YOU鈥橪L get square eyes!鈥� my mother used to say as I sat for hour after hour glued to the TV. I ignored her, of course. It was just something parents said. Fast-forward a few decades and now I鈥檓 the parent. My 5-year-old lives in a world where screens aren鈥檛 fixed pieces of furniture, but lie around on the kitchen table, on the sofa, by the bed, constantly accessible. You can鈥檛 even avoid them by going outside. 鈥淪creens are not only in our pockets, they鈥檙e on billboards, buses and bins,鈥� says Tim Smith, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.
The concerns have multiplied with the screens. In the past decade, we have heard that they will rewire our brains, strip us of cognitive abilities and damage our mental health. Many of us feel more distracted by them, feeling grumpier, guiltier and more tired as a result. The list of ills makes square eyes sound benign.
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So should we take these concerns more seriously? Given the amount of time so many of us spend with our lit-up devices, it is an important question.
The trouble is, many of the most emphatic answers are the least reliable. Smartphones and tablets are not only TVs, they are chat rooms, shopfronts, banks and photo albums. We use them to work and play, to record physical activity and monitor sleep. We can look up peer-reviewed papers or scroll through anti-vaxxing forums, crucial distinctions that disappear when we use the umbrella term 鈥渟creen time鈥�. As the fears grow and the debate becomes ever more heated, it鈥檚 time to separate the proven health advice from the hyperbole.
Are screens bad for our bodies?
Smartphone pinky, tech neck, bone spurs at the back of our skulls: the ailments we are meant to have inflicted on ourselves through excessive phone use all sound terrifying. Hence the headlines. In truth, there is no good evidence that such alarming conditions are caused by our tech habit.
Any harm is likely to be far less spectacular. The World 午夜福利1000集合 Organization, for example, recommends limiting screen time as a way of tackling obesity, voicing no health concerns related to screens in particular.
What about the effect of staring at small, bright screens on our eyesight? In the past few years, more children in the UK have been prescribed glasses, says Max Davie at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child 午夜福利1000集合 in London. This has led some to claim that phones and tablets are to blame. But Davie thinks the increase in prescriptions has more to do with aggressive management of existing conditions. 鈥淎t the moment, we don鈥檛 have sufficient evidence for a causal link,鈥� he says.
One thing that does appear to be taking a hit is sleep. Studies have shown that people who are given a book to read in bed find it harder to go to sleep if they read it on a screen rather than on paper. This is probably because of the blue light that most screens emit, which throws off our circadian rhythm and tricks us into thinking it is daytime.
Of course, most of us who look at our phones last thing at night aren鈥檛 reading a book. Much sleep disruption is related to mental stimulation: waiting for the next notification, say, or scrolling through endless news feeds. Insufficient or disrupted sleep has been linked to increased risk for all manner of health problems, including depression and other mental health concerns (see 鈥淎re screens messing with my head?鈥�).
鈥淚f there are any recommendations to be adopted, not using screens in the hour before bed seems to be the one with the greatest support,鈥� says Smith.
Are screens messing with my head?
From video games to gambling, the apps and websites we can access on our phones have sparked widespread concern. Big tech companies are also adept at tapping into our need for social validation, hooking us on likes, retweets and follower counts. In testimony to a US Senate hearing in June, Tristan Harris, a former Google designer and co-founder of the , argued that the internet has created a culture of mass narcissism.
This has led many to worry about the emotional stresses of a hypersocial world on adolescents. A quick online search brings up dozens of papers linking screen use or social media with detrimental effects on mental health, including depression, anorexia and suicide. Some figures suggest girls are more affected. 鈥淎fter two decades in decline, the mental health [problems] of 10 to 14-year-old girls have shot up 170 per cent in the last eight years,鈥� Harris said in his testimony.
Such sound bites are alarming. They are also widely believed, thanks to popular books like iGen by , a psychologist at San Diego State University, which claims that digital technology has wrecked a generation. The trouble is that the underlying data can be used to tell different stories, says Amy Orben at the University of Oxford, who studies the impact of digital technology 鈥� and social media in particular 鈥� on mental health.
