A specialized iPhone app was used to block internet access, recording any time that the feature was disabled.
In numbers, nearly all the participants — 91 percent — improved on at least one of the three outcomes, while around three-quarters reported better mental health by the end.
The findings even suggest that the intervention had a stronger effect on depression symptoms than antidepressants, and was roughly on par with cognitive behavioral therapy.
What’s driving all this? Ward suggests that the simplest explanation is that the experiment forced participants to spend more time doing fulfilling things in the real world.
… the assumption here is that people know what they find fulfilling. Before the internet people would stare at the tv for 12 hours a day.
I have several very fulfilling hobbies but I don’t have enough money or time (especially time) to do them. Hurray.
I often feel like I don’t have time for my many hobbies, then I realize I’ve just spent 3 hours on lemmy or reddit.
Are you me? Because this is me.
We need to get off the internet. Or at least off lemmy. Probably better to get off the internet more often, otherwise we’ll just find something else :/
OTOH my friend and I spent most of the weekend making this for his new apartment. The opening fits his little TV, so when he isn’t watching a show he can play fire videos on it.
That’s so cool! Is it plaster? I really like the stone lines
It’s rectangles of 2-inch solid foam insulation glued onto a plywood frame. We carved the stones with knives and smoothed the edges with the side of a soldering iron. Then we pressed the surface of a big rock all over it for texture, and painted it with mod podge to seal it. Next will paint it gray and do some dry-brushing with black, brown and rust to give the rocks some variety. The “mantle” on top is an already varnished pine board salvaged from built-in bunk beds I made for my kids back in the day.
Very resourceful, I love it. If you remember, I’d be interested in seeing the finished product, but either way I hope it turns out great! Nice job making the time for something like this!
That’s irrelevant. The study showed that people were in better mental health and the reason why he said it was because they were doing fulfilling hobbies is probably because they told the researchers that’s what they did instead.
Yes, we love science unless it’s critical of our own behavior, right? Lemme think now… who else has that attitude?
Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn’t just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It’s still not where I used to be before, but it’s a work-in-progress anyway.
I have a very similar experience as you, using the internet less as recreation and more as a tool definitely helped my mental health
I’ve been thinking how socialising on the internet with strangers is so hugely different to socialising with people in real life.
In real life you can see someone face to face, you can get a sense of their personality, and you learn to trust them. Those things are harder on the internet. You can’t see a person’s face, or hear their accent. Someone on the internet could be lying when they tell you about themselves, and it’s harder to tell if they’re lying.
Also of course on the internet people are much more willing to be rude and offensive because there are few penalties. If you meet someone in a pub, they probably won’t be rude to you, most of the time. If you disagree about something, you might say “okay, agree to disagree” and move onto another topic. But on the internet people will just be disrespectful cunts because they can get away with it, without negative social consequences for themselves.
In conclusion, internet socialising should be better than it is.
It’s always interesting when people from the Internet meet in-person. It should happen more often to the point when the people become friends and exchange it to real life socialising.
The demand is there and keeps increasing. I even thought about some platform where people from reddit/lemmy type of platform do stuff together like sports, outdoor, going to pub or something like that. I’m writing here about non-mainstream solutions.
Interesting idea. I suppose you could start a Lemmy community for meet ups for people in your country. I don’t know how easy it would be to find willing people who are relatively local to you though.
SN: Not that I’m a fan of it, but maybe this is one of the benefits of RTO. I have always found that building rapport in person is better than doing it online.
Yeah there’s some truth to that. Working at home can be lonely in my experience. But on the other hand you save all the hassle with commuting.
The internet is what you make it. I’ve never spent much time on overtly corporate media social or otherwise. Combined with largely avoiding the most politically toxic places both maga or ML.
Most of my time online is spent visiting places focused on retro Computing, Retro Gaming, music or some other hobbies. The internet hasn’t changed drastically in 30 years. Just the way average people use it.
The corporate sites will never respect your time or privacy. They’re just endless treadmills to keep you busy and engaged. We’ve always been able to hop off.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post - you can tweak your own Internet usage and you should - this part is just ridiculously untrue:
The internet hasn’t changed drastically in 30 years.
In the last 30 years, we saw coming of google, facebook, amazon and others as a major forces on the Internet, deploying Skinner boxes for billions of people and shaping what internet is to vast majority of users…
Those are services etc on the internet. Not the internet itself.
Yeah definitely. I just heee to disable social media and anything that’s based on addictive behavior, algorithmic feed etc. and I automatically start doing more interesting things online, such as read Wikis of subjects I like, play with programming etc.
The problem is everything that’s driven by engagement and made to keep you scrolling artificially is toxic by consequence.
The internet just isn’t a good space to spend a lot of time. It’s mostly corporate controlled and they’ve found anger drives interaction online so most things you read are designed to be upsetting. I’ve drastically cut down on my internet usage over the last few years and while I do spend more time doing things I enjoy, due to not being online, I’ve found that going back on reddit or something similar can send me right back into a negative headspace for the rest of the day like when I was online more. I just think that most parts of the internet are miserable places to be.
I don’t remember it always being this way either. Back when small formus were the norm I found the internet to be much less hostile overall. Not that there weren’t jerks and chuds online back then, but there wasn’t the profit incentive to drive engagement over all else
Striking results - 91% of participants improved their mental state, and typical improvement was similar to reversing 10 years of age-related decline.
