Jakab, M. (2025). Systemic and therapeutic aspects of withdrawing from digital consumption.

A domain-based review of digital minimalism and its relations to digital wellbeing within the media ecosystem.

Current Psychology, –(Ahead of print), -.
doi: 10.1007/s12144-025-07906-9 (IF: 2.5)

Abstract

While minimalist lifestyles have mostly been scrutinized in regard to their material implications, a contemporary understanding needs to embrace digital minimalism as well. However, research on the latter is underdeveloped and lacks a theoretical superstructure. This domain-based literature review intends to outline the potential ramifications of digital minimalism for the lifeworld and the media ecosystem and, accordingly, its implications for digital wellbeing and the role of digital minimalism in current psychotherapy research.

The findings demonstrate that
(1) within the media ecosystem, digital minimalism can directly reduce consumerism and contribute to a lowered amount of energy needed for virtualization. It can also disrupt the attention economy by making users unavailable to digital messages.
(2) Digital minimalism can interfere with wellbeing in two ways: As an explicit intervention, it is aimed at the technological-functional level on a short-term scale. As the virtual extension of a minimalist lifestyle, it aims more at avoiding connectivity and virtualization over longer periods of time.
(3) As of now, there is little scholarly interest in digital minimalism within psychotherapy science. The few approaches discussed mainly stem from CBT, and, to a lesser extent, systemic therapy. Neither psychodynamic nor existentialist-humanist models of a growth-oriented way of reducing digital interaction are described.