I Tracked My Screen Time for 30 Days and the Results Were Horrifying

It started as a bet with my roommate.

He claimed he used his phone "way less than average." I claimed the same thing about myself. We were both obviously lying, but neither of us knew it yet. So we agreed: one month of honest screen time tracking, no deleting apps to game the numbers, no putting the phone face-down while a podcast played. Everything counted.

I lost the bet by a landslide.

The Setup (And How I Almost Cheated)

I'm on an iPhone, so iOS Screen Time was already baked in — I just had to actually look at it instead of dismissing the weekly summary notification like I'd been doing for three years. My roommate used an app called Digital Wellbeing on his Android. Same idea.

The rules were simple. Check your weekly screen time report every Sunday. Screenshot it. Share it. Loser buys dinner at the end of the month.

I told myself I'd be fine. I work from home. I'm on my laptop most of the day for actual work stuff. The phone is just for, like, quick checks. A few texts. Maybe some Reddit before bed.

Yeah.

Seven Hours and Twenty-Three Minutes

That was my daily average in week one. Seven hours and twenty-three minutes. Per day.

I stared at that number for a long time. I did the math twice because I thought I'd made an error. That's over 51 hours a week. That's more than a full-time job. That's — and this one really got me — basically every waking hour outside of actual sleep, if you account for the fact that I was sleeping around seven hours a night.

My roommate? Four hours and eleven minutes. Smug about it, too.

The first thing I did was try to explain it away. "Well, I listen to podcasts a lot and the screen is on." False — podcast time wasn't counting because the screen was locked. "I use my phone for work." Also technically false, since my work phone is a separate device. "The numbers must be wrong." The numbers were not wrong.

I was just on my phone constantly. And I had no idea.

The App Breakdown (This Part Is Embarrassing)

Here's where it gets specific. Screen Time breaks everything down by app, and I wish it didn't.

Instagram: 1 hour 47 minutes daily. I don't post. I barely have followers. I was consuming content from accounts I'd followed in 2019 and never unfollowed, plus Reels that the algorithm had figured out I couldn't stop watching. Clips of people cooking things I'd never cook and traveling to places I wasn't going to.

Reddit: 1 hour 12 minutes. This one surprised me least. Reddit is designed to be a bottomless pit. I knew this. I continued anyway.

YouTube: 58 minutes. Mostly on the app, not on a TV or laptop, which meant I was watching long-form video on a small screen while also theoretically doing other things, like eating, or lying in bed, or sitting on the toilet for a duration of time I won't specify.

Safari: 44 minutes. Random Google searches, articles I started and didn't finish, and at least three separate occasions where I looked up symptoms of things that turned out to be fine.

Texting and actual calls combined? 31 minutes. Thirty-one minutes of actual human connection versus seven-plus hours of doomscrolling.

The remaining time was scattered across weather apps (I checked the weather a lot, apparently), a couple of games I thought I'd deleted, and TikTok, which I'd downloaded "just to see what it was like" in October and apparently never stopped.

The Dopamine Loop I Didn't Know I Was In

Here's what nobody told me before I started this experiment: the problem isn't willpower. Or not entirely.

Around week two, I started noticing the moments when I picked up my phone. Not the intentional ones — like "I need to text someone" — but the reflexive ones. The ones where my hand moved before my brain decided anything.

Stopped at a red light. Phone. Waiting for the microwave. Phone. The credits rolled on a TV show. Phone. A slightly uncomfortable thought passed through my head. Phone.

I was using the phone to escape small moments of boredom or discomfort, and the apps were built to reward exactly that. Every time I opened Instagram, there was something new. The scroll never ran out. The algorithm knew what kept me going. I wasn't browsing — I was being processed.

The thing that really broke my brain: I'd be on my phone to avoid being bored, and I'd still be bored. Just bored and also unable to stop.

What I Tried to Do About It

I didn't go cold turkey. I knew I wouldn't stick to it, and starting an experiment I was going to fail immediately felt worse than starting a realistic one.

App timers. iOS lets you set daily limits by app. I set Instagram to 30 minutes, Reddit to 20, TikTok to 15. The phone locks you out with a "Time Limit" screen when you hit it. You can also tap "Ignore Limit" with one click, which I did approximately 80% of the time in week two. But the friction helped. Having to actively choose to override it made me aware I was making a choice.

Grayscale mode. This sounds insane but it actually worked better than the timers. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, turn it on, set it to Grayscale. Your phone becomes boring to look at. The bright colors are a huge part of what makes apps engaging — Instagram especially. In grayscale, it looks like a fax machine from 1994. I spent measurably less time on it.

Phone-free zones. Bedroom: no phone after 10pm. Dinner table: phone stays in the other room. Bathroom: just... no. This was the hardest one. The bathroom felt weirdly vulnerable without it.

Morning buffer. I'd been reading about morning routines and one thing that kept coming up was not touching your phone for the first 30 minutes after waking up. I started doing this. The first few days were disorienting — I kept reaching for it out of habit and having to physically redirect my hand. By week three, the morning felt calmer in a way I hadn't expected.

The Results After 30 Days

Final daily average: four hours and 51 minutes.

Not a miracle. Still probably too much. But down from seven and a half hours, which is almost three hours a day back in my life. Three hours. That's a book a week if I wanted it to be. Or a run plus cooking a real dinner. Or just... existing without being tethered to a rectangle.

The app breakdown shifted too. Instagram dropped to 40 minutes. Reddit held steady around 50 (I'm more honest about this one being intentional downtime). TikTok I deleted entirely after week three when I caught myself watching a 47-part series about someone building a cabin in Montana. I don't care about cabins. I don't live anywhere near Montana. Deleted.

My roommate, predictably, did not improve his numbers because he had already won the bet by the time we started making changes. He is currently insufferable about it.

What Stuck and What Didn't

Grayscale mode: still on. I turned it off for a week to see if I missed the colors. I did not miss the colors. More importantly, my usage crept back up the moment I did. Back on.

App timers: mostly abandoned. They help but the one-tap override makes them too easy to dismiss. What actually replaced them was the grayscale, which is passive friction rather than active.

Phone-free bedroom: mostly sticking. I bought a cheap alarm clock so I didn't need my phone on the nightstand. Slept better immediately, which might be placebo but I'll take it.

Bathroom rule: still failing at this one. Let's say I'm at about 60% compliance. Progress, not perfection.

Morning buffer: holding. This one genuinely changed how my mornings feel. Harder to explain why, but the quiet before the noise hits differently now.

The Thing I Didn't Expect

I thought cutting screen time would feel like deprivation. Like I was missing out, constantly behind, not knowing things.

It didn't. Mostly it felt like nothing happened. Like I just had more time that I used for slightly less stupid things. I wasn't more informed when I was on my phone constantly — I was more anxious and more distracted. The information I actually needed still reached me. The rest was just noise I'd mistaken for necessity.

Seven hours a day. I gave that up voluntarily and didn't miss most of it.

That's the part that still gets me, honestly. Not that I was using my phone too much. But how thoroughly I'd convinced myself that I wasn't.