Chapter 1: The Apps Got Us Trapped

Hi, I’m Wendy Zukerman and you’re listening to Science Vs. 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, owner of YouTube, were found negligent for basically creating addictive products that harmed a young woman's mental health^[1]...

A huge slap to big tech today

A landmark verdict that could change the face of social media

Deliberately and negligently designed 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 dollars^[2]..  They are 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  “Trojan 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 wanna use my phone less, obviously like everyone else

 I've been trying to quit for the last two years. It has gotten worse.

I wanna stop doom scrolling

just feels like I'm constantly consuming something off of a screen.

Surveys find that over half of adults in the US want to spend less time on their phones^[3][4][5]…

My mental health is 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 us scrolling?? Rather ironically, online you can find tons of people claiming they’ve found the answer!

These are 5 really simple brain tips that will help you break social media addiction and stop doom scrolling

The first tip is friction stacking. 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? 

When it comes to scrolling a lot of us have been

endless scrolling, constant notifications

And then there’s science. Science vs scrolling will be right back after the break. Don’t look at your phone!

PREROLL

WZ 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 me is senior producer Meryl Horn, hi Meryl!

MH Hi!

WZ It’s been a while! Since we’ve been chatting about science!

MH yeah yeah it has

WZ So have you been spending all that time on your phone?

MH  Uh, sometimes it feels like that.

WZ Uh, seriously. Do, do you have a problem with scrolling, do you think?

MH Yeah. Um, the, the reason I wanted to do this episode was because I'd, I'd find myself like just staring at my phone for way longer than I kind of meant to, especially at the end of the day. Um. Like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't even feel like good, like I would often feel like worse about my life or just crappy in general. And yet I'd spend all this time, you know, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

WZ Yeah. Yeah. And this is a feeling so many, so many of us have had. It's, it's really kind of crazy when you think about how pervasive this feeling is, is. So when it comes to this question of how do we stop scrolling… Where do we begin here?

Chapter 2: Yes, it’s the scrolling that’s to blame

MH  Well, first off, the research does find that scrolling itself is especially bad compared to other things we do on our phones.

WZ Okay.

MH So like one, one study asked people like how they felt after doing different things on their phones and the researchers could spy on them to see like exactly what they were using their phones for. And they found that, yeah, it was like the scrolling that people said they regretted the most^[6] compared to stuff like communicating with their friends or like getting information.^[7] Yeah. Um, you could also see this like 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.

Mm-hmm.

MH Where when they went on a messaging app, they only regretted it 18% of the time.

WZ Uhhuh

MH  And another study backed this up^[8], finding something really similar, but this one looked at meaninglessness instead, which, you know, again, found that people said their experience was more meaningless^[9] if they had just spent that time scrolling compared to this other stuff, which help me understand like why it feels so bad.

WZ: But then why do we do it!??

MH  'cause 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 or, you know, those, the parts of our brain that light up when we're doing something rewarding do light up when we like, see social media.^[10][11] 

WZ So that's why we're going back for more… what happens next, how do we stop?  And I don't want to. Completely put the onus on us to work out how to un suck ourselves from social media. The big tech companies clearly have a role to play here, but while we're waiting for them to sort it out, Meryl, do you have anything that we can do for ourselves?

Chapter 3: The Hardcore Approach

MH  I do, yes. So let's dive in and find out like what actually works here to, to stop scrolling. Um, so to start, let’s meet Jaejeung Kim^[12], he’s an assistant professor at Chungnam National University in Korea. He’s also had a problem with scrolling… for him, YouTube is the thing that would get him.

JK  I kept on watching. Watching.

MH Mm-hmm.

JK And I end up watching something that I never intended.

MH You just get sucked down these rabbit holes.

JK Yeah. Yeah.

WZ  Scientists, they're people too.

MH Yeah. But he has done a lot of work, uh, trying to figure out like exactly what strategies work to stop, like how can people break these habits?

WZ Interesting. Yeah.

MH And so I wanted to start with the most hardcore intervention that he's come up with.

WZ Mmm.

MH Do you wanna guess what they did to help people stop scrolling?

WZ Delete the apps, put your phone in the bin. Buy a Nokia from the early 2000s. MH Nice guesses. Um, I guess it wasn't, it wasn't that extreme in a way.

