1 Thing You Can Do Today

Take a break from your phone

Life without a screen is close to impossible. We use devices to work, connect, and to play.

According to a recent report from Datareportal, worldwide, the average person spends a total of 6 hours and 57 minutes looking at a screen each day – with almost four hours of that on a mobile phone. The younger you are, the longer your daily average screen time.

Research is mounting that “excessive media and phone use is not good for us physically, mentally or emotionally,” says professor of psychology, Mary Gomes PhD.

“It is no surprise that incoming texts, emails and notifications are a near-constant presence for many people. Our moment-to-moment experience is being fragmented on an unprecedented scale,” she says.


Gomes regularly assigns a media fast in her classes, with her students reporting the following benefits:

  • More ‘present-moment awareness’. Students described more presence, sensory awareness, mindfulness and flow.
  • Deepened connections. The full richness of human relationships is best found face-to-face, says Gomes. The students reported improved connections with family, friends and classmates, finding a difference in conversations when phones were out of the way.
  • Productivity and learning. Any work that requires a focused mind will benefit from a media break, and studies have found the more distant the phone, the better the performance: when phones were placed in another room, learning improved notably, more than when they were tucked away in nearby backpacks. In the UK, secondary schools that banned phones on campus saw significant increases in student test scores.

Gomes believes we can all benefit from a fast from our phones, whether it’s a temporary breather, or an opportunity to create enduring change.

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