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Phone-Free February is the best excuse to drop your apps and reconnect with real life

"Sorry, I won't be responding to DMs for 28 days."

via Canva/Photos

Four young people glued to their phones.

A little over a decade ago, people began celebrating Dry January to get their drinking under control after the holiday season. It’s so popular that these days, it's customary for people to say they’re not going out to the bar or a club because they are taking a month off of the sauce. It’s a great excuse for people to stay sober, and most friends won’t give y a hard time for taking a month off.

A similar sentiment surrounds smartphone use, and with the advent of Phone Free February, nonprofits are now encouraging people to take the month to either drastically reduce their phone usage or refrain from using it altogether. For some, putting the phone away for 28 days is hard because they need it for work, but they can create strategies to curb their use of social media apps or texting during their free time.

What is Phone Free February?

“While phones help us achieve many important tasks, they are also designed to keep us hooked. This highly addictive design has us checking our phones an average of 221 times every day,” the Global Solidarity Foundation, an organization promoting Phone Free February, notes on its website. Jacob Warn from the organization told the Washington Post that the month is an opportunity to “get you to question what you need your phone for."

phone-free February, smartphone addiction, mental healthA couple glued to their phones.via Canva/Photos

Organizers hope that if people take some time to live phone-free, they can realize its grip on their lives. When people call giving up their phones or reducing their use a digital detox, they’re not wrong; every time we swipe through a social media app, we get minor hits of dopamine to the areas of our brains that respond to drugs like cocaine. Withdrawal from social media and other dopamine-creating apps is akin to getting off of a drug, so Phone Free February participants should consider that when deciding how they want to reduce their use.

“There is some benefit in a hard stop for some people, but I’ve also seen it backfire on people, so it depends on the person and what they want to accomplish,” Emily Hemendinger, MPH, LCSW, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, writes. Particpaints should also use the month to consider long-term smartphone habits.

“Are you wanting to just take the time off and go right back to interacting with it in the same exact way after a day, or week, or month, or is there a way that you can change moving forward? There are plenty of ways we can work on improving those habits, so they don’t drag you down,” Hemendinger adds. “Digital detoxes are fine, but if you’re going back to the same behavior, you may find yourself needing more and more of these detoxes.”

Are smartphones bad for your mental health?

Another great reason to take some time off from your smartphone is to improve your mental health. Excessive smartphone use has been associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and social isolation. It’s also thought to be one of the main drivers of the recent rates of self-harm in teens and young adults.

phone-free February, smartphone addiction, mental healthA family glued to their phones.via Canva/Photos

If that’s not enough for people to reconsider their relationship with smartphones, Dino Ambrosi, founder of Project Reboot, says smartphones dominate all our free time. If you assume that the average 18-year-old today will live to the age of 90, after calculating the average time they spend sleeping, going to school, working, cooking, eating, doing chores, sleeping, and taking care of personal hygiene, today’s 18-year-olds have only 334 months of their adult lives to themselves. "Today, the average 18-year-old in the United States is on pace to spend 93% of their remaining free time looking at a screen,” Ambrosi told Upworthy.

Just as Dry January is a time to recommit ourselves to healthy drinking habits, Phone Free February is a moment to step back and reconsider our relationship with technology. Most of us joined the smartphone revolution nearly 2 decades ago, and since then, they have had an increasingly tighter grip on our lives. But the convenience of having a smartphone also comes with a cost, and that’s the most valuable thing we have in our lives: time. How much should we spend staring at a screen instead of enjoying the real beauty surrounding us?

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Health

Bill Maher says smartphones are deadlier for kids than school shooters. Where's the logic?

He supports taking phones away from kids at school.

via Warner Brothers PR and Pixabay/Pexels

Kids staring at their phones and HBO's Bill Maher.

The September 4th school shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia that killed 2 students and 2 teachers prompted an interesting discussion about how to protect school children on the September 6th episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

In the wake of the tragedy, Maher was encouraged that the shooter’s father has been charged with murder for buying his 14-year-old son an AR-15 that may have been used in the shooting.

“It's America. So we had a school shooting. When schools go back into session and we're gonna have to talk about this 'cause it happens a few times every year. I think it's happened 45 times already this year, by the way. Here's the new wrinkle in this one. Now they're blaming the parents as I think they should,” Maher said on a segment featuring John Avlon, a Democrat running for Congress in New York’s First District and Rich Lowry, Editor-in-Chief of the conservative National Review.

