(Mercola)—In an era where smartphones have become an extension of ourselves, British journalist Decca Aitkenhead conducted a bold experiment that might make you rethink your relationship with technology. Inspired by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research on teen mental health, Aitkenhead challenged 10 teenagers — her two sons along with their friends — to give up their cellphones for one month.¹

The results, published in the U.K.’s Sunday Times Magazine, offer a compelling glimpse into how digital detox — intentionally abstaining from electronic devices — can transform young lives, echoing other recent research on the topic.

Digital Detox Leads to ‘Unexpected Resilience and Joy’

Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, wrote, “The Anxious Generation,” a book describing the mental health crisis that’s risen along with children’s use of cellphones and social media. Haidt says this shift in technology usage, which occurred in the early 2010s, led to a “great rewiring of childhood,” including alterations in self-concept and social skills.²

Play-based childhoods have largely disappeared — the product of “social trust collapses among adults” and parents becoming “more fearful, overprotective, and less willing to let their kids spend time with other kids unsupervised in the real world.” Instead, phone-based childhoods are now the norm, and rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide among youth have increased.³

Haidt argues that excessive cellphone use among children and teens may impair development of executive function and social skills, leading to attention fragmentation, delayed maturity and impaired creativity, which could persist lifelong.⁴

In addition to ditching cellphones for a month, the teens took part in a two-day camping trip, unsupervised. While some were initially resistant, at the end of the experiment the teens reported having more energy and focus. They read more and reported feeling calmer and more efficient. The Defender reported:⁵

“The unsupervised camping trip proved particularly transformative. Despite initial doubts about the teens’ competence, they demonstrated remarkable growth, ‘In under 36 unsupervised hours, they appear to have grown up by about two years,’ Aitkenhead said. Although several kids later reported finding it challenging not to slip back into old patterns, at the end of the trip, all of them said they hadn’t missed their cellphones.”

Benefits of a Social Media Detox: Better Sleep and Less Stress

A study published in Behavioral Sciences explored the effects of limiting social media use among people aged 18 to 30.⁶ The results reveal that a “social media detox” could have significant benefits for your health and wellbeing.

Researchers recruited 43 young adults and tracked their cellphone and social media usage for two weeks to establish a baseline. Then, participants were asked to limit their social media use to 30 minutes daily for two weeks, followed by two weeks of normal use. Throughout the study, participants completed surveys about addiction, physical health, mental health and relationships. Some also participated in interviews about their experiences.

On average, participants reduced their social media usage by 77.7% during the detox period. This dramatic reduction led to some intriguing changes. Cellphone and social media addiction scores decreased significantly during the detox and remained lower even two weeks after returning to normal use. This suggests that taking a break from social media helps reset your relationship with your devices in a lasting way.

One of the most noticeable benefits reported was improved sleep. Participants experienced both longer sleep duration and better sleep quality during the detox period. Many shared that they fell asleep earlier because they weren’t scrolling late into the night. These sleep improvements were maintained to some degree even after returning to normal social media use.⁷

The detox also reduced stress levels among participants. They reported feeling less pressure to constantly check notifications or maintain an online presence. Several noted increased productivity and confidence as well. While the effects were relatively small, they were statistically significant and supported by participants’ interview responses.⁸

Measures of life satisfaction and overall wellness also showed improvement. These gains were maintained or even increased further during the two-week follow-up period. The study reveals that stepping back from social media, even temporarily, helps you gain perspective and feel more content with your life offline.

A Manageable Approach to Digital Wellness

If completely quitting social media sounds too extreme, this study suggests a more moderate approach is still beneficial. Most participants found limiting themselves to 30 minutes per day challenging but doable. After an initial adjustment period, many were surprised by how much they enjoyed the detox.

Some participants recommended personalizing limits based on your current usage or focusing on restricting the most “destructive” apps first. Others found it helpful to turn off notifications or delete social media apps from their phones during the detox period. The key is to start by finding an approach that feels sustainable for your lifestyle.

While some participants experienced feelings of disconnection initially, many ultimately reported spending more quality time with friends and family in person.⁹ The detox encouraged them to seek out other forms of connection and entertainment. Even after returning to normal use, many participants said they became more aware of their social media habits and took steps to better regulate their usage going forward.

