Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice

Introduction

0:00Imagine 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.

0:31Now, 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.

Advice Episode

0:54Well, 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 quantify 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.

1:33So 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.

Research Paper

1:55All 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?

2:26Well, 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.

2:57And 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.

3:28Then to get even better results, they did something even more impressive. They made this a randomized control trial. So they recruited a group of participants and then randomly divided them into a group that was going to have the internet blocking and then a group that was not so that they could really be comparing what was the difference between these two groups and not accidentally measuring things like self-selection effects. As the experiment went on, they could measure the impact with various means. They had surveys that they would have the participants filled out.

3:59They had various tests, like tests of attention that they would have the participants do at various times, and they would do something called random experience sampling where they would randomly text the participants and say, hey, tell me right now in this moment how you are feeling. This is sort of the gold standard in social psychology for measuring people's subjective well-being on average. Okay. So that was the experiment, and they had the intervention group do this for two weeks while the control group did not. And then there were some more complexities after that where then they swapped, and the control group started using them, and they measured what happened with the intervention group for the week that followed.

4:35But that was the core of the experiment. What did they find? Well, I'm going to put a couple plots up on the screen here for people who are watching. Okay. So this first plot here is looking at sustained attention ability. I want you to look at the blue lines. This is the intervention group. And between the beginning of the experience and time point two, so two is after two weeks, we see this blue line goes way up. A marked increase in the ability to pay attention. Then as we go forward, it falls a little bit, but not all the way back down the baseline. So even after they started using their phone for the Internet again, they still had some attention left.

5:10All right. What about mental health? An even more dramatic effect here. Look at this blue line.

5:15That's the intervention group. 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.

5:48But 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,

6:20our mental health and our subjective well-being. Maybe we were really underestimating what a hit we were taking by being using the Internet on our phone so constantly.

Mechanisms Explained

6:30All right.

Mechanisms Explained

6:30So 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,

7:06can 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. Because the average daily screen time before the experiment began was 304 minutes. By the end of the experiment, that had dropped down to 161 minutes. So they basically dropped the amount of time they're looking at their screens by about a factor of two when you took mobile Internet off of the phones.

7:40Okay. 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.

8:15The subject spent more time doing meaningful offline activities. They experienced more social interaction. They slept more. And their sense of self-control increased. Let's think about those for a second. So the first three, meaningful offline activities, more social interaction, and more sleeping. The researchers are saying this is probably just a straight-up time reallocation. That is where that 150 minutes that used to be looking at Internet-connected apps on the phone,

8:47that's where it went. They just reallocated it towards activities that had much more positive impacts on their daily life. Now, here's what this tells me. If we see pretty consistently that once you take highly optimized Internet power distracting apps off of phones, if we see this in the research, the subjects all move towards those much more meaningful activities, it tells me that we're wired to do the right thing. That if you don't have extra constraints on us, if you put us in a situation where we're bored,

9:19we have natural drives that will drive us towards, let's go do something meaningful. Let's talk to other people. I'm tired. Why don't I actually go to sleep? And what we want to understand is happening with our phones is that it's basically just short-circuiting our natural drives. Left to our own devices, we tend to do the things that are good for us from a subjective well-being perspective. And it's only when we have these sort of outside tools come in that hijack those drives that we end up in trouble. I mean, we see similar things with drugs and alcohol where it will make our lives worse

9:50because it's hijacking our drives or our mind in a way that gets us away from the activities we normally would be doing to be beneficial. It looks like the phones are doing the same thing. If we could just get those highly engineered distracting apps out of our life, we will naturally start doing things that are going to make us much happier. 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,

10:24and 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 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, the 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

10:57or 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.

11:28It'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. If we 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

12:02and 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.

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Sticking to Intervention

15:38How do I successfully stick with this intervention?

15:43So if you know the thing to do is to spend 14 days blocking mobile internet on your phone and you get all these benefits, how do we make sure we'll stick with this? Well, this is a relevant question. There's a key data point from early in the paper that should give us pause. They had originally recruited right around 500 participants for this study. But only 25.5% of the participants remained compliant throughout the whole experiment. Now, remember, they could check compliance exactly because they could look at the logs of the blocking software.

16:13Now, I assume some of this noncompliance was actually unrelated to the internet blocking, just people got busy or tired of the surveys and the tests and the experience sampling, and they're like, forget it. I don't want to do it. But the sense you get from reading the paper is that a lot of this measured noncompliance was people getting around the mobile internet blocking. They could turn it off. Now, it would be logged if they did, and then they wouldn't be counted in the data, but you could turn it off. And it seemed like a large number of people at some point circumvented it at least a little bit. So this motivates a critical question.

16:45If you want to do this experiment in your life to get these benefits, what can you do to maximize the odds that you're like the 25.5% of the participants who stuck with the blocking and not like the 74.5% who gave in and started using their phone again? Well, I came up with three tips, and if you're going to put this into practice, I came up with three tips that I think would be helpful, okay? All right, let's start with the first one here. I'll reveal it.

