Brooke Williams made a drastic change in March when she replaced her iPhone with a flip phone that has no access to the internet.
The 22-year-old’s screen time plummeted to 20 minutes a day, from over nine hours.
The tipping point that led her to switch? She realized she cared more about what people thought of her online than she cared about herself in real life.
“I was spending hours and hours and days of my life curating and playing a person that wasn’t me to serve to other people,” said Williams, a recent environmental studies graduate at Kent State University. “That wasn’t genuine, and it wasn’t who I wanted to be.”
Williams represents a growing number of young adults who are pushing back against what they consider excessive time on smartphones.
In 2025, 46% of teens said they are online almost constantly, according to the Pew Research Center. But in another 2024 study, more than a third of teens ages 13 to 17 said they have cut back on their phone screen time, and 72% said they feel peaceful when they don’t have their smartphone.
Disconnecting from social media is more than deleting apps
When recent Kent State graduate Brooke Williams gave up most of her social media, she lost multiple friends.
But then she realized where her real connections came from: a handful of friends with whom she has grown especially close.
Like Williams, Jessica Greene, a 21-year-old psychology student at the University of Akron, has been trying to disconnect from the online world. She said she doesn’t want to rely on technology to live her day-to-day life.
Even so, it’s been hard because much of her screen time comes from doing schoolwork and running campus social media accounts.
Her average screen time is 9 hours and 46 minutes per day.
“Every time I look at it, I’m disgusted,” she said.
‘Digital detox’ — disconnecting from social media for a time — can lead to relief
A healthy relationship with technology comes down to the question of balance, said Eric Sotnak, a University of Akron philosophy professor who teaches digital ethics.
“If you live your entire life in an exclusively digital environment with little real-world and offline interaction with people, I don’t think that’s a good relationship,” he said.
For those who want to disconnect, placing smartphones out of reach while doing activities is helpful, said Andrew Lepp, a recreation, park and tourism management professor at Kent State who studies screen time as it relates to young adults.
A 2024 study found that participating in a “digital detox,” or disconnecting from devices or social media for a period of time, resulted in relief. It was also less challenging than the participants expected, and the majority of people adapted to having less access to the internet.
“Reflect on your cell phone use,” Lepp encouraged. “Get that weekly report about how much time you’re spending on it, and ask yourself, ‘Could my time be spent differently? What if I took one of these hours of smartphone use and dedicated it to my best friend or some new relationship?’”
How Kent State student broke her technology cycle
At just 4 years old in 2008, Williams remembers already having unsupervised access to the internet.
But she doesn’t want to spend her life online.
Williams said she doesn’t see a future where people can completely escape the addictiveness of phones — but that doesn’t mean she won’t try.
Since becoming more intentional about her screen time, Williams said her mind has become much clearer and her memory sharper. She has been replacing screen time with reading, studying or talking to people. She stopped bringing her phone into her bedroom, to class or to appointments.
She’s in the process of going analog, which, for her, means writing in a diary, using a planner, taking photos with an actual camera and getting an iPod Nano to play music. She also keeps a deck of cards in her purse for when she gets bored.
“The freedom to not have to carry the entire internet with me while being connected to my family is excellent,” she said, explaining that she often uses her phone to call and text her loved ones.
When she leaves the house, Williams brings a notepad and writes down things she wants to Google later on.
By the time she gets around to searching a celebrity’s birthday or the thread counts in sheets she’s considering buying, she said often doesn’t care to know the information anymore.
“It doesn’t really matter that much,” she said.
Before she got her flip phone, the Sunbeam Aspen, Williams described the feeling of being on her iPhone as a sort of “amnesia.”
“I pick up my phone instinctively, I just go between apps for about two minutes … and I don’t actually look at anything,” she said. “I don’t text anyone. I don’t participate in anything. I’m just touching it, because that’s what you do. I’m touching my phone because I have been touching it for the past 12 years.”
How other students are addressing technology in their lives
Kent State student Joseph Driscoll often walked into his fraternity house this past semester to find everyone sitting on the couch together, all on their phones.
“They’ll still be talking to each other, but … it’s just people doing their own thing next to someone else,” the 22-year-old recreation and tourism management student said. “I prefer to be more involved.”
He said he spends around three hours on his phone per day, mostly playing music. He’s been working to dial back his phone usage, and he feels that his life has gotten significantly better because of it.
Driscoll said he focuses more on rock climbing, playing instruments and work, and inevitably, he doesn’t have much time left for scrolling.
“Now I feel like I’m at a point where I don’t really need social media time,” he said. “Before, I went on it just out of boredom and to find something to do. But now, I feel like I have enough to do where I’m more fulfilled with everything else I’m doing.”
Since prioritizing face-to-face interactions, he said he feels more fulfilled socially.
To limit her own screen time, Greene has started printing school-related work when she can, taking paper notes, keeping her phone in her bag during class and staying off her phone for the first hour she’s awake every morning. That step in particular has completely changed the progression of her day, she said.
“I’ve noticed I’ve been increasingly productive,” Greene said. “I’m more willing to get work done because I feel like I’m acting on my own accord, and I’m not just waking up and immediately being overstimulated with a bunch of stuff.”
Anti-tech student recommends others perform phone audits
Williams recommended that other young adults perform a “phone audit,” going through apps to figure out what is actually making them happy and what they don’t like.
Williams said when she sees other people on their screens all the time, she thinks about how overwhelmed she used to feel from the amount of information she took in.
“It’s like standing in an airport all hours of the day and just hearing the bustle constantly,” Williams said. “It’s not healthy. You need to rest.”
She hopes other people will work toward the same goal.
By getting rid of her smartphone, Williams said, she’s able to keep the internet in one place. She thinks keeping the internet in a stationary place could solve a lot of screen-time problems for others, too.
“When I was little, even though the internet was a big thing in my life, it was a place you went to, not a place that came with you,” she said. “The computer wasn’t in your pocket.”
Lauren Cohen is a community reporting intern for the Akron Beacon Journal and Signal Akron. The position is funded through a grant from the Knight Foundation, which is a funder of Signal Akron.