Maher says that the shooter’s parents were “derelict” in their duty and extended that critique to those who let their kids bring smartphones to school. “And we can't also talk about taking phones away from kids in school. It's funny. I think the problem here is that parents just don't have the ability to say no to kids for anything,” Maher said to a big round of applause.



In a country where liberals and conservatives are at odds over gun control laws, Maher sees charging parents as a sensible, bipartisan way to improve the situation. He equated this to the recent rise in bipartisan laws nationwide that ban students from bringing their smartphones to class.

“This is an issue of bipartisan support,” Avlon said. “There shouldn't be smartphones in schools because nobody likes 'em. Not good for the kids, not good for the teachers, not good for learning. So that's an area where there is bipartisan agreement. Let's act on that. Let's keep advancing it.”

Studies show that since 2010, when smartphones became widely used by young people, the U.S., and other developed nations saw an astronomical spike in mental health problems, including self-harm, suicide, psychological distress, anxiety, and depression.



Smartphones and social media are also associated with bullying, decreased attention span, diminished social development and trouble with sleep. Collectively, these issues have resulted in an unprecedented mental health crisis.

A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that the suicide rate among young people rose 62% between 2007 and 2021. The problem has been especially bad for teenage girls, who are at higher risk of suicidal ideation and behaviors than their male counterparts. In 2021, 3 in 10 female high school students said they had seriously considered attempting suicide.

While there’s yet to be a study that confirms a direct, causal link between smartphone use and the dramatic rise in suicide among young people, studies show that when smartphone use is reduced, their mental health improves.

Maher made a bold point during the discussion that’s worth examining. He says the mental health problems caused by smartphones may pose a greater danger to America’s youth than school shootings.

“But a point to [Avalon’s] point about the guns being obviously more dangerous in the immediate than the phones. Yeah, true. But if you did a really long-term study, I mean over decades. I'm not sure that would come out that way because suicides alone caused by the phone. We know this happens; lots of other bad things happened because of that godd**n phone. And now, 9 states are on board with taking away the phone for the day.”



“I'm a Neanderthal on this,” Lowry added. “All screens are the enemy. They are distraction machines. Even if you're just sitting and watching TV all day, is that a happy person? No. And we've conducted this mass social psychological experiment on teens with social media. And it's been a disaster.”

It’s not fair to the victims of teen suicide or school shootings to say that one problem is greater than the other because the loss of every young life is an unquestionable tragedy. But when it comes to the space these issues occupy in the public consciousness, all 3 panelists agreed that we should treat mental health issues caused by smartphones as seriously as school shootings.

Every year, an average of 6,500 young Americans between the ages of 10 to 24 years old die by suicide. Over the past 10 years, an average of 38.5 Americans were murdered at the hands of school shooters every year.

The school shooting epidemic has inspired millions of Americans to take political action by backing gun control legislation and red flag laws. It has also deputized countless citizens to create school preparedness plans so that educators, students and law enforcement agencies have all the resources necessary to combat an active shooter situation. The problem persists, but concerted efforts are being made nationwide to make schools safer.

Smartphones don’t appear to be as dangerous as AR-15s, but their abuse can lead to the same devastating results. What if we take the same energy to help reduce suicide rates and improve mental health among young people by creating phone-free schools and childhoods that are more about sunshine than screen time?

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Education

Away for a Day is making schools smartphone-free to improve grades and mental health

We should value academics and mental health more than technology.

via RDNE Stock Project/Pexels

A classroom of kids staring at their phones.

We have reached a tipping point where people are beginning to realize that the great social experiment of giving smartphones to children and teens has been disastrous for their mental health. Since young people started using smartphones about 15 years ago, there have been tremendous spikes in anxiety, depression and self-harm.

Big tech companies, such as Meta, have claimed there is no causal evidence that smartphones and social media are responsible for the mental health crisis. But we know that the rise in mental health problems began when young people started using smartphones and studies show that when kids take a break from social media for over a week, their mental health improves.

“There's enough data out there to show that it's not just correlational anymore. Clearly, some of this is causal and we're at this breaking point,” Lisa Tabb from Away for the Day told Upworthy.

The Away for a Day (AFTD) movement is working to reverse that trend by giving parents and schools resources to remove smartphones from the classroom. Tabb is also a former TV news producer and the co-producer of “Screenagers,” the first feature documentary to explore the impact of screen technology on kids and offer parents and families proven solutions that work.

Smartphones in schools are a tremendous distraction, even if they are just in a student’s pocket or backpack. “If you give them a warm chocolate chip cookie in their pocket and say, don't eat it. It's just not fair. It's just not fair,” Tabb told Upworthy. “And science shows that kids are distracted not only by their own device but everybody else's devices, too.”