17:14This is dramatic, Jesse. Those who are listening, again, are missing avatar-style visual effects. All right, tip number one, block precisely. So if you're going to block internet-connected apps, you have to be a little bit more precise than basically saying, leave the phone, leave text messaging, everything else is blocked. The problem is, and I'm sure a lot of the participants face this, is that there's many pragmatic apps on our phones

17:45in the modern world that use the internet or the cellular, and you need them just to function practically in the world, right? So I'm looking at my own phone, and I can see on here, for example, Park Mobile, right? You park somewhere. It's how we pay for parking here in DC. That uses the internet, but I need that because I'm often parking in places. The two-factor authentication that I use to log into Georgetown or if we're logging into our system here

18:16at our production company, I need that on my phone so that I can do two-factor authentication. There's a couple other apps like that as well. So if you want to succeed, you can't have those type of frustrations, so you need to block more narrowly. Whatever blocking software you're using, you have to go through and choose specific apps to block, not just all. The simple advice I would give is look at the so-called S&G apps, social media, news, and games. These are the ones that are really engineered to grab your attention and therefore create that sense of motivation to pick up your phone.

18:47So go block every S&G you can find, but you can leave the other pragmatic apps, the weather app, the parking app, the two-factor authentication app, you can leave those open so that you're not going to have the issue where you're like, oh, I really need this app. Let me turn off my blocking and now you never turn it back on again. All right, so that's tip number one if you want to succeed with this intervention. All right, tip number two.

19:14Strengthen controls. So one of the things that they did in this paper is that the software they were using to block mobile internet access, it wasn't particularly strong. The subjects could turn it off or circumvent it. It would take them out of the sample study, but they could do it. This is partially experimental design. The researchers didn't want to take over completely the subject's phone. I mean, what if they're in an emergency and they couldn't use it? But it also has to do with the reality of iOS, which several years ago made a change

19:45that made it very difficult for third-party apps to really have strong controls over blocking on your phone. They didn't like the idea of a third-party app being able to strongly block other third-party apps. But if you can have stronger blocking, by which I mean blocking in which there's more friction involved than actually turning it off, it will significantly increase your probability of compliance with this intervention. So if you want to move just one step above the sort of basic controls they were doing, you can think about a device like Brick. Brick has a physical key fob

20:17that becomes involved if you want to actually turn off a particular blocking mode. You have to touch it to your phone. You can put this in another room or keep it in your car or your bag. So you still have access to anything if you need it, but the friction of going to get a device and touching to your device is often enough to give pause and to prevent that short-term motivation circuit from winning because it sees a real cost to you having to actually demonstrably go and get this thing and make it clear to yourself that you failed with your own rules. You want to go a step above that. You can configure your phone.

20:48So if you have a partner, right, you can configure your phone such that it's protected with iOS's screen time, but it's like you're the kid and your partner is the parent, right? And only they know the PIN code for actually changing what settings are on your phone. So if you want to change the blocking software, you would have to get the number from someone else. Again, that's a higher level of friction, but that's really going to work as well. You're going to think, okay, I'm not going to go bother like my husband or my wife or my girlfriend or my boyfriend to get this PIN number. That's just admitting I fail.

21:18I guess I'm going to have to do without checking Instagram right in this moment. All right, those are three tips. Let me give you the third tip to succeed with this intervention.

21:33Lean into boredom.

21:36This is one of the more interesting things I saw in the paper was this idea that many of these subjects naturally drifted to the same high-value activities once you took the mobile internet, that sort of potent distraction out of their life. The point is our instincts are good. If we get rid of these sort of artificial constraints in our lives, our instincts for how we want to alleviate boredom tend to be good. I want to go hang out with people. I want to go do something interesting. I want to make my intentions

22:07made manifest concretely in the world. So you're going to feel discomfort when you don't have access to those same apps that you're used to delivering you numbing or diversion. That's okay. Feel that discomfort. Feel that boredom. And tell yourself, rewire yourself to think, the solution to this boredom is not circumventing the blocks and going back to having access to apps on my phone. Let me try other things that might get rid of this boredom unrelated to my phone.

22:38And that's going to drive you really quickly towards activities that are actually very good for you. It's like if you're very hungry and you're put into a food environment where you don't have ultra-processed foods that are hyper-palatable, you're going to eat the things that are good for you. You're like, oh, I have meat here and vegetables and fruit, like stuff that your body recognizes and likes. So in the absence of the artificial, our instincts work really well. So in the absence of artificial diversions, the boredom will drive you towards good behavior if you let it.

23:10Just take your phone off the table as the solution and see what other solutions arise in that roiled wake. 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

23:41that 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 to full night's sleep, interacting in the real world with other people, meaningful offline activities. So this is my advice.

24:11Take the lesson from this paper 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 takes 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.

24:42So 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's been read like 200,000 times. Did you know about it before it came out?

25:08I had heard rumors. I mean, there's a lot of papers. I kind of heard people mention it. And then I think it was 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.

