We’re all tired of hearing “you kids and your phones” from older generations, but to some degree, they have a point. And the results of the survey issued by The Lancer in January reflect this.
In a survey of 275 students on campus, 70 percent rated their concern for our generation’s social media and phone usage as a four out of five or higher, with students giving social media consumption more fives in this category than global warming or politics.
If this is the case, and everyone is so collectively concerned about this rising issue of social media and phone usage, why isn’t anything changing?
Through the results of the survey, The Lancer was also able to find the likely answer. In a separate question asking students to rate how affected they are by different issues on a personal level, only 29 percent of students rated social media usage as a four out of five or higher, a vastly smaller percentage than the 70 percent who were concerned with their generation’s usage of social media and their phones.
“Everyone else is a phone addict, but I’m obviously not.” This belief is not a personal failing; our brains are wired to think this way, especially as young adults. There is only so much rationality to the way our brains think, and as animals, our brains are hardwired to be constantly working in our favor over anything else, including logic.
The belief that unlike everyone else, we are especially immune to a certain issue that everyone but us faces, is called a personal fable, a cognitive bias that young people are especially prone to having. You might even be able to identify this pattern of behavior in your younger self.
Looking back to middle school, do you remember feeling like no one else could ever understand you? Or like your problems were entirely unique and you were unlike everyone else? Middle school age is the peak time for falling into your cognitive personal fable, but it still affects people well into their high school and even college years. It’s a side effect of your brain attempting to develop a personal identity, something that is the main focus of your brain from early middle school and into your early 20s.
Just because it’s a normal way to feel, doesn’t mean it’s not something that all of us could benefit from addressing. Looking inward and identifying that maybe, I too, might be part of the problem can lead us to a better and happier state of being, both as individuals and as a whole. Too much social media usage leads to a lack of motivation, a dependency on instant gratification and a general feeling of depression and loneliness.
I noticed this exact issue in my own life back in November during Thanksgiving break, in which my screen time was regularly hitting seven hours or more per day. I was really unhappy, feeling like I couldn’t get myself to do anything other than scroll on TikTok. With every break in my day I was scrolling on my phone; I couldn’t even sit through an episode of TV or I would get bored. I wasn’t participating in hobbies anymore, I wasn’t going out to see my friends, and I felt unbelievably stressed about everything from the state of the world to every microscopic decision throughout my day.
I needed a change, but I knew I could never just get rid of all my apps. I had friends who wanted to send me things, and I knew I would feel even more isolated than before if I was completely out of the loop.
Instead, I wanted a way to limit my time on my apps that would actually work, unlike screen time limits, which I could never actually commit to, as I found myself just adding 15 minutes every time the timer would run out.
I found a free app that worked for both Android and Apple called ScreenZen, which forced me to wait for a specified amount of time before opening any of my problem apps such as TikTok or Instagram. Once I did get it open, I could only watch it for a small amount of time before it kicked me out again. I set my apps to only let me use them for 10-minute intervals. Once the timer was up, the app closed, and I had to wait again before opening it.
What helped me out the most was that the number of opens I had a day was limited; I set mine to three 10-minute opens a day, which caused me to actually think about my app usage and treat my social media time like a limited resource, I wasn’t opening TikTok every time a class got boring because now I wanted to make my screen time count.
At first, it felt awful. I wanted to look at my phone and distract myself every time I got mildly bored, but within a week or two, I almost didn’t notice it, and I wasn’t reaching for my phone at the first mild feeling of discomfort. I was actually happier than I had been in quite a while. I was finishing my schoolwork on time, and I was hanging out with friends in a way that felt meaningful. I was finding myself being bored, but it was so strange: It was like I was happy to be bored.
I became an advocate for ScreenZen pretty quickly, and so far, amongst my group of friends, everyone I’ve put on to the app has loved it and stuck with it. There are obviously other ways to approach getting off of your phone, but I wanted to highlight the way I was able to do it and that it doesn’t have to be immensely difficult. Whatever works for your relationship with your phone, or your way of getting motivated, is great. I implore everyone to at least try a couple of different things and see how it feels to get off of your phone, even if you’re still convinced that you have no part in the problem.
