Science has found a simple way to free us from our addiction to social media

A simple trick can cure your addiction to social media

My phone has hacked my attention. No matter where I am or what I'm doing — brushing my teeth, watching TV, or crossing a street — I find myself incessantly scrolling and tapping on my phone. When I do manage to put it down, I pick it up again a few minutes later. And once I pick it up, I get sucked in: I unlock my phone to check the weather, and somehow I end up on Instagram for half an hour. Most of the time, I don't even realize that I'm doing it. 

I'm far from alone. People's screen time has shot through the roof — most of us now spend about a quarter of our waking hours looking at our phones. Even the absence of a phone's weight from their pockets is enough to make many people anxious. 

Researchers say that looking at our phones is akin to pulling a slot machine. It exploits our psychological vulnerabilities, Maria Bridge, the chief operations officer at the Center for Humane Technology, told me. We are hooked to the variable dopamine rewards phones offer like a drug addict, Bridge said. And the constant usage has real consequences, research by a San Diego University professor has found that addictive phone use is linked to depression, poor sleep cycles, and higher suicidal risk.

Our collective device addiction is no accident. Tech companies have designed their apps and devices to keep you engaged for as long as possible. The key to enabling this addictive behavior is eliminating "friction" between you and the phone. Mark Zuckerberg famously said in 2011 that he wanted to enable "real-time serendipity in friction-less experiences." Over a decade later, smartphones have achieved just that. All you have to do is pull out your phone, which unlocks to your home screen, tap the Instagram icon, where you're already signed in, and videos start playing that snag your attention. It's far too easy and far too instantaneous, and it's seriously affecting people's mental health. 

To try and break my habit, I decided to slow down my phone experience with a new app called One Sec. While there is irony in using an app to cure an app addiction, One Sec acts as more of an intervention than a replacement. The app uses a simple trick: It asks me to breathe before opening certain apps. By forcing me to be more intentional about how I use my phone, it ended up reducing my screen time more than any other trick I've tried — and I've tried them all. 

Digital drugs

Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist, professor at Stanford University, and the author of "Dopamine Nation," which explores the smartphone's role as the "modern-day hypodermic needle for a wired generation," told me that we are "being held hostage by these digital drugs." Because our phones are causing our brains to release dopamine around the clock, she explained, the brain adapts by decreasing its own dopamine transmission to the nerves that reward us with signals like joy and pleasure. This means that we begin depending on our phones to retain our mind's baseline dopamine levels, keeping us clicking and swiping to prevent it from falling into a deficit state.

The effects of this dopamine warping across society have been substantial. Studies have found that teens who spend seven hours or more a day on screens are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety as those who use them for just an hour a day. Similarly, adults who spend six hours or more in front of screens have a higher risk of depression. And while most of us understand the downsides, we also can't quit. Whether it's an urgent email notification or our need to keep up with social feeds, we invariably find a reason to take out our phones and jump back in.

Over the past few years, as researchers have discovered the negative effects of our smartphone overuse, the very companies that have facilitated our dependence — Apple, Google, Facebook, and the like — have tried to take up the mantle of digital-detox therapists. They have introduced tools to monitor and limit screen time, made it easier for parents to control their kids' smartphone use, and set boundaries on who can contact you in your downtime hours. While these efforts are commendable, I can't help but think about the conflicting interests here. Tech companies' digital well-being tools are never the default, and when they are — like Instagram's alert that you've seen everything in your feed — they are always easy to ignore and keep on scrolling. Plus, studies have shown that things like app limits that merely measure your screen time won't break compulsive habits. In my experience, once the timer lifts the next day, I'm back to fidgeting with my phone. These interventions are no more than Band-Aids for tech companies, since their bottom line depends on keeping you hooked. 

Un-hacking the brain

I grew tired of how my phone was sucking up my time, so in an attempt to break my addiction, I decided to spend two weeks using the app One Sec, which promises to help break compulsive phone habits. The two-year-old app is simple: Before letting me open certain apps, One Sec will run a full-screen animation — paired with a drumbeat of subtle haptic vibrations — that guides me through a 10-second breathing exercise. When that's done, it gives me two options: I could either select "I don't want to open Twitter," if I no longer have the urge to check my feed, or "Continue to Twitter." 

Sandy Gould, a senior computer-science lecturer at Cardiff University, has researched ways to curb our compulsive phone tendencies. When we perform actions on autopilot, Gould told me, we don't think much about consequences. And most of our smartphone habits have evolved to work on autopilot. The trick then is to switch smartphone use from an automatic, compulsive action to something more intentional. Adding an intervention forces people to be deliberate and consider "why am I opening this?" — potentially breaking our compulsive habits. 

