It’s Election Day, which means tonight a lot of us will be lying in bed at 11:40 p.m., refreshing a map that hasn’t changed in twenty minutes. I know because I’ve done it every cycle. This year I’m trying something different: my phone goes gray at 9 p.m. A grayscale phone is the rare screen-time fix with actual experiments behind it, and in one study it cut daily use by an average of 39 minutes. But the same research has a catch that nobody posting “I made my phone black and white!” videos seems to mention, and it changes how you should use it.
A grayscale phone works because color is the bait
Your phone’s apps are designed to be tapped. The red notification badges, the bright icons, the thumbnails that pop on a feed: color does a lot of that work. Turn the screen gray and the apps don’t change at all, but they get noticeably less appealing to look at. Instagram without color looks like a newspaper’s photo page. That small drop in appeal is enough friction to make you put the thing down sooner.
The best-known evidence comes from Alex Holte, a psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash. In his first study of about 220 students, switching to grayscale cut smartphone use by an average of 39 minutes a day. In a follow-up with nearly 135 participants, many people saw significant drops in both screen time and anxiety levels.
Then there’s a 2023 randomized field experiment published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Researchers split 112 people into three groups: grayscale mode, self-set time limits, or simply tracking their usage. Grayscale produced an immediate, significant drop in objectively measured screen time compared with the tracking group. Time limits worked too, but more slowly and by a smaller amount. Of all the screen-time tricks people swear by, grayscale is one of the few that’s been tested against a control group and come out ahead.
The catch: fewer minutes didn’t mean feeling better
The “I tried it for a week” posts skip what came next. In that 2023 experiment, using the phone less had no immediate causal effect on how good people felt, or on their academic performance. The minutes went down. The mood didn’t automatically go up.
That doesn’t mean grayscale is pointless, and Holte’s follow-up did find lower anxiety for many people. But it tells you something useful about where the benefit comes from. Taking 39 minutes off your phone only helps if those 39 minutes become something better than staring at the ceiling feeling vaguely deprived. If you go gray and then just sit there thinking about the election results you’re not checking, you’ve traded one kind of restlessness for another.
The setting gets you the time. What you do with it decides whether you feel any different.
Thirty-nine minutes a day adds up to 38 hours before New Year’s
I like seeing this as a real number. From today, November 3, through New Year’s Eve is 59 days. If grayscale saves you the 39 minutes a day Holte’s students averaged, that’s 39 times 59, or 2,301 minutes. Divide by 60 and you get about 38 hours between now and the end of the year.
Thirty-eight hours is basically a full work week, landing in the busiest stretch of the year. That’s the shopping you keep putting off, every holiday card, a few novels, or simply going to bed on time for two months. Stretch it to a full year and 39 minutes a day is 14,235 minutes, or about 237 hours. That’s almost six 40-hour work weeks you’re currently spending on a screen you mostly don’t remember using.
Your number will be different, obviously. Check your own baseline first (on an iPhone it’s under Settings, then Screen Time) so you can see what grayscale is doing for you after a week instead of guessing.
Election night is the best night to switch your phone to gray
The timing is better than it sounds. Pew Research Center’s February 2026 report on Americans and the news found that 52% of U.S. adults say they’re worn out by the amount of news, and 60% say they’ve cut back on how much news they get overall. If you’re in that 52%, election night is basically peak exposure, and a gray screen is a lot easier to put down at midnight than a glowing red-and-blue map.
You don’t have to swear off the results either. Check them once, on purpose, at a time you choose, and let the gray screen make the eleventh refresh feel as dull as it is.
A one-tap escape back to color is what keeps grayscale on
The biggest reason people quit grayscale is the first time they need color, like checking whether a sweater is navy or black, or taking a photo of the kids. So make color easy to get back.
On an iPhone, open Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text Size, then Color Filters. Turn Color Filters on and choose Grayscale. Then go to Settings, Accessibility, Accessibility Shortcut, and add Color Filters. Now a triple-click of the side button flips color on and off in a second, and you won’t be tempted to turn the whole thing off in frustration. On Android, the Digital Wellbeing bedtime mode can drain the color from your screen on a schedule, which is a nice way to make it automatic in the evenings.
Then decide where the time goes, because that’s the part the research says matters. Put a book on your nightstand. Leave your phone charging in the kitchen and use a plain alarm clock (and if bedtime is where the time should go, my guide to better sleep has the rest). Text a friend to call you instead of scrolling. Pick one thing, not five. If the news is what keeps you scrolling, these ways to spot and avoid your stress triggers help with the bigger picture.
I’m starting tonight, and I’m keeping it to evenings for the first two weeks so it doesn’t feel like a punishment. If it sticks, I’ll go all day. A grayscale phone won’t fix your relationship with your phone by itself. It just gives you back some time, and you get to decide what to do with it.