160 Stories of Reducing Screen Time

And What They Can Teach Us

Nov 14, 2024

TLDR: I collected and analyzed 160 success posts on nosurf, the subreddit dedicated to people who want to stop being addicted to the internet. For the list of success stories go here or here. The following is an analysis of these stories.

I’m a software engineer with an internet addiction that I’ve struggled with for about 18 years. I’ve likely spent half of my waking adult life sitting unproductively in front of a screen, which is a catastrophe I’d like to help other people avoid.

In recent years, I’ve felt increasingly determined to overcome my addiction to Reddit and YouTube. Ultimately, this led me to seek out scientific literature on the treatment of internet addiction, but unfortunately it is quite limited. The only interventions I could find that had been studied were therapy and medication.

Therapy and medication can definitely help with internet addiction. But they are just two of many possible strategies, they don’t work for everyone, and not everyone has access to them. What I wanted, but couldn’t find, was data on the practical methods to quit, including things like what blockers to use on your phone, how to set up your devices so they’re less appealing… etc.

I realized that there is a wealth of such information on forums like r/nosurf in the form of success stories. So I decided to find ALL of the success posts on r/nosurf, and collect data about techniques used to quit, as well as symptoms, lengths of withdrawal, etc.

This process lacks the rigor of proper clinical trials, but I think it may be more practically useful to currently addicted people. And a large collection of success stories could provide data to model what the most successful treatment might look like.

Sometimes I imagine us internet addicts as being trapped in a virtual world, and the people on r/nosurf are trying to figure out how to get back to the real world. Occasionally the people who manage to succeed will return to the virtual world for the (hopefully) last time with a message about how they got out, and what it’s like on the other side.

I combed through all 33764 posts on r/nosurf to find these messages. Here’s what I learned.

ADDICTION

Among the success posts, these are the most frequently mentioned problematic apps/activities (with the number of mentions):

NOTE: This ordering doesn’t represent the actual distribution of addiction in the population, as it was taken from a sample of Reddit users who successfully got out. I'm sure this list would look quite different if the success posts came from (for example) Instagram or Twitter. And I’d guess pornography is lower on the list than it would be if there weren’t a taboo against talking about it. And lastly, this list probably severely underweights newer platforms, like TikTok (which was mentioned only 4 times in the success posts).

I found it surprising that even on Reddit the number one most mentioned problematic app was YouTube!

INTERNET ADDICTION SYMPTOMS

I sometimes encounter people (including a previous therapist!) who don't understand how internet use could be harmful, or how you could be addicted to the internet. To them I offer this sampling of (non-success) Reddit post titles I came across during this process:

My 5 year old bro is already worried about likes and subscribers 🥲
been an internet addict since i was 11, weekly screentime is 60h+
I'm starting to find the internet existentially terrifying.
My friend says he spends 9 hours a day talking to an AI chat robot
I average 12+ hrs a day on my phone . Yesterday i spent 16 hrs on my phone . i feel like a slave to my own phone. help
Oh my god this addiction is hell
The only time I’m not looking at the screen is when I sleep.

Intuitively, of course spending 10+ hours a day on any form of light entertainment is going to be bad for you, simply because that's 10+ hours per day that you are not doing other things. You're not exercising, spending time with people, cleaning your room, planning your life, sleeping, or doing homework.

There are probably many reasons why excessive internet use could be bad for us. But it's no surprise that the number one complaint in these success posts was just a feeling of wasted time. I suspect that many of the other complaints may stem from the time spent online crowding out other activities.

In the success posts, the most cited negative effects of internet usage were:

NOTE ON RESULTS: These are all self-reported. It can be difficult to pin down the cause(s) of one's own unwanted conditions, and some of these complaints could have been caused or exacerbated by something other than internet use. On the other hand, these numbers are probably too low as people may not list (or even notice) all of their symptoms.

