How To Stop Scrolling

This is the show that pits facts against phones.

“Today on the show, how do we stop scrolling?”

Just last week in a landmark case, Meta, which owns Instagram and Google, on or of YouTube, will found negligent for basically creating addictive products that harm to young woman's mental health. A huge slap to big tech today. The landmark verdict that could change the face of social media. Deliberately and negligently design their products to get young users hooked on the apps.

They kept her endless scrolling, constant notifications, algorithms that learn exactly what keeps you watching.

The tech giants have been ordered to pay her $6 million, they're appealing.

But this case has reignited a huge conversation over how these apps can just suck us in. The young woman's lawyer said during closing arguments that these apps are, quote, "trogen horses." They look wonderful and great, but you invite them in and they take over. Which, away from this case, is exactly the way that a lot of our listeners have been feeling about these apps.

"I want to use my phone lists, obviously, like everyone else." "I've been trying to quit for the last two years, it has gotten worse." "I want to stop doing scrolling." "This feels like I'm constantly consuming something off of a screen." So, they find that over half of adults in the US want to spend less time on their phones.

"I meant the house, it's just better when I'm off social media, and it's hard to get out of the scrolling." So, the question we have for this episode is this, given that so many of us feel hooked.

“Is there any way to unhook ourselves to stop scrolling?”

Rather, ironically, online, you can find tons of people claiming that they've found the answer. These are five really simple brain tricks that can help you break social media addiction and stop doom scrolling.

The first tip is friction stocking.

We need to create as many layers between us and that damn phone. And if you can slay that dragon, if you can resist temptation, well, you can do anything. So, how do you slay that dragon? Is there anything that can actually get us off our phones that's science-approved? But it comes just scrolling a lot of us have been endless scrolling, constant notifications, and then

the science. Don't look at your phone! With Amazon, I come to work with every four thousand five hundred euros per week. That's where we're going to take a look at. Welcome back. There's a lot of chat right now about how these tech giants have created

social media apps designed to suck us in. Now, we're going to talk about how to get unsucked time for the science. With their awards, say, do you produce that? Hello. Hi, Wendy. It's been a while since we've been chatting about science.

“Yeah, yeah. So, have you been spending all that time on your phone?”

Sometimes it feels like that. Seriously, do you have a problem with scrolling? Yeah, the reason I wanted to do this episode was because I'd find myself just staring at my phone for way longer than I kind of meant to, especially at the end of the day. And it wouldn't even feel like good, like out-off and feel like worse about my life or just

crappy and general, and yet I'd spend all this time scrolling scrolling scrolling and this is a feeling that many of us have had, and it is, it's kind of crazy to think about how evasive this feeling is. So, Merrill, when it comes to this question of how do we stop scrolling? I've heard where do we begin?

Well, first off, the research does find that scrolling itself is especially bad compared to other

things we do on our phones. Okay. So, like, one study asked people, like, how they felt

to see exactly what they're using their phones for. And they found that, yeah, it was, like, the scrolling that people said they regretted the most compared to stuff, like communicating with their friends or like getting information. Yeah, you could also see this in how much they regretted going on certain apps, like, after they went on Instagram, they would say, that I regretted that, like, 42% of the time, where when they went on a messaging app, they only regretted at 18% of the time.

And another study backed this up, finding something really similar, but this one looked at meaningless instead, which, you know, again, found that people said their experience was more meaningless if they had just spent that time scrolling compared to this other stuff, which

“helped me understand, like, why it feels so bad? But then why do we keep doing it? Do you think?”

Because it's like, it does give us some kind of, like, short-term happiness, a lot of the time to scroll. The whole reason we do it is because we're probably getting some kind of, you know, dopamine hits. So, you know, those, the parts of our brain that light up when we're doing something rewarding are, do light up when we, like, see social media? Okay. Okay, so that, I mean, that is why, yeah, we keep going back for war. So then, we know, what happens next? How do we still? And,

you know, I don't want to completely put the onus on us to work out how to suck ourselves from social media. The big tech companies clearly have her all to play here. But while we're waiting for them to sort it out, Barrel, do you have anything that we can do for ourselves?