AI and Research

25:24I want to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. 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.

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26:26Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash deepquestions. That's betterhelp.com slash deepquestions. All right. Let's get back to the show. All right. Well, that's enough hearing from me. We also like to hear from you because it's a Monday advice episode. We often introduce a second segment in which we open our inbox to get questions, comments, and reactions from my audience. If you have things you want to send in to be covered on the show,

26:57you can use podcast at calnewport.com. All right. We got some time today, Jess. Let's do a few questions. Who do we have up first? Our first question is from Tyler and it's about AI and academic research. All right. So Tyler says, I imagine you've gotten many emails with this link already, but just wanted to make sure it got to you. Keep up the good work, fellas. All right. So what he sent me was a Substack essay. I'll put it on the screen here. It's from a Substack

27:28called, So Here's the Idea, the Organization Science Substack, and the essay is titled More Versus Better, Part 1. Now, I actually went through and read this essay and enjoyed it so much that I wrote a newsletter about it. So the newsletter that came out today at calnewport.com goes deep into this. So if this sounds interesting to you, go over to calnewport.com and check out my essay today where I get into the details on this essay. You should subscribe. I mean, this is Dispatches from the Front Lines of the War of Depth Versus Distraction. So if you listen to this, you should subscribe.

27:59But let me go over some of the high points here on the podcast. So here's the basic idea. This is a task force. The authors are a task force that were organized by a particular well-known journal in Organization Science. It's called Organization Science. This task force was pulled together to answer the question of what role is AI having in the submissions and publications? Like, what role is it having on the academic research community that is publishing in this journal?

28:31And they gathered really good data because these are researchers from a field where what you do is gather really good data. So they know what they're doing here. I want to show you a couple charts. I'm going to bring this up here. All right, here's the first chart. So this is labeled monthly submission volume at Organization Science from January 2013 until the end of 2025. The key thing here is at the far right, we see this massive increase in submissions and it happens right after this vertical line

29:01is labeled ChatGPT. So the first thing they noticed is there was a bump during COVID-19. It bumped up from what was happening before but it was pretty steady. And then post-ChatGPT, they've been having an increasing rate of submissions per year. All right, so that's chart number one. Here's chart number two. This is monthly submission volume by AI use category. So that black line is the total submissions per month. That dotted line in the middle is ChatGPT gets introduced. These lines down the bottom

29:32are measuring how much AI was used in the paper submitted. The orange line is zero to 15% AI and what you can see is as the total volume of submissions go up, the total fraction of those submissions or volume of submissions that don't use AI is going down. So they're clearly measuring they are getting more AI submissions ever since ChatGPT came out. I think, let's see here. Okay,

30:02and then here we see a chart that measures essentially the readability of papers and Jesse, as you'll notice, it's pretty flat from 2013 through COVID-19 and then what happens at the ChatGPT line? It takes a nosedive, just a nosedive. So the papers become massively and notably less readable right around the time ChatGPT is emerging. Here's a couple numbers from the paper among manuscripts that were high AI submissions,

30:33so 70% or more of the manuscript was generated with the help of AI. Nearly 70% were desk rejected, which means an editor determined they should not be sent out for review. So they were so bad the editor's like, we're not even gonna do peer review on this. 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

31:04assessment 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

31:35and 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 okay if these were all good submissions and 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 is 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,

32:07way, 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.

32:39And 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 in this particular journal. by flooding the works with significantly more submissions that are lower quality 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

33:09one 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 that 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

33:40that's going to mean we'll just become strictly better at what we do but they can make things worse so 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 alright Jesse

Listener Questions

33:53what do we got next our next message is from Emily who had a question about our recent episode on reversing brain rot with cognitive fitness that was a popular episode yeah especially online the kids like the term brain rot I guess is what's going on so for those who missed it I gave advice for how to get your brain back and shape in a world in which we have lots of distractions so obviously today's episode follows up on some of those ideas I would add the 14 day intervention we talked about today is like idea number six from that how to reverse

34:24brain rot episode I did a couple weeks ago alright so Emily is writing in reaction to that episode from a couple weeks ago here's what she said I really enjoyed your recent episode on building cognitive fitness I'm currently using the composing of this email to not avoid writing so thank you for the motivation my question for you is also related to this writing portion of your proposed regimen my expertise is in architecture and design and I have found that my journal and notebooks tend to fill with drawings

34:54and schematics as much as with words do you think that there are equivalent alternative forms of creating composing and communicating that require the same sort of brain processes that writing does or do you believe that written language is uniquely superior for practicing that mental orchestration well I think exercise is a useful analogy here Emily because there's different types of exercise that can promote fitness in different ways all of which is good and in general variety is good and I think that's what we're talking about here technical drawing and schematics are going to

35:25work your brain in useful ways from a cognitive fitness standpoint they're not the same ways that writing works it there's some overlap and there's some ways where they're both different so they're both good and a life where you're doing some writing and you're doing some technical drawing and schematics I think that's like an athlete who cross trains you know