To Feel Better, Take the Smart Out of Smartphone

Researchers say you can improve your mental health, well-being, and attention span in just two weeks. All you have to do is get off mobile internet. Adrian Ward, a 38-year-old psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, decided to study what it would be like to return to the internet of his childhood, one that was delivered to a single room in his home via a dial-up connection, reports NPR. He and colleagues, including Noah Castelo of the University of Alberta, recruited 467 participants, aged 18 to 74, who agreed to download an iPhone app that would block all internet access on their smartphone for two weeks. Participants could still use nonmobile internet, say from a desktop computer, but no internet on their phones.

Showing the difficulty of this task, just 266 participants downloaded the app and only 119 had it active for 10 days or more, per a release. Some had to break the rules to use Zoom or map apps, per NPR. Still, researchers learned a lot, tracking participants' mental health, well-being, and sustained attention ability. Average daily screen time declined 50%, from more than 5 hours to just over 2.5 hours. And after the break, 91% of participants showed improved scores in at least one category. Some 71% reported better mental health and 73% reported better subjective well-being, according to the study published Feb. 18 in PNAS Nexus.

Researchers say the change in attention ability "was equivalent to erasing 10 years of age-related decline," per the release. Most surprising was a drop in depressive symptoms that matched or was even greater than decreases among studied patients taking antidepressants, per NPR. And mental health and well-being scores remained at an improved level even after participants returned to using their phones as normal. Why? Probably because of the activities they got up to when not glued to their devices. They spent more time socializing in person, exercising, being in nature, and sleeping. "Our big question was, are we adapted to deal with constant connection to everything all the time? The data suggest that we are not," Ward tells PsyPost. (More smartphones stories.)