Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice
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What is a digital intervention and why might I need one?
Imagine if I could offer you a pill that gave you the following benefits. One, your symptoms of anxiety and depression would significantly reduce. Two, your overall sense of moment to moment life satisfaction would improve. And three, you would gain substantially more ability to concentrate. And to make this even more enticing, let's say this pill would deliver you those benefits in only two weeks. If such a drug existed, it would be a blockbuster. Now, the bad news is there is no such pill that can do this. The good news, however, is that according to a major new research paper, there's a simple intervention for your digital habits that can deliver all of those promises. I'm talking about something that's free and
that you can put in place with minimal preparation, something that you could start implementing today. Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show. And clearly, this is a perfect type of topic to dive deeply into. So here's what we're going to do. I have the paper here. We're going to go through it. I'll start by describing the intervention they studied and quantified the exact benefits that they measured. Then we'll look closer at the mechanisms that the researchers believe explain why this intervention works so well. And then we'll end with three pieces of advice of my own for how to maximize the chances that you will succeed with this intervention if you choose to try it.
So if you've been fed up with your distracted digital life, this is an episode you definitely need to hear. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
All right, so we're going to proceed here by addressing three key questions. The first question, What was the intervention studied in this research paper? Well, if you look at the title of the paper, it sort of gives it away. Here is the title. Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being. All right, let's look a little bit closer at this. What do they mean by blocking mobile internet? Well, they used an app blocking tool called Freedom. And what they did is they set it up to block internet-powered apps like social media and the web browser, but leave things like instant messaging and phone calls alone. This is key. As a lot of people know, especially parents in the audience, you need the ability to have a phone on which you can do calls or messages or WhatsApp.
I checked it recently, Jesse. I'm on three different parental WhatsApp groups right now that I have to monitor. And with three kids in school, I would say I get called by the school nurse like roughly once a month. All right. So they figured out how to. block the internet without making you have to live without the other functional benefits of a smartphone. Now, here's what's critical about this research. Part of what made it good was they could then check compliance. They could look at the log produced by the blocking software and make sure that their research subjects actually kept the blocking on, that they weren't occasionally going around it. So that made a big difference. Then to get even better results, they did something even more impressive.
They made this a randomized control trial. So they recruited a group of participants and then randomly divided them into a group that was going to have the internet blocking and then a group that was not so that they could really be comparing what was the difference between these two groups and not accidentally measuring things like self-selection effects. As the experiment went on, they could measure the impact with various means. They had surveys that they would have the participants filled out. They had various tests, like tests of attention that they would have the participants do at various times. And they would do something called random experience sampling, where they would randomly text the participants and say, hey, tell me right now in this moment how you are feeling.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is a digital intervention and why might I need one?
0:00–5:17
2
What simple intervention can improve my digital habits?
5:17–10:06
3
What are the benefits of blocking mobile internet?
10:06–23:17
4
How does blocking mobile internet affect mental health?
23:17–30:45
5
What mechanisms explain the improvements from the intervention?
30:45–42:54
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Deep Questions with Cal Newport
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