WZ None of these are crazy.

MH 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.

WZ I would, Jaejeung, if you wanna go even more extreme, I'll sign up. Um, okay. So what did they do?

MH So his approach was to, uh, just make an app that would kick you off your phone. If you go past a certain time limit, you couldn’t use your phone for anything except to make phone calls.^[13].^[14]

WZ OK.

MH So yeah, first, you know, there's about 40 people, and first you had to put in your goals for how long you wanna spend on your phone. So like, maybe you're using it for five hours a day and you wanna get down to four hours a day. Then you got this special app, uh, it's called Goalkeeper, and it had three different levels. So sometimes people would just get the easy level, basically a control where you just get a warning message when you go past your time limit. Uh, in another one you just get kicked off your phone for a little bit of time.^[15] Um, but then the third level is, is the intense one. So Jaejeung called this condition “strong lockout.”

JK  And the strong lockout is what I was very interested. I was. I'm eager to lock people out.

MH Just 'cause you wanna make people suffer?

JK Uh, yeah. I want, haha wanna see the greatest effect. So we lock them out until the midnight after the time exceeded

WZ 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 gonna interrupt with your sleep. At least just keep it off until 8 a.m. or something.

MH That's true. But then people will be eating up their time for the next day, so

WZ Ohhhh

MH Yeah, they were, people were very aware of like how much time they had left on their phone and, okay. Yeah. And so every, everyone, uh, tried out these like kind of different levels of the app for, for one week, and I, I first wanted to know, yeah, what happened when people were in this the week when they had the really hardcore approach, the strong lockout. First, let's just look at, did it work to get people to use their phones less?

JK Uh, yes it did. Yes it did. Yeah, it's quite effective.

MH So yeah people did use their phones for roughly 75 minutes less every day.^[16] So in that sense, it worked. But then the caveat was that people really didn’t really like it, um, at least a lot of the time. Like they said they felt more frustrated and coerced^[17] compared to the control condition, where they were just getting a little warning but didn’t actually get locked out of their phone.  And then they got really stressed out when they saw that like the time was like getting close to when they would have to get cut off.

WZ Yes. That's the point.

MH Yeah. But I think the thing that was frustrating was that we use our phones for a lot of different things, right? Yes, of course. Yes. So when we get locked out of everything altogether, it can be really annoying.

WZ Yes, it's a big stick. It's a big stick. That's right. And there can be days where you're off Instagram, but you've got a lot of work stuff to do, blah, blah, blah, you're traveling, you wanna listen to a bunch of podcasts, and then you've,

MH you just wanna like pay for the subway. Like I do all the sorts of things with my phone. I don't wanna be locked out altogether.

MH  And then there's one other super, kind of hardcore study^[18] I wanted to tell you about. Mm-hmm. Um, since you're interested in, you know, signing up for a study yourself

WZ Okay.

MH Where you just have to like get rid of your phone. So I talked to this researcher who set up this study where they wanted to cut the internet off people's phones for two weeks. Mm-hmm.

WZ Yeah.

MH But then when it was actually time to, to start the experiments, um, and download this app that cut off the internet. A ton of people didn't actually go through with it. Yeah. So more than 40% of them just didn't even get the app, even though they signed up for this study.

WZ Mm.

MH And then even a bunch of people who got the app kept cheating.^[19] They'd like re-enable 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 wanna do this.

WZ  Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could, uh. I could see, I could see myself falling on my own petard or whatever that phrase is.

MH Batard?

WZ I don't know. I'm just saying words.

MH I guess that's a loaf of bread.

Chapter 4: The Gentle Nudge

MH So maybe, um, we should go in the opposite direction. Like what, what if, um, all we need to do to, 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 wanna be doing this right now?

WZ Uhhuh.

MH Um, so Jaejeung has also, also tried this approach, like in a, in a different study, he created an app where people would just get a little popup window when they tried to open up certain apps, um, and, and they could just get rid of this little popup with a little click of the button.^[20]

WZ Yes. Quite a few people have apps similar to this.

MH Yeah. I've tried this out before. 'cause the iPhone comes with like a screen time app that works similar to this.^[21] 

WZ Oh yeah. I have always wondered, does it, does it actually work? 'cause the, the popup comes on And it's quite a low hurdle to just

MH mm-hmm.

