467 people volunteered to switch the internet off their phones for two weeks. It worked. Three out of four could not keep it switched off.
Nobody's phone was confiscated. Calls still worked. Texts still worked. Laptops and desktops kept their internet. An app blocked one thing only: mobile internet on the phone itself, both wifi and cellular data. So what came out of people's pockets was not the phone. It was the always-on connection inside it.
The 467 people who signed up were split at random. Half had the block running for the first two weeks while the other half carried on as normal. Then they swapped, and the second half went two weeks blocked.
Everyone was measured three times: at the start, in the middle and at the end. 313 of them finished all three.
119 people kept the block running for at least ten of the fourteen days. That is a quarter of everyone who committed to it.
These were not random people. They had volunteered. More than eight in ten rated themselves highly motivated to cut down their phone use before it even started.
Three out of four of them still could not keep it switched off.
The results counted everyone who signed up, including the people who never managed to keep the block on.
Wellbeing improved. Mental health improved. Sustained attention improved by an amount the researchers compared to undoing roughly ten years of age-related decline. 91 percent of participants got better on at least one of those three.
With the internet off the phone, the time had to go somewhere.
It went to the offline world: seeing people face to face, exercising, being outdoors, reading, hobbies. Time spent on media dropped. People felt more connected to others and more in control of their own attention.
They also slept about twelve minutes more a night.
Most of the effects trace back to how the time was spent. More of the offline world, a little more sleep, more sense of control. Those changes account for the improvement in wellbeing and in mental health.
They do not account for the attention result. None of the measured changes explained why people could concentrate for longer. That one is still open.
Two numbers, side by side.
It worked, measured across everybody who signed up. And three quarters of a group who had volunteered for it, and said they wanted it, could not keep it running for ten days out of fourteen.
The second number is the one that gets left out when this study is shared. It is also the one that tells you what you are up against.
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