Here's something slightly annoying to know about yourself: you almost certainly scroll more on holiday than you do at home.

It's not that you like your phone more in warm weather. It's not that the wi-fi at your Airbnb is suspiciously good. It's that the invisible machinery that usually interrupts you; the office, the commute, the school run, the routines, isn't there. And without competition, the phone wins by default.

This is what behavioral researchers call a default behavior. When your environment doesn't direct you toward something specific, you go to the easiest option available. For most of us in 2026, that option is the phone. Not because we're weak. Not because we lack discipline. Just because it's there, it's easy, and it's very, very good at being both of those things simultaneously.

A 2025 study in Frontiers in Public Health found that problematic smartphone use had risen measurably between 2022 and 2024 and the increase tracked closely with reduced structure in daily life. The less external shape a day has, the more the phone fills it. Holiday weeks, slow Sundays, sick days at home: these are all fertile ground for the scroll.

It's worth sitting with that for a second, because it reframes the whole thing. It's not a character flaw. It's a design problem.

Why this is useful, not just depressing

A 2025 study published in PNAS Nexus found something that changes how you might think about all of this. Researchers blocked participants' mobile internet access for two weeks and found improvements in attention, wellbeing, and mental health that were — in the researchers' own words comparable to antidepressants and equivalent to being ten years cognitively younger.

Ten years younger. From putting the phone down.

The remarkable part wasn't the magnitude, though. It was how ordinary the mechanism was: people who weren't constantly connected naturally spent more time outside, socialising in person, and moving around. Nobody told them to. Nobody gave them a program to follow or a habit tracker to fill in. It just happened, because the default changed.

You don't have to block your internet to get something out of this. But understanding that the default is the mechanism, not willpower, not motivation, not having the right mindset, is genuinely freeing. 

What holidays reveal that ordinary life hides

There's something else worth noticing here. Holiday scrolling often feels worse than everyday scrolling. More guilty. More hollow. Because you're surrounded by the sea, the people you love, the meal you paid too much for and you're still reaching for the rectangle.

That contrast is useful information. It's your brain noticing the gap between what you're doing and what you actually want to be doing. Most of the time, that gap is invisible because everyday life is loud enough to drown it out. On holiday, it gets quiet enough to hear.

So if you come back from a trip feeling like you wasted it on your phone, that's not a reason to feel bad about yourself. It's a signal that you noticed. And noticing is where change actually starts.

How to shift the default without making it a project

The goal here isn't a phone-free holiday. That's a lot of pressure and honestly, you're going to want to take photos. The goal is just to nudge the default slightly — enough that the phone has to compete a bit more for your attention, rather than winning by walkover.

A few things that actually work:

• Name a phone-free stretch. One meal, one morning, the first hour at the beach. Tell someone else so it becomes a shared default instead of a solo resolution. Shared defaults are stickier, you're not just relying on yourself to hold the line.
• Put it somewhere inconvenient.In the bag instead of the pocket. In the other room instead of the table. On the charger while you eat. The friction doesn't need to be large. It just needs to exist. Even a few extra seconds of effort is enough to make you pause and ask whether you actually want to open it.
• Notice the boredom and let it be. This one's harder than it sounds. Boredom isn't a failure state — it's actually what your brain looks like when it's resting and consolidating. The phone kills boredom so efficiently that most of us have stopped experiencing it entirely. The first few minutes of sitting with nothing are uncomfortable. The minutes after that are often something else: an idea, a conversation, a nap, just looking at where you are.
• Leave one thing behind. Not forever, just for a walk, or a swim, or a dinner. The research consistently shows that the mere presence of a phone on the table reduces conversation quality, even when nobody's using it. Its absence, on the other hand, does something quietly good.

None of this requires a grand commitment or a lifestyle overhaul. It's just small adjustments to the default, enough to let the holiday compete on fair terms.

The scroll will still be there after the holiday. The holiday won't.