We've all been there. You decide to take a five-minute break, open your phone, and twenty minutes later you're watching a stranger's cat video with no memory of how you got there — and somehow feeling more stressed than before. That's not a willpower problem. It's a design problem.

Most of us take screen breaks by switching screens. You close a spreadsheet, open Instagram. You step away from a Slack thread and land on a YouTube scroll. The body gets a change of posture but the brain stays exactly where it started — processing, reacting, catching up.