How 3 cellphone addicts say they cut down on screen time and improved their lives

Americans are tethered to their cellphones, checking them 205 times every day, according to a survey conducted by the nonprofit consumer organization Reviews.org, and 43% saying they feel “addicted” to their devices.

For those who have lived most or all of their lives in the smartphone age, that addiction is particularly pronounced. Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) spend six hours and 18 minutes on their phones every day. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) spend six hours and two minutes, while Gen Xers are on their phones four hours and 54 minutes each day.

But with cellphones becoming a more entrenched part of daily life, some people have come up with successful strategies for decreasing their screen time — and improving their lives in the process. Three of those people relayed their stories to Yahoo News.

‘Wasting my life away’

In late 2023, Kailani Song, a 15-year-old high school student in Virginia, was horrified by the discovery that she had spent more than 10 hours in a single day on her phone — much of it reading comics on Webtoon — and averaged more than six hours on it every day.

“That felt like I was wasting my life away. If I live 90 years, but 30 of those years are on my phone, did I really live those 90 years?” she told Yahoo News.

Song decided she needed to take action, but was reluctant to simply go cold turkey.

“I was worried that if I cut it down to a really short amount of time, I wouldn’t be able to follow through, because it would be too big of a jump,” she said. “So, I decided that I would go hour by hour, so that every week, I would lower my screen time by an hour.”

She gave herself a six-week timeframe, successfully completing that goal. After winnowing down the time spent on her phone, however, she realized that getting down to less than an hour a day was unrealistic to sustain.

“If I’m asking for help or texting someone so they can help me with my homework, I have to use my phone for that,” she said.

Song used the Settings app on her phone to limit the amount of time she could spend on social media apps to just 10 minutes per day, and documented her progress in a YouTube video, the making of which she said held her accountable to stay on track.

In addition to improving her posture because she wasn’t hunched over her phone for long periods of the day, Song reported other notable life improvements.

“I could go to bed earlier, because I wasted less time and did my homework earlier. I was also more focused,” she said, adding, “And my energy went up. Being on your phone drains your energy a little bit, I think.”

While Song still uses YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, she has continued to adhere to time limits on each platform, and has cut her average daily screen time by more than half, while growing an online support network of people seeking out strategies to kick their cellphone habit.

“When it comes to lowering your screen time, I think just set a very tangible and easy-to-reach goal that you can go for, even if it’s just very small steps, like lowering it by 15 minutes,” she said. “Fifteen minutes is still 15 minutes. And if you have to go on your phone, don’t feel guilty about it.”

‘Digital Sabbath’

Shortly after the birth of her daughter in 2016, a health and science writer, Catherine Price, was up with her baby in the middle of the night, sitting on the couch, scrolling on her cellphone, when she had a revelation.

“I could see this little baby looking up at her mother, and then her mother looking down at her phone,” said Price, 46, a resident of Philadelphia. She added, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not how I want to be living, and it’s not what I want her to think of a human relationship as being.’”

Price had watched videos that were part of “still face” experiments in which researchers compared normal parent interactions with newborns to those with parents who offered no facial expressions, in the way people look when on their phones.

“You could see these babies [in the second group] go through confusion, followed by slight distress, followed by severe agitation,” Price said.

“Babies are only able to focus 10 to 12 inches in front of their faces, and the theory is that they can specifically bond with whoever is holding them,” she added. “That made me wonder what is happening when we’re not returning our baby’s gaze. What is that doing to them?”

Her epiphany that night sent her searching out “stuff that had been written to try to find a solution.” But back in 2016, she said, it seemed that no one was “really talking about this.”

“One of the first things I tried was to get my husband to agree to take a 24-hour break from our phones, a ‘digital Sabbath,’ people call it,” she said. “We’d turn off our phones on Friday night and then we’d go through this stage of anxiety where our brains were super twitchy. And then the next morning, time seemed to slow down.”

Freed from the obsessive desire to scroll on E-Bay for hours on end in search of items for a home renovation project, Price was shocked to discover how much she could do before 11 a.m. when her phone wasn’t part of the picture.

“We’d cooked breakfast, we’d had a conversation, we went for a walk, we played with our daughter,” she said, adding, “As the day went on, we started to feel this sense of calm that was really surprising. It’s almost like you don’t realize how stressed out you’ve been until you take away the stressor.”

Price and her husband also implemented other rules, like charging their phones in a closet, clearing their home screen of apps and keeping a strict prohibition on phones in the bedroom. All of those steps were made easier by the digital Sabbath.

“Something about taking a break made the phone have less power over me,” she said.

The experience also inspired her to write “How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life,” a guide on how to go about phone detox.

“I say ‘breaking up with your phone,’ which doesn’t mean dumping it,” she said. “It’s about creating better boundaries and a healthier relationship.”

Like Song, Price stresses that the process can be difficult for many people.

“There’s so much guilt and shame around this, and this feeling of failure when people don’t successfully cut back. We really speak about this as if it's a drug or a food that we’re trying to avoid. That isn’t really helpful, first of all,” she said. “Second, there are extremely powerful companies on the other side of your devices and feeds that make money every minute we spend on their apps.”

‘The distraction apps’

Like Price, Hung Tang, 35, an insurance salesman in South Elgin, Ill., was motivated to take action to address his cellphone addiction after the birth of his child.

“I was like, “I really need to stop this and spend more time with him,’” Tang told Yahoo News. “He’d be in his crib, and I’d be on the couch with my phone, and I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I wanted to give him my full attention and be in the moment.”

An eight-hour-a-day cellphone habit that he said was caused because the devices give you “access to pretty much anything that you’re interested in,” Tang started taking steps to address the issue a month after his son was born.

“I turned the phone off, put it in a different room, but it didn’t really work out for me, because in the back of my mind, I always thought, ‘What if someone’s trying to get in touch with me?’” he said.

Ironically, an offer from his cellphone carrier to provide him with a free second line proved to be a solution.

“I gave only my family members the second number,” he explained. “I left off all the social media, the distraction apps. I had access to my email and my bank.”

After he arrives home from work and on weekends, Tang now puts his old phone on airplane mode and powers up the less-loaded version. That way, he said, he isn’t tempted to split his attention between mindless scrolling and paying attention to his wife and son.

“I didn’t have that doubt in my head that I might be missing something important. It gave me peace of mind,” he said, adding, “Just by not having access to social media, I started not caring about going to social media anymore. I don’t care about what other people are doing, and I’ve gotten used to staying away from the phone.”

As with Price and Song, the benefits have been palpable.

“It made me appreciate life more, just being there in the moment with my son,” Tang said. “He’s growing up so fast.”