Even SEAL discipline could not keep phone use down for 60 days

In November, retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf and his old teammate Chad Wright, a former SEAL turned endurance athlete, pulled out their phones and checked the damage. Stumpf remembers about four and a half hours a day. They made a pact to spend January trying to drive total phone use, not counting calls, to under an hour a day.

It was a competition between two men selected for discipline and resilience, and trained to do high risk work on little sleep. Wright got down to about 90 minutes at his best. In the last week of January, Stumpf got down to 30 minutes.

The story is about how quickly that victory collapsed, and why Stumpf thinks the collapse says more about the phone than about willpower.

Stumpf did not quit the internet. He moved it. He forced the things he normally did with his thumb onto his laptop, where the same apps were clunky and awkward. Instagram on a laptop, he said, is not intuitive, so he would post what he needed to post and close the computer.

For that month, the change was unmistakable. Stumpf said, "My mental health was better in January than it had been in a long time."

In their limited phone time that month, the two men texted each other about how good it felt. Wright wrote, "Man, this is amazing," Stumpf recalled. Stumpf answered, "We should do this more often."

Then the old habit returned. Stumpf said, "I went right back to using my thumb." By probably March, he said, he was back to scrolling with his thumb, and Wright had probably doubled his use.

The speed of the reversal is what stuck with Stumpf. Two men forged in one of the military's toughest selections, where perhaps 10 to 15 of every 100 candidates get through, could win a screen time challenge and still lose it within about 60 days. To him, that says everything about how sticky the platforms are designed to be, not about a lack of toughness.