The Phone Habit We Never Quite Dropped
It started as a lifeline. It became an addiction.
Some honest thoughts on phones, friends, and the slightly awkward business of running a phone-free clothing brand from a phone.
A few weeks ago I was sat across from a friend I hadn't seen in months. Good food, good pub, the kind of catch-up you look forward to for days. And at some point I realised I'd checked my phone four times in twenty minutes. Not for anything. Not a message I needed, not an email that mattered. Just checked it. The way you'd touch your pocket to make sure your keys are still there.
He hadn't noticed. Or he was too polite to say. Either way, I noticed, and it bothered me enough to still be thinking about it now.
Here's the bit that makes it sting a little more. I can tell you exactly when this habit started, because I can point to the date. It was useful once. Then it just kept going.
A small confession before we get into it. This is the piece that's taken longest to write since we started Quieter, not because the words were hard (some of them were), but because it's the one we wanted to get properly right rather than just feel right. More research went into this post than anything else on the site so far as it was the inspiration for starting the brand in the first place.
It made sense at the time.
During lockdown, the phone was the only way to be with anyone. A video call wasn't a replacement for a pub garden, but it was something, and something was better than nothing. Checking in constantly wasn't a problem. It was the entire point. The phone became the room where everyone still was.
The trouble is, the pubs reopened (Hooray!). The gardens came back. The friends went back to being five minutes down the road instead of trapped in a grid of video tiles playing pub quizzes. And somehow the habit didn't unlearn itself. We kept reaching for the phone the way we'd reached for it when it was genuinely all we had left.
It's not just us.
We went looking for the actual figures, expecting to feel a bit better. We did not feel a bit better.
None of this happened by accident.
It's tempting to read "checks his phone 85 times a day" as a personal failing. Weak willpower. A bad habit. Worth being honest about something first: the apps on that phone were built by teams of engineers and psychologists whose job, quite literally, was to make putting it down as hard as possible.
The mechanism has a name: Variable reward scheduling. First studied by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s with pigeons and levers. He found that a reward given at unpredictable intervals creates far more compulsive, harder-to-quit behaviour than a reward given every single time. A slot machine works this way. So does a notification badge. You don't know if it's a like, a message that matters, or nothing at all, and that uncertainty is precisely the point. It's the same lever, just smaller and in your pocket.
This isn't a fringe theory. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has described smartphones outright as "slot machines in our pockets." Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's former Vice President of Growth, said publicly that the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops his own team built were "destroying how society works." These are people who built the thing, on record, describing what they built.
None of which is an excuse, exactly. But it does change the question a bit. It's not "why can't I put my phone down." It's "I'm up against a system specifically engineered by very clever, very well-funded people to make sure I don't." Framed that way, the 85 checks a day stop feeling like a flaw in us, and start looking more like the system working precisely as intended.
This particular figure is from the US, since it's the most robust long-running dataset we could find. UK-specific figures point in the same direction (more on that below), but this is the clearest single before-and-after number going.
It's not quite as simple as "phones=bad."
A 2025 study from King's College London and the University of Greenwich followed over 1,600 young adults in the UK and found something worth sitting with. Time spent online overall was linked to higher loneliness. Using social media specifically wasn't. WhatsApp, in particular, was linked to lower loneliness. It's not the phone. It's what you're doing on it, and whether you can put it down.
Researchers studying UK behaviour after lockdown found the same pattern we noticed ourselves. Even after every restriction lifted, on what was meant to be a clean return to normal life, more than half of people kept doing things online or hybrid that they used to just do in person. Not because they had to. Because the habit had already set.
I run a brand about putting the phone down. From my phone.
There's a particular flavour of irony in building a DTC (industry speak for we're not in shops) clothing brand whose entire message is "ditch the phone, get outside, less scroll, more stroll." Quieter exists because of a phone. The Instagram, the emails, the Shopify backend, the photos, the replies to people who message us at 11pm about sizing. All of it lives in the same black mirror we're quietly asking everyone else to look up from.
I'm not going to pretend that doesn't sit slightly awkwardly. It does. But the honest answer is that running Quieter has actually narrowed my phone use rather than widened it, just not in the direction you'd expect.
Here's the part nobody asked for. I have other Instagram accounts. A few, actually. They get essentially zero attention from me now, because every spare scrap of phone time goes into Quieter. One of them is for Sennen, our dog. Sennen has an Instagram account. Sennen has not posted in months. Sennen does not know this and would not care, being a dog, but I think about it more than is probably healthy.
