A break from your smartphone can restart your mood. Here’s how long you need – Wyoming Public Media

If you order coffee in a mobile app while scrolling your social emissions or you can’t stop watching videos and read news articles on your phone before going to bed, listen!

Researchers have studied what happened when people agreed to block the Internet from their smartphones in just two weeks. And it turns out, 91% felt better after the break.

“What we found was that people have better mental health, better subjective well-being and better sustainable attention,” says Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin.

Researchers include 467 participants aged 18 to 74, who agreed to the monthly study aimed at testing the theory that the constant connection with everything, all the time, has unforeseen consequences.

At a time when more than 90% of Americans have a smartphone, we forget that the presence of a supercomputer with an activated internet at one fingertips 24/7 is a new phenomenon.

Ward, who is 38 years old, remembers a relationship with her home as a child. In those days, the Internet lived in a room in your home. “You used it at specific times because you had limited minutes and you had to make sure that no one else is using the telephone line,” Ward recalls.

So, what would it be to go back in those days? Without scrolling to social media, no mobile shopping, no streaming shows or media on your phone?

Researchers measure three different results of well -being, mood and attention in the beginning, middle and end of a four -week study. While 91% of participants improve their results in at least one category, 71% report better mental health after the break than before, and 73% report better subjective well-being.

Participants completed a study often used by doctors to assess the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Includes questions such as: How often do you have little interest or pleasure to do things you usually enjoy in the past week? Participants’ answers indicated a significant mood lift.

One of the surprising discoveries is that the reduction of depressive symptoms was PAR – or even larger than the reductions documented in studies of people taking antidepressant drugs.

“The size of these effects is greater than we expected,” says the first author of the study, Noah Castello, an assistant at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Of course, for some people, medicines and/or conversations are key to mental health management, and researchers do not suggest that less time on the Internet is a substitute for this type of care.

The internet interruption of their phones also improved the attention of participants, which is measured by a computer task. They followed images that alternated between mountain scenes and cities. Previous studies show that effectiveness tends to decrease with age, but to the surprise of researchers, after the internet, there was a significant impetus to the results. “The effects on attention were so big as the participants were 10 years older,” Castello says.

It is not clear how long the effect the effect of less time online would be, but this study confirms what was found in observations. “This is one of the first experiments that provides causal evidence that reducing the time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits,” Castello said.

When participants agreed to block the Internet on their phones, they were allowed to continue using laptops or iPad during work or at home, and may continue to use their phones for conversation or text. So, researchers were not sure if participants would exchange phones for another shape on the screen.

But, as it turns out, breaking the habit of scrolling into their phones has led to significant changes in the way they spent their time. And the interesting thing is that every day the break continued, the benefits have increased, almost as a positive feedback.

“It’s not that you stop using the Internet and magically just feel better,” Ward says. What happened is that people spend more time engaged in healthy behavior.

“People say they have spent more time in nature, more time to socialize, more time in hobbies,” he explains. They also got more sleep and felt more socially related to other people.

“I’m not surprised by the discoveries,” says Dr. Judith Joseph, a psychiatrist at the New York University of Langone and author of High Functioning: Overcome the hidden depression and regain your joyS She says studies show that most people do not want to be connected to their devices.

“They know their phones are a problem, but they just can’t stop,” she says. And she says that when they start to deal with behaviors like those who see each other in the study – more exercises, time outdoors, good sleep, more social interactions – it is not surprising that they begin to feel better.

“People’s assistance to retrain their brain to extract joy from healthy activities there is an antidepressant,” she says, so she says that findings pointing to the reduction of symptoms of depression and anxiety make sense.

“If [people] Look at this improvement in joy in such a short period of time, then it gives us hope, “she says, adding that simple changes can be helpful.

Try: Tips for scaling your own smartphone use

During the survey, many participants had to break the rules just to complete things their jobs or families require to do, such as turning on a card app to navigate the car or to get into the Zoom meeting from the phone them. This is a reminder of how dependent we are on our mobile devices.

It is almost impossible to reach a cold turkey, given the demands of our society. So what do you do if you want to try this? “If we are expected to be available at all times, then how do we just decide that we will break?” He asks Ward. This is a public struggle.

Here are some ways to make your screen time easier.

1. Make short breaks. As most of us cannot turn off the Internet and still function, Joseph recommends taking small vacations, starting with baby steps. “If you can start with 30 minutes here or 20 minutes there, try to see if you can increase these steps a week,” she says
2. Consider digital detox. Choose one day a week you and your family feed, except for what is needed for communication. Either set the time, or during a meal, or in the evening when the work ends to connect face to face with your family or friends, making a commitment to be “present” at the moment.
3. Manage the notice and add “rubbing”. Experts also advise to exclude notifications and use applications to limit their time in certain social media. Some tools can help you reduce the time on the screen by adding rubbing, ie, which makes it a little more difficult to start using any application you are hooked to.
4. Try a dumb phone. If you are really fed and want to try something new, consider moving to a “boring” phone, like the old flip phones that many of us have relied on. This way you still have calls and text messages (and some other tools, depending on the phone), but the scroll is much less compelling.
5. Get a new activity without a phone. It is worth setting new habits in your offline life. Get a new hobby or make a regular date with a phone call friend. Do you like to walk? Try to leave your phone at home and see how you feel. The more we give ourselves to break, the greater the likelihood of those around us.

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