Discovered truths about Google’s digital habit feature

Digital Wellbeing tools aren’t designed only to help you manage your screen time and sleep habits, but they are also there to raise your awareness. Sometimes, you might pick up your phone, unlock it, and start fiddling with an app without realizing the app you’re using. I do this all the time with Reddit, where I subconsciously open it.

According to a 2025 survey conducted by Harmony Healthcare IT (1,000 respondents), Americans spend an average of 5 hours and 16 minutes per day on their phones. That’s around a 14% increase compared to data gathered in 2024. That equates to more than half a working or school day spent on our phones.

Unfortunately, digital addiction is a real thing. That’s why Google brought Digital Wellbeing tools to help combat this ongoing issue. Thankfully, you can freely enable these tools through your Android settings, whether you own a Pixel device or another budget option; you can also leverage these tools to gain some surprising insights into your personal phone habits.

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Learn how many notifications you get in a day

Find out which apps are giving you the most grief

One reason we feel almost obligated to check our phones is due to the notifications. Unless you explicitly set up your notifications to distinguish between essential and less important ones, you’re likely to check your phone to find out where it is from. Notifications can be a primary reason why you feel the need to be on your phone, as many apps demand your attention.

When you want to gain insight into your alerts, Google’s Digital Wellbeing can provide that for you. Google’s Digital Wellbeing tools tell you how many notifications you receive per day. It even tells you which apps are responsible for sending them, as you might find that some apps are more disruptive or demanding of your attention than others, and uninstalling or muting them may be the key to reducing your screen time.

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Learn what apps you use most daily

Some apps are far more addictive than others

The most obvious insight you gain from Google’s Digital Wellbeing tools is learning which apps you use the most. The neat part is that you can understand this through a graph (sorted by day or hourly). Sometimes, it might not even be about a particular third-party app. You’d be surprised about your activity in general. For me, I spend a considerable amount of time adjusting my device’s settings and browsing the Google Play Store, which I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked into the data.

It also tells you how long you’re accessing them. To me, it’s essential to know what’s dictating my screen time since I’d rather limit the lengthy, unimportant apps than the ones I check daily but only spend a few minutes with.

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Learn what websites you visit daily

Web browsing consumes more time than you think

Aside from learning about the apps you use, you can learn about the websites you visit daily if you’re using Chrome. When you visit the activity page, you can add permissions to show your Chrome activity in Digital Wellbeing.

When you check your activity, the websites you’ve visited are displayed. It’s also split by how long you spend browsing those websites. Similar to app activity, your activity can be sorted by the amount of time spent daily or hourly. I found it interesting that I duplicated my activity between the website version and some apps, which helped me determine which content type captured my attention the most.

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Learn when you are getting the most screen time

You can discover some interesting patterns

Aside from learning websites and apps that take up the most screen time. You can also learn more when you’re most active. For example, I spend most of my screen time in the evenings, and I am particularly active on weekends. That’s partly because it’s when I take breaks from work (around dinner time and late in the evening) and also when I read the news and social media. I’ve also learned that I spend a considerable amount of time on my phone during my lunch break, as it’s far easier to browse on a smaller device while I’m eating.

Gaining insight into my screen time habits, particularly when I use my phone excessively, helps me become more aware of my behavior. Even now, since I spend a lot of unnecessary time browsing on it over lunch, it motivates me to try and change that by picking up a paperback book to read instead.

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Learn how many times you open an app

You might be opening apps you don’t even use

Not only do Google’s Digital Wellbeing tools tell you about the apps and websites you use, but you can also learn more about how often you open up an app. When you select the View activity details option, you can choose Times opened from the dropdown menu above the graph. Above the graph, it will tell you the total number of unlocks you complete in a day or week. Below the graph, you will find the apps that you’ve opened. Choosing an app from the list will produce a separate graph that can be broken down by the time you’ve opened that particular app, either hourly or daily.

I find this insight particularly interesting, given how many unlocks I perform on my phone. For example, I wasn’t the biggest believer in enabling Always on Display on my phone. I thought it was just contributing to battery drain and wasn’t useful enough to keep it on. However, using it has helped me reduce the time I spend using my phone.

My most important notifications appear below the time and date on my Always on Display. As a result, leaving the Always on Display on makes it so that I am far less tempted to unlock my phone to check my apps. So, Google’s Digital Wellbeing would reflect that I unlock my phone less and open fewer apps than before due to my change in habits.

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Learn about your sleeping

Bedtime mode helps with sleep health awareness

Bedtime mode is a built-in Digital Wellbeing tool that helps you improve your sleep habits by limiting your screen time. You won’t gain statistics that tell you about your sleeping habits — you’d want to pair it with a sleep-tracking app or use an actual sleep tracker for that. But how you use Bedtime mode is still telling.

For example, when I started using Bedtime mode to reduce my screen time and lower the number of notifications I receive, I found that I fell asleep 30-40 minutes earlier than before. Sometimes, I slip and browse Reddit right before bed to read TV and movie discussions, and it has kept me up longer than I intended. To me, Bedtime mode made a noticeable difference in my sleeping habits.

If you find that you’re still picking up your phone during Bedtime mode, you can also set up screen time reminders to encourage you to stay off your apps while checking your phone. Bedtime mode is excellent at helping you gain awareness of your sleep and the actions you need to take to improve it.

Your eyes could use the break

Balancing screen time between your devices can be challenging, especially if your job requires it. But your eyes can use the break. When you spend a lot of time looking at screens, it strains your eyes. But if you can’t physically separate from your phone or computer because your livelihood depends on it, consider adding blue light filters and following the 20-20-20 rule.