I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
I don't use it for social media.
I think yes, since the App Store and anything involving likes/up-down votes/karma (sorry) and basically any form of reward for posting or consuming content.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
I used public transit back in the no-phone/dumbphone era. I'm never going back. But if there were some way to ditch the rest of the smartphone....
We tend to forget that we didn't always have Google maps to help us, so we would ask a stranger for directions, we would have to wait before being able to call someone, etc.
Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.
If you want to limit screen time pain is a feature not a bug though.
My phone has calls, SMS, MMS, email (IMAP), calendar (CDAV), contacts (CDAV), navigation (offline and Waze), note-taking, voice memos, a music player, weather, and voice-to-text via Azure's AI models. The only things I've missed so far are:
- Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
- A way to scan QR codes. It would be fine if I could just extract the text into a Note.
- The ability to record a call without an additional device. I've been dealing with a medical billing kerfuffle and it was much easier to disclose and press record, than to disclose and find another recording device.
- The ability to send and read SMS/MMS messages from my MacBook Pro. It should be possible with the Bluetooth HFP, which many cars use to enable the same thing. Sadly, Tunabelly Software's app "Handsfree 2" was pulled from the market and I could not get Sustainable Softworks' app "Phone Amego" to work. I've considered building a TUI for this purpose.
- At first I missed Audible, but then I learned two important facts. First, I can listen to my Audible books on my Kindle as long as I connect a bluetooth speaker (including Ford SYNC). And second, Audible and iTunes for Windows integrate with each other to allow me to burn Audible books to CDs, 80 minutes at a time.
- I really miss having O'Reilly Learning Platform. I used to listen to audiobooks on there all the time, and now I've got no good solution for it. I've replaced that time with Audible books (which are rarely about software). I still get plenty of software book reading done when I can focus my eyes on it, though.
There have also been some UX problems, which are livable:
- The camera is not extremely high quality. I've taken to borrowing my wife's iPad to take photos of my whiteboard when I need to preserve something before I erase it. It's fine for texting photos to friends, but not for document scanning.
- The music player is good for music, but not great for audiobooks and podcasts. It doesn't remember where you are in the middle of an audio file when you play it again later (which would, admittedly, be weird for music).
But the benefits have been incredible:
- I no longer stay up way too late every night pushing pixels past my peepers. Instead, I stay up way too late only some nights, reading technology books.
- I no longer browse social media, play puzzle games, or browse news headlines every time I'm bored for a few minutes. Instead, I contemplate (what my plans for tomorrow are, a recent problem I failed to solve, what that odd sound is, how pretty the clouds are, etc.).
- I no longer have to put up with Liquid Glass. (I also replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio LWS2200H and downgraded my MacBook Pro to Sequoia.)
- I no longer have to be concerned with anybody but my carrier tracking me.
- I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health. Conversations with friends and coworkers still keep me apprised of the things that are important enough to need to know. All the other crap just passes me by. Nothing is shoving headline notifications at me, and the easy moments to browse headlines have been replaced by devicelessness.
Ngl, lately it feels like some of my projects are born out of sheer aggravation more than anything else. I get the impulse.
<< I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health.
Can confirm; this approach helped me a lot too. There is so much I can't do so being aware of its minutiae does nothing for me except make it worse. I still keep up with local news, because it is far more likely to make immediate impact.
They are really cheap and some like kaechoda and other brands are really slim as well so I can recommend it genuinely.
Its worth looking more into but yes I am having an android now partially because of whatsapp and the fact that my old dumb phone had died
Rest in peace, it was really cool.
Unfortunately, my iPad Pro gets way, way, way more use. Much too addictive as a media consumption device.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now. From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
I think I'm immunized from it because I hate using smartphones, especially when I'm at home and could be doing the task on a PC with a big screen and keyboard. I have a few but just use them for practical tasks when away from home (occasional text, deliveries on porch, looking something up in the store, listening to podcasts, to do list for the day). Viewing content on a tiny screen with a minefield of things to accidentally tap? No thanks. They are great multi-function devices to replace others on the go.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...
> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:
> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.
> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.
> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.
> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.
Sometimes I think that psychology students mental health must have extremely large influence on the field of psychology.
He can call and text me and my wife anytime of the day. Thankfully the school bans phone usage, so it's not a lot.
A handful of his friends have no phone. Most have, and all apps are accessible (not sure how parents configure age restricted content/apps).
It's a lot of work to limit and tweak and even his 1 minute a day on Safari (because I couldn't find a way to cut to 0) allowed him to create a TikTok and Instagram account (on web). I am a technologist... and gee my 13 year is a genius when trying to find ways to circumvent the restrictions. Every other week I have to change some minor thing in Settings. But my point is that it's a LOT of work... I can see why some people either completely ban or allow. But to me it's worth. Messages is open because I believe he needs to talk with his friends, but fuck Tiktok and Instagram and Youtube.
That may be part of the reason for difficulty of configuration. You might be in a small cohort of people actually using them. That cohort should be larger.
Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are the worst. They are all blocked on our kids’ wifi as well as their phones.
I would forgo all the benefits of a smart phone if it meant my kids could grow up without one.
There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.
Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.
Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.
All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.
The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283320908_Net_Child...
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
isn't it 21 all over the US? it was changed to cut drunk driving in the late 70s at the federal level, tied to highway funds, so the states needed to cave
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
I wasn't aware. Or more specifically, I thought it wouldn't ethically be possible to do that research while it's legally forbidden.
I assumed We'd be bound to look at cases pathologic enough to warrant intervention, and the researchers tracking back the root cause at drug ingestion. While a useful approach, it would tell us nothing about all the other cases that weren't pathological.
On tobacco specifically I think most long term effects disappear in smoker below 25 ? Not arguing that kids should smoke, but like coming at th French situation, it looks like there is a dose where the effects on kids will be negligible.
PS: even for people withing the legal smoking range, studies on drugs still tend to focus on patients that had to enter the medical system
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10798824/
If you have any good study that encompasses a wider range I'd love to read it.
I’ll see if I can find some studies but it might be some weeks before I get back to this post.
For instance alcohol addiction is extremely destructive at pathological levels, and we have a flurry of studies coming to a "no safe dose" conclusion. But we also have plenty of evidence on what happens when outright banning alcohol at large scale and it's not great either.
I'm not sure we have a good model or understanding yet of what it actually means to have addictive substances around and their social effects.
To say nothing of the inconsistency of those bans. You can vote, enlist in the army, and take on life-altering student loans... but smoke a cigarette? No way!
Also, isn't it the sale and purchase of alcohol that is banned for underage persons, not the consumption? That is, if parents want to give their kids alcohol, that's not illegal.
How so? I don't see you make an argument for why your simile would be more accurate, and I fear I lack the imagination to conjure up what back-seat phoning would look like.
I mean slug is not important - id - is. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/eating-carrots-make-childr...
If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/
No smart phones until after 8th grade.
You know. Everything's round and cute and colorful. Like candy.
"Oh. This is for retarded people."
Unfortunately I was wrong.
It's actually much worse than that. It's for normal people. But it makes you retarded.
Slowly. You don't even notice it happening.
It eats away... day by day.