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.
The researchers included 467 participants, ages 18 to 74, who agreed to the month-long study aimed at testing the theory that constant connection to everything, all the time, has unintended consequences.
At a time when more then 90% of Americans have a smartphone, we forget that having an internet-enabled supercomputer at our fingertips 24/7 is a new phenomenon.
Ward, who is 38, remembers a dial-up connection in his home as a kid. In those days, the internet lived in a room in your home. “You used it at specific times because you had limited minutes and had to make sure nobody else was using the phone line,” Ward recalls.
So, what would it be like to go back to those days? No social media scrolling, no mobile-app shopping, no streaming shows or media on your phone?
The researchers measured three different outcomes of well-being, mood and attention at the beginning, middle and end of the four-week study. While 91% of participants improved their scores in at least one category, 71% reported better mental health after the break, compared to before, and 73% reported better subjective well-being.
The participants completed a survey often used by doctors to assess symptoms of depression and anxiety. It includes questions such as:Â How often in the past week have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things you typically enjoy? The participants’ responses pointed to a significant lift in mood.
One of the surprising findings is that the decrease in depressive symptoms was on par — or even greater than — reductions documented in studies of people taking antidepressant medications.
“The size of these effects are larger than we anticipated,” says the study’s first author, Noah Castelo, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.