“I do. Yes. So let's dive in and find out, like, what actually works here to stop scrolling.”

So to start, let's meet Jay Jong Kim, he's an assistant professor at Chong Nam National University in Korea. He's also had a problem with scrolling for him, YouTube is the thing that would

get him. I kept watching, watching, and I ended up watching something that I never intended.

It just gets sucked down these rabbit holes. Yeah, yeah. Scientists, people too. Yeah, but he has done a lot of work trying to figure out, like, exactly what strategies work to stop, like how can people break these happens? Yeah. And it's so I wanted to start with the most hardcore intervention that he's come up with. Do you want to guess what they did? So people will stop scrolling, to lay the apps, put you fine in the bin. Buy a Nokia from the early 2000s. Nice

guesses. I guess it wasn't that extreme. None of these are crazy. Well, not too many people would sign up for a study. I don't think where they had to, like, get rid of their phones. I would

“Jay Jong, if you want to go even more extreme, I'll sign up. Okay, so what did they do? So his approach”

was to just make an app that would kick you off your phone. If you go past a certain time limit,

then you couldn't use your phone for anything except to make phone calls. Okay. So, yeah, first,

you know, there's about 40 people and first you had to put in your goals for how long you want to spend on your phone. So, like, maybe you're using it for five hours a day and you want to get down to four hours a day. Then you got this special app called goalkeeper and it had three different levels. So, sometimes people would just get the easy levels, basically a control where you just got a warning message when you go past your time limit. And another one, you just get kicked off your

phone for a little bit of time. But the third level is the intense one. So, Jay Jong called this condition strong lockout. And the strong lockout is what I was very interested. I was, I'm eager to lock people out. Just because you want to make people suffer? Yeah, I want to see the greatest effect. So, we lock them out until the midnight after the time is seated. That it's interesting that he said it'll come back on at midnight, like Cinderella. Because that would be the worst time

to then get access to your phone. It's going to interrupt with you sleep at least. Just keep it off until 8 a.m. or something. That's true. But then people will be eating up their time for the next day. So, yeah, there were people were very aware of like how much time they had left on their phone. Okay. And so, every everyone tried out these like kind of different levels of the app for for one

week. And I first wanted to know, yeah, what happened when people were in the week when they had

their really hardcore approach, the strong lockout. First, let's just look at, did it work to get people to use their phones less? Yes, it did. It's quite effective. So, yeah, people did use their phones

was that people really didn't like it. At least a lot of the time, like they they said,

they felt more frustrated and coerced compared to the control condition where they were just getting a little warning, but they didn't actually get locked out of their phone. And then they got really stressed out when they saw that the time was getting close to what they would have to get

“cut off. Yes, that's the point. Yeah, but I think the thing that was frustrating was that we use”

our phones for a lot of different things. Yes, of course. Yes. So, when we get locked out of everything altogether, it can be really annoying. Yes, it's a big stick. It's a big stick. That's right. And they can be days where you're off Instagram, but you've got a lot of work stuff to do, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're traveling. You want to listen to a bunch of podcasts. And then you you just want to pay for the subway. Like, I do all the sorts of things with my phone. I don't

want to be locked out altogether. And then there's one other super hardcore study I wanted to tell you about since you're interested in signing up for a study yourself where you just have to like get rid of your phone. So, I talked to this researcher who set up the study where they wanted to cut the internet off people's phones for two weeks. But then when it was actually time to

“to start the experiments and download this app that cut off the internet, a ton of people”

didn't actually go through with it. So, more than 40% of them just didn't even get the app, even though they signed up for this study. And then even a bunch of people who got the app kept cheating, they'd like re-enabled the internet again and again and again during the study. So, even though you think you might want something super extreme, it seems like for a lot of people, they don't actually want to do this. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I could, uh,

