With some reluctance, I log in and look at the daily screen time for my smartphone. It tallies up the numbers and reveals 5.5 hours a day. I start to feel guilty and resentful. What else could I be doing with all that time? Those 5.5 hours add up to ~2,000 hours or 83 days of using my phone per year. Ouch. According to a Statista survey, 5-6 hours of use per day is the standard for about 50% of people.
The good news is I reduced my phone’s screen time to about 1.5 hours per day. But it begs the question, at what point does smartphone use become a problem? Where do we draw the line? Screen time is a tricky metric because it depends on why I’m using an application. For example, I could be using Google Maps for a 4-hour drive. Do those 4 hours indicate an obsession with my phone? No.
The Downside of Compulsive Consumption
We should draw the line when these devices become a legitimate addiction. According to psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, addiction is “the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior … despite its harm to self and/or others.” It may seem overly dramatic to say smartphone use harms us, but it can.
Besides being a potential time drain, smartphones and their apps can:
- Rob us of physical health because we become too sedentary.
- Make us feel socially isolated since we don’t venture out of the house or apartment anymore.
- Ruin our attention spans because of the instant gratification offered to us repeatedly.
- Destroy our self-image or self-worth with excessive comparisons to “perfect” people on social media, even though nobody’s life is nearly as perfect as it looks.
Smartphones have many good uses, like video chatting with family or using an app to learn a new language. There are no issues there, and it’s great to have. But some apps want to addict us like a rat in B. F. Skinner’s experiments. They give us infinite dopamine whenever we want it, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Looking Forward – Find More Rewarding Activities
Massive teams of engineers and human behavioral scientists work behind the scenes to keep us addicted. At the slightest hint of boredom or mental strife, apps are there to numb us and give us a dose of dopamine. Yet the satisfaction we feel from that dose is short-lived, so we continue the cycle. It’s the epitome of cheap, unfulfilling pleasure.
It’s time to take a break, but we don’t need to become Luddites. It’s about being more thoughtful and changing how we use these apps and phones. Use smartphones as tools. For now, there are excellent activities to substitute: go outside more, read books, nurture genuine connections with friends or family in person. I have some answers to the overuse problem in my previous post, with YouTube as the focus (In my case, YouTube was my most used app). The battle for my time continues, but I’m finding more and more success these days in reducing my smartphone addiction.