Should you take social media off your phone?

On The Mel Robbins Podcast ("Get Your Focus, Motivation, and Life Back", September 2026), social psychologist Jonathan Haidt was asked what's possible once people see how their phones pull at them. His first step for adults was simple. If an app sends you notifications and keeps you coming back to scroll, take it off your phone, and if you still want it:

just use it only on a computer or on an old iPad

Jonathan Haidt, The Mel Robbins Podcast, 2026

You don't close the account or quit for good. You move the app to a device that's less convenient. In that conversation, Haidt, a professor at NYU Stern and the author of The Anxious Generation, said the aim is to turn the phone back into a tool, so your attention comes in larger pieces.

Why the device matters

A phone is with you in every queue, every lull and every bed. A laptop isn't. That's the logic behind Haidt's advice, and it's also one of the strategies researchers offered in a small trial with 70 students. People picked their own changes from a list of ten. One was to keep tasks such as social media on a computer when they can be done there; another was hiding social and email apps in a folder off the home screen, or deleting them. Those who chose their own package cut nearly an hour a day of phone use, against 11 minutes for those who only tracked their use (Olson et al., 2022). It was a package, so the trial can't say how much the computer rule did by itself.

The leak to plan for

The bigger studies add a catch. When people cut back on one or two social apps, much of the freed time moves to other apps on the same phone. In a US trial with 1,933 adults, roughly half of the time that daily app limits removed moved to other apps (Allcott, Gentzkow and Song, 2022). When thousands of US adults switched off Facebook or Instagram for six weeks, most of the freed time went to other phone apps rather than offline activities (Allcott et al., 2025).

So moving one app off the phone is a good start, and on its own it often isn't enough. The habit is reaching for the phone in a dull moment, so it tends to look for the next app. Haidt's step works best with a plan for that next reach.

How this fits the phone program

The phone program builds this in. If your pattern is the one we call the Scroll, where stopping is the hard part, you start by limiting the app that holds you. In the paid chapters you tidy your home screen and limit your top app on your own phone, then plan your stop and the second app that tends to open next, which is exactly the leak these trials measured. A ready replacement is one of the extra changes you can choose for your pattern. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: The Mel Robbins Podcast, episode 434, Get Your Focus, Motivation, and Life Back, with Jonathan Haidt, 14 September 2026 Research: Olson et al. (2022) · Allcott, Gentzkow and Song (2022) · Allcott et al. (2025)