A break from your smartphone can reboot your mood
Allison Aubrey on NPR’s Morning Edition, Feb 2025
If you order up coffee on a mobile app while scrolling your social feeds, or can’t stop watching videos and reading news articles on your phone at bedtime, listen up!
Researchers studied what happened when people agreed to block the internet from their smartphones for just two weeks. And turns out, 91% felt better after the break.
“What we found was that people had better mental health, better subjective well-being and better sustained attention,” says Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Of course for some people, medications and/or talk therapy are key to managing mental health, and the researchers are not suggesting less internet time is a replacement for that kind of care.
A break from the internet on their phones also improved participants’ attention spans, which was measured by a computer task. They tracked images that alternated between mountain scenes and cities. Prior research has shown that performance tends to drop off as people age, but to the researchers’ surprise, after the internet break, there was a significant boost in scores. “The effects on attention were about as large as if participants had become 10 years younger,” Castelo says.
It’s not clear how long-lasting the effect of less time online would be, but this study validates what has been found in observational studies. “It’s one of the first experiments that does provide causal evidence that reducing time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits,” Castelo said.
When the participants agreed to block the internet on their phones, they were permitted to continue to use laptops or iPads at work or home, and they could also continue to use their phones to talk or text. So, researchers weren’t sure if participants would swap phones for another form of screen time.
But, as it turns out, breaking the habit of scrolling on their phones led to significant changes in how they spent their time. And, interestingly, each day the break went on, the benefits increased, almost like a positive feedback loop…
