My Journey With the Balance Phone and More
A Review and Reflection.
By Dr Silja Litvin
The Background
As a psychologist and founder of a mental health company who developed a digital mental health app for school students, I have been driven by a single question for nearly 20 years: how can we better protect and heal young people? Through my research, I have had access to real-world, live user mental health data from around the globe, including measures such as the GAD-7 (anxiety) and PHQ-9 (depression).
The user data of hundreds of thousands of young people has given me deep insight into the struggles and challenges that young people face from day to day. But it was the top three symptoms, along with specific user data, that flagged a disconcerting issue for me.
Young people significantly struggled with:
- Sleep hygiene (trouble falling asleep/staying asleep)
- Fatigue/low energy
- Trouble concentrating
Parents see this reflected in their everyday life in the form of crankiness, bad school performance, and even less easily spotted things like weight gain.
This is actually not surprising: Our data showed that 93% of the users logged in at least once a week between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Mind you, these are 12–22-year-olds. I found that shocking: what is a 13-year-old doing online at 2 a.m.? The above symptoms, which are key indicators for depression and anxiety, were clearly linked to the hours spent awake during the night.
More data emerged, painting a picture of addiction and the inability of young people to manage their media consumption: 85% of all teenagers say they are regularly awoken by notifications, and it takes them up to two hours to disengage from their phones and fall asleep again.
The Reluctant Admission
Fast forward a few dozen papers, some deep introspection, and multiple talks with parents on the dangers of unfettered access to a smartphone or smart devices, and I came to the uncomfortable understanding that I, Dr Silja Litvin, was also too ‘weak’ to use my phone’s social media capabilities with moderation:
I regularly reset my 30-minutes-a-day Instagram limit and found myself grabbing my phone to go on YouTube feeds whenever I had a second of waiting; unable to bear the nothingness of my own thoughts, as the silence rang through my dopamine-depleted brain like a gong. I deleted and reinstalled Instagram multiple times, tried to ‘curate’ my feed to lessen the brain rot, and logged into YouTube via the search engine to make it less pleasant – but I had to face reality:
I needed a dumb phone.
So, after a lot of research and talking with owners of different types of dumb phones, I realised that if I opted for a completely basic device, like the old Nokia Brick, I would still need to keep my iPhone for essentials like Uber, WhatsApp, and Google. And I assumed I would creep my way back into old habits. If I couldn’t rely on behavioural engineering to make myself use media the way I intended, then I would have to engineer my environment in a way that forced me to: Curbing screentime habits is no small feat when you’re up against a multi-billion-dollar industry of persuasive design built to suck in our attention, millisecond by millisecond.
The Katabasis
With this in mind, I decided to try the Balance Phone, which I was half dreading and half anticipating with excitement. A Balance Phone is an Android phone with a system that blocks apps and features commonly considered unhealthy or unhelpful, such as social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. It also blocks pornographic and other harmful content, effectively removing most elements of the attention economy.
When it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised by its elegance and by the beautiful booklet that accompanied it, making my moment of self-perceived moral superiority a gently commercial and, paradoxically, Instagrammable one.
After announcing my decision to try the Balance Phone, I encountered two persistent responses: The first was the surprise that I, an adult and psychologist, no less, was unable to control my media consumption simply by uninstalling an app. The second was that I must truly dislike myself to inflict the horror of platform switching upon myself. I had never had anything but an iPhone, and I was warned that it would be The Worst.
It was.
During my ordeal with the Android phone hosting the Balance Phone management system, I have seldom felt as frustrated, enraged, and helpless as I did while trying to find menu items I had been mindlessly using for the past 15 years on an iPhone. Brute stubbornness and the desire to get off Instagram and give my brain a break were the only reasons I managed to persist through to the real challenges that came.
Long story short, between the 15th of December 2025 and January 5th 2026, I exchanged over 25 emails with the very friendly and emotionally supportive Balance Phone customer service, spent at least three hours on ChatGPT and various forums, factory reset the phone three times, spent four to six hours unsuccessfully downloading and transferring data, and made a visit to an IT shop in Cascais with two whiny five-year-olds before I decided it was time to let go and surrender the phone back to its maker. Somehow, I was not able to transfer my WhatsApp data to the Balance Phone because it operates as a managed device, with a device-level security policy in place. Unfortunately, a dealbreaker, with years and years of chats having archived my conversations like a Wikipedia of my life that I am not ready to sacrifice.
The funny thing is that I had just gotten off the phone with a mom whose 17-year-old daughter was able to transfer her WhatsApp data without using Smart Switch a data transfer app, which I was not able to do.
The Reemergence
As a psychologist and an eternal optimist, I was able to reframe the ordeal with renewed resolve. During my migration battle, I had broken my iPhone screen and was completely phoneless over the Christmas days, forcing me to go cold turkey into the dreaded media detox. By the time I got my iPhone repaired, I found it easy to delete YouTube and Instagram, my two main vices, another victory of environmental engineering over willpower. I said I would give it another go, and if I cheated myself again, I would install a child lock on my phone, managed by my husband.
The First Week
After the first week of deleting my social media, I was able to understand which parts of my phone use were habits, which were boredom, and which were genuine need. I only went on YouTube once, to show the kids a video on tsunamis. During the first few days, while my iPhone was broken, I found myself reaching for my phone numerous times an hour to look at this or that. It was frustrating, but interestingly not as bad as I thought, considering I had been spending a minimum of two hours a day on media before that.
