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Image by Getty / Futurism
Let’s face it: we’re all hopelessly addicted to our smartphones. Such is the power of having the internet at your fingertips at literally every single moment of the day.
Is this bad for our brains? Probably; there’s a reason terms like “doomscrolling” exist. But demonstrating a connection between heavy smartphone use and cognitive woes has been difficult. There’s a clear correlation, but causation requires another level of rigor.
Determined to find answers, a team of researchers conducted an experiment that forced participants to completely block all internet access on their smartphones for two whole weeks. Phone calls and old-school texting were still permitted, and if they wanted to, the subjects could still go online using a computer.
What the team found, as detailed in a study published in the journal PNAS Nexus, was that even though the intervention was relatively short, it finished with significant improvements — and we really mean significant — to the participants’ mental health, attention span, and subjective well-being.
“Smartphones have drastically changed our lives and behaviors over the past 15 years, but our basic human psychology remains the same,” study coauthor Adrian Ward, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement about the work. “Our big question was, are we adapted to deal with constant connection to everything all the time? The data suggest that we are not.”
The experiment involved 467 randomly selected participants with an average age of 32. They were divided into two groups for the month-long study: one that had no internet on their smartphone for the first two weeks, and another that did the same in the last two weeks. Midway through, they swapped roles, allowing the scientists to document whether any of the effects lasted once the participants got their internet back.
A specialized iPhone app was used to block internet access, recording any time that the feature was disabled. The participants were given multiple self-reported surveys to assess changes in their mental state. The researchers also administered computer-based tests to more objectively keep track of factors like their attention span.
In numbers, nearly all the participants — 91 percent — improved on at least one of the three outcomes, while around three-quarters reported better mental health by the end. What’s really striking, though, is that attention spans improved to a degree comparable to reversing ten years of age-related cognitive decline, the study found.
The findings even suggest that the intervention had a stronger effect on depression symptoms than antidepressants, and was roughly on par with cognitive behavioral therapy. The authors note, however, that the nature of the work is “quite different from those studied in clinical psychology contexts.”
What’s driving all this? Ward suggests that the simplest explanation is that the experiment forced participants to spend more time doing fulfilling things in the real world.
“That’s doing hobbies, talking to people face-to-face, or going out in nature,” Ward said. “They got more sleep, felt more socially connected, and felt more in control of their own decisions.”
That it only took two weeks off the grid to produce these remarkable effects is encouraging. Maybe most of have a chance of fighting the brain rot. On the flip side, it doesn’t make for a very long trial, so in the future, undertaking lengthier experiments could bear out the intervention’s long-term benefits.
More on mental health: Scientists Find That Yelling at AI Chatbots Can Make You Feel Better
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