Why locks fail

You already know this from the inside. Focus mode, app limits, grayscale, Screen Time — they help until they don’t. The moment you remember the bypass, the restriction was only a delay.

Psychological reactance (Brehm) predicts that a freedom taken away becomes more desirable. A lock can increase the pull of the thing locked. Shame-based blockers can also make people feel worse without changing the cue-response loop — especially when the tool treats a slip as a moral failure.

Reviews of digital-addiction interventions are honest about the evidence: it is still weak, and many apps treat the symptom (minutes on screen) without the cause (internal triggers: boredom, anxiety, loneliness). A 2025 umbrella review in JMIR concluded that current interventions to reduce digital addiction are not strong. That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason not to trust a streak counter.

Blockers are environment design. They work as a Ulysses contract when you set them in a calm hour and cannot quietly undo them — a second device, a password you do not know, handing the phone to someone else (Lembke’s self-binding). Software you can disable is not self-binding. It is a suggestion.

Still cannot block Instagram. No website can. Its job is the part blockers skip: sit with the internal trigger, replace the behavior, tell the truth, wait long enough for the baseline to move.