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By Dr. David Traster, DC, MS, DACNB
Co-owner, The Neurologic Wellness Institute
Boca Raton • Chicago • Waukesha • Wood Dale
Most people think their phone is a tool.
A convenience.
A connector.
A harmless slab of glass that happens to vibrate a little too often.
But if you sit long enough with people who struggle with brain fog, anxiety, dizziness, migraines, attention problems, or a vague sense of being “off,” a different pattern starts to emerge.
It’s not that the brain is broken.
It’s that the brain is never allowed to finish a thought.
Attention Is Not Willpower — It’s a Physiological State
Attention is often framed as a moral issue.
You’re focused… or you’re lazy.
You concentrate… or you don’t try hard enough.
Neuroscience tells a very different story.
Sustained attention is a state the brain enters when prediction, sensory input, and internal energy are aligned. It depends on timing, inhibition, and the ability to hold a stable internal model long enough for meaning to emerge.
That state is fragile.
And it is especially vulnerable to one thing the human brain doesn't deal with well:
Permanent, on-demand interruption.
A Simple Experiment With an Uncomfortable Result
Recently, researchers ran a deceptively simple experiment.
They didn’t ask people to delete social media.
They didn’t take away phones.
They didn’t enforce mindfulness or meditation.
They did something far more precise.
They blocked mobile internet access on smartphones for two weeks.
Calls still worked.
Texts still worked.
Laptops and desktops still worked.
The phone remained a phone.
It just stopped being a portal to infinite novelty.
What happened next should make all of us pause.
The Brain Changed — Quickly
Within two weeks, participants showed:
Improved sustained attention, measured objectively — not just self-report
Reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression
Higher subjective well-being
Less mental fragmentation
More stable mood
The magnitude of attention improvement was striking — roughly equivalent to reversing a decade of attentional aging.
Not from supplements.
Not from training drills.
Not from cognitive therapy.
From silence.
Or more accurately — from the absence of constant digital unpredictability.
Why the Brain Responded So Strongly
To understand why this worked, we need to talk about how the brain actually functions.
The brain is not a passive receiver of information.
It is a prediction engine.
Moment to moment, it is asking:
What matters right now?
What can be safely ignored?
What deserves energy?
What can wait?
Mobile internet collapses those distinctions.
Every vibration carries equal potential importance.
Every notification competes with the present moment.
Every pause becomes an opportunity for stimulation.
The brain never gets to close the loop.
And a brain that cannot close loops cannot stabilize attention.
Fragmentation Becomes the Baseline
When mobile internet is always available, the nervous system adapts — but not in a healthy way.
Attention becomes shallow
Task switching increases
Internal noise rises
Emotional regulation weakens
Cognitive fatigue appears earlier
This isn’t addiction in the classic sense.
It’s attentional erosion.
The brain is forced into a constant state of partial readiness — alert enough to respond, but never settled enough to integrate.
Over time, this state feels like:
Brain fog
Anxiety without a clear cause
Restlessness
Difficulty reading or thinking deeply
Fatigue that sleep doesn’t fully fix
Sound familiar?
The Most Interesting Finding Wasn’t the Screen Time
Yes, screen time dropped significantly when mobile internet was blocked.
But that wasn’t the most important change.
What mattered was what replaced it.
People didn’t just stare at walls.
They:
Spent more time outside
Exercised more
Talked to people face-to-face
Moved their bodies without distraction
Let their minds wander again
In other words, they re-entered the sensory world.
And the brain responded exactly as it always has.
Attention Is Built Through Embodiment
Deep attention doesn’t come from forcing focus.
It comes from stable sensory input, predictable environments, and embodied movement.
The vestibular system.
The visual system.
Proprioception.
Breathing.
Rhythm.
When these systems are allowed to synchronize without interruption, attention emerges naturally.
Mobile internet disrupts this synchronization constantly.
Not dramatically.
Not violently.
But relentlessly.
This Is Not an Anti-Technology Argument
This matters.
The goal is not to romanticize a pre-digital past or shame modern life.
Mobile internet is useful.
Powerful.
Often necessary.
But usefulness does not mean neutrality.
The brain pays a price for permanent access — and until recently, we lacked strong causal evidence showing just how much.
Now we have it.
And the conclusion is uncomfortable:
The brain functions better when it is not constantly reachable.
What This Means for Healing Brains
For people dealing with dizziness, migraines, anxiety, post-concussion symptoms, long COVID, or chronic stress, this finding is not peripheral.
It is central.
A nervous system trying to heal cannot do so while being continuously interrupted.
Neuroplasticity requires:
Repetition
Stability
Completion
Recovery
Constant mobile access fragments all four.
This may explain why some patients do “everything right” — exercises, supplements, therapy — yet plateau.
The brain never gets quiet enough to consolidate change.
The Real Intervention Wasn’t Disconnection — It Was Re-Connection
The paradox of the study is this:
By disconnecting from mobile internet, people reconnected with:
Their bodies
Their environment
Other humans
Their own thoughts
Attention returned because meaning returned.
The brain remembered what it feels like to stay with something long enough for depth to emerge.
A Question Worth Sitting With
The question this research leaves us with isn’t whether smartphones are bad.
It’s this:
What kind of brain state does your daily digital environment demand?
A state of readiness?
Or a state of presence?
A state of fragmentation?
Or a state of coherence?
Because the brain will adapt to whatever you ask of it.
The only question is whether that adaptation is helping you think, feel, and move — or quietly pulling you further away from yourself.
And sometimes, the most powerful neurological intervention isn’t something you add.
It’s something you finally allow to be absent.
References
Castelo, N., Kushlev, K., Ward, A. F., Esterman, M., & Reiner, P. B. (2025). Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being. PNAS Nexus, 4(2), pgaf017.
Esterman, M., Noonan, S. K., Rosenberg, M., & DeGutis, J. (2013). In the zone or zoning out? Tracking behavioral and neural fluctuations during sustained attention. Cerebral Cortex, 23(11), 2712–2723.
McEwen, B. S., & Morrison, J. H. (2013). The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron, 79(1), 16–29.
Raichle, M. E. (2015). The brain’s default mode network. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 38, 433–447.
Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25–42.