Unlike screen limits, One Sec doesn't outright ban me from accessing Twitter. Instead, it enables me to reflect and decide on my own whether I truly want to use the app. After a couple of days with One Sec, I realized I was now on Twitter only when I had a specific purpose in mind, such as responding to a message or reading what people are tweeting about a particular news event. When I would try to mindlessly open Twitter, I felt as if One Sec's breathing exercise was snapping me back into consciousness. 

Ian Anderson, a social-psychology researcher at University of Southern California, isn't surprised One Sec would reduce app usage. "Setting boundaries like this helps us reevaluate our present habits and potentially create better social-media habits that align more with our well-being," Anderson told me.

Frederik Riedel, the German-based developer of the app, told me that creating better boundaries  was the motivation behind the development of the app. "I felt worse after scrolling for 30 minutes on Instagram," he told me. "I asked myself: Why do I always come back to this app, even though I don't want it, and even though I feel worse afterward?"

In a study Riedel conducted with the Max Planck Institute and the University of Heidelberg in 2022, researchers found that among participants who used One Sec for six weeks, it reduced their app usage by 57%. I can attest to that figure: One Sec has nearly halved my compulsive Twitter use. Before, I was averaging 193 Twitter opens in a week, but now I only open the app 86 times a week. If each session is assumed to be a couple of minutes, that means I've saved more than three hours of mindless doom scrolling. 

One Sec already has close to a million downloads, according to Riedel (Sensor Tower, an independent tracker, puts the number closer to 600,000 downloads), and uses several clever and subtle psychological mechanisms in addition to the breathing exercise. After the 10-second pause, One Sec shows me how many times I've tried to open Twitter in the past 24 hours, and because I opted into the "intention picker" tool, it forces me to specify why I want to open Twitter by choosing one of several intentions I preset like "Work" and "Can't sleep." The app can also send you a "Don't get lost" notification after you have spent a few minutes on an app.

A common shortcoming of similar apps is that you can get used to the tool's interventions and start automatically bypassing them. One Sec overcomes this by changing up what it shows you before you can open an app. Sometimes it's the breathing exercise, but sometimes it can ask you to follow a circle on a blank screen or turn on your front-facing camera, so you're suddenly looking at yourself. Georgia Turner, a neuroscience researcher and Ph.D. student at Cambridge University, told me that One Sec's constantly changing prompts avoid the risk that people can become immune to intervention over time and simply integrate the prompt into their automatic routines. Bridge, from the Center for Humane Technology, has been a One Sec user for weeks and managed to get her impulsive email habits under control. She told me that the little psychological elements are what makes this app so powerful.

The only complaint I have about One Sec is that its browser extensions and Android app are too limited and lack the extensive range of tools found on its iPhone counterpart. At $4 a month, its subscription price is also on the higher side, but there's a free version if you, like me, are looking to restrict just one app. 

The internet finally gets speed bumps

More companies are trying to introduce "speed bumps" to slow down how quickly we operate online. When Twitter added an extra step for retweeting tweets with links, for example, the company said that 40% more users read them before sharing. Similarly, simple friction mechanisms like the one Twitter rolled out have been found to be effective at stemming the tide of misinformation online.  

But often, tech companies have little incentive to make these changes — especially not to the extent that people would stop using their apps altogether. Bridge believes the only path forward is regulating the trillion-dollar attention economy that's "hacking our human psychology, that puts profits over people."

And there's some concern that additional tech can only go so far to curb our addictions. Even though an app like One Sec can snap me out of a compulsive habit, it doesn't kick me off of the phone altogether. On some occasions, when One Sec prevented me from entering an app like Instagram, I simply moved to a different one I hadn't blocked yet. 

Eventually, people will need to break away from the devices completely rather than using tricks and hacks.  "At some point, we need to separate from the devices themselves in order to let our brains rest and recover," Lembke, the psychiatrist and professor,  told me. "It's not just a matter of what we're doing on our phones. It's also the sheer amount of time we spend looking at them, holding them, swiping them, almost as if they're alive and we're their caretakers."  

At stake is not only our mental health but also our ability to think. Phones allow us to fill pockets of free time and boredom instead of using that time more intentionally, Adam Alter, a marketing professor at the New York University Stern School of Business and the author of "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," said.

"We're short-circuiting our ability to be creative — to push against the obvious, which tends to happen when we're idle, bored, or not focusing intently on a specific concept," he added. 

For now, using tools that can help us be more intentional about how we spend our time online is an important step toward breaking our collective phone addiction. If my experience is any indication, apps like One Sec can be successful to counteract bad habits. A few weeks into using the app, it was clear to me that I wasn't addicted to Twitter or Instagram — I had just formed a compulsive habit that unintentionally steered me to those apps throughout the day. Once I was able to recognize that habit, it was easy for me to break free and reclaim the lost hours.

Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.