I noticed my screen time in late 2024. I had not really looked before. The phone said five hours and forty seven minutes per day, average over the previous month. I tried the usual fixes. App blockers. Notification settings. Greyscale mode. None of them lasted more than a week.
The problem is not really willpower. The problem is that the phone is in your hand. When the phone is in your hand, every decision about whether to look at it has to be made fresh. Each decision is small. The number of decisions per day is large. By the end of the day, willpower is gone, and the phone is still in your hand.
I bought a combination lock box. The kind people use to keep snacks away from themselves at night. I put my phone in it for two hours. The first thirty minutes were uncomfortable. The next ninety were the most focused I had felt in months. I bought a Faraday pouch for restaurants, for the times I could not lock the phone away entirely but still wanted it silent. Neither of these objects is clever. Neither does anything you could not also do by setting your phone to airplane mode and putting it in a drawer.
The reason it worked was that the objects made the choice physical. To get the phone back, I had to dial a code, or pull it out of the pouch, or get up and walk to wherever I had hidden it. The slight inconvenience was the entire point.
I do not believe these objects will work for everyone. I do not believe they are a cure for whatever you think is wrong with your phone use. But they worked for me, and the people I gave them to, and that seemed like enough reason to make them properly and sell them.
BRICK exists for one reason. To make the choice physical for people who want that.
The Detox Kit is the two objects together. The Box and The Pouch. Buy them separately or buy them as a bundle. Either way, the test is the same: can you go ninety minutes without your phone, when you have decided to.
Henry, founder of BRICK, May 2026.