Friction will change your behavior
– a science deep dive –
This article is a short science deep dive into the psychological concept of friction. I’ll explain what Friction is, how it works, and how we've implemented it at one sec to support you developing healthier digital habits.
I catch notifications with my fingers before I even have read them, silencing the ping. I open Instagram without realizing it. Muscle memory and brain coordination work in sync: a slightly uncomfortable feeling arises, and before I know it, my thumb’s tapping that app again.
All for a quick dopamine fix… And again, I am getting sucked again in this world full of content. Everytime I have ended up watching passively reels for hours, it’s leaving me with a feeling of lost control.
And I am not alone with it.
There is no stop …
Our use of smartphones is escalating. More than six billion people worldwide own smartphones, forming how we connect, gain knowledge, entertain us and organize our lives.
And with this use, its positive and negative effects on our physical and emotional wellbeing are also scaling up. One factor contributing to the exceleration of some negative effects is the design of those digital environments to avoid a certain experience: Friction. [Boosting digital agency through a self-nudge app. David J. Grüning, 2025]
… because of frictionless UX/UI design
Friction has become an important concept in the early 2000 for UX and UI designers. Friction is avoided by making the user experience seamless and intuitive. This is why friction as a concept is more and more investigated in psychology, researching how “frictionless” environments are affecting us and how friction can be implemented to foster certain positive as well as negative effects. [Grüning, D. J., 2025]
What is Friction?
I asked Dr. David Grüning, lead scientist at one sec. He explained it as follows:
“Friction is the psychological experience of encountering barriers to certain actions, that make those actions more effortful, but not impossible.”
It sounds simple enough: if you try to do something and encounter even a small obstacle, you're less likely to go through with it. This is exactly what happens if you set up one sec interventions - features that make you wait and reflect on yourself - for apps you want to use less.
The Intervention will not only add friction, but also combines it with a substituting behavior. Your attention shifts away from why you wanted to open the app originally – an obstacle effectively lowering the chances that you actually would continue to use the opened app.
Importantly, friction is never meant to block a behavior entirely. It intends to add just enough resistance to make you consider alternatives to this behavior while maintaining your agency of choice. [Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. Grüning & Riedel & Lorenz-Spreen, 2023]
Why Friction Works: Compact Barriers and Added Effort
Where a hard block might feel restrictive or frustrating, adding a small amount of effort can reshape the decision process on how we behave. [Grüning & Riedel & Lorenz-Spreen, 2023]
Instagram isn’t blocked, but now you have to wait, breathe, and look at yourself for a second first. That pause is powerful. It reframes the question from "Can I do this?" to "Do I actually want to do this right now?"
This shifts our attention to the consequences of our behavior. If we understand our behavior as something that can result in positive or negative consequences, friction does become more meaningful.
By implementing friction in a smart way, we can try to reduce the negative outcomes as much as possible (automatic scrolling or mere quick reward learning) while retaining the positive outcomes like social connection, creativity or staying informed. [Grüning, D. J., 2025]
Changing the Decision Environment
What makes one sec effective is how it changes our decision environment. Our digital world is built to be frictionless. Companies build their apps and software deliberately frictionless to make people spend more time in them and exploit human psychology and physiology. [Herzog, S. M., & Hertwig, R., 2025]
Since TikTok started with their short videos without any breaks in-between, every large Social Media platform has adopted this model. This is a prominent indication of how important frictionlessness is to the companies (to increase “engagement” optimally).
This is even reflected in the materials we touch and see: We swipe, tap, flick, and scroll on glass and metal interfaces with no resistance. We don’t even think before acting.
Where we do our decisions, matters, says David:
“A decision environment is every environment in which individuals choose a certain behavior or how to act. By changing it so, you also change the likelihood of those actions.”
By interrupting this seamless flow, friction can give us space to pause, reflect, and decide.
The limitations of Nudging
Adding friction like this is a form of nudging. Nudging refers to implementing small changes in one's environment which are meant to steer users toward better decisions without ultimately restricting their freedom of choice [Thaler & Sunstein, 2021].
The idea behind nudging is that humans have inherent cognitive deficiencies in their decision making. So the nudge tries to correct those momentous mistakes, but is likely to not change behavior in the long end, note Herzog and Hertwig (2025).
This means, it produces a change in behavior, but will not give you the skills to adjust your behavior without them. So if the nudge is removed, it’s common to experience a fallback to the state before the nudge was used.
The problem with a decision maker without skills or knowledge is they have to rely on intransparent nudges from hopefully benevolent choice architects. In the worst case, this can lead to a violation of the user’s autonomy by the implementation of toxic choice architectures.
