Maybe it is that damn phone

Technology dependence causes profound declines in mental health — but there is a solution

For years, our parents have told us to get off our phones because they’re frying our brains. Most of us didn’t listen, and we paid the price.

While as kids we may have seen their warnings as the product of geriatrics and pearl-clutching Luddism, they were right. Our attention spans are dwindling, and teen mental illness is steadily increasing in our nation. It even affects our sleep.

Sure, part of this can be chalked up to our crumbling capitalist hellscape of a world, but phones do play an incredibly significant role in our collective decline in happiness. Our parents were (unfortunately) right all along.

Whether we’re scrolling endlessly on TikTok and Instagram or repeatedly testing our luck on gacha rolls, our phones stress us out and drain our emotional energy reserves. When we use our phones to isolate ourselves, we get trapped in a cage of instant gratification and dopamine, secluding ourselves from our friends and loved ones.

Eventually, the initial high that we get from social media runs out, and we are left searching for more in a place that grows more boring and mind-numbing by the day. We spend hours on our phones trying to recreate the same positive feeling we had when we first started using it, all while it slips further and further out of reach.

Given the addictive nature of social media, it’s no surprise that young people use their phones as much as they do. As of 2023, 13-year-olds spend an average of 4.1 hours per day on social media, and that number only increases with age; 17-year-olds spend on average 5.8 hours per day on the same apps. While some of this time is spent talking with friends and engaging with each other’s posts, most of those hours are spent “doomscrolling” — scrolling through (often upsetting) short-form content for hours on end.

It doesn’t take a genius to guess that this is not conducive to a healthy mental state. Far too much of a teen’s day is being spent trying to shut their brains off and indulge in a numbing wash of mindless rewards. Ironically, our brains are much more active as they buzz with dopamine — this neurotransmitter activates reward pathways that send neurological sparks all around the brain. The sensory parts of our brain are also much more active as they take in the eye-catching videos we scroll through.

This time, however, could be spent on self-care, connecting with loved ones or engaging in positive hobbies; unfortunately, the human mind is hard-wired to take the quickest route to dopamine it can. That’s what’s so insidious about social media and, by extension, phones — it’s just so easy to get hooked, and so unreasonably hard to stop. We get addicted, literally.

So what do we do? How do we fix this problem that we seem so doomed to fall into?

The answer is, we quit.

Something as simple as setting a screen time limit on your phone (or even specifically on social media apps) can dramatically reduce your phone usage. With your newfound time, devote part of your day to focusing on yourself or getting ahead on work or other tasks. Maybe you take a nap, or go to bed early — actions that have both been proven to significantly improve your mental health.

You don’t have to start big. Instead of completely cutting devices out of your life, maybe try to reduce your average screen time by 30 minutes per day. Two weeks later, take off another 30 minutes, and so on. Or maybe you’re one of a few brave souls who can cut screen time out cold turkey. Either way, you may eventually find you don’t even want to go back on the apps you once so desperately clung to — I know I certainly don’t.

Written by: Sage Kamocsay— skamocsay@ucdavis.edu

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