When Digital Connectivity Drivers Meet Digital Disconnection: A Cross-Country Study on Smartphone Checking, Digital Disconnection Strategies, and Digital Stress

In today's digitized societies, where constant connectivity is perceived as a social norm, many people voluntarily seek temporary digital disconnection to balance out benefits and harms. Given that any direct effectiveness of digital disconnection is limited, recent approaches emphasized its conditionality. Conducted in two culturally dissimilar countries (the United States and Indonesia), the present large-scale cross-sectional youth surveys ( N s = 1,922 and 2,107, respectively) explored whether different popular feature- and rules-based digital disconnection strategies (digital detox app use vs. reflective smartphone disengagement vs. digital solitude) may serve as an ambivalent moderator for relationships between habitual and compulsive smartphone checking, on one side, and digital stress experiences, on the other. For U.S. youth only, results indeed suggested that reflective smartphone disengagement might minimize detrimental side effects of firm checking habits, whereas it exacerbates links to digital stress for people who struggle with smartphone checking compulsiveness.