At one sec, we noticed that for a lasting change in behavior, it’s more important to build on the user’s compentences and boost them in this learning process. So they can adapt them to their individual needs. In the end, users know what is most problematic about their consumption and which apps they want to adress.
Boost yourself instead
That’s why we made one sec so adaptive. Not everyone needs the same strength of intervention or even the same kind of intervention. Users can use one sec to self-nudge their very own interventions as they see fit. This self-nudge is one way to do what is called boosting, in David’s words:
“The idea of Boosting recognizes that changing your behavior sustainably and long-term requires more than a momentary change in your choice architecture.“
People and their situations and reasons of why they use their smartphone are diverse. As a result, there’s no one intervention for all users and situations. Instead, there should be different interventions to choose from.
“Users should understand their own behavior and have the autonomy to follow up on their understanding by implementing changes as they need them.”
We build one sec not as the application of one intervention but as a toolbox of many interventions. In the app, you can find all kinds of interventions for all kinds of applications. That is, you can choose your intervention styles, how often they trigger, how strong they are, and with which apps they intervene, and much more.
What is also important to note: Using one sec is not about blocking access — it’s about introducing just enough (mental) resistance to give you back the power of choice when you want to be online. David summarizes:
“The goal is to introduce just enough resistance to pause — and maybe change direction if you want to.”
How one sec adds Friction to digital life
When Frederik invented one sec in 2020 during the pandemic, he simply wanted to make it harder to open social media. His first version showed a screen asking him to take a breath before opening an app.
That small change made a big difference. It interrupted people's automatic behavior to just tap on an app and inserted a new decision point.
Since then, we've expanded the idea by combining friction with other supportive techniques, e.g.:
- The Mirror Intervention – provides room for reflection: You’ll see your own face staring at your screen waiting
- Journaling Prompts – Journal in the morning or evening with adjustable prompts
- Redirective Distractions – Quick games like math puzzles or "follow the dot"
Friction and a better digital world
Research shows that the implementation of friction also works in broader digital contexts. For example, it has been shown to:
- Reduce the spread of misinformation (e.g., Jahn et al., 2023)
- Lower offensive content creation (e.g., Katsaros et al., 2022)
In both cases, small barriers before posting or sharing helped people pause and rethink their actions. That’s a big deal in a world flooded with emotional bait, fake news, and harmful content.
Unfortunately, this does not feed into the interest of companies like TikTok, Meta or others.
Without friction, passive & automatic engagement is not just the easiest to foster from the companies’ side, it is also the least effortful to moderate.
If people just spent their time swiping videos, there is less actual content & interactions that need to be supervised or moderated.
Final Thoughts
At one sec, we see friction not as a punishment but as a chance to reflect. To be mindful about your behavior and make meaningful decisions, sometimes including changing direction.
This feeds our understanding that, when we’re facing problems made by technology, technological solutions can be an answer. Friction, when designed thoughtfully, isn’t a roadblock. It’s an invitation to be intentional.
Successfully changing behavioral habits is not (always) about sheer willpower. It’s about making intelligent changes to our environments which channel our decision into healthier directions. It’s about having a chance to change, step by step.
To do so, even one breath can be enough.
About this article
With this article, we intend to start a series of short science deep dives around smartphone use. The idea is to provide insights into the science of smartphone use while also making one sec’s own research more accessible.
one sec so far is the only screen time app that was developed from the start in collaboration with scientific institutions like the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development.
All the research conducted within one sec is a collaborative effort together with researchers at different universities (like Stanford or UCL) or governmental bodies (e.g., Danish Competition & Consumer Authority).
Sources
- Boosting digital agency through a self-nudge app. David J. Grüning, 2025
- Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. Grüning & Riedel & Lorenz-Spreen, 2023
- Friction Interventions to Curb the Spread of Misinformation on Social Media. Jahn & Rendsvig & Flammini & Menczer & Hendricks, 2023
- Nudge: The final edition. Thaler & Sunstein, 2021
- Nudging and boosting: Steering or empowering good decisions. Perspectives on Psychological Science. Hertwig, R., & Grüne-Yanoff, T. 2017.
- Boosting: Empowering citizens with behavioral science. Herzog, S. M., & Hertwig, R., 2025
- Reconsidering Tweets: Intervening during Tweet Creation Decreases Offensive Content. Katsaros & Yang & Fratamico, 2022
Links
Lucas Strehle. Reviewed by Dr. David Grüning
December 29, 2025