I could see, I could see myself falling on my own to Todd or whatever that phrase is to Todd. But Todd, I don't know, I'm just saying words. I guess that's a loaf of bread. So, maybe we should go in the opposite direction. Like what, what if all we need to do to stop scrolling is a little like reminder, like a gentle nudge, um, you know, something that that just asks us. Like, are you sure you want to be doing this right now? Uh-huh. So, Jay Zhang is also also

tried this approach. Like, in a different study, he created an app where people would just get a little pop-up window when they tried to open up certain apps and they can just get rid of this little pop-up with a little click of the button. Yes, quite a few people have apps similar to this. Yeah, I've tried this out before because the iPhone comes with like a screen time app that works

similar to this. Oh, yeah, I have always wondered does it does it actually work because the

the pop-up comes on and it's quite a low hurdle to just say, yeah, this is what I want to do. Yeah, it's easy to hit ignore, but it does give you that little nut trap. Yeah, that's right. And so, yeah, he, um, Jay Zhang set up the study where first people had to put in a list of apps that they wanted to like stop themselves from going on too so much. Mm-hmm. So, we call it like the black list app. So, it could be like, you know, Facebook, um, Instagram or YouTube.

Got it. And then he looked at what happened when people got this little pop-up window. Did, did, did they decide not to go on to those black list of apps? It has reduced the use

about 10 to 15 percent. Just from getting that little box that just says, do you want to

continue? Yes, or no? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And that little, um, stop. I have made you think and reconsider your use. So, what of similar studies found? Does this gentle nudging work, generally, we've got Jay Zhang's study? Yeah, other studies do find that it can work a little bit like Jay Zhang's, but then a bunch of other studies didn't find any effects. So, yeah, I find a review that kind of looked at all these studies together. And, uh, bottom line, it calls, um,

this type of strategy, quote, barely effective. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay, it's just too easy to swat that fly away. You sure? Yeah, I'm sure. I want to stay on the app. I just, it automatically ignore it. Every single time. It wasn't surprising that it doesn't work great. Okay. So, I think, yeah, we probably, we need to turn up the dial back up a little bit now, right? Because, you know, maybe the problem with these kind of approaches, the gentle nudge, is that there's not enough

like friction. So, I don't know if you've heard of this, like, a buzzword online right now, and

“flinsers are like, you know, to stop scrolling, you need to up the friction. Right. So, the friction is too hot,”

and the friction is too cold. We need the Goldilocks about a friction to stop us from scrolling.

their apps, um, as, like, having worked for some of them. Now, what I've tried, and,

“too, pretty good success is hide all the social media apps on your phone. That has really helped.”

And I haven't found, like, a bullet solution, but the brick app has really helped me. The brick is something it's, I've been getting ads for it, it's on, it's, like, this little device, that, like, you physically have to, like, go to, to unlock your apps. That's sort of expensive. There's also cheaper ways to do the same thing. There's one called touch grass, where you have, like, go outside and, like, take a picture of yourself touching grass before you can use.

That's your apps. So, this is, it's a really common strategy, but let's find out if it actually,

like, what actually happens when people try this. So, okay. In that study that Jay Jong did,

where, you know, people put in these blacklisted apps. In, in other cases, they, he made it harder for them to get to those apps. They couldn't just, you know, click it away. Okay. People would get a pop-up window where you had to enter in a string of numbers before you could go onto the app. Got it. So, sometimes, there's only 10 digits long. Other times, there's a 30-digit long number. That has, like, manually put in before they got to use their app. I asked Jay Jong,

what this was like. Yeah. Very frustrating. And our participant mentioned that,

“oh, there's one little thing. One, two, a failed to input 30-digit number at once. You have to”

retipe it. You start to start all over again. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's very frustrating. Yeah. I was,

I was imagining that's what would happen. Very frustrating, very frustrating. Okay. So, surely, that stops you going on the app, right? That feels like enough. Yeah. Yeah. So, in the study, again, around 40 people a few weeks long, he looks like what happened when they got these different, kind of levels. And, yeah, especially when they got the 30-digit number, a lot of the time, they decided, I'm not even gonna bother. Yeah. Almost half the time, they decided, like, yeah.