The most difficult part of having a phone without anything interesting on it was the little pockets of waiting. The 4.35 minutes it took for the popcorn to finish in the microwave were spent contemplating my facial features reflected in the microwave glass. The minutes it took my husband to settle down for movie night stretched into aeons of boredom as I frantically looked for a tiny dopamine hit in my living room. Moments in the ‘Quiet Place’ left me missing the times my kids would invade my privacy by following me literally anywhere.
The upside is that I read two books during the week without checking my phone every chapter: the second book was easier. I brushed up on my philosophy with AI, and I can feel a real change in how patient I am with the kids. I feel that five more minutes at the playground no longer hurts because there is nothing better awaiting anyway. Having birthed snails, I can now watch them ooze in and out of the car in slow motion with much less of the nervous energy I used to have. Maybe one day it will not upset me at all. I feel clearer, more connected, and less irritable.
Oh, and writing is much, much easier…
After The First Month
Dr Anna Lembke, author of ‘Dopamine Nation’, says it takes two weeks for the dopamine system to reset, and at least a month for traces of reactions to addictive substances to return to normal (scientists are calling for social media and media-adjacent addictions, like porn addiction, to be classified similarly to substance abuse). That is why rehab is usually a minimum of 28 days.
Twenty-eight days of re-learning habits, fighting impulses, and self-regulating without a numbing agent like social media has freed up so much time that I was able to fall in love again with learning, creating, and sitting a little more comfortably in silence.
Now don’t get me wrong: waiting at the cashier while watching the little old lady fish for pennies, white-knuckling the frustration like some kind of lunatic, still sucks. But oh, I feel like I have re-entered an era of reasoning, connection, and understanding. Sometimes I catch myself feeling like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, connecting the dots of my thoughts on the giant blue screen of life.
All jokes aside, I was, and still am, a bit shocked by how much apathy and brain fog were ruling my life for so long. What have I unequivocally missed out on? What small joys did I miss on a regular basis? How many flowers growing alongside the road did I plomp my butt on while scrolling through rage-bait?
The Realisation: Environment Hacking
The biggest realisation I have come to is that we, at this point in our evolutionary timeline, are not equipped to stand with willpower alone against the multi-billion-dollar attention economy. All the while, the beast of an AI is measuring our every nanosecond to flood us with what our prehistoric brains are built to work hard for. No one can fault themselves. No parent can expect that from their child. The only way to protect yourself is through Environment Hacking: reducing exposure.
It appears that my husband won’t have to manage a child account on my behalf (yet… he remains a valuable backup plan for moments of weakness). I am still going strong, over a month in, and I am actually tweaking the hacking day by day. I have now gone grayscale on my phone (it is a terrible, horrible, no good experience). I am deleting my Facebook account that I have had since just a few years after it went live, with Instagram to follow. I have turned looping videos off on Spotify, and I will be keeping the phone out of my bedroom.
Once I manage a balanced way to deal with WhatsApp, every mother’s control centre, I will be able to feel content using my phone the way I want to: as a tool that adds incredible value instead of a data-mining device selling my life moments for pennies to big tech.
Looping back to the Balance Phone
I think a mix of bad luck, misunderstanding, and tech ineptness led me to drop the Balance Phone on my behalf.
Had I not been interested in my WhatsApp feed, I would probably be happily using it. After speaking with tens of parents and their children about the Balance Phone, I wholeheartedly endorse it as a first phone to bridge the years between giving one’s child the freedom and autonomy to roam the streets with friends while still being contactable, using the phone as the great tool it is for Uber, Maps, and music, and then graduating onto a non-restricted smartphone after having undergone digital literacy training that the Healthy Digital Childhood Alliance and others are currently working on.
It is the perfect communication device that smartphones had set out to be in the glory days of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tech advent, instead of the attention economy machine it is now.
Silja Litvin
DISCLAIMERS:
- I want to be fully transparent that I am endorsing the Balance Phone company entirely of my own free will. There is no commercial partnership, affiliate arrangement, or financial kickback of any kind for me or for the Healthy Digital Childhood Alliance.
We reached out to the Balance Phone team after publishing this blog to offer them the opportunity to comment or clarify any points. This is what they shared:
Comment from the Balance Phone Team:
“We’re very grateful to Dr Litvin for taking the time to share such a thoughtful and honest reflection of our product, company, and community. Hearing directly from users, especially when they present both the strengths of our product and the areas where we can improve, is essential to us. It’s the most crucial step in learning, improving, and building a product that better serves our users.”
The Balance Phone team has also kindly made a €10 discount code available for our readers. This is simply a gesture of collaboration and support for families and is not part of any commercial agreement. Just use SILJA10
Chat GPT 5.2 was used with the following prompts:
- Proofread for grammar and clarity. Do not change tone or sentiment.
- You are the Editor-in-Chief of a high-quality magazine read by thoughtful, time-pressed parents. You are reviewing the introduction to a product review written by a psychologist. Please provide detailed editorial notes that question and evaluate: the quality and strength of the writing the premise and whether it is convincingly established the clarity, flow, and overall structure the enjoyability and engagement level for a parent audience Your feedback should be specific, constructive, and written in a professional, editorial tone. Do not rewrite the text—only provide editing notes that would help the author improve the introduction. Provide them per paragraph.
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