Technology has always been an escape for some people, especially kids.
A survey by the non-profit research organization Common Sense Media shows overall screen use among tweens and teens soared by 17 percent from 2019 to 2021. On average, daily screen time among tweens went up to five hours 33 minutes, and to eight hours 39 minutes for teens.
If we assume that the average being lives to 70 years old, an incredible 16 to 25 years of that is spent on screens.
The rapid increases reported by the survey over 2019-2021 might reasonably be explained by Covid and lockdown, during which screen time invariably increased as governments introduced apps to help handle Covid crisis for individual screening, tracing and enabling vaccine passports.
Many teens and tweens found themselves spending hours every day on screens, primarily with social and video apps like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.
The world today has more than 6.9 billion smartphone users. Global smartphone penetration has led to unprecedented addictive behavior.
In 2016, findings from psychiatrist Lin Yu-Hsuan of the National Taiwan University Hospital and his team indicated that smartphone addiction has features with substance-related and behavioral addictive disorders.
A study by the US Addiction Centre in 2021 reports 6.3 percent of the smartphone population have an addiction. Phone addiction is the obsessive use of a smartphone and its behavioral addiction is often dubbed "nomophobia," or the fear of being without a mobile device.
Chronic phone overuse changes reward circuits in the brain chemically, said a study by the Radiological Society of North America in 2017. Scientists scanned brains of people who were addicted to phones and discovered a change in their gray matter.
Gray matter in the brain is connected to the part of the central nervous system responsible for enabling individuals to control movement, memory and emotions.
In this series on digital hygiene, I want to look at the two proposed risk factors of phone addiction: personality and environment.
"Addictive personality" suggests a personality type that makes a person more likely to become addicted to smartphones.
But it's not so straightforward.
No single personality type sets someone up for phone addiction, but there are a few traits such as conscientiousness, openness and emotional stability that have been reported as important factors of problematic smartphone use, shown in a study in 2017 by Dr Zaheer Hussain of Nottingham Trent University.
Another commonly studied personality trait, neuroticism, has been reported to be associated with phone addiction. Social anxiety and impulsivity were also reported to be correlated to smartphone addiction.
Environment is another cause.
Environmental factors include lack of parental supervision in childhood and peer pressure. These factors raise the risk of experimentation with smartphones.
For example, the Japanese spend under half the global average time on their smartphones, which some people argue is because parents are generally strict on children's phone use.
Filipinos, on the other hand, spend the highest amount of average time on their phones because of the popularity of online gaming with a penetration rate of 96.4 percent, says Meltwater, an online media monitoring company.
Indeed technology can help or it can hurt. For many teenagers, smartphones are both a relief valve and a trap.
Dr Jolly Wong is a policy fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge
The world has more than 6.9 billion smartphone users. BLOOMBERG