So the phone use hasn't gone away. It's just been entirely redirected into one very specific, very deliberate thing, which is trying to convince other people to use their phones less. Make of that what you will. I've made my peace with it, mostly, except where Sennen's abandoned grid is concerned.
Some things that are scientifically a bit more useful than willpower.
Good news first. There are a few things that have actual evidence behind them, not just a wellness influencer's vibes. Bad news second. A couple of the obvious ones don't work nearly as well as you'd hope, and the research is refreshingly honest about that.
Turn your phone grey and no, we don't mean spray it
Switching your screen to greyscale, a setting buried in your accessibility menu that most people don't know exists, has been tested in several proper studies. One found it cut daily screen time by nearly 38 minutes. Another found a smaller but still real drop of around 20 minutes a day. Turns out a lot of the pull of your phone is simply that it's bloody gorgeous. Remove the colour, remove a surprising amount of the appeal. Instagram in grainy black and white looks like a 1970s family slideshow that you've been forced to sit through.
iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters → Greyscale. Android: Settings → Accessibility → Colour and Motion → Colour Correction → Greyscale. Triple-clicking the side button can usually toggle it on and off, so you're not stuck in 1953 forever.
Put it in another room. Not face down. Another room.
Researchers at the University of Texas ran cognitive tests on people with their phone on the desk, in a pocket, or in a different room entirely. The phone-in-another-room group performed significantly better. Here's the annoying part. It didn't matter whether the phone was switched on, switched off, face up or face down. Just having it nearby, even powered off, was enough to quietly use up a bit of your brain. Something is apparently working overtime in the background just to not pick it up.
So the "I turned it face down, that counts" move you've definitely tried doesn't really hold up. Sorry. And, for what it's worth, the hammer is not in the research. That option is entirely between you and the phone. And replacing it these days is like taking out a small mortgage.
Turning off notifications. Maybe. Ish.
This is the one everyone assumes is the obvious fix, and the research is, annoyingly, a bit shrug-emoji about it. A couple of proper trials found that switching off push notifications for a week made no measurable difference to how often people checked their phone or how long they spent on it. The theory is that by the time you're checking compulsively, the habit has already detached itself from the notification entirely. You're not checking because it buzzed. You're checking because checking is just what your hands do now. Worth doing anyway, since fewer interruptions clearly help concentration in the moment, just don't expect it alone to fix the bigger habit.
My own setup these days is a grey phone, charged in the kitchen overnight, with most notifications off except actual humans trying to reach me. There's a setting called Reduce Interruptions that does the rest, letting the day job through while quietly blocking the cat doing a Donald Trump impression. The closest thing to a sensible middle ground the phone offers. Sennen's Instagram remains untouched. Some habits are entirely safe from intervention
I don't think the answer is throwing the phone in the sea, mostly because I'd need it to look up the tide times first. I think the answer is closer to what it was during lockdown, actually. Using it when it's genuinely useful (like staying in contact with mates and loved ones) and noticing, properly noticing, the moments when it isn't.
Sources
Opal, “The State of Screen Time in the United Kingdom”
opalapp.com/blog/the-state-of-screen-time-in-the-uk
Nottingham Trent University, Lancaster University, University of Lincoln & University of the West of England, published in PLOS One
via Yorkshire Post coverage
Matthews et al., “Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences — King’s College London / University of Greenwich
kcl.ac.uk/news/social-media-and-loneliness
“To Zoom or not to Zoom: A longitudinal study of UK population’s activities during the COVID-19 pandemic”
PMC9278744
US Census Bureau, American Time Use Survey
as reported by WBUR On Point — wbur.org/onpoint/2022/12/20/what-to-do-about-americans-lost-connections
B.F. Skinner, operant conditioning and variable ratio reinforcement schedules
Foundational behavioural psychology research, 1950s
Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology
On smartphones as “slot machines in our pockets”
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP of Growth
Public remarks on dopamine-driven feedback loops, widely reported including by The Guardian and CNN
Holte & Ferraro, “True colors: Grayscale setting reduces screen time in college students,” The Social Science Journal, 2020
Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
University of Texas at Austin
Fitz et al. and related notification-disabling intervention studies
Summarised via Psychology Today, “Disabling Smartphone Notifications and Digital Well-Being”
Phone away. Even just for a bit. Especially when you don't mean to check.
Wayne and Mike