Section
Attention and habit
Addiction, distraction, sleep and the numbers people repeat about them.
More famous numbers per square inch than any other subject here, and most of them are not research findings. This section traces each one to where it actually came from — a press interview, a marketing survey, a vendor's five-day tracking exercise — and reports what the controlled studies found instead, including the trials of abstinence whose effects turn out to be real, small and not durable. For a workplace-oriented comparison point on how digital activity is translated into metrics, see this page.
This is the part of the subject with the highest ratio of famous statistics to real studies.
| Article | Findings | Strong / mixed / weak |
|---|---|---|
| What a digital detox does Randomised trials of quitting social media find real but small well-being gains that do not persist, and the strictest meta-analysis of abstinence finds no effect at all. |
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| Interruptions, focus and the numbers The two most-quoted statistics about interruption have no peer-reviewed paper behind them, and the published experiment cited next to one of them found the opposite. |
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| How often people actually use their phones Metered panels put UK adults at four and a half hours online a day, while the most-quoted pickup counts come from a 94-person vendor study and self-report marketing polls. |
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| Devices, light and sleep The strongest evidence points away from light and towards timing: screens used in bed cost measurable sleep, while pre-bed screen use mostly does not. |
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| Is technology addiction real One digital behaviour has a diagnostic code and it is gaming; every headline figure about phone or internet addiction comes from screening scales with no validated cut-off. |
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What a digital detox does
Abstinence trials find small well-being gains of around 0.17 to 0.21 standard deviations, no lasting effect, and one meta-analysis finds nothing at all.
7 sourced findings · 1299 words · updated 2026-08-09
Interruptions, focus and the numbers
The 23-minute refocus figure comes from a magazine interview and the 40% multitasking loss from a quotation. Here is what was actually measured.
7 sourced findings · 1568 words · updated 2026-08-09
How often people actually use their phones
Logged phone use runs to roughly four hours a day and 60-80 pickups. The famous 2,617 touches and 186 checks come from vendor and marketing surveys.
7 sourced findings · 1289 words · updated 2026-08-09
Devices, light and sleep
Blue-light filters show no demonstrated benefit in a Cochrane review. What predicts lost sleep is interactive use in bed, not screen exposure in the evening.
7 sourced findings · 1564 words · updated 2026-08-09
Is technology addiction real
Only gaming disorder has a diagnostic code. Internet and smartphone addiction appear in no manual, and prevalence figures move with the questionnaire used.
7 sourced findings · 1309 words · updated 2026-08-09