Even taking a short break from your smartphone can reverse years of brain damage.

And that's according to a new study.

The study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, involved more than 400 participants with an average age of 32.

They were restricted from internet access on their smartphones for 14 days.

Researchers say in just two weeks, the participants showed improvement and their sustained attention that was equivalent to reversing ten years of age related cognitive decline.

To mental health experts we spoke with at Mara Health Care in Kentucky say the results are not surprising.

More about that in today's medical news, as they give tips on how to detox from your smartphone.

What I find to be the most significant is that age related cognitive decline, which is really talking to, like our memory, our attention span, being able to focus and be task oriented.

It's kind of those things that you might see in the elderly, like, harder to keep up with things.

I think that that really shows up in our therapy practices.

And I think that it's reinforcing a lot of things that we're seeing here lately when it comes to social media.

Because we're not learning to sit with some discomfort.

It's that endless scrolling.

And it really highlights the fact that just like when you're riding a bicycle or you're exercising, like if you don't do it every day, you kind of lose your muscles, right?

And so when you're not using your brain, every day, with critical thinking, you kind of lose that skill and you have to relearn it.

For on our social media, if we're on our smartphones a lot, you know, we are going to be missing out on the real world, and we're not going to be really present, and we're not going to be using those critical thinking and problem solving skills because, you know, we have just the next thing at our fingertips to just scroll over to.

But I would say that what's significant for me is that this is a high impact behavioral factor.

It's a behavioral intervention that they're studying.

And I think that just shows that some of the things that we do do in therapy and some of the things that we do recommend from a medication standpoint.

You know, it's not just medications that can help with mental health problems.

It's our behaviors.

It's our lifestyle.

And I think that that's so important that, you know, looking at okay, like what does this behavioral intervention tell us about how our lifestyle affects the way we feel and the way we function.

We're seeing studies on, you know, two year olds who've been just exposed to like passive screen time where they're watching TV or they're watching, you know, a video screen.

We're already seeing changes in the white matter of those, children who, do, you know, have the screen time versus those who don't.

There are structural changes.

There's actually a decrease in the white matter if you have more, if those kids have more than two hours a day and then later on those, those same children will are more likely to have some learning, impairments or cognitive delay.

I think one of the things that we can do is that all of our phones allow us to set perimeters, we can set like on iPhones.

You can set a focus time where you're not getting we get about 63 notifications a day, and most of them are meaningless notifications.

But it draws our attention onto our phone.

And once we're on it, we're in all of the different apps, right?

And so even turning off notifications, setting a focus time, most phones also allow you to select how long you can spend on a specific app.

But I think also, just if I want to get on the internet, I'm going to use the computer or when we're at dinner, I'm going to set my phone someplace completely separate so that I have to make an effort to go get it.

If you use it as your alarm clock set it across the room on something instead of right there next to you in bed.

So the first thing that you do in the morning isn't get on your phone.

It's just building habits on habits.

We already have.