Last Updated On: October 26th, 2025
Introduction to Digital Hygiene
A study found that high school and college students spend around a quarter of class time texting, gaming, and swiping on apps. Does that sound accurate to your experience? Does it seem excessive, or just fine? Some students believe unrestricted device usage is bad for their study habits. Some don’t see a problem. I’m Gen X, so maybe you can guess my relationship to my phone? And maybe not—I guessed and got it wrong. It turns out I pick up my phone at least 32 times in 24 hours. And I’m old. Still-uses-Facebook old.
Digital overstimulation is therefore not a problem specific to your generation. When smartphones first became popular, immediately people who seem old to you started making the mistakes you make now. At any age, device addiction can become a way of life. It’s bad for mental health generally. Specifically, it’s terrible for your ability to remain focused and on-task. And not just in the ways you might think.
Digital hygiene is the concept of keeping a healthy distance between you, an autonomous individual working toward goals, and the digital universe, a set of useful tools that will hurt you when misused.
This post is about improving mental health when interacting with your devices. Just as you brush your teeth, so they don’t fall out, digital hygiene requires a small effort to prevent bad study habits and subpar grades.
If you’re wondering whether you suffer from digital overstimulation, the answer is likely yes. It’s not just you and me, it’s most of us. There are reasons for this. Whether you constantly update a social feed or obsess over daily steps, virtual contact with “the world” feels good. It’s fun. Little bursts of endorphins reward our likes and hearts. It feels smart to stay on top of things. Always being online feels like the only way to keep up with the pace of modern society.
Any habit is hard to break when it’s centered around a necessary object or behavior. And I agree with your probable opinion that your phone and iPad are necessary objects. The Internet is necessary. You can’t and shouldn’t fear or avoid them. But online tools and time-management strategies can help make your device manageable. Face it, we can’t use devices 24/7. We can’t text and drive, because it can be fatal. (Seriously, stop it. I got an expensive ticket, and I got off easy.) And though many have tried, we can’t text while taking a test. Do you see a pattern forming?
Important work requires uninterrupted focus. In your career as a student, the time for greatest focus is study time. But how do I put down a device that’s basically a part of my hand? And why does it feel so unpleasant to be separated from my apps? I’ll answer those questions after you consider a few ideas.
The Multitasking Myth and Study Performance
Myth: multitasking is a thing. Most of us feel or have felt that we can competently perform multiple simultaneous actions—especially when some tasks are passive, like reading a friend’s text and listening to mom’s voicemail while you’re annotating a biology chapter.
Fact: multitasking is not a thing. In study after study, evidence is extremely clear that humans are smarter when doing one thing at a time than when doing two things at once.
Myth: there’s no harm in switching between Algebra II and Instagram; it’s like a little break! Studying some subjects is no fun, so it feels delightful to stop every couple of problems and jump online to see where the party is. And it only takes a second.
Fact: there is real harm, measured in negative achievement. Not only do we perform poorly and fail to impress when our focus is divided, there’s a bigger issue. It’s called the switch cost, defined as the loss of time and energy required to refocus on a task after each distraction. Short-term and long-term memory are both negatively affected, resulting in careless studies that you can’t remember on the test worth 20% of your grade, or during the in-class discussions worth 15%. This is because the more often you change your focus in a given time frame, the less able you are to pay attention at all. Mental fatigue sets in. Comprehension becomes difficult. Work gets clumsy. Even if you stop switching back and forth after ten minutes, for at least an hour it’s harder to understand what you’re reading, writing, or even thinking. Ineffective study costs points on assignments and exams. Points add up to grades.
Digital Hygiene Protocols for Students
Putting “protocols” on device usage sounds complicated. All it means is that you can get a higher GPA and a quicker mind by controlling the amount of time spent on any one activity. Setting a goal is as simple as saying, “According to the science, I’ll study better once I turn off my notifications.” Meeting the goal is another story. You’ve somehow got to turn off those friendly noises and flashing lights, and this feels wrong. That’s because we’ve been trained by devices to rely on devices. Untrain yourself. Discover freedom.
PART I: DIGITAL DETOX
As a person with an identity, you are not your phone. More to the point, your phone is not yours. Creating healthy distance between you and devices is a holistic concept. There are many ways to embrace it. Make no sudden moves; let the process happen at a pace that feels just barely faster than you’d like.
- For a week, practice leaving your phone in your pocket in certain circumstances, like during classes or in certain social situations. Too hard?
- First, experiment with a controlled reduction in screen time. Find a safe environment and turn off your notifications or get offline entirely if you’re feeling brave. Set a timer for thirty minutes. See what it’s like to make a sandwich or read a hard-copy book, or fly a kite, without texting or scrolling. When the timer goes off, open your devices again. Do this once a day and gradually increase your offline time until you’re comfortable being offline for a few hours. Oh, but how?
- Uninstall your biggest time-sucks. Nothing major, but if it’s a game involving candy, cards or cute animals, maybe let it go?
- If it’s TikTok or something equally important (I would never delete TikTok), just turn off app notifications for the ones you can’t bring yourself to uninstall. Your apps can live on “silent;” they won’t starve. Make it so that you must come up with the idea to open the app on your own, instead of being lured to open it. This should be about 99% of apps. Take back control of your time. You’ll be shocked at the stuff you simply forget about when it’s not constantly reminding you of its existence.
