Six ways to reduce screen time, ranked by the strength of the evidence behind each one rather than by how often they get repeated. One of the most-quoted tips does not survive its own meta-analysis.

Science

The Real Reason You Can't Stop Checking Your Phone (It's Not Willpower)

Blaming yourself for your phone addiction is like blaming yourself for eating chips from a bowl that someone keeps refilling. The design is the problem.

Research

Do Apple Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing Actually Work?

Tracking your screen time reliably changes what you know about it and rarely changes the number. What the field studies and the one randomised trial actually found, and which tools moved the figure.

Research

Does a Digital Detox Actually Work?

Two preregistered randomised trials found real improvements in mood, sleep and stress during a detox, and both found screen time rebounding to near baseline once it ended. What that makes a detox good for.

Science

Your Phone Is Ruining Your Sleep (And It's Not Just the Blue Light)

Blue light filters address one of four mechanisms. The other three are psychological, and they are why Night Shift did not fix your sleep.

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How dependent on your phone are you, really?

A short, honest self-assessment about when and why you reach for your phone. No email required, nothing stored. It runs entirely in your browser.

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If it feels like more than a habit, here is where the line between habit and addiction sits, and when to see someone.

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7 daysBeginner

7-Day Phone Detox

Based on Catherine Price's method from 'How to Break Up with Your Phone.' Each day adds one small change rather than asking you to stop everything at once, which is the whole premise of the method.

30 daysIntermediate

30-Day Digital Reset

Inspired by Cal Newport's 30-day 'digital declutter' from Digital Minimalism. The most-cited study of habit formation followed 96 people for 12 weeks and found automaticity took a median of 66 days, ranging from 18 to 254, and only about half the participants' data fitted the model at all. Treat four weeks as a reasonable commitment rather than the point at which anything becomes automatic. Each week builds on the last: awareness, subtraction, replacement, and optimization.

14 daysIntermediate

Social Media Cleanse

A structured two-week break from social media. A 2022 randomised trial from the University of Bath (Lambert et al., Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking) found that a one-week break from social media significantly improved well-being, depression, and anxiety scores across 154 participants. Two weeks gives your brain enough time to fully move past the initial withdrawal (which peaks around days 2-3) and discover what fills the space.

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