For many people who got their first cellphones in the late 1990s or early 2000s, flip phones were chrome and neon portals into pop culture and newfound social circles with your peers.
Now, the digital world — a constantly accessible gateway to millions of other people, information on every subject and breaking news from around the world — feels frustratingly cluttered to a growing number of those same one-time flip-phone enthusiasts.
Some Gen Zers and millennials use apps or hardware to block their access to social media, set their smartphone screens to grayscale, or purchase “dumb phones” that can’t access the internet. Reddit’s “r/dumbphones” forum has 185,000 weekly visitors, as of Friday afternoon, and “offline groups” offer 30-day dumb phone challenges that encourage groups of participants to meet up in person.
Curious about the hype around a smartphone detox, two CNBC Make It producers — Megan Sauer, age 29, and Renée Onque, age 26 — hid their iPhones from themselves and bought flip phones to use for a four-day experiment, from a Friday morning through a Monday evening. Their phones could only call, text and take low-resolution photos. In the spirit of the detox, the publishers agreed to avoid social media on laptops and tablets.
Neither reporter wanted to test five or more days due, to workplace ramifications: On flip phones, they couldn’t access authenticator apps, sources from previous projects or record audio from their phone calls. But even a four-day break can boost your mental health “if you replace your smartphone activity with the right kind of activity, one that either engages your senses like walking in the sunshine, or your imagination like reading,” says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford.
The parameters of the experiment, including its duration, were based on academic research and recommendations from experts including Véliz and Anastasia Dedyukhina, director of Consciously Digital Institute, which aims to help organizations and individuals develop healthier relationships with technology.
Just two weeks of blocking internet access on smartphones boosted mood, restored attention or improved well-being for 91% of participants in a small February 2025 study conducted by researchers at organizations including the University of Alberta and Georgetown University. But in another study, participants who were enthusiastic to swap their smartphones for dumb phones reported more psychological benefits than participants who felt neutral going into the one week experiment, found researchers from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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In preparation for their long weekend, the reporters logged pre-scheduled appointments on physical calendars, wrote reminders on sticky notes and made plans that relied on the New York subway or friends who could help with ride-hailing transportation around New York and New Jersey. Then, they powered down their smartphones.
Their experiences were imperfect — one had to turn her smartphone back on during Day 1 — but both say they’d do a similar detox again. Neither would ditch their smartphones permanently.
Here are the thoughts, challenges and conclusions they documented during their four-day hiatus.
Day 1: Friday
Renée Onque, 8:22 am: We can work from home on Fridays and Mondays, so I don’t have to wake up early. Still, I set my alarm clock wrong. My friend texts me, “Good morning,” and my flip phone rings so loudly that it wakes me up instead.
Megan Sauer, 8:30 am: Instead of my usual morning routine, thumbing through news alerts and app notifications, I see only one text message from a friend, asking if I’ve officially started my experiment. I briefly take my smartphone out of the drawer when I realize I’d forgotten to write down a source’s contact information for an interview, then log on to my laptop for the workday.
Sauer, 1:17 pm: Our jobs don’t require much interaction with our phones beyond simple phone calls, so work feels pretty normal. I complete the interview, work through edits on two of my in-progress stories and eventually eat lunch. While eating, I get a familiar restless itch to scroll through social media. I use that energy to text a friend to see if she’s free for dinner tonight.
Sauer, 6:30 pm: After work, at the restaurant, my friend laughs about how she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to check my location. I’m chronically 10 minutes behind, so I don’t really mind that my closest pals use Find My Friends to gauge my actual time of arrival — but it does strike me as a smartphone feature I could live without.
Onque, 6:40 pm: My sister calls me. She says she’ll email me pictures of cupcakes she’d baked and her cats taking their first trip outside on her terrace, instead of texting me the photos. I send her a few kombucha recommendations via email. Surprisingly, this doesn’t bother me, and actually makes emailing feel more enjoyable and light-hearted.
Onque, 7:45 pm: I successfully merge phone calls, my replacement for group FaceTime, for the first time. Three people is the maximum on my flip phone — including myself — which is disappointing and limiting, because four of us are trying to make weekend plans. We relay details to each other across multiple phone calls.
I also learn that my flip phone won’t charge effectively if I use it while it’s plugged in, which forces me to put it down more often. It’s annoying, but probably good for me.
Day 2: Saturday
Sauer, 8:30 am: With nowhere to be and no Instagram to scroll, I start the morning reading John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” Normally, when I read a particularly dense book, I have to put my smartphone in another room so I can focus. But even with the flip phone next to me, I can respond to incoming texts and return to reading, instead of getting distracted by the screen.
