share just makes so much sense🙏🏼
an out of office over the weekend is honestly exactly what i have been missing. i can’t believe ive only just heard of this!! i feel like i can never truly switch off.