Do Brick and other phone-blocking gadgets work? No independent trial has tested them

Brick and its new bedtime sibling, Brick Night, promise to curb phone use through physical friction. No independent controlled study has tested either product. Trials of related tools show that strict limits can cut screen time in the short run, while sleep research supports only an association between screens in bed and insomnia.

No independent, controlled study has tested whether Brick, the tap-to-block phone gadget, reduces screen time, and none has tested its new bedtime version, Brick Night. What exists for the products themselves is a company survey of its own users and a handful of journalist and reviewer trials, which point in different directions. The closest rigorous evidence comes from studies of software tools, and it suggests that strict limits can cut phone use substantially in the short run.

The question matters because these devices cost real money and make large promises about attention, mood and sleep. Brick Night, priced at $129, goes further than its predecessor by targeting the bedroom, where the research on screens and sleep is stronger but still falls short of proving that blocking apps helps.

What Brick and Brick Night actually do

Despite the name, neither product physically locks a phone. Brick is a token that toggles a software block on apps the owner has chosen, and Brick Night uses Bluetooth to sense when a phone enters a bedroom or other designated sleep space, then switches on a chosen blocking mode during selected hours. Both sit on top of the phone's own software controls, though the technical details of how they do so were not verified for this article.

The original Brick launched in September 2023 and sells for $59, according to a news report and Fast Company. Brick Night is the company's second product. According to the company's press release, distributed through Business Wire, it costs $129, is sold exclusively at getbrick.com, and became available on October 22, 2026. Some coverage has circulated an October 30 date, but the press release and Fast Company both point to October 22, and an Australian trade report lists availability from October 23 there.

The release adds that several people sharing a bedroom can use one Brick Night, each choosing their own blocked apps. It also argues that, unlike schedule-based blockers, a location trigger creates friction. That is a marketing claim, not a finding. ChannelNews, an Australian trade outlet, reports that the product is not positioned as a medical device.

What the company's survey and reviewers report

A self-selected survey of existing users

Brick's website reports that more than 95% of users feel less distracted, more than 93% feel more focused, and more than 99% reduce their screen time. The figures come from a survey of more than 3,500 users, according to the company's own marketing page.

Those numbers are the only large-sample data on Brick, and they carry heavy limits. No methodology was found, there is no control group, and the responses are self-reported by people who already bought and kept using the product. The survey cannot show that Brick caused any change, and it gives no baseline or typical size of effect.

Journalist tests: small, short and split

Healthline's staff trial produced the most mixed account. According to the outlet, some testers saw their scrolling shrink, but others did not eliminate screen time. One tester reported that use shifted to different formats and platforms, and another said screen time held steady or even rose slightly over a few weeks. Several testers also reached for their phones out of habit, a sign of how automatic the behavior is.

Other reviews lean positive but give few numbers. A Consumer Reports staff writer who averaged more than 4 hours a day on the phone said that using Brick intentionally cut a meaningful amount of screen time; only a snippet of that paywalled piece was available, and no figures appeared in it. NBC Select tested the device with staff for two weeks, and one tester's longest blocked stretch was eight hours during the workday while another's was about two hours. An ABC News shopping review said the biggest change was less a screen-time number than how downtime felt.

Cybernews rated Brick the most effective blocker it reviewed because it adds real physical friction, while cautioning that behavioral results vary by person. It is a review site without trial data, and its affiliate relationships could not be determined. Fast Company says only that Brick has become a popular way to limit screen time, which speaks to popularity rather than effectiveness.

These reviews share weaknesses: small groups, about two weeks of use, self-selection, little objective logging, and in some cases a shopping context. Novelty can also inflate early enthusiasm for any new gadget.

The closest controlled evidence comes from software

Blocking mobile internet entirely

The most-cited trial is Castelo and colleagues' randomized study in PNAS Nexus, published in February 2025. It enrolled 467 participants for four weeks. One group blocked mobile internet on their phones for the first two weeks, while a delayed-intervention group served as the control and blocked it during the second two weeks. The tool was the premium version of the Freedom app with a locked mode, and the researchers tracked compliance objectively. Participants' screen time before the block resembled that of the average American smartphone user, according to the paper.

According to the study's press release on EurekAlert and a MedicalXpress report, blocking cut screen time from an average of 314 minutes a day to 161 minutes, and improved wellbeing, mental health and attention. Those figures were not independently checked against the paper's text for this article. The reports also say the wellbeing and mental health benefits persisted at four weeks, two weeks after participants went back online, that time spent offline increased, that sleep rose, and that participants found the experiment difficult. Comparisons in the press release to age-related decline and to antidepressants reflect the authors' framing and deserve caution.

