Should quitting smartphones be this hard?

According to a Pew survey conducted this year, about half of U.S. adults say that they spend too much time on their phone. About a quarter say that they are on their phone “almost constantly” and, of the 45 percent who have tried decreasing their phone use, only 25 percent say they succeeded.

In the past five years, attempts to disconnect from the smartphone have abounded: There are communities dedicated to “dumbphones” (cellphones capable of little more than calling and texting) and similar low-tech gadgets; people attend Luddite festivals; weary workers go on digital detox retreats or try integrating a digital sabbath into their week.

Reducing smartphone screen time has been linked to both physical and mental health benefits. Stepping away from the screen can reduce eye strain and improve posture, and participants in social media detoxes have reported decreased feelings of anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

Despite the benefits, there hasn’t been widespread adoption. Why don’t these methods stick?

“The go-to when people are like, ‘Oh, I’m done with Instagram, I’m done with Facebook’ is just to delete it. They don’t have a plan,” said Gabriela Nguyen, Ed.M. ’25. She’s the founder of Appstinence, a free program “Created by Gen Z For All,” incubated at the Harvard Innovation Labs, that helps people “get off of addictive tech for good.” To her, the problem with other approaches is sustainability.

Nguyen receives emails from appstinent hopefuls explaining how they’ve tried, and failed, to reduce use in the past, their “process” essentially amounting to going to the store, buying a Nokia, and swearing off smartphones. When it doesn’t work in the long-term, “they feel like it’s a moral failing,” she said. “It’s not.”

Expecting to end smartphone dependency quickly is where most go wrong. Appstinence’s 5D Method — decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade, and depart — is a guide for gradually weaning from social media and smartphones, created specifically with human psychology in mind. Take the second D, deactivate. According to Nguyen, Anna Lembke, author of “Dopamine Nation,” “basically describes how our reward cycle settings need about a month to reset behaviors.” That 30-day period aligns with the 30 days social media platforms like Instagram give you to reactivate your account before automatic deletion — the third D.

“Appstinence is not hard and fast self-optimization; it’s not an ‘I’m gonna regain focus and instantly get a six-pack’ kind of thing,” she said. “The overall method is supposed to bring people to a point where they’ve re-understood the way technology is supposed to work in their life.”

This thinking tracks with what Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain for Harvard and MIT, has been saying and writing about for more than 15 years. Author of “Good Without God” and “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation,” he likens our relationship with technology to a reverent — and destructive — faith. He first faced phone addiction in 2006, when the Palm Treo was the center of his attention. He was able to curb his addiction for a while, but then came the pandemic. He realized that he was no longer in control of his relationships with his devices: “They were running me.”

Fifty-eight percent of adults under 50 have attempted to decrease time spent on their smartphone within the last year — Epstein included. He’s tried it all: dumbphones, e-ink devices, identifying as Luddite, even formal addiction recovery meetings. What worked best was interrogating the relationship itself. “We have agency to choose applications for technology,” he said, not the other way around.

And it isn’t an all-or-nothing decision. “Imagine if someone were to say, ‘I’m in a bad relationship romantically, and so therefore I shall never have another romantic relationship ever again,’” he said. “It’s like no, we want healthy relationships. Either make this relationship healthier by working on it or get out and find somebody else.”

Once people finally kick their toxic relationship to the infinite scroll, Nguyen says the next battleground will be in the workplace. “I hear from friends, family, and colleagues about how their companies have policies that AI is not optional,” she said. Between employers that force tech use and those that are laxer, Nguyen sees workers, especially young ones, choosing the latter.

But it won’t be as easy as telling your boss you’re cutting back on screen time.

“The model was that people went to work; they physically crossed a threshold,” said Sharon Block, professor of practice and executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “They worked for X amount of time, and then they re-crossed that threshold and they weren’t at work.” Whether blue- or white-collar, that’s no longer the reality for most workers. “The law hasn’t been adapted to fit the blurring of that boundary between when are you working and when are you not.”

Progress toward redefining that boundary has recently come in the form of “right to disconnect” legislation. In 2016, France passed its “right to disconnect” law, giving employees the right to ignore digital communications from their employers after work hours. Similar laws exist in Australia, Italy, and Ontario, Canada, but despite these strides abroad over the past decade, a 2024 “right to disconnect” bill proposed in California was shelved without a formal vote.

Block says the chances of adoption in the U.S. are slim, given how “far behind” the country is in terms of worker protections. “Working people in the United States don’t have a [federal] right to paid sick days, what most countries in the world consider the absolute bare minimum for having a decent work-life balance.”

One potential avenue for work-life tech balance, Block says, could be charging a premium if employers require employees to respond to after-hours messages, similar to overtime. But, according to Block, when it comes to legislative priorities, the right to disconnect is likely low on the list. “Paid sick days and paid maternity, paternity, and family leave would come first.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that those working in labor law aren’t thinking about what tech is doing to workers.

“We spend some time here in the center looking at the impact that AI is having on the experience of work,” Block said. When she worked at the Department of Labor, Block juggled three cellphones: one personal and two for work. It couldn’t be called work-life balance, but it maintained something that remote and AI-infused workplaces can’t promise. “Most of my closest friends are people from work,” she said, “in part because I spent a lot of my career working such long hours, but I just don’t think I could have had those relationships if we were on Zoom screens all the time as opposed to actually sitting together, working, and seeing each other as full humans.”

So, there’s little stopping your job from taking over your personal devices and everything requires an app. It increasingly seems like there is no escape from the plugged-in lifestyle. But the defeatist outlook is why Nguyen, Epstein, and others interested in a low-tech future champion the agency we do have when it comes to technology.

“[Tech companies are] convincing us that we’re not adequate as we are and that everything has to be enhanced by godlike superintelligence in order to be valid or worthwhile,” Epstein said. “They’re prescribing to us a certain set of expectations, which are essentially to use tech all the time for everything forever. We’re saying no.”