WZ Say, yeah, this is what I want to do.

MH Yeah. It's easy to hit, ignore, but it does give you that little nudge, right?

WZ Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

MH And so, yeah, he, um, Jaejeung set up the study where first people had to put in a, a list of apps that they wanted to, like, stop themselves from, from going on to so much.

JK  So we call it like the blacklist app. So it could be like, you know, Facebook, um, Instagram, or YouTube.

WZ  Got it.

MH And then he, he looked at what happened when people got this little popup window. Um, did, did they decide not to go onto those blacklisted apps?

JK  It has, uh, reduced the use about 10 to 15%^[22]

MH Just from getting that little box that just says, do you wanna continue? Yes or no?

JK Yes, yes, yes.

MH Huh.

JK And that little, um, stop, uh, have made you think and reconsider your use.

WZ So what have similar studies found? Does this gentle nudging work generally? We’ve got Jaejeung’s study…

MH Yeah, other studies do find that it can work a little bit like Jaejeung’s, but then a bunch of other studies didn't find any effects.

WZ: Mm-hmm.

MH: So, yeah, I found a review that kind of looked at all these studies together and, uh, bottom line it called, um, this type of strategy quote, barely effective.^[23] 

WZ Mm. Okay. Okay. It's just too easy to swat that fly away. You.

MH Mm-hmm.

WZ You sure? You sure? Yeah. I'm sure I wanna stay on the app.

MH I, yeah. I just automatically ignore it every single time.

WZ Yeah.

MH So for me it was, it wasn't surprising that it doesn't work great. Like, okay.

Chapter 5: What if we up the friction?

MH 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, this like a buzzword online right now. Influencers are like, you know, to stop scrolling, you need to up the friction.

WZ Right, so the, the friction is too hot. Then the friction is too cold. We need the Goldilocks amount of friction to stop us from scrolling.

MH And you know, some of our listeners, um, mentioned this sort of approach, like making it harder to use their apps. Mm-hmm. Um, as like having worked for some of them.

Now what I've tried and to pretty good success is hide all the social media apps on your phone. That has really helped.

I haven't found like a bullet solution, but the Brick app has really helped me.

MH  The brick is something it's,^[24] I've been getting ads for it a ton. It's like this little device that like you physically have to like, go to, to unlock your apps. Um, that's sort of expensive. There's also cheaper ways to do the same thing. I, there's one called Touch Grass, where you have to like go outside and like take a picture of yourself touching grass^[25] before you can use your apps. So this is, it's a really common strategy. Um, but let's find out if it actually, like what actually happens when people try this, so, okay. In that study that Jaejeung did where, you know, people put in these blacklisted apps, um, 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.

WZ  Okay.

MH People would get a pop-up window where you had to enter in a string of numbers before you could go onto the app.^[26] Got it. So. Sometimes it was only 10 digits long. Other times it's a 30 digit long number.

WZ Whoa.

MH That they had to like manually put in before they got to use their app. Oh, I asked Jaejeung, uh, what this was like.

JK Very frustrating. And our participant mentioned that, well , there's one little thing.

Uh, once you, uh, failed to input 30-digit number at once, you have to retype it.

MH You start to start all over again.

JK Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's. So it's very frustrating.

WZ  Yeah, I was, I was imagining that's what would happen. It's very frustrating. Very frustrating. Mm-hmm. Okay. So surely that stops you going on the app, right? That feels like enough. Yeah.

MH Yeah. So in the study, again, around 40 people, a few weeks long, he looked at like, what happened when these, they got these different kind of levels and Yeah. When they, especially when they got the 30 digit number, a lot of the time they decided, I'm not even gonna bother.^[27] Yeah. Um, almost half the time they decided like, yeah, f this, I'm not, it's not worth it 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.

WZ  Okay.

MH Which is that once people were in the app, they then spent more time in it than they, than they would've done otherwise.^[28] 

WZ Oh you know what this is like Meryl. It's like when people are waiting in line at an ice cream shop, and then when they get to the front, they have to get all the frigging tasters

MH to take their time.

WZ Exactly, exactly. But we're still waiting in the line, Heather. Um, is this, what? Is this what happened?