After this, I'm not worried that to go on this app. And the other, the 10-digit number, like, worked okay, too. So, overall, it did work to get people to stop going on their apps as much. But, there is a pretty big caveat to this, okay. Which is that once people were in the app, they then spent more time in it than they, than they would have done otherwise. You know what this is like, Merrill? It's like when people are waiting in line at a nice

cream shop, and then when they get to the front, they have to get all the friggin tasties. I'm sitting there a time, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But, where's still waiting in the line? Heather? Yeah, exactly like that happened. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, stay dark. So, they, once they got in, so, hey, once I got in, I want to use this for 30 minutes, instead of, like, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 3 times of 10 minutes, session.

So, so the frequency decreased, but the total time remains the same. So, overall, people didn't actually spend less time on their blacklisted apps. So, like, I mean, maybe this is still helpful. If your goal is to go on to your apps, less often to, like, kind of do that checking checking, like, habitual checking less? Yeah. But, if your goal is to spend less time on your phone, it might not work to do this, kind of,

friction approach. And then, one final thing from the study I thought was interesting, they looked at what people did when they did decide to not go on to that naughty, listed app. And it turns out, about half the time, people just went to some other app instead. So, they were still on their phones often, just doing something else. That maybe they thought was better for them, because they didn't put it on their blacklist.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that feels right. I mean, if you're sitting on the toilet, you gotta look at that. You gotta do something. All right. So, here is what we have learned thus far.

“If you want to stop scrolling, adding some friction is a good idea, but if the hurdle is too low,”

like a little pop-up, it's not going to work. If the hurdle is too high, what's you jump it? Watch out, because then you might be spending more time scrolling, because you're so proud of yourself for putting in those 30 digits. Yeah. Right. Yeah, but might sort of backfire once you get a- So, is there any Goldilocks amount of friction then? Well, there is actually a approach that nothing to do with friction at all that I found, that it seems to be the best way to stop scrolling

. You can do it every day, to others and to get home to your home.

You can do it when it's time to get back to your home. And if you can do it, you can do it like we do in the world that you're out of. Because with credit, it's just like that. Or you're now going to get credit on your own. Augs money, credit, I infer, online. Welcome back. Today, we are talking about how we can stop scrolling, Merrill Horn. See, you've produced your science thesis.

“It's been looking into this and I think you've promised us a solution.”

Yes. We're all kind of dilemmas. Yeah. Is that- Am I- Am I overselling? I mean, I think, no, I think it's a solution. That's definitely worth trying. Yeah. And it is something that is even easier than a lot of the things we've been talking about to try. It's jump in. So, next, we're going to meet Dr. Leah Kristen Fickard. She did a study on this. She's a researcher at the University of Copeland's in Germany.

And, like, basically, all the researchers that I talk to about this,

Leah also got into this for personal reasons. She's a psychologist. In psychology, we don't do research. We do a research. Oh, yes, a research.

“As you can imagine, I have a problem with my phone on my own. So, I realized, especially during COVID,”

that this is a research topic that could really help me with my user pattern using my phone, using social media in a healthy and beneficial way, and not only do we scroll the whole day. What has she uncovered? Well, so, the idea for her came up in a meeting. She was having one day with some students, where they were basically brainstorming ways to stop scrolling. One of the students talked about, okay, but I haven't looked at our old phones.

Like, the first phones we ever had was like, in the year we had this old Nokia phones.

It was a black and white phone. We used it to text somebody. We used it to call somebody. Maybe play a game, but that it. And then we discussed, okay, like, how can we

“arrange that nowadays? Can we make our phones crappier, like they used to be? Not to make it more”

crappy, but to make it less attractive. And we realized all those saturated colors. You're a blinking red push or notification button. All of those colors keep you distracted and keep you on your phone. So, yeah, the colors. You know, from studies that people generally prefer bright colors. It's probably why our apps are all rainbow colored. And so, the idea was maybe if we get rid of these bright colors, make our phones black and white, or put it in gray

scale, we'll use our phones less. Have you heard of this approach, Wendy? I guess I know some people obviously who have their phone on gray scale, but I didn't know that this was a tactic to get them to stop using that phone so much. Yeah, so do you want to try it, Wendy? Sure. Sure, sure, sure. All right. And if listeners want to try this, too. So, on both iPhones and Android's is under accessibility. So, when do you have an iPhone? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so go to settings.

