Does a pause before opening an app actually work?

A pause before opening an app does work for many people, based on the research so far. The best evidence comes from a 2023 study of one sec, an app made by riedel.wtf that shows a short breathing pause before a chosen app opens. Smaller studies of similar “friction” tools point the same way, with honest limits that are worth knowing before you pick a tool.

This page walks through what each study found, how big and how long it was, and what it does and does not tell you. We make Calma, a different kind of app blocker. None of these studies tested Calma, and we say where that matters.

What did the one sec study find?

The 2023 PNAS study of one sec found that a pause before opening an app led to fewer app opens. The study, by Grüning, Riedel and Lorenz-Spreen, was published in PNAS on February 16, 2023. It had two parts.

Part 1: a field study with real iPhones. The researchers invited new one sec users on iOS through a message inside the app. Of 719 who signed up, 280 used one sec for all six weeks. one sec logged every attempt to open a “target app” the person had chosen. The authors report three numbers:

• In about 36% of attempts, people closed the target app after the pause appeared.
• By week six, people tried to open their target apps 37% less than in week one.
• Combined, actual openings of target apps fell by 57% after six weeks.

People also said, in a survey after the six weeks, that they spent less time with those apps and were more satisfied with how they used them. That part is self-reported.

Part 2: an online experiment. To see which part of the pause did the work, the team ran a preregistered experiment with 500 people recruited on Prolific. Participants watched viral video clips in one of five conditions: no intervention, a short message, a 10-second wait, a button to skip the next video, or all three. The option to skip, alone or with the other two, had the strongest effect. The wait also reduced viewing. The message alone did not.

In plain words: being offered an easy “no” mattered more than being told why.

What are the limits of the one sec study?

The main limits are no control group, self-selected users, a six-week window, and a co-author who created one sec. The authors discuss most of these themselves:

• No control group in the field study. Everyone had one sec installed, so week one is already “with the pause.” The authors write that a trial with a randomly assigned group not using one sec is the next step.
• Self-selected users. Participants were people who chose to install one sec. The authors note this “self-selection bias,” and that people who dropped out rated their own use as less of a problem.
• Opens, not total time. The 57% is about openings. Time spent and satisfaction came from surveys.
• Six weeks. The study doesn’t say what happens after that.
• The lab part used videos, not phones. It isolates the ingredients, but in a setting built for the test.
• Disclosure. The paper’s competing-interests statement says co-author Frederik Riedel “is the originator of one sec.”

None of this makes the result wrong. It means the finding is “a pause cut app opens for motivated new users over six weeks,” not “a pause fixes phone habits for everyone.”

Do other studies show the same thing?

Yes, several smaller studies point in the same direction, and they add two useful details: more effort stops more opens, and too much effort frustrates people.

Across these studies, friction scales: in LocknType, a bigger task stopped more opens. And people push back: GoalKeeper found more frustration with stricter lockouts, and the 2026 study was built around people who had switched their nudges off.

Why would a short pause work at all?

Because a lot of phone checking is habit, and habits run on cues. Psychologists Wendy Wood and David Neal describe habits as responses triggered by the context they were learned in, without a goal in between (Psychological Review, 2007). You pick up the phone in line, in bed or at a red light because that is where you always do.

Research on phones fits that picture:

• Checking habits. A 2012 paper by Oulasvirta and colleagues in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing described a “checking habit”: brief, repeated looks at content that is quick to reach. Their field data suggest these checks are reinforced by small “rewards” of new information that arrive almost instantly.
• Most checks are self-started. A 2021 study in Computers in Human Behavior filmed 37 people’s daily phone use with wearable cameras. Of 1,130 interactions, 89% were started by the user, not by a notification.
• We are bad at counting. A 2015 study in PLOS ONE compared 23 people’s real use over two weeks with their estimates. Estimates of how many times they used their phone did not match what the phone logged.

A pause works on the first step of that loop. It puts a moment of choice between the cue and the feed, right where the cue would otherwise lead straight into the app. That fits the one sec result, which is about openings: the pause acts at the door.

Does planning ahead help too?