Reclaiming Your Time and Attention: Study Findings

A comprehensive review published in Cureus analyzed 21 trials with 3,625 participants, shedding light on the additional benefits of abstaining from electronic devices.¹⁰ One of the most immediate benefits of a digital detox, as observed in multiple studies, is the reclamation of your time and attention.

One study examined the consequences of a 14-day period where young individuals limited their social media use to 30 minutes daily. Participants reported having more free time for activities that truly enrich their lives, such as reading, exercising or spending quality time with loved ones.¹¹

Many experienced a sense of relief and freedom from the constant demands of their devices. The study also found improvements in sleep quality, overall life satisfaction and stress levels. By stepping away from the digital world, you give yourself the opportunity to be more present in the physical world, leading to deeper connections and more meaningful experiences.

Digital Detox Improves Mental Health and Well-Being

The comprehensive review and other studies have shown significant positive impacts of digital detox on mental health as well. Excessive use of cellphones and social media has been linked to feelings of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.¹² By taking a break from these digital platforms, many experience a reduction in these negative emotions.

One study also reported improvements in perceived healthiness and supportive connections among participants. Additionally, limiting your exposure to social media can help alleviate feelings of inadequacy or FOMO (fear of missing out).¹³ A qualitative study, involving interviews with seven individuals who experienced digital detoxes, revealed that participants gained a new perspective on their relationship with technology following the experience.¹⁴

They became more aware of their digital consumption patterns and better equipped to set boundaries around device usage. This newfound awareness led to more intentional and balanced use of technology in the long term.

Meanwhile, research focusing on cellphone addiction among young adults in India emphasizes the importance of digital detox in reducing excessive cellphone use and its adverse effects.¹⁵ It’s important to find a healthy balance that allows you to enjoy the benefits of technology without sacrificing your well-being or real-world connections.

Less Cellphone Use Helps Lower Your EMF Exposure

Another key benefit of taking a break from the digital world is reduced exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Exposure to radiofrequency EMFs from cellphones and other sources poses a substantial health risk. For instance, a controlled study found cellphone radiation causes acute cell death and disrupted cell division in cheek cells, with a 57% increase in cell death indicators after high exposure.¹⁶

A systematic review and meta-analysis also revealed that using a cellphone for over 1,000 cumulative hours in your lifetime — equivalent to just 17 minutes per day over 10 years — increased tumor risk by a striking 60%.¹⁷

Several studies have also found that EMFs have a deleterious effect on the reproductive systems of both men and women. Research published in Fertility and Sterility found that men who used their cellphones more than 20 times a day had significantly lower sperm counts than those who only used them once a week or less.¹⁸

A Path Forward: Embark on Your Own Digital Detox

Haidt suggests adopting the following tips as “norms” to help break smartphone addiction in children and teens:¹⁹

1. No smartphones before high school (around age 14)
2. No social media accounts until age 16
3. Phone-free schools with restricted or zero use during the school day
4. Give kids far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world

“If we do those four things, we can actually fix this problem in the next year or two,” Haidt said. “We’re not going to burn the technology, [but] we need to delay it.”²⁰ However, even as an adult, taking digital detoxes and using your devices in moderation — with steps in place to reduce your EMF exposure — is important.

For teenagers looking to embark on a digital detox, it’s important to approach the process gradually and set realistic goals, like implementing a step-by-step reduction in screen time. Start by identifying your current usage patterns and the specific apps or activities that consume most of your time.

Then, set clear boundaries for when and how long you’ll use your devices each day. It’s also helpful to create “no-phone zones” in your home, such as the dinner table and your bedroom, to cultivate spaces that are completely free from digital distractions. To make your digital detox more effective and enjoyable, try replacing screen time with alternative activities. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Engage in physical activities — Join a sports team, go for bike rides or daily walks, or try yoga
• Explore creative hobbies — Learn to play an instrument, try painting or start writing
• Spend time in nature — Go for hikes, have a picnic in the park or start a vegetable garden
• Connect with friends in person — Organize game nights, study groups or just hang out
• Learn a new skill — Take up cooking, photography or a foreign language
• Practice mindfulness — Try meditation or journaling to reflect on your experiences
• Read books — Visit your local library and discover new genres or authors
• Volunteer in your community — Find causes you care about and contribute your time

By gradually reducing your screen time and filling those hours with engaging, offline activities, you can develop a more mindful relationship with digital devices while improving your overall physical and mental well-being.