Accessibility. Accessibility. And then scroll down to display and text size. Got it. And now color filters. Yes. And toggle that button on. And there you go. Okay, gray scale, here we go. Oh, okay. It's subtle. It's noir. It's classy. Well, for me, it was more of a like, whoa, it's like a completely different thing, like, I felt like it was super dramatic. So, really? I said, yeah, no one ever stood out. I was like, whoa, it's like, but tell me about the science.

So, does it actually work? I would be really surprised if this made a difference. Well, yeah, let's see what happened under a study. So, I've actually got about 100 people to do this, switch their phones to gray scale. Yeah. And yeah, right away, they got pretty big response. We asked our participants, okay, how do you feel, how are you? And what they did say was, um, it's us. It's forming. We don't want it. Yeah. Because we want to have our little funny

phones. We want to have, we want to play with our phone. We want to have a good time. We want to feel good using our phone. Yeah. But what they also said is, oh, it's really working.

of their phones being on gray scale, people spent a lot less time on their phones over an hour

“or less on average. Whoa, an hour less, just because their phone was on gray scale. Mm-hmm.”

And other, so there's also longer term studies that have people do this for a week that don't find as big effects. So maybe 20 to 40 minutes less a day. Like once you get used to it. Yeah. Right. But out of all the four studies that I could find on this, it did work. People use their phones for less time. Yeah. And there's a couple of studies that looked at people who are really heavy phone users. They were considered to have problematic smartphone use, which is sort of a

hand-wavey way of measuring how addicted someone is their smartphone. Okay. And they found

that gray scale was helpful for them. One study found that people with this thought less anxious

after switching their phones to gray scale. Oh, I mean, you don't say pokey's machines. Or what do you call them in the US? Flot machines. You don't see slot machines that a gray scale, right? Yeah. And what but there are some things that are harder to do. I noticed when I put my phone in gray scale, like once someone's calling you the the buttons for answering the phone, or declining it are in right and green. So now when I'm picking up a call, I'm like, oh gosh,

which button do I push? You really have to pay attention to picture you hit the right one. What do you mean? It's that now. You don't realize how dependent you are on the colors until they're gone. Okay. Okay. All right. The most things that still works. Okay. All right. And, you know, a few of our listeners told us this word for them, including this one, whose voice you might recognize. I have been using gray scale for like three weeks. And then when I look at my screen time report,

my screen time is down. My phone time is down like 30%. Which is actually more than I thought it would be. Wow. Blight to realm. Executive editor here at Science Vases. Yeah. She tried it. It works for her. Here she is again. I do notice that if I'm on socials or whatever, I'm like, none of this looks like fun. Like, it really, nothing is popping. And also, you know what the

“main thing is? Is that my phone does not look like a bag of jelly games anymore?”

Like, it's really striking when you turn it back on, when you turn the color on, you're like, ooh, candy. Hmm, candy store. They're looking put it on gray scale. You're like, ow, it looks like I'm wearing a newspaper. And Wendy, this is one of the things that, you know, I still have my fun on gray scale most of the time. I think it does help me too. Which it kind of, um, it didn't make me think of a more sort of philosophical question about all of this that I put to

Leah. Is it a little sad that like we would need to like put our worlds in black and white on our phones to get us this role as? I think, of course, somehow it can be said, but on the other hand, it can be so much more beautiful to realize what the colors in your real life. And I think we are so concentrated on the life that we see in our phones. Let's say our YouTube friends and everyone

we are following. Like, of course, they have a beautiful life and the perfect sled. Amazing

holidays, great outfits, but what about your own life, what about your holiday, your friends, your dog, yeah, you would put nature, you're surrounded by. So I think if it helps us to realize, okay, we have that too, and we see all that colors in our life, we don't need color on our phone. Do you know, Mary, I wonder if I had such a humdrum reaction to, oh, okay, it's just my phone on Grayscale, because the other day, I saw the most beautiful rainbow, it went over my house,

over I ran to one window, I saw the rainbow and then I ran to the other side of, it's not a big house, but the other side of the rainbow was coming over my house. And so to put my phone on Grayscale, not a big deal, not a big-- You already have all the colors of your life. That's right. But I'm sure that'll fade away and then I'll just want to look at the cotton candy of my phone.