Planning ahead with if-then plans helps people reach goals in general, though that research is not about phones. A 2006 meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology looked at “implementation intentions,” plans in the form “if situation Y happens, then I will do X.” Across 94 independent tests, these plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = .65).

For phones, an if-then plan might be “If I get into bed, then the phone goes on the dresser.” A scheduled block is a similar idea written down in advance, though no study we found tested app schedules as implementation intentions.

Expect change to be slow and uneven. In a study published online in 2009 in the European Journal of Social Psychology, 96 volunteers repeated a new daily habit for 12 weeks. The time it took to get close to fully automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, measured with a self-report scale.

What does this mean for choosing an app blocker?

The research supports a pause with an easy way out, and it was done on one specific app. In practice:

• If you want the tool that was studied, that is one sec. It is the only app in this category we found with a peer-reviewed field study. It costs $19.99 a year in the US App Store as of September 25, 2026, has a free version for one app, and runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and in browsers.
• Other pause apps use the same idea (ScreenZen’s wait, Clearspace’s breath or exercise). We found no comparable published study of their own, so the one sec numbers don’t transfer to them automatically.
• Stricter is not always better. A harder task stops more opens, but GoalKeeper found more frustration, and many people switch friction off. The tool you keep using beats the strict one you delete.
• A pause on every open is one design, not the only one. If your trouble happens at set times, like in bed or in the first hour of work, a pause only at those times may fit better.

That last point is how Calma works. Calma is an app blocker for iPhone that rests the apps you pick during the times you choose, like 10 PM to 7 AM, with a calm block screen instead of a wall. Its open limits are the closest thing to one sec: you choose how many times a day an app can open, and each open shows an Open app button. Calma has not been studied, so we make no claim about what it does for your habits. For a side-by-side, see Calma vs one sec.

How can you test a pause on yourself?

Run a small, two-week experiment. It costs little and shows what works for you.

1. Pick one to three apps you open on reflex, like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
2. Note your baseline. Go to Settings > Screen Time, tap Daily Average, then Week, and scroll to Pickups. Write down last week’s pickups and your most used apps. (Path from Apple’s iOS 27 guide.)
3. Add one kind of friction. A pause on every open, an open limit, or a block during one time window. Change one thing at a time.
4. Check again after one and two weeks, using the same Screen Time screen instead of your memory. Estimates of how often you pick up your phone are often off.
5. Keep what you’d keep using. If the tool annoys you, make it lighter before you give up on it.

Per-app guides for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube cover the Screen Time and in-app settings step by step. If doomscrolling is the pattern, start with what doomscrolling is and why a pause helps.

Sources

All checked on September 25, 2026, through each publisher’s DOI record.

1. Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., and Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. PNAS, 120(8). Full text on PubMed Central.
2. Kim, J., Park, J., Lee, H., Ko, M., and Lee, U. (2019). LocknType: Lockout task intervention for discouraging smartphone app use. CHI 2019.
3. Kim, J., Jung, H., Ko, M., and Lee, U. (2019). GoalKeeper: Exploring interaction lockout mechanisms for regulating smartphone use. Proc. ACM IMWUT, 3(1).
4. Lyngs, U., Lukoff, K., Slovak, P., et al. (2020). ‘I just want to hack myself to not get distracted’. CHI 2020.
5. Peña-Albert, A. K., Ingram, S., Khazaal, Y., et al. (2026). Restoring engagement in digital self-control tools using nudge reconfiguration prompts. JMIR Formative Research, 10.
6. Wood, W., and Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4).
7. Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L., and Raita, E. (2012). Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16. Online June 2011.
8. Heitmayer, M., and Lahlou, S. (2021). Why are smartphones disruptive? An empirical study of smartphone use in real-life contexts. Computers in Human Behavior, 116.
9. Andrews, S., Ellis, D. A., Shaw, H., and Piwek, L. (2015). Beyond self-report: Tools to compare estimated and real-world smartphone use. PLOS ONE.
10. Gollwitzer, P. M., and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38.
11. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6). Online July 2009.
12. one sec on the App Store (prices) and one sec FAQ (free version, platforms).