MH Yeah, exactly like that. Here’s Jaejeung

JK  So they, once they got in, so, hey, once I got in, I wanna use this for 30 minutes instead of like 10 minute, 10 minute, 10 minute — three times of 10 minutes sessions.

MH Oh,

JK: so, so the frequency decreased, but the total time remained the same.

MH  So overall people didn't actually spend less time on their blacklisted apps. Um, 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 check, like habitual checking less.

WZ Yes.

MH But if your goal is to spend less time on your phone, it might not work to do this kind of friction approach.

WZ Ohhh

MH And then one final thing from the study I thought was interesting. Um, they looked at what people did when, when they did decide to not go on to that naughty listed app. It, it turns out about half the time people just went to some other app instead.^[29] 

WZ Mm-hmm.

MH So they were still on their phones, often just doing something else that maybe they thought was better for them. 'cause they didn't put it on their blacklist, but yeah.

WZ Okay. Yeah. That feels right. I mean, if you're sitting on the toilet. You gotta look at something.

MH You gotta do something.

WZ  All right, so here is what we have learned thus far. If you wanna stop scrolling. Adding some friction is a good idea, but if the hurdle is too low, like a little popup, it's not gonna work. If the hurdle is too high, once you jump it, watch out. 'cause then you might be spending more time scrolling 'cause you're so proud of yourself. Mm-hmm. For putting in those 30 digits. Right.

MH Yeah. It might sort of backfire once you get in.

WZ Mm-hmm. So is there any. Goldilocks amount of friction then?

MH Well, there is actually an approach that, nothing to do with friction at all that I found that it seems to be the, the best way to stop scrolling.

WZ Oh, okay.

MH According to the science that, that I found. So I'll tell you what that is after the break.

BREAK

Chapter 6: Is greyscale the solution?

WZ  Welcome back. Today we are talking about how we can stop scrolling. Meryl Horn, senior producer at Science versus has been looking into this and I think you've promised us a solution to our scrolling dilemmas.

MH Yeah. kind of.

WZ Is that, am I, am I overselling?

MH I mean, I think, no, I think it's a solution.

WZ Great.

MH Um, that's definitely worth trying. Yeah. And it, it is something that is even easier than a lot of the things we've been talking about to try.

WZ Let's jump in.

MH So, uh, next we're gonna meet Dr. Lea-Christin Wickord^[30] she did a study on this. She’s a researcher at the University of Koblenz in Germany. And like basically all the researchers I talked to about this, Lea also got into this for personal reasons.  She’s a psychologist…

LW In psychology we don't do research; we do “me-search.”

MH Oh, yes, “me-search.”

LW As, as you can imagine, I, I have a problem with my phone on my own. So I realized, uh, especially during COVID, that, um, this is a research topic that could really help me, uh, with my usage pattern, using my phone, using social media in a healthy and beneficial way. And not only doomscroll the whole day.

WZ  What has she uncovered?

MH Well, so the idea for her came up in a meeting she was having one day with some students where they're basically brainstorming ways to stop scrolling.

LW  One of the students talked about, OK, but have a look at our old phones. Like the first phones we ever had, it was like in Europe, we had these 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’s it. And then we discuss, OK, like how can we arrange that nowadays?

MH Can we make our phones crappier like they used to be.

LW Not to make it more crappy, but to make it less attractive. And, um, we realized all those saturated colors, your, uh, blinking red, uh, push notification, uh, button, all of those colors, keep you distracted and keep you on your phone.

So yeah, the colors! We know from studies that people generally prefer bright colors.^[31][32][33] it’s probably why all our apps are rainbow colored. And so the idea was maybe if we get rid of these bright colors, make it black and white, or put it in “grayscale” we’ll use our phones less.   Have you heard of this approach, Wendy?

WZ I, I guess I know some people, obviously who have their phone on grayscale, but I didn't know that this was a tactic to get them to stop using their phone so much.

MH Yeah.  So, do you wanna try it, Wendy?

WZ Sure, sure, sure, sure. All right.

MH And if listeners wanna try this too, so. On both iPhones and Androids is under accessibility. So Wendy, you have an iPhone?

WZ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MH Okay, so go to settings. Accessibility. Accessibility. And then scroll down to display and text size.

WZ Oh, got it.

MH And now color filters.

WZ Yes.

MH And toggle that button on. And there you go. Okay. Greyscale, here we go. Oh, okay. It's subtle, it's noir. It's classy.

MH 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

WZ Did you really?

MH I did. Yeah. No, when I first did it, I was like, what?

WZ So like, but tell me about the science here. So does it actually work? I would be really surprised if this made a difference.

MH Well, yeah. Let's see what happened in her study.^[34] Okay. So she got about a hundred people to do this Uhhuh, um, switch their phones to greyscale. Yeah. And yeah, right away they, they got a pretty big response.

LW  We asked our participants, okay, how do you feel? And what they did say was, um. It sucks. It, it's boring. We don't want it. Yeah. Because we want to have our little funny phones. We want to have, uh, we want to play with our phone. We want to have a good time. We want to feel good using our phone.

MH Yeah.

LW But what they also said is, oh, it's really working.

Yeah, so this generally works! In Lea’s study, they found that after a day or two of their phones being on greyscale, people spent a lot less time on their phones - over an hour less on average.^[35]

WZ  Whoa. An hour less. Just 'cause their phone was on gray scale.

MH Mm-hmm. And there are also longer term studies - like ones that have people do this for a week - don’t find as big effects - maybe 20-40 minutes less a day, like once you get used to it. But out of all 4 studies^[36][37][38]  on this that I could find, it did work - people used their phones for less time.

WZ Whoa

MH Yeah and there’s a couple studies^[39][40] looked at people who are REALLY heavy phone users… They were considered to have  “problematic smartphone use” which is sort of a handwavy way of measuring how addicted someone is to their smartphone. And they found that greyscale was helpful for them. One study found that people with this felt less anxious after switching their phone to greyscale.

WZ  Oh, I mean, you don't see pokies machines or what do you call them in the us Um, slot machines. You don't see slot machines that are greyscale. Right?

MH Yeah.  And. Uh, well, but there are some things, um, that are harder to do. Um, I noticed when I put my phone in greyscale, like when someone's calling you the, the buttons for answering the phone. Uh, or declining it are, uh, in red and green. So now when I'm picking up a call, I'm like, oh gosh, like which button do I push? Like you really have to pay attention to make sure you hit the right one.

WZ What do you mean? It's that -- Meryl…

MH You don't realize how dependent you are on the colors until they're gone.

WZ Mm. Okay. Okay. All right.

MH But for most things it still works okay.

WZ All right.

MH And you know, a few of our listeners, uh, told us that this worked for them, um, including this one whose voice you might recognize.

BT I’ve been using Greyscale for like 3 weeks and when I look at my screentime report, my screentime is down by like 30%, which is actually more than I thought it would be.

WZ  Wow. Blythe Terrell, executive editor. Mm-hmm. Here at Science Vs …

MH Yes. She tried it, it worked for her. Um, here she is again.

BT I do notice that if I’m on socials or whatever, I’m like none of this looks like fun. Nothing is popping. And ya know what the main thing is? My phone doesn't look like a bag of jelly beans anymore. Like it’s really striking when you turn the color on you're like ooo candy- candy store. And when you put it on greyscale it’s like it looks like I’m reading the newspaper.

MH  And Wendy, this is one of the things that, you know, I still have my phone on grayscale most of the time. I think it does help me too. Which

WZ Uhhuh

MH it kind of, um, it did make me think of a more sort of philosophical question about all this that I, I put to Leah.

MH Is it a little sad that like we'd need to like put our worlds in black and white on our phones to get us to scroll less?

LW I think of course somehow it can be sad, but on the other hand it can be so much more beautiful to realize all the colors in your real life. Um, and I think we are so concentrated on the life that we see in our phones, let's say our YouTube friends and, uh, everyone we are following, like of course they have a beautiful life and. The perfect flats, amazing holidays, great outfits. But what about your own life? What about your holiday, your friends, your dog? Yeah. The beautiful nature you're surrounded by. So I think if it helps us to realize, okay, we have that too, and we see all the colors in our life. We don't need color on our phone.

WZ  Do you know Meryl? I wonder if I had such a humdrum reaction to, oh, okay. It's just my phone on greyscale 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, and the rainbow was coming over my house. Yeah. And so to put my phone on gray, not a big deal. Not a big,

MH you already have all the colors of your life.

WZ That's right. But I'm sure that'll fade away. And then I'll just wanna look at the, the cotton candy of my phone. So, so, okay.

Chapter 7: If we stop scrolling, do we feel better?

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?

MH 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. Mm-hmm. So like, one study^[41] got hundreds of people and had, um, some of them use their phones for an hour less every day, and it worked to like, improve life satisfaction.^[42] But, uh, a lot of studies have been done on this. Some of them haven't found any benefit at all. Some have found like negative effects. Um, and one review^[43] that I found that looked at three other reviews about like whether or not these interventions that reduce screen time affect wellbeing, they said that that was quote questionable^[44] 

WZ: What?

MH Yeah.

WZ What do you make of that, of all this mixed-?

MH Yeah. I, I think maybe for some people it, they really don't need to be reducing their screen time Right. To feel better. And maybe, you know, we shouldn't be beating ourselves up if, if we're having a hard time with this because there's no guarantee that cutting down on screen time is gonna like, turn your life around. Um, but on the other hand, like for me, I think it does help.

WZ Yeah. And for our listeners who were saying they struggle with this...and everyone online who's really responding to the news of that court case last week … saying yeah this is maybe not the cause of all sadness in their lives, but they don't feel good after they do it.  

Chapter 8: Final tips to stop scrolling

MH Yeah. But, if this is a problem for you, and you want to change something Jaejeung said the first thing you gotta do?

JK  You need to press the button and that starting point is really hard.

MH Yeah, I noticed that too. Like when I first started researching for this episode, there was something in me that's just like, uh, I don't wanna do any of this. Like, I just wanna keep using my phone.

JK Exactly. I think that's the hardest point.

WZ  Wait, what does he mean? You need to press the button.

MH I mean, for me, like when I started doing this research, I just like, I just felt like nothing was really gonna work. You know, I, I, I read about greyscale and the first time I heard of it, I was just like, that sounds kind of like dumb. I I'm not gonna do that.

WZ Yeah. That's kind of where I'm at. I,

MH but I think I was just resistant to doing anything. Like, I was just feeling really you're so, yeah. Like kind of lazy. And so, uh, Jaejeung was, is basically like, you know, just starting is often the hardest part of this. Um, and for him, you know, this means just like putting his phone in a different room sometimes if he is like working or going to bed. And then he has this one thing he does for when he's already in a scrolling session.

JK I just physically, I talk to myself. Hey. Stop using and just start work or just do it.

MH And then you're more likely to actually just like close your phone if you just tell yourself, Hey, stop?

JK Yes.

MH Interesting.

JK Physically speaking, it works for me, but I'm, I'm not sure if it works for others, but it does for me.

WZ  I do find that when I am scrolling and don't wanna 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 — 'cause you can be on a good run with social media where you’re getting video after video that's actually quite delightful — and then I stopped it when I saw this video of kids, plucky little kids, wearing mustaches and saying, I love wearing a mustache. And I was like, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

MH That was your dark moment. I thought it was gonna be way worse than that.

WZ That was enough. That was enough.

MH Wow.

WZ I was like no …

MH The kids wearing mustaches. Okay.

WZ Phone in the bin.

MH Your wake up call.

WZ Exactly.

MH That was it.

WZ Thanks Meryl.

MH Thanks, Wendy.

WZ That’s Science Vs.  And if you try any of the stuff that we've talked about. On this episode, you put your phone in greyscale. You download an app that has a little nudge, um, you watch a dumb video that you despise, and you then you throw the phone in the bin. Uh, please let us know, on Instagram. We are at Science_vs. I'm on TikTok @WendyZuk and we love to hear from you. Meryl, how many citations are in this week's episode?

MH OK, we have 44 citations.

WZ Great. Okay.

MH Um, which if you wanna see those, you can go to the show notes and follow the links to the transcript.

This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Wendy Zukerman is our executive producer. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko-Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. Thanks so much to the researchers we spoke to, including Dr. Kai Lukoff, Hyunsung Cho, Dr. Alex Holte, Dr. Jan Ole Rixen, Dr. Jay Olson, and Dr. Noah Castelo. A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family.

Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.

We’ll fact you next week!