Meryl Horn

So there were a couple big trials that have found people's mental health gets a little better when they use their phones less.

So, like, one study got hundreds of people and had some of them use their phones for an hour less every day, and it worked to, like, improve life satisfaction.

But a lot of studies have been done on this, and some of them haven't found any benefit at all.

Some have found, like,

negative effects and one review that i found that looked at three other reviews about like whether or not these interventions that reduce screen time affect well-being they said that that was quote questionable what

Yeah.

What do you make of that, of all this mix?

Yeah, I think maybe for some people, they really don't need to be reducing their screen time to feel better.

And maybe, you know, we shouldn't be beating ourselves up if we're having a hard time with this because there's no guarantee that cutting down on screen time is going to, like, turn your life around.

But on the other hand, like, for me, I think it does help.

Yeah.

But if this is a problem for you and you want to try changing something, Che Jong said that the first thing that you got to do… You need to press the button.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Like when I first started researching for this episode, there was something in me that was just like, I don't want to do any of this.

Like I just want to keep using my phone.

Wait, what does he mean you need to press the button?

I mean, for me, like when I started doing this research, I just like, I just felt like nothing was really going to work.

You know, I read about grayscale and the first time I heard of it, I was just like, that sounds kind of like dumb.

I'm not going to do that.

But I think I was just resistant to doing anything.