Reduce smartphone usage by just one hour for a healthy and satisfied life, study suggests

A recent study has found that reducing smartphone use by just one hour a day will result in less anxiety, and more satisfaction with life, Daily Mail reported.

The study found that it is not important to completely give up smartphone usage for a better and less anxious and satisfying life. They discovered that reducing its daily use had positive effects on a person’s well-being.

Earlier studies have already established that excessive usage of smartphones causes obesity, neck pain and addiction-like behaviours.

So, experts at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum in Germany set up the study to find out how much usage of smartphones is ‘too much’.

The team led by Dr Julia Brailovskaia set out to find out if people’s lives are well-off without smartphones, or how much cutoff in mobile usage per day can be called the ‘sweet spot’.

The research team recruited a total of 619 people for the study and divide them into three groups.

Around 200 of them were asked to totally give up smartphone usage for one week, while another 226 reduced their usage of smartphones. The rest 192 were asked to keep up as usual.

Dr Brailovskaia said that they found that both completely giving up the smartphone and reducing its daily use by one hour had positive effects on the lifestyle and well-being of the participants.

She added that in the group that reduced use, these effects even lasted longer and were thus more stable than in the abstinence group.

According to the study, people spend more than three hours a day glued to their smartphone screens on average.

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The smartphone is ‘both a blessing and a curse’, said Dr Brailovskaia.

The team interviewed all the groups about changes in their behaviour and lifestyle after one week, one month and four months.

They inquired about how much they engaged in physical activity, how many cigarettes they smoked a day, how satisfied a person was with their life and if they show any signs of anxiety or depression.

A change in habits in the long term was noted during the one-week intervention, even four months after the end of the experiment, the members of the abstinence group used their smartphones on average 38 minutes less per day than before.

Life satisfaction and time spent being physically active increased, while symptoms of depression and anxiety and cigarette consumption decreased.

Dr Brailovskaia said that it’s not necessary to completely give up the smartphone to feel better. The study has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.