HomeTechnologyAn app can help you limit your screen time... breathing

An app can help you limit your screen time… breathing

A new app, One Sec, offers to take a breath for ten seconds before opening certain apps, to determine if you really want to open them.

Breathing can help you cut down on screen time. According to a Business Insider article, the app One Sec, created two years ago, offers a simple trick to reduce addiction to certain apps: just take a deep breath before opening them. This would allow you to be more intentional in the way you use your phone, explains the American news site.

For example, when a user wants to open the Twitter app, One Sec displays a full-screen animation associated with vibrations, then a 10-second breathing exercise. After this step, two options are offered: “I don’t want to open Twitter” or “Continue on Twitter”. This forces users to think about why they are opening the app and prevents them from doing it mechanically.

In addition to this 10-second pause, One Sec shows the user how many times they have tried to open the app in question in the last 24 hours. Another tool requires you to indicate the reason you want to open it, namely “Working” or “I can’t sleep”, for example. One Sec finally offers to send a notification when the user has spent several minutes in an application.

Follow a circle or turn on your front camera

The breathing exercise is not the only one that the application offers. To prevent users from getting used to this intervention and ending up automatically skipping it, One Sec changes the animation that appears before opening an app: sometimes it’s a breathing exercise, sometimes it might ask you to follow a circle on a blank screen or turn on The front camera, so that the user sees himself.

According to a study by Frederik Riedel, the German developer of the app, conducted with the Max Planck Institute and the University of Heidelberg in 2022, One Sec reduced the screen time of those who used it by 57%. One million people have downloaded the app according to Riedel. Sensor Tower, an independent tracker, puts the figure at 600,000 downloads, Business Insider reports.

Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter can waste a lot of time. The algorithms of these applications are developed to retain the user for as long as possible on the networks. Screen addiction isn’t without its consequences: People who spend seven hours or more on their phones are at high risk of depression, according to studies cited by Business Insider.

Author: Marius Boquet
Source: BFM TV

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