We meal-prep, check labels for added sugar, wear rings that track our sleep and try to fit in movement daily – but there’s one wellness metric most of us ignore: how often we unlock our phones.
Stats vary, but the national average appears to hover near 100 smartphone ‘pickups’ per day. In my informal polling, many of us can easily double that. And the cost isn’t just our time: Habitual pickups overstimulate our brain’s reward center, spike our anxiety, fragment our memory and attention span, and erode the very connections that fuel joy and resilience.
David Houghton, MD, System Vice Chair of Neurology at Ochsner Health, joined me for a podcast on the topic. “Every time we unconsciously or habitually unlock our phones,” he said, we’re tapping into the same dopaminereward circuit we see in gambling or other addictions. In this case though, the vice just happens to fit in your pocket.”
He also points out that every pickup pulls our attention away from something else. “One of the greatest risks of hours of screen time is that we’re not focusing on the people and projects that really matter most. We’re not spending quality time with people we love, going for walks or trying new things – we’re simply not having those other experiences when our focus is on our phones.”
Parents often see the fallout first. The new nonprofit Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) recently held a standing-room-only forum in New Orleans, urging tougher safeguards for kids.
It’s important to recognize that this isn’t just a kids’ issue, though. We’re all at risk. The brain chemistry that allows a seventh grader to get hooked is the same circuitry that keeps adults scrolling into the wee hours of the night.
Enter The 10-Day Pickup Challenge
I invite you to join me for a bit of a self-experiment: For 10 days (ideally spanning two weekends), track a single metric – your personal number of pickups – and aim to drop it by at least 20 percent. Think of it as interval training for the part of our brain that drives our focus, decision-making and emotional regulation.
Here’s how the challenge works:
Get your baseline
iPhone: Settings → Screen Time → See All App & Website Activity.
Android: Settings → Digital Wellbeing → Show your data.
Note the daily pickups figure for the past week; that’s the number of times you unlock your phone. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ numbers. These are just baseline starting points, a snapshot of your current pickup status.
Aim for a 20 percent reduction.
It’s about progress, not perfection. If your average is 100 pickups, try to get it below 80. Encourage your spouse, kids, friends and coworkers to track theirs, then compare percentage improvement instead of raw scores.
Set yourself up for success
• Turn off non-essential notifications. Keep emergency contacts on ‘always allow’ but remove alerts for everything else non-urgent. Over time we start to realize that most things can wait.
• Schedule focus time. Apple’s Focus or Android’s Focus Mode blocks interruptions during deep-work blocks, dinner, workouts or family time.
• Add barriers. Turn off Face ID or Touch ID so that you’re prompted to enter a passcode. That extra two-second pause is often enough to ask, ‘Do I really need to open my phone right now?’
• Swap one reflex with a reset. Each time you almost reach for the phone, try a single 4-7-8 breath (inhale 4 seconds, hold 7, exhale 8). It’s an effective tool to help us reset and re-center, dropping our heart rate and cortisol levels.
What to expect
Every time we unconsciously unlock our phone, we’re training our brain to self-interrupt. Dialing back our pickups helps to strengthen our ability to focus more deeply. Mindless scrolling can also trigger anxiety and depression, due in part to the near-constant stimulation that keeps our nervous system in overdrive. Scrolling less gives us the opportunity to tune to other human beings – in real life, which in turn helps to raise levels of oxytocin, our body’s ‘bonding hormone.’
Keep the momentum
The key is to establish new and lasting habits that extend beyond the 10-day Pickup Challenge. And when you do pick up your phone, do it with purpose: answer the text, post the photo, then put the device back down – face-down.
Wellbeing isn’t only about what we eat or drink, or how much we move. It’s also about what we choose to notice, and how we decide to spend our time. Fewer pickups creates more space to focus our time and energy on what really matters. Simply put, it’s wellness in its purest form.
Ready to take the challenge?
Screenshot your baseline, tag @mollykimballrd and @stcharlesavenuemag with your 10-day percentage drop, and share the strategies that worked for you.