“So, okay, so I think my last question is, once people scroll less, do they actually feel better?”

Do they appreciate the rainbow in their life more? Well, the answer to this was sort of surprising, so there there were a couple big trials that have found people's mental health, gets a little better when they use their phones less. So like one study got hundreds of people and had some of them use their phones for an hour less every day and it worked to like improve

any benefit at all, some of the founds, like negative effects and one review that I founds,

that looks at three other reviews about like whether or not these interventions that

“reduce screen time affect well-being. They said that that was quote questionable. What?”

Yeah, what do you make of that of all this makes? Yeah, I think maybe for some people, they really don't need to be reducing their screen time to feel better and maybe, you know, we shouldn't be beating ourselves up if we're having a hard time with this because there's no guarantee that cutting down on screen time is going to like turn your life around. But on the other hand, like for me, I think it does help. Yeah, yeah, and for all of that listeners who are saying

that they really struggle with this and and everyone online who's really been responding to the news of that quote case that came down last week saying, you know, yeah, this is this is something that's maybe not the cause of all the sadness in my life, but I don't feel good after I kind of get sucked into my phone for a few hours. Yeah, but if this is a problem for you and you want to try changing something,

“Jay Jong said that the first thing that you got to do, you need to press the button”

and that starting point is really hard. Yeah, I noticed that too, like when I first started

researching for this episode, there was something in me that was just like, uh, I don't want to do any of this, like I just want to keep using my phone. Exactly. I think that's the hardest point. Wait, what does he mean? You need to press the button? I mean, for me, like when I started doing this research, I just like, I just felt like nothing was really going to work, you know, I I write about gray scale and the first time I heard of it, I was just like, that sounds kind of like

dumb. I'm not going to do that. Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. But I think I was just resistant to doing anything like I was just feeling kind of lazy. And so, uh, Jay Jong was, is basically like,

you know, just starting is often the hardest part of this. And for him, you know, this means

just like putting his phone in a different room sometimes if he's working or going to bed. And then he has this one thing he does for when he's already in a scrolling session. I just physically, I talked to myself, hey, stop using and just start work. We're just doing it. And then you're more likely to actually just like close your phone if you just tell yourself, hey, yeah, stop. Yes. Interesting.

Physically speaking, it works for me, but I'm not sure if it works for others, but it does for me. I do find that when I am scrolling and don't want to be anymore, really questioning whether I'm enjoying any of the content I've just seen does help. So as an example, so I was on a good run because you can be on a good run with social media where you getting video after video that's actually quite delightful. And then I stopped it when I saw this

video of kids, of plucky little kids wearing moustaches and saying, I love wearing a moustache. And I was like, put the f*** on my doing with my life. That was your dark moment. I was going to be way worse than that. That was enough. That was enough. I was dark. I can't explain what it's such a sport in the business here. Wake up call. Exactly. That was it. Thanks, Marilyn. Thanks Wendy. That's science vases. And if you try any of the stuff that we've talked about

on this episode, you put your fighting gray scale, your download and app that has a little nudge of you watch a dumb video that you despise and then you throw the phone in the van. Please let us know on Instagram. We are at science underscore vs. I'm on TikTok at Wendy's Look and we love to hear from you. Merrill, how many citations are in this week's episode?

“Okay. We have 44 citations. Great. Which if you want to see those, you can go to the show notes”

and follow the links to the transcripts. This episode was produced by Merrill Horn, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimmler, Michelle Dang, and a Katy Foster Keys. I'm the executive producer, we're edited by Black Terrell, fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard, mix and sound design by Bobby Lord, music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, so Wiley, Emma Munger, and Peter Leonard.

Thank you so much to all of the researchers that we spoke to, including Dr. Kai Luka. Hi, I'm Song Cho, Dr. Alex Holt, Dr. Jan Olrickson, Dr. Jay Olson, and Dr. Noah Castello.

studio's original, listen to us for free, unsplotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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