Self-experiment: turning your mobile phones display to grayscale

As an experiment to see how it affected her mood, Megan E. Holstein made her phone's display grayscale. It took her a while to get used to it, but now she likes it that way because the world around her seems more attractive.

She wrote about the experience in Better Humans:

Spontaneously, the colors in the room around me became brighter. I felt an urge to go outside and enjoy the world"-"even though it was 8 PM on an Ohio winter night, pitch black and cold out.

Text messages felt constraining in a way they never did before. I texted a few people on the black and white screen. It felt like trying to talk to my loved ones through a paper towel tube. People say that texting is not meaningful in the same way in-person interaction is, but I never felt that way until now.

Suddenly, the idea of scrolling through Instagram photos seemed preposterous. Of course looking at a picture isn't like the real thing. In my head, I've always known that. But the muted black and white screen made it feel real. It suddenly seemed that much more important to travel while I'm young and I can.

Image: Better Humans