Ultimately, social media is just one of many different things that might affect someone鈥檚 well-being. Without controlled studies, it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions.
When Orben started looking into screen use a few years ago, she wanted to explore some of the more extreme claims researchers were making. For example, Twenge has linked social media use with teenage depression and suicide. Orben was curious to look at the evidence herself.
She found it didn鈥檛 stack up. First, she spotted shortcomings in several large studies from 2017 that claimed to reveal correlations between the use of devices with screens and depressive symptoms in users. 鈥淚 found that changing how the data was analysed would give me very different results,鈥� says Orben.
To put her and her colleagues鈥� results in perspective, they compared the effect of device use to other things in an adolescent鈥檚 life. For instance, they looked at the effect of wearing glasses and found that this was correlated more negatively with well-being than screen use. They also looked at how often adolescents ate potatoes. 鈥淧otatoes are in a similar ballpark to screens,鈥� says Orben. That doesn鈥檛 mean they should be banned from schools.
Twenge stands by her findings, pointing in turn to what she considers flaws in Orben鈥檚 statistical methods. For Davie and others, however, the effect of screen time and social media use on mental health remains speculative. 鈥淲e cannot regard social media overall as good or bad,鈥� says Davie. He believes Orben has done fantastic work in myth-busting, but warns against making blanket statements about individuals. He says he would never tell bereaved parents that an Instagram post about self-harm played no part in the death of their child, for example. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know that in individual cases social media is not responsible,鈥� he says.
Am I addicted to my phone?
Unless you are using it for purposes we already know are addictive, such as accessing gambling websites, the answer is probably not. Yet reaching for my phone has become an annoying tic and a phantom buzz in my pocket can make me pull out my phone and check for messages that aren鈥檛 there. Whenever there is a lull in my concentration 鈥� in the middle of writing this sentence, for example 鈥� my thoughts return to my phone. What鈥檚 going on?
In front of the US Senate, Harris painted a damning picture of the methods that tech companies like Facebook and Twitter use to command our attention in what he described as a 鈥渞ace to the bottom of your brainstem鈥�. He called out design tricks like pulling down on the screen to refresh it, which shares characteristics with the mechanism of slot machines. 鈥淚t has the same kind of addictive qualities that keep people in Las Vegas hooked,鈥� he said.
We are also in thrall to the recommendation algorithms that know what we want better than we do. More than 70 per cent of viewing time on YouTube consists of people watching videos suggested by the platform rather than sought out deliberately. 鈥淵ou sit down to watch one video and wake up 2 hours later and say 鈥極h my god, what just happened?'鈥� said Harris. 鈥淭he answer is that you had a supercomputer pointed at your brain.鈥�
All this means we are often sucked into our phones, thoughts elsewhere, even when we have more immediate things to focus on 鈥� such as crossing a road. The risks have led authorities in a handful of towns, including Augsburg in Germany, to install traffic lights on the ground in the hope that distracted pedestrians won鈥檛 step in front of a bus.
Although the increased risk of distraction is very real, talk of addiction may be too simplistic. 鈥淚 think we need to be very careful about the use of the word 鈥榓ddiction鈥�,鈥� says Davie. 鈥淎ddiction has a specific meaning of compulsive use, requiring increasing doses and a damaging effect on your life. But there are a lot of people who spend 8 hours a day playing games and that鈥檚 just how they like to spend their time. It鈥檚 OK as long as it鈥檚 not interfering with the rest of your life.鈥� You aren鈥檛 addicted, but you may have a terrible habit.
How much screen time should kids have?
This is where I struggle most. Not only do I get distracted by my phone when I should be paying attention to my daughter 鈥� 鈥淒ad. Dad. Dad!鈥� 鈥� but I use screens to distract her all the time. When I need to cook, when I need to make a work call, when I鈥檓 feeling tired, I just stick her in front of a screen. Is this a problem? It all depends who you ask and how old your child is. There are no guidelines for teenagers, for example, and even the advice for younger children is far from clear.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) discourages parents from allowing children under 2 to have any interaction with screens and recommends no more than an hour a day for 2 to 5-year-olds. under 3 should have no screen time and those aged 3 to 4 should be limited to an hour a day, but its focus once more is on curbing childhood obesity.
