We picked 10 Social Limits users at random and compared July–September 2025 with July–September 2026. Every number below comes from their app data, not a survey.
All figures come from real user data. Personal information has been removed to protect users' privacy.
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Employees download the app, sign in with their work account and choose their own step goal.
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Average steps per user per day, at the start of the year and after a year of Social Limits.
Without the commute and the walk around the office, movement falls away fast. A 2025 systematic review found people take about 2,500 fewer steps a day when they work from home.
Pooled result from 7 studies comparing days working from home with days working on site.7
Schöne et al., 2025, BMC Public Health · Read the study ↗The average gain for the users in this case study, from 5,099 to 7,706 steps a day. About the same as the steps lost to working from home.
Social Limits keeps social apps locked until the day's step goal is met, so movement gets built into the day wherever people work.
Social apps stay locked until the day's step goal is met. After a year, the typical unlock moved more than an hour later.
Users hit their step goal on 680 days in July–September 2026, up from 523 a year earlier, 30% more mornings won back.
These users now walk 2,600 more steps a day and keep social media locked for longer each morning. Here's what independent research links to changes like these.
Adults walking 7,000+ steps a day vs fewer than 7,000. Each extra 1,000 steps a day was linked to a 9% lower risk.6
Bizzozero-Peroni et al., 2024 · Read the study ↗People who exercised reported 1.5 fewer days of poor mental health a month than matched non-exercisers, across 1.2 million US adults.5
Chekroud et al., 2018 · Read the study ↗Physically active workers gain 3–4.6 productive working days a year over inactive workers: 0.44–0.86 fewer days off sick and 2.6–3.71 fewer days of reduced performance at work.1
RAND Europe, 2019 · Read the study ↗ASICS Desk Break experiment (2024): desk workers who added 15 minutes of movement a day for a week reported 33% higher productivity and 29% better focus. A company-run, self-reported study of 80 office workers; not peer reviewed.4
Read the study ↗About this case study. 10 users were drawn at random from everyone who started using Social Limits before August 2025, is still active, and has at least 45 days of step data in late summer of both years. We compare July to September 2025 with July to September 2026, the most recent three complete months, so seasons don't skew the comparison. One user has no step data for August 2026, so that month averages 9 users. With only 10 users, results are indicative and vary between people. All data is anonymised.
Research figures. The studies in "What the research says" are independent of Social Limits. Most are observational and show associations, not proof of cause; the ASICS Desk Break experiment is a company-run study of 80 office workers using self-reported measures and has not been peer reviewed. Its 15-minute daily movement break is about 1,500 steps; these users added around 2,600 steps a day. Applying their figures to these users is an estimate, not a measurement.
Remote work. The 2,564-step figure is the pooled mean difference from 7 studies (95% CI −3,809 to −1,320) in Schöne et al., 2025. The studies varied widely and most were run during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the authors treat it as an indication rather than a settled number. We don't know whether the users in this case study work from home; the comparison shows the size of their gain next to the steps typically lost to remote work.
Unlock times. The time social media unlocked is when the day's step goal was met, in each user's local time, on days the goal was met (523 days in 2025, 680 in 2026). "Typical" is the median. Days the goal wasn't met, when social media stayed locked, aren't included.
How we estimate productive hours. The 2,607 extra steps a day equal about 26 minutes of brisk walking at roughly 100 steps a minute,2 or 182 minutes a week, above the 150 minutes the WHO recommends.3 RAND found that physically active workers lose 3.0 to 4.6 fewer working days a year to sick leave and reduced performance than inactive workers.1 At 7.5 hours a day that is 23 to 34 hours. It applies in full to an employee who moves from inactive to active, and it is an estimate from published research, not a measurement of these users' work.
