The Screen Regime: How Our Dependence on
Technology is Affecting Our Mental Health

It is well known that our current generation presents record-breaking dependency on electronics. While there are important necessities for increased technology use, a great amount of use can be identified as an addiction for entertainment. Furthermore, with the pandemic, screen time has doubled for adolescents to an average of approximately 7.7 hours per day according to USA Today (Rodriguez, 2021). Unfortunately, the rise of mental and physical health problems in our population has also skyrocketed in recent years and this association has sparked curiosity. In order to look at this relationship, we must view what the scientific literature says as well as look at the opportunity cost that excess technology use presents.

It is a common belief that technology use causes increased rates of depression. However, there is more nuance to that statement that must be understood before making such claims. Firstly, we should take into account exactly what people are doing online. If their entire day consists of monotonous work or some form of online bullying, then it is plausible to draw a correlation to poorer mental health. However, using technology to create friendships and entertain oneself should provide a therapeutic effect. According to a longitudinal study by Selfhout et. al (2009), there is a noticeable difference in reported mental health based on the circumstances of technology use (pp.819-833). Children with low quality friendships who spent time surfing the internet had increased reported measures of depressive feelings. Meanwhile, children with medium or high quality friendships that surfed the internet do not report an increase in depressive symptoms. This data shows that a poor social environment leads to greater feelings of depression rather than the action of surfing the web for hours. Moreover, when the children in poor friendships groups switched to socializing with others online, the rates of perceived depressive symptoms reduced. Thus, what we do online matters to the extent of fulfilling innate social needs.

There are also further studies that support these findings. A large-scale cross-sectional study of over 120,000 fifteen year old kids from the UK by Przybylski and Weinstein (2017) examined the percent to which time spent on technology had an effect on the kids’ mental well-being. The study found that there were only negligible impacts of time spent on technology on mental health and technology use accounted for less than 1% of the variance in mental health symptoms. This shows that habits of technology use only account for so little in the multivariate issue of declining mental health. Therefore, at first glance, excess technology use can only be attributed to 1% of the development of worsened mental health.

However, there is a sizable opportunity cost in electing to entertain oneself with electronics rather than taking part in other beneficial activities (Przybylski, 2014). This can be detrimental over decades as increased lost chances in improving oneself may compound over time into a future deficit. There is little scientific literature supporting that statement as of now but it is important to take time off the phone in order to explore the outside world and improve oneself. While technology itself is not actively hurting you, it can halt the progression and development of one’s experiences outside of the screen.

References

Przybylski, A. K. (2014). Electronic gaming and psychosocial adjustment. Pediatrics, 134,

e716–e722. doi:10.1542/ peds.2013-4021

Przybylski, A. and Weinstein, N. (2017). A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis:

Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents. Psychological Science, 28(2). DOI: 10.1177/0956797616678438

Rodriguez, Adrianna. “Screen Time among Teenagers during COVID More than

Doubled Outside of Virtual School, Study Finds.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 1 Nov.2021,

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/11/01/covid-screen-time-among-teens-doubles-during-pandemic-study-finds/6230769001/.

Selfout M. H. W., Branje S. J. T., Delsing M. et al. (2009). Different types of Internet use,

depression, and social anxiety: The role of perceived friendship quality. Journal of

Adolescence, 32, 819–833. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2008.10.011