The UK government largely follows the AAP鈥檚 guidelines. But the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child 午夜福利1000集合 has opted not to recommend time limits at all. 鈥淭here鈥檚 general confusion,鈥� says Smith.
He thinks the college鈥檚 approach is the most logical. It bases its position on a regular review of research and has concluded that there isn鈥檛 enough evidence of positive or negative effects for any guidelines to be issued. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a very honest way of creating evidence-based policy,鈥� says Smith.
The college鈥檚 view is that advice is only as good as it is effective. 鈥淧eople鈥檚 support for an outright ban on screen time for children under 2 lasts until they spend a day where there are children of different ages in the same room,鈥� says Davie. 鈥淭hen they quickly realise it鈥檚 unworkable.鈥� He thinks guidelines that are hard to comply with fail to help families establish good habits and are ignored.
鈥淲hen it comes to negative impact, potatoes are in a similar ballpark to screens鈥�
It isn鈥檛 all negative. In 2016, no evidence that spending time interacting with a screen 鈥� rather than moving around or interacting with other humans 鈥� delayed certain developmental milestones, such as learning to walk and talk. On the contrary, they found a correlation between screen use and earlier development of fine motor skills, such as the ability to pick up blocks and stack them in a tower.
Once again, there is no causal link. It could be that those infants who happen to develop fine motor skills early are simply more likely to pick up and play with a screen. It is possible, though, that the prodding and swiping needed to work a screen trains these skills.
We shouldn鈥檛 underestimate the value of screen use for older children too. Not only do they provide unprecedented access to many forms of valuable information and entertainment, but educating children about the dangers they will find online requires them to have some familiarity with it. 鈥淚n order to think critically, kids need to engage,鈥� says Smith.
How can I learn to stop worrying and love my screens?
The explosion of mobile phone use has revolutionised our lives. I can download movies and podcasts, write articles, communicate with my family and broadcast to the world all at the push of a button. This is unprecedented power, but there are still many important questions about these maddening, valuable devices that we have been unable to answer. What is clear, however, is that many initial reactions have been more knee-jerk than evidence-based.
Rather than impose arbitrary constraints, we should take a look at our use of screens and ask how they fit with the activities and lifestyles we want as individuals and families. Orben, who is 24, has grown up with social media. For her and her peers, managing how they spend time with their screens was part of growing up. 鈥淟ike any social media user, there are times when I feel I should use it less, that I need to feel in control,鈥� she says. 鈥淲e all have ways in which we try to self-regulate.鈥�
Maybe you tweak your phone鈥檚 settings to reduce the number of alerts you get, or uninstall certain apps so they aren鈥檛 readily available. Some have suggested introducing 鈥渕ental speed bumps鈥� that interrupt the habit of checking a phone too often, such as writing a note to yourself on your lock screen or simply wrapping a rubber band around the device as a reminder.
Apple and Android phones and tablets now come with widgets that let you monitor and manage screen use. You can set time limits, turn off notifications and track what you have been doing on the device. There are also 鈥渘ight-time鈥� settings that cut the blue light emitted by the screen and a 鈥渨ind-down鈥� mode designed to make the screen less enticing by turning it black and white.
These all help us become more conscious of our usage. But Apple and Google could do more, says Smith. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a little bit of a misdirection,鈥� he says. For one thing, these widgets don鈥檛 allow you to explore your screen use for periods of more than a week, which you might want to do to see if any lifestyle changes are making a difference.
Every new technology with widespread impact has given rise to new fears. Orben recalls an article from 1941 that lamented how adolescents in the US were addicted to radio programmes. 鈥淚n a lot of parenting magazines from that time, you could just replace the word 鈥榬adio鈥� with 鈥榮ocial media鈥� and you could probably publish that today,鈥� she says.
So the best bet may simply be to ask yourself what level of screen use makes you and those around you happy and try to stick to it. If you find yourself overindulging, don鈥檛 panic 鈥� and certainly don鈥檛 feel guilty. Nobody knows anything worth getting scared about.
