Your phone as tool and trap: what limiting it has shown

The phone holds the calendar, the timer and the notes, and also the apps that pull you away from them. A review of studies that followed children and adolescents over time found support for associations in both directions between digital media and ADHD symptoms, more consistently for problematic use than for screen time ¹. One randomised trial of cutting back, in healthy students, reported benefits, but screen time rose rapidly once the intervention ended ².

What the evidence says

Problematic use shows up more consistently than hours. In a study of adolescents, the findings suggest a one-way relation: problems with social media use increased ADHD symptoms over time, and intensity of use did not ³. A meta-analysis of children and adolescents found a significant difference in problematic internet use between groups with ADHD and non-clinical controls, but not between ADHD groups and clinical controls ⁴. In a survey of 563 Chinese university students, none of whom reported an ADHD diagnosis, self-rated inattention was linked to more problematic short-video use indirectly, through greater proneness to boredom ⁵.

Blocking and cutting back have been tested. In a randomised trial of 467 adults recruited online in the US and Canada, blocking mobile internet on smartphones for two weeks improved mental health, subjective well-being and objectively measured sustained attention, and 91% of participants improved on at least one of these ⁶. Only about a quarter of those who committed to the block kept it on for at least 10 of the 14 days ⁶. In a randomised trial without blinding, 111 healthy students in Austria either cut their screen time for three weeks or used their phones as usual. The reduction showed small to medium effects on depressive symptoms, stress, sleep quality and well-being ².

Social media breaks give mixed results. A reanalysis of a published meta-analysis, whose author had concluded that social media effects were not statistically different from zero, found significant improvements in mental health outcomes for interventions of one week or longer, with an effect size of d = 0.156 ⁷.

A pause before the app opens. A field study followed 280 people who had just installed a self-nudge app and used it for six weeks. They closed the target app again on average 36% of the times they tried to open it, and after six weeks actual openings had fallen by 57% ⁸. The study had no comparison group that did not use the app, and the app’s originator is one of its authors ⁸. The same paper reports an online experiment in which 500 adults were randomly assigned to conditions and watched video clips. There, the option to dismiss the attempt had the strongest effect, the time delay also reduced use, and the message asking people to deliberate was not effective ⁹.

What we don’t know

We found no trial of limiting phone use in adults with ADHD. The studies of blocking, cutting back and pausing above are not ADHD studies.

Whether changes last is an open question. In the three-week trial, screen time was approaching its initial level again at follow-up ².

Things to try

These are options to test for yourself. None comes from an ADHD trial.

• Add a pause, with an option to back out, to the apps you open by reflex. In the online experiment with video clips, the option to dismiss had the strongest effect, and a message asking people to deliberate was not effective ⁹.
• Try a period without mobile internet. In the blocking trial, people without mobile internet spent more time socialising in person, exercising and being in nature ⁶.
• Give a social media break at least a week. The reanalysis found significant improvements for interventions of one week or longer ⁷.

If phone use feels out of your control, it is worth raising with a qualified professional.