Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Screen time down to 30 minutes
In November, they pulled out their phones and found about four and a half hours of screen time a day. The goal for January was under an hour of total phone use, with phone calls stripped out. Endurance athlete Chad Wright got as close as about 90 minutes.
In the last week of January, Andy Stumpf's total was down to 30 minutes. He still did most of the same things, but he forced them onto his laptop, where Instagram is clunky and the thumb movements don't exist, so he posted what he wanted and closed the lid. His mental health that month was better than it had been in a long time.
Within about 60 days, both were back to the same habits that started the experiment. A useful test for any platform is whether it works for you or you work for it.
Why is the phone so hard to put down?
Many apps use variable rewards, where the payoff arrives unpredictably. The psychologist B. F. Skinner showed in the 1950s that pigeons pressed a lever far more persistently when food came at random intervals than on a fixed schedule. Feeds that refresh with new and varied content follow a similar logic. The same principle drives slot machines.
How long does it take to build a habit?
A 2009 study at University College London, led by Phillippa Lally, followed 96 volunteers as they tried to make a new behavior automatic. The median time to reach automaticity was 66 days. Individual times ranged from 18 days to 254 days. The study was published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
More from Andrew Huberman