Studies show that test scores increase when smartphones are taken out of the classroom.

Smartphones expose students to dangerous, inappropriate content online and are associated with depression and anxiety. “We're worried about the very, the very big, scary stuff that can happen online, but we're more concerned about all the tiny microaggressions that happen throughout the day when kids are seeing their friends online that went to a party that they weren't invited to,” Tabb said.

away for the day, screenagers, smartphonesSmartphones are bad for focus.via Away for the Day

That’s why AFTD is pushing for smartphones to be taken out of schools or, at least, out of students’ pockets and backpacks. “Phones don’t necessarily have to be left at home. It just has to be phones off their person,” Tabb told Upworthy.

“We believe having phones and smartwatches put away in lockers so the devices are physically away from the students is the best practice,” ATDE writes on its website. “If your students do not have lockers, we suggest that phones are put in places like hanging pocket holders, baskets, locked safes, or Yondr pouches. For those schools where this is not logistically possible, having students put their phones in their backpacks is the next best choice.”

Most schools confiscate students' phones if they are out at an inappropriate time and either the student or their parent must pick them up from the office after school. At Corte Madera High School in Portola Valley, California, students who violate the rule multiple times will have to check their phones in the office before the school day begins and pick them up after the final bell.



Creating a phone-free school day is a lot of work for students, teachers and administrators, but the benefits of having schools where mental health and academics are prioritized over technology are priceless.

“I have a great story about a middle school principal told me a few years ago,” Tabb told Upworthy. “The school had an electronic hall pass system and one year, 1800 students used the pass to visit the school counselor. This was when students were allowed to have their phones with them all school day. The following year, she instituted an away-all-day policy and the use of the hall pass to see the counselor literally went down to 10.”

Parents, students, teachers, and school administrators who want to implement phone-free policies in their schools can learn more and get free toolkits to get started Away for the Day’s website.

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Kids

Got an iPhone? Expert shows you how to stop paying Apple for services you don't want.

A few steps could save you a lot of money.

via Yeray Hdez Guerra/Flickr

A man is shocked after seeing his iPhone charges.

Americans everywhere are dealing with subscription fatigue. A report by the financial experts at the Motley Fool found that 57% of respondents to their survey believe they are overpaying for subscriptions and 40% say they have too many.

The worst part is checking your bank account and find you’re being charged for a subscription or service that you don’t even use.

A fast way to cut back on your subscription payments is to unsubscribe to services on your phone. Content strategist Marvelle Reed, aka the “Marketing Misfit,” recently shared a video on TikTok explaining how to see what you’ve subscribed to on your iPhone and cancel the services you don’t need.

"If you've got a bunch of charges coming from Apple that you don't know where they came from or you don't know why they still trying to charge you and you want to cancel all them checks, this is what you do," Reed opens the video.

#greenscreenvideo #greenscreen

@marketingmarvy

#greenscreenvideo #greenscreen

1. Go to "Settings” on your device

2. Click on your profile

3. Go to "Media and Purchases"

4. Click on "View Account"

5. Scroll down to "Purchase History"

6. Review all of your charges and turn off subscriptions you no longer want

The video was a big help to those who discovered they were being charged for services they didn’t need. "You are sent from heaven!!! The way I was just talking about all the random charges on my credit card that I can’t keep up with. Thank you, my friend!!" Summertime wrote. "Thanks for this. There were two charges for an app that I canceled," Aailyahalexis added.

Reed’s post is also a great reminder for everyone, even if they don’t have an iPhone, to check their bank account once a month for unnecessary services or subscriptions and those that may have raised their prices. In a world where an increasing number of services are on a subscription model, staying one step ahead of unnecessary charges is a big part of staying financially fit.

1. Go to "Settings” on your device

2. Click on your profile

3. Go to "Media and Purchases"

4. Click on "View Account"

5. Scroll down to "Purchase History"

6. Review all of your charges and turn off subscriptions you no longer want

The video was a big help to those who were being charged for services they don’t need. "You are sent from heaven!!! The way I was just talking about all the random charges on my credit card that I can’t keep up with. Thank you, my friend!!" Summertime wrote. Thanks for this. There were two charges for an app that I canceled," Aailyahalexis added.

Reed’s post is also a great reminder for everyone, even if they don’t have an iPhone, to check their bank account once a month for services they didn’t know they were paying for or subscriptions that may have raised their prices. In a world where an increasing number of services are on a subscription model, staying one step ahead of unnecessary charges is a big aprt of financial fitness.

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