Smartphones enable people to access the online world from anywhere at any time. Despite the benefits of this technology, there is growing concern that smartphone use could adversely impact cognitive functioning and mental health. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that these concerns may be well-founded, but causal evidence remains scarce. We conducted a month-long randomized controlled trial to investigate how removing constant access to the internet through smartphones might impact psychological functioning. We used a mobile phone application to block all mobile internet access from participants’ smartphones for 2 weeks and objectively track compliance. This intervention specifically targeted the feature that makes smartphones “smart” (mobile internet) while allowing participants to maintain mobile connection (through texts and calls) and nonmobile access to the internet (e.g. through desktop computers). The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. Mediation analyses suggest that these improvements can be partially explained by the intervention’s impact on how people spent their time; when people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes, and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being.
Ignorance is bliss, I guess 😄
Note what they continued to allow. They could still text and call, they did not completely isolate. They just shrunk their bubble.
Instead of being bombarded by global stressors, international conflicts, and the need to participate on a massive stage, they were limited to those friends and family they would give a direct line of contact to.
An echo chamber, if you want to think negatively about it. A village, for a positive label.
The internet is an ongoing experiment, what happens when you take a being who for thousands of generations commonly only directly interacted with his village and neighboring villages, for whom “The World” and all its glories and shames, was just an abstract concept brought home by stories from wanderers…what happens to that species when you put the whole world, up to the minute, within reach at every moment?
What happens when you can subscribe to every conflict and decision made way above your pay grade, and worry how it might hurt you? What happens when you don’t even have to choose to subscribe, it’s injected into your data stream because your anxiety and need to know bring revenue? What happens when you don’t even seek it, but it is delivered right to you?
I feel like if you’d like to make you mental health healthier, you’d avoid looking at negativity in social media apps and also take breaks from browsing the internet too
Blocking it from my computer would probably help, too. I think the internet is the problem. Specifically social media.
