So, what would it be like going back to that time? Do you have social media scrolling, mobile app shopping, streaming shows and media on your phone?
The researchers measured three different outcomes at the beginning, middle and end of the four-week study: happiness, mood, and attention. 91% of participants improved their scores in at least one category, while 71% reported better mental health after the break compared to previous ones, and 73% reported better subjective well-being.
Participants completed a survey that physicians often use to assess symptoms of depression and anxiety. It includes questions such as: Have you ever felt very interested or joy in doing what you typically enjoy last week? Participants’ responses noted that mood was significantly improved.
One surprising finding is that the reduction in depressive symptoms is (or even greater) a documented reduction in studies of people taking antidepressants.
“The magnitude of these effects is greater than we expected,” says Noah Castello, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, Noah Castello, the first author of the study.
Of course, for some, drugs and talk therapy are key to managing mental health, and researchers have not suggested that researchers are alternatives to such care.
The break from the Internet with mobile phones improved the attention span of participants. This was measured by computer tasks. They tracked images that alternate between mountain scenes and cities. Previous studies have shown that performance tends to decrease as age increases with age, but to the surprise of researchers, the scores have improved significantly after the internet broke. “The impact on attention was roughly the same size as participants were 10 years younger,” says Castello.
It is not clear how long online time will be, but this study examines what was found in observational studies. “This is one of the first experiments to provide causal evidence that there are all these important benefits to reducing the time spent on mobile phones,” Castello said.
When participants agreed to block the internet on their mobile phones, they were allowed to continue using laptops and iPads at work or at home. You can also use your mobile phone to speak and text. Therefore, the researchers were unsure whether participants would exchange phones at different formats of screen time.
But in the end, breaking the habit of scrolling on a phone caused a major change in how they spent their time. And, interestingly, the daily breaks continued to increase profits, like a positive feedback loop.
“It’s not that you’re going to stop using the internet and feel magically better,” Ward says. What happened was that people spent more time engaging in healthy behaviors.
“People reported spending more time in nature, socializing more time, and doing hobbies,” he explains. They also got more sleep and felt more socially connected to others.
“I’m not surprised by this discovery,” says Dr. Judith Joseph, a psychiatrist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center and highly functional author. She says that most people don’t want to be connected to their devices, according to research.
“They know their phones are a problem, but they can’t stop them,” she says. And it’s not surprising that as she begins to engage in behaviors like those seen in research, they start to feel better, including more exercise, more outdoor time, better sleep, more social interactions.
“Helping the brain retraining to extract joy from healthy activities has antidepressant effects,” she says, so she says the findings that show a reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety make sense.
“If (people) see this improvement in pleasure in such a short period of time, it gives us hope,” she said, adding that simple changes are beneficial.
Try it: Tips for scaling your smartphone usage
During the survey, many participants had to break the rules just to achieve what their work and family needed. For example, I turned on the Maps app to navigate in my car, or logged in to the Zoom meeting from my phone. This is a reminder of how dependent we are on mobile devices.
Given the demands of our society, it is almost impossible to go to a cold turkey. So what if you want to try this? “How can we decide to cut off if we expect access to every moment?” Ward asks. It’s a social struggle.
