NPR: A break from your smartphone can reboot your mood. Here's how long you need

by Allison Aubrey

If you order up coffee on a mobile app while scrolling your social feeds, or can't stop watching videos and reading news articles on your phone at bedtime, listen up!

Researchers studied what happened when people agreed to block the internet from their smartphones for just two weeks. And turns out, 91% felt better after the break.

"What we found was that people had better mental health, better subjective well-being and better sustained attention," says Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers included 467 participants, ages 18 to 74, who agreed to the month-long study aimed at testing the theory that constant connection to everything, all the time, has unintended consequences.

At a time when more then 90% of Americans have a smartphone, we forget that having an internet-enabled supercomputer at our fingertips 24/7 is a new phenomenon.

Read more at npr.org.