Building a Community of Champions for Healthy Cell Phone Habits

Heads Up

Phones Down

An Initiative of our Community Foundation

This Edition:

Prioritizing Healthy Tech Habits in 2025

It’s a new year, and a new era when it comes to our relationship with technology – in 2024, we saw school districts across the nation implement more restrictive cell phone policies. Additionally, Congress has taken steps toward enacting legislation to protect kids online. In Mesa County, School District 51 implemented its own successful cell phone policy, and our Community Foundation has begun a community education and awareness campaign, Heads Up Parenting, to gently remind parents and caregivers of babies and toddlers that “Your phone doesn’t need you. They do.” 

To continue the momentum, we have some Heads Up-themed suggestions for “healthier tech habits” in 2025, with some inspiration from local leaders and organizations.  

While social media can be a great way of staying in touch with friends and family, the platforms are designed to keep users scrolling, which can negatively impact relationships as well as physical and mental health, especially for younger users. The healthy habits suggested in this article, Top 6 Healthy Social Media Habits For A Better Life, can be a great way to jumpstart your New Year’s resolutions. Try setting daily limits for time spent on social media, and instead use that time to prioritize real-life experiences and interactions, like face-to-face conversations with friends, or practicing a new skill. Small changes can make a big difference - studies have shown that limiting social media use can decrease loneliness and depression. To borrow District 51’s tagline, “More Social, Less Media!” 

When you hear the word “detox,” you might think of a juice cleanse or another extreme diet trend. Have you ever heard the phrase “digital detox”? The concept is catching on as our collective awareness of the harms of excess technology use increases. This article, 12 Best Social Media Detox Tips for People Who Want a Social Media Break, offers creative ideas for how to successfully detach from your apps. For example, a simple way to keep phones from interfering with sleep is to get an “old fashioned” alarm clock so that phones can stay outside the bedroom. This is especially important for adolescents, who need quality sleep but are susceptible to phone-induced sleep deprivation, which can have significant impacts on their mental health and academic performance.

Another idea is to delete troublesome apps. It’s easy to re-install them and you might realize you don’t miss them as much as you thought you would and actually experience “JOMO” (Joy of Missing Out) instead of “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out). In Mesa County, the Outdoor Wilderness Lab (OWL) had recent success with a digital detox – read more below. 

According to recent research, two time frames were identified where screen use seemed especially harmful for kids – at mealtime and at bedtime. In the article, the author advises committing to no screens during these crucial times and says that because limiting bedtime screen use was the most effective practice that the study evaluated, “if you only choose one rule to implement, that may be the most effective one for reducing total screen time.”

But setting the rules for just the kids isn’t enough – the study examines the associations between parent screen use and problematic screen use among adolescents and found a correlation between the two.

This article from Common Sense Media offers four ways parents can role model screen time to their children. Read more here.

About this Initiative

A current area of focus for our Community Foundation is the mental health and well-being of young people. Heads Up, Phones Down provides information and resources for our community to foster healthier social media and technology habits that promote more face-to-face interactions and better mental health. 

We invite parents, educators and community members to join us in this effort. Learn more about our work here.

The Western Colorado Community Foundation is a nonprofit, public charity established by local community leaders in 1996. We serve a seven county region that includes Delta, Eagle, Garfield, Mesa, Montrose, Ouray, and Rio Blanco Counties. We are growing steadily and now manage over 330 charitable funds totaling over $186 million in assets and awarded over $8 million in grants and scholarships last year.