Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: What simple intervention can improve my digital habits?
One is right before the experiment starts. Look at how high that jumps up by the end of the experiment. It's a massive increase. And look what happens when they measured in at the third time point after they started using their phones again. Though mental health began going down, they had a long after effect of benefits from spending those two weeks without mobile internet.
Here's the third chart, subjective well-being. Once again, look at that blue line. From the beginning of the experiment to the end of the two-week period, we see a massive jump. And again, As we go from time period two to time period three and they start using their phones again, it falls, but we still get some after effect benefits from the two weeks they spent without using their phone.
So these are notable results and they were delivered really fast. In these sort of prospective randomized control studies where you're really comparing one group to another, to see such a large jump on such important metrics in only two weeks is pretty rare.
It gives us the sense that maybe we were underestimating just how much damage to our ability to pay attention, our mental health and our subjective well-being. Maybe we were really underestimating what a hit we were taking by using the Internet on our phone so constantly. All right, so those results then motivate a natural follow-up question. That's what they saw, but why did they see that?
What were the mechanisms that mediated these improvements in those factors when they stopped using mobile internet on their phone? So that's our second question here. What explains these results? Now, fortunately, the researchers also looked at this question.
They measured many factors during the experiment before and after to try to figure out what changed during the period of not using mobile internet. that seems at least like it's likely, can it, to be mediating the positive results that they saw? Well, the first thing they looked at was just the obvious top-line number.
When you take mobile internet off of your phone, how much less do you look at it? And they discovered that actually significantly less. The average daily screen time before the experiment began was 304 minutes per By the end of the experiment, that had dropped down to 161 minutes.
So they basically dropped the amount of time they were looking at their screens by about a factor of two when you took mobile internet off of the phones. Okay, so they freed up this sort of 150 or so minutes each day that they used to be looking at mobile internet devices. How did this then lead to them being happier, less mental health impacts, and ability to focus more?
Well, the researchers went on to isolate four what they called mediation factors that emerged as having strong changes during the experimental period. And it's their best guesses at what is actually mediating the positive dependent variable effects. So here's the four mediation factors that they measured during the experimental period.
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Chapter 3: What are the benefits of blocking mobile internet?
But what about that fourth mediation factor, which was a sense of increased self-control? Here's my understanding of what's going on here. And this is sort of my theory based on my own study of these issues.
So one of the things that happens when you have your phone with you at all times, like most people do, and you have these internet-based apps that are highly distracting on the phone, as I've talked about many times before on this show, the short-term motivation centers in your brain learn that picking up that phone and tapping on one of those apps is is very likely to give you a reward signal.
The expected value is high. And because of that, because you have such a clean reward signal coming out of those apps, your short-term motivation center of your brain is constantly voting for picking up your phone. And you feel this as like a constant urge for distraction that pulls you away from other things you might want to do or prevents you from doing those things in the first place.
And it can make you feel... Like you don't have control over your own body or mind. You're like, why did I just spend 150 minutes on TikTok? I didn't want to do that. So it leaves you feeling like you don't have much self-control.
Now, on the flip side, when you get those apps out of your life, those short-term motivations in your brain is no longer voting for picking up your phone so strongly, and you find yourself able to do other things more easily. Because you do not have to overcome... the vote of your brain saying, hey, let's pick up the phone. It's not nearly as strong anymore. What is that going to feel like?
I have more self-control. And so a course that was going to pick up on surveys is when you turn off mobile internet on your phone, you will begin to experience your day as one in which you have much more control or autonomy over what you do, which is also going to be obviously a very positive factor. To go to the end of the paper, here's one of the things the authors say. I'm quoting here.
These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive function, and well-being.
And to put that conclusion more plainly, constant access to the internet through mobile devices is causing way more problems than most of us guessed. It is making us miserable. It really is an emergency. But for all the urgency of this problem, the solution, fortunately, looks to be pretty simple. Block mobile internet on your phone.
After even just two weeks, you will realize just how much you were missing in your life. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Hey, men. you need to take better care of your skin. The best way to do this? With Caldeira Lab. Caldeira Lab makes high-performance skincare designed specifically for men's skin.
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Chapter 4: How does blocking mobile internet affect mental health?
And you're going to find yourself drawn to activities that make a big difference. All right, so what's the long-term vision here? Let's say you do this intervention for two weeks. You feel much better. You can concentrate. Your subjective well-being is better. Your mental health is feeling stronger.
