There is growing awareness about the ill effects of spending time online – the global average is 2.5hrs a day. In response to this awareness, there is a plethora of new start-up ventures claiming to help us deal with this. We featured the boom in digital detox in a piece few weeks ago and why most of them don’t actually help as one would expect. Here’s a balanced piece grounded in research from a psychology professor at Georgetown university.
First, the professor cites the literature survey of studies done so far which indeed confirm how our digital afflictions are hurting our mental well-being. However, they also show a nuance. He sums up the literate survey as:
“In short, the existing evidence suggests that rather than completely abstaining from tech use for a weekend, smaller changes in digital screen time – giving up a problematic app, reducing daily phone use – might be a more productive and sustainable way to practise digital detoxing. That being said, when you’re spending time with other people, you can’t really go wrong with taking a break from your phone. Whether it’s friends sharing a meal or parents visiting a museum with their kids, my colleagues and I have found that people engaging in activities together feel better when they set their phones aside.”
He then talks about a study he conducted where participants were asked to install an app that would cut off internet connectivity on their phones making their smartphones ‘dumbphones’ with just call and messaging features. The participants at the end of the study did report significant improvement in subjective well-being:
“First, removing the internet from people’s phones reduced the overall amount of digital media they consumed. This reduction in and of itself drove some of the positive effects on wellbeing – but not all of them. A second factor had to do with time. Essentially, people spent less time on their phones, freeing up about 2.5 hours per day for other activities, such as reading or spending time outdoors. The final factor had to do with attention: with no internet on their phones, people felt less distracted. This presumably allowed them to enjoy whatever they were doing more, further enhancing their wellbeing.
… Beyond the effects on subjective feelings of wellness and attention, we found that, after two weeks in the dumbphone condition, people performed better in a computer task designed to objectively measure the ability to sustain attention. This task is boring by design: it involves having to press the space bar when a picture of a mountain flashes on the screen and not press it otherwise – over and over again. As you can imagine, people with ADHD perform worse on this task, and performance declines with age. The improvement we observed in participants in the dumbphone condition was substantial, comparable with what you’d expect if you reversed about 10 years of cognitive decline.
We can only speculate about how and why dumbphones improved people’s ability to pay attention, but one possibility is that most everyday tasks are no match for the easy and constant stimulation available on our phones. When that easy source of dopamine is restricted, someone might gradually rediscover their ability to derive pleasure from activities that require effort and sustained attention.”
In conclusion, he says: “First, you need to decide which of the content you consume is ‘toxic’ for your wellbeing – eg, a certain social media app where you tend to doomscroll – and avoid or reduce it. Second, you should replace at least part of this toxic content with non-digital activities that you know make you happy, whether it’s socialising, reading, exercising or other hobbies. Finally, you need to make sure that the change you introduce limits the distractions from your phone, so that you and those around you can reap the full benefits of those activities.
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