Daily limits and a customizable app

A 2025 randomized trial in BMC Medicine enrolled 111 healthy students in Austria. The 58 participants in the intervention group limited smartphone screen time to 2 hours a day or less for 3 weeks, using the phone's own limiter or an additional app, according to the trial registry. The 53 controls carried on as usual, and the design was unblinded. The intervention group cut screen time by 155.25 minutes a day (standard deviation 132.14), with small to medium effects on depressive symptoms, stress, sleep quality and wellbeing. Students averaged about 276 minutes a day to begin with. A note on the study page also says no differences in screen time were seen from week 7 onward; whether that describes follow-up could not be confirmed.

A 2026 randomized trial of an app called Wellspent, published in JMIR mHealth and uHealth, tested a milder approach: a customizable tool that prompts users on chosen apps. It produced no significant reduction in problematic social media use or in self-efficacy. It did cut daily time on each participant's most problematic app by roughly 29 minutes. In week 2, 33% of reminder events led participants to stop using the app within 1 minute.

Warnings from consumer research

Two other findings complicate the picture. In a paper in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, a longitudinal field study of 242 people found that screen-time tracking improved digital self-awareness but was less likely to reduce mobile use. In a separate online experiment with 139 participants, consumers preferred informational tracking over more restrictive options such as blocking and nudges, even though they rated tracking as less effective. Only the abstract was reviewed, and its publication date was not verified.

That combination helps explain the logic behind Brick: passive monitoring tends not to change behavior, but people shy away from tools that restrict them. A physical object they chose to buy might be a way to impose a limit on themselves. That is a hypothesis, not a tested result.

A seven-day randomized study of 76 people comparing a 50% with a 10% cut in social media use adds a measurement warning. The manipulation largely failed because the control group reduced social media use by 38% on average. Participants' actual screen time fell, but their self-reported screen time did not change. Its date was not verified, though the page suggests about 2021. The lesson is that noticing and tracking use can itself change it, and that self-reports can mislead.

Why a tap-to-unlock gadget may not behave like the tested tools

Across the controlled trials, the size of the effect tracked the strictness of the restriction. Blocking all mobile internet produced very large reductions, a 2-hour cap produced reductions of more than two hours a day, and a single-app prompt produced about half an hour. Brick sits somewhere between these. Owners choose which apps to block and can unblock by tapping, so the result probably depends on how each person sets it up. That is an inference, not something any study has tested.

The Castelo result in particular may owe more to total disconnection than to friction. Because that trial cut off mobile internet altogether, it cannot show that a puck-style unlock works, or that blocking a few apps carries the same benefits. The authors have suggested that more targeted blocks might lower the costs of restriction, but that hint was seen only in a document snippet and was not fully verified.

Substitution is the other obvious risk. Healthline's testers described time migrating to unblocked apps and other formats, and the reflexive phone-grabbing they reported suggests that habit can outlast any single blocked app. Whether targeted blocking reduces the harms of heavy use or merely relocates the use has not been tested for these gadgets.

Durability is a further gap. Most trials ran two to four weeks, and the participants were students or volunteers who agreed to take part. No long-term retention data for Brick were found, so it remains unknown whether owners keep using it after the novelty fades.

The sleep premise behind Brick Night

Brick Night leans on research linking screens in bed to poor sleep. The press release says large-scale studies have found a strong association between screens in bed and both insomnia and shorter sleep, regardless of the screen activity. The study most often cited is by Hjetland and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry on March 31, 2025, which analyzed Norwegian university students.

The paper's model found that the odds of insomnia symptoms rose 59% for each additional hour of screen time in bed (odds ratio 1.59, p<.001). According to the Frontiers press release, each extra hour was also linked to 24 fewer minutes of sleep. The press release describes a sample of 45,202 young adults in Norway, while the paper's own discussion refers to almost 40,000 university students, so the analyzed sample may be smaller than the survey total. Healthline describes the participants as aged 18 to 28.

Several caveats apply. The study is cross-sectional and relies on self-reports, and its statistical model adjusted only for age and sex. The lead author said it cannot establish causality and that students with insomnia might use screens more, so reverse causation is plausible. The study also found that social media was not more harmful than other screen activities, and Healthline reports a co-author saying students who used only social media had the lowest insomnia rates and longest sleep.