The idea is once you get to that point, you will follow something like my own lead, like what I do in my life, and permanently quit or disable these apps that are on your phone that are causing these diversions to make your phone boring, like losing your taste for junk food. And now you can be around potato chips and have no desire to eat them.
You will get there when it comes to these digital diversions. If they're not normally on your phone and you don't normally spend much time with them, they become less alluring. And what becomes more attractive is all of the other interesting things going on in your life, getting a full night's sleep, interacting in the real world with other people, meaningful offline activities.
So this is my advice. Take the lesson from this paper and And right away, go ahead and do a 14-day mobile internet break on your phone. Keep all the apps you need for your day-to-day life. Just take off the ones you don't. Remember the three tips that I mentioned so that you're more likely to succeed with this.
And if you make it to the other end, then ask yourself, like a true digital minimalist, what role do I really want these technologies to play in my life? And then it might be time to make some permanent changes. So there we go. That was a well-done study, Jesse. It actually involved one of the co-authors is a colleague of mine at Georgetown. Oh, really? Yeah, from the psychology department.
So there we go. It's a pretty international group of researchers. I see a lot of these papers. Some are good. Some are bad. This is a high-quality one. It appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus Open Access Journal. So that's actually a really solid one. That paper has been read like 200,000 times. Did you know about it before it came out? Um, I had heard rumors.
I mean, I, there's a lot of papers. I kind of heard people mention it. And then I think it was a newsletter director, Nate, who was like telling me about this two week paper. And I went and read it and was like, Oh, this is a good one. So that's how we decided to do it on the show. I'll take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. This episode is also sponsored by better help.
So it's may now, which means it's mental health awareness month. This seems like a good opportunity to remind you that if you're struggling with your mind, you don't have to deal with this all by yourself. Having someone with you to listen, to understand, and to support you can make all the difference. This is where BetterHelp enters the scene.
It's a service that makes it easy for you to find and meet with a qualified therapist. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and their 12 years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get that match right on the first time.
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Chapter 5: What mechanisms explain the improvements from the intervention?
By comparison, the desk rejection rate for low AI manuscripts, manuscripts where there's very little AI used, was 44%. So it almost doubled the chance you would get rejected right off the bat if it was written with the help of AI. Now, remember, the editors don't know that. They labeled these after the fact. This is just strictly based on their assessment of the quality of the paper.
Later on, the researchers found that the percentage of high AI papers that made it all the way through to the final stage, where they say revise and resubmit for publication, was around 4%, whereas for low AI papers, that rate was 12%. So you have a 3x reduction in the probability that your paper would actually make it through and be published. So what they're finding is this is a real problem.
AI made it easier to write and submit papers. And because of this, they're getting a ton more submissions, which really is actually taxing their resources because editors have to look at these submissions and peer reviewers have to peer review them if they're sufficiently good. Now, this would be OK if these were all good submissions. We're just strictly increasing the amount of good science.
You know, great. We're going to now have a productivity boom in this actual academic field. But it's not what they saw, what they clearly measured. This AI made it faster to produce papers, but the papers you were producing were bad. They weren't readable. They were way more likely to be desk rejected, way, way more likely to not make it through to acceptance.
And I think this is a good specific case study of a more general issue that we've been talking about recently on this show, which is when it comes to productivity, making things faster doesn't necessarily make things better. Making it easier to technically finish and submit a paper doesn't necessarily mean that you are a more productive scientist or science is proceeding more productively.
And often you can have a reverse effect where producing lower quality things faster gunks up the works and prevents the good stuff from happening. And that's for sure is what's happening to this particular journal. By flooding the works with significantly more submissions that are lower quality, you're I am sure that now the energy required and the rate at which good research is produced is down.
And we see this in our individual lives as well. I've talked about this effect like in last week's podcast with Dave Epstein, right? You speed up one part of your life at some work process you're doing. Like I'm going to use email, like very quickly bounce back and forth ideas with people, but it leads to too much work on your plate.
It all piles up at the bottleneck of you actually doing the hard work. And because you're so distracted, keeping up with all these email conversations, the rate at which you actually finish things goes down. And you made one thing in your work process faster, but you made the rate at which you produce useful stuff slower. And this happens time. And again, when we bring in digital tools,
that makes one thing faster, easier, and we assume that's going to mean we'll just become strictly better at what we do, but they can make things worse. I think it's a great experiment, but if you want a shareable version of this discussion or you want to get some more details, go to calnewport.com. I just wrote about it today. All right, Jesse, what do we got next?
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