• ^{1, 2, 4, 5, 19, 20} Children’s Health Defense, The Defender August 13, 2024
• ³ The Anxious Generation March 2, 2024
• ^{6, 7, 8, 9} Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Dec; 13(12): 1004
• ^{10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15} Cureus. 2024 Apr; 16(4): e58719
• ¹⁶ Environmental Research June 15, 2024, Volume 251, Part 1, 118634, Results
• ¹⁷ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2020, 17(21), 8079; doi: 10.3390/ijerph17218079
• ¹⁸ Fertility and Sterility December 2023 Epub ahead of print

But here’s the real kicker. Out of 35 autopsies of people who died shortly after getting injected, only TEN could be ruled out as being caused by the jabs. That means that out of 35 autopsies in this published study, over 71% of the deaths could have been caused by the vaccines.

There have been dozens of studies over the last two years that have shown similar results, but this is the first that is coming from a “reputable” source that even Big Pharma shills in corporate media cannot disparage. It’s also the first that looks at this type of autopsy data on a scale that is statistically significant.

Without the ability to denounce or even falsely “debunk” the study, corporate media has chosen (or being instructed) to ignore the study completely. That’s not new, nor is it new to most of our readers that the jabs are being shown as extremely dangerous. What makes this particular bombshell special is that it comes at a time when many American “normies” are finally starting to ask the right questions.

They’re wondering if the jabs are really safe. They’re wondering if the medical powers-that-be like Anthony Fauci and even our own doctors were lying or just misinformed. Some are even starting to wonder if “conspiracy theorists” were right all along that the jabs are part of a depopulation and control initiative. This is why the article about the study below is so important to share. After two years of being gaslighted, ridiculed, and often times harmed directly, those of us who have been fighting for the truth to get out are finally starting to see some daylight.

By no means am I suggesting this is enough to change the hearts and minds of the masses. Since this won’t get play on CNN or Fox News, we’re still looking at an infinitesimal portion of the population that is waking up. But if we’re ever going to reach a tipping point of mass consciousness, we’ll need to take these small victories of scientific honest and amplify them as much as possible. Otherwise, all will be lost.

The article below by Will Jones at The Daily Skeptic was republished by the Brownstone Institute. All of the data checks out. All of the conclusions are sound, albeit perhaps a bit more muted than we’d like. That’s fine. Whatever it takes to get the truth ball rolling, we’ll take it.

Major New Autopsy Report Reveals Those Who Died Suddenly Were Likely Killed by the Covid “Vaccine”

A major new autopsy report has found that three people who died unexpectedly at home with no pre-existing disease shortly after Covid vaccination were likely killed by the vaccine. A further two deaths were found to be possibly due to the vaccine.

The report, published in Clinical Research in Cardiology, the official journal of the German Cardiac Society, detailed autopsies carried out at Heidelberg University Hospital in 2021. Led by Thomas Longerich and Peter Schirmacher, it found that in five deaths that occurred within a week of the first or second dose of vaccination with Pfizer or Moderna, inflammation of the heart tissue due to an autoimmune response triggered by the vaccine had likely or possibly caused the death.

In total the report looked at 35 autopsies carried out at the University of Heidelberg in people who died within 20 days of Covid vaccination, of which 10 were deemed on examination to be due to a pre-existing illness and not the vaccine. For the remaining 20, the report did not rule out the vaccine as a cause of death, which Dr. Schirmacher has confirmed to me is intentional as the autopsy results were inconclusive. Almost all of the remaining cases were of a cardiovascular cause, as indicated in the table below from the supplementary materials, where 21 of the 30 deaths are attributed to a cardiovascular cause. One of these is attributed to blood clots (VITT) from AstraZeneca vaccination (the report was looking specifically at post-vaccine myocarditis deaths), leaving 20 from other cardiovascular causes.

