An analysis of the screen's relation to your mood, your habits, and your well-being By Amanda Frantz How much time do you spend on your phone? If you’re anything like a normal teen, it’s a staggering five hours a day. Let that sink in. That’s five hours of homework, hiking, reading, learning, lost. And if you're anything like me, it’s alarming to learn you spend 157 hours a month on your phone, which boils down to almost an entire week. Imagine spending an entire week plugged into Facebook, or Instagram, or Discord, or Youtube. It’s nuts.
After teen self esteem, confidence, and happiness had been on a steady rise since the 90’s, it began to tentatively drop alongside the invention of the smartphone, and took a hard plunge following smartphone teen ownership reaching 50%. The year was 2012. Nowadays, it’s become a common practice to “stalk” individuals on the internet, filtering through their feeds on Instagram or Facebook, comparing them to their own. It’s not unlikely, if you have a profile on a site, to feel the need to “tailor” it, picturing things to look like you’re living your best life, your most productive life. Smartphones are diversifying and adapting like viruses. There are apps for your every need, modifications for every situation. They are designed for everything from enabling you to examine Olympus Mons on Mars to reminding you to drink water. The fact that smartphones are so addicting is no huge wonder. They’re literally designed for it. Human brains are funny. If you were born between 1995 and 2001, you are part of the iGen and Gen X overlap. You probably don’t remember a time without the internet and computers. Or, maybe, one day it wasn’t there, and then was. I grew up playing Freddie Fish and Pajama Sam games on my now dated, chunky Windows computer with my sister. In later 2008, my mother purchased a copy of Zoo Tycoon 2, and then my home life got a whole lot more exciting. We were allotted ‘screen time’- one irreplaceable half hour a day. I’d play my bit, and then my sister would play hers while I gazed over her shoulder. I ate supper whilst observing her raise a Sim baby, design a enclosure for a polar bear, or create a Spore creature. This kind of relation to a screen is what drives the human brain a little nuts. It was entertaining, and I was addicted. Computers and iphones are so fast it builds a chemical reward response with you- the more content, such as pictures or videos, the faster you get a baby-sized dopamine rush, which makes you feel the same as if you’d completed and actual task, such as cleaning your room or getting a good grade on a test. It’s frightening to think of how this is going to impact our generation further down the line. Will we grow to be completely lenient? Or not? Do we have a chance to rewild ourselves? And what do the inventors of the iphone think of this? In Silicon Valley, parents are raising their children tech-free. Even Steve Jobs, pioneer of the smartphone, recognized to what extent that his devices could be double-headed snakes. In a 2011 New York Times interview, Jobs revealed he prohibited his two children from using the iPad, newly released. Many families followed his example to a T. Apple programmers and designers who keep their family on company grounds have rules that’d seem strict to us, but to them it’s a lifestyle- no screens for the kids, plain and simple. One Silicon Valley employee prohibits screens for her daughters day and night, with the exception of friday- when they watch a movie together as a family. If you wanted to cut back on screen time, yourself, it’s easy. Try eating meals without a screen. When you go out to eat with friends, leave your phone in a pocket and pick it up only when needed. When you are using your phone, ask yourself if it’s necessary. Unplug, and you may find you appreciate the outside world more than ever.
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