You check the weather, close the app, and open a feed. A minute later you put the phone down. Then you pick it up again. There was no notification.
If you want to stop checking your phone this way, start with one situation where it happens: the gap after an email, the wait for coffee, the first few minutes on the sofa. Decide where the phone will go and what you will do during that gap. “Use my phone less” leaves a lot to decide in the moment.
We make STARE, an iPhone app for quiet sittings and a photo diary. That is our interest in this subject. The suggestions below also work without it.
Why do I keep checking my phone for no reason?
There may be a reason even when you cannot name a task. You are seeing whether anything has changed.
In a paper published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing in 2012, Antti Oulasvirta and colleagues described a checking habit: short, repeated visits to information that updates on a phone. Across three studies, they found that checking could lead into other activities on the device and increase use. Quickly available information helped reinforce the habit. Read the researchers' abstract and publication details.
The paper predates today's feeds, so it cannot explain every feature you use now. But the pattern is recognisable: you open the phone to find out whether there is something to open it for.
That gives you a specific place to experiment. Watch for the first check, before it becomes twenty minutes of browsing.
Look at pickups as well as hours
An hour on a video call with a friend and an hour of repeatedly refreshing a feed can feel very different. The daily total does not tell you which one you want to change.
On an iPhone, open Settings → Screen Time and look at your activity report. Apple includes reports for app use, pickups, and notifications; the exact labels vary by iOS version. If you share Screen Time across devices, check which devices the report includes. Apple explains its Screen Time reports here.
Use the report to choose one thing to notice tomorrow. Perhaps you repeatedly open the same app after lunch. Perhaps the checks cluster in the evening, when you thought you were watching a film.
You do not need a target number yet. Write down a plain observation: “I pick up the phone whenever the episode gets slow.” That is something you can work with.
Change one gap in the day
Choose a situation that happens often enough to try again. Keep the change small enough to describe in one sentence.
- At your desk: after sending an email, leave the phone on a shelf until you have started the next task.
- After dinner: put it on charge away from your seat while you drink your tea.
- While waiting: leave it in your bag for the first few minutes, unless you need it for the thing you are waiting for.
These are practical experiments, not a protocol tested in the studies linked here. Pick the one that fits your day and see what happens.
Make the next few minutes easy to spend. Look out of the window. Finish your drink. Sit for a while. If every pause comes with an instruction to read a difficult book or complete another chore, reaching for the phone may still be the most inviting option.
If a notification starts the checking, change that app's notification settings. If you open it without a notification, try moving its icon away from your first Home Screen. If you want a firmer boundary, look at the app limits or schedules available in Screen Time. Each addresses a different part of the problem; you do not need to turn them all on at once.
What the research does, and does not, show
A 2025 randomised trial by Noah Castelo and colleagues tested a much larger change. Participants were asked to block internet access on their smartphones for two weeks, including both Wi-Fi and mobile data. Calls and texts remained available, and they could still use the internet on other devices.
The researchers reported improvements in subjective well-being, mental health, and an objective test of sustained attention. The paper was published in PNAS Nexus.
The scale matters. Two weeks with no internet on your phone is a substantial intervention. The findings do not establish that a two-minute pause produces the same results, or that STARE produces them. Neither this trial nor the earlier checking-habit study tested our app.
For an ordinary afternoon, you can ask a more modest question: did putting the phone away let you spend those minutes as you intended? You can answer that without making a claim about your brain.
Where STARE fits
STARE gives a quiet pause a beginning, an end, and a small record.
You choose a sitting, point the rear camera towards whatever is in front of you, and put the phone down. Nothing is photographed during the sitting. When it ends, the app takes one photograph. You decide whether to keep it.
The view can be your desk, a window, or the wall across the room. It does not need to become a good photograph. Over time, the moments you keep form a diary of places where you stopped for a while.
You can begin without creating an account or inviting friends. If you use the social part, friends' stares arrive after your own sitting, and the feed has an ending. There are no public likes or follower counts to check.
STARE does not block other apps. If you need enforced limits, use a tool built for that job. If you want a short pause and a photograph to remember it by, STARE is available on the App Store. Start with two minutes. A timer is also enough if you do not want the diary.
Try it at the next familiar moment
Choose the next gap you can already picture: after lunch, after closing your laptop, after getting home. Give the phone a place to rest before you sit down.
Later, ask what happened. Did you check it anyway? Did you leave it alone but spend the whole time wanting to check? Did you forget about it while your tea cooled?
Any of those answers tells you more than a resolution to be better with your phone. Keep the arrangement if it helped. Change it if it did not.