By Hannah Lazarte
“It’s because of that phone!”
That’s the excuse most, if not all parents say is the reason for everything you do wrong. Although they have no reason to back this up, they may be right.
In 2023, Anna Merod from K-12 Dive created a survey that studied students’ screen time. She found that students had an average phone usage time of more than four hours, using their phone for around 20 minutes on school nights.
If you are frequently watching negative videos right before you go to bed, a mental health issue may be forming. Those minutes of negativity could be the reason why you might lose sleep, also damaging your physical health.
“Animal studies show that exposure to screen-based light before or during sleep causes depression, even when the animal isn’t looking at the screen,” Potsdam said.
As shown by the articles, student depression is increasing due to screens. In studies by the Child Mind Institute, users who spent most of their time on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook reported having a higher rate of depression when compared to those who spent little time on social media.
Maybe screen time isn’t the main cause of depression, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact. Not only is depression damaging mental health but so are people’s attention spans.
It’s a widely known fact that people’s attention spans are shrinking because of excessive scrolling through social media apps. These apps include TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. All of these platforms have endless videos that are 30 seconds to a minute long. To get to the next short video, someone just has to ‘scroll’ up or down, also known as “the scroll of doom”. People have become so used to this short-formed content that their attention spans are shorter in comparison to previous years. According to The Mirror, 50% of TikTok users said that videos ‘longer than a minute’ cause them stress.
“When my phone is next to me while I’m doing homework … I always get distracted so I leave my phone out of reach,“ a Fountain Valley High School student said.
As attention spans decrease, so do the performances of students based on their ability to remember information and their academic level. In 2018, New York-Presbyterian Health Matters conducted a study that found kids who had a screen time over two hours did not score as high on language and thinking tests, in comparison to those who had a lower screen time.
“Studies show that students with shorter attention spans tend to perform worse on tests, struggle to retain information long-term and have a harder time connecting disparate ideas into cohesive understanding,” Jennifer Oaten, a writer from Santa Maria College said.
If you’d like to reduce your screen time, you should start by putting time limits on your apps. These time limits could be your starting point for less app usage.
You can also increase your attention span by removing distractions and not multitasking. Multitasking diverts your attention to multiple things at once instead of focusing on one major thing.
Most, if not all, know the negative effects of screen time and social media. Although most people know about it, not all of them want to get rid of it. In the end, it’s just how much you really want to change your daily habits. People have been so dependent on devices that everyone can’t let go of them so easily.
In the end, maybe it is because of that phone. . .
