Is all screen time the same? Catherine Price's fridge test

On NPR's Life Kit ("How to Manage Screen Time During a Pandemic", April 2020), host Anya Kamenetz pointed out that her phone was also her line to every person she cared about outside her home. How do you limit that? Catherine Price, the science journalist who wrote How to Break Up with Your Phone, answered that the uses of a phone aren't all the same, and reached for a food comparison:

It's like a little refrigerator that has all sorts of different types of apps in it

Catherine Price, Life Kit, NPR, 2020

Some of what's in the fridge is good for you and some isn't, she said, so treating the phone as one lump object is the wrong way to think about it.

Quality, then quantity

Price's practical point in that conversation is to judge apps by how you feel while and after you use them. If calling friends leaves you feeling good, keep the phone icon where it is. She kept her camera on her home screen because she enjoyed photographing trees in bloom. If social media feels connecting in a small dose but leaves you feeling bad afterward, take it off the home screen, or delete it and reinstall it when you actually want to check. She also suggested a charging spot near you but out of arm's reach, and something easy to pick up instead, like a book or a puzzle.

She was speaking early in the pandemic, when screens carried work, school and family at once. The idea travels well beyond that moment: count what the phone is doing for you before you count minutes.

What the research says about minutes

The evidence backs the shift in emphasis. The American Psychiatric Association says the time spent on a technology doesn't, on its own, show that use is a problem (APA, 2024). A meta-analysis of 71 studies of short-form video, mostly of young people and mostly correlational, found that feeling unable to stop was linked with feeling worse far more than the minutes were (Nguyen et al., 2025). Those are links, not proof of a cause, but they point the same way as Price's fridge.

Price's sorting also lines up with what helped in a small trial. Students who chose their own changes, such as moving social apps off the home screen and keeping the phone out of reach, cut nearly an hour a day of phone use, against 11 minutes for those who only tracked it (Olson et al., 2022).

How this fits the phone program

The phone program starts from the same idea: a better test than minutes is whether your phone does what you meant it to. You begin by describing your own phone in your own words and checking the numbers it already keeps. If your pattern is the one we call the Escape, where the phone is how you get away from a feeling, you start by naming that feeling, which is Price's "how do I feel" question made specific. In the paid chapters you tidy your home screen on your own phone, with the people who need you still let through. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: NPR Life Kit, How to Manage Screen Time During a Pandemic, with Catherine Price, 30 April 2020 Research: American Psychiatric Association (2024) · Nguyen et al. (2025) · Olson et al. (2022)