- Eventually, you can take a break from devices, regularly, once a week for a whole day at a time. You won’t believe the benefits. (Literally. You already don’t believe me. Or are you starting to?)
PART II: DIGITAL QUARANTINE
During study periods, your digital distance enters a more extreme phase, but safely, under even more controlled conditions.
- Set boundaries around study hours. Schedule set times that stay relatively stable on a daily and weekly basis. During these study times, increase your device usage restrictions.
- Stack your habits. Build your digital hygiene protocols into existing routines and they’ll become habitual much sooner. If you set study hours to lead directly to your daily swim, or to follow your weekly lunch with an advisor, they’ll feel like a comfy old sweater instead of tight new shoes.
- Study less, learn more. Okay, not exactly. But chopping up your study time into doable periods, with short breaks between, helps you learn faster and retain more information. For instance, the Pomodoro method prescribes a two- or three-minute break for every twenty-five minutes of study, and a fifteen- to thirty-minute break after four twenty-five minute periods. And yes, on those teeny breaks, you can get online. In fact, if you’re jonesing for some screen, you probably should—very briefly, as allowed under your own time-management strategy.
- Focus your digital environment. During study time, limit available devices to those necessary to study. If you need the internet, only open relevant apps. For example, if you have fifty pages of reading to do and your only text is an online version that isn’t downloadable, you’ll have to keep your device open to read. Or if you’re writing an essay and you need thesaurus.com to supplement your vocabulary, make sure to block more attractive sites until a scheduled time; more about that later.
- Focus your mental environment. Make a list of ideas, concerns, and interests related to your subject of study, and use something like the parking-lot method to “park” unrelated or tangential thoughts during the specified time. You can always test-drive those ideas later.
PART III: DIGITAL MAINTENANCE
It will be clear to the attentive reader that all this is easier said than done. Like any skill set, digital hygiene will get rusty unless you practice it on a regular basis.
- At night, before bed, is a very good time to schedule daily digital cleansing. Cutting off screen time a half-hour before going to sleep not only helps you get more sleep but changes the type of sleep you get. Interacting with the internet mimics a stress response in humans, and stressed-out people don’t sleep well. Again, a book is a great solution. Reading text from paper for a half-hour before bed can reduce stress by a staggering 68%. So, leave your phone far from your bed! Make it necessary to get up in order to play with it. This seems low-tech but it is an excellent strategy for that exact reason.
- Find the controls that turn off all device notifications at once, so you don’t have to go one-by-one through all your apps each study time. Get familiar with that function.
- Add browser controls. I know, I just said you should delete some apps. But there are time-management apps and browser extensions that help keep track of your device usage. Your relationship with your device will never feel high maintenance; to appreciate it, you must see it in raw numbers. Some extensions and apps reward you for meeting usage-reduction goals. Above, I alluded to app blockers that you can set on a schedule, in order to keep study time a no-distraction zone. There are free and subscription-based services. Find what works for you.
- Interact with materials, not apps. The more you use your hands to study, the more you learn and remember. It’s science! Your muscles and nerves stimulate the process of creating memory. So, if you’re studying from a hard copy you own, annotate with a pencil directly in the book, in the margins, on a separate page—everywhere. If you don’t own the book, write in a notebook. If you study from an online source, you’ll have to annotate your reading on a separate document, either in a word processing program or on paper. Guess which one you’ll remember better, for a longer time? Hint: “digital quarantine.”
Special Considerations
These guidelines can feel impossibly strict, and there are plenty of exceptions requiring a little creativity to find a workaround. One of them is emergency accessibility. Always treat safety as a first priority! Every situation is unique. You may find that when you’re home, leaving your phone off for a while constitutes no danger. You may have circumstances, permanent or temporary, that requires you to stay accessible. This is perfectly compatible with digital hygiene. You may set up your phone to notify only for calls or texts from certain obligatory contacts whom you will warn not to abuse the privilege.
Or, you may suffer from nomophobia (No Mobile Phone phoBia), the anxiety some of us feel when deprived of our phones and devices or restricted from using them. This can be a scary sensation, and it will not help you study. Begin by easing into digital separation the way recommended above under Hygiene Protocols, Part I: slowly and gradually, under controlled circumstances in a safe and comforting place. If this is still too alarming, you may want to consult a therapist about your anxiety.
Take Control of Your Digital Life
Like most tools, the Internet and its devices are both useful and dangerous. Left alone with objects that seem almost alive in their ability to pull focus, many of us are not the best stewards of our own time. There is no shame in this! No evolutionary protocols were in place for the explosion of attention-grabbing stimuli that took place just a generation ago. For all of us, the struggle is real.
Try a first step toward digital control, today or tomorrow: see whether it’s easy or difficult to leave your phone in your backpack and not take it out for your entire lunch period. If it’s not easy, you may want to start brushing your teeth, and by teeth, I mean your device protocols. Use devices intentionally! Don’t let them use you! Or else you’ll be as old and gray as I am by the time you finally learn some digital restraint.
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