“Starting tomorrow, none at all.” How many times have you made that vow at midnight, and how many times broken it?
The vow itself may have been a bad plan. Let me tell you about an experiment run on 619 people.
Quit completely, or cut back — which one lasts?
There’s a report that “cut one hour a day” won.
A randomized controlled trial (Brailovskaia 2022) split 619 people into three groups: (1) stop phones entirely for 7 days, (2) cut use by one hour a day, (3) do nothing. The result: the reduction group still showed about 45 fewer minutes of use per day at four months, along with reported gains in life satisfaction and physical activity. More of the change survived in the reduction group than in the full-stop group.
“Go to zero” sounds brave, but it doesn’t last. “Cut an hour” is plain, but it stays.
Why does “an hour” beat “zero”?
The likely reason is simple. Zero collapses on the first failure.
Swear off completely, and the moment you open it once, “well, it’s ruined now” fires, and you slide back into the screen like a rebound binge. Meanwhile, habit research (Lally 2010, N=96) reports that a single skipped day does not really break habit formation.
So a target that survives failure fits how people actually behave. It’s the same with your phone: rather than the perfect goal of zero, an achievable goal of “one hour less than yesterday” lets the sense of “I did it” pile up.
Tonight’s step: don’t swear off everything
Tonight’s job is to make the vow smaller.
- Drop “none at all tomorrow.” Replace it with “tomorrow I’ll cut one hour.”
- Use Screen Time (iPhone) or Digital Wellbeing (Android) to set a limit on just the one app that eats the most time (about a minute).
- Decide one thing to do with the hour you free up — a bath, a book, a stretch, anything.
The third step matters more than it looks. Time you only “free up” flows back to where it was. Only time with a destination becomes time you’ve reclaimed.