Inbal Nahum-Shani of the University of Michigan, speaking at the Association for Psychological Science in 2016, noted that stress could get in the way of new habits — even ones that we’ve worked on embedding in our lives. That goes for digital detoxes and staying off social media, too; when stressful situations hit, we can fall back on things we know, like checking our phones every 12 seconds. A lot of people know about stress-reduction strategies like breathing deeply and counting, but, she explained, “for various reasons, we fail to use the strategies as the stress occurs in real life.”