TECHNIQUES USED TO QUIT

In my research, one thing came through loud and clear: willpower alone rarely works. In fact, hardly anyone says they successfully got out by just deciding to stop.

So, if you feel like all of your effort is going towards trying to resist urges, you’re probably doing it wrong. The people who successfully got out instead put their energy into constructing environments that would either reduce their urges, or make it impossible to indulge them.

I gathered all of the techniques mentioned in the success posts, and found they fit into 3 categories, detailed below. You can also see the techniques highlighted within the posts themselves here.

1. Adding friction

That is, making it difficult to do the unwanted activity. For example, if you have a dumbphone instead of a smartphone, then you can’t go online any moment that you get the urge. That’s a lot of friction and it has helped many people dramatically cut down on their screen time.

So why not just get rid of your phone and computer completely? Then you’ll have maximum friction, and probably no internet addiction. I think this is actually an underappreciated option for a lot of people. The problem is many of us need these devices to work or stay in touch with people.

The trick is adding enough friction to get your internet use under control, without sacrificing the internet use you need. It can take some creativity and trial and error to fit a solution to your particular addictions, addiction severity, and internet needs.

Here are the most-mentioned techniques for adding friction:

Delete problematic apps - 41
Use “blocker” apps to block sites and applications - 32
Use a dumbphone, smartwatch-as-dumbphone, or dumbed-down smartphone - 31
Deactivate/delete online accounts - 24
Remove access to home wifi, by changing the password, not paying for wifi, or leaving your computer at an office etc. - 16
Unsubscribe/unfollow etc. Sites will be less appealing if they are less tailored to your interests - 16
Remove access to problematic devices (by selling, giving away, or hiding etc.) - 10
YouTube extensions to make it less appealing (eg DF Tube and Unhook) - 9

Blockers are apps that can be configured to block problematic sites or apps on your computer or phone. They can be configured to provide anywhere from very low to very high friction, but as soon as you find a way around them they become significantly less effective.

There are many of these, but the only ones mentioned more than once in the success posts are:

r/nosurf is littered with people who give up after trying one or two of the pretty low friction techniques (like just having some personal rules, or setting up a blocker on their phone in a way that can easily be bypassed).

In contrast, those who got out often had to combine multiple techniques. And, perhaps most importantly, if something they tried didn’t add enough friction to be effective, they didn’t give up... THEY ADDED MORE FRICTION.

(I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the most successful techniques are extremely high friction, like removing home wifi, and using dumbphones!)

2. Filling time with other activities

For example, if you are swimming it’s pretty difficult to watch YouTube. r/nosurf has curated a list of possible activities here.It doesn’t seem crucial to work out what to do with spare time before quitting, but it probably helps reduce some of the withdrawal symptoms (especially boredom). It was pretty common for people to just get bored, and let that boredom motivate them to look for other things to do.

These alternative activities can be seen both as techniques to quit, and also some of the most powerful benefits of quitting. Here are the top replacement activities people listed:

Reading - 53
Exercise - 35
Walking - 15
Learning - 15
Socializing - 13
Being productive - 10

Many people mentioned how they were never able to read while stuck on the internet. But once they got out, they quickly became able to read again. My take on why reading is the dominant alternative activity is that it’s a pretty easy drop-in replacement. You don’t need a gym membership, other people, or a lot of energy.

I myself was shocked how much fun I had doing simple chores like cleaning my room or cooking once I stopped listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, and going on Reddit 8 hours a day.

3. Using psychological techniques

There are certain things that seem to help by changing our psychology around internet use. Here are the most commonly mentioned psychological techniques:

Tracking screen time helps measure progress and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Support groups seem to be highly effective. They weren't mentioned as often as some other things, but when they were mentioned, they were often cited as the most important thing the person did.

The people who got out often exemplified what I imagine is a helpful mindset when quitting any addiction. They focused on patient, iterative improvement. That is, when they failed, instead of getting too frustrated or giving up, they would try to figure out why a technique didn’t work, and then try something else.