Onque, 2:30 pm: I’m seeing a movie with a friend, and I can’t pull up my purchase confirmation QR code on my flip phone. My friend, who still has her smartphone, meets me at my apartment, calls us an Uber and presents the QR code to get our tickets at the theater. I frequently apologize because I feel like a burden. She assures me that it’s no big deal.
Sauer, 6:35 pm: I leave home late for my own movie-going plans, and the subway is delayed. Since I can’t call an Uber, I anxiously wait, enduring the consequence of my tardiness. I jog to the theater from the station and, breathless, show the usher a blurry screenshot of a QR code that my friend sent directly to my flip phone. It scans without a problem. “Thank God,” I say. The usher laughs.
Onque, 8:15 pm: I feel slightly embarrassed and a little shy using my flip phone at a restaurant and, later, a bar. Everyone who notices wants to ask me about it. I hear people whispering, “Look! She has a flip phone.”
Sauer, 10:30 pm: At a bar after the movie, people stop me to ask about the flip phone. “It really says a lot about you as a person that you’re willing to go offline,” one patron says. I shrug.
Later, though I know how to get home — and I don’t, at any point, feel unsafe — I feel uncomfortable taking the subway without my smartphone. I’m not exactly sure why.
Day 3: Sunday
Onque, 12:00 pm: I drop my flip phone while on a call, and the battery falls out. That ends the call and turns the phone off. I accidentally drop my smartphone a lot. Dropping a flip phone has greater implications.
Sauer, 12:30 pm: I feel much less inclined to check my phone or answer calls and texts until I’m finished with a chore, a TV episode or even just relaxing. I simply don’t think about my flip phone when it’s not in my hand. With my smartphone, even when I have “Do Not Disturb” turned on, I feel like a bad friend when I delay getting back to people. The flip phone feels like a digital obligation buffer.
Onque, 7:28 pm: I try to check my texts while speaking with someone, and the call hangs up. But my flip phone’s limitations, which have forced me to put it down more frequently than usual over the past few days, aren’t all bad. I don’t panic about cleaning my apartment or finishing other tasks on my to-do list because I feel like I have more time. In short, I’m a lot more in the present. I wonder if this feeling will stay with me after I get my smartphone back.
Day 4: Monday
Sauer, 7:30 am: I jolt out of bed when I realize I’ve forgotten to tell my therapist — who conducts sessions with me over the phone on Monday afternoons — about my temporary new phone number. Once the panic subsides, I find that I’m much more relaxed while working than I was on Friday. I can focus, even before my morning cappuccino sets in, on completing my morning tasks efficiently.
Onque, 2:30 pm: Overall, my workday feels like a typical Monday. I tackle edits for an ongoing draft, research and write a pitch for a larger project, schedule interviews for upcoming stories throughout the week — standard stuff. Typically, I use my smartphone to listen to music while I work. It keeps me energized and focused. If I were in the office, I’d probably listen to Spotify from my laptop instead. At home, I challenge myself by turning to vinyl records, and have it works, except that I work to repeatedly get up to flip each record to side B.
Sauer, 5:00 pm: I typically hit a wall in the afternoons. Not today. I complete my day’s work — including more draft revisions, a series of fact-checking emails and, somehow, just one single meeting — by 5:00 pm I feel peppy enough to go for a walk.
Onque, 6:15 pm: I thought I’d spend these four days retreating socially, reading more, focusing on my personal goals and maybe struggling to feel connected to my loved ones without the ability to send them loads of memes daily.
Instead, I’ve spent a lot more time engaging with people than usual, through phone calls and spur-of-the-moment hangouts. Life and work were harder than usual, though not significantly so. I had to approach some things differently. It wasn’t taxing. I’m not sure I’d feel as laissez-faire about it if I had to do this every day.
Sauer, 6:40 pm: Usually, if I’m awake, I’m fighting the urge to buy clothing. But while booking travel on my iPad, I realize I haven’t thought about online shopping — or much about my appearance, wardrobe, hair or makeup, in general — over the last four days. Until this experiment, I wasn’t aware of just how often my iPhone incentivizes me to stare at its screen. Hundreds of notifications per day make me feel like I’m falling behind.
Without them, my fear of missing out becomes more muted, and I feel less guilty when I don’t immediately respond to a phone call or text message. When I turn on my smartphone Tuesday morning, I shut off notifications for several apps, including social media, shopping and game platforms. I don’t need reminders to distract myself.
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