For the five deaths in the main report attributed as likely or possibly due to the vaccines, the authors state:

All cases lacked significant coronary heart disease, acute or chronic manifestations of ischaemic heart disease, manifestations of cardiomyopathy or other signs of a pre-existing, clinically relevant heart disease.

This indicates that the authors limited themselves to deaths where there was no “pre-existing, clinically relevant heart disease”, making the report very conservative in which deaths it was willing to pin on the vaccines.

Dr. Schirmacher told me:

We included only cases, in which the constellation was unequivocally clear and no other cause of death was demonstrable despite all efforts. We cannot rule out vaccine effects in the other cases, but here we had an alternative potential cause of death (e.g. myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism). If there is severe ischemic cardiomyopathy it is almost impossible to rule out myocarditis effects or definitively rule in inflammatory alterations as due to vaccination. These cases were not included.

We did not aim to include or find every case but the characteristics of definitive, unequivocal cases beyond any doubt. Only by this way you can establish the typical characteristics; otherwise less strict criteria may lead to ‘contamination’ of the collective; it is absolutely plausible that by these criteria we may have missed further cases but the intention of our study was never quantitative or extrapolation and there are numerous positive and negative bias. But we wanted to establish the fact not the size.

It is of course very possible that the vaccines also cause death where there is an underlying cardiovascular condition, and indeed, that it is more likely to do so. Thus these five deaths are the minimum from these autopsy cases in which the vaccines are involved – those in which there is no other plausible explanation.

It is worth noting here that initially in 2021, when the autopsies were first carried out, Dr. Schirmacher stated his team had concluded 30-40% of the deaths were due to the vaccines. These earlier estimates may give us a better indication of how many of the deaths the authors really think are attributable to the vaccines, when they are unconstrained by highly conservative assumptions (and looking at causes besides myocarditis). Note that these percentages are based on a selection of deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination, not a random sample of all deaths, so the authors rightly warn that no estimation of individual risk can be made from them.

Did the autopsies find spike protein from the vaccines present in the heart tissue? The samples from the five vaccine-attributed deaths were tested for infectious agents including SARS-CoV-2 (in one instance revealing “low viral copy numbers” of a herpes virus, which the authors deemed insufficient to explain the inflammation). However, no tests were done specifically for the virus spike protein or nucleocapsid protein, such as have been used successfully in other autopsies to aid attribution to the vaccine, so unfortunately this evidence was unavailable for these autopsies.

The autopsies in the report also only cover doses 1 and 2, not any booster doses, and only deaths within 20 days of vaccination, so the report doesn’t address directly the question of what’s been causing the elevated heart deaths since the booster rollouts from autumn 2021 or whether the vaccines can trigger cardiovascular death weeks or months later. (Other autopsies have confirmed that the spike protein can persist in the body for weeks or months after vaccination and trigger a fatal autoimmune attack on the heart.)

What the report does do, however, is establish that people who die suddenly in the days immediately following vaccination may well have died from a vaccine-related autoimmune attack on the heart. It also confirms how deadly even mild vaccine-induced myocarditis can be – and thus why studies like the one from Thailand, finding cardiovascular adverse effects in around a third of teenagers (29.2%) following Pfizer vaccination and subclinical heart inflammation in one in 43 (2.3%), and the study from Switzerland finding at least 2.8% with subclinical myocarditis and elevated troponin levels (indicating heart injury) across all vaccinated people, are so worrying.

The authors of the new study diplomatically write that the “reported incidence” of myocarditis after vaccination is “low” and the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with COVID-19 are “stated to be greater than the recorded risk associated with COVID-19 vaccination” – notably declining to commit themselves to the official propositions that they dutifully repeat.

The fact that those who die suddenly after vaccination may have died from the hidden effects of the Covid vaccine on their heart is thus now firmly established in the medical literature. The big remaining question is how often it occurs.

Stop Press: Dr. John Campbell has produced a helpful overview of the report’s findings in his latest video.