Meryl Horn

I did.

Yeah, no, when I first did it, I was like, what?

But tell me about the science.

So does it actually work?

Well, yeah, let's see what happened in her studies.

So she got about 100 people to do this, switch their phones to grayscale.

And yeah, right away, they got a pretty big response.

So this generally works.

In Leah's study, they found that after a day or two of their phones being on grayscale, people spent a lot less time on their phones, over an hour less on average.

And other, so there's also longer term studies that have people do this for a week that don't find as big effects.

So maybe 20 to 40 minutes less a day, like once you get used to it.

But out of all the four studies that I could find on this, it did work.

People use their phones for less time.

Whoa.

Yeah, and there was a couple studies that looked at people who are really heavy phone users.

They were considered to have problematic smartphone use, which is sort of a hand-wavy way of measuring how addicted someone is to their smartphone.

And they found that grayscale was helpful for them.

One study found that people with this felt less anxious after switching their phones to grayscale.

Yeah.

But there are some things that are harder to do.