THE BENEFITS OF QUITTING

It's difficult to overstate how positive many people felt about cutting back their internet use. Here are some representative quotes:

"My anxiety has NEVER been lower. I don't remember a time when I wasn't anxious. I am more stress-free than I can recall. This is a beautiful change."
"I was going outside more, doing my hobby (sewing) and never stopped being amazed at how much time there is in a day when I don't spend it in front of the screen"
"It was like being a child in an open field, exploring the world without being tethered to the concerns of adult life. Seeing things and thinking about them, being present in the moment, enjoying the world as it is."
"I feel so free, I kind of want to cry."
"I was suddenly able to enjoy the little pleasures of life again"
"I went from being the worst student in the class to one of the best, in two months."
"I feel an enormous sense of RELIEF"

The most mentioned benefits:

Better mood (besides having less anxiety) - 48
More free time - 35
Less anxiety - 33
Better social life - 33
Increased productivity - 27
Better attention/focus - 21
Better sleep - 20
Greater sense of appreciation - 15
Increased sense of control and intentionality - 13
A feeling of freedom - 13
More present-moment awareness - 12
Better school outcomes - 11
Less comparing of self to others - 10
Clarity of mind (less brain fog and more orderly thoughts) - 10

WITHDRAWAL

As with a lot of addictions, addressing internet addiction can lead to withdrawal. Not everyone seems to get withdrawal symptoms, but 42 out of the 160 posts mentioned them, and I’d guess that is a big undercount.

Here are some representative quotes:

"Really hard was the simple fact that I had no internet at hand anymore to hide or run away from my feelings”
“I felt physically sick"
“Week 1-3: Horrible. Felt like I was battling a serious drug addiction. Wanted to sleep all day and felt like an empty bored zombie. Felt so out of tune with the world”
"My thoughts were racing like crazy, I had a major jack in anxiety, night sweats. I kept pulling out my dumbphone and then realizing there was nothing there, and I would compulsively clutch it in my pocket. I felt uncomfortably tense all the time, like mentally AND physically. I was clenching my jaws and couldn't unclench."
"I felt like I was starting to go slightly crazy and was breaking stuff, pacing around the house like a madman, getting angry at nothing, etc"

I counted any negative consequence of quitting that didn’t last for too long, to be a withdrawal symptom.

Here are the most mentioned withdrawal symptoms:

Boredom - 15
Urges to use - 10
Difficult thoughts and feelings (besides anxiety) - 6
Increased anxiety - 5
Irritability - 4
Feeling sick - 3
Fomo (fear of missing out) - 3
Frustration - 2
Restlessness - 2
Tiredness - 2
Loneliness - 2

One of the key things I was eager to learn from this analysis was how long withdrawal symptoms last. What I found was that for most people, withdrawal symptoms took 2-3 weeks to go away, although occasionally, symptoms remained for as long as 3 months. More severe symptoms didn't seem to last as long as less severe symptoms.

I’d guess that the main cause of failed attempts at quitting is withdrawal (urges to use and boredom being the most common symptoms).

Many people mentioned using the internet to avoid feeling negative feelings and so when they quit they had to face their feelings head on, which could be quite tough. Here is a nicely written example:

“The first three months or so, I had to spend some time coming face to face with all the feelings and things I had been avoiding. Not gonna lie, that was heavy. Instead of numbing myself with screentime, I tried to just sit with those feelings, and feel them. Anxiety is a bitch, and I spent hours, just curled up in a ball, crying and feeling that awful cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. But as I sat with it, it lessened. “

THE NEGATIVES OF QUITTING

This category is distinguished from withdrawal symptoms by being longer lasting, or unresolved by the time of writing. (I probably didn’t split these up perfectly, and actually there’s a decent amount of blurring between this section and the previous one.)

Very few people mentioned long-term negative effects. One reason could be that r/nosurf is all about quitting the internet. People may feel like they aren’t “supposed” to have negative outcomes here. Or perhaps there just weren’t many to report.

