Why it matters
Your phone isn't just a habit.
It’s shaping how you spend your time and what gets your attention. Is it time for a little less smartphone and a little more conversation?
Give being untethered a try.
What are people checking?
75%
Social media
go straight to their feeds.
52%
The news
catch up on the headlines.
21%
The weather
check the forecast.
18%
The commute
check for travel disruptions.
6%
The stock market
scan the markets before they’re even out of bed.
Even the broadband traffic has a morning routine. Virgin Media O2 recorded marked jumps immediately after 6am, 7am, and 8am. The company suggests these line up with alarms going off, followed by a scroll before getting up.
Source: Virgin Media O2, January 2025
What do you reach for?
Every Monday · #MobileFreeMondays
One day a week
Make a personal commitment to try Mobile Free Mondays. No donation, petition, or proof required. Make the pledge.
A campaign by The Dead Good Club
The evidence
What improved
Sustained attention
Objectively measured attention improved in the intervention group.
Mental health
Participants showed better mental-health outcomes.
Subjective well-being
People reported feeling better overall.
Broad benefit
91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes.
Time with people
The benefits were partly explained by participants using their time ‘better’: without mobile internet, participants spent more time socialising in person, exercising, and being in nature.
Increased social connectedness, is therefore a possible benefit. Not a general claim that putting a phone away repairs relationships.
Your Monday can include company of others, solitude, or a mixture. There isn't a prescribed social life to go with it.
Mood and sleep
Another randomized controlled trial found that reducing smartphone screen time to no more than two hours per day for three weeks improved mental health in healthy university students (especially depressive symptoms, stress, sleep quality, and well-being).
These findings support considering reduction; they aren't a promise of better sleep or a clinical benefit from Monday.
Reduction counts
And a study of 619 smartphone users in Germany randomly assigned them to one of three groups for seven days:
Abstinence
no smartphone use at all.
Reduction
cut daily use by one hour.
Control
use the phone as usual.
Both intervention groups reduced problematic smartphone tendencies, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms; both also reported greater life satisfaction and more physical activity. most effects were stronger and more lasting in the reduction group.[3]
Concluding that reducing smartphone use by one hour per day was at least as beneficial as quitting entirely for a week, and its benefits lasted longer. Meaning complete abstinence is unnecessary: less screen time, not zero screen time, appears to be the key.
Mondays on auto-dial
The footprint
And the planet?
Your phone doesn't run on thin air. A smartphone needs electricity to charge its battery, and its internet connection relies on networks and data centres, which need electricity too. Before any of that, there are the materials, manufacturing, and transport. Together, these contribute to its carbon footprint.[1]
So what happens to that footprint when you ditch the phone one day a week? It depends on how much you use your phone. Let’s ballpark 4.5 hours of use per day.
Why 4.5 hours? The IPA’s 2025 TouchPoints research found young adults in Great Britain (aged 15–24) spend 4 hours 49 minutes a day on their mobiles.
Ofcom’s 2025 research gives a similar number, estimating that UK adults spend an average of 4.5 hours online each day across smartphones, tablets, and computers, with most of that time spent on smartphones.
Source: Ofcom, Online Nation 2025
Based on these numbers, we’ve chosen 4.5 hours a day as our calculator’s starting point. Your screen-time report can give you a number that more accurately reflects your usage.
In our example, we’ve calculated how many hours of phone use would be saved in a year by one person not using it for 4.5 hours every Monday. That comes to 234 hours less phone use over a year.
Where the carbon comes in.
In How Bad Are Bananas?, Mike Berners-Lee puts a year of smartphone use at 69 kg of CO₂e for an average user and 86 kg for a heavy one. That covers making the phone, charging it, and the networks and data centres behind it. That works out to about 60 grams per hour on average.
Source: Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas? (2020)
If only 10% of the UK’s 53 million smartphone owners aged 16+ participated in Mobile Free Mondays, we’d collectively reduce phone use by 1.2 billion hours over a year.
At the selected 60-gram factor, those hours carry an allocated footprint of about 72,000 tonnes a year. Actual savings would depend on changes in energy demand, device replacement, and what people do instead.
How’s that stack up?
72,000 tonnes of CO2e a year is equivalent to the electricity used to boil around 12 billion cups of tea, roughly 173 cups for every person in the UK. It is also comparable to the carbon absorbed by about 3.3 million mature trees over a year
The feeling
Intentional Media Movement
Your feed offers an endless supply of things you never asked to see. Pop in for the football score and come out with six air-fryer recipes and a new conspiracy theory.
There’s another approach that Mobile Free Mondays is, at its core, rooted in - and that’s Intentional Media. The practice is simply the act of limiting passive consumption of media and making deliberate choices about what you want to read, watch, or listen to.
From doomscrolling to depth; actively moving away from endless algorithmic feeds and negative news loops, opt instead for books, listening to full albums, or putting a movie on from your watch list.
Think of it as the slow-food approach to what goes into your head. And just as the Slow Food Movement bucks against fast-food chains and over-processed convenience food, the Intentional Media Movement aims to reclaim attention from algorithmic "fast media" and the attention economy.
Mobile Free Mondays gives you the mechanism to explore what deserves your attention.
A chance to follow an interest beyond the hook.
But I need my phone.
Fair enough. There may well be several good reasons why you can’t ditch the phone for a day.
Explore ways you can adapt or when analogue options can step in. Keep what you need for work, travel, caring, health, and accessibility and filter out the rest with app blockers or windows of non-phone use. There are ways to keep essential calls coming through while muting everything else.
This ultimately is about making your relationship with your phone a healthier one.
As with any relationship, when it gets rocky, something has to give. It doesn’t always have to be the nuclear option but it’s usually not something that will just resolve itself.
In the Harvard Gazette article Should quitting smartphones be this hard? Greg Epstein compares changing your relationship with technology to changing an unhealthy romantic relationship, and the answer needn’t be swearing off relationships (or technology) forever but rather one of exploring and trialing solutions.
Read the Harvard Gazette article
It’s part of my job.
Your phone might be your rota, your next booking, or social media. Putting it in a drawer doesn’t make those responsibilities disappear.
Referencing the article Should quitting smartphones be this hard? again, Harvard Law School’s Sharon Block points out that the boundaries between being at work and being off work have blurred.
Switching off isn’t always a choice workers are free to make.
Progress toward redefining that boundary has had mixed success, known as the “right to disconnect”. Some countries and companies acknowledge there should be a boundary, with communications expected only during work hours. But this doesn’t make it easy in reality if your workplace culture is encouraging you to be always-on.
Keep the access your job requires, while encouraging healthy boundaries (social post never go out on Mondays or set up a Slack auto-responder saying all comms will be through email first on Mondays). Try to get others at work on-board and maybe the whole company might adopt a Mobile Free Monday policy. You never know!
Want to give it a go?
Make the pledge as a personal commitment to try Mobile Free Mondays. No donation, petition, or proof required.
How to Do ItBrowse the Resources
A campaign by The Dead Good Club
Mobile Free Mondays · A Dead Good Club campaign
Every Monday · #MobileFreeMondays