Some headlines, including Fast Company's phrasing that an hour of phone use in bed can raise insomnia risk by 59%, turn an odds ratio per hour into a causal claim about risk. A more accurate reading is that, in one survey of young Norwegian adults, each extra hour of screen use in bed was associated with 59% higher odds of insomnia symptoms. Nothing found shows that blocking apps at night improves sleep, and no data exist on whether Brick Night itself does.

What it means, and what to watch

The fair summary is that physical blockers are plausible but unproven. Trials of related software suggest that restricting phone use can work in the short run, particularly when the restriction is firm and compliance is monitored, and reviewers describe benefits that are real for some people and negligible for others. What no one has shown is that a tap-to-unlock token delivers a lasting reduction, or that it does better than the free controls already built into phones.

The evidence to watch for is a head-to-head trial with objective logs and a follow-up measured in months rather than weeks. A registered trial of a two-week iOS app restriction in young adults, listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, may add related data, though its status was not verified. Until a trial tests the gadgets themselves, the strongest claims about Brick, and especially about Brick Night and sleep, remain marketing rather than science.

Frequently asked questions

Does Brick actually reduce screen time?

No independent controlled study has tested it. Reviewer tests are mixed, with some testers reporting less scrolling and others reporting that use shifted to other apps or stayed the same. The company's survey of more than 3,500 users reports large benefits, but it is self-selected and self-reported.

Does Brick Night improve sleep?

No evidence found shows that it does. Research links screen time in bed to insomnia symptoms and shorter sleep in young Norwegian adults, but that study is observational and cannot show that blocking apps improves sleep.

Does Brick physically lock a phone?

No. Brick is a token that toggles a software block on apps the owner selects. Brick Night uses Bluetooth to detect when a phone is in the bedroom and activates a chosen blocking mode during selected hours.

How much do Brick and Brick Night cost?

The original Brick costs $59, and Brick Night costs $129, sold exclusively at getbrick.com from October 22, 2026, according to the company's press release. Australian pricing for Brick Night is A$206.

Does one hour of phone use in bed raise insomnia risk by 59%?

Not as such. A Norwegian student survey found 59% higher odds of insomnia symptoms per extra hour of screen time in bed. The study was cross-sectional and self-reported, and its lead author said it cannot determine causality.

Sources

1. Brick Launches 'Brick Night' to Automatically Block Distracting Apps in the Bedroom , Business Wire via Yahoo Finance (2026-10-22)
2. How Brick Night wants to curb your pre-bed scrolling , Fast Company
3. Brick Night Automatically Blocks Distracting Apps In The Bedroom , ChannelNews
4. Brick's new app blocker is designed for bedtime doomscrolling , Biztoc
5. Brick — Take Back Control of Your Screen Time , Brick (getbrick.com)
6. We Tried The Brick Phone Lock: Our Honest Thoughts , Healthline
7. Can Brick Solve My Screen Time Problem? , Consumer Reports
8. We tested The Brick for two weeks. Did it free us from mindless scrolling? , NBC News (NBC Select)
9. I tried the viral Brick app-blocker for 2 weeks. It's now on sale for back-to-school , ABC News
10. Brick Phone Blocker Review in 2026 , Cybernews
11. Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being , PNAS Nexus (2025-02-01)
12. Benefits of taking a break from smartphones , EurekAlert (2025-02-01)
13. Taking a break from smartphones: Study confirms its benefits , MedicalXpress (2025-02-01)
14. Smartphone screen time reduction improves mental health: a randomized controlled trial , BMC Medicine (Springer) (2025-01-01)
15. Study Details: NCT06353451 , ClinicalTrials.gov
16. Effects of Digital Detox on Mental Health in Young Adults (NCT07827703) , ClinicalTrials.gov
17. Promoting Self-Regulated Social Media Use on Smartphones With a Mobile Intervention App (Wellspent): Randomized Controlled Trial , JMIR mHealth and uHealth (2026-01-01)
18. "Your Screen-Time App Is Keeping Track": Consumers Are Happy to Monitor but Unlikely to Reduce Smartphone Usage , Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (University of Chicago Press)
19. Does a 7-day restriction on the use of social media improve cognitive functioning and emotional well-being? Results from a randomized controlled trial , ScienceDirect
20. How and when screens are used: comparing different screen activities and sleep in Norwegian university students , Frontiers in Psychiatry (2025-03-31)
21. One hour's screen use after going to bed increases your risk of insomnia by 59%, scientists find , Frontiers science news (2025-03-31)
22. 1 Hour of Screen Time at Bedtime Raises Insomnia Risk by 59% , Healthline (2025-01-01)

This article was drafted with the help of AI and reviewed by Jaroha editors before publication.