Disrupting Digital Habits Among Danish Adolescence: Evidence from 1.2 Million Social Media Interactions

Adolescents frequently report spending more time on social media than they intend, yet evidence on scalable interventions that reduce habitual use without harming well-being remains limited. We conducted a randomized field experiment with 269 Danish adolescents aged 13–17 years to test whether reintroducing decision points at moments of access can disrupt habitual social media use and reduce unintentional, habit-driven engagement. Participants’ smartphone activity was continuously logged across six weeks, yielding more than 1.2 million recorded interactions. After two weeks, participants were randomly assigned to one of three interventions delivered at app entry: reflection prompts, usage planning, or brief waiting delays.Compared with baseline, planning and waiting interventions reduced total daily social media use by 33.8\% and 38.0\%, respectively, whereas reflection alone produced no significant change. These reductions were driven primarily by changes at the point of access: adolescents attempted to open social media apps less frequently and, when prompted, were substantially more likely to abandon an access attempt before the app opened. When access did occur, engagement was consolidated into fewer but longer sessions, consistent with a shift away from frequent, automatic checking toward more deliberate use. Across all conditions, reduced use was not accompanied by declines in self-reported well-being, satisfaction, or social connectedness.Together, these results demonstrate that introducing brief, autonomy-preserving decision points at app entry can reduce adolescents’ daily social media use by more than one-third, highlighting access-based frictions as a powerful and scalable lever for addressing habitual digital behavior.