Most mentioned negatives of quitting:

Losing contact with people - 8
Practical difficulties - 6
Boredom - 5
Difficulties with other people (like friends getting upset that they weren’t on social media anymore) - 5
Loneliness - 3

Most of the people who listed practical difficulties were using pretty extreme techniques, like no home wifi or using a dumbphone.

Almost everyone who listed long-term negative effects still felt positive overall about quitting. But not everyone. I think we need to acknowledge that there is some risk that quitting won’t turn out well for everyone.

BOOKS

Here are the most commonly mentioned books that users found helpful:

Digital Minimalism - 5
Deep Work - 4
Smart Phone, Dumb Phone - 3
The Shallows - 3
How To Break Up With Your Phone - 3

The enthusiasm for Smart Phone Dumb Phone was particularly high among people who mentioned it. For the people it does work for, it seems like it just kinda works overnight, without much effort. But I’ve also seen people on r/nosurf say how useless it was for them.

PROCEDURE

First, using Pushshift, I found all 33764 posts published on r/nosurf through the end of 2023.

Then, using a little code and a lot of time, I filtered them down to "success posts," which I considered to be posts where the person significantly reduced their overall screen time for at least a month.

I started by filtering posts using heuristics. For example, if the title ended with a "?", I figured it was a question and not a success post. After applying these filters, I created a command line tool that helped me to read through the remaining 17013 titles and select those that seemed like they could possibly be successes.

That gave me 678 candidate posts. After reading through each candidate post, I found 160 posts that met the criteria (not including multiple posts from the same author).

I then read all of the success posts and manually tagged information that I wanted to get numbers on. I was looking for techniques used, apps people were addicted to, the benefits of quitting, withdrawal symptoms, among other things.

I first tried to find pre-existing tagging software to help with this, but instead decided on an approach where I’d just use text files and tag them like #example-tag{{this}}. This allowed me to create scripts to analyze these tags, and to create a website where you can filter the posts by tag.

Limitations with this approach:

This selection process almost certainly missed some success posts. But as a sanity check I found all the success posts I could by looking at the previous collection here, scanning through the top posts of all time (people like success stories!), and using the search function on Reddit. I compared my list to those sources, and found that I had caught them all or explicitly rejected those that didn't meet my specific criteria.
Manually tagging data is extremely fraught. For one thing, I'm sure I missed a lot of potential tags (like not counting as benefits all the benefits listed in a post). Also, deciding how to categorize things is tricky, and I'm sure I wasn't perfectly consistent. And there is often more than one way to categorize things. The somewhat arbitrary decisions I made probably affected the counts significantly.
And lastly, I only looked at the success posts. Ideally, it would have been interesting to also find posts where people had tried and failed to quit, so that I could compare the strategies that resulted in success to those that didn’t.

For example, maybe deleting apps was listed just as often in the success stories as in the non-success stories. Maybe this was listed very often in these success posts simply because it’s a kind of obvious thing to try.

I do think that the fact that the success-post writers themselves thought their listed strategies were useful, doesn’t definitively prove that they actually were. But I’d guess that it’s decent evidence.

CONCLUSION

I hope this collection of success posts is useful. And I hope that the website is also useful as a way to further explore these posts.

Because this website was created using an archive of r/nosurf posts, it includes some success posts that have been deleted from Reddit. If you want me to delete one of your posts from there, please let me know (all usernames have already been redacted).

And if you have any feedback or questions, I’d be happy to hear it.

—

My name is Mike 👋 I'm interested in continuing this work investigating the causes and impacts of internet addiction, as well as its solutions. If you have leads on any academic labs, non-profits, or companies that are working in this area, please let me know. And if you are working in this area yourself, I’d love the opportunity to learn more about your work, and how I might be able to contribute. My email is mjkurrels (at) gmail.com.

Inching to Conclusions

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