To be Happier, Take a Vacation... from Your Smartphone

Today, nearly every American - 91% - owns a cellphone that can access the internet, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2011, only about one-third did. Another study finds they average 5 hours and 16 minutes a day staring at small screens.

With that rapid infiltration has come widespread concern about the negative psychological effects of being chronically online. A 2022 Gallup Poll found that 58% of American smartphone users, including 80% of those under 30 years of age, worry they use their devices too much.

New research by Adrian Ward, associate professor of marketing at Texas McCombs, validates those worries and suggests a remedy. In a controlled experiment, he found that just two weeks of blocking mobile internet from smartphones improved three dimensions of psychological functioning: mental health, subjective well-being, and attention span.

"Smartphones have drastically changed our lives and behaviors over the past 15 years, but our basic human psychology remains the same," Ward says. "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 conducted the study with an interdisciplinary team of experts in psychology, psychiatry, and consumer behavior, including Noah Costelo of the University of Alberta, Kostadin Kushlev of Georgetown University, Michael Esterman of Boston University, and Peter Reiner of the University of British Columbia.

The researchers conducted a four-week randomized controlled trial in which 467 participants, average age 32, were asked to install an app on their smartphones. The app blocked all internet access, including browsers and social media, only allowing calls and text messages.

Participants could still access the internet through computers at home, work, and school, but they were no longer constantly connected to the online world.

To assess the effects of the intervention over time, participants were randomly split into two groups. One group activated the app for the first two weeks and then got internet access back. The other blocked the internet during the latter two weeks.

Using both self-reported assessments and objective computer-based tests, the researchers measured participants’ psychological functioning at the beginning, middle, and end of the four weeks.

Overall, they found that blocking mobile internet for two weeks led to notable improvements in mental health, subjective well-being, and sustained attention.

  • 91% of participants improved on at least one of the three outcomes.
  • 71% of participants reported better mental health after the internet break than before it. The average degree of improvement in symptoms of depression was larger than that reported in multiple studies of antidepressant medications.
  • Attention spans improved by an amount equivalent to reversing 10 years of age-related cognitive decline.
  • The benefits of blocking mobile internet seem to increase over time. Experience-sampling data showed that people felt progressively better day by day during the intervention period.

These effects on psychological functioning can be explained by how blocking the mobile internet affected participants’ daily lives, Ward says. Rather than watching more TV or movies, they "increased time spent in the offline world. That's doing hobbies, talking to people face-to-face, or going out in nature. They got more sleep, felt more socially connected, and felt more in control of their own decisions."

For marketers, Ward says, the findings suggest a huge appetite among consumers for technologies that stimulate them less and thus help them reduce their time online. For example, a company might move to a subscription-based business model so users aren’t bombarded with flashy ads begging for a click.

Employers might offer apps to help employees become happier and more productive by cutting back their mobile internet consumption, he says.

But he recommends giving workers the option whether to buy in. In the study, only 57% of participants followed through on installing the app, and only a quarter went the full two weeks offline.

"Maybe you put it to a vote, and people will choose to vote for it," says Ward. "The fact that 80% of people think they use their phones too much suggests that maybe they will."

Noah Castelo, Kostadin Kushlev, Adrian F Ward, Michael Esterman, Peter B Reiner.
Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being.
PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2025. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017

Most Popular Now

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

Are You Eligible for a Clinical Trial? C…

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...

Global Study Reveals How Patients View M…

How physicians feel about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has been studied many times. But what do patients think? A team led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich...