I Used to Be Addicted to My Phone. This Tiny Piece of Plastic Changed Everything.
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Though it felt a bit like discovering an addiction treatment at my local heroin store, I found the screen-time solution that works for me via an Instagram ad. For months, Meta's algorithm badgered me to buy a little piece of plastic mounted on a magnet. I could touch my iPhone to it and it would temporarily turn my device from a smartphone to a dumbphone. I could set certain apps to become inaccessible until I touched my phone to the piece of plastic again. The little block was called “Brick.”
For a guy who spends eight hours or more on my phone fairly often, the results have been good. According to Apple's screen-time reports, days in which I “brick” my phone correspond to anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent less time on my phone. (This week, as I write this story, I'm down 30 percent from last week, when I was moving around a lot and forgot to bring my treasured piece of plastic with me.) I've set Brick to withhold all social media apps and a few others, like the MLB app, so that I cannot wind myself up by checking Pittsburgh Pirates scores. For anywhere between three and nine hours on certain days, my phone is for texts, calls, emails, Slack and Teams messages, and nothing else. It's not a 2005 LG flip phone, but it's more spartan than what most of us use today.
During this summer of bricking, a few thoughts refused to leave me. One was that this was all so stupid. My solution to spending less time on my phone, as a 31-year-old man, was not “touching grass” or even setting a basic timer on my desk. Instead it was a $59 fridge magnet, one that I found via the least reliable of means (an Instagram ad) and that I have still struggled to find testimonials about. (The first thing that came up when I looked for Reddit commentary was an apparent bit of astroturfing by an account that seemed only to want to sell Bricks.) The second thought was an extension of the first: Here was this product that was mundane (again, a literal piece of plastic), expensive (59 American dollars!), and only on my radar because of Instagram advertising (with no friends having ever used it). Despite that unbelievably sketchy origin story, Brick has become one of the best productivity tools in my kit.
That's not a product endorsement. Your psychological needs may be much different from mine. But the experience has made me wonder: Why did this ridiculous little thing work for me when a bunch of other purported life hacks (and even products) did not help me make a dent in my screen time? And do the most obvious mechanisms for lessening screen time—putting your phone away, acting like an actual human being sometimes, or taking a walk outside—really need to take a back seat to industry? Should I be ashamed to have outsourced self-control to something as banal as a 4-square-inch trinket?
The nascent “digital detox” sector is a hard one to triangulate. There's ample evidence that kids these days want to spend less time on their phones , and there are a handful of companies trying to capitalize on that desire, selling screen time–slashing hardware and software. The actual market for these businesses is still, as best I can tell, tiny enough that most market research firms haven't even tried to measure it. The one market research report I could find pegs the digital detox industry as a growing market, but still a tiny one, doing around half a billion dollars in worldwide sales per year. Moreover, we shouldn't want this sector to get much bigger. Why pay a third party to reclaim time we've taken from ourselves?
The industry is also small because its biggest players aren't really in the digital detox business. Apple's “Screen Time” and Android's “Digital Wellbeing” reports are in billions of our pockets at all times, included with the devices we've already bought. Apple and Google offer these reports because they like to be able to show regulators, politicians, and the public that they take digital health somewhat seriously. It's easy for me to set—and then set aside—an iPhone time limit for any app. These features were probably an easy call in Cupertino and a harder one at, for example, Meta.
“Apple's business model is not based on how much time you're on their device,” Scott Kollins, a doctor who now works as chief medical officer at Aura , one of the tech companies that's entered the digital well-being space, told me. “It's the fact that you have the device in the first place to get access to all the other things. Other companies whose business model does rely on serving up information, clicks, things like that, that's a little bit of a different story, and it becomes a little more tricky to sayangle.”
Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg offering Instagram-specific screen-time reports and time limits has the whiff of an arsonist handing out firefighting tips. But because of the largest tech companies' incentives, the digital detox space is one of the most ripe for new entrants. The Apples and Googles of the world want to do enough to keep the authorities off their backs, but not much more. They have bigger fish to fry. The TikToks, Instagrams, and Xs of the world would rather nobody be worried about screen time at all, even as a few of those apps allow users to set their own limits. Business abhors a vacuum, and so a litany of tech platforms have come along selling solutions to this wildly common problem.
The apparent leader in the industry is Opal , which shows up among the App Store's “Essential Productivity Apps” and is generally well reviewed. Every app focused on cutting screen time has a challenge, though. Namely, it is an app . As a reviewer for Dazed pointed out , “using Opal just made me want to look at my phone even more.” This is a common trap in productivity platforms. I am an avid user of the task-management app Trello, despite a terrible recent update , and often find my productivity hampered by how much time I spend making sure that I have organized my information in that app perfectly. This sort of tool might work well for you, but it could also become, you know, another app that occupies a lot of your mindshare.
Enter the blunt-object approach, typified by Brick. I put my little piece of plastic in the kitchen, 15 feet away from the den where I work. I tap my phone to it, and goes Instagram poof . It would not be hard for me to walk the 15 feet and turn my precious faucet of digital slop back on, but I have never done that until I've wrapped up the workday or had to leave the house for a while. Brick has an app, but there's nothing to do in it except select which apps get bricked and then activate the bricking functionality. Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon, compared this approach to the ignition interlock devices that require people who have driven drunk to blow into a machine in order to turn their cars on. He said that both speak to the same philosophy, that “these kinds of draconian mechanisms are the only way to, over time, break this addiction.” This approach has a “limited degree of success associated with it” across disciplines, Lightman told me.
Within my brain's wiring, however, the simple requirement of needing to stand up and walk a few feet to get back to my apps has been weirdly effective. “This is a tried-and-true psychological behavioral principle,” Kollins said. “Anything that you do to interrupt an otherwise routine chain of behaviors can be effective in disrupting it downstream, no matter how easy it is. You've successfully broken that chain.”
Forgive another grim analogy, but it's the same theory as the one behind the building of suicide barriers , like the one I used to live a few blocks away from in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC The fence might not be high enough that it would be that hard to scale it, but the introduction of a momentary inconvenience makes a person less likely to carry out the act. This approach to limiting screen time follows the same principle in a much lower-stakes mental interaction. Apple's built-in app time limiters can be cast aside with a simple tap or two. But make me stand up ? Nope, that's too much work, or too shameful. I'd rather go another few minutes without vertical video than humble myself.
The absurdity of this journey of self-discovery has crept on me often. So many other remedies exist for less than the price of a pretty good dinner out for two: Just leave your phone in the other room for a while! Just don't download time-wasting apps! Just look at a clock and give yourself a set amount of time for daily scrolling! But I probably wouldn't talk about any other addictive behavior that way, and it's not like a bottle of whiskey also serves as the point of contact between people and their employers, or between a child and their parent during an emergency at school. Maybe the $59 